Book Review: Jeffrey Kerr - Lamar's Folly

I'd previously read Seat of Empire, one of Kerr's several non-fiction works, which recounted the acrimonious debate between Sam Houston and Mirabeau Lamar over where the capital of the new nation of Texas was to be located. Happily for me, an Austinite, it ended up being here, but beyond the incredible wealth of historical detail Kerr revealed in that book lay a fascinating human story of a clash of personalities and ambitions - the grandiose visions of Lamar the poet for Texas to be its own sovereign empire stretching out to the Pacific, and the more hardheaded plans of Houston the politician for Texas to take its place alongside the other states as just another part of America. This novel is a (heavily) fictionalized exploration of that deep-seated personal enmity between the two men and conflict between different destinies for Texas. While I disagreed with several of Kerr's artistic decisions, I also read the whole thing straight through in a day; he is a skillful storyteller as well as an excellent historian.

Most of the novel is told in narrative form from the perspective of Edward Fontaine, a real person who was Lamar's personal secretary, and who also eventually built and became the pastor at the church that became St. David's Episcopal Church (which is where I had my christening!). There are also brief passages in each chapter from the perspective of his slave Jacob, another real person who founded several Baptist churches in Central Texas. In each chapter Edward recounts his relationship with Lamar, from their meeting during the battle of San Jacinto to their eventual parting after the end of Lamar's tenure as President of Texas, as Lamar does everything in his power, and a bit beyond, to forge Texas into an imperial nation while simultaneously feuding with Houston on both a political level and a personal one, as the less-charismatic Lamar is often upstaged by the more flamboyant Houston, with Jacob adding additional context and a non-Anglo perspective that's often an ironic counterpoint to Edward's version of events. Eventually Lamar's career is wrecked by the confluence of two scandals - his not-quite-legal dispatch of an ill-fated expedition to conquer Santa Fe and thus enrich and enlarge Texas, and the Kerr-invented affair he carries on with the wife of a blacksmith he sent along with it. The novel ends with both Edward and Jacob reflecting on Lamar's hubris, the confluence of personal tragedy and underlying character flaws that might have contributed to it, and nods toward their respective post-Lamar lives in a Texas where Houston's vision predominates (with the obvious exception of the location of the capital!), even though many Texans have unconsciously adopted Lamar's attitude of a Texas apart from the rest of the country.

I had very mixed feelings about the David-and-Bathsheba affair (surprisingly, no one in the novel mentions the obvious Biblical parallel) between Lamar and Mrs. Tucker that Kerr concocted for the novel, which plays a big role in Edward's gradual disillusionment with Lamar. It adds a very human element to Lamar's outsized personality, and is actually believable given Lamar's real-life tragic loss of his wife and brother, and it also gives its title a nice double meaning when combined with the ultimate disaster of the Santa Fe Expedition (interestingly, I learned in a KUT interview with Kerr that "Lamar's folly" was a real-life contemporaneous reference to a comically inadequate defensive palisade that Lamar had built around the Capitol; for some reason this is not referenced within the novel itself). However, I wasn't ever able to fully relax and just roll with it. Obviously just about anything is fair game when it comes to historical fiction, and Kerr does quite well with his other flourishes, but given that Lamar is the central axis around which the entire novel revolves, and the quality of his character most of all, I wasn't quite sure what I was supposed to take away from his affair, especially because Kerr doesn't really need it for any ruminations on "the perils of hubris" or "power inevitably corrupts" or "sin destroys even the mighty" or what have you. Imagine a historical fiction along the lines of the Broadway play Hamilton, except that Jefferson is also given an extra mistress for some reason and ends up fighting a duel of his own, or Steven Spielberg's movie Lincoln but Lincoln is given a fictitious brother fighting for the South. It just violated my suspension of disbelief, whereas Kerr's other liberties, such as not mentioning Edward's wife or side career as a politician himself, didn't for whatever reason. It's interesting that he didn't substantially alter Sam Houston, a much more sympathetic person, to the same degree.

