WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING?

There are, to the best of my knowledge, three English language bookstores in Paris, all within walking distance of our apartment.  The closest, and by far the best known, is Shakespeare & Co., on a Left Bank quai cattycorner across from Notre Dame de Paris [our neighborhood church.]  As readers of my Autobiography will know [Volume One, Chapter Three], I spent a good deal of time hanging out there in the Spring of ’55, when it was called Le Mistral.  The second, also quite well known among Americans in Paris, is The Village Voice [no kidding!], on rue Princesse in the 6^th.  The Village Voice, which is more of a real bookstore and less of a tourist magnet than Shakespeare & Co., hosts readings by visiting English language authors, several of which Susie and I have attended.  The third is a tiny second hand bookshop on a back street up behind Odeon, which Susie and I discovered when we were wandering around one day after seeing a movie at one of the three cinemas in the Odeon area.

Several days ago, I walked to the little secondhand bookstore, where I found a serviceable Dave Brown schlock spy story, which occupied me for a day [not bad for 2 Euros.]  Then Susie and I went to rue st. Julien le Pauvre to have a bite at an English style tea house we favor, after which we walked around the corner to Shakespeare & Co. to look for something to read.  I bought another schlock spy book, by Steve Coonts, but Susie, whose tastes are somewhat more elevated than mine, opted for E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth.  The Coonts took me all of two days, and there I was again looking for something to read.

Despite having spent a curious and informative afternoon with E. O. Wilson in his Harvard office a quarter of a century ago [Autobiography, Volume Two, Chapter Five], I have long been suspicious of the field he fostered, Sociobiology, while remaining quite impressed by his extraordinary work on ants.  But pressed for something to read, I decided to try his new book.  To my surprise and delight, I found it engrossing and utterly charming.  Or at least that was my reaction to the first three-fourths of the book, but I will get to that in a bit.

The subject of the book is the evolution of eusociality in animal species, including homo sapiens, and the transformation of eusociality into culture in humans.  Wilson defines eusociality as “the condition of multiple generations organized into groups by means of an altruistic division of labor.”  “Altruism” here has a quite specific meaning, namely behavior that does not increase, or even decreases, an organism’s probability of reproducing.  Such behavior is extremely common in ant colonies, in many, if not most, of which there are so-called “worker ants” and “soldier ants” whose actions contribute to the “queen” ant’s ability to reproduce, even though they themselves do not, indeed perhaps cannot, reproduce.  Wilson has been studying ants all his life, and has an endless supply of fascinating examples drawn from the thousands upon thousands of species and genera of ants.  [In the 1950’s, when my sister was doing her doctorate in Biology at Harvard, Wilson was one of her fellow graduate students.  Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould were the star students, of course, and Wilson was very much the odd man out, since in those days no one who was fated to be anyone studied so-called “social insects” – ants, termites, and bees.]

You can see the problem that altruistic behavior, thus defined, presents to an evolutionary biologist.  How on earth can natural selection select the genes that code for altruistic behavior, when such behavior has no reproductive edge, and may even greatly diminish or even eliminate the probability that the organism bearing those genes will reproduce at all?  In theory, such genes should be selected against and disappear from the genome as soon as mutations produce them. 

According to Wilson, evolutionary biologists have been debating and investigating this question intensely for several decades, and Wilson is once again the odd man out.  The dominant explanation is something called “inclusive fitness,” according to which what natural selection selects for is the number of genes that are passed on globally – i.e., by any organism – rather than for the reproduction of any one organism carrying that gene.  The idea [see Richard Dawkins’ influential book, The Selfish Gene] is something like this:  If brother ants on average share fifty percent of their genes [because of the mechanisms of chromosomal reproduction], then one of them will improve the chances of its genes being passed on to the next generation if it takes a less than fifty percent chance of failing to reproduce in order to up the chances of its brother reproducing [by feeding it, for example, or protecting it from a predator] by more than fifty percent.  Cousins will be less likely to sacrifice for one another, and so on for even more distant relatives.  Ants don’t know any of this, of course, but natural selection operates as though they do.  Elaborate Game Theoretic models have been developed to defend this explanation for the evolution of “altruistic” behavior in eusocial species.

Against this theory, which he claims has proved to be both mathematically and experimentally disconfirmed [in this book he does not give details], Wilson offers a theory of group selection, according to which it is not individual organisms but groups of organisms – colonies, nests, extended families – that compete against one another with natural selection determining which group – and hence which assemblage of genes – survives and reproduces most successfully.

