latent
portentous
codification
cursory
somatic
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Monday, May 28, 2012
Saturday, May 26, 2012
Friday, May 25, 2012
GRE Verbal Section 1- Section 50
Glossary Session 1- Session 10
自测
ravage
quarantine
quiescence
decimate
abeyance
evasive
congenial
melancholy
Thursday, May 24, 2012
15-2
Mycorrhizal fungi infect more
plants than do any other fungi and are necessary for many plants to thrive, but
they have escaped widespread investigation until recently for two reasons.
First, the symbiotic association is so well-balanced that the roots of host
plants show no damage even when densely infected. Second, the fungi cannot as yet be cultivated in the absence of a living root. Despite these difficulties,
there has been important new work that suggests that this symbiotic association
can be harnessed to achieve more economical use of costly superphosphate fertilizer and to permit better exploitation of cheaper, less
soluble rock phosphate. Mycorrhizal benefits are not limited to improved
phosphate uptake in host plants. In legumes, mycorrhizal inoculation has
increased nitrogen fixation beyond levels achieved by adding phosphate fertilizer alone. Certain symbiotic associations also
increase the host plant’s resistance to harmful root fungi. Whether this
resistance results from exclusion of harmful fungi through competition for
sites, from metabolic change involving antibiotic production, or from increased
vigor is undetermined.
15-1
All of Francoise Duparc’s surviving paintings blend portraiture and genre.
Her subjects appear to be acquaintances whom she has asked to pose; she has
captured both their self-consciousness and the spontaneity of their everyday
activities, the depiction of which characterizes genre painting. But genre
painting, especially when it portrayed members of the humblest classes, was
never popular in eighteenth-century France. The Le Nain brothers and Georges de
La Tour, who also chose such themes, were largely ignored. Their present high standing
is due to a different, more democratic political climate and to different
aesthetic values: we no longer require artists to provide ideal images of
humanity for our moral edification but rather regard such idealization as a falsification
of the truth. Duparc gives no improving message and discreetly refrains from
judging her subjects. In brief, her works neither elevate nor instruct. This
restraint largely explains her lack of popular success during her lifetime,
even if her talent did not go completely unrecognized by her eighteenth-century
French contemporaries.
14-2
Hydrogeology is a science dealing with the properties, distribution, and
circulation of water on the surface of the land, in the soil and underlying
rocks, and in the atmosphere. The hydrologic cycle, a major topic in this
science, is the complete cycle of phenomena through which water passes,
beginning as atmospheric water vapor, passing into liquid and solid form as
precipitation, thence along and into the ground surface, and finally again
returning to the form of atmospheric water vapor by means of evaporation and
transpiration.
The term “geohydrology” is sometimes erroneously used as a synonym for
“hydrogeology.” Geohydrology is concerned with underground water. There are
many formations that contain water but are not part of the hydrologic cycle
because of geologic changes that have isolated them underground. These systems
are properly termed geohydrologic but not hydrogeologic. Only when a system
possesses natural or artificial boundaries that associate the water within it
with the hydrologic cycle may the entire system properly be termed
hydrogeologic.
7-2
Upwards of a billion stars in our galaxy have burnt up their internal
energy sources, and so can no longer produce the heat a star needs to oppose
the inward force of gravity. These stars, of more than a few solar masses,
evolve, in general, much more rapidly than does a star like the Sun. Moreover,
it is just these more massive stars whose collapse does not halt at
intermediate stages (that is, as white dwarfs or neutron stars). Instead, the
collapse continues until a singularity (an infinitely dense concentration of
matter) is reached.
It would be wonderful to observe a singularity and obtain direct evidence
of the undoubtedly bizarre phenomena that occur near one. Unfortunately in most
cases a distant observer cannot see the singularity; outgoing light rays are
dragged back by gravity so forcefully that even if they could start out within a few kilometers of the singularity, they
would end up in the singularity itself.
7-1
By the time the American colonists took up arms against Great Britain in
order to secure their independence, the institution of Black slavery was deeply
entrenched. But the contradiction inherent in this situation was, for many, a
source of constant embarrassment. “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme
to me,” Abigail Adams wrote her husband in 1774, “to fight ourselves for what
we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to
freedom as we have.”
Many Americans besides Abigail Adams were struck by the inconsistency of
their stand during the War of Independence, and they were not averse to making
moves to emancipate the slaves. Quakers and other religious groups organized
antislavery societies, while numerous individuals manumitted their slaves. In
fact, within several years of the end of the War of Independence, most of the
Eastern states had made provisions for the gradual emancipation of slaves.
6-2
Feelings of hopelessness among medieval workers trapped in the poverty
cycle gradually lessened as it became possible for women’s labor to supplement
a family’s money income by more than pennies. By 1300, women spinners could be
found working on their own for wealthy sponsors, even after the introduction in Italy and France of
prohibition against advancing money for supplies to women spinners. Historians
have usually interpreted this prohibition simply as evidence of women’s
economic subjection, since it obliged them to turn to usurers; however, it was
also almost certainly a response to a trend toward differential reward for
women’s higher skill. Yarn can be spun irregularly and lumpily, but perfectly
smooth yarn is worth more. Working for merchant entrepreneurs on time rates,
women had been paid hardly more than children; working as entrepreneurs
themselves and producing good work by the piece, they could break into
the rational system of differential rewards.