But if that doesn't bother you, then otherwise this is quite good. Kerr very convincingly represents the way that secondhand reports and personal loyalties can forever taint your perceptions of someone, as Edward despises Houston solely due to loyalty to Lamar and the rumors of Houston's drinking and infidelities despite Houston's unfailing courtesy towards him. Jacob throughout provides a more level-headed perspective on the two men, continually preferring Houston due to his kindness towards slaves and Indians versus Lamar's more typical Southern white supremacist views (though there is one curious scene in the book where, just prior to a scouting expedition reaching the settlement of Waterloo, Jacob states that Lamar scalps an Indian he and Edward have both shot and offers the scalp to Edward, which is supposed to illustrate his dislike of Indians, though Edward does not mention the scalping at all; otherwise their two narrations agree entirely on actual events). Lamar's own personal transition from an opponent of the genocide of the Indians to a strong proponent is also given a firm grounding in his own character, and how his desire for Texas as he saw it to become a great nation led him to pursue whatever means necessary to make that happen, including dispatching the Santa Fe expedition despite Houston convincing the Texas Congress not to authorize it. And of course the initial battle over the location of the capital plays a large role in the book, although not the infamous Angelina Eberly cannon incident later on (in that same KUT interview with Kerr he reveals that Lamar was the only President of Texas inaugurated in Houston, and that Houston was the only President inaugurated in Austin; this historical irony also for some reason wasn't mentioned here and was not really emphasized in Seat of Empire either).

As a lover of Austin history in general and of Kerr's previous book in particular I was predisposed to like it, but anyone who enjoys Texas-themed historical fiction will enjoy it as well.

Book Review: John Campbell - Frozen Hell

I vividly remember reading "Who Goes There?" as a child, in a sci-fi short story compilation I checked out from the library whose name I can't recall. I've completely forgotten the other stories, which were of the kind that fellow sci-fi veteran Robert Silverberg fondly but firmly sums up in the Introduction here as "wordy epics in which grim, methodical supermen repeatedly saved the world from menacing aliens by mastering, with the greatest of ease, such things as faster-than-light travel, the fabrication of matter-destroying rays, the release of atomic energy, and the penetration of hyperspace." Campbell's story about an Antarctic expedition's struggle against a shapeshifting alien was incredibly different - intensely-paced, relentless, eerie, and genuinely frightening to young me. It was a great bridge for me between more "literary" short stories like Jack London's "To Build a Fire" and other fantasy horror like H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which coincidentally was also published in serial form in the same Astounding magazine about 2 years before "Who Goes There?", which Campbell of course went on to become the phenomenal editor of.

This extended version, based on a manuscript recently discovered in a Harvard archive, adds 3 intro chapters and a few thousand words of additional verbiage throughout. Campbell was wise to cut the extra material, which is overly didactic and not strictly necessary to the plot. The Preface has a good discussion of the importance of firm editing; as newly-minted editor Campbell would advise Asimov years later, "When you have difficulty with the beginning of the story, that is because you are starting in the wrong place, and almost certainly too soon. Pick out a later point in the story and begin again" However, interestingly I didn't find that the extra baggage diluted the power of the story much for me, although perhaps that was because it still had the force of memory behind it. It's still the immensely influential Ur-sci-fi-horror work that inspired John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, Cris Carter, and so many more, and if you had never read the short story I don't think the impact would be much lessened. At the end there is a preview of a "faithful sequel" set in the present day written by John Betancourt, who helped compile this project. I wish that Peter Watts' wonderful tribute "The Things", which retells "Who Goes There?" from the alien's perspective, had been included, but otherwise this is a delight to read, and Betancourt has done the world a real service by raising this 80 year old story out of the ice of obscurity back to the land of the living. May it continue to spread its tentacles of influence!

Book Review: Peter Turchin - Ages of Discord

If anyone can claim to be making Isaac Asimov's dream of psychohistory manifest it's Turchin, who has done more work to create a truly scientific and predictive theory of macrohistorical patterns than probably anyone else. While this is of course impossible in the strictly Asimovian sense of being able to tell exactly when major crises will arise - and unlike Asimov, Turchin does not even pretend to then be able to present timely solutions via hologram - this book makes a convincing argument that we can discern real lessons about general trends in societal upheaval, while still humbly emphasizing how difficult it is to make even modest predictions about the future. Unfortunately, as the title unhappily alludes to, Turchin's prediction is that the 2020s will be even more unpleasant than today, an era of strife that echoes previous periods in history where the existing social order proved unable to accommodate internal divisions, and the political system could not easily resolve these tensions due to elite greed and status-hoarding. While not Marxist in analysis or conclusion, Turchin's Structural-Demographic Theory broadly aligns with the notion that the rich and powerful have diverted too much of society's wealth and privilege towards themselves, and general wage stagnation combined with class immobility is already having dangerously destabilizing effects on our cultural norms. Even though the book's prognosis is negative, it's just as high-quality as Turchin's other recent works, which collectively form one of the most impressive oeuvres in contemporary social science.

