READING SUGGESTIONS

My comments on Nagel prompted a request from Larry K. for some of my sister's reading recommendations.  She gave me four titles:

Sean B. Carroll -- The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution

 

Sean B. Carroll -- Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo

Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb -- Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life

 

Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart -- The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma

 

In addition, there are the following outstanding books by Nick Lane which she led me to some time ago:

 

Oxygen:  The Molecule That Made The World

 

Power, Sex, Suicide:  Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life

 

Life Ascending:  The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution

 

Any one of these, I think, would be a revelation to those who are unaware of the astonishing work now being done in Biology.

LAST LINES

My light-hearted post about catchphrases prompted a considerable outpouring of suggestions from the readers of this blog, encouraging me to try another game:  Last Lines.  The classic last line, of course, comes from the same Casablanca that gave us "We'll always have Paris."  I refer to Bogart's last words to Claude Rains:  "Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."  Wikipedia tells me that the line was actually written a month after shooting ended, and Bogart had to be brought back to dub it.

But my all time favorite is a throwaway line delivered by Linda Fiorentino at the very end of Men in Black.   She, Will Smith, and Tommy Lee Jones are leaving the scene of their epic engagement with the giant intergalactic cockroach [played with over the top brilliance by Vincent d'Onofrio].  Jones suggests that they consult with Dennis Rodman about some new crisis.  "Is he an alien?" Fiorentino ask.  Yes, she is told.  As she gets in the car, she says ruminatively, "Not much of a disguise."

CATCHPHRASES

During my walk this morning, which was very quiet inasmuch as it is Labor Day, I got to musing about catchphrases that make their way into popular consciousness.  For those of us who have reached a certain age, Humphrey Bogart's classic line, "We'll always have Paris" captures perfectly a nostalgic feeling of loss and remembrance [though few of us are fortunate enough to find Ingrid Bergman in our memories.]  What are some of the others? I asked myself.

One line that I seized on the moment I heard it comes from the movie Jerry McGuire, starring Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding, and Renée Zellweger.  I have been using it whenever I can, thinking that I was the only person who had noticed it, but now it is popping up on TV enough so that I realize I am not alone.  Cruise has lost Zellweger by his bad behavior, and she is seeking consolation from her feminist support group when Cruise barges in and launches into a long apology and plea for forgiveness.  When he pauses for breath, she says, "You had me with hello."

Another favorite that lingers in the mind is the conclusion of the first stanza of Dryden's great poem, Alexander's Feast:  "None but the brave deserve the fair."  A  while back, I got that confused with "the good die young," which turns out to be the title of a song by someone named Billy Joel [there, I have revealed my total cluelessness.]

And then there is "You shall not crucify us on a cross of gold,"  the oratorical flourish of William Jennings Bryan, immortalized in The Wizard of Oz ["oz" being the customary contraction for an ounce of gold.]

I invite other nominations from my indefatigable readers.

CASTING NEWS: David Whalen to play Augustus's dad in TFIOS

David Whalen

According to IMDB and Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre, Pittsburgh-native actor David Whalen will play Mr. Mark Waters, Augustus's dad. This was confirmed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Here are some quotes from the book by Gus's dad:

WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING

I have just finished reading Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, by my old friend and one-time student, Thomas Nagel.  I am sorry to say that I did not find it an illuminating or persuasive book, for a variety of reasons.  In this brief discussion, I should like to focus on just one, which I think has relevance for a certain kind of philosophy in general, and not just for Tom's book.

Let me begin, somewhat implausibly, by quoting a thirty-year old story from my autobiography about the famous biologist and founder of Sociobiology, E. O. Wilson  [pp. 537-540].   I have edited it down a bit. 

