Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating

Author: Mark Bittman

In his new book, Food Matters, The New York Times food columnist writes about the environmental impact of industrial farming — and how individuals can make a difference by cutting down on the amount of animal products they consume.

"All industrial farming — from fish farming to chicken farming to egg and dairy farming — has an environmental impact," he tells Morning Edition's Steve Inskeep.

Bittman's recommendation? Eat more fruits and vegetables and skip a few helpings of meat.

"There's nothing wrong with eating smaller amounts of meat," he says. "It's quite common sense that you can eliminate animal products from some of your diet."

Bittman says that Americans raise and slaughter 10 billion animals each year for consumption. If we all decreased consumption of animal products by 10 percent, he says, it "would have both an environmental impact and an impact on all of our mutual health."

As for Bittman's personal diet, it used to be that he'd eat bacon and eggs for breakfast and a hamburger for lunch. But a few years ago, he changed his ways. Now, a typical day's fare might include a bowl of oatmeal (see Bittman's recipe for porridge) with maple syrup for breakfast, fruits and vegetables for lunch, then a more "old-style" type meal — which might include meat — for dinner.

After just a few months of the new diet, Bittman says, he noticed improvements to his health: "I lost 35 pounds — which is about 15 percent of my body weight — my cholesterol went down 40 points; my blood sugar went from borderline bad to just fine; [and] my knees, which were starting to give out as a result of running at too high a weight, got better."

All of those things — and, he says, he's shrinking his carbon footprint.

"Feeling like you're changing the world," he says. "That's a nice thing, too."

The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate

Author: Adam Frank

Eloquent, urgent, and inspiring, The Constant Fire tackles the acrimonious debate between science and religion, taking us beyond its stagnant parameters into the wider domain of human spiritual experience. From a Neolithic archaeological site in Ireland to modern theories of star formation, Adam Frank traverses a wide terrain, broadening our sights and allowing us to imagine an alternative perspective. Drawing from his experience as a practicing astrophysicist and from the writings of the great scholars of religion, philosophy, and mythology, Frank locates the connective tissue linking science and religion--their commonality as sacred pursuits--and finds their shared aspiration in pursuit of "the True and the Real." Taking us from the burning of Giordano Bruno in 1600 to Einstein and on to today's pressing issues of global warming and resource depletion, The Constant Fire shows us how to move beyond this stale debate into a more profound experience of the world as sacred--a world that embraces science without renouncing human spirituality.

Books on human irrationality

Recommend five books on human irrationality.

1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds By Charles Mackay 1841

There is nothing modern about financial bubbles. In this classic work, Charles Mackay compiled an exhaustive list of the "schemes, projects and phantasies" that are a recurring theme of economic history. From the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland, in which 12 acres of valuable land were offered for a single bulb, to the South Sea Bubble of 18th-century England, in which a cheerleading press spurred a dramatic spike in the value of a debt-ridden slave-trading company, Mackay demonstrates that "every age has its peculiar folly." He notes that even the most intelligent investors are vulnerable to these frenzies of irrational exuberance: Isaac Newton is reported to have lost a small fortune after the South Sea Co. went bust.

2. Judgment Under Uncertainty
By Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky
Cambridge, 1982

It's hard to overstate the influence of this academic volume, which revealed many of the hard-wired flaws that shape human behavior. For one thing, authors Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky -- all of them psychologists -- almost single-handedly dismantled the assumption of "rational man," which had been the standard view of human nature since Plato. In experiment after experiment, the psychologists demonstrated that, unlike the hypothetical consumers in economics textbooks, real people don't treat losses and gains equivalently, or properly perceive risks, or even understand the basic laws of statistics -- with sometimes severe consequences. For example, the failure of many investors to properly weigh losses -- people are irrationally loss averse -- makes these investors much more likely to sell stocks that have gone up in value. This leads, over time, to a portfolio composed entirely of shares that are declining in value, which is why the stocks that these investors sell tend to significantly outperform the stocks that they keep.

3. How We Know What Isn't So
By Thomas Gilovich
Free Press, 1991

Thomas Gilovich is an eminent psychologist at Cornell University, but he is also a lucid writer with a knack for teaching the public about its own mental mistakes. Consider the hot-hand phenomenon in basketball: Most fans are convinced that a player who has made several shots in a row is more likely to make his next shot -- he's in the zone, so to speak. But Gilovich, employing an exhaustive analysis of the 1980-81 Philadelphia 76ers, shows that this belief is an illusion, akin to trying to discern a pattern in a series of random coin flips and then predicting what the next flip will bring. The same logic also applies to "hot" mutual-fund managers, who are wrongly convinced, along with their customers, that they can consistently beat the market.

4. The Winner's Curse
By Richard H. Thaler
Princeton, 1992

In 2000, the Texas Rangers signed Alex Rodriguez to the richest contract in baseball history after participating in a blind auction. If the team had consulted Richard H. Thaler's "The Winner's Curse," it would have known that such auctions invariably lead to irrational offers -- and, indeed, the Rangers' bid (a 10-year contract for $252 million) overshot the next highest offer by about $100 million. In addition to documenting how bidders at auctions operate, Thaler -- a behavioral economist at the University of Chicago -- examines other anomalies, such as the stock market's seasonal fluctuations (nearly one-third of annual returns occur in January) and the surprising unselfishness of people playing economic games. When given $10 and told to share the money with someone else, most people don't keep it all, or even most of it. Instead, they tend to split the cash equally, which is neither selfish nor rational. As Thaler notes, people have a powerful instinct for generosity, which can lead them to do things that flagrantly violate the model of Homo Economicus.

