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He's such a caricature of pure evil!

What will he do next? Slant drill for oil under the elementry school? Or Blot out the sun?


Excellent!

a common caricature of frenchmen has them swearing "Mon Dieu!" all the time. Which means "my God!"

QUALITATIVE COMMENTS: (with 300 mg) I would have liked to, and was expecting to, have an exciting visual day, but I seemed to be unable to escape self-analysis. At the peak of the experience I was quite intoxicated and hyper with energy, so that it was not hard to move around. I was quite restless. But I spent most of the day in considerable agony, attempting to break through without success. I learned a great deal about myself and my inner workings. Everything almost was, but in the final analysis, wasn't. I began to become aware of a point, a brilliant white light, that seemed to be where God was entering, and it was inconceivably wonderful to perceive it and to be close to it. One wished for it to approach with all one's heart. I could see that people would sit and meditate for hours on end just in the hope that this little bit of light would contact them. I begged for it to continue and come closer but it did not. It faded away not to return in that particular guise the rest of the day. Listening to Mozart's Requiem, there were magnificent heights of beauty and glory. The world was so far away from God, and nothing was more important than getting back in touch with Him. But I saw how we created the nuclear fiasco to threaten the existence of the planet, as if it would be only through the threat of complete annihilation that people might wake up and begin to become concerned about each other. And so also with the famines in Africa. Many similar scenes of joy and despair kept me in balance. I ended up the experience in a very peaceful space, feeling that though I had been through a lot, I had accomplished a great deal. I felt wonderful, free, and clear.

(with 350 mg) Once I got through the nausea stage, I ventured out-of-doors and I was aware of an intensification of color and a considerable change in the texture of the cloth of my skirt and in the concrete of the sidewalk, and in the flowers and leaves that were handed me by an observer. I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world. Although I was afraid of motion, I was persuaded to take a ride in a car. The driver turned on the radio and suddenly the music 'The March of the Siamese Children' from 'The King and I' became the most perfect background music for the parody of real life which was indeed the normal activity of Telegraph Avenue on any Saturday morning. The perfectly ordinary people on their perfectly ordinary errands were clearly the most cleverly contrived set of characters all performing all manners of eccentric activities for our particular hilarity and enjoyment. I felt that I was at the same time both observing and performing in an outrageous moving picture. I experienced one moment of transcendant happiness when, while passing Epworth Hall, I looked out of the window of the car and up at the building and I was suddenly in Italy looking up at a gay apartment building with its shutters flung open in sunshine, and with its window boxes with flowers. We stopped at a spot overlooking the bay, but I found the view uninteresting and the sun uncomfortable. I sat there on the seat of the car looking down at the ground, and the earth became a mosaic of beautiful stones which had been placed in an intricate design which soon all began to move in a serpentine manner. Then I became aware that I was looking at the skin of a beautiful snake--all the ground around me was this same huge creature and we were all standing on the back of this gigantic and beautiful reptile. The experience was very pleasing and I felt no revulsion. Just then, another automobile stopped to look at the view and I experienced my first real feeling of persecution and I wanted very much to leave.

(with 400 mg) During the initial phase of the intoxication (between 2 and 3 hours) everything seemed to have a humorous interpretation. People's faces are in caricature, small cars seem to be chasing big cars, and all cars coming towards me seem to have faces. This one is a duchess moving in regal pomp, that one is a wizened old man running away from someone. A remarkable effect of this drug is the extreme empathy felt for all small things; a stone, a flower, an insect. I believe that it would be impossible to harm anything--to commit an overt harmful or painful act on anyone or anything is beyond one's capabilities. One cannot pluck a flower--and even to walk upon a gravel path requires one to pick his footing carefully, to avoid hurting or disturbing the stones. I found the color perception to be the most striking aspect of the experience. The slightest difference of shade could be amplified to extreme contrast. Many subtle hues became phosphorescent in intensity. Saturated colors were often unchanged, but they were surrounded by cascades of new colors tumbling over the edges.

(with 400 mg) It took a long time to come on and I was afraid that I had done it wrong but my concerns were soon ended. The world soon became transformed where objects glowed as if from an inner illumination and my body sprang to life. The sense of my body, being alive in my muscles and sinews, filled me with enormous joy. I watched Ermina fill to brimming with animal spirit, her features tranformed, her body cat-like in her graceful natural movement. I was stopped in my tracks. The world seemed to hold its breath as the cat changed again into the Goddess. As she shed her clothes, she shed her ego and when the dance began, Ermina was no more. There was only the dance without the slightest self-consconciousness. How can anything so beautiful be chained and changed by other's expectations? I became aware of myself in her and as we looked deeply into one another my boundaries disappeared and I became her looking at me.

EXTENSIONS AND COMMENTARY: Mescaline is one of the oldest psychedelics known to man. It is the major active component of the small dumpling cactus known as Peyote. It grows wild in the Southwestern United States and in Northern Mexico, and has been used as an intimate component of a number of religious traditions amongst the native Indians of these areas. The cactus has the botanical name of Lophophora williamsii or Anhalonium lewinii and is immediately recognizable by its small round shape and the appearance of tufts of soft fuzz in place of the more conventional spines. The dried plant material has been classically used with anywhere from a few to a couple of dozen of the hard tops, called buttons, being consumed in the course of a ceremony.

Throughout the more recently published record of clinical human studies with mescaline, it has been used in the form of the synthetic material, and has usually been administered as the sulfate salt. Although this form has a miserable melting point (it contains water of crystallization, and the exact melting point depends on the rate of heating of the sample) it nonetheless forms magnificent crystals from water. Long, glistening needles that are, in a sense, its signature and its mark of purity. The dosages associated with the above "qualitative comments" are given as if measured as the sulfate, although the actual form used was usually the hydrochloride salt. The conversion factor is given under "dosage" above.

Mescaline has always been the central standard against which all other compounds are viewed. Even the United States Chemical Warfare group, in their human studies of a number of substituted phenethylamines, used mescaline as the reference material for both quantitative and qualitative comparisons. The Edgewood Arsenal code number for it was EA-1306. All psychedelics are given properties that are something like "twice the potency of mescaline" or "twice as long-lived as mescaline." This simple drug is truly the central prototype against which everything else is measured. The earliest studies with the "psychotomimetic amphetamines" had quantitative psychological numbers attached that read as "mescaline units." Mescaline was cast in concrete as being active at the 3.75 mg/kg level. That means for a 80 kilogram person (a 170 pound person) a dose of 300 milligrams. If a new compound proved to be active at 30 milligrams, there was a M.U. level of 10 put into the published literature. The behavioral biologists were happy, because now they had numbers to represent psychological properties. But in truth, none of this represented the magic of this material, the nature of the experience itself. That is why, in this Book II, there is only one line given to "dosage," but a full page given to "qualitative comments".

Four simple N-modified mescaline analogues are of interest in that they are natural and have been explored in man.