6-1
Although pathogenic organisms constantly alight on the skin, they find it a
very unfavorable environment and, in the absence of injury, have great
difficulty colonizing it. This “self-sterilizing” capacity of the skin results
from the tendency of all well-developed ecosystems toward homeostasis, or the
maintenance of the status quo.
Species that typically live in soil, water, and elsewhere rarely multiply
on the skin. Undamaged skin is also unfavorable to most human pathogens. The
skin is too acid and too arid for some species. The constant shedding of the
surface skin layers further hinders the establishment of invaders. The most
interesting defense mechanism, however, results from the metabolic activities
of the resident flora. Unsaturated fatty acids, an important component
of the lipids in sebum collected from the skin surface, inhibit the growth of
several bacterial and fungal cutaneous pathogens. These acids are a metabolic
product of certain gram-positive members of the cutaneous community, which
break down the more complex lipids in freshly secreted sebum.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
5-2
Chimps and children, gulls and Greeks—the ethologists go their merry way,
comparing bits of human cultural behavior with bits of genetically programmed
animal behavior. True, humans are animals; they share certain anatomical
features with other animals, and some items of human behavior may seem
analogous to the behavior of other animals. But such analogies can seriously
mislead if we fail to look at the context of a particular item of behavior.
Thus one ethologist compares the presentation of a twig by a cormorant with
gift-giving in humans. Yet the cormorant’s twig-presentation simply inhibits
attack and is comparable to other appeasement rituals found in many species.
Human gift-giving differs in form and purpose not only from culture to culture,
but within the same culture in various social contexts. Everything significant
about it derives from its social context. Thus, ethologists can accomplish
little—beyond reminding us that we are animals—until they study humans as
cultural beings.
5-1
The primary method previously used by paleontologists to estimate climatic
changes that occurred during Pleistocene glacial cycles was the determination
of 18O/16O ratios in calcareous fossils. However, because
this ratio is influenced by a number of factors, the absolute magnitude of the
temperature difference between Pleistocene glacial and interglacial cycles
could not be unequivocally ascertained. For example, both temperature
fluctuations and isotopic changes in seawater affect the 18O/16O
ratio. And, since both factors influence the ratio in the same direction, the
contribution of each to the 18O/16O cannot be determined.
Fortunately, recent studies indicate that the racemization reaction of
amino acids can be used to determine more accurately temperatures that occurred
during Pleistocene glacial cycles. Only L-amino acids are usually found in the
proteins of living organisms, but over long periods of geological time these
acids undergo racemization, producing D-amino acids, which are not found in
proteins. This reaction depends on both time and temperature; thus, if one
variable is known, the reaction can be used to calculate the other.
14-1
Whether the languages of the ancient American peoples were used for
expressing abstract universal concepts can be clearly answered in the case of
Nahuatl. Nahuatl, like Greek and German, is a language that allows the
formation of extensive compounds. By the combination of radicals or semantic
elements, single compound words can express complex conceptual relations, often
of an abstract universal character.
The tlamatinime (“those who know”)
were able to use this rich stock of abstract terms to express the nuances of
their thought. They also availed themselves of other forms of expression with
metaphorical meaning, some probably original, some derived from Toltec
coinages. Of these forms the most characteristic in Nahuatl is the
juxtaposition of two words that, because they are synonyms, associated terms,
or even contraries, complement each other to evoke one single idea. Used as
metaphor, the juxtaposed terms connote specific or essential traits of the
being they refer to, introducing a mode of poetry as an almost habitual form of
expression.
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
4-4
During adolescence, the development of political ideology becomes apparent
in the individual; ideology here is defined as the presence of roughly
consistent attitudes, more or less organized in reference to a more encompassing,
though perhaps tacit, set of general principles. As
such, political ideology is dim or absent at the
beginning of adolescence. Its acquisition by the adolescent, in even the most
modest sense, requires the acquisition of relatively sophisticated cognitive
skills: the ability to manage abstractness, to synthesize and generalize, to
imagine the future. These are accompanied by a steady advance in the ability to
understand principles.
4-3
Climatic conditions are delicately adjusted to the composition of the
Earth’s atmosphere. If there were a change in the atmosphere—for example, in
the relative proportions of atmospheric gases—the climate would probably change
also. A slight increase in water vapor, for instance, would increase the
heat-retaining capacity of the atmosphere and would lead to a rise in global
temperatures. In contrast, a large increase in water vapor would increase the
thickness and extent of the cloud layer, reducing the amount of solar energy
reaching the Earth’s surface.
4-2
The Food and Drug Administration has recently proposed severe restrictions
on the use of antibiotics to promote the health and growth of meat animals.
Medications added to feeds kill many microorganisms but also encourage the
appearance of bacterial strains that are resistant to anti-infective drugs.
Already, for example, penicillin and the tetracyclines are not as effective
therapeutically as they once were. The drug resistance is chiefly conferred by
tiny circlets of genes, called plasmids, that can be exchanged between
different strains and even different species of bacteria. Plasmids are also one
of the two kinds of vehicles (the other being viruses) that molecular
biologists depend on when performing gene transplant experiments. Even present
guidelines forbid the laboratory use of plasmids bearing genes for resistance
to antibiotics. Yet, while congressional debate rages over whether or not to
toughen these restrictions on scientists in their laboratories, little
congressional attention has been focused on an ill-advised agricultural
practice that produces known deleterious effects.