The idea that societies have semi-regular patterns of crisis and stability is thousands of years old; Polybius' anacyclosis model in The Histories predates the Caesars, and the Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms famously begins "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been." However, since as a rich post-Industrial Revolution nation we have escaped a simple Malthusian equilibrium that would lend itself to the easy use of closed-system dynamics, you have to get more a bit more complex in order to discern any kind of cyclical trends in American history. Picking the right variables can be extremely difficult and frankly, some of the choices Turchin makes come off as questionable; when he was describing how in addition to the steady multi-century Structural-Demographic Theory sine waves of peace --> complacency --> conflict there are also 50-year "fathers and sons" cycles, I was reminded of cargo cult science like the Dow theory model of stock prices, where you hallucinate a bunch of overlapping variable-length "patterns" of main movements, medium swings, and short swings on top of a bunch of random-walk price data in order to derive whatever trendlines look most convincing to your investors. Turchin does his best to avoid pareidolic numbers games, but his well-intentioned attempts to find proxies for inherently squishy concepts like "cooperative social mood" for SDT - measures like "visits to national parks and monuments" or "relative frequency of the phrase 'corporate greed' according to Google Ngram" - have the unavoidable air of arbitrariness, even if he does make a good case that they're measuring something real.

Still, once I got over my quibbles with his exact choice of indices, his basic theory seemed unimpeachable. The highest level of the model is simple: the Political Stress Indicator = Mass Mobilization Potential x Elite Mobilization Potential x State Fiscal Distress. Each of the right-hand terms is then composed of a few variables:

• Mass Mobilization Potential combines measures of real wages, urbanization rates, and the relative proportion of young (20-29 years old) people in society
• Elite Mobilization Potential combines elite income and intraelite competition for important governmental positions
• State Fiscal Distress combines national debt relative to tax revenue, and popular + elite trust in the ability of the government to service the debt and in institutions more generally

That's it! Or nearly it, because some of the components depend on a few other variables (e.g. real wages are determined by labor supply vs demand, which is also affected by immigration levels and the birthrate and so on). It's a bit more tractable than a gigantic matrix of 330 million Lotka-Volterra equations, or the unreadably long Prime Radiant from Foundation, and though it seems almost impossibly oversimplified (no separate measures of religious sectarianism, racial strife, technological stagnation, etc?), Turchin is able to justify most of his choices well by connecting each part of the model to social science literature that I happen to agree with. The historian Arnold Toynbee had a famous line that "Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder", and in Turchin's view, societies have an amazing ability to create problems for themselves due to selfishness, interpreted broadly. So if you've read Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal, you will agree that economic inequality is reinforcing partisan polarization as the Republican Party moves ever rightward in response to the wishes of its donor class; per Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics, our elites have gradually gotten greedier and treat our country as being more profitable to steal from than invest in; as Mark Ames' Going Postal documented, workplace shootings are a frustrated response to the decline of unions and corresponding increase in the worker-as-serf labor model; and so on. This might seem like standard left-wing/progressive/labor liberal analysis, but if you've read anything about social network analysis (Duncan Watts' Everything Is Obvious... Once You Know the Answer) or cultural multilevel selection (Joe Henrich's The Secret of Our Success), or even Turchin's own prior books on asabiya like Ultrasociety, it's hard not to nod along to descriptions of how cooperation within a society can break down over time:

These four mechanisms, (1) competition between groups, (2) competition within groups, (3) cultural distance between competing groups, and (4) cultural homogeneity within groups are not the only processes that can affect the spread of cooperation norms. However, these four processes are interesting because historical evidence suggests that all of them play a role in trend reversals during secular cycles, and because they happen to be connected by one of the most important formulas in multilevel selection theory, so in a certain sense they are just four aspects of a single, more fundamental mechanism.

I think even a conservative would agree that Democrats and Republicans right now check off all 4 of those points: they're competing intensely with each other for control, there are vicious intraparty struggles, they're far apart from each other on many issues, and they're purging moderates/dissenters via litmus tests. The key point is that they are doing all of those things to a far greater degree than they have in the past, and with no sign of abatement. Even though you can find examples of people writing "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times" about essentially every year since the beginning of time, there are plenty of social indicators that are showing worsening conflict and increasing unhappiness with how our theoretically vast prosperity is actually experienced. It probably won't get better either: vital programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are under continuous attack, and the fiscal irresponsibility of the Republican Party is actually starting to look pretty good to left-wing proponents of Medicare For All or Universal Basic Income. Why worry about paying for useful social programs if Republicans don't feel they have to pay for their wars or tax cuts for the rich? We're not quite into the 70s radical era chronicled in Bryan Burrough's Days of Rage, with a climbing murder rate and open domestic terrorist violence, but steady background problems like housing unaffordability, wage stagnation, career precariousness, and so on have become foregrounded, because in the same way as the middle and lower classes are being squeezed, the American elite has worked to close itself off, and so frustrated would-be elites have amplified the struggles of the population at large as inequality and social immobility move up the ladder.