The real delight in the book is Wilson’s repeated extended comparisons of hominid evolution with ant evolution.  There are a variety of animal species that have developed eusocial behavior:  ants, of course, and termites and bees, and naked moles [who knew?], and a rare species of shrimp [this one is a real outlier, as we shall see], and, of course, the pre-hominids and hominids leading to homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens.  From his extensive study of and reflection on these instances of eusociality, Wilson comes to the conclusion that there were three facts about the early hominds – “preadaptations,” as he calls them – that prepared them for the possibility of making the leap from eusociality to culture [which is the real subject of his book.]  Rather unexpectedly, these are: first, the shift from an herbivorous to an omnivorous diet, which is to say the regular hunting for and eating of meat;  second, the possession of flat, soft appendages [i.e., fingers, as opposed to talons or claws] suitable for working materials like stone, shaping them, and manipulating them;  and finally, the successful mastery of controlled fire.  It is this last that has forever barred highly intelligent creatures like dolphins or octopi from ever evolving culture.

There is much, much more in the first three-quarters of the book, all of it fascinating, and some of it – the occasional autobiographical bits – quite charming.  Here is just one passage that gives something of the flavor of Wilson’s authorial voice:

“[I]n 1967, I received a piece of fossil metasequoia amber that two amateur collectors had picked up in a New Jersey stratum of Late Cretaceous age, about 90 million years old.  Present together were two beautifully preserved worker ants in the transparent amber.  They were almost twice as old as the most ancient ant fossil previously known.  As I held the piece in my hand, I knew I was the first to look back into the deep history of one of Earth’s two most successful insect groups.  It was among the most exciting moments of my life (and I can understand if the reader does not appreciate my reaction to a fossil insect.)  In fact, I was so excited that I fumbled and dropped the piece.  It fell to the floor and broke into two fragments.  I froze and stared down in horror, as though I had just bumped into and shattered a priceless Ming Dynasty vase.  However, fortune continued to favor me that day.  There remained one undamaged ant in each fragment, and each could be polished separately.”  [pp. 121-122.]

And so it goes, until, on page 232, things turn horribly wrong, and the book more or less falls apart.  The elaborate and fascinating discussions of ants and termites, hominids and homo neanderthalensis, have all been the merest prolegomenon to Wilson’s real subject, the evolution of culture.  The final one-quarter of the book is devoted to a discussion of the evolution of language, cultural variation, morality, honor, religion, and the creative arts.  And here, despite having a number of quite interesting things to say [about color perception, for example], Wilson wanders outside the sphere of his indisputable mastery and reveals his limits. 

Discussing the famous debate between B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky in 1957, Wilson completely breaks tone by quoting an extremely technical passage from Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s book, which he then mocks, as if to say, “How can jargon like this possibly tell us anything about language?”  Now, Wilson has for more than two hundred pages been skimming over some equally technical stuff in evolutionary biology, repeatedly saying that he is simplifying it for a non-specialist audience, but instead of quoting any of the many quite lucid informal explanations Chomsky has given of his influential theories, Wilson adopts a know-nothing attitude that would do credit to an evangelical Christian.  I was so affronted by the passage that had it not occurred late in Wilson’s exposition, I would have simply thrown down the book in exasperation and refused to continue reading.

So, I warmly recommend the first three-quarters of Wilson’s new book as an engrossing and extremely informative treatment of a rich subject.  I you can find a second-hand copy in which the last sixty-five pages have been torn out, so much the better.

REPORT FROM PARADISE

Susie and I had dinner Friday evening with Anne Berry and Philip Minns, two old friends who live in the Paris suburb of Sevres.  Anne and Philip are both professional simultaneous translators, a profession which I cannot even imagine being able to pursue.  We were discussing the Socialist Party victory in the parliamentary elections, and I remarked that France once again had a socialist government after two decades.  Philip then told me something of which I was completely unaware.

France, like America, has four levels of government -- the city or municipal level,what we would call the county and state levels, and then the national level.  As in America, elections at the various levels are staggered, occurring in different years. When Francois Mitterand, the last Socialist President, was in office, he actually faced a hostile majority in the National Assembly and right wing administrations at the lower levels, right down to some of the major cities.  But Francois Hollande not only now has a majority in both the National Assembly and the mostly ceremonial Senate, he also has Socialist governments at every other level of the French political system.   France is, at least for the next several years, officially a socialist country.

