Daedalus articles from March 2007

Daedalus archives from March 2007

Genes, environments & behaviors.
March 22, 2007... Our large brains are surely at the center of our humanity. But it is equally certain that few organs are the subject of more misinformation in scientific and public discourse--especially in the widespread notion that most behaviors controlled...

Promiscuity.
March 22, 2007... Darwin's theory of natural selection is so widely known it is almost a cliche, despite continually being misunderstood. His concept of sexual selection is less well known but no less important. Darwin developed the idea of sexual selection to...

Challenging Darwin't theory so sexual selection.
March 22, 2007... May a biologist in these polarized times dare suggest that Darwin is a bit wrong about anything? Even worse, does a biologist risk insult, ridicule, anger, and intimidation to suggest that Darwin is incorrect on a big issue? We have a test case...

Why bother? The evolutionary genetics of sex.
March 22, 2007... It is an astonishing finding--derived from more than a century of painstaking research into the cellular basis of reproduction in a huge variety of organisms--that sex is the most prevalent mode of reproduction among the great division of life...

Frameworks of desire.
March 22, 2007... Genes versus choice. A quick and dirty search of newspaper stories covering scientific research on homosexuality shows that the popular press has settled on this analytic framework to explain homosexuality: either genes cause homosexuality, or...

What I learned about sex on the Internet.
March 22, 2007... Addecade ago, I had the peculiar distinction of being dubbed "The Sex Priestess of the Ivy League" by the sassy New York Observer. I was teaching in Princeton's creative writing program and promoting a new book, The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide...

Reading the "Kamasutra": the strange & the familiar.
March 22, 2007... The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love, and one of the oldest in the world. It is not, as most people think, a book about the positions in sexual intercourse. It is a book about the art of living--finding a partner,...

Kafka & sex.(Austrian writer Franz Kafka)
March 22, 2007... On one occasion Kafka composed a story with a sexual intensity that perhaps no other writer has ever experienced. The story is "The Judgment," which Kafka wrote in one go on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, 1912. He described the...

The lesbianism of Philip Larkin.
March 22, 2007... "Love variously doth various minds inspire," wrote Dryden, but for many of us true sexual eccentricity remains difficult to comprehend. We still don't have the words. Granted, in most modern liberal societies, you can use the terms gay or...

Song for Pushkin.(Chandra Pushkin)
March 22, 2007... Sitting among wild young men I am lost in my thoughts. --Aleksandr Pushkin An imagined Russia--Soviet or otherwise--along with an imagined America have at times over the past century served as vehicles of hope in India as...

A trip to Hibbing High School.
March 22, 2007... "As I went out--" Those are the first words of "Ain't Talkin'," the last song on Bob Dylan's Modern Times, released in the fall of 2006. It's a great opening line for anything: a song, a tall tale, a fable, a novel, a soliloquy. The world...

Darkened Chessboard.(Poem)(Brief article)
March 22, 2007... With the night already fallen, It's hard to see who is playing, Who is watching the game At the little table in the park Where no one says a word Engrossed as they are in the next move. Their dinners are getting cold. The wives...

Secret History.(Poem)(Brief article)
March 22, 2007... Of the light in my room: Its mood swings, Dark-morning glooms, Summer ecstasies. Spider on the wall, Lamp burning late, Shoes left by the bed, I'm your humble scribe. Dust balls, simple souls Conferring in the corner....

Clowns.(Fictional work)
March 22, 2007... When Mama couldn't have another baby, I knew I could find her one. "Going out," I told Mama that first time, but she said nothing as usual, only staring out the kitchen window at the empty field in the back lot. And Daddy, he was never...

On Benjamin's '-abilities'.(Walter Benjamin)
March 22, 2007... One of the most important tendencies to emerge in literary studies over the past few decades has been the extension of its techniques--close reading, rhetorical textual analysis, and, more generally, analyzing and interpreting so-called...

On the state of American television.
March 22, 2007... It elects presidents. It wins wars. It is both a mirror and an engine of our culture. Television is, undeniably, an extremely influential force in our country. And television viewing has never been more a part of our lives. Last year, Nielsen...