5. Predictably Irrational
By Dan Ariely
HarperCollins, 2008

Dan Ariely is a mischievous scientist: He delights in duping business students, getting them to make decisions that, in retrospect, seem utterly ridiculous. In "Predictably Irrational," an engaging summary of his research, Ariely explains why brand-name aspirin is more effective than generic aspirin even when people are given the same pill under different labels (paying more produces the expectation of better results, and the headache complies), and why the promise of getting something without paying for it -- such as free shipping, or a free T-shirt if we buy two other shirts -- prompts shoppers to spend more money than they would have in the absence of the offer. (In other words, we go broke trying to save a buck.) In one of his most famous experiments, Ariely showed how exposing people to a few random digits can later dramatically influence how much they bid for wine: Higher numbers lead to higher bids. The lesson, Ariely says, is that the rational brain is a feeble piece of machinery.

The Age of Aging: How Demographics are Changing the Global Economy and Our World

Author: George Magnus

Review: Economist

EVERY age has its big demographic scares. In 1798, when the world’s population was about 1 billion, Thomas Malthus published his “Essay on the Principle of Population”, predicting that, thanks to mankind’s enthusiastic procreation habits, by the middle of the 19th century there would no longer be enough food to go round. In the event, people happily continued both to multiply and to eat.

Indeed, in the early part of the 20th century, when the world’s population had grown to double that at Malthus’s time, fears started to run in the opposite direction: that people were having too few babies and mankind was in danger of dying out. The super-abundant baby-boomer generation after the second world war gave the lie to that. But by 1972 the argument had come full circle again. The Club of Rome, a global think-tank, produced a doom-laden report, “The Limits to Growth”, which claimed that within less than a century a mixture of man-made pollution and resource shortages would once again cause widespread population decline. What the think-tankers had not reckoned with was the green revolution. By the start of the new millennium the world’s total population had reached 6 billion. It is now expected to rise to nearly 9 billion by 2050.

But from the early 1990s the World Bank and others began to issue dire warnings about an entirely new scare, soon christened the “demographic time bomb”. Thanks to a combination of growing longevity and falling birth rates, the average age of populations, first in the world’s rich countries and, after a time lag, in emerging nations too, has been rising inexorably. By 2050 the world will have about 2 billion people aged over 60, three times as many as today. In parts of the rich world, mainly Japan and western Europe, that age group already makes up nearly a quarter of the population. By 2050 their share will rise to 30-40%, and even in the—much younger—developing world it will go up to 25-30%.

In other words, those of working age will have to support a vastly increased number of dependants. In rich countries there are now roughly four workers for every pensioner. By 2050 there will be little more than two. Those two will have to work mighty hard to keep that pensioner supplied with reasonable retirement benefits and decent health care unless something is done. And done soon: in western Europe the working population is likely to start shrinking as soon as next year or 2010. The same is true for China, which largely because of its one-child policy will grow old before it becomes properly rich.

There is no doubt that global greying will happen. Many of the people that will contribute to it have already been born, so short of some catastrophe that kills off large numbers of people, or some Viagra-fuelled leap in birth rates, population numbers and age composition can be predicted with fair accuracy for decades ahead. What remedies should be adopted it is much harder to say.

The pundits who have pronounced on this over the past decade or so fall roughly into three categories: those who claim that this is just another Malthusian scare story and can be sorted out with a few tweaks to retirement ages and pension policies; those who preach gloom and doom (a meltdown in asset prices, poverty in old age, health-care rationing and even intergenerational warfare as the young and the old slug it out for scarce resources); and those in the middle, who crunch the numbers and try to come up with sensible ideas to make their effect less grim.

This book falls firmly into the last category. It provides a clear, sober and well-written analysis of the problem, both in developed and developing countries, and runs through the options for heading off the worst effects. The biggest part of the solution lies in expanding the shrinking band of workers, mainly by getting people to retire later and persuading even more women to take up paid employment. At the same time more productivity will have to be squeezed out of the labour force that remains. And people will have to be persuaded to save a lot more for their old age.

None of this will be easy, particularly in a recession. But the biggest problem is timing. In order to head off the worst problems a few decades hence, action will need to be taken straight away. Yet politicians are elected for just a few years at a time. Will they have the guts to annoy voters by introducing tough measures now that will take decades to pay off?

Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes

Author: S. Vygotsky, L. S. Vygotskii

The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society should correct much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky's important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English.

The Vygotsky who emerges from these pages can no longer be glibly included among the neobehaviorists. In these essays he outlines a dialectical-materialist theory of cognitive development that anticipates much recent work in American social science. The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky's relevance to modem psychological thought.

Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom

Author: Thomas Armstrong

The story of much recent innovation in education follows a familiar pattern: the theory of an innovative thinker (in this case, Harvard's Howard Gardner) gets applied by an innovative practitioner (third grade teacher Bruce Campbell), who puts the flesh of action on the bones of thinking. Along the way, theories get substantiated, the subjects of the successful experiment benefit greatly - and, as Bruce Campbell reports in this self-interview, the experimenter is forever altered.

Bruce, together with his wife Linda MacRae-Campbell and Dee Dickinson (Dee and Linda are guest editors for this issue), is currently co-authoring a book titled LearningWorks: Teaching and Learning through the Multiple Intelligences. Contact the Campbells at 19614 Soundview Drive, Stanwood, WA 98292, 206/652-9502.