4-1
Notable as important nineteenth-century novels by women, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights treat women very differently.
Shelley produced a “masculine” text in which the fates of subordinate female
characters seem entirely dependent on the actions of male heroes or anti-heroes. Bronte produced
a more realistic narrative, portraying a world where men battle for the favors of apparently high-spirited,
independent women. Nevertheless, these two novels are alike in several crucial
ways. Many readers are convinced that the compelling mysteries of each plot
conceal elaborate structures of allusion and fierce, though shadowy, moral
ambitions that seem to indicate metaphysical intentions, though efforts by
critics to articulate these intentions have generated much controversy. Both
novelists use a storytelling method that emphasizes ironic disjunctions between
different perspectives on the same events as well as ironic tensions that
inhere in the relationship between surface drama and concealed authorial
intention, a method I call an evidentiary narrative technique.
13-4
The molecules of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere affect the heat
balance of the Earth by acting as a one-way screen. Although these molecules
allow radiation at visible wavelengths, where most of the energy of sunlight is
concentrated, to pass through, they absorb some of the longer-wavelength,
infrared emissions radiated from the Earth’s surface, radiation that would
otherwise be transmitted back into space. For the Earth to maintain a constant
average temperature, such emissions from the planet must balance incoming solar
radiation. If there were no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, heat would escape
from the Earth much more easily. The surface temperature would be so much lower
that the oceans might be a solid mass of ice.
Monday, May 21, 2012
13-3
Some modern anthropologists hold that biological evolution has shaped not
only human morphology but also human behavior. The role those anthropologists
ascribe to evolution is not of dictating the details of human behavior but one
of imposing constraints—ways of feeling, thinking, and acting that “come naturally”
in archetypal situations in any culture. Our “frailties”—emotions and motives
such as rage, fear, greed, gluttony, joy, lust, love—may be a very mixed
assortment, but they share at least one immediate quality: we are, as we say, “in
the grip” of them. And thus they give us our sense of constraints.
13-2
Roger Rosenblatt’s book Black Fiction,
in attempting to apply literary rather than sociopolitical criteria to its
subject, successfully alters the approach taken by most previous studies. As
Rosenblatt notes, criticism of Black writing has often served as a pretext for expounding
on Black history. Addison Gayle’s recent work, for example, judges the value of
Black fiction by overtly political standards, rating each work according to the
notions of Black identity which it propounds.
13-1
A mysterious phenomenon is the ability of over-water migrants to travel on
course. Birds, bees, and other species can keep track
of time without any sensory cues from the outside world, and such “biological
clocks” clearly contribute to their “compass sense.” For example, they can use
the position of the Sun or stars, along with the time
of day, to find north. But compass sense alone cannot
explain how birds navigate the ocean: after a flock traveling east is blown far
south by a storm, it will assume the proper northeasterly course to compensate.
Perhaps, some scientists thought, migrants determine their geographic position
on Earth by celestial navigation, almost as human navigators use stars and
planets, but this would demand of the animals a fantastic map sense. Researchers now
know that some species have a magnetic sense, which might allow migrants to
determine their geographic location by detecting variations in the strength of
the Earth’s magnetic field.
12-4
In eighteenth-century France and England, reformers rallied around
egalitarian ideals, but few reformers advocated higher education for women.
Although the public decried women’s lack of education, it did not encourage
learning for its own sake for women. In spite of the general prejudice against
learned women, there was one place where women could exhibit their erudition:
the literary salon. Many writers have defined the woman’s role in the salon as
that of an intelligent hostess, but the salon had more than a social function
for women. It was an informal university, too, where women exchanged ideas with
educated persons, read their own works and heard those of others, and received
and gave criticism.
In the 1750’s, when salons were firmly established in France, some English
women, who called themselves “Bluestocking,” followed the example of the salonnieres (French salon hostesses) and
formed their own salons. Most Bluestockings did not wish to mirror the salonnieres; they simply desired to
adapt a proven formula to their own purpose—the elevation of women’s status
through moral and intellectual training. Differences in social orientation and
background can account perhaps for differences in the nature of French and
English salons. The French salon incorporated aristocratic attitudes that
exalted courtly pleasure and emphasized artistic accomplishments. The English
Bluestockings, originating from a more modest background, emphasized learning
and work over pleasure. Accustomed to the regimented life of court circles, salonnieres tended toward formality in
their salons. The English women, though somewhat puritanical, were more casual
in their approach.
At first, the Bluestockings did imitate the salonnieres by including men in their circles. However, as they
gained cohesion, the Bluestockings came to regard themselves as a women’s group
and to possess a sense of female solidarity lacking in the salonnieres, who remained isolated from one another by the primacy
each held in her own salon. In an atmosphere of mutual support, the
Bluestockings went beyond the salon experience. They traveled, studied, worked,
wrote for publication, and by their activities challenged the stereotype of the
passive woman. Although the salonnieres
were aware of sexual inequality, the narrow boundaries of their world kept
their intellectual pursuits within conventional limits. Many salonnieres, in fact, camouflaged their
nontraditional activities behind the role of hostess and deferred to men in public.