It might not be fully appreciated that many of history's most famous revolutionaries have not been actual poor or working class people, but upper-middle class bourgeois types who leveraged popular discontent into mass movements in conjunction with their own personal grievances. Marx, Lenin, Che, Mao - while they all might have felt genuine sympathy and identification with the lower classes, it's fairly easy to imagine that if the ruling classes had just bought each of them off with a relatively nice government post early on, they might have remained inside the system more or less happily without engaging in violent class struggle. There are many historical examples of this "closing of the patriciate" when there aren't enough elite positions to go around, and indeed the popular caricature of a contemporary Democratic Socialist of America member devoted to the destruction of capitalism is a liberal arts graduate who can't use their expensive college degree to reach the station they think commensurate with their self-identity. This is not to say that they don't have perfectly legitimate problems or that their grievances aren't as real as anyone else's, but it's an important component of Turchin's model, and I think of reality, that when there are more potential elites than elite positions available, that those frustrated elite aspirants will turn against the system more effectively than a prole would. They're certainly much more capable of upsetting the system than the stereotypical laid-off factory worker or fast-food employee who is barely keeping their head above water and doesn't have time to go to rallies and meetings and whatnot. And on the other side, those lucky elites who got in while the getting was good feel little or no broader loyalty to the society that they wield their power in, which explains why so many of them are such awful and craven apologists for a status quo that benefits them at the expense of everyone else. Relative positioning is hugely important to people, and the most common way to resolve this conflict is... conflict.

Now, surely not every single period of internal strife in every country in every historical period is due to the fact that the Marx of the day had idle hands, but Turchin convincingly applies Structural-Demographic Theory to the broad arc of American history, and he analyzes events like the Civil War in ways I had not thought of before. He doesn't deny that the Civil War was fought over slavery, but he does raise the question of why war became unavoidable in 1860 specifically. It's one thing to say that the Compromise of 1850 was "good enough" for another 10 years of peace, or suggest that by 1870 the North would have been too industrially powerful for the South to attempt secession, but Turchin's theory is capable of connecting the Civil War backwards to the Era of Good Feelings and then forward to the Gilded Age in a way that aligns neatly with more orthodox explanations like those of Eric Foner while still showing that immigration patterns, urbanization trends, and elite fragmentation made the 1860 election particularly volatile in a way that 1840 or 1880 was not. Every era has its own problems, but to get an all-consuming crisis like the Civil War, it takes a very particular confluence of internal contradictions, and even those other factors like "states' rights", nullification, or tariff disputes can easily be reinterpreted as intra-elite arguments over distributing wealth and power. I was struck by the difference in partisanship between then and now, however; Foner's excellent book Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men described the coalescence of the Republican Party out of a whirlwind of competing parties, but these days more of the struggle is within the two major parties rather than between them and the constellation of minor parties like Turchin describes, perhaps due to more sophisticated party organizations and a more entrenched Duverger's Law:

As David Potter notes, in 1854 voters were presented with a stunning array of parties and factions: Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers, Republicans, People's Party men, Anti-Nebraskaites, Fusionists, Know-Nothings, Know-Somethings, Main Lawites, Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindoos, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells, Adopted Citizens, and others. This fragmentation was a remarkable change from the situation 40 years before. During the Era of Good Feelings, after the demise of the Federalist Party, there was only one significant political party in the United States. Even when Democratic Republicans split into Democrats and Whigs, parties represented not ideologies but interests and support for specific leaders. The 1860 presidential election, by contrast, was a four-way race, in which Abraham Lincoln got only 39.8 percent of the popular vote, with candidates from other parties receiving 29.5, 18.1, and 12.6 percent.

One major criticism of SDT that I had was how immigration fits into the model. Immigration was at historic lows during the 1960s and 70s, which were a time of violent social upheaval and the decoupling of wages from productivity growth. Immigration is higher now, but for the most part immigrants are fairly positive for America (they commit fewer crimes than natives, start more businesses, bring better foods, etc) and seem to be used as easy scapegoats rather than truly being actual causes of dysfunction. Turchin ties high immigration to labor oversupply, and therefore to the wage stagnation part of the Mass Mobilization Principle, but while there might be a few visible instances of immigrants lowering wages in a particular sector, like H1-B programmers in Silicon Valley, those sectors are often actually the most supportive of increased immigration, and the areas most opposed to immigration are stereotypically places like Iowa where immigrants not only don't compete with natives, they're absolutely crucial to the agricultural sector and to rural society more generally. The relationship between immigration and political instability seems more likely to be via the channel of greater ethnic diversity lowering general public trust, although even there, the places with the most immigrants (i.e. big cities) typically like them the most, and it's the low-immigrant areas who produce the angry ranting nativist politicians. Either way I think immigration has more complex effects than are being captured in his model, though to be fair I couldn't honestly say that I believe that raising immigration empirically produces greater political stability, especially if I think of international comparisons and the global rise in nativism. Maybe the suggestion that the more the US absorbs Latin American immigrants the more we will develop a Latin American society has some uncomfortable truth to it.