If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

- Margaret Mead

In recent years, new definitions of intelligence have gained acceptance and have dramatically enhanced the appraisal of human competencies. Howard Gardner of Harvard University in his book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, suggests that there are at least seven human intelligences, two of which, verbal/linguistic intelligence and logical/mathematical intelligence, have dominated the traditional pedagogy of western societies.

The five non-traditional intelligences, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal, have generally been overlooked in education. However, if we can develop ways to teach and learn by engaging all seven intelligences, we will increase the possibilities for student success and create the opportunity to, in Margaret Mead's words, "weave a social fabric in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place."

How can the Multiple Intelligences be implemented in the classroom?

To implement Gardner's theory in an educational setting, I organized my third grade classroom in Marysville, Washington, into seven learning centers, each dedicated to one of the seven intelligences. The students spend approximately two-thirds of each school day moving through the centers - 15 to 20 minutes at each center. Curriculum is thematic, and the centers provide seven different ways for the students to learn the subject matter.

Each day begins with a brief lecture and discussion explaining one aspect of the current theme. For example, during a unit on outer space, the morning's lecture might focus on spiral galaxies. In a unit about the arts of Africa, one lecture might describe the Adinkra textile patterns of Ghana. After the morning lecture, a timer is set and students - in groups of three or four - start work at their centers, eventually rotating through all seven.

What kinds of learning activities take place at each center?

All students learn each day's lesson in seven ways. They build models, dance, make collaborative decisions, create songs, solve deductive reasoning problems, read, write, and illustrate all in one school day. Some more specific examples of activities at each center follow:

• In the Personal Work Center (Intrapersonal Intelligence), students explore the present area of study through research, reflection, or individual projects.
• In the Working Together Center (Interpersonal Intelligence), they develop cooperative learning skills as they solve problems, answer questions, create learning games, brainstorm ideas and discuss that day's topic collaboratively.
• In the Music Center (Musical Intelligence), students compose and sing songs about the subject matter, make their own instruments, and learn in rhythmical ways.
• In the Art Center (Spatial Intelligence), they explore a subject area using diverse art media, manipulables, puzzles, charts, and pictures.
• In the Building Center (Kinesthetic Intelligence), they build models, dramatize events, and dance, all in ways that relate to the content of that day's subject matter.
• In the Reading Center (Verbal/Linguistic Intelligence), students read, write, and learn in many traditional modes. They analyze and organize information in written form.
• In the Math & Science Center (Logical/ Mathematical Intelligence), they work with math games, manipulatives, mathematical concepts, science experiments, deductive reasoning, and problem solving.

Following their work at the centers, a few minutes are set aside for groups and individual students to share their work from the centers. Much of the remainder of the day is spent with students working on independent projects, either individually or in small groups where they apply the diverse skills developed at the centers. The daily work at the seven centers profoundly influences their ability to make informative, entertaining, multimodal presentations of their studies. Additionally, it is common for parents to comment on how much more expressive their children have become at home.

What are some of the results of this program?

During the 1989-1990 school year, an action research project was conducted in my classroom to assess the effects of this multimodal learning format. A daily teacher's journal was kept with specific entries recording the following:

• general daily comments
• a daily evaluation of how focused or "on-task" students were
• an evaluation of the transitions between centers
• an explanation of any discipline problems
• a self-assessment - how the teacher's time was used
• tracking of three individuals, previously identified as students with behavior problems.

In addition, a Classroom Climate Survey was administered 12 times during the year, a Student Assessment Inventory of work at the seven centers was administered nine times during the year, and a Center Group Survey was administered eight times during the year.

The research data revealed the following:

1. The students develop increased responsibility, self-direction and independence over the course of the year. Although no attempt was made to compare this group of students with those in other third grade classes, the self-direction and motivation of these students was apparent to numerous classroom visitors. The students became skilled at developing their own projects, gathering the necessary resources and materials, and making well-planned presentations of all kinds.

2. Discipline problems were significantly reduced. Students previously identified as having serious behavior problems showed rapid improvement during the first six weeks of school. By mid-year, they were making important contributions to their groups. And by year's end, they had assumed positive leadership roles which had not formerly been evident.

3. All students developed and applied new skills. In the fall, most students described only one center as their "favorite" and as the one where they felt confident. (The distribution among the seven centers was relatively even.) By mid-year, most identified three to four favorite centers. By year's end, every student identified at least six centers which were favorites and at which they felt skilled. Moreover, they were all making multimodal presentations of independent projects including songs, skits, visuals, poems, games, surveys, puzzles, and group participation activities.

4. Cooperative learning skills improved in all students. Since so much of the center work was collaborative, students became highly skilled at listening, helping each other, sharing leadership in different activities, accommodating group changes, and introducing new classmates to the program. They learned not only to respect each other, but also to appreciate and call upon the unique gifts and abilities of their classmates.

5. Academic achievement improved. Standardized test scores were above state and national averages in all areas. Retention was high on a classroom year-end test of all areas studied during the year. Methods for recalling information were predominantly musical, visual and kinesthetic, indicating the influence of working through the different intelligences. Students who had previously been unsuccessful in school became high achievers in new areas.