            "A Canadian philosopher, Michael Ruse, asked whether I would like to meet E. O. Wilson.  I said sure, and Ruse set it up.  It was agreed that I would spend an afternoon in his office, which doubled as his laboratory.  In advance of the rendezvous, we exchanged gifts.  I sent him, through Michael, a copy of The Poverty of Liberalism, and he sent back a copy of his latest book, Promethean Fire, co-authored by Wilson and Charles Lumsden.  The volume, which sits on my shelves today, is inscribed "For Robert Paul Wolff, with warm regards, Edward O. Wilson, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard U., January 25, 1984."

            We met in Wilson's office in the Museum.  After the usual greetings, he showed me the centerpiece of the office, a large table on which, under a Plexiglas dome, was a bustling, complex ant colony.  Wilson banged the side of the table, which set the ants scurrying, and as they poured out of the anthill he pointed out the soldier ants, worker ants, and so forth.  I didn't have much in the way of conversation.  What can you say about an anthill, after all?  So, casting about for something to say, I mused aloud, "I wonder how many ants there are in the entire colony."  "Fifteen thousand," Wilson replied.  "How can you be sure?" I asked.  "I counted them," he said.

            There are moments in life when the scales fall from your eyes and you suddenly see clearly something that has hitherto been obscured from view.  This was one of those moments.  I had from time to time reflected on how different the workaday lives are of people in different corners of the Academy, even though we all call ourselves "Professor."   Here was E. O. Wilson, the creator of Sociobiology, who thought nothing at all about counting fifteen thousand ants.  Had anyone asked me to figure out the number of ants in an anthill, the farthest I would have gone was watching eight or ten walk by and then guesstimating the rest.

            To be sure, philosophers sometimes descend to the level of the particular.  But our tendency is to go in somewhat the opposite direction.  Confronted with the real world, the reflex reaction of philosophers is to ask about possible worlds.  It was clear to me that although we were both professors and authors, Wilson and I led lives so utterly different that no real mutual understanding was likely.  It was also clear that however much the world might think of Wilson as the tendentious, controversial author of Sociobiology, his real interest was in those ants.

            When our conversation about the anthill began to drag, Wilson took me into a nearby room in which there were rows of file cabinets.  He pulled out a drawer at random to show me a card on which was impaled an ant.  The card identified the ant as belonging to one of the more than twenty thousand species of ants that are estimated to exist somewhere or other on the face of the earth.  A second éclaircissementilluminated my mind.  I had a vision of thousands of English curates and amateur entomologists, each of whom had devoted much of his or her life to searching for, identifying, catching, impaling, and thus nailing down for all time one of those ant species.  Here again, I saw clearly how different my field was from Wilson's.  Philosophy does not advance by the taking of thousands of tiny steps, assuming for the sake of argument that it advances at all.  Instead, ages pass during which little or nothing happens, although thousands of philosophers are doing their best.  Then, there is a moment of transformation -- fourth century B. C,. in Greece, or the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe.  Suddenly, the subject leaps forward, changing forever the way we think.  But Entomology is not like that at all.  Every one of those file cards was the evidence of a worthwhile piece of work, undertaken, completed, and added to our knowledge of the ant.  I was properly humbled.  After we parted, I reflected that Wilson probably had learned nothing at all from meeting me, but I felt that I had learned a good deal from meeting him."

In the past several years, guided by my sister, Barbara, I have read a number of books on the latest advances in evolutionary biology and molecular biology.  The work I have found reported there is truly astounding, both in its detail, in its penetration down to the molecular level, and in its breadth and imagination.  Thousands upon thousands of scientists have devoted their lives to studying innumerable species -- their habits, their morphology, their DNA, and such crucially important but obscure matters as the processes inside their cells by which energy is generated and passed along "an energy gradient" to other parts of the cell.  One chapter-long discussion that I especially recall concerned the molecular interactions that take place every time a muscle contracts.  The process takes pages and pages to describe even in terms suitable for a lay reader like myself, and yet that process is repeated thousands of times a second whenever a muscle, any muscle, contracts [as, for example, when a suite of muscles contract so that I can type these words.]