The N-acetyl analogue has been found in the peyote plant, and it is also a major metabolite of mescaline in man. It is made by the gentle reaction of mescaline with acetic anhydride (a bit too much heat, and the product N-acetyl mescaline will cyclize to a dihydroisoquinoline, itself a fine white crystalline solid, mp 160-161 C) and can be recrystallized from boiling toluene. A number of human trials with this amide at levels in the 300 to 750 milligrams range have shown it to be with very little activity. At the highest levels there have been suggestions of drowsiness. Certainly there were none of the classic mescaline psychedelic effects.

If free base mescaline is brought into reaction with ethyl formate (to produce the amide, N-formylmescaline) and subsequently reduced (with lithium aluminum hydride) it is converted to the N-methyl homologue. This base has also been found as a trace component in the Peyote cactus. And the effects of N-methylation of other psychedelic drugs have been commented upon elsewhere in these recipes, all with consistently negative results (with the noteworthy exception of the conversion of MDA to MDMA). Here, too, there is no obvious activity in man, although the levels assayed were only up to 25 milligrams.

N,N-Dimethylmescaline has been given the trivial name of Trichocerine as it has been found as a natural product in several cacti of the Trichocereus Genus but, interestingly, never in any Peyote variant. It also has proven inactive in man in dosages in excess of 500 milligrams, administered parenterally. This observation, the absence of activity of a simple tertiary amine, has been exploited in the development of several iodinated radiopharmaceuticals that are mentioned elsewhere in this book.

The fourth modification is the compound with the nitrogen atom oxidatively removed from the scene. This is the mescaline metabolite, 3,4,5- trimethoxyphenylacetic acid, or TMPEA. Human dosages up to 750 milligrams orally failed to produce either physiological or psychological changes.

One additional manipulation with some of these structures has been made and should be mentioned. These are the analogues with an oxygen atom inserted between the aromatic ring and the aliphatic chain. They are, in essence, aminoethyl phenyl ethers. The first is related to mescaline itself, 2- (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenoxy)ethylamine. Human trials were conducted over the dose range of 10 to 300 milligrams and there were no effects observed. The second is related to trichocerine, N,N-dimethyl-2-(3,4,5-trimethoxyphenoxy)ethylamine . It was inactive in man over the range of 10 to 400 milligrams. Mescaline, at a dose of 420 milligrams, served as the control in these studies.

I looked at your characterisation of evolution and the evidence for it and thought: you are totally ignorant of evolution and paleontology.

Then I looked at your syntax and spelling, and realised that you are simply ignorant.

There is certainly a huge amount of evidence for evolution; for example, just take human evolution: go to a library and look up Tatersall, Ian. Becoming Human: Evolution and human uniqueness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. You may also want to look up Eldredge, Niles. The triumph of evolution and the failure of creationism. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

What I find extremely amusing is that your caricature of evolution is in fact the "reasoning" the Creation "Scientists" [sic] and Fundamentalist Christians use when talking about their own take on how the world is as it is.

You dismiss evolution as "pretty religious", which implies that relying on religion or belief is a poor method of argument, which is accurate. Shame that Creationism simply has religion or belief as its only bolster in this argument. You are hoist with your own petard.

I wish this guy was an element in the US government. Instead, we're stuck with Fritz "Freling" Hollings' caricature of how technology can / should be used to serve his supposed constituents. Which is laughable at best, since it seems to be more focused on eviscerating digital rights /privacy and handing them out to corporations wholesale.

Good to see digital democracy is alive and well in Peru. Sorry I can't say the same about things back home, though........

This essay originally appeared in The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 1999. It is adapted from chapters 19 and 20 of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny , by Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books in 2000 and by Vintage Books in 2001. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. (Please note that a central argument of the New Yorker essay--that biological evolution is directional, and Stephen Jay Gould's argument to the contrary is deeply flawed--is made in much greater detail in chapter 19 of the book.)

THE ACCIDENTAL CREATIONIST

Why Stephen Jay Gould is bad for evolution.

BY ROBERT WRIGHT

FOUR months ago, when the Kansas Board of Education voted to cut evolution from the mandatory science curriculum, few people were more outraged than Stephen Jay Gould. Teaching biology without evolution is "like teaching English but making grammar optional," Gould said. The Kansas decision reeked of "absurdity" and "ignorance" and was a national embarrassment. The question of whether to teach evolution "only comes up in this crazy country," he told an audience at the University of Kansas after the decision.

All of this is more or less true. But it's also true that, over the years, Gould himself has lent real strength to the creationist movement. Not intentionally, of course. Gould's politics are secular left, the opposite of creationist politics, and his outrage toward creationists is genuine. Yet, in spite of this stance and, oddly, in some ways because of it he has wound up aiding and abetting their cause.

This indictment of Gould will no doubt surprise his large reading public. After all, in addition to being America's unofficial evolutionist laureate, Gould is a scientist of sterling credentialsa Harvard paleontologist and, currently, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In what more capable hands could the defense of science rest?

This indictment will also surprise many evolutionary biologists, but for different reasons. It isn't that they necessarily consider Gould a great scientist; a number of insiders take a quite different view. But they do generally think of him as a valiant warrior against the creationist hordes. The eminent British biologist John Maynard Smith has observed, "Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by nonbiologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists."

In truth, though, Gould is not helping the evolutionists against the creationists, and the sooner the evolutionists realize that the better. For, as Maynard Smith has noted, Gould "is giving nonbiologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory."

Over the past three decades, in essays, books, and technical papers, Gould has advanced a distinctive view of evolution. He stresses its flukier aspectsfreak environmental catastrophes and the like and downplays natural selection's power to design complex life forms. In fact, if you really pay attention to what he is saying, and accept it, you might start to wonder how evolution could have created anything as intricate as a human being.

As it happens, creationists have been wondering the very same thing, and they're delighted to have a Harvard paleontologist who will nourish their doubts. Gould is a particular godsend to the more intellectual anti-evolutionists, who mount the sustained (and ostensibly secular) critiques that give creationism a veneer of legitimacy. In attacking Darwinian theory, they don't have to build a straw man; Gould has built one for them. When Phillip E. Johnson, the most noted of these writers, begins a sentence, "As Stephen Jay Gould describes it, in his fine book," this is not good cause for Gould to swell with pride.

Gould also performs a more subtle service for creationists. Having bolstered their caricature of Darwinism as implausible, he bolsters their caricature of it as an atheist plot. He depicts evolution as something that can't possibly reflect a higher purpose, and thus can't provide the sort of spiritual consolation most people are after. Even Gould's recent book "Rocks of Ages," which claims to reconcile science and religion, draws this moral from the story of evolution: we live in a universe that is "indifferent to our suffering."

Obviously, if the grounds for this conclusion are as firm as he says, then we have to live with it. But they're not. Though modern Darwinism is incompatible with various religious beliefs (such as a literal interpretation of Genesis), it needn't alienate religious seekers of a liberal-minded variety: those with no attachment to any scriptural creation scenario but with a suspicionor, at least, a hopethat life has more meaning than meets the eye. Indeed, the Darwinian account of our creation, once stripped of the misconceptions that Gould has covered it with, is not only compatible with a higher purpose but vaguely suggestive of one.