But even if Structural-Demographic Theory may not be completely accurate to the level of Hari Seldon, in the main I think he has captured the dynamics of this "Age of Diminished Expectations", in Krugman's phrase, in a provocative and useful way. Certainly this book is far more readable, and more empirical, than anything Marx wrote, thanks to Turchin's careful grounding in the cliodynamic data of SESHAT and use of familiar scientific models from other disciplines, but as Robert Fitch once said, "vulgar Marxism explains 90 percent of what happens in the world", and a lot of Marxist concepts would fit in comfortably here. Of course, his prediction that the 2020s are going to be even nastier than the 10s were is a real bummer, and he doesn't even pretend to offer solutions - the collective action required to reorient ourselves to the common good is exactly the thing being eroded by elite overproduction, popular immiseration, and our likely imminent fiscal crisis - but it took us a good while to get into our current gridlock, and short of the vanguard of the proletariat violently overthrowing the bourgeoisie, which is a cure worse than the disease, it will take a while to get out of. Nobody likes the "hey guys, all let's work together!" type of liberalism, but here are my quick thoughts on ways that the Political Stress Indicator could be lowered, divided by components:

• Mass Mobilization Potential: Medicare For All to reduce health costs, curtail zoning restrictions to reduce housing costs, institute a points-based immigration system, encourage unionization to increase wages and job security, consolidate welfare programs under a UBI, guaranteed jobs program, bring down college costs via increased state support and reform of alumni donation and endowment policies
• Elite Mobilization Potential: institute proportional representation and greatly expand the House, eliminate/disempower the Senate, pass anti-corruption measures like HR1, implement Elizabeth Warren's codetermination proposal, actually prosecute elite criminals, expand meritocratic advancement systems and elite accountability mechanisms more generally
• State Fiscal Distress: tax rich people a lot more by whatever means necessary, shift to less regressive taxation methods like Georgist land taxes, enhance macroeconomic stability via Federal Reserve policy reform

Maybe it's not possible to solve every societal problem permanently, especially inherent ones like elite corruption, but there's no reason not to try.

Book Review: Carl Zimmer - She Has Her Mother's Laugh

The most important decision you can make in your life is who to have children with. This is understood more or less unconsciously by practically everyone, but the true nature of heredity - precisely what traits we inherit from our parents, and how we bequeath them in turn to our own children - is far more complex and subtle than we give it credit for. Zimmer traces our conception of heredity from one kind of ignorance to another, from our historical innocence of its genetic basis to our current incomprehension of what the ultimate consequences of our newfound power over it will be now that we have powerful tools like CRISPR. He does a great job balancing the pop sci elements of genetics 101 with the more complex cultural consequences at each stage of our understanding, so as concepts like X-inactivation, mosaicism, or epigenetics get discovered, you get crucial context as to how people used that new knowledge for both good and ill. The word "eugenics" casts a long shadow over our current attempts to consciously affect how our own heredity works, as it should, but the incandescence of real scientific knowledge is enough, or should be, to give us confidence that as we begin to use genetic engineering to deliberately reshape our genes that we don't have to simply repeat the old bigoted mistakes of the past. Our DNA might blindly attempt to replicate itself, but we don't have to, and a clear-eyed assessment of the possibilities in front of us should give us a great deal of optimism for our descendants.