Though the Bluestockings were trailblazers when compared with the salonnieres, they were not feminists.
They were too traditional, too hemmed in by their generation to demand social and political
rights. Nonetheless, in their desire for education, their willingness to go beyond the confines of the salon in pursuing their interests, and their
championing of unity among women, the Bluestockings began the process of
questioning women’s role in society.
12-3
When the same parameters and quantitative theory are used to analyze both
termite colonies and troops of rhesus macaques, we will have a unified science
of sociobiology. Can this ever really happen? As my own studies have advanced,
I have been increasingly impressed with the functional similarities between
insect and vertebrate societies and less so with the structural differences
that seem, at first glance, to constitute such an immense gulf between them.
Consider for a moment termites and macaques. Both form cooperative
groups that occupy territories. In both kinds of society there is a well-marked
division of labor. Members of both groups communicate to each other
hunger, alarm, hostility, caste status or rank, and reproductive status. From
the specialist’s point of view, this comparison may at first seem facile—or
worse. But it is out of such deliberate oversimplification that the beginnings
of a general theory are made.
12-2
Computer programmers often remark that computing machines, with a perfect
lack of discrimination, will do any foolish thing they are told to do. The
reason for this lies, of course, in the narrow fixation of the computing
machine’s “intelligence” on the details of its own perceptions—its inability to
be guided by any large context. In a psychological description of the computer
intelligence, three related adjectives come to mind: single-minded, literal-minded,
and simpleminded. Recognizing this, we should at the same time recognize that
this single-mindedness, literal-mindedness, and simplemindedness also
characterizes theoretical mathematics, though to a lesser extent.
12-1
The belief that art originates in intuitive rather than rational faculties
was worked out historically and philosophically in the somewhat wearisome
volumes of Benedetto Croce, who is usually considered the originator of a new
aesthetic. Croce was, in fact, expressing a very old idea. Long before the
Romantics stressed intuition and self-expression, the frenzy of inspiration was
regarded as fundamental to art, but philosophers had always assumed it must be
controlled by law and by the intellectual power of putting things into
harmonious order. This general philosophic concept of art was supported by
technical necessities. It was necessary to master certain laws and to use
intellect in order to build Gothic cathedrals, or set up the stained glass
windows of Chartres. When this bracing element of craftsmanship ceased to
dominate artists’ outlook, new technical elements had to be adopted to maintain
the intellectual element in art. Such were linear
perspective and anatomy.
Sunday, May 20, 2012
11-4
We can distinguish three different realms of matter, three levels on the
quantum ladder. The first is the atomic realm, which includes the world of
atoms, their interactions, and the structures that are formed by them, such as
molecules, liquids and solids, and gases and plasmas. This realm includes all
the phenomena of atomic physics, chemistry, and, in a certain sense, biology.
The energy exchanges taking place in this realm are of a relatively low order.
If these exchanges are below one electron volt, such as in the collisions
between molecules of the air in a room, then atoms and molecules can be
regarded as elementary particles. That is, they have “conditional elementarity”
because they keep their identity and do not change in any collisions or in
other processes at these low energy exchanges. If one goes to higher energy
exchanges, say 104 electron volts, then atoms and molecules will
decompose into nuclei and electrons; at this level, the latter particles must
be considered as elementary. We find examples of structures and processes of
this first rung of the quantum ladder on Earth, on planets, and on the surfaces
of stars.
11-3
Initially the Vinaver theory that Malory’s eight romances, once thought to
be fundamentally unified, were in fact eight independent works produced both a
sense of relief and an unpleasant shock. Vinaver’s theory comfortably explained
away the apparent contradictions of chronology and made each romance independently
satisfying. It was, however, disagreeable to find that what had been thought of
as one book was now eight books. Part of this response was the natural reaction
to the disturbance of set ideas. Nevertheless, even now, after lengthy
consideration of the theory’s refined but legitimate observations, one cannot
avoid the conclusion that the eight romances are only one work. It is not quite
a matter of disagreeing with the theory of independence, but of rejecting its
implications: that the romances may be taken in any or no particular order,
that they have no cumulative effect, and that they are as separate as the works
of a modern novelist.
11-2
In large part as a consequence of the feminist movement, historians have
focused a great deal of attention in recent years on determining more
accurately the status of women in various periods. Although much has been
accomplished for the modern period, premodern cultures have proved more
difficult: sources are restricted in number, fragmentary, difficult to interpret,
and often contradictory. Thus it is not particularly surprising that some
earlier scholarship concerning such cultures has so far gone unchallenged. An
example is Johann Bachofen’s 1861 treatise on Amazons, women-ruled societies of
questionable existence contemporary with ancient Greece.
11-1
Visual recognition involves storing and retrieving memories. Neural
activity, triggered by the eye, forms an image in the brain’s memory system
that constitutes an internal representation of the viewed object. When an
object is encountered again, it is matched with its internal representation and
thereby recognized. Controversy surrounds the question of whether recognition
is a parallel, one-step process or a serial, step-by-step one. Psychologists of
the Gestalt school maintain that objects are recognized as wholes in a parallel
procedure: the internal representation is matched with the retinal image in a single operation. Other psychologists have proposed that internal
representation features are matched serially with an object’s features.