All the favors that Gould unwittingly performs for creationists can be traced to his thinking on the fundamental issue of "directionality," or "progressivism"that is, how inclined evolution is (if at all) to build more complex and intelligent animals over time.

Consider the bombardier beetle. In one compartment, the beetle carries a harmless chemical mix. In another compartment resides a catalyst. The beetle adds the catalyst to the mix to create a scalding substance that he can then spray, through a pliable rear-end nozzle, on tormentors. (This basic ideamaking chemicals safe to transport but deadly when deployedwould, long after natural selection invented it, be reinvented by human beings, in the form of binary chemical weapons.)

Clearly, a beetle equipped with two munitions tanks and a spray nozzle is more complex than a beetle lacking such accoutrements. And this isn't just any old kind of biological complexity. The beetle's arsenal involves behavioral complexity: aiming and squirting a toxic nozzle. Aiming and squirtinglike any impressive behaviorinvolves information processing, a command-and-control system. In some small measure, then, evolution's promotion of the beetle to bombardier rank involved a growth in intelligence. In other lineages, the evolution of intelligenceof behavioral complexityhas proceeded further. And we have binary chemical weapons, among other things, to show for it.

WAS this general trend in the cards? Or is the growth in complexity and intelligence we've seen on this planet more or less an accident, something that doesn't flow from basic properties of natural selection?

Ten years ago, Gould's position on the directionality issue was extreme: he didn't even concede that biological complexity has tended to grow over time. This reluctance, evident in his book "Wonderful Life" (1989), was harshly criticized (by me, for one), and he has since abandoned it. (Full disclosure: I made the criticism in an unfavorable review of Gould's book, and he has since written unfavorable things about my work.) In his more recent assault on directionality, the 1996 book "Full House," Gould allows that the outer envelope of complexitythe complexity of the most complex species aroundmay tend to grow. For that matter, he acknowledges, the average complexity of all species may have grown. But he insists that this growth does not constitute "progress" because it is fundamentally "random."

[Author's note: Since this essay was published in The New Yorker, I've noticed that some readers misinterpret my critique of Gould's emphasis on "randomness." The issue is not whether new genes are generated randomly--a question on which Gould and I agree. The issue is whether the process by which genes are selectively preserved is just as likely to move organic complexity downward as upward (Gould's position) or whether that process will more often move complexity upward (my position). In other words: if you think I am departing from standard Darwinian theory, and positing the existence of "orthogenesis" or any other quasi-mystical force, you have misunderstood my argument.]

To explain what he means by "random," Gould uses the metaphor of "the drunkard's walk." A drunk is heading down a sidewalk that runs east-west. Skirting the sidewalk's south side is a brick wall, and on the north side is a curb and a street. Will the drunk eventually veer off the curb, into the street? Probably. Does this mean he has a "northerly directional tendency"? No. He's just as likely to veer south as north. But when he veers south the wall bounces him back to the north. He is taking "a random walk" that just seems to have a directional tendency.

If you get enough drunks and give them enough time, one of them may eventually get all the way to the other side of the street. That's us: the lucky species that, through millions of years of random motion, happened to get to the far north, the land of great complexity. But we didn't get there because north is an inherently valuable place to be. If it weren't for the brick wallthat is, the fact that no species can have less than zero complexitythere would be just as many drunks south of the sidewalk as north of it, and the randomness of all their paths would be obvious. Gould writes, "The vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity."

What Gould neglects is a number of nonrandom factors that fall under the rubric of "positive feedback." The bombardier beetle is a good example. Since there was a time when beetles didn't exist, there must have been a time when no animals were specially adapted to kill and eat them. Then beetles came along, and then various animals did acquire, by natural selection, the means to kill and eat them. This growth in behavioral complexity spurred a response: the beetle's binary weapon. Thus does complexity breed complexitypositive feedback.

One might expect that, given enough time, beetle predators would up the ante, developing some clever way to neutralize the beetle's noxious spray. In fact, they have. Skunks and one species of mouse, the biologists James Gould (no relation) and William Keeton have written, "evolved specialized innate behavior patterns that cause the spray to be discharged harmlessly, and they can then eat the beetles." Evolutionary biologists call this form of positive feedback an "arms race." Richard Dawkins and John Tyler Bonner, among others, have noted that arms races favor the evolution of complexity. Yet Gould's two books on the evolution of complexity don't even mention the phenomenon.

Finding evidence of arms races in the fossil record is tricky. But Harry Jerison, a paleoneurologist at U.C.L.A., measured the remnants of various mammalian lineages spanning tens of millions of years and discerned a suggestive pattern. In North America, the "relative brain size" of carnivorous mammals - brain size in proportion to body size - showed a strong tendency to grow over time. So did the relative brain size of the herbivorous mammals that were their prey. Meanwhile, comparable South American herbivores, which faced no predators, showed almost no growth in relative brain size. Apparently, ongoing species-against-species duels are conducive to progress.

Arms races can happen within species, not just between them. For example, male chimps spend lots of time scheming to top each other. They form coalitions that, on attaining political dominance, get prime sexual access to females. So savvy males should, on average, get the most genes into the next generation, raising the average level of savviness. And, the savvier the average chimp, the savvier chimps have to be to excel in the next round. There'slittle doubt that this arms race has helped make chimps as smart as they are, and there's no clear reason that the process should stop now.

Yet natural selection, as described by Gould, has no room for such a dynamic. "Natural selection talks only about adaptation to changing local environments," he writes. And "the sequence of local environments in any one place should be effectively random through geological time the seas come in and the seas go out, the weather gets colder, then hotter, etc. If organisms are tracking local environments by natural selection, then their evolutionary history should be effectively random as well."

This would be good logic if environments consisted entirely of sea and air. But a living thing's environment consists largely of other living things: things it eats and things that eat it, not to mention members of its own species which compete and consort with it. And no one not even Gould denies that the average complexity of all species constituting this organic environment tends to grow. Nor would it matter if we assumed, along with Gould, that back at the dawn of life the growth in average complexity was wholly random. The fact would remain that, for whatever reason, environmental complexity started to grow. Species, in "tracking" this growth of complexity, can't be described as stumbling around randomly. Their evolution is directional. And since they are part of the environment of other species the process is self-reinforcing. More positive feedback.

The evolution of human intelligence has the earmarks of positive feedback. To the extent that we can judge from an imperfect fossil record, the growth in brain size from Australopithecus africanus through Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and early Homo sapiens to modern Homo sapiensis fairly brisk, with no signs of backtracking and little in the way of pauses. This suggests three million years of pretty persistent brain expansion.

In Gould's world view, the only way to explain this trend is as a long series of lucky coin flips - the most serendipitous drunken walk in the history of drinking. And it isn't just our ancestors, in Gould's scheme, who were so lucky. Mammalian lineages broadly exhibit movement toward braininess.

The odds of all this happening by luck alone, as Gould would have it, seem to me not that different from the odds that God created all species in a few days. By the basic criterion of scientific judgment - that the most plausible story wins - it's roughly a tie. So, as long as Gould's version of evolution dominates popular understanding, why should the average school-board member find one theory beyond serious doubt and the other unworthy of mention? Neither fits the facts.