So what is it like living in paradise?  Well, the weather has been awful for months, putting a damper on Fete de la Musique, and last nignt Spain eliminated France from the quarterfinals of the Europe Cup, so the sans-culottes are not dancing in the streets.  Indeed, Susie has observed, as we sit in our little cafe, that the current fashion among French women is skin-tight leggings under very short skirts, so perhaps "sans culottes" is not an entirely appropriate term.

It is, of course, a trifle early to form a reasoned judgment concerning the new government.  The second round of elections for the National Assembly was only seven days ago.   But as one who has spent most of the last three-quarters of a century having private fantasies of democratic socialism, I cannot help but have hopes.

The local opinion is that taxes will go up.  If they are imposed on the more affluent to pay for social services for the poor, I say let them go up.  I pay two sorts of taxes on my little apartment, and I consider every Euro of them a Euro well spent.  Now, if Holland can only somehow browbeat Angela Merkel into allowing a modest rate of inflation and moderating her calls for austerity in the face of economic recession.  That really would be something to cheer about.

ANOTHER ODD FACT ABOUT PARIS

Like many other classical music lovers, I have long since grown accustomed to being able to locate a classical music station on my radio in almost any part of America.  It all started for me in the 40's as a boy in New York City with WQXR, which may have been, for all I know, the original classical music station.  It was the norm for WQXR to play entire classical works -- a Beethoven symphony, a Mozart quartet, even -- God help us all -- A Mahler symphony [although that required a health warning that older listeners might expire before Mahler got to the last movement.]  When I went off to Harvard in 1950, I discovered to my delight that during the end-of-semester "reading period" [when slackards read all the stuff they were supposed to have read during term, and the rest of us crammed for finals] the Harvard radio station put on what they called a "classical music orgy" -- a two week twenty-four hours a day bonanza of classical music, arranged chronologically from medieval plainsong to Stravinsky.  The announcer might say, at 4 a.m. [when I was doing my studying] "and here now are the symphonies of Beethoven," whereupon the station would literally play all nine symphonies in order!  Chapel Hill has a splendid classical music station with a hefty serving of early music as well as more popular items from the classical and romantic periods.

When Susie and I bought our Paris apartment, an essential element of our decorations was a Bose radio and CD player, on which I confidently assumed I would be able to locate the Paris classical music stations and program them into the radio's pre-set buttons.  Some tedious scanning of the bandwidth did indeed turn up two stations that seemed to be playing classical music -- 91.7 and 101.1 FM.

But when we turned those stations on, we made a horrible, astonishing, incomprehensible discovery.  THEY ONLY PLAY SNIPPETS.  The announcer promises a Haydn quartet, to be sure, but only plays one movement.  He starts playing a Monteverdi madrigal, and then breaks into it for some useless discussion with a fellow announcer while the madrigal continues in the background.  In eight years, I have never heard either station play a major work from start to finish!  It is as though they think their listeners are incapable of the concentration required to listen to a complete work of music.

I have no idea what the explanation is for this mystery, and I welcome comments from anyone who is more knowldgeable than I.  There is no doubt that when Susie and I attend an early music concert at a church or recital hall, an audience appears who seem quite capable of sitting through entire works, without the interpolation of chit chat designed to take the sting out of music that lasts for more than three minutes.

Susie notes that at least one of the classical music stations also plays jazz.  Now really!

THE NEWS FROM PARIS

The dismal weather has lifted, and exactly one day early, summer has arrived in Paris, just in time for Fete de la Musique tomorrow evening.  I cooked cuisses de canard the other night, and this evening I will make lovely large crevettes rose [big shrimp].  Yesterday evening we went across the street to have pizza and watch France get creamed by Sweden in soccer.  Oh well.  As a one-time Brooklyn Dodger fan converted to a Red Sox fan, I am accustomed to disappointment.

Today, Susie and I had an errand in the ritzy part of town -- Boulevard Haussmann, in the 8th arondissement, right up the street from the very up-scale department store Printemps.  We were wearing our matching Obama 2012 T-shirts, and I am happy to report that if the election were held in Paris, Obama would win by a landslide.  Everywhere we went, cab drivers, doormen, elegant young Parisiennes all gave us the high sign.  Unfortunately ...

While we were in Western Massachusetts, we attended a concert by Aston Magna, the early music group whose summer concerts we went to faithfully for twenty years when we lived in Pelham.  Once again I was struck by the paradox that this rural backwater has early music that far outshines anything we have heard in Paris.