These scientific examinations have been carried out not merely for the human species, but for countless species of spiders, clams, worms, algae, plants, bacteria, fruit flies, fish, and mammals.  We -- which is to say the collective scientific community -- now know so much more than we knew even a few years ago, and will know so much more in a few more years, that simply keeping up as an interested lay person requires constant study.  My sister, who teaches extraordinary courses on this field in an adult education program in Washington D. C., is forced to assign new books almost every year because a work even two or three years old is out of date.

Tom Nagel undertakes in his slender 128 page book to show that "the  materialist Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false," and yet in those pages, there is not a single chapter, a single paragraph, a single sentence, indeed not a single word about all of this extraordinary science.  On the face of it, that just cannot be right.  Surely one cannot engage with the "Neo-Darwinian conception of nature" without so much as relating a single bit of its substance.

"Not so," philosophers will reply.  "We can examine the logical structure of arguments and grasp their validity or invalidity without imposing on ourselves the tedium of master all those details."  Well, maybe so, but I have my doubts.  Consider a different example, this one from the medical field of neurology.  One of the bits of philosophy put forward back in the day when I was actually reading philosophy was the notion of "contrast terms."  It was said that pairs of terms such as "left/right" or "up/down" were defined in relation to one another in such a manner that it was impossible to understand one without understanding the other.  Nobody offered any evidence for this claim.  Its truth was taken as self-evident.  Well, along comes the wonderful neurologist Oliver Sacks, who reports the case of a woman who, having suffered a massive cerebral stroke, lost all understanding of the concept "left" while retaining a complete understanding of the concept "right."  She ate only the food on the right half of her plate and complained that the portions were too small.  When she made herself up, she only put lipstick on the right half of her lips.

It just seems to me that before Tom Nagel announces that the Neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false, it behooves him to spend a good deal of time immersed in the substance of that conception.  Tom makes a good deal of the fact of consciousness [to which he devotes one of his five chapters,] claiming, as you might expect, that consciousness is utterly different in kind from the neurological condition of non-conscious life forms.  But he does not talk at all about all the work that has been done tracing, step by step, the neurological development of species that appear to be located somewhere along the continuum between consciousness and non-consciousness.  Perhaps had he done so, he would have concluded that his initial instinct was correct.  But he does not do the work.  And failing to do that work, he is, I think, dismissing and failing to pay attention to all the extraordinary research that is now being done.

What then does Tom offer in place of this "almost certainly false" Neo-Darwinian conception?  Aristotelian natural teleology!  Tom is quite aware that his readers will roll their eyes at this suggestion, but mysteriously, he does not spend any time telling us what precisely he means by natural teleology.  That just strikes me as philosophical malpractice.  I mean, you cannot write a whole book modestly, tentatively, but nonetheless definitively trashing Neo-Darwinism, and then not even take a few pages to spell out exactly what your hesitantly offered alternative is.

One final point, called to my attention by my son, Patrick.  The great philosophers of science in the past  -- Aristotle, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant -- were all completely au courant with the latest scienc [and in many cases made important contributions to it].  None of them, I am convinced, would have undertaken to call into question some major theory of their day without discussing in detail the evidence for it. 

Meanwhile, at my sister's suggestion, I have ordered from Amazon The Art of Being a Parasite by Claude Combes.  It is not scheduled to arrive for another two weeks, but when I have read it, I will report to you on what I have learned.

Why is TFIOS not shot in Indianapolis?

We all know that TFIOS is mostly set in Indianapolis. So why is it not shot there? David Lindquist wrote an article about that for the Indystar:

In a world where Illinois and Ohio are big players in the movie industry, Indiana is barely in the game. Mercenary filmmakers go where the deals are, and 39 states offer tax incentives to production crews. Indiana isn’t one of those states.

In the coming months, Pittsburgh will stand in for Indianapolis in “The Fault in Our Stars,” while Massachusetts towns will represent fictional Carlinville, Ind., in Robert Downey Jr.’s film “The Judge.”