Gould recognizes that his story is an unlikely one. If you replayed evolution on this planet, he says, the chances of getting any species as smart as humans - smart enough to reflect on itself - are "extremely small." In fact, he fairly delights in the prospect that "we are, whatever our glories and accomplishments, a momentary cosmic accident that would never arise again if the tree of life could be replanted from seed and regrown under similar conditions." To insist otherwise, to see evolution as a natural progression toward intelligent forms of life, is to indulge a "delusion" grounded in "human arrogance" and desperate "hope."

This is where Gould's aims, perversely, converge with those of the creationists: both, for their own philosophical reasons, want to depict the evolution of a human level of intelligence as spectacularly unlikely. But what, exactly, is Gould's philosophical reason? Why is he so chipper about our creation's being an aimless and pointless process? The answer lies in Darwinism's checkered political past.

Early in this century, biological progressivism was dear to the hearts of social Darwinists, who used evolution to justify racism, imperialism, and a laissez-faire indifference to poverty. Part of the logic behind social Darwinism - to the extent that it had a coherent logic - was something like the following: The suffering, even death, of the weak at the hands of the strong is an example of "survival of the fittest." And surely the "survival of the fittest" has God's blessing. After all, He built the dynamic into His great creative process, natural selection. And how do we know that natural selection is God's handiwork? Because of its inexorable tendency to create organisms as majestic as ourselves, organisms worthy of admission to Heaven. In short, biological progressivism was used to deify nature in all its aspects, and nature, thus deified, was invoked in support of oppression.

This variant of social Darwinism - which infers political and moral values from the direction of evolution - has been essentially dead for a long time, but for Gould it is still an ever-present enemy. His denunciations of progressivism often include dark allusions to the political values that accompanied it in the early twentieth century. His war against progressivism, it seems, is waged partly to vanquish a religious right that died out long ago. Yet the effect of the war isto give aid and comfort to a new religious right.

Anti-progressivism is the grand unifying theme in Gould's oeuvre. To the lay reader, he may seem a man of many theories, but, time and again they amount to the argument that natural selection, far from being a tireless engineer of organic improvement, is actually an erratic agent that is often swamped by outside factors, and so cant be counted on to push evolution upward. Hence his championing of "punctuated equilibrium"the idea that evolution proceeds in fits and starts, and spends much of its time moving nowhere in particular. Hence, too, his insistence that many parts of plants and animals are not "adaptations" (things designed by natural selection for a particular purpose) but "spandrels" (incidental by-products of past evolution which may happen to serve a function but weren't originally "selected" for that function).

Neither of these claims is wholly wrong. Both - in moderate form, at least--were embraced by some Darwinians before Gould came along and applied new labels to them. But Gould bills these retreads as fresh and radical, and his rhetorical extravaganzas then become priceless assets for creationists. In depicting himself as the torch carrier for "a new and general theory of evolution," he once declared standard Darwinian theory--the so-called modern synthesis that had crystallized by mid-century - "effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy." Not surprisingly, this sound bite is endlessly repeated by such writers as Michael Denton, whose book "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" is a favorite of creationists.

Gould was widely criticized for pronouncing Darwinism dead, and he has long since qualified the claim. But the fact remains that he made the statement, it was silly, and it had consequences. When an interviewer asked Phillip Johnson how he came to suspect that Darwinism lacked scientific merit, he said that reading Gould's claim had been a formative experience. Gould's writings on punctuated equilibrium have been a particular gift to creationists. He dwells on gaps in the fossil record to argue that evolution works fitfully; creationists then quote him to argue that it doesn't work at all. (They love the conspiratorial aura of Gould's description of these gaps as the "trade secret of paleontology.")

Obviously, we can't hold scholars strictly responsible for how their words are used. There are lots of gaps in the fossil record, and though many biologists believe that Gould cites the record too selectively, it isn't his fault when creationists quote him dishonestly, as they sometimes do. The problem is that often they don't have to. The biochemist Michael Behe writes, in the anti-evolutionist text "Darwin's Black Box," "Gould has argued that the rapid rate of appearance of new life forms demands a mechanism other than natural selection for its explanation." Gould does say that, when he depicts punctuated equilibrium as a mayor new concept, requiring "additional laws," beyond natural selection.

This particular excess has drawn criticism from Gould's mentor, the renowned biologist Ernst Mayr. In his book "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology" Mayr insists that any plausible version of punctuated equilibrium is "completely consistent" with the modern Darwinian synthesis, and that the engine of change in punctuated equilibriumis natural selection. Mayr should know. He, more than anyone else, created the theory of punctuated equilibrium, decades before Gould gave it that catchy title.

Of all the Gouldian themes cherished by Darwinism's detractors, perhaps the most interesting is one publicized by Johnson in the early nineteen-nineties, in an Atlantic Monthly essay and in his book "Darwin on Trial." Johnson's argument began with the accurate observation that species often go extinct because of what you might call bad luck, not bad genes. For example, a meteor may strike and trigger an environmental cataclysm, wiping out thousands of species that, only the day before, seemed ideally suited to life on earth.

Johnson then asked: If which genes perish is so often determined randomly, how could natural selection work well? Isn't the idea supposed to be that, while genetic traits are generated randomly, they are weeded out selectively, depending on whether they are "fit"?

That is indeed how natural selection designs fit organisms. But, according to mainstream Darwinian theory, most of the consequential weeding out doesn't happen conspicuously and suddenly, when whole species go extinct; it happens on a day-to-day basis within a species, as some individuals fail to spread their genes as ably as other individuals. So even if every few hundred million years a meteor strikes, wiping out lots of well-designed species, other well designed species remain, and the design work continues.

Maybe Johnson's mistake was to use Gould as a source. Gould has repeatedly stressed the randomness of great species extinctions, and emphasized selection among species, while underplaying day-to-day selection within species. Indeed, Johnson's book cited Gould on all three of those themes. ("As usual," he wrote, "Gould is the most interesting commentator.")

RANDOM extinctions are a central theme of Gould's book "Wonderful Life." In using them to assault the notion of evolutionary progress, he took a different tack from Johnson's, but in the end he was no more successful.

The book is about the fossils of the Burgess Shale, products of an apparently sudden (as these things go) expansion of biological diversity around five hundred and seventy million years ago, at the beginning of the Cambrian Period. The subsequenthistory of the Shale animals, Gould argued, illustrates how radically bad luck can alter evolution's course. In particular, some very weird-looking Shale creatures had fallen prey to an essentially random mass extinction, and left no descendants. If not for this bad break, today's tree of life would presumably look very different.

Since Gould's book was published, his interpretation of these fossils has been challenged by a number of paleontologists. It now seems that the Burgess Shale animals weren't nearly so weird as Gould and some other researchers first thought; many fit readily into a standard taxonomic tree, and their descendants are with us still. In the case of a fossil so bizarre-looking that it was named Hallucigenia, Gould--following the then-prevailing interpretationseems to have been looking at it upside down. Those baffling squiggly things on its "back" were legs. And those strangely spiky"legs" were spikes--armor, presumably the product of an arms race.