Paris is at the moment engaged in replacing the underground electricity lines throughout the city, so everywhere one turns, there are deep trenches where sidewalks used to be, and green barriers directing foot traffic around the holes.  Our street is now finished, since yesterday a group of men arrved with a big truck full of hot tar and proceeded to re-tar the sidewalk across the way from our apartment.  I view every municipal improvement as a direct consequence of the fact that Paris has a gay socialist mayor -- silly of me, I know, but it is such a delight to encounter little squares in Paris named after former members of the Communist Party.  The realities of capitalism in the seats of power and poverty in the banlieus do not change, of course.

GLOOMY THOUGHTS ON A RAINY DAY IN PARIS

Eighty years ago, with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, adopting a number of the policy planks of the Socialist Party [but of course not acknowledging as much], began a successful effort of more than three decades to put in place a structure of protections for working class families that is now usually referred to as The Welfare State.  Social Security, a federally enforced minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Aid to Dependent Children, workplace safety regulations, unionization protections, Medicare, and Medicaid, among other initiatives, fundamentally transformed the life experiences of hundreds of millions of Americans.  It was not socialism.  Indeed, one of its purposes was to weaken the appeal of socialism and thus protect capitalism from its own destructive tendencies.  But it made a long and good life possible even for those who did not inhabit the upper reaches of society.  It is easy to forget that two generations ago, the aged were among the poorest segments of the American population, living lives extended by medical advances but made miserable by poverty and neglect.

From the beginning, these laws, regulations, and government institutions were opposed by conservatives, who fought them in Congress and challenged them in the courts.  For at least forty years, it has been the stated goal of the Republican Party to dismantle the Welfare State, component by component, and as the decades have passed, they have achieved some of their goals, on occasion aided by the Democratic Party itself.  Ronald Reagan’s first significant act upon assuming the presidency was to fight, and eventually to break, the air traffic controllers’ union, a success that accelerated the decline of unionization in America.  Workplace safety laws have been weakened, the minimum wage frozen so as not to keep pace with inflation, and under the guidance of Bill Clinton, “welfare as we know it” was ended.  This last “reform” had a less than feared effect during the boom years of the 90’s, but in the present deep and continuing recession, the absence of financial support for the poor is causing widespread, albeit mostly unreported, hardship.

In the next ten days or so, we face the threat of a Supreme Court reversal of the Affordable Care Act, with consequences whose severity is only now being recognized.  This threat is widely recognized as only the first battle in a campaign to undo judicially the last eighty years of welfare legislation, returning us to the conditions that obtained when FDR took office.

These legislative and judicial assaults have of course been coupled with a massive increase in income and wealth inequality, of a sort never before seen in this country.  The present tendencies threaten to turn America into a Banana Republic, with permanent high unemployment, stagnant wages for all but the fortunate few, and the complete transformation of our politics into a Plutocracy.

Nothing that I have just written is in the slightest new or original, of course.  But living at the moment in a country that has just elected a socialist president and legislature brings home to me how appalling the United States has become even by capitalist standards.  I am under no illusion that Barack Obama and the present-day Democratic Party offer Americans a truly progressive path beyond “vulture capitalism” [to invoke on of Rick Perry’s more felicitous phrases].  But Obama and the Democratic Party will, if they are in power, protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, support and extend necessary reforms to the capitalist health care system, raise the minimum wage, enforce workplace health and safety standards, impose some measure of regulation [albeit insufficient] on finance capital, and undertake to create jobs by economic stimuli.  With working class Americans under siege, that is not nothing, by a long shot.

One can, of course, hold out for the complete collapse of capitalism, as a precursor to a socialist transformation.  But no one of whom I am aware has explained how that transformation would emerge from the chaos and misery of the collapse.  Perhaps I am too much the victim of the history through which I have lived, but I fear that fascism would be a likelier successor than socialism to a total collapse of capitalism.

These are not happy times, even for someone my age who can expect to die before the worst happens.

ELTON MAYO, HAWTHORNE, AND WESTERN ELECTRIC

I too have some doubts about the necessity for random choice of the students in the Pilot Program, but since that method will achieve exactly what I was aiming for anyway, I am happy to accede to the wisdom of my betters.  Now, however, things get really interesting.  Dania will select a control group of sixty students from the remaining 120 or so -- also randomly.  In the coming year, we will interview each first-year student who decides to leave Bennett, whether from our group or the control group.  We will then be able to match students who leave from the control group with students who stay in our group, according to economic condition, family problems, love interest, acdemic troubles, and any other factors influencing the decision to drop out.  We will, of course, do everything in our power to keep our sixty students in school.  By the end of a year, we ought to have a pretty good idea whether we are actually making a difference, and -- what is even more important -- why we are making a difference.