In summary, it is clear that students' learning improved. Many students said they enjoyed school for the first time. And as the school year progressed, new skills emerged: some students discovered musical, artistic, literary, mathematical and other new-found capacities and abilities. Others became skilled leaders. In addition, self-confidence and motivation increased significantly. Finally, students developed responsibility, self-reliance and independence as they took an active role in shaping their own learning experiences.

What is the teacher's role in a Multiple Intelligences program?

The teacher's role also transforms in this type of program. I developed skills different from those I would develop by standing in front of a class lecturing each day. I need to observe my students from seven new perspectives. In planning the centers, I find I am pushing my students from behind rather than pulling them from in front. Also I am working with them, rather than for them. I explore what they explore, discover what they discover, and often learn what they learn. I find my satisfaction in their enthusiasm for learning and independence, rather than in their test scores and ability to sit quietly. And most importantly, because I am planning for such a diversity of activities, I have become more creative and multimodal in my own thinking and my own learning. I can now comfortably write and sing songs. I am learning to draw and paint. I see growth and development within myself. I sometimes wonder who is changing the most, my students or myself.

Why is a Multiple Intelligences model successful?

The reasons for the academic and behavioral success of the program appear to be twofold. First, every student has an opportunity to specialize and excel in at least one area. Usually, however, it is three or four. In the two years since this program was initiated, I have not had one student who was unable to find an area of specialty and success. Secondly, each student learns the subject matter in a variety of different ways, thereby multiplying chances of successfully understanding and retaining that information.

Many student needs are met through this program. Their intellectual needs are met by constantly being challenged and frequently exercising their creativity. At the same time, their emotional needs are met by working closely with others. They develop diverse strengths, and they understand themselves better as individuals.

The emphasis in such a program is upon learning rather than teaching. The students' interests and developmental needs dictate the direction of the program. Such a model adapts to students, rather than expecting students to adapt to it. From my own classroom experiences, I believe that teaching and learning through the multiple intelligences helps solve many common school problems and optimizes the learning experience for students and teachers alike. Again following Margaret Mead, if we educate to engage the "whole gamut of human potentialities" in the classroom, society will benefit by enabling "each diverse human gift to find its fitting place."

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Four Factors In Educational Reform

by Howard Gardner

Many of us interested in efforts at educational reform have focused on the learner or student, be she a young child in preschool or an adult bent on acquiring a new skill. It is clarifying to have such a focus and, indeed, any efforts at reform are doomed to fail unless they concentrate on the properties and potentials of the individual learner. My own work on multiple intelligences has partaken of this general focus; colleagues and I have sought to foster a range of intellectual strengths in our students.

But after several years of active involvement in efforts at educational reform, I am convinced that success depends upon the active involvement of at least four factors:

Assessment * Unless one is able to assess the learning that takes place in different domains, and by different cognitive processes, even superior curricular innovations are destined to remain unutilized. In this country, assessment drives instruction. We must devise procedures and instruments which are "intelligence-fair" and which allow us to look directly at the kinds of learning in which we are interested.

Curriculum * Far too much of what is taught today is included primarily for historical reasons. Even teachers, not to mention students, often cannot explain why a certain topic needs to be covered in school. We need to reconfigure curricula so that they focus on skills, knowledge, and above all, understandings that are truly desirable in out country today. And we need to adapt those curricula as much as possible to the particular learning styles and strengths of students.

Teacher Education * While most teacher education institutions make an honest effort to produce teaching candidates of high quality, these institutions have not been at the forefront of efforts at educational improvement. Too often they are weighted down by students of indifferent quality and by excessive - and often counterproductive - requirements which surround training and certification. We need to attract stronger individuals into teaching, improve conditions so that they will remain in teaching, and use our master teachers to help train the next generation of students and teachers.

Community Participation * In the past, Americans have been content to place most educational burdens on the schools. This is no longer a viable option. The increasing cognitive demands of schooling, the severe problems in our society today, and the need for support of students which extends well beyond the 9-3 period each day, all make it essential that other individuals and institutions contribute to the educational process. In addition to support from family members and other mentoring adults, such institutions as business, the professions, and especially museums need to be involved much more intimately in the educational process.

Too often, Americans have responded to educational needs only in times of crisis. This is an unacceptable approach. Education works effectively only when responsibility is assumed over the long run. We have made significant progress in this regard over the past decade. There is reason to be optimistic for students of the future, as dedicated individuals continue to collaborate in solving the challenging educational problems of our time.

Dr. Howard Gardner is a Professor of Education and Co-chair of Project Zero at Harvard University. He is the author of nine books, including Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983), and To Open Minds: Chinese Clues to the Dilemma of Comtemporary Education (1989).

Human Learning

Author: Jeanne Ellis Ormrod

Human Learning, fifth edition, is the leading text on learning theories applied to education. It covers a broad range of learning theories, including behaviorist, social cognitive, cognitive, and developmental. Complex learning and cognition, including metacognition, transfer, and social processes in knowledge construction are also covered, as is motivation. Coverage demonstrates, through the author's extremely lucid and engaging prose, how different concepts relate to one another. The book provides dozens of proven examples, and emphasizes meaningful learning that makes the fundamentals of these theories comprehensible to students with little or no prior coursework in psychology. Key revisions to this book include a thoroughly updated section on behaviorism, a new, separate chapter on the developmental theories of Piaget and Vygotsky, and a reorganized motivation section.

Booknews

New edition of an undergraduate text for students who do not have much background in psychology. The author covers behaviorist views of learning, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, social learning theory, cognitive views of learning, several topics in memory, complex learning and cognition, effective study strategies, and learning through interactions with others.