Still, Gould's premise is valid. Whether or not the Burgess Shale animals are a case in point, species do go extinct because of cosmic rolls of the dice. A meteor shows up and - poof!--no dinosaurs. But Gould's argument from this premise blurs the line between two separate issues: the question of whether a given species was likely to evolve and the question of whether the properties it embodies were likely to evolve.

For example, if our ancestors had been wiped out through bad luck, then, as Gould has repeatedly proclaimed, human beings would never have evolved. This point - in some ways the central point of "Wonderful Life" - is so unarguable that, as far as I know, it has never been argued against. No sober biologist would claim that there was some kind of inexorability to the evolution of Homo sapiens per se: a species five or six feet tall with ear lobes, bad jokes, and all the rest. The question is whether the evolution of some form of highly intelligent life was likely all along. In his first book on directionality, Gould simply skirted the question; in the second, he declared the answer to be no. The problem with this answer goes beyond Gould's overlooking arms races. The broader issue is what you might call natural selection's genius.

Though natural selection is a blind process that works by trial and error - and random trial, at that - it has a remarkable knack for invention, for finding and filling empty niches. It doesn't just invent great technologies; it keeps reinventing them. Flight and eyesight are two properties so amazing that creationists cite them for their implausibility. Yet flight has arisen through evolution on at least three separate occasions, and eyes have developed independently dozens of times.

Eyes are so favored by natural selection because light is a terrific medium of perception. It moves in straight lines, bounces off solid things, and travels faster than anything in the known universe. But smell, sound, touch, and taste are also amply represented in the animal kingdom, and are just the beginning of a long list of organic data-gathering technologies.

Indeed, humankind's vaunted twentieth-century advances in sensory technology seem almost like a long exercise in reinventingthe wheel. We now have infrared sensors for night vision; rattlesnakes beat us to that one. We use sonar - old hat to bats and dolphins. Someburglar alarms work by creating electric fields and sensing disturbances in them; so do some fish, such as the elephant-snout fish of Africa.

Why is natural selection so attentive to sensory technologies? Because they facilitate adaptively flexible behavior. And what else does that? The ability to process all this sensory data and adjust behavior accordingly. In other words: brains - that is, intelligence as an abstract property. It is natural selection's demonstrable affinity for certain properties - its tendency to invent them and nurture them independently in myriad species - which renders trivial Gould's truism about how bad luck can wipe out any one species or group of species. The fates of particular species may depend on the luck of the draw. But the properties they embody were in the cards - at least, in the sense that the deck was stacked heavily in their favor.

Consider some properties of human intelligence which are often taken as defining assets of our species, such as language and the inventive use of tools. Though no species is nearly as accomplished as ours in either realm, primitive versions of these features are widespread.

The most obvious examples of tool use come from our close relatives, chimpanzees. Chimps pound nuts open with sticks and stones. They take twigs, strip them of leaves, poke them into termite nests, then pull them out and eat the termites. Some chimps even use sticks to brush each other's teeth. This sort of thing doesn't seem to be narrowly programmed by the genes. There is innovation and then emulation. In other words, there is cultural evolutionthe selective transmission of nongenetic information from animal to animal.

Animals also can be surprisingly articulate. East African vervet monkeys have several warning calls, depending on the predator: one means "snake," one means "eagle," and one means "leopard," and each elicits an apt response (looking down, looking up, or running into the bush). Mastery of this language takes cultural fine-tuning. Young vervets may look up, see a pigeon, and give the "eagle" call. Adults then look up and, by failing to join in the call, induce an enlightening chagrin.

Of course, no nonhuman species is about to embark on the sort of cultural evolution that got us from the Stone Age to the sophisticated technology of the information age. None of these animals could possibly formulate a message as complex as "Have you tried just turning it off and then turning it on again and seeing if that solves the problem?"

Still, they may not be as far from that utterance as they seem. For at some point, with the accumulation of tools and other forms of culture, culture itself can become an accelerator of genetic evolution. As those individuals best at manipulating culture reproduce more successfully than their neighbors, genes for deft intellect spread faster. This, in turn, speeds up cultural evolution, which further speeds up genetic evolution, and so on: yet another form of progressive evolution via positive feedback. In our lineage, this "co-evolution" of genes and culture may have acquired momentum with the first handcrafted stone tools, more than two million years ago, when the brains of our ancestors were only half the size of modern brains.

Many biologists believe that human social organization has also favored genes for intelligence. Our species, for example, has "reciprocal altruism." We are designed to feel warmly toward people who do favors for us, to return the favors, and thus to forge mutually beneficial relationshipsfriendships. What's more, one kind of favor we swap is social support. That is, we are a "coalitional" species; groups compete with each other for status and influence. Reciprocal altruism takes brainpowerto remember who has helped you and who has hurt you. And the coalitional variety takes more brainpower, since strategic plotting and communication among allies are vital.

Here again, the basic ingredients are not peculiar to us. Vampire bats have reciprocal altruism; they'll donate painstakingly gathered blood to a needy friend, who will return the favor when fortunes are reversed. And vampire bats have bigger forebrains - the locus of much "social" intelligence - than other bats.

As for the richer form of reciprocal altruism, coalitional contention, it turns out not to be confined to such famously political animals as chimpanzees. Bottle-nosed dolphins even form coalitions of coalitions. Team X of male dolphins will help team Y vanquish team Z, and, later, team Y will return the favor. Since victory brings sex, skill in coalition building is an obvious candidate for an arms race among dolphins.

All told, if you look at the foundations of human intelligence - tool use, language, reciprocal altruism, coalitional contention, and others - you can find them, if in primitive form, scattered far and wide across the animal kingdom. Given evolution's tendency to generate more and more species, to elevate complexity, and to keep inventing and reinventing technologies, the eventual combination of these foundational properties in a single species was likely all along.

Gould writes, "Humans are here by the luck of the draw." Undeniably true. But there's a difference between saying it took great luck for you to be the winner and saying it took great luck for there to be a winner. This is the distinction off which lotteries, casinos, and bingo parlors make their money. In the game of evolution, I submit, it was just a matter of time before one species or another raised its hand (or, at least, its grasping appendage) and said, "Bingo!"

This thesis, though little publicized, is not radical. Some noted biologists, such as William D. Hamilton and Edward O. Wilson, believe that the evolution of great intelligence was likely from the start.

Hamilton's work also suggests another interesting likelihood. He was the first to rigorously explain the evolution of family bonds - that is, "kin-selected altruism." In the human species, with its complex emotions, such altruism entails love and empathy. What's more, these warm feelings were expanded by the advent of reciprocal altruism so that we are now capable of empathizing with people we're not related to. Since natural selection has invented both kinds of altruism numerous times, it is not too wild to suggest that this expansive sentiment was probable all along.