Although some experiments show that, as an object becomes familiar, its
internal representation becomes more holistic and the recognition process
correspondingly more parallel, the weight of evidence seems to support the
serial hypothesis, at least for objects that are not notably simple and
familiar.
Friday, May 18, 2012
10-4
Extraordinary creative activity has been characterized as revolutionary,
flying in the face of what is established and producing not what is acceptable
but what will become accepted. According to this formulation, highly creative
activity transcends the limits of an existing form and establishes a new
principle of organization. However, the idea that extraordinary creativity
transcends established limits is misleading when it is applied to the arts,
even though it may be valid for the sciences. Differences between highly
creative art and highly creative science arise in part from a difference in
their goals. For the sciences, a new theory is the goal and end result of the
creative act. Innovative science produces new propositions in terms of which
diverse phenomena can be related to one another in more coherent ways. Such
phenomena as a brilliant diamond or a nesting bird are relegated to the role of
data, serving as the means for formulating or testing a new theory. The goal of
highly creative art is very different: the phenomenon itself becomes the direct
product of the creative act. Shakespeare’s Hamlet
is not a tract about the behavior of indecisive princes or the uses of
political power; nor is Picasso’s painting Guernica
primarily a propositional statement about the Spanish Civil War or the evils of
fascism. What highly creative artistic activity produces is not a new
generalization that transcends established limits, but rather an aesthetic
particular. Aesthetic particulars produced by the highly creative artist extend
or exploit, in an innovative way, the limits of an existing form, rather than
transcend that form.
10-3
The transfer of heat and water vapor from the ocean to the air above it
depends on a disequilibrium at the interface of the water and the air. Within
about a millimeter of the water, air temperature is close to that of the surface water, and the air is nearly saturated with water vapor.
But the differences, however small, are crucial, and the disequilibrium is
maintained by air near the surface mixing with air higher up, which is
typically appreciably cooler and lower in water-vapor content. The air is mixed
by means of turbulence that depends on the wind for its energy. As wind speed
increases, so does turbulence, and thus the rate of heat and moisture transfer.
Detailed understanding of this phenomenon awaits further study. An interacting—and
complicating—phenomenon is wind-to-water transfer of momentum that occurs when
waves are formed. When the wind makes waves, it transfers important amounts of
energy—energy that is therefore not available to provide turbulence.
10-2
By 1950, the results of attempts to relate brain processes to mental
experience appeared rather discouraging. Such variations in size, shape,
chemistry, conduction speed, excitation threshold, and the like as had been
demonstrated in nerve cells remained negligible in significance for any
possible correlation with the manifold dimensions of mental experience.
10-1
A Marxist sociologist has argued that racism stems from the class struggle
that is unique to the capitalist system—that racial prejudice is generated by
capitalists as a means of controlling workers. His thesis works relatively well
when applied to discrimination against Blacks in the United States, but his
definition of racial prejudice as “racially-based negative prejudgments against
a group generally accepted as a race in any given region of ethnic
competition,” can be interpreted as also including hostility toward such ethnic
groups as the Chinese in California and the Jews in medieval Europe. However,
since prejudice against these latter peoples was not inspired by capitalists,
he has to reason that such antagonisms were not really based on race. He disposes thusly (albeit unconvincingly) of both the intolerance faced by
Jews before the rise of capitalism and the early twentieth-century
discrimination against Oriental people in California, which, inconveniently,
was instigated by workers.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Glossary Session 31- Session 40
自测
pell-mell
agitation
recede
decry
vitiate
undercut
forestall
aggrandize
diminish
equivocal
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Glossary Session 21- Session 30
自测
evince
affluent
mourn
exclaim
rejoice
disregard
precursor
vestige
vague
assertive
conflate
buttress
Glossary Session 11- Session 20
自测
divest
regality
forfeit
debase
perennial
supplant
sabotage
topple
culminate
embroider
obstinacy
indolence
impiety
Glossary Session 1- Session 10
自测
ravage
quarantine
quiescence
decimate
abeyance
evasive
congenial
melancholy
Monday, May 7, 2012
3-4
The hypothesis of an expanding Earth has never attracted notable support,
and if it were not for the historical example of continental drift, such
indifference might be a legitimate response to an apparently improbable
concept. It should be remembered, however, that drift too was once regarded as
illusory, but the idea was kept alive until evidence from physicists compelled
geologists to reinterpret their data.
Of course, it would be as dangerous to overreact to history by concluding
that the majority must now be wrong about expansion as it would be to reenact
the response that greeted the suggestion that the continents had drifted. The
cases are not precisely analogous. There were serious problems with the
pre-drift world view that a drift theory could help to resolve, whereas Earth
expansion appears to offer no comparable advantages. If, however, physicists
could show that the Earth’s gravitational force has decreased with time, expansion
would have to be reconsidered and accommodated.
Sunday, May 6, 2012
3-3
My objective is to analyze certain forms of knowledge, not in terms of
repression or law, but in terms of power. But the word power is apt to lead to
misunderstandings about the nature, form, and unity of power. By power, I do
not mean a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of
the citizenry. I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation that, in contrast
to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general
system of domination exerted by one group over another, a system whose effects,
through successive derivations, pervade the entire social body. The sovereignty
of the state, the form of law, or the overall unity of a domination are only
the terminal forms power takes.