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means

Author: Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

War! Pollution! Overpopulation! Why are so many people so miserable, and why do they do such terrible things? Most people in our culture think it's because something is wrong with us--with human beings.

Daniel Quinn shows that it's because something is wrong with our beliefs or myths, and the way society is organized around them.

What is our present social organization called? Civilization. Yet, civilization has only been around for about 10,000 years. Humans were around for a long time before that. (Our understanding of the exact chronology is always being revised, but anatomically modern humans date back about 120,000 years, and different forms of hominids have existed for millions.)

All social animals have social organizations. Birds form flocks; bees live in hives, and humans were tribal. It wasn't a perfect system, but it worked a lot better for us than anything else. That's why tribalism lasted for so many millennia and still continues in some parts of the world. Our civilization is an attempt to improve on tribalism, and it has certainly spread quickly, but is it really as successful as we have been led to believe?

Ours was not the only civilization. There have been other civilizations, such as the Maya. The difference between us and them is that when things weren't working out, they were willing to abandon their civilizations. The very idea is almost unthinkable to us.

The idea that civilization is the last, best way to live, and other related beliefs, are what made our version of civilization spread so fast and far. Unfortunately, it is these same ideas that will ultimately destroy us unless we change them. Problems like pollution and overpopulation are the results of the mistaken ideas our social organization is based on, and not the fault of human nature itself. Humans are no more defective than eagles or daisies are.

Our civilization's mistaken beliefs are like lethal genes. You could also compare them to deadly disease(s). Lethal genes, and even deadly diseases, don't always kill you immediately. AIDS is the perfect example. It spread worldwide because its victims die slowly. Civilization has also spread worldwide, but it doesn't have to kill us.

The Maya melted back into the forest. We can't do that anymore because there are few wilderness areas left, but there are other alternatives. We can't go back, but we can go forward by creating new ways to live. We can find alternatives that work better before it's too late.

The Stuff of Thought

Author: Steven Pinker

Language is so familiar that we don't notice how strange it is. Why is it all right to say "I poured wine into the glass" but not "I filled wine into the glass"? Why can you "stroll for ten minutes" but not "walk to the shop for ten minutes"? And why, to switch from the mundane to the scatological, can you tell someone "Don't hurt yourself" but not "Don't fuck you"?

In his new book, Steven Pinker answers these puzzles and many more. On the surface, these pairs of sentences may seem to have parallel meanings, but Pinker shows that the similarities conceal underlying differences. People effortlessly discern that the pairs have divergent deep structures and that this governs what we can and can't say. Pinker elegantly teases out these structures and uses them to illuminate not just the working of ordinary verbs but a range of linguistic phenomena, from metaphor and children's names to euphemism and obscenity.

Pinker is a distinguished professor of psychology at Harvard University, but outside academic circles is better known for his splendid popular books. He started over a decade ago with The Language Instinct. This merged modern thinking about the evolution of the human mind with the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky.

Pinker has divided his subsequent books between these two themes of evolution and linguistics. How The Mind Works and The Blank State argued that the modern human mind still bears the mark of our primeval ancestry, while in the intervening Words and Rules, Pinker stuck to the linguistic issue of how our finite minds can generate an indefinite range of complex sentences.

In this new volume, Pinker returns to the workings of language, and evolutionary considerations take a back seat. I prefer Pinker's language books to the evolutionary ones. Both are immensely readable and stimulating. Pinker is a master at making complex ideas palatable with snippets of popular culture and tried-and-tested jokes.

But his evolutionary ideas are often highly speculative. According to his critics, they are nothing but "just so stories" which differ from Kipling's fables only in lacking a good moral. In truth, Pinker's arguments for his evolutionary claims often seem to protest too much. By contrast, the language books are full of hard data. This is Pinker's real area of expertise, and it is always fascinating to see him unpick the curious ways in which language works.

Pinker's main theme in this book is that language lays bare the basic categories used by the human mind. By studying the ways verbs work, for instance, we can see how our minds categorise actions. It turns out, curiously, that actions that work because of gravity are classified differently from those that use other kinds of force. (That's why you can "pour wine into the glass" but not "fill wine into the glass"). Applying this method across a wide range of linguistic constructions, Pinker pieces together the basic concepts by which humans structure the world.

We turn out to be a depressingly practical bunch. It's all to do with different kinds of stuff, and what can go where, and how one thing can be used to smear, shatter, or fill up another. Those millions of years as hunter-gatherers seem to have left their imprint. Our basic outlook on the universe is that of a caveman wondering how to crack the next nut.

Of course, as Pinker stresses, this doesn't mean that all our thinking is still stuck in the stone age. Now we don't just think about food, but about monetary inflation, bureaucratic bottlenecks, and the decline of the novel. But modern thought is still built on the patterns laid down long ago.

We can extend the range of things we talk about, often using metaphor to get new ideas off the ground, but new ways of thinking never fully break free of the old. For example, note the spatial meanings of "inflation", "bottleneck" and "decline". We may be thinking about abstract matters, but we can't manage without the help of simple spatial notions.

Which comes first, language or thought? Do we think in basic physical terms because of the way English shapes our thought, or does English work as it does because of how we already think?