The first genetics class I took was in 7th grade, and the Darwin vs Lamarck debate was one of the first things we covered. I often take a dim and impatient view of science classes that insist on walking students all the way back through the buried strata of ancient debates like that - much like "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", in Ernst Haeckel's famous line, most intro classes force students to recapitulate the history of the development of the subject matter by dredging up lots of discarded hypotheses - but genetics is complicated enough to be worthy of a comprehensive review, since some aspects of Lamarck's hypothesis are still being debated. I'm always amazed how ancient peoples could simultaneously spend hundreds or thousands of years patiently turning teosinte into corn or wolves into sheepdogs, yet be foggy on what exactly children share with their parents or why specifically it might be unwise to follow in your ancestor's footsteps and marry your first cousin, or think it was plausible that giraffes have long necks due to stretching. Pioneers of fruit and vegetable breeding like Luther Burbank, or even Gregor Mendel himself, had to spend an ungodly number of hours untangling phenotypes, proposing, rejecting, and concocting ever more elaborate hypotheses to explain why successive batches of peas and raspberries exhibited maddening almost-regularities, so retracing their thought patterns is still valuable and relevant. I particularly sympathized with Mendel, since in class when we learned about Punnett squares, the simple example of a dominant/recessive trait we were given was eye color. This confused me since both of my parents have green eyes yet I and my two siblings all have brown eyes. Theory destroyed? No; this is perfectly explicable given that eye color is in reality controlled by multiple genes, but if I were a 19th century monk trying to figure it out I'd have thought it was quite improbable given my naive monogenetic heterozygotic model.

So in that light it's not so surprising that the ideology behind inbred dynasties like the Ptolemies, Hapsburgs, or Romanovs lasted so long: if you want your children to inherit "royalty", then the more royals in their lineage the better! And of course the notion of heredity has been used to justify not only the continued rule of the strong, but also the subjugation of the weak, such as in the awful cases of the so-called "feeble-minded" individuals Zimmer profiles who were sterilized or otherwise dissuaded from having children due to stupid ideas about inherited cretinism. Intelligence remains the most hotly-debated form of heredity, since both nature and nurture seem important. Most people, including geneticists, freely acknowledge that there is at least some environmental influence, but it doesn't seem like anyone really believes that the choice of person who provides the other half of your child's genes is completely irrelevant to their welfare. If who you had kids with truly didn't matter at all, the world would look a lot different! This knowledge that your partner matters is also true for inherited diseases, as seen by the many techniques to reduce the chances of passing on congenital conditions via genetic testing and deliberate matching. A more innocuous trait like height, which is no longer as adaptive as it used to be (instead of a reliable marker of superior health, now that basically everyone has enough to eat it usually just signifies a difficulty fitting into tiny sports cars or airplane seats), falls somewhere in between, and so it took polymath Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, many hours of staring at height charts to come up with innovative statistical concepts like regression to the mean in order to explain why the children of the tall were not always the size of their parents, or how the odd pair of short people often produced average children. He was also the guy who first systematically fitted human attributes to Gaussian distributions, vastly improving our ability to analyze psychological and behavioral traits.

But many of the more fascinating aspects of heredity had to wait for modern science to come around in order to be studied in more detail. The discovery that not all cells are the same (mitosis-using somatic cells which make up your body vs meiosis-using zygotic cells that make up sperm and eggs) was fairly recent, as was the distinction between totipotent cells (which can turn into anything), pluripotent cells (which can become any type of somatic cell), and multipotent cells (which are limited to specific cell genres). Also interesting to me were things like lyonization/X-inactivation, where clumps of cells decide at once whether or not to express certain traits and produce things like calico patterns in cats, or the distinction between mosaicism (different cell lineages inside the same organism, so your body is generating multiple lines of mutation within yourself) vs chimerism (where your body can include cells from other organisms, meaning a mother can actually back-inherit genes from her baby via reverse travel up through the placenta). The idea that your body depends on other organisms that you don't share any DNA with - things that are in you but not of you - is worth a ponder. Zimmer got the bacteria in his belly button analyzed, and found that he had 53 distinct species present, including 17 species that hadn't been seen before. Your specific intestinal ecosystem of gut bacteria is crucial for digestion. Less whimsically, mitochondria, which are crucial because they provide the body's energy via conversion of oxygen and sugar into ATP, are also separate organisms, yet are inherited almost but not quite entirely exclusively from our mothers (ancestry services like 23andMe use mitochondrial DNA to infer maternal lineage). He also relates the fascinating case of a form of infectious canine cancer which has been spreading from dog to dog for an almost unfathomably long time:

Contagious cancer is not all that different from an ordinary tumor that becomes metastatic and spreads from one organ to another. The new organ is, in effect, another animal. But unlike ordinary tumors, contagious cancers no longer face an inescapable death. Instead of gaining a few years' worth of mutations, they can gain centuries of them. After eleven thousand years circulating among dogs, for example, CTVT has acquired an impressive arsenal of mutations in genes linked to immune surveillance. And just like ordinary cancer cells, CTVT cells have stolen mitochondria to replace their own. The only difference is that they steal mitochondria from a series of dogs - at least five different dogs over the past two thousand years. From the days of the Roman Empire onward, CTVT has recharged itself like a vampire, with the youth of its canine victims.

