The God Gene - la Repubblicadownload.repubblica.it/pdf/nyt/2009/23112009.pdf · Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim cleric who ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tor-tured.

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009 Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

Supplemento al numero

odierno de la RepubblicaSped. abb. postale art. 1

legge 46/04 del 27/02/2004 — Roma

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

LENS

We like to think of youth as a carefree and in-nocent time. But who are we kidding?

For most of human history, child mortalitywas rampant. Now, on top of quarreling families,schoolyard bullies and monsters under the bed,

many children have sufferedacutely from their parents’economic distress. Childrenof jobless parents are morevulnerable to psychologi-cal problems and trouble inschool. One 9-year-oldstarted pulling her hair outafter her father was laid off,Michael Luo wrote in The

Times.“The extent that job losers are stressed and

emotionally disengaged or withdrawn, this reallymatters for kids,” Ariel Kalil, a University of Chi-cago professor of public policy, told The Times.

With the grim reality these days, it is no sur-prise that even children’s entertainment is filledwith dark stories and flawed characters.

In the Spike Jonze movie “Where the WildThings Are,” based on a book by Maurice Send-ak, a boy named Max discovers a world populat-ed by beasts, becomes their king, and finds thathis new subjects areas rife with human failingsas the family he left at home.

The recent animated films “Coraline” and“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” both based on chil-dren’s books, also paint multi-layered and bitter-sweet portraits of family life.

“This kind of honest, realistic assessment ofhuman relationships has gone missing from fartoo many supposedly grown-up movies,” A.O.Scott of The Times wrote.

The Walt Disney Company is taking anotherlook at that most squeaky-clean of icons, MickeyMouse. In a video game, Epic Mickey, he willhave the chance to be “cantankerous and cun-ning, as well as heroic.”

“I wanted him to be able to be naughty — whenyou’re playing as Mickey you can misbehaveand even be a little selfish,” Warren Spector, thecreative director working on the game, told TheTimes.

In Epic Mickey, the mouse starts to resemblea rat as he misbehaves. But in the picture bookseries “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” the protagonist,Greg, often evades punishment.

“I’m trying to find a way to earn money with-out doing any actual work,” Greg says of his ap-proach to his lawn-mowing business. The seriesis controversial among parents. The author, JeffKinney, thinks kids understand the message.“Even my kindergarten child understands thatGreg is being naughty, and that he shouldn’t actlike him,” he told The Times.

And that’s the moral, for adults: children, whilestill impressionable, are more sophisticated thanmany grown-ups give them credit for.

“I think it can help parents tune into what kidsknow and how they think,” Dr. Joshua Sparrow,a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, saidof the “Wimpy Kid” books. “It captures what achild is able to get and what’s beyond their reach,and how you have to adjust your expectationsbecause they are still a work in progress.”

IN THE OAXACA Valley of Mexico,

the archaeologists Joyce Marcus

and Kent Flannery have gained

a remarkable insight into the origin of

religion.

During 15 years of exca-

vation they have uncov-

ered not some monumen-

tal temple but evidence of

a critical transition in reli-

gious behavior. The record

begins with a simple dancing floor, the

arena for the communal religious dances

held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000

B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines

that appeared after the beginning of

corn-based agriculture around 1,500

B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophis-

ticated, astronomically oriented temples

of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to

a new perspective on religion, one that

seeks to explain why religious behavior

has occurred in societies at every stage

of development and in every region of

the world. Religion has the hallmarks

of an evolved behavior, meaning that it

exists because it was favored by natural

selection. It is universal because it was

wired into our neural circuitry before

the ancestral human population dis-

persed from its African homeland.

For atheists, it is not a particularly

welcome thought that religion evolved

because it conferred essential benefits

on early human societies and their suc-

cessors. If religion is necessary for life, it

is hard to portray it as useless.

For believers, it may seem threaten-

ing to think that the mind has been

shaped to believe in gods, since the

actual existence of the divine may then

seem less likely.

But the evolutionary perspective on

religion does not necessarily threaten

DAVID SILVERMAN/GETTY IMAGES; BELOW, MEREDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Religion has been found at all stages of societal development. Above, a mass baptism in Brazil. A Maria Lionza ritual in Venezuela.

NICHOLAS

WADE

ESSAY

A Grim TimeTo Be Young

Con tin ued on Page IV

The God Gene

For comments, write [email protected].

III VIWORLD TRENDS

Portrait of a 9/11

‘jackal’ emerges.

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

In the Pacific, trash

collects in currents. VIIIARTS & STYLES

A former president

returns to the screen.

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O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA R Y

II MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009

Direttore responsabile: Ezio MauroVicedirettori: Mauro Bene,

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Court Ruling Extends America’s DisgraceTwo courts, one in Italy and one in the United

States, ruled recently on the Bush administra-tion’s practice of extraordinary rendition, whichis the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture.The Italian court got it right. The American courtgot it miserably wrong.

In Italy, a judge ruled that a station chief forthe Central Intelligence Agency and 22 otherAmericans broke the law in the 2003 abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, a Muslim clericwho ended up in Egypt, where he said he was tor-tured.