According to the once-modish thesis of linguistic determinism, language runs the show. Different peoples think differently because brought up to speak different languages. Classic exhibits in the determinist gallery are the Hopi, reputed not to distinguish space and time because of their odd structure of tenses, and the Inuit, whose 30-odd words for snow are supposed to allow them to make meteorological distinctions that escape the rest of us.

Pinker will have none of this. He argues that all humans share a universal "language of thought" containing basic concepts of space, time, force and sorts of stuff. Not all spoken languages express these categories using identical grammatical constructions, but the same linguistic oddities keep popping up in unrelated languages, and all societies have some way of marking these fundamental distinctions. Pinker allows that linguistic training can make a difference to more sophisticated thinking. You'd be hard put to distinguish the days of the week if you didn't live in a community that named them. But even here Pinker thinks that the linguistic determinists put the cart before the horse.

Modern humans distinguish the days because they need to, not because language has forced them to think in those terms. Similarly, if the Inuits didn't have 30 words for snow, it would have been necessary to invent them. To drive the point home, Pinker observes that English speakers have all been introduced to words like "skylark", "plover" and "redshank" without this making the slightest different to the thoughts of any but a few twitchers.

Linguistic determinism is just one of the foes Pinker takes on. He engages with a number of rival theories of language. Sometimes he cuts a few argumentative corners in the interests of mounting a persuasive case. Still, it is not hard to forgive him. He may be partisan, but he is never boring. And he does know a lot about words.

David Papineau is professor of philosophy at King's College, London

UNACCUSTOMED EARTH

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri

Review: For NYTimes - LIESL SCHILLINGER

Quaint and antique, the cry for love of country that Sir Walter Scott made in his poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” is something schoolchildren quit memorizing a century ago. Its stirring theme rouses a patriot’s yearning: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!”

It’s easy to forget, given the sensitivities that have been awakened in this country since 9/11, thrusting lifelong citizens under suspicion for having foreign-sounding names and subjecting visitors to the indignity of being fingerprinted, that America was conceived in a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build new identities, grounded in the present and the future, not the past. This dream, despite current fears, has in great part been made real. And the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself — accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs — is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sensitive new collection of stories, “Unaccustomed Earth.” Here, as in her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” and her novel, “The Namesake,” Lahiri, who is of Bengali descent but was born in London, raised in Rhode Island and today makes her home in Brooklyn, shows that the place to which you feel the strongest attachment isn’t necessarily the country you’re tied to by blood or birth: it’s the place that allows you to become yourself. This place, she quietly indicates, may not lie on any map.

The eight stories in this splendid volume expand upon Lahiri’s epigraph, a metaphysical passage from “The Custom-House,” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing. Human fortunes may be improved, Hawthorne argues, if men and women “strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.” It’s an apt, rich metaphor for the transformations Lahiri oversees in these pages, in which two generations of Bengali immigrants to America — the newcomers and their hyphenated children — struggle to build normal, secure lives. But Lahiri does not so much accept Hawthorne’s notion as test it. Is it true that transplanting strengthens the plant? Or can such experiments produce mixed outcomes?

As her characters mature in their new environments, they carry with them the potential for upheaval. Geography is no guarantee of security. Lahiri shows that people may be felled at any time by swift jabs of chance, wherever they happen to live. Uncontrollable events may assail them — accidents of fate, health or weather. More often, they suffer less dramatic reversals: failed love affairs, alcoholism, even simple passivity — the sort of troubles that seem avoidable to everyone except the person who succumbs to them. Like Laura, the well-meaning narrator of “Brief Encounter,” the men and women of Lahiri’s stories often find themselves overwhelmed by unexpected passions. They share her refrain: “I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” Again and again, the reader is caught off-guard by the accesses of emotion and experience that waylay Lahiri’s characters, despite their peregrinations, their precautions, their concealments.

Each of the five stories in the book’s first section is self-contained. In “Hell-Heaven,” the assimilated Bengali-American narrator considers how little thought she once gave to her mother’s sacrifices as she reconstructs the tormenting, unrequited passion her young mother had for a graduate student during the narrator’s childhood. In “Only Goodness,” an older sister learns a sharp lesson about the limits of her responsibility to a self-destructive younger brother. “A Choice of Accommodations” shows a shift in power dynamics between a Bengali-American husband and his workaholic Anglo wife during a weekend away from their kids — at the wedding of the husband’s prep-school crush. And the American graduate student at the center of “Nobody’s Business” pines for his Bengali-American roommate, a graduate-school dropout who entertains no romantic feelings for him, spurns the polite advances of “prospective grooms” from the global Bengali singles circuit and considers herself engaged to a selfish, foul-tempered Egyptian historian.

In the title story, Ruma, a Bengali-American lawyer, repeats her mother’s life pattern when she gives up her job and follows her husband to a distant city as they await the birth of their second child. “Growing up, her mother’s example — moving to a foreign place for the sake of marriage, caring exclusively for children and a household — had served as a warning, a path to avoid. Yet this was Ruma’s life now.” The nurturing force field of pregnancy shields Ruma from the sting this reflection might be expected to provoke, but it doesn’t protect her widowed father. When he visits her in Seattle from his condo in Pennsylvania, he asks her a very American question: “Will this make you happy?” Urging Ruma not to isolate herself, to look for work, he reminds her that “self-reliance is important.” Thinking back on his wife’s unhappiness in the early years of their marriage, he realizes that “he had always assumed Ruma’s life would be different.” But if his daughter chooses a life in Seattle that she could have led in Calcutta, who’s to say this isn’t evidence of another kind of freedom?