It seems to me that power must be understood as the multiplicity of force
relations that are immanent in the social sphere; as the process that, through
ceaseless struggle and confrontation, transforms, strengthens, or reverses
them; as the support that these force relations find in one another, or on the
contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions that isolate them from one
another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general
design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in
the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.
Thus, the viewpoint that permits one to understand the exercise of power,
even in its more “peripheral” effects, and that also makes it possible to use
its mechanisms as a structural framework for analyzing the social order, must
not be sought in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and
descendent forms of power emanate but in the moving substrate of force
relations that, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender local and
unstable states of power. If power seems omnipresent, it is not because it has
the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but
because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather
in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere, not because
it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. And if power at
times seems to be permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-reproducing, it is
simply because the overall effect that emerges from all these mobilities is a concatenation
that rests on each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement. One
needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a
structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name
that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society.
3-2
The black experience, one might automatically assume, is known to every
Black author. Henry James was pondering a similar assumption when he said: “You
were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.” This disparity
between an experience and knowledge of that experience is the longest bridge an
artist must cross. Don L. Lee, in his picture of the Black poet, “studying his
own poetry and the poetry of other Black poets,” touches
on the crucial point. In order to transform his own
sufferings—or joys—as a Black person into usable knowledge for his readers, the
author must first order his experiences in his mind. Only then can he create
feelingly and coherently the combination of fact and meaning that Black
audiences require for the reexploration of their lives. A cultural community of
Black authors studying one another’s best works systematically would represent
a dynamic interchange of the spirit—corrective and instructive and increasingly
beautiful in its recorded expression.
3-1
It is well known that biological changes at the molecular level have
morphogenetic consequences, consequences affecting the formation and
differentiation of tissues and organs. It is superfluous to point out that gene mutations and disturbances of the bio-synthetic processes in the
embryo may result in abnormalities in the morphology (structure) of an
organism. However, whereas much is known about causes and consequences at the
molecular level, and in spite of an enormous accumulation of chemical and
morphological data on embryos of various kinds, our understanding of how genes
control morphogenesis is still far from complete. Perhaps one reason for this
is that molecular biologists and morphologists speak different languages.
Whereas the former speak about messenger-RNA and conformational changes of
protein molecules, the latter speak of ectoderms, hypoblasts, and neural
crests.
One solution to this predicament is to try to find some phenomena relevant
to morphogenesis which both the molecular biologist and the morphologist can
understand and discuss. As morphogenesis must be basically the result of
changes in behavior of the individual cells, it seems logical to ask
morphologists to describe the morphogenetic events observed in terms of changes
in cellular contact, changes in the rate of proliferation of cells, or similar
phenomena. Once this is done, it may be appropriate to ask questions about the
molecular background for these changes. One may, for instance, ask whether
variations in cell contact reflect alterations in the populations of molecules
at the cell surface, or one may inquire about the molecular basis for the
increased cell mobility involved in cell dispersion.
Studies of this kind have been carried out with cells released from tissues
in various ways and then allowed to reveal their behavior after being spread
out into a thin layer. In many cases, such cells show the ability to
reaggregate, after which different cell types may sort themselves out into
different layers and even take part in still more intricate morphogenetic
events. But in most cases, the behavior of cells in the intact embryo is
difficult to study because of the thickness and opacity of the cell masses. The
sea urchin embryo, however, has the advantage
that it is so transparent that each cell can be easily observed throughout
development. Thus, by recording the development of a sea urchin embryo with
time-lapse photography, the research scientist might discover previously
unknown features of cellular behavior. Perhaps the study of the sea urchin in
this manner can provide a medium by which the molecular biologist and the
morphologist can begin communicating with each other more effectively about the
way in which genes control morphogenesis.
9-4
In his 1976 study of slavery in the United States, Herbert Gutman, like
Fogel, Engerman, and Genovese, has rightly stressed the slaves’ achievements.
But unlike these historians, Gutman gives plantation owners little credit for
these achievements. Rather, Gutman argues that one must look to the Black
family and the slaves’ extended kinship system to understand how crucial
achievements, such as the maintenance of a cultural heritage and the
development of a communal consciousness, were possible. His findings compel
attention.
Gutman recreates the family and extended kinship structure mainly through
an ingenious use of what any historian should draw
upon, quantifiable data, derived in this case mostly
from plantation birth registers. He also uses accounts of ex-slaves to probe
the human reality behind his statistics. These sources indicate that the
two-parent household predominated in slave quarters just as it did among freed
slaves after emancipation. Although Gutman admits that forced separation by
sale was frequent, he shows that the slaves’ preference, revealed most clearly
on plantations where sale was infrequent, was very much for stable monogamy. In
less conclusive fashion Fogel, Engerman, and Genovese had already indicated the
predominance of two-parent households; however, only Gutman emphasizes the
preference for stable monogamy and points out what stable monogamy meant for
the slaves’ cultural heritage. Gutman argues convincingly that the stability of
the Black family encouraged the transmission of—and so was crucial in
sustaining—the Black heritage of folklore, music, and religious expression from
one generation to another, a heritage that slaves were continually fashioning
out of their African and American experiences.
Gutman’s examination of other facets of kinship also produces important
findings. Gutman discovers that cousins rarely married, an exogamous tendency
that contrasted sharply with the endogamy practiced by the plantation owners.