This prospect - that evolution's directionality may have a "moral" dimension - helps explain why some religiously inclined people find progressivism intriguing. Obviously, this theme wouldn't sell the creationists themselves on Darwinism; if you think that Genesis is literally true, evolution will always be your enemy. But, in the battle between Darwinians and creationists for the hearts and minds of the uncommitted, it matters whether evolution by natural selection is spiritually suggestive.

Even if you accept the arguments for directionality, and agree that intelligence and even love were likely from the start, that is hardly overwhelming evidence of a higher purpose. But it's closer to it than Gould's version of evolution - a stumbling, bumbling process that just happened to lead, Mr. Magoo-like, to Einstein, Mother Teresa, and the Internet.

Some Darwinians flirt with deism, the no-frills faith that was favored during the Enlightenment precisely for its compatibility with science. In this view, God set cosmic history in motion and then adopted a hands-off policy, confident that it would lead to something interesting. Certainly, history has led to something interesting. Who knows? Maybe the present moment - when an intelligent form of life starts to collectively, deliberately shape the whole biosphere's destiny, was itself, in some statistical sense, destiny.

But, really, how consoling could any Darwinian god be? Those who would like to believe in a higher power that is both omnipotent and benign will be frustrated by the most casual inspection of the medium of our design. Among the key ingredients in natural selection's creative energy are death and suffering, the casting aside of the "unfit." And, for every bit of love and harmony, there seems to be a flip side of antagonism and cruelty; among the things we do for loved ones is hate their enemies. What kind of god would use natural selection as a creative tool?

It is tempting to answer as the biologist George Williams has: a very bad god. On the other hand, a smart, reflective species with a capacity for empathy could be capable of greater things than we've seen. Maybe human behavior will someday justify a theology rather like that of the ancient Manichaeans: maybe nature, though dominated by darkness, has always contained seeds of light, seeds of intellect and love, which over the ages grow until they transcend their base embodiment.

In any event, to note the ample dark side of evolution is simply to re-state the problem that any honest religion must confront: the problem of evil. And solving timeless theological quandaries is beyond Darwinism's job description. My point is just that Darwinism needn't put theologians out of a job. Granted, it may force them to abandon beliefs. Scientific progress, as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, has long spurred the amendment of religious doctrine - "to the great advantage of religion" - while religion's essence remained intact. For many religious people, part of that essence is the belief that, above and beyond the vestigial cruelties and absurdities of the human experience, there is a point to it all, a point that, even if obscure, may yet become manifest. So far, biological science has provided no reason to conclude otherwise.

An adapted excerpt (first published in The New Yorker)from Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, By Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. Other excerpts are available at www.nonzero.org

One of the best things about the evolutionary biology field and the huge egos that dominate it is the intense academic flame wars that take place constantly. One of my favorite feuds was between Daniel Dennett, a renowned professor of philosophy and cognitive studies at Tufts. In one of his best works, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett states that Gould is an intellectual coward for not following his ideas through to their logical conclusion. A couple of years later, Gould responded with an ad hominem attack in the New York Review of Books. Here's Dennett's reply: Date: Thu, 12 Jun 1997 12:05:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Dennett To: nyrev@nybooks.com Subject: reply to Gould June 12, 1997 To the Editor The New York Review of Books 1755 Broadway New York, NY 10019-3780 Stephen Jay Gould complains that in Darwin's Dangerous Idea I attack his views via "hint, innuendo, false attribution" and "caricature." That is false. On the contrary, I went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that my account of his views was fair and accurate. One does not lightly embark on the course of demonstrating that a figure as famous and as honored as Stephen Jay Gould--"America's evolutionist laureate"--has misled his huge public about the theories in his field. I knew he was going to hate my book, and given the effectiveness of his past public attacks on sociobiology, IQ testing, and other targets of his disfavor, prudence alone would dictate that I should secure my criticisms against easy rebuttal and condemnation. So I did my usual homework, and checked it all out with experts in the field, including experts sympathetic to Gould, urging them to correct any errors they spotted. I sent drafts of my critical chapters to Gould himself more than a year before I sent the final manuscript to the publisher, inviting him to meet with me at his convenience, or to respond in whatever way he chose. I invited him to participate in my seminar that was reviewing the penultimate draft. Gould kindly met with me in the summer of 1994, and we spent several hours going over his objections to the penultimate draft. He raised a variety of objections, and supported some of them with texts, and wherever he convinced me I had misinterpreted him, I revised my draft accordingly. On some points, however, he failed to persuade me, and one is particularly instructive, since now he accuses me of deliberately misrepresenting him. I claimed that for a while he had presented punctuated equilibrium as a revolutionary "saltationist" alternative to standard neo-Darwinism, and he implored me to check this claim by reviewing all his work that dealt with the issue. It started well; he provided me with his complete curriculum vitae and photocopies of every piece therein that I requested. When I reviewed them, however, I found quotations--in addition to those that appear in my book on pages 286-290--that clearly supported my claim. I wrote back to him citing these. (Instead of quoting the quotations from my long letter to Gould, I refer readers to his notorious 1980 paper in Paleobiology, entitled "Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?") I ended my letter: "I want to be fair. When you begged me to see for myself that your opponents were foisting a caricature on you, you struck a nerve . . . . But now I need some more help from you if I am going to say that your critics are wrong in claiming that you tried on saltationism and then abandoned it." He never responded to my letter, or made any further attempt to correct my claims, and now he describes my interpretation of his views as "a farrago of false charges." On the contrary, my interpretation is standard fare, widely accepted in the field. For instance, two eminent evolutionary biologists, Jerry A. Coyne and Brian Charlesworth of Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, wrote recently in response to a similar complaint of Gould's in a letter in Science (18 April, 1997, p338-341.): "In the past 25 years, Eldredge and Gould have proposed so many different versions of their theory that it is difficult to describe it with any accuracy. . . . Punctuated equilibrium originally attracted great attention because it invoked distinctly non-Darwinian mechanisms for stasis and change. . . . leading to Gould's pronouncement that 'if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory [of evolution] is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.'" Neo-Darwinism--the synthetic theory of evolution that Gould propagandistically elides into "Darwinian fundamentalism"--is alive and well, in the textbooks and the laboratories. When Gould suggests otherwise, he is misleading the public. Let me say a word about "Darwinian fundamentalism." Nonsense. I do not espouse the preposterous views Gould attributes to this mythic creed. Gould labors to create a caricature of the "strict" adaptationist, a type that occurs nowhere in nature and is explicitly disavowed, at length, by me (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pp. 55, 238-261, 302-5, 326-8, and elsewhere). In fact, the passage from my book which Gould uses to anchor his fantasy is misquoted by him. It is adaptationist thinking, not "adaptation, natural selection's main consequence" that I say plays a crucial and ubiquitous role in analysis, and so it does, even though, as I stress again and again, there are plenty of other factors (comets, and other catastrophes, for instance) that may well play the predominant causal role in particular cases. What is amazing is that Gould wrests this quotation from the very section (pp238-61) in which I attempt to undo the travesty of Gould's previous efforts over the years to caricature adaptationist thinking. When Gould complains further of my "red-baiting" and "gratuitous speculation" about his religious views, this hits a new low. As he knows full well, his scientific critics have often attributed his curious biases to his politics or his views on religion, and I was pointedly disassociating myself from those claims. My criticisms are of his science and his logic, not his political or religious views. But Gould wants to have it both ways; he lards his own writing with political and religious motifs and then howls about red-baiting when anybody takes him up on it--even to dismiss it as beside the point, which is what I did. Besides, if his politics and religion are to be off limits to criticism, then he should clean up his own act. It is he, not I, who has repeatedly failed to live up to the fine principle that he himself has so eloquently expressed: Scientists have power by virtue of the respect commanded by the discipline. We may therefore be sorely tempted to misuse that power in furthering a personal prejudice or social goal--why not provide that extra oomph by extending the umbrella of science over a personal preference in ethics or politics? But we cannot, lest we lose the very respect that tempted us in the first place. (Bully for Brontosaurus, 1991, pp.429-430.) I am sorry it has come to this. In my discussions with Gould over the years, I have tried hard to get him to stop misrepresenting the works that he disapproved of, to clarify his position, and to disavow the misconstruals of evolutionary theory that are so often expressed by non-biologists citing him as their authority. In my book I carefully left open a graceful avenue for him to take: if he wished, he could claim that his eager public had been misreading him and then take responsibility for correcting their readings. He chose instead to turn up the volume of his vituperation. There are quite a few minor mistakes in my book, including three he cites, but they do not substantially affect any of my criticisms of his views. I have put a list of these errors on the web site of the Center for Cognitive Studies . I will not respond further to Gould's charges, trusting that readers will take him up on his challenge: "If you think I am being simplistic or unfair to Dennett in this characterization, read his book. . . " Do, please; see for yourself; that's the scientific way. John Maynard Smith praises my book; Stephen Jay Gould attacks it. They are both authorities, but they can't both be right, can they? Daniel C. Dennett