Ruma is struck by how much her father “resembled an American in his old age. With his gray hair and fair skin he could have been practically from anywhere.” Seeing his daughter, Ruma’s father has the opposite reaction: “She now resembled his wife so strongly that he could not bear to look at her directly.” Ruma’s identity, Lahiri suggests, is affected less by her coordinates on the globe than by the internal indices of her will. She is a creature of the American soil, but she carries her own emotional bearings within her. What are the real possibilities for change attached to a move? Lahiri seems to ask. What are the limits?

While tending Ruma’s neglected garden, her father shows his grandson how to sow seeds. The boy digs holes, but plants Legos in them, along with a plastic dinosaur and a wooden block with a star. Emblems of the international, the prehistoric and the celestial, they are buried in one garden plot, auguries of an ideal future, a utopia that could be anywhere or nowhere. How can it grow?

Lahiri’s final three stories, grouped together as “Hema and Kaushik,” explore the overlapping histories of the title characters, a girl and boy from two Bengali immigrant families, set during significant moments of their lives. “Once in a Lifetime” begins in 1974, the year Kaushik Choudhuri and his parents leave Cambridge and return to India. Seven years later, when the Choudhuris return to Massachusetts, Hema’s parents are perplexed to find that “Bombay had made them more American than Cambridge had.” The next story, “Year’s End,” visits Kaushik during his senior year at Swarthmore as he wrestles with the news of his father’s remarriage and meets his father’s new wife and stepdaughters. The final story, “Going Ashore,” begins with Hema, now a Latin professor at Wellesley, spending a few months in Rome before entering into an arranged marriage with a parent-approved Hindu Punjabi man named Navin. Hema likes Navin’s traditionalism and respect: “It touched her to be treated, at 37, like a teenaged girl.” The couple plan to settle in Massachusetts. But in Rome, Hema runs across Kaushik, now a world-roving war photographer. “As a photographer, his origins were irrelevant,” Kaushik thinks. But how irrelevant are Kaushik’s origins — to Hema and to himself? And which suitor will Hema choose? The romantic who has no home outside of memory? Or the realist who wants to make a home where his wife chooses to live?

Except for their names, “Hema and Kaushik” could evoke any American’s ’70s childhood, any American’s bittersweet acceptance of the compromises of adulthood. The generational conflicts Lahiri depicts cut across national lines; the waves of admiration, competition and criticism that flow between the two families could occur between Smiths and Taylors in any suburban town; and the fight for connection and control between Hema and Kaushik — as children and as adults — replays the tussle that has gone on ever since men and women lived in caves.

Lahiri handles her characters without leaving any fingerprints. She allows them to grow as if unguided, as if she were accompanying them rather than training them through the espalier of her narration. Reading her stories is like watching time-lapse nature videos of different plants, each with its own inherent growth cycle, breaking through the soil, spreading into bloom or collapsing back to earth.

Psychology

Author: David G Meyers

This modular version of Myers's full-length text, Psychology, reflects the author's research-supported belief that many students learn better using a text comprised of brief modules, as opposed standard-length chapters. Psychology, Eighth Edition, in Modules breaks down the 18 chapters of Psychology into 58 short modules, retaining that acclaimed text's captivating writing, superior pedagogy, and wealth of references to recent cutting-edge research. The modular version has its own extensive media and supplements package, with content organized to match its table of contents.

Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes & Dolphins

Author: Craig Stanford

Apes and dolphins: primates and cetaceans. Could any creatures appear to be more different? Yet both are large-brained intelligent mammals with complex communication and social interaction. In the first book to study apes and dolphins side by side, Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford, a dolphin biologist and a primatologist who have spent their careers studying these animals in the wild, combine their insights with compelling results that teaches us about another large-brained mammal: Homo sapiens. Noting that apes and dolphins have had no common ancestor in nearly 100 million years, Bearzi and Stanford describe the parallel evolution that gave rise to their intelligence. They detail their subjects’ ability to develop family bonds, form alliances, and care for their young. They offer an understanding of their culture, politics, social structure, personality, and capacity for emotion. The resulting dual portrait — with striking overlaps in behavior — is key to understanding the nature of “beautiful minds.”

Dr. Craig Stanford is the co-director of the Jane Goodall Primate Research Center at the University of Southern California, where he is also a professor of biological anthropology. His previous books include Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature and The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behavior.

Evolution: What the Fossils Say & Why it Matters

Author: Donald Prothero

Review: The claims of the Intelligent Design creationists are brilliantly encapsulated and devastatingly dismantled by the geologist and paleontologist Donald Prothero in the best book ever produced on the subject. I’ve known Don since the early 1990s when I took an active role investigating the claims of the creationists and publicly airing them in numerous forums, including in articles, essays, opinion editorials, books, lectures, and debates. Throughout this odyssey Don has been my co-pilot, directing my efforts, focusing my concentration, checking my facts, and guiding me through the labyrinth of scientific sources, of which he is the master. I am delighted beyond words that Dr. Prothero has taken time away from his primary paleontological research to put down on paper all he knows about this multifarious movement. It’s a thankless job but someone has to do it, and the world is a better place for Don’s efforts. In particular, Prothero’s visual presentation of the fossil and genetic evidence for evolution is so unmistakably powerful that I venture to say that no one could read this book and still deny the reality of evolution. It happened. Deal with it.