More difficult for people to accept was the idea that the same DNA can be expressed differently based on environmental stimulus; epigenetics and gene expression seemed dangerously close to the ideas of Lamarck or Lysenko, the Soviet charlatan who thought that you could breed winter-resistant wheat by sowing the seeds in snow. Zimmer quotes geneticist Keven Mitchell expressing extreme skepticism that your life experiences as stored in your neurons could affect your sperm/eggs in order to thereby affect your children's neurons:

For transgeneration epigenetic transmission of behaviour to occur in mammals," he wrote, "here's what would have to happen:Experience --> Brain state --> Altered gene expression in some specific neurons (so far so good, all systems working normally)-->Transmission of information to germline (how? what signal?) --> Instantiation of epigenetic states in gametes (how?) --> Propagation of state through genomic epigenetic "rebooting," embryogenesis and subsequent brain development (hmm...) --> Translation of state into altered gene expression in specific neurons (ah now, c'mon) --> Altered sensitivity of specific neural circuits, as if the animal had had the same experience itself --> Altered behaviour now reflecting experience of parents, which somehow over-rides plasticity and epigenetic responsiveness of those same circuits to the behaviour of the animal itself (which supposedly kicked off the whole cascade in the first place)

Put that way, it does sound science fictional, like the genetic memory in the Dune series. Particularly that last part: if our minds are shaped by our parents' life experiences, how would we then pass down our own experiences to our children in turn without our experiences being overridden, unless all we're doing is transmitting Nth generation photocopies of particularly vivid days in the lives of our cavemen ancestors ceaselessly unto the future? But, fascinatingly, it seems that it is actually possible for plants to inherit certain gene expressions of their ancestors; whether due to patterns of DNA methylation (coatings around DNA that affect their transcription), different RNA interactions during DNA replication, or the distinct sequences of plant germ cells transforming into somatic cells, plants seem to have different tools of heredity than animals do.

Zimmer uses those teases of cellular recollection to segue into a brief discussion of the distinctly human tools of mimesis, social learning, and culture that allow us to pass on far more than our genes to the next generation. Joe Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success is my current favorite book on cultural evolution, and some of Henrich's work on importance of our cultural heritage, which Zimmer estimates as extending back to about 7 million years (!), is cited here. But it's the possibilities of genetic engineering, particularly new tools like CRISPR, that are the most exciting, as the ability to selectively edit individual genes to precisely insert desired traits opens up all kinds of obvious avenues for genetic improvement. I don't think anyone but the most determined GMO conspiracy theorist would have issues with the kind of accelerated horticulture that plant scientist Zachary Lippmann wants to do to ground cherries, like Luther Burbank on fast forward:

He would edit genes that controlled when the fruits fell from the bushes, so that farmers wouldn't have to rummage on the ground for them. He would make a change to get the plants to ripen their fruits in batches rather than a few at a time. He would adjust the plants' response to sunlight so they would start producing fruit early in the growing season. They would grow to a fixed height so that farmers could use machines to gather them.

But people are rightly more worried about what this power could mean for human beings. We still have some time to ponder the ethical boundaries of deliberate gene editing, because it's unfortunately not quite as simple as cutting and pasting genes to make ourselves supermen, though we have already taken some steps into that world. In addition to the fact that CRISPR techniques themselves are still new and unperfected (Zimmer relates the example of some edited female mosquitoes that were somehow able to revert their CRISPR edits during their development from eggs; see also the saga of Chinese scientist He Jiankui from a month ago, well after this book was published), many of the traits we're most interested in depend on thousands of genes working together in ways that are still not well understood. Furthermore, even were we to develop a gene drive that would spread some new ability throughout humanity as fast as we're able to reproduce, there are still countless potential unintended consequences of a mutagenic chain reaction. Personally I'm all for getting rid of genetic diseases, and even conscious editing to encourage health and intelligence, but we have a while before we get there. The dream of a completely deterministic heredity has not yet been achieved, and so in the meantime we can still marvel at how the characteristics that we find most attractive or unique in each other get carried on to each new generation. "Life finds a way" indeed.