This preference for exogamy, Gutman suggests, may have derived from West
African rules governing marriage, which, though they differed from one tribal
group to another, all involved some kind of prohibition against unions with
close kin. This taboo against cousins’ marrying is important, argues Gutman,
because it is one of many indications of a strong awareness among slaves of an
extended kinship network. The fact that distantly related kin would care for
children separated from their families also suggests this awareness. When blood
relationships were few, as in newly created plantations in the Southwest,
“fictive” kinship arrangements took their place until a new pattern of
consanguinity developed. Gutman presents convincing evidence that this extended
kinship structure—which he believes developed by the mid-to-late eighteenth
century—provided the foundations for the strong communal consciousness that
existed among slaves.
In sum, Gutman’s study is significant because it offers a closely reasoned
and original explanation of some of the slaves’ achievements, one that
correctly emphasizes the resources that slaves themselves possessed.
9-3
The dark regions in the starry night sky are not pockets in the universe
that are devoid of stars as had long been thought. Rather, they are dark
because of interstellar dust that hides the stars behind it. Although its
visual effect is so pronounced, dust is only a minor constituent of the
material, extremely low in density, that lies between the stars. Dust accounts
for about one percent of the total mass of interstellar matter. The rest is
hydrogen and helium gas, with small amounts of other elements. The interstellar
material, rather like terrestrial clouds, comes in all shapes and sizes. The
average density of interstellar material in the vicinity of our Sun is 1,000 to
10,000 times less than the best terrestrial laboratory vacuum. It is only
because of the enormous interstellar distances that so little material per unit
of volume becomes so significant. Optical astronomy is most directly affected,
for although interstellar gas is perfectly transparent, the dust is not.
9-2
It has long been known that the rate of oxidative metabolism (the process
that uses oxygen to convert food into energy) in any animal has a profound
effect on its living patterns. The high metabolic rate of small animals, for
example, gives them sustained power and activity per unit of weight, but at the cost of requiring constant consumption of food and water.
Very large animals, with their relatively low metabolic rates, can survive well
on a sporadic food supply, but can generate little metabolic energy per gram of
body weight. If only oxidative metabolic rate is considered, therefore, one
might assume that smaller, more active, animals could prey on larger ones, at
least if they attacked in groups. Perhaps they could if it were not for
anaerobic glycolysis, the great equalizer.
Anaerobic glycolysis is a process in which energy is produced, without
oxygen, through the breakdown of muscle glycogen into lactic acid and adenosine
triphosphate (ATP), the energy provider. The amount of energy that can be produced
anaerobically is a function of the amount of glycogen present—in all
vertebrates about 0.5 percent of their muscles’ wet weight. Thus the anaerobic
energy reserves of a vertebrate are proportional to the size of the animal. If,
for example, some predators had attacked a 100-ton dinosaur, normally torpid,
the dinosaur would have been able to generate almost instantaneously, via
anaerobic glycolysis, the energy of 3,000 humans at maximum oxidative metabolic
energy production. This explains how many large species have managed to compete
with their more active neighbors: the compensation for a low oxidative
metabolic rate is glycolysis.
There are limitations, however, to this compensation. The glycogen reserves
of any animal are good, at most, for only about two minutes at maximum effort,
after which only the normal oxidative metabolic source of energy remains. With
the conclusion of a burst of activity, the lactic acid level is high in the
body fluids, leaving the large animal vulnerable to attack until the acid is
reconverted, via oxidative metabolism, by the liver into glucose, which is then
sent (in part) back to the muscles for glycogen resynthesis. During this
process the enormous energy debt that the animal has run
up through anaerobic glycolysis must be repaid, a
debt that is proportionally much greater for the larger vertebrates than for
the smaller ones. Whereas the tiny shrew can replace in minutes the glycogen
used for maximum effort, for example, the gigantic dinosaur would have required
more than three weeks. It might seem that this interminably long recovery time
in a large vertebrate would prove a grave disadvantage for survival.
Fortunately, muscle glycogen is used only when needed and even then only in
whatever quantity is necessary. Only in times of panic or during mortal combat
would the entire reserves be consumed.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
9-1
Great comic art is never otherwordly, it does not seek to mystify us, and
it does not deny ambiguity by branding as evil whatever differs from good.
Great comic artists assume that truth may bear all lights, and thus they seek
to accentuate contradictions in social action, not gloss
over or transcend them by appeals to extrasocial
symbols of divine ends, cosmic purpose, or laws of nature. The moment of
transcendence in great comic art is a social moment, born out of the conviction
that we are human, even though we try to be gods. The comic community to which
artists address themselves is a community of reasoning, loving, joyful,
compassionate beings, who are willing to assume the human risks of acting
rationally. Without invoking gods or demons, great comic art arouses courage in
reason, courage which grows out of trust in what human beings can do as humans.
8-4
It is a popular misconception that nuclear fusion power is free of
radioactivity; in fact, the deuterium-tritium reaction that nuclear scientists
are currently exploring with such zeal produces both alpha particles and
neutrons. (The neutrons are used to produce tritium from a lithium blanket
surrounding the reactor.) Another common misconception is that nuclear fusion
power is a virtually unlimited source of energy because of the enormous
quantity of deuterium in the sea. Actually, its limits are set by the amount of
available lithium, which is about as plentiful as uranium in the Earth’s crust.