One of the most frequent questions asked by creationists (of any stripe) is "Where are the transitional fossils?" They usually point, somewhat dismissively, at specimens such as Tiktaalik and ask for more. They claim that there should be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of intermediate forms and hence many more transitional fossils than what makes it into the newspaper. This betrays a fundamental lack of knowledge about evolutionary theory in general and paleontology in particular. Outside of a few spectacular examples, most fossils, whether they be transitional or otherwise, never make it into the news. Rather they get descibed and discussed in journals such as The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Paleobiology. and other specialized journals devoted to paleontology. How many of you have heard of Messelastur gratulator? Messelastur gratulator is a member of the sister taxon to owls and shows some morphological traits that link them to Falconiformes as well. Or Martinogale? Martinogale is one of the earliest New World skunks known and is close to the origins of all new world skunks. Of course, one could also find them in places such as Faunmap, Miomap, and The Paleobiology Database. You can also find them by searching the databases of many museums and universities. Although all of these methods can be time consuming and require more research skills than what creationists and intelligent design advocates seem to be able to muster.

The book is divided into two sections. The first sections contains chapters on the nature of science, the fossil record, the growth of evolutionary theory, systematics, and creationism. Each chapter provides some interesting material for those who are not very familiar with the subject. The first chapter on the nature of science, for example, covers the scientific method, the difference between the scientific use and the vernacular use of the word "theory", belief systems and science, the supernatural, and pseudoscience and baloney detection. This chapter and several others make liberal use of Carl Sagan quotations, which won me over immediately. The chapter on systematics is, in my opinion, worth the price of the book. Starting with an overview of what systematics and taxonomy are, the chapter discusses cladistics, the impact of molecular biology on classification, the tree of life, and an interesting section on "Ancestor Worship." In this section Prothero makes several important points:

Some aspects of cladistic theory have proven more difficult for many scientists to accept. For example, a cladogram is simply a branching diagram of relationships between three or more taxa. It does not specify whether one taxon is ancestral to another; it only shows the topology of their relationships as established by shared derived characters... The nodes are simply branching points supported by shared derived characters, which presumably represent the most recent hypothetical common ancestor of the taxa that branch from that node. But strictly speaking, cladograms never put real taxa at any nodes, but only at the tips of branches.

The important question you should be asking is "why?" Prothero supplies the answer a few paragraphs later (and this is the important part of the section):

But there's another reason why cladists avoid the concept of ancestry. To be a true ancestor, the fossil must have nothing but shared primitive characters relative to its descendants. If it has any derived feature not found in a descendant, it cannot be an ancestor.

The importance of this point will not be lost on anyone who has debated human evolution, or discussed transitional species, with creationists. I have refrained from mentioning the chapter on creationism, technically the third chapter, till now. Anyone who follows the attempts of creationists to undermine science will be familiar with the material covered in this chapter. Prothero makes liberal use of Talk Origins and the chapter reads like an extended entry on The Panda's Thumb.

This brings us to the second part of the book, called "Evolution? The Fossils Say Yes." As you may surmise from the title, this is a play on Gish's book and Gish, among others, comes in for some heavy criticism. There is, however, more to the section than bashing Gish. In eleven chapters Prothero presents the fossil evidence for the origin of life, discusses the Cambrian slow burn, invertebrate transitions, the origins of the vertebrates, the origins of fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, dinosaurs, and birds. He also discusses the evolution of ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs, the evolution of snakes and crocodiles, whales, horses, rhinoceros, titanotheres, elephants, and hominids, just to touch on a few examples. Even more valuable is the photographic evidence. The book is lavishly illustrated with fossils of every type and provide powerful supporting evidence for the text. Over and above that are the superb illustrations by Carl Buell - paleoartist extraordinaire. Oh and I almost forgot, along the way Prothero provides the most efficient and complete refutation of creationist accounts of the origin of the Grand Canyon I have ever seen. It was a thing of beauty.

Overall, the book is well written, well organized and makes a powerful case for evolution. It is definitely a worthy addition to the anti-creationist literature and fills a much needed gap. It is also an excellent book for the average lay person interested in evolutionary biology and paleontology.

A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on Why God is Good and Faith Isn't Evil

Author: David Meyers

David G. Myers is the author of the most widely used psychology textbook on college campuses today, soon to be in its 9th edition, and he devotes a good deal of his time to keeping it up to date. But Myers, a trustee of the John Templeton Foundation and a professor of social psychology at Hope College in Michigan, also has a vocation—getting people on different sides of difficult issues to talk to each other.

In his new book, A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists: Musings on Why God Is Good and Faith Isn't Evil, Myers does not try to convince skeptics to accept the "truth claims" of religion, but he does draw their attention to its social benefits. Studies show that, compared with their secular counterparts, religious people tend to be happier and healthier and to contribute more to helping others through volunteer work and charitable giving. Nor, he insists, is religion the enemy of science. "Believers can share with skeptics a commitment to reason, evidence, and critical thinking," he writes, "while also embracing a faith that supports happiness, health, and helpfulness."

This middle ground, Myers recently argued in "On Faith," the religion blog of the Washington Post, is precisely what today's "new atheists" refuse to accept, a point he also emphasized in his response to Religulous, the new movie by Bill Maher. Publishers Weekly, among other reviewers, has singled out his new book's calm reasonableness as a particular strength: "Myers adds to the numerous apologetic texts that have emerged since the neo-atheist movement began. But this quick jaunt into potentially dangerous waters is head and shoulders above the rest."