Book Review: Joscelyn Goodwin - Upstate Cauldron

What's the deal with New York state and social movements? Upstate New York is a fascinating part of the country for all kinds of reasons, but one of the least visible ones is its outsized role in American history as an incubator for utopian experiments of all kinds, going back 200 years: socialist colonies, artistic communes, or entire religions like the Mormons. There doesn't seem to have been an equivalent density of religions, spiritualist movements, or cults founded in other parts of the country, at least not until the Bay Area in the 60s, so I was curious to see if there was something special about the land east of Erie County and north of New York City. Does clustering work for religions just like it does for industries, and the counties along the Erie Canal are the modern equivalent of ancient centers of religiogenesis like the Fertile Crescent, the Motown of messiahs? Is there some demographic peculiarity that's persisted throughout the centuries throughout waves of immigration, attracting a certain kind of prophet or seeker? Or is there just something in the water of the Finger Lakes, as it were? I don't feel like Godwin (whose name fortuitously means "friend of God") really answered my questions about why here and not elsewhere, since this book is really just a long list, but not only are the relationships between all of these people really engaging, even if you're familiar with the area you will learn a lot about the truly staggering number of dreamers whose legacies began here.

Upstate was fairly secular in the pre-Revolutionary period, only catching the spiritual fever during the Second Great Awakening. This transformed it into the Burned-Over District, whereupon it immediately began spawning an enormous variety of interrelated social campaigns. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is just how truly fecund some areas were. For example, Port Gibson (Hiram Edson, founder of the Seventh-Day Adventists), Palmyra (Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church), and Hydesville (Kate and Maggie Fox, pioneers of poltergeists) are all tiny towns within a 15 minute drive of each other. Furthermore, each of those movements was very plugged into the zeitgeist: Edson was inspired by William Miller (whose predictions that the world would end in 1843 and/or 1844 resulted in the Great Disappointment), Joseph Smith's father was a professional treasure hunting scam artist (all the rage at the time, hence the golden plates Smith was so adept at finding and then making conveniently disappear), and the Fox sisters themselves had plenty of ties to the Quakers, feminists, abolitionists, and seemingly every other progressive development of the era.

That seemingly paradoxical connection between religious movements and secular movements was not as surprising then as it seems today, since those who were dissatisfied with orthodoxies of all kinds talked to each other, and shared many goals of improving society. Thus you have socialist phalansteries next to Shaker villages; obscurantist Freemasonry cheek by jowl with the self-improvement Chatauqua Assembly; Millennialist Christians like Charles Finney inspiring both free love experiments like John Noyes' Oneida Community and freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll; yogi George Bragdon succeeding abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Garrison in Rochester; the atheist Skaneateles Community spawning from the same ground as a major Quaker ministry; the Arts and Crafts Movement touching upon both the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the hippies in Woodstock; author of the Wizard of Oz series L. Frank Baum marrying the daughter of radical feminist Matilda Gage, who along with fellow suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton directly connected via freethought to Andrew Dickson White and Ezra Cornell, the founders of Cornell University; and even proto-X-Files enthusiast Charles Fort fitting neatly into a proud tradition of paranormal enthusiasts, of who the famous Theosophist like Helena Blavatasky was only one. Rarely have I had to flip back and forth through an index so vigorously to keep track of the connections, which extend far beyond what I just listed.

I didn't really get answer to my question of why the Erie Canal is such an artery of enthusiasm though; at the end I was still left with my vague impression that more oddballs of a greater variety have been drawn more strongly to upstate New York for a longer time than anywhere else for mysterious reasons not amenable to overly strict analysis. It's not revivalist religious enthusiasm smoothly transforming into broader interests, or else you'd probably see a similar mélange of movements in places like Arkansas or Tennessee. It's not simply demographics, or else the Germans in Wisconsin or Texas should have resembled their New Yorker cousins, and likewise for the other ethnic groups in the region (my Buffalo-born mother is Irish and Italian, neither of which appear to have the zeal for creating new religions anywhere else they've settled in the US). It's also not just geography, because although neighboring areas like Vermont or the Susquehanna Valley do still maintain some similar social experiments like the Amish or hippie communes, they don't have the sheer variety New York did. It's not even just that the 19th century was a uniquely good time to let your hair down, because even though nobody has stumbled on stone tablets in a while, upstate still has a vast array of charmingly eccentric ateliers and art studios. The land between the Taconic Mountains and the Southern Tier fermented more than religions - all kinds of secular movements like socialism, anti-slavery, temperance, feminism, and nonsectarian education made major strides here, connected by a questioning spirit that wasn't present in the rest of the country. Even hugely influential companies like Kodak, Xerox, and IBM have deep upstate roots, though business is outside the scope of the book.

Oh well, even if Godwin didn't answer my question, he wrote a copiously well-researched chronicle that only left me even more interested in the region. My hat is off to him for trawling through so many screeds, manifestos, prophecies, and Grand Theories of Everything, and the helpful maps at the end would make great itineraries for quite a few road trips. By the end, you're more than ready to found your own cult amongst the pines of the Adirondacks; can there be any higher praise?