Coming to the 2014 Indiana General Assembly: A lobbying group that insists a new law is the only thing that stands between the Hoosier state and Hollywood gold.

Novelist John Green spent the past week on the set of “The Fault in Our Stars,” the film adaptation of his novel that’s sold about 1 million copies since its publication in January 2012.

Despite the book’s plot, in which two Indianapolis teens meet in a support group for cancer patients and fall in love, producers Wyck Godfrey and Marty Bowen of “Twilight” series fame selected Pittsburgh as the site for filming (plus an upcoming visit to Amsterdam).

Why Pennsylvania? The state offers a tax credit expected to put 10 percent to 15 percent of additional financing into the movie’s budget, Green said. Indiana has no such program. 

Using a hypothetical budget of $10 million, here’s how Pennsylvania's production incentive works:

After spending $10 million in the state, a film might have $8 million of its expenditures deemed eligible for a 25 percent transferable tax credit. Because a visiting production company typically doesn’t have $2 million in tax liabilities in the state, its credit can be sold, in the form of a certificate, to a Pennsylvania-based corporation that does — perhaps for 80 percent of face value.

So, filmmakers head back to California with $1.6 million they wouldn’t have if cameras had rolled in a non-incentive state.

Green expressed frustration at Indiana's inability to compete. “I wish this movie could be filmed in Indianapolis, because I think it would be great for the city,” Green said. “But as soon as it was explained to me, I understood there was just no other way. It just wasn’t possible.”

References to Indiana won’t be scrubbed from the big-screen version of “The Fault in Our Stars.” Lead actor Ansel Elgort wore a Pacers jersey (a Rik Smits jersey, to be specific) during Monday’s opening day of filming. Even “Funky Bones,” the 39-foot by 69-foot sculpture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s 100 Acres art and nature park, will stick around as a memorable landmark. Well, make that a replica of “Funky Bones.”

Green said that filmmakers consulted with the sculpture’s creator, Dutch artist Joep Van Lieshout, to fabricate a “Funky Bones” in Pittsburgh. “To contextualize the size of the budget difference, it’s far, far cheaper to recreate a very expensive work of art from scratch than it is to just film in Indianapolis,” Green said.

Before the era of film-related tax incentives, which began in 1991 in Louisiana, Indiana boasted 1979’s “Breaking Away” and 1986’s “Hoosiers” as local stories made into popular films in the state. Through the 1990s, “Rudy,” “A League of Their Own” and “Blue Chips” included scenes shot in Indiana.

Back in the 1958, Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine and Dean Martin made a movie titled “Some Came Running” in Madison, Ind. A Walk of Fame plaque still commemorates the film in downtown Madison, a tribute that caught the eye of Indiana-based filmmaker Benjamin Dewhurst when he recently worked in the Ohio River town.

Dewhurst is part of the executive committee for the Indiana Media Production Alliance, the lobbying group seeking approval of film-industry tax incentives when the state legislature returns to work in January.

He’s disappointed that “The Fault in Our Stars” is being filmed elsewhere. For “The Judge,” an upcoming movie starring Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall, tax incentives in Massachusetts equal to 25 cents for every new dollar of spending brought to the state snared a story set in fictional Carlinville, Ind.

The (Springfield, Mass.) Republican reported that “The Judge” crew hung a large banner advertising the “Crawford County Summer Blueberry Festival” in Shelburne Falls, Mass. Indiana is home to a Crawford County, while Massachusetts is not.

“That’s Hoosier pride that’s just going out the window,” Dewhurst said.

An economic argument

But the ability to lure film and TV productions to Indiana is about more than bragging rights and artistic authenticity, sound technician Chuck Budreau said.

Budreau, a member of Indiana Media Production Alliance’s executive committee and the film coordinator for Gen Con Indy, said tax incentives can translate into an economic boom.