The gist of Gould's dissatisfaction with this is that it is all too teleological. Genes don't want anything. It's true the genes are the primary medium of information about the structure of organisms, and after that, Selection (among other things, including meteors and the like) Happens. But too much of story of the 'ultras' - at least the somewhat-unfair caricature of the ultras, which is still useful for making the point - depends on attributing to genes a sort of goal, which is sort of like saying that shingles "want" to keep rain of our heads, or even that shingles keep rains off our heads because they "want" to get put on roofs. It's a bit anthropomorphic

Cheap productive science is what you do once someone with more moxy has already done the expensive risky science.

200 years from now no one's going to remember who managed to squeeze 2 extra ergs out of the alkaline battery while trying to get 3 extra ergs out of the alkaline battery; but that guy who cracks universal free power while trying to iron out antigravity, matter conversion, a light speed drive, or a penis enlarger that actually works will earn immortality as the model of choice for the crazey genius caricature in all future WB cartoons.

As I understand it, it's a caricature of Wales and the Welsh. Since most of the locations in the book are based on his piece for Wired, where he went around the world tracking the laying of fiber-optic data lines, he had plenty of first-hand experience in the Phillipines, the South Pacific, and other places.

One other thought... was Qwghlm a caricature of some location that actually exists in the UK or was it a total figment of Stephenson's imagination like the TWA 800 ceiling ornament?

/Brian

"Jar Jar Binks, the notorious duck-billed racial caricature from "The Phantom Menace" ....you may now call him Senator Binks."

First Hillary Clinton becomes a Senator, now Jar-Jar Binks... I'm moving to Canada...

For those to lazy to register:

AFTER sitting through "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones," I'm tempted to quote an evergreen Public Enemy song: don't believe the hype. But really, belief is beside the point. The promotional machinery around the "Star Wars" franchise exists beyond fervor or skepticism; it is a fact of life. When the fifth installment in George Lucas's pop-Wagnerian cycle opens nationally on Thursday (after being shown at the first TriBeCa Film Festival on Sunday afternoon), the event will have all the spontaneity and surprise of an election day in the old Soviet Union.

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Like weary Brezhnev-era Muscovites, the American

moviegoing public will line up out of habit and compulsion, ruefully hoping that this episode will at least be a little better than the last one, and perhaps inwardly suspecting that the whole elephantine system is rotten. Even the true believers camped out on the sidewalks with their toy light sabers (or the ones at the screening I attended who burst into applause at the appearance of the 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm company logos) seem more dutiful than enthusiastic.

Already I can hear the equally habitual murmurs of protest: Oh, come on, lighten up! It's only a movie.

Well, for one thing, given the scale and expense (reportedly $140 million) of the enterprise, not to mention its ability to command the money and attention of audiences around the world, there's nothing "only" about it. And for another, while "Attack of the Clones" is many things -- a two-hour-and-12-minute action- figure commercial, a demo reel heralding the latest advances in digital filmmaking, a chance for gifted actors to be handsomely paid for delivering the worst line readings of their careers -- it is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.

Twenty-five years ago the first "Star Wars" picture, which we are now supposed to call "Episode IV -- A New Hope," offered a revelatory combination of whimsy and grandeur. The big, archetypal themes were there and would emerge into sharper relief through the next two films, but they were leavened by a cheeky sense of fun grounded in Mr. Lucas's love of old serials and B-movies. The solemn drama of Luke Skywalker's Oedipal struggle with Darth Vader was offset by, among other things, the twinkling Gable-and- Lombard sexiness of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher as Han Solo and Princess Leia. The special effects were spectacular and elaborate, but there was also something jaunty in the inventiveness that produced them.

That was a long time ago. In reviving the saga, and setting out to chronicle Luke's genealogy and the earlier history of the Jedi order, Mr. Lucas seems to have lost his boyish glee. As the effects have grown more intricate and realistic, their ability to yield pleasure and astonishment has diminished.

"Clones" takes place 10 years after "Episode I -- The Phantom Menace," and it is as thick with exposition as an undergraduate history course. An early reference to disgruntled miners on one of the moons of Naboo elicits a spasm of anxiety: will this be on the final? Footnotes to the earlier (which is to say, to the later) episodes are interesting in a scholastic kind of way. Now, at long last, we know the parentage of Boba Fett, the vengeful bounty hunter from the first three films.

But where are the clones? Send in the clones! Patience, young Jedi. They're already here, on a distant, storm-tossed planet, waiting for their big climactic battle scene. First, however, you must attend to the political turmoil that threatens the stability of the republic. Separatists in far-flung solar systems, apparently in cahoots with the dark side, are causing all kinds of trouble, and the beleagured Jedi and the fractious senate are ill equipped to contain it. This leads to some earnest palaver among the sinister chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) and the Jedi elders, who include Samuel L. Jackson, Jimmy Smits, Ewan McGregor and Yoda, as well as assorted masked and computer-animated space knights and politicos.

