Some predicted that this book would be the death knell of the idea of group selection. No longer would evolutionary biologists suggest that natural selection worked to promote the good of the species (group selection) or even the individual and his close relatives who share many of his genes (kin selection, a type of group selection).

But prediction is difficult in a contingent world such as ours, where life is complex and accidents and coincidences wield so much power. Has "The Selfish Gene" in fact killed off group selection ideas? Why not? And what effect has the book had instead?

Reconsiderations: Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme

In novels and films, the most common scientist by far is the mad one. From H. G. Wells’s Dr. Mo­­reau to Ian Fleming’s Dr. No to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, scientists are portrayed as evil geniuses unrestrained by ethics and usually bent on world domination. Over the past two years, as I struggled to write my own novel about physicists and their quest for the Theory of Everything, I often worried that I was falling prey to this stereotype myself. It is incredibly difficult to create fictional scientists who are neither insane villains nor cardboard heroes. To faithfully depict the life and work of a researcher, you need to immerse yourself in the details of his or her research, and very few writers have done this task well.

We Need More Novels about Real Scientists

A 32-page primer from the National Academies.

What You Need to Know About Energy

In the summer of 1976, as Chairman Mao lay on his deathbed in Beijing, the pigs at the Ximen Village Production Brigade Apricot Garden Pig Farm in Gaomi County, Shandong Province, also began to die. The first batch of five were found with “their skin dotted with purple splotches the size of bronze coins, their eyes open, as if they’d died with unresolved grievances.” The commune vet declared they had succumbed to “what we call the Red Death” and ordered them to be cremated and buried immediately. But it had been raining for weeks and the ground was too waterlogged. Dousing the carcasses with kerosene and trying to set them alight simply filled the farm with vile-smelling smoke. Soon 800 more pigs were infected. A fresh team of vets arrived by motorboat with more sophisticated medicines, but their ministrations were of little help. Dead pigs were piled up throughout the farm, their bloated forms expanding and exploding in the heat.

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Networks -- used throughout the sciences in the study of biological, technological, and social complexity -- can often be too complex to visualize or understand.

In a May 1 Nature paper, “Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks,” Santa Fe Institute (SFI) researchers Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore, and Mark Newman show that many real-world networks can be understood as a hierarchy of modules, where nodes cluster together to form modules, which themselves cluster into larger modules -- arrangements similar to the organization of sports players into teams, teams into conferences, and conferences into leagues, for example.

This hierarchical organization, the researchers show, can simultaneously explain a number of patterns previously discovered in networks, such as the surprising heterogeneity in the number of connections some nodes have, or the prevalence of triangles in a network diagram. Their discovery suggests that hierarchy may, in fact, be a fundamental organizational principle for complex networks.

Unlike much previous work in this area, Clauset, Moore, and Newman propose a direct but flexible model of hierarchical structure, which they apply to networks using the tools of statistical physics and machine learning.

Nature paper describes technique for extracting hierarchical structure of networks

Unlike adults, children don't integrate different types of sensory information.

One sense at a time

If you want to understand how former allies end up going to war -- or former lovers end up getting divorced -- take a look at how Boeing and the Air Force are treating each other in their angry confrontation over the award of a next-generation tanker program to Northrop Grumman. Boeing expected to win the contract, and now finds itself facing the prospect of losing a 50-year aerial refueling franchise (and $100 billion in sales) while its main rival in the commercial airliner business sets up shop on Boeing's home turf. Boeing is convinced it should have won, and is spending millions of dollars on lawyers and advertising to press its case in a formal complaint to the Government Accountability Office.

Air Force leaders, on the other hand, believe that Boeing is willfully mis-stating the facts in a bid to obscure the inferior performance of the plane it proposed. A marathon session of Air Force acquisition experts two weeks ago concluded that none of the 200 issues raised by Boeing in its complaint to GAO was likely to be upheld, and that whatever minor problems the accountability office might uncover would be far from sufficient to overturn a competitive outcome the service says was not close. Beyond the merits of Boeing's case, Air Force officials are insulted by the tone of the company's public statements, which have used phrases such as "deeply flawed" and "severely prejudiced" to describe the tanker selection process.

Boeing and the Air Force At War: The Damage Spreads

This research brief summarizes research detailing a methodology for assessing the benefits and costs of U.S. Air Force intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance employment strategies.

New Approaches to Planning, Executing, and Assessing ISR Operations

Lavinia Greenlaw:

The Importance of Music to Girls is the story of the adventures that music leads us into—how it forms and transforms us. As a soundtrack, it’s there in the background while we go about the thrilling and mortifying business of growing up: raging, falling in love, wanting to change the world. Lavinia Greenlaw turns the volume up loud, and in prose of pure fury and beauty makes us remember how the music came first.

For Greenlaw, music—from bubblegum pop to classical piano to the passionate catharsis of punk rock—is at first the key to being a girl and then the means of escape from all that, a way to talk to boys and a way to do without them. School reports and diary entries reveal the girl behind them searching for an identity through the sounds that compelled her generation. Crushing on Donny Osmond and his shiny teeth, disco dancing in four-inch wedge heels and sparkly eye shadow, being mesmerized by Joy Division’s suicidally brilliant Ian Curtis—Greenlaw has written a razor-sharp remembrance of childhood and adolescence, filtered through the art that strikes us at the most visceral level of all.

The Importance of Music to Girls

In June of 2003, two months after the United States conquered Iraq, I sat in on a briefing given by US Army intelligence officers in that most Sunni of Iraq's cities, Tikrit, to a couple of officers visiting from Baghdad. One of the American intelligence officers based in Saddam's famous hometown explained that they were worried about "Shiite fingers" from Iran "creeping" up to Tikrit to establish an Iranian style government.

At a time when the mostly Sunni Iraqi resistance had already established itself and its ability was improving, I was astounded by how stupid the notion of an Iranian threat in Tikrit was. I have remained shocked, like many journalists and academics familiar with the region and its languages, that the Americans have shown no improvement in their understanding of the Muslim world with which they are so deeply engaged militarily and as an imperial power.

We should expect little interest in understanding the outside world from an insular and isolated government whose leaders show open contempt for their own people. And we should expect diplomatic and military officials themselves required to maintain ideological purity to voice an equally unsophisticated world view.

But too often the so called experts are equally ignorant.

Selling the War with Iran