“We want to build an industry,” Budreau said. “It’s nice to build the artistic things, and they will come along with it. But the main thing is, we want an industry that will create local jobs and not just bring people in from California to shoot films here.”

IMPA’s proposed legislation includes a 30 percent rebate or refundable tax credit on expenditures and non-resident labor, with minimum spending of $50,000. An additional 10 percent rebate or credit is tied to the hiring of Indiana-based crew members. And a 5 percent rebate or credit is tied to Indiana stories or filming that’s done in economically depressed areas.

Rebates or credits wouldn’t exceed 40 percent per project. The annual cap for all projects would be $25 million, and no project could earn more than $7.5 million. IMPA also wants the legislation to have no expiration date, unlike an Indiana tax incentive that applied to films made between July 2008 and December 2011.

Budreau said IMPA surveyed 160 film-industry workers when putting together the proposal. He added that present incentives in Illinois, a 30 percent credit on productions and a 30 percent credit on local salaries, provided a basic framework for the plan.

Film productions generated $184 million in spending in Illinois in 2012, according to state officials. TV productions generated $92 million.

“Divergent,” a highly anticipated sci-fi film starring “The Fault in Our Stars” lead actress Shailene Woodley, was made in Chicago earlier this year.

“Indiana gets overlooked simply because we can’t offer that benefit of a tax incentive,” said IMPA president Glenn Pratt.

What can filmmakers do with money that comes back from incentives?

“You’re able to put it toward your post-production, your marketing and distribution or pay back your investors,” said Pratt, a 2010 Ball State University graduate who works as a production coordinator for commercial and independent projects.

Past struggles

Indiana’s previous tax incentive for film production offered a 15 percent credit. The Media Production Expenditure Tax Credit was debated for three years and went into effect only after the state legislature overturned a veto by then Gov. Mitch Daniels. At the time, Daniels said the measure gave away too much cash to low-budget projects that would be made in Indiana regardless, and he added that a large portion of the “subsidies would not lead to a single new job or purchase in our state.”

Few projects of any size were filmed in Indiana between mid-2008 and the beginning of 2012. IMPA has the tally at seven films with budgets exceeding $1 million.

“(The tax incentive) was very minimally used,” said Erin Schneider, director of Film Indiana, an initiative that’s part of Indiana Economic Development Corporation. “I think that’s because of what was going on around us at the time. Michigan was incredibly aggressive.”

Tax credits in Michigan topped out at 42 percent of a production’s expenditures, and the state approved $115 million in rebates in 2010. A year later, Michigan legislators set a $25 million ceiling for rebates and Hollywood grew less enamored with the Mitten State.

Critics of film-related tax incentives aren’t difficult to find.

In 2010, states committed about $1.5 billion to subsidizing film and TV production, “money that they otherwise could have spent on public services like education, health care, public safety, and infrastructure,” according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit group that evaluates state fiscal policies.

Even “The Fault in Our Stars” author Green said he has a “complicated relationship” with tax incentives.

“I have mixed feelings about it,” said Green, who’s lived in Indianapolis since 2007. “I certainly understand why someone would want to stand up and say, ‘If you want to do work here, you should pay taxes here.’ But we’re never going to have those kinds of big productions unless we can compete with the likes of Pennsylvania.”

Read the whole article over at the INDYSTAR

Thanks a lot to David Lindquist!

QUICK RESPONSES

I am very pleased that so many people found the William Polk piece useful.  Because it was linked to on Brian Leiter's blog, it is received an unusually large number of views, and I suspect has been re-linked on other sites as well, judging from the traffic that Google reports.

I simply cannot predict the outcome of the forthcoming Congressional debate, nor is it clear that Obama will abide by that vote, should it go against him.  Nevertheless, I am convinced that putting the matter to Congressional debate is a [rare] move in the right direction.

I hope no one will make the mistake of concluding from all of this that Assad's actions are in any way defensible.  This is an awful situation, and even if the wisest course for the US is to do nothing, no one can be happy with how things are going to play  out.