Research should certainly continue on controlled nuclear fusion, but no energy
program should be premised on its existence until it has proven practical. For
the immediate future, we must continue to use hydroelectric power, nuclear
fission, and fossil fuels to meet our energy needs. The energy sources already
in major use are in major use for good reason.
8-3
“I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most
intense.” Virginia Woolf’s provocative statement about her intentions in
writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly
been ignored by the critics, since it highlights an aspect of her literary
interests very different from the traditional picture of the “poetic” novelist
concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and with following the
intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a
realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic as well as
a visionary: literary critics’ cavalier dismissal of Woolf’s social vision will
not withstand scrutiny.
In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals
are shaped (or deformed) by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on people’s lives, how class, wealth, and gender help
to determine people’s fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically
rendered social setting and in a precise historical time.
Woolf’s focus on society has not been generally recognized because of her
intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novels
are usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentally
sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform their
society and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unaware
of how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. (Her Writer’s Diary notes: “the only honest people are the artists,”
whereas “these social reformers and philanthropists…harbor…discreditable
desires under the disguise of loving their kind…”) Woolf detested what she
called “preaching” in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence
(among others) for working by this method.
Woolf’s own social criticism is expressed in the language of observation
rather than in direct commentary, since for her, fiction is a contemplative,
not an active art. She describes phenomena and provides materials for a
judgment about society and social issues; it is the reader’s work to put the
observations together and understand the coherent point of view behind them. As
a moralist, Woolf works by indirection, subtly undermining officially accepted
mores, mocking, suggesting, calling into question, rather than asserting,
advocating, bearing witness: hers is the satirist’s art.
Woolf’s literary models were acute social observers like Chekhov and
Chaucer. As she put it in The Common
Reader, “It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one
stone set upon another because of anything Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as
we read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore.” Like Chaucer, Woolf
chose to understand as well as to judge, to know her society root and branch—a
decision crucial in order to produce art rather than polemic.
8-2
Tocqueville, apparently, was wrong. Jacksonian America was not a fluid, egalitarian
society where individual wealth and poverty were ephemeral conditions. At least
so argues E. Pessen in his iconoclastic study of the very rich in the United
States between 1825 and 1850.
Pessen does present a quantity of examples, together with some refreshingly
intelligible statistics, to establish the existence of an inordinately wealthy class.
Though active in commerce or the professions, most of the wealthy were not
self-made, but had inherited family fortunes. In no sense mercurial, these great
fortunes survived the financial panics that destroyed lesser ones. Indeed, in
several cities the wealthiest one percent constantly increased its share until
by 1850 it owned half of the community’s wealth. Although these observations are
true, Pessen overestimates their importance by concluding from them that the
undoubted progress toward inequality in the late eighteenth century continued
in the Jacksonian period and that the United States was a class-ridden, plutocratic
society even before industrialization.
8-1
The evolution of intelligence among early large mammals of the grasslands
was due in great measure to the interaction between two ecologically
synchronized groups of these animals, the hunting carnivores and the herbivores
that they hunted. The interaction resulting from the differences between
predator and prey led to a general improvement in brain functions; however,
certain components of intelligence were improved far more than others.
The kind of intelligence favored by the interplay of increasingly smarter
catchers and increasingly keener escapers is defined by attention—that aspect
of mind carrying consciousness forward from one moment to the next. It ranges
from a passive, free-floating awareness to a highly focused, active fixation. The
range through these states is mediated by the arousal system, a network of
tracts converging from sensory systems to integrating centers in the brain
stem. From the more relaxed to the more vigorous levels, sensitivity to novelty
is increased. The organism is more awake, more vigilant; this increased
vigilance results in the apprehension of ever more subtle signals as the organism
becomes more sensitive to its surroundings. The processes of arousal and concentration
give attention its direction. Arousal is at first general, with a flooding of
impulses in the brain stem; then gradually the activation is channeled. Thus
begins concentration, the holding of consistent images. One meaning of intelligence
is the way in which these images and other alertly searched information are
used in the context of previous experience. Consciousness links past attention
to the present and permits the integration of details with perceived ends and purposes.
The elements of intelligence and consciousness come together marvelously to
produce different styles in predator and prey. Herbivores and carnivores
develop different kinds of attention related to escaping or chasing. Although
in both kinds of animal, arousal stimulates the production of adrenaline and
norepinephrine by the adrenal glands, the effect in herbivores is primarily
fear, whereas in carnivores the effect is primarily aggression. For both,
arousal attunes the animal to what is ahead. Perhaps it does not experience
forethought as we know it, but the animal does experience something like it.
The predator is searchingly aggressive, innerdirected, tuned by the nervous
system and the adrenal hormones, but aware in a sense closer to human consciousness
than, say, a hungry lizard’s instinctive snap at a passing beetle. Using past
events as a framework, the large mammal predator is working out a relationship
between movement and food, sensitive to possibilities in cold trails and
distant sounds—and yesterday’s unforgotten lessons. The herbivore prey is of a
different mind. Its mood of wariness rather than searching and its attitude of
general expectancy instead of anticipating are silk-thin veils of tranquility
over an explosive endocrine system.
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