Two days earlier, a federal appeals court inManhattan brushed off a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was seizedin an American airport by federal agents actingon bad information from Canadian officials. Hewas held incommunicado and harshly interro-

gated before being sent to Syria, where he wastortured. He spent almost a year in a grave-sizeunderground cell before the Syrians let him go.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sec-ond Circuit decided that none of that entitled Mr. Arar to a day in court.

In Mr. Nasr’s case, authorities said that theyhad reason to suspect he was involved in recruit-ing militants to go to Iraq. It has long been estab-lished that Mr. Arar was not guilty of anything. Canada admitted that it had supplied false in-formation to American authorities, and in 2007, it apologized and offered Mr. Arar $10 million indamages. Neither the Bush nor Obama adminis-trations followed suit, leaving Mr. Arar to pursue litigation.

In June 2008, a three-judge panel of the same court dismissed Mr. Arar’s civil rights suit onflimsy grounds. The court then took a rare step,

scheduling a rehearing before all of the court’s active members before an appeal was filed. Sad-ly, the full court’s decision is even more insensi-tive to the violation of his rights and the courts’ duty to hold government accountable for breach-es of the law.

Written by Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, the59-page majority opinion held that no civil dam-ages remedy exists for the horrors visited onMr. Arar. To “decide how to implement extraor-dinary rendition,” he wrote, is “for the electedmembers of Congress — and not for us as judg-es.” Allowing suits against policy makers forrendition and torture would “affect diplomacy,foreign policy and the security of the nation,”Judge Jacobs said.

The ruling distorts precedent and the Constitu-tional separation of powers to deny justice to Mr.Arar and give officials a pass for egregious mis-

conduct. The overt disregard for the central roleof judges in policing executive branch excesses has frightening implications for safeguardingcivil liberties, as four judges suggested in dis-senting opinions.

It is painful to recall that this is the same fed-eral circuit court that declared in 1980 that evenforeigners accused of torture in foreign countriescan be called to account in American courts. The torturer is the “enemy of all mankind,” the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declared back then.

One of the dissenters, Judge Guido Calabresi,said that “when the history of this distinguishedcourt is written, today’s majority decision will beviewed with dismay.”

The damage to Mr. Arar, America’s reputation and the rule of law is already quite plain. The Su-preme Court should reverse this ruling.

E D I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M E S

TAPAJÓS NATIONAL FOREST, BrazilNo matter how many times you

hear them, there are some statisticsthat just stun you. The one that alwaysshocks me is this: Imagine if you took all the cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships in the world and added up their exhaust every year. The amount ofcarbon dioxide, or CO2, all those cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships collec-tively emit into the atmosphere is actu-ally less than the carbon emissions ev-ery year that result from the chopping down and clearing of tropical forests in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo. We are now losing a tropicalforest the size of New York State ev-ery year, and the carbon that releases into the atmosphere now accounts for roughly 17 percent of all global emis-sions contributing to climate change.

It is going to be a long time beforewe transform the world’s transpor-tation fleet so it is emission-free. Butright now — like tomorrow — we could eliminate 17 percent of all global emis-sions if we could halt the cutting andburning of tropical forests. But to dothat requires putting in place a whole new system of economic development — one that makes it more profitable forthe poorer, forest-rich nations to pre-serve and manage their trees ratherthan to chop them down to make fur-niture or plant soybeans.

Without a new system for economicdevelopment in the timber-rich trop-ics, you can kiss the rainforests good-bye. The old model of economic growthwill devour them. The only Amazonyour grandchildren will ever relateto is the one that ends in dot-com and sells books.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

A Way to Save the Planet’s Lungs

ANTONIO SCORZA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The clearing of tropical forests, like in Brazil, account for 17 percent of

global emissions contributing to climate change.

Life Online a Disturbing Trend

To the Editor: I found the Living: Online articles from the No-

vember 9 edition of the International Weekly pub-lished in La Repubblica very disturbing. Peopleare spending time and energy fertilizing cropsand stimulating an economy that exist only as a virtual illusion inside a soulless box called a com-puter.

We do not communicate with each other any-more. People are spiritually poor because theyare wasting their time with these unnecessary,virtual ventures that are far removed from thereal world. These problems can only be solved byoffering people real opportunities. We want to beself-sufficient (“Virtual Farm”). We know we are procrastinating (“Taming your Digital Distrac-tions”). We want to stimulate the economy—but we don’t trust the economy, because we don’t trustpeople.

People must talk to each other face-to-face. Wemust need get away from our computers and takea personal role in the evolution of our society.

LEILA CRISTANI

Milan

Confusing Power and Energy

To the Editor:The premise set forth in the article “From Wind

and Straw, Danish Self Sufficiency,” published inThe Observer on November 1, makes the usualmistake, confusing power and energy. They arenot the same.

Wind turbines are uneconomic because of thebasic physics of energy and power, but they areprofitable because of subsidies. Unless there isenough reliable backup, fossil, hydro, or nuclear,reliance on wind will bring blackouts.

If the necessary backup is carbon-free nuclear,its low running costs mean that unreliable wind power is not needed. W.J. HYDE

Kent, England

The Global Village

To the Editor:Roger Cohen’s Intelligence column (“Distant

Echoes Under the Plum Tree,” September 8 issue)was a very enjoyable read, and Mr. Cohen’s col-umn is one reason I read the weekly edition of The Times that is inserted in my local Chinese-lan-guage newspaper in Taiwan. His way of writing about the global village we now live in, East and West, North and South, makes this transplantedNew Yorker feel right at home reading the weekly edition here. DAN BLOOM

Chiayi City, Taiwan

Proud to Be British and European

To the Editor:I sadly agree with much of what Louis Sallons

(from France) wrote in his letter to The Interna-tional Weekly with regard to the general attitudeof the British to matters European.

However, I must dispute his statement that “the United Kingdom is not in Europe and the Brits are not Europeans.” The United Kingdom is most defi-nitely in Europe, and always has been, and I, for one, am proud to be both British and European — and I fancy I am not entirely alone in this attitude. MICHAEL TONG

Kingsbridge, England

The Lessons of Overfishing

To the Editor:In the 1920’s, John Steinbeck wrote of the sar-

dine fisheries in Monterey in Cannery Row; atschool in the 1950’s I learned of the Grand Banks and North Sea cod fisheries, and 60 years later youreport on efforts in Oma, Japan to save its bluefin tuna from overfishing (The International Weekly, October 25). I wonder if we have learned anything from past mistakes? PETER BAKER

London

LETTERS TO THE INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Send comments to [email protected].

To better understand this issue, I’mvisiting the Tapajós National Forestin the heart of the Brazilian Amazonon a trip organized by ConservationInternational and the Brazilian gov-ernment. Flying in here by prop planefrom Manaus, you can understandwhy the Amazon rainforest is consid-ered one of the lungs of the world. Evenfrom 6,000 meters, all you see in every direction is an unbroken expanse ofrainforest treetops that, from the air,looks like a vast and endless carpet of broccoli.

Once on the ground, we drove from Santarém into Tapajós, where we met with the community cooperative thatmanages the eco-friendly business-es here that support the 8,000 localpeople living in this protected forest. What you learn when you visit with a tiny Brazilian community that actual-ly lives in, and off, the forest is a simplebut crucial truth: To save an ecosys-tem of nature, you need an ecosystem of markets and governance.

“You need a new model of economicdevelopment — one that is based onraising people’s standards of living bymaintaining their natural capital, not just by converting that natural capital

to ranching or industrial farming orlogging,” said José María Silva, vicepresident for South America of Con-servation International.

Right now people protecting therainforest are paid a pittance — com-pared with those who strip it — eventhough we now know that the rainfor-est provides everything from keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere to maintain-ing the flow of freshwater into rivers.

The good news is that Brazil has put in place all the elements of a systemto compensate its forest-dwellers formaintaining the forests. Brazil hasalready set aside 43 percent of theAmazon rainforest for conservationand for indigenous peoples. Another19 percent of the Amazon, though, has already been deforested by farmersand ranchers.

So the big question is what will hap-pen to the other 38 percent. The more we get the Brazilian system to work,the more of that 38 percent will be pre-served and the less carbon reductions the whole world would have to make. But it takes money.

The residents of the Tapajós reserveare already organized into coopera-tives that sell eco-tourism on rainforest

trails, furniture and other wood prod-ucts made from sustainable selectivelogging and a very attractive line of purses made from “ecological leather,”also known as rainforest rubber. Theyalso get government subsidies.

Sergio Pimentel, 48, explained to me that he used to farm about two hect-ares of land for subsistence, but now isusing only about two-fifths of a hectareto support his family of six. The rest of the income comes through the co-op’s forest businesses. “We were born in-side the forest,” he added. “So we knowthe importance of it being preserved,but we need better access to globalmarkets for the products we makehere. Can you help us with that?”

There are community co-ops like

this all over the protected areas of the Amazon rainforest. But this systemneeds money — money to expand into more markets, money to maintain po-lice monitoring and enforcement and money to improve the productivity of farming on already degraded lands sopeople won’t eat up more rainforest.That is why we need to make sure thatwhatever energy-climate bill comesout of the United States Congress, and whatever framework comes out of the Copenhagen conference next month,they include provisions for financing rainforest conservation systems likethose in Brazil. The last 38 percent of the Amazon is still up for grabs. It isthere for us to save. Your grandchil-dren will thank you.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

III MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009

BILL MARSH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

2000 2009 or most recent dataInitial public offerings (IPOs) A measure of

China’s financial strength.

Hong Kong and Shanghai

are now global leaders,

supplanting New York.

Figures are for Jan. 1 through

Nov. 13 of both years.

All dollar figures are rounded.

Foreign currency reserves By virtue of

these holdings, China has

become America’s biggest

foreign lender. No country

has ever loaned another so

much money. Nor has any

held so much in reserves.

Trade balance

Most recent data is from 2008.

Fortune Global 500 Biggest global companies

by revenue.

Gross domestic product

Most recent data is from 2008.

Billionaires Many in

China come from real

estate; others are

entrepreneurs rich off

IPOs.

Where China Outranks

The United States

Where China Is Behind,

But Rising Fast

U.S.

CHINA

U.S.

CHINA

U.S.

CHINA

U.S.

CHINA

–78%

+79%

U.S.

CHINA

+50%

+1,273%

U.S.

CHINA

$1.2

+$28 +$267

$4.3

2 79

$9.8 TRILLION

298 BILLIONAIRES 359

$14.2

$19.4 $34.8

$63.0 BILLION

–$422 BILLION –$853

$13.7

Deficitincreased

102%

Surplusincreased

841%

Sources: Dealogic (IPOs); International Monetary Fund, United Nations, Chinese government (reserves); Global Trade Atlas (trade); Forbes (billionaires); Fortune; World Bank (GDP); Capital IQ, Bloomberg (top 50)

–22%

+363%

+20%

+3,850%

+45%

+261%

180 140

8 37

2000 2009 or most recent data

$31 BILLION

$166 BILLION

$47 BILLION (OCT.)

$2.273 TRILLION (SEPT.)

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Not long after he was rousted from bed and seizedin a predawn raid in Pakistan inMarch 2003, Khalid Shaikh Moham-med gave his captors two demands:He wanted a lawyer, and he wantedto be taken to New York.

After a nearly seven-year odyssey that took him to secret Central Intel-ligence Agency jails in Europe andan American military prison in Cu-ba, Mr. Mohammed is finally likely toget his wish.

He will be the most senior leaderof Al Qaeda to date held to accountfor the mass murder of nearly 3,000Americans, facing trial in Manhat-tan while his boss, Osama bin Laden,continues to elude a worldwide drag-net.

Yet the boastful, calculating andfiercely independent Mr. Moham-med has never neatly fit the mold of Qaeda chieftain. He has little use forthe high-minded moralizing of some of his associates, and for years beforethe September 11 attacks, he refused to swear an oath of loyalty to Mr. bin Laden — figuring that ifthe Qaeda leader canceledthe September 11 plot, he would not have to obey the order.

A detailed portrait ofthe life and worldviewof Mr. Mohammed, 44,has emerged in the years since his capture, filledin by declassified C.I.A.documents, interrogation transcripts, the report ofthe commission that in-vestigated the September11 attacks and his own tes-timony at a military tribu-nal. And the most signifi-cant terrorism trial in American his-tory will be a grand stage for a man who describes himself as a “jackal,” consumed with a zeal for perpetual battle against the United States.

“The trial will be more than just asoapbox for him,” said Jarret Brach-man, author of “Global Jihadism” anda terrorism consultant to several gov-ernment agencies. “It will be a chancefor him to indict the entire system.”

The last time Mr. Mohammed had such a platform was at a militaryhearing at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he delivered a rambling expo-sition on a number of topics, includ-ing American history.

“Because war, for sure, there willbe victims,” he said through a trans-lator, explaining that he had someremorse for the children killed onSeptember 11, 2001. “I said I’m nothappy that 3,000 people been killedin America. I feel sorry even. I don’t like to kill children and the kids.”

But he added: “This is why the lan-guage of any war in the world is kill-ing. I mean the language of the war is victims.”

A Pakistani raised in Kuwait, Mr. Mohammed became important toAl Qaeda’s mission in large part be-cause of his background: he had an

engineering degree from an Ameri-can university, spoke passable Eng-lish and had a deeper understanding of the West than any of Mr. bin Lad-en’s other lieutenants.

In 1996, Mr. Mohammed traveledto Afghanistan to sell Mr. bin Laden on an idea: simultaneously hijack-ing 10 aircraft and flying them into different prominent civilian targets in the United States. He would be on the one plane not to crash, and after the plane landed would emerge and deliver a speech condemning Ameri-can policy on Israel.

Mr. bin Laden dismissed the ideaas impractical, but three years later he changed his mind and summonedMr. Mohammed to Kandahar.

Yet for all his professed wisdom about the UnitedStates, Mr. Mohammedlater admitted that he hadcompletely misjudgedwhat the American re-sponse to the September 11 attacks would be. He didnot expect the Americanmilitary campaign in Af-ghanistan, and he did not anticipate the relentlesshunt for Al Qaeda leaders throughout South Asiaand the Middle East.

Until the attorney gen-eral announced on Novem-ber 13 that Mr. Moham-

med would be tried alongside four ac-cused September 11 co-conspirators in a Manhattan federal court “justblocks away” from ground zero, his fate was far from certain. Indeed,the defense might yet seek a changeof the trial site.

In September 2006, along with oth-er C.I.A. prisoners in secret overseasjails, Mr. Mohammed was moved to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

But even as the United Statesprepares to put him on trial, Mr.Mohammed is still considered some-what of an outcast inside the terror-ist network, rarely if ever mentionedin public pronouncements by Mr.bin Laden or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri.

Some terrorism experts believethat Mr. Mohammed will always beconsidered too secular — and toopractical — to be completely accept-ed by the terrorist network’s senior leaders.

“As opposed to the rest of theseguys who sit around and talk, K.S.M.actually got the job done,” said Mr. Brachman, the terrorism consul-tant.

“That’s what set him apart, andthat’s what made him so scary.”

A 9/11 Mastermind

Is Awaiting His Stage

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Attorney General Eric Holder announced on November 13

that Mr. Mohammed would stand trial in New York.

Khalid Shaikh

Mohammed in

2003.

Bin Laden talked, while his lieutenantplanned a strike.

China’s Sprint to the TopBy DAVID BARBOZA

SHANGHAI — President Obama’s first official visit to China brought him to a country that, despite the globaldownturn, is increasingly wealthy,confident, ambitious — and perplex-ing.

Over the past decade, the nation has begun transforming itself from a glob-al font of low-priced goods fueled bycheap labor into a much more diverse and complex economic power. It hasdeveloped huge disparities of wealth.

“There are a lot of billionaires, butthere’s also a lot of poverty in China,” says C. Fred Bergsten, director of thePeterson Institute for InternationalEconomics, a nonpartisan researchinstitution in Washington. “It’s a very

bipolar society. People have to recog-nize that both elements are there.”

Per capita income is still small —about $3,200, which is less than 10percent that of the United States and slightly more than that of Iraq — andmany farmers earn less than a dollar aday. Yet China is also home to the fast-est-growing number of billionaires.

China doesn’t just dominate trade;it scours the globe for resources; doles out multibillion-dollar loans to otherdeveloping nations; and holds stakes in Wall Street giants like MorganStanley and the Blackstone Group.

A nation that sold about 600,000 carsin 2000 is now poised to eclipse theUnited States and is on course to sellnearly 15 million vehicles in 2009. No

country has ever accumulated larger foreign exchange reserves ($2.2 tril-lion). No country has more Web surf-ers (338 million).

And China leads the world in initial public stock offerings.

While some economists argue that China’s low-cost manufacturing hurtsAmerica by draining away Americanjobs, other economists say that ex-porting those jobs to China allowscompanies to become more profitablein America.

One thing seems clear: China’s mo-mentous shift is creating the need for armies of analysts, economists andexperts to explain and forecast howChina’s rise will remake the world,and the lives of ordinary Americans.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

IV MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009

the central position of either side. That religious behavior was fa-vored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the hu-man body, why not the mind too?What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their commu-nity, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With bothreligion and language, it is culture,not genetics, that then supplies thecontent of what is learned.

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religionmay have conferred advantag-es. Their rituals emphasize in-tense communal dancing that may last through the night.The sustained rhythmic move-ment induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotionalcommitment to the group. Rit-uals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

The ancestral humanpopulation of 50,000 years agowould have lived in small, egal-itarian groups without chiefs.Religion served them as aninvisible government, commit-ting people to put their commu-nity’s needs ahead of their ownself-interest. For fear of divinepunishment, people followedrules of self-restraint towardmembers of the community.Religion emboldened them togive their lives in battle against out-siders. Groups fortified by religiousbelief would have prevailed overthose that lacked it, and genes thatprompted the mind toward ritualwould have become universal.

In natural selection, genes thatenable their owners to leave moresurviving progeny become morecommon. The idea that natural selection can favor groups, instead of acting directly on individuals, iscontroversial. Though Darwin pro-posed the idea, the traditional viewamong biologists is that selection onindividuals would stamp out altru-istic behavior far faster than group-level selection could favor it.

But group selection has recently gained two powerful champions, thebiologists David Sloan Wilson and

Edward O. Wilson, who argued that two special circumstances in recenthuman evolution would have given group selection much more of anedge than usual. One is the highlyegalitarian nature of hunter-gather-er societies, which makes everyonebehave alike and gives individualaltruists a better chance of passing on their genes. The other is intense warfare between groups, which enhances group-level selection in fa-vor of community-benefiting behav-iors such as altruism and religion.

A propensity to learn the reli-gion of one’s community becameso firmly implanted in the humanneural circuitry, according to this

new view, that religion was retainedwhen hunter-gatherers began tosettle in fixed communities. In thelarger, hierarchical societies madepossible by settled living, rulers co-opted religion as their source of au-thority. Religion was also harnessedto tasks like agriculture, which inthe first societies to practice it re-quired unaccustomed forms of laborand organization.

Religion is often blamed for its ex-cesses, whether in promoting perse-cution or warfare, but gets less cred-it for its function of patching up themoral fabric of society. But perhaps it doesn’t deserve either blame or credit. If religion is seen as a meansof generating social cohesion, it is asociety and its leaders that put that cohesion to good or bad ends.

By LYDIA POLGREEN

BAGEPALLI, India — Under harsh fluorescent lights, dozens of headsbend over keyboards, the clatteringunison of earnest typing filling theroom. Monitors flicker with insurance forms, time sheets and customer ser-vice e-mail messages, tasks from far away, sent to this corner of India to beprocessed on the cheap.

This scene unfolds in cities across India, especially in the high-tech hubsof Bangalore and Gurgaon, places syn-onymous with the information technol-ogy revolution that has transformed In-dia’s economy and pushed the countrytoward double-digit economic growth.

But these workers are young peoplefrom villages clustered around thissmall town deep in rural Karnataka State in India’s southwest. They arepart of an experiment by a handful of entrepreneurs to bring the jobs out-sourcing has created to distant cornersof India that have been largely cut off from its extraordinary economic rise.

Only about a million workers areemployed in the busy call centers andpristine tech company campuses that have come to symbolize India’s boom — a small number, given the country’s more than 1 billion people.

Almost all of those jobs are in cities. But 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas. India largely skipped — or nev-er arrived at — the industrial phase of development that might have pulledthe rural masses to cities.

India has struggled unsuccessfully with the question of how to lift this vastunderclass out of poverty. Some econo-mists argue that India still needs rapidurbanization if it is ever to become amajor economic power and providejobs to its vast legions of unemployed.But the founders of Rural Shores, acompany that is setting up outsourc-ing offices in rural areas, say it makesmore sense to take the jobs where thepeople are.

“We thought, ‘Why not take the jobsto the village?’ ” said G. Srinivasan,the company’s director. “There is a lot of talent there, and we can train them to do the job.”

Rural India was once seen as a dead weight on the Indian economy, a bas-tion of backwardness. But companies have come to see India’s backwaters differently, as an untapped market forrelatively inexpensive goods like low-tech cellphones, kitchen gadgets and cheap motorcycles.

Now some businesses have begun looking to rural India for an untappedpool of eager and motivated office

workers. Rural Shores has hired about100 young people, most of them highschool graduates who have completed some college, all of them from rural ar-eas around this small town. The com-pany has three centers now, but it aimsto open 500 centers across India in the next five years.

Most of the center’s employees are the first members of their families to have office jobs. They speak haltingEnglish at best, but have enough skillwith the language to do basic data en-try, read forms and even write simplee-mail messages.

With much lower rent and wagesthan in similar centers in cities, thecompany says it can do the same jobs as many outsourcing companies for half the price. A Bangalore office work-er with skills similar to those of work-ers here commands about 7,000 rupeesa month, or $150, Mr. Srinivasan said. In small towns and villages, a mini-mum-wage salary of about $60 a monthis considered excellent.

Here in Bagepalli, the Rural Shoresoffice hums through two shifts a day.One set of workers captures data from scanned timecards filled out by truck

drivers in the United States. Most of the workers are the children

of farmers and often the first genera-tion to finish high school. For many, a job at an outsourcing center is an un-imaginable opportunity.

K. Aruna, 19, lives with her widowed mother and younger sister in a two-room house on a narrow, muddy lane in a small village on the outskirts ofBagepalli. Until Ms. Aruna got a jobat the Rural Shores center, the family subsisted on what their small farm andtwo cows could produce. Sometimesthey struggled to earn $20 a monthamong the three of them. They could scarcely afford vegetables.

With her new job Ms. Aruna nowmakes more than $70 a month. Thefamily has bought some furniture — a wardrobe — and new saris and jew-elry.

“I am the only person in this villageto have an office job,” Ms. Aruna said, fingering the teardrop-shaped goldearrings she had bought herself. “Inever thought it would be possible.”

By KENNETH CHANG

AMHERST, Massachusetts — Cre-ationism is growing in the Muslimworld, from Turkey to Pakistan to In-donesia, international academics saidin October as they gathered here to dis-cuss the topic.

But, they said, young-Earth cre-ationists, who believe God created theuniverse, Earth and life just a few thou-sand years ago, are rare, if not nonex-istent.

One reason is that although the Ko-ran, the holy text of Islam, says the uni-verse was created in six days, the nextline adds that a day, in this instance,is metaphorical: “a thousand years ofyour reckoning.”

By contrast, some Christian creation-ists find in the Bible a strict chronologythat requires a 6,000-year-old Earth and thus object not only to evolution but also to much of modern geology andcosmology, which say the Earth and theuniverse are billions of years old.

“Views of scientific evolution are clearly influenced by underlying reli-gious beliefs,” said Salman Hameed, who convened the two-day conferencehere at Hampshire College, where he isa professor of integrated science and humanities. “There is no young-Earthcreationism.”

But that does not mean that all of evolution fits Islam or that all Muslimshappily accept the findings of modernbiology. More and more seem to be join-ing the ranks of the so-called old-Earthcreationists. They do not quarrel withastronomers and geologists, just biolo-gists, insisting that life is the creationof God, not the happenstance conse-quence of random occurrences.

The debate over evolution is onlynow gaining prominence in many Is-lamic countries as education improvesand more students are exposed to the ideas of modern biology. The degree ofacceptance of evolution varies.

Research led by the Evolution Edu-cation Research Center at McGill Uni-versity, in Montreal, found that highschool biology textbooks in Pakistancovered the theory of evolution.

In a survey of 2,527 Pakistani highschool students conducted by the McGillresearchers and their international col-

laborators, 28 percent of the students agreed with the creationist sentiment,“Evolution is not a well-accepted sci-entific fact.” More than 60 percent dis-agreed, and the rest were not sure.

Eighty-six percent agreed with thisstatement: “Millions of fossils showthat life has existed for billions of yearsand changed over time.”

One of the conference participants, Taner Edis, said he never encounteredcreationist undertones when he wasgrowing up in Turkey in the 1970s.

Some years later, while browsing a bookstore on a visit to Turkey, Dr. Edis,a professor of physics at Truman State University in Missouri, found booksabout creationism filed in the science section. “It actually caught me by sur-prise,” he said.

Turkey is officially a secular gov-ernment but is now ruled by an Islam-ic party. The teaching of evolution has largely disappeared, at least belowthe university level, and the sciencecurriculum in public schools is writ-ten in deference to religious beliefs,Dr. Edis said.

Harun Yahya, a Turkish creationist of the old-Earth variety, has gainedprominence in Turkey and elsewhere.On the other side of Asia, most of the biology teachers in Indonesia use Mr. Yahya’s creationist books in their class-rooms, the McGill researchers found,although some said they did that to pro-vide counterarguments to materialstheir students were reading anyway.

The quality of biology education“varies highly depending on whatcountry you’re in and what schoolyou’re in,” said Jason R. Wiles, a pro-fessor of biology at Syracuse Universi-ty in New York and associate director of the McGill center.

For many Muslims, even evolutionand the notion that life flourished with-out the intervening hand of Allah islargely compatible with their religion.What many find unacceptable is theidea that humans evolved from pri-mates.

Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominentatomic physicist at Quaid-e-AzamUniversity in Pakistan, said that whenhe gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the BigBang to the evolution of life on Earth,the audience listened without objec-tion to most of it. “Everything is O.K.until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoysaid.

Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escortedout. “That’s the one thing that willnever be possible to bridge,” he said.“Your lineage is what determines yourworth.”

WATHIQ KHUZAIE/GETTY IMAGES

As primitive groups fortified by faith

prevailed over others, religion was

favored by natural selection. Iraqi

men and a boy praying.

DAVID JONATHAN ROSS

LYNSEY ADDARIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Outsourcing Firms Find Cheap and Eager Workers in Rural India

Through Natural Selection,New Perspective on Religion

Muslim WorldIs GrapplingWith God And Darwin

From Page I

In lectures on evolution,‘everything is O.K. untilthe apes stand up.’

K. Aruna, second from

left, said she was the only

person in her village to

work in an office.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

Darwin’s

finches on

the Islamic

symbol in art

work used at a

conference in

Massachusetts

about the

acceptance

of evolution

among

Muslims.

Repubblica NewYork

W O R L D T R E N D S

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009 V

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By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — President Obama came into office pledging to end eight years of Ameri-can inaction on climate change under President George W. Bush, and all year he has promisedthat the United States would lead the way to-ward a global agreement in Copenhagen nextmonth to address the warming planet.

But recently in Singapore, Mr. Obama was forced to acknowledge that a comprehensive climate deal was beyond reach this year. In-stead, he and other world leaders agreed that they would work toward a more modest interim agreement with a promise to renew work to-ward a binding treaty next year.

The admission places Mr. Obama in the awkward position of being, at least for now, asunlikely to spearhead an international effort to combat global warming as his predecessor — iffor different reasons.

In Mr. Bush’s case, he remained skeptical about the science of global warming until nearthe end of his presidency and dubious about the need for concerted global action.

But Mr. Obama has been a champion of cli-mate change regulation. He has moved unilat-erally to limit greenhouse gases from vehicles and large sources such as coal-burning power plants. And in recent months, China, India, Bra-zil and some other developing countries have is-sued promises to slow the growth of emissions,although with the knowledge that a bindingtreaty to enforce such pledges will not take ef-fect for at least several years.

Yet Mr. Obama has found himself limited inhis ambitions by a Congress that is unwilling to move as far or as fast as he would like.

American negotiators have been hinderedin talks leading to the Copenhagen conferenceby inaction on legislation supported by the ad-ministration that would impose strict caps oncarbon dioxide emissions.

The House passed a relatively stringent billin June, but the Senate is not expected to begin

serious debate on the measure until next year.Without a firm commitment from the United

States — for decades the world’s leading emit-ter of climate-altering gases — other nations have been reluctant to deliver firmer pledges of their own. Mr. Obama’s aides say he remains determined to use his domestic authority and international clout to continue pressing towarda global agreement, despite the latest setback.

Mr. Obama expressed support on November 15 for a proposal from Prime Minister Lars Lok-ke Rasmussen of Denmark to pursue a two-step process at the Copenhagen conference.

Under the plan, the 192 nations convening inthe Danish capital would formulate a nonbind-ing political agreement calling for reductions in global warming emissions and aid for devel-oping nations to adapt to a changing climate.The group would also promise to work to put together a binding global pact in 2010, complete with firm emissions targets, enforcement mechanisms and specific dollar amounts to aidpoorer nations.

Although many read the compromise as asign that the Copenhagen talks were doomed toproduce at best a weak agreement, Yvo de Boer,

the United Nations official managing the climate negotiations, said the statementsout of the Singapore meeting did not limit his ambitions.

“Copenhagen can and must deliver clarity on emission reduction targets and the finance to kick start rapid action,”Mr. de Boer said. “I have seen nothing that would change my view on that.”

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the compromise agreed to by the leaders in Singapore was an hon-est admission of what had become obvi-ous over the past several weeks, as nego-tiations toward a climate treaty stalled.

But he said the admission was a severe disappointment from President Obamaand the other leaders.

“It signifies an abandonment of moral responsibility that a position of leader-ship on the world stage clearly implies,” Mr. Pachauri said in an e-mail message,adding that the scientific consensus onglobal warming demanded immediateaction, not stalling tactics.

Mr. Obama, speaking in Japan on No-vember 13, seemed to anticipate the criticism the United States will face for the setback inthe Copenhagen talks. He said he had started a momentous change in American policy on global warming that would take some time to complete.

“Already, the United States has taken moresteps to combat climate change in 10 monthsthan we have in our recent history,” Mr.Obama said, “by embracing the latest science,by investing in new energy, by raising effi-ciency standards, forging new partnershipsand engaging in international climate negotia-tions.

“In short, America knows there is more workto do,” he said, “but we are meeting our respon-sibility, and will continue to do so.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS

President Obama, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia, and Prime Minister Lars Lokke

Rasmussen of Denmark at a climate change meeting this month in Singapore.

NEWS ANALYSIS

Setback for Obama in Warming Fight

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

MARASHONI, Kenya — With the stroke ofa pen, the last of Kenya’s honey hunters maysoon be homeless.

Since time immemorial, the Ogiek have been Kenya’s traditional forest dwellers. They havestalked antelope with homemade bows, made medicine from leaves and trapped bees to pro-duce honey. They have struggled to survive the press of modernity, and many times they havebeen persecuted, driven from their forests and belittled as “dorobo,” a word meaning roughly

people with no cattle. Somehow, they have al-ways managed to survive.

Now, though, the little-known Ogiek,among East Africa’s last bona fide huntersand gatherers, face their gravest test yet. The Kenyan government is gearing up to evict tensof thousands of settlers, illegal or not, from the Mau Forest, the Ogiek’s ancestral home and a critical water source for this entire country. The question is: Will the few thousand remaining

Ogiek be given a reprieve or forced out?“Tell Obama and his men to help us,” plead-

ed Daniel M. Kobei, an Ogiek leader, who stillseems almost stunned that the Ogiek may haveto leave a forest they have battled for decades to conserve. “It’s not that we’re special, but thisforest is our home.”

No doubt the Mau Forest is crucial. It is — ormore accurately, used to be — a thick, stagger-ingly beautiful forest in western Kenya, captur-ing the rains and the mist and, in turn, feedingmore than a dozen lakes and rivers across the

region, even contributing to the flow ofthe Nile.

But in the past 15 years, because ofill-planned settlement schemes (thegovernment essentially handed outchunks of forest to cronies), 25 percentof the trees have been wiped out. Much of the forest is now simply meadow. TheOgiek say there are fewer antelope and bees. They constantly use the Kiswa-hili word “haribika,” which meansspoiled. Scientists say the environmen-tal destruction has led to flash floods, micro-climate change, soil erosion and dried-up lakes.

The results were painfully obviousthis summer when East Africa was hitby one of the worst droughts in years.In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, the water taps went dry for weeks. And because Kenya gets a lot of electricity from hy-dropower, the water shortage meantblackouts, which many Kenyans be-lieve contributed to the recent spike incrime and unemployment.

Suddenly, the Kenyan governmentseemed to spring into action, commis-sioning hefty environmental reports

and insisting on ejecting all settlers from theMau Forest so that the government could plantmillions of trees and get the country’s water sources churning again. But the sudden envi-ronmental altruism has bred suspicion as well.

“The government wants that forest for eco-nomic reasons, not conservation reasons,” saidTowett Kimaiyo, an Ogiek leader. “The onlypeople who are going to benefit are the saw-millers.”

TIM FRECCIA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Ogiek believe those trying to remove them

from the forest wish to open it for exploitation.

Kenya’s Forest Dwellers Doubt Government Motive for Eviction

A new U.S. leader confronts the Byzantine layers ofclimate negotiation.

Repubblica NewYork

S C I E N C E & T E C H N O L O GY

VI MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009

Unfurling the Sails

LightSail-1 will be carried into space piggyback on a

larger satellite. Once in orbit, it will be ejected after the

main satellite is deployed.

Pushed by Light

LightSail-1, illustrated at left, will

try to show that spacecraft can be

moved by the photons that make

up sunlight. Photons have no

mass, but when they reflect off of a

mirrored surface, they do transfer

a tiny amount of momentum.

Traversing the Solar System

Solar sails currently in development are designed to

operate as close to the Sun as the orbit of