Mr. McGregor, revisiting the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi and looking ever less likely to age into Sir Alec Guinness, must also undertake some intergalactic police work, trying to find those responsible for an attempt on the life of Senator Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman), who has become a legislator after her tenure as the elected (and apparently term-limited) queen of Naboo. (Jar Jar Binks, the notorious duck-billed racial caricature from "The Phantom Menace," has also returned, accent and all. Now you may call him Senator Binks. Whether this makes the character less offensive or more is something to ponder.)

Obi-Wan's apprentice, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), is assigned to be Padmé's bodyguard. He promptly falls in love with her, which occasions some of the most embarrassing romantic avowals in recent screen history. The gifted Anakin also manifests some of the traits that will eventually pull him over to the dark side: arrogance, a hot temper and contempt for democratic institutions. It is clear by now that the purpose of the saga is to do for Anakin/ Darth Vader what Robert A. Caro has been doing for Lyndon B. Johnson, but Mr. Lucas lacks Mr. Caro's feel for human psychology and his insight into the workings of politics.

The story of a young, ambitious knight's corruption, set against a backdrop of incipient civil war, has enormous potential, but Mr. Lucas (who wrote the script with Jonathan Hales) is, at best, a haphazard storyteller. He also has lost either the will or the ability to connect with actors, and his crowded, noisy cosmos is pyschologically and emotionally barren. Mr. Christensen and Ms. Portman are timid and stiff, and uncertain of their diction. They alternate between the august tones of high-school Shakespeareans and the suburban soap-opera naturalism of "Dawson's Creek." Only Mr. Jackson, Frank Oz (the voice of Yoda) and, later, the formidable Christopher Lee seem comfortable in their performances, perhaps because they know better than to take the proceedings too seriously.

Now is perhaps the time to say that the special effects -- the scaly critters and planetary landscapes, the swordplay and the spaceship chases -- demonstrate impressive polish and visual integrity. But now is also the time to say: so what? Yes, the battle scenes and the monster rallies are superior to anything in "The Mummy," "The Mummy Returns" or "The Scorpion King," but that lowbrow franchise at least has the good sense to acknowledge its silliness. "Attack of the Clones," in contrast, like "The Phantom Menace," lumbers along in the confining armor of bogus wisdom.

There are two moments, one early and one late, in which the sententious hooey is cast off and some of the old "Star Wars" spirit peeks out. The first is an aerial chase through traffic-clogged skies, in which the great cinematic challenge of conveying flight is breathtakingly surmounted. The other is a light- saber duel between the evil Count Dooku (Mr. Lee) and Yoda. Watching the elfin, leaping Yoda mix it up with the tall, graceful British bad guy momentarily dispels the ponderous tedium that has come before, but it is too little, too late.

Given Mr. Lee's long career in horror films, the contest also recalls one of those debates that erupt among third graders about the relative prowess of fictional characters. ("No way could Batman beat up Superman. He doesn't even really have powers." "Yuh-uh, 'cause what if Batman had some Kryptonite?" "Yeah, but neither one of them could beat the Incredible Hulk.") Could Yoda beat up Dracula? Good question. But the more relevant one is whether Anakin Skywalker can beat Spider-Man. The answer, young Jedi, is in your hands.

Out of interest, I wrote a simple program which creates a random file. [...] It turns out on my systems, and with code ( please don't mock my newbie code :), improve it if you will ), never ever produced any file that could executed properly, let alone do something useful. [...] I just wanted to try and put it in perspective, how unlikely it is that life was created randomly.

If you want to redo your experiment using reasonable methods, check out the field known as "genetic programming".

Natural selection isn't the only process acting, either; there is also self-organization. For a very fascinating theoretical argument (backed up by computer simulations) as to why life might not only be not unlikely, but inevitable, check out Stuart Kauffmann's At Home in the Universe .

So it is STUPID to think that life, which is far more complex than a computer program, happened only by chance.

Democracy was never grounded upon efficiency or the desires of the elites. ( If you're reading slashdot, I submit that your're an elite in the US, in terms of education at the very least ).

It is well known that a dictatorship is the historically most efficient form of governance. The problem comes when the dictator is not so kind or needs to pass the reign onto another.

You attitudes, unfortunately, reflects the popular caricature of the amoral scientest. He couldn't care less about the rights and conditions of those around him so long as he has a morsel of security and a chance to serve SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS.

By all means, move to Singapore, Malaysia, or even Australia. But if you think you can run away from humann nature....

1. A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or
   ridicule. See Synonyms at caricature.
2. 
   The genre of literature comprising such works.

Something so bad as to be equivalent to intentional mockery; a travesty: The trial was a parody of justice.

Music. The practice of reworking an already established composition, especially the incorporation into the Mass of material borrowed from other works, such as motets or
madrigals.

From the website: Virtual U is a caricature of real academic life grounded in authentic conceptual structures and data.
Silly me, I always thought academic life was a caricature of reality already, how could they caricaturize it further?

Flat characters aren't necessarily a drawback in stories that aren't really character-focused. In plot-based novels it's not uncommon for there to be flat roles played by supporting characters. Those characteristics that define them are often used to push plot. What you call a caricature others might call an archetype: po-tay-to po-tah-to. She's a pretty good plotter, too, one of the best I've read since PG Wodehouse. Even LOTR has its fair share of characters that aren't all that deep.

I'll agree with your cliche point, though. Part of her popularity lies in the fact that many readers of Potter aren't hardcore readers of fantasy. This means that what seems like novelty to them is really just rehash to anybody who knows the genre. She's taking many traditional fantasy themes and reclaiming them as her own. That's fine and all, but not exactly imaginative.

• Flat characters. Each character has a one or two powerful traits which 100% defines them. Harry is the good guy who will always do the good thing. Hermione is the bossy nerd. Etc. They seemed like caricatures.
• Cliche. Wizards, dragons, magic brooms: every fantasy element Rowling uses was blatantly recycled from some other source. Her plotline follows tried-and-true dramatic conventions to the letter. I'm baffled as to why I've heard her praised as "imaginative."

Just because it's a "children's book" is no excuse: it's certainly possible to write one and avoid these mistakes (take Lemony Snicket's, for instance).

That said, in the balance it's a good, gripping novel. But Rowling's genius seems to me a derivative one, of weaving together well-worn elements into an exciting narrative with a vivid, feature-film feel. In my view, the above flaws stop it far short of being the be-all and end-all of children's literature.

You are free to reinstall any software to the machines provided that you aqcuire valid licenses for this software

All that Microsoft really needs to do, if this is not already the case, is to make a condition of any site license they give to schools that they may only install the licensed software on computers that were donated that came with a Microsoft OS and included complete media and documentation. One would presume that a school would want to make all of their PCs have consistent software installed on them, including the site-licensed OS.

One can imagine a caricature of Darth Vader choking the life out of a school child and saying "I find your lack of a pre-installed MS-OS license distrubing." It's difficult to be too cynical; I hope that I haven't insulted George Lucas by this comparing Darth Vader to Microsoft.

MS is free to include any provisions it wants in its school site licenses, such as disallowing "viral-licensed software" anywhere at the school, or whatever the derogatory term for free software is this week. This could land them in more anti-trust hot water, but the courts have already demonstrated themselves to be impotent, so what is the risk?