There is, of course, a possibility that we will succeed in keeping more students in school simply because we are paying attention to them, regardless of the details of the program I have devised.  This might be called the Elton Mayo or Western Electric effect, for reasons I shall explain momentarily.  But unlike Elton Mayo, I don't care.  All I care about is keeping those students in school and seeing them graduate with a good degree from Bennett.

Who on earth was Elton Mayo?  In the late 19th century, a chap named Fred W. Taylor made a big splash with a theory of scientific management of industrial enterprises that was supposed to rationalize production and increase profitability.  In the 1920's, the Western Electric Company recruited a social science researcher named Elton Mayo to apply these theories to its Hawthorne plant.  Mayo and his associates interviewed the workers, analyzed the layout of the floor where teams were assembling electrical units, studied the rate at which the piecework was proceeding, and then made some minor adjustments to the lighting.  Lo and behold, production went up.  Then they left, and production slumped to its previous level.  It took them a while to realise that their success had nothing to do with their scientific analysis or the adjustments they had made to the lighting, and everything to do with the fact that the exploited, underpaid, regimented workers were so grateful that anyone was paying attention to them.  [That is my language, of course, not theirs.]

But I really do not care whether the precise details of my pilot program are the cause of such success as we may achieve.  Indeed, it would not surprise me at all to discover that any program that requires the faculty to pay close attention to the students and take responsibility for their success or failure will work just as well.  If we succeed in dramatically raising the retention and graduation rates, and if other schools, replicating our efforts, find that alternative programs embodying these elements work even better, I will be delighted and consider myself to have been vindicated.

The entire effort is premised on my conviction that every young woman admitted to Bennett is capable, under the right circumstances, of completing the undergraduate program and graduating.

THE OLD PHILOSOPHER LEARNS A NEW TRICK OR TWO

I have often remarked that I do not consider myself a scholar.  It goes without saying that I also do not consider myself a research scientist.  But my lack of research credentials was brought home to me rather abruptly by Dania Francis, the young advanced doctoral student whom I recruited, at the suggestion of the head of the Spencer Foundation, to assist me with the formulation of what is apparently called a “research protocol” for my new  project at Bennett.

I had decided to select sixty of the incoming one hundred eighty-three Bennett Freshwomen for the Pilot Program I shall be running in AY 2012-2013.  For various reasons, I wanted a representative sample of students, as determined both by their high school GPS’s [that is “grade point average” for my foreign readers] and by their status as either in-state North Carolina students or out-of-state students. 

The Excel spreadsheet of the incoming students provided to me by the “Office of Enrolment Management” is organized in descending order by GPA, so, since I was selecting a third of the class for my Pilot Program, I thought the cool way to choose them would be simply to go down the list, tagging every fourth name.  This produced a representative selection of GPA’s and, as I anticipated, close to a representative sample by geographic origin.  Pretty good, yes?  I then divided the sixty students thus selected into ten groups by simply opening a new field in the spreadsheet called “Group,” and then going down the list of sixty students [still arranged, of course, by GPA] and marking the fields numerically, 1 through 10, in order, thus producing ten groups, each of which had a range of GPA’s.  I checked, and they also had a scattering of in-state and out-of-state students.  Along about now, I was feeling pretty good about myself, thinking that I could do this without the help of a graduate student!

With mock modesty, I explained all of this to Dania, expecting her to exclaim, “But that is exactly the way it should have been done!”  Fat chance.  She looked at what I had done and said quietly, “I think you should choose the students randomly.”  “But,” I replied, “My way has produced a selection that almost perfectly mirrors the entire class.”  “Yes,” she replied, “but there may be hidden variables.  I think the Spencer Foundation would prefer a random selection.”

Well, all of this was in aid of getting money from the Spencer, and my ego is not so large as to stand in the way of a grant, so I said, “How would you do that?”  “Very simple,” she said [rather like explaining rain to a child], “we just assign them numbers 1 through 183, and then generate a random number sequence that selects sixty of them.  Then we do the same thing to group them in ten groups of six each”  [I hope I have that right.]  She drove back to Boston from Amherst, and had it all done by the next day.

I reported all of this to Mike McPherson, President of the Spencer.  Here is his reply:  “Sounds great. It's a good sign that she immediately recognized the need to use random assignment, since that option is available.”

Pretty clearly, I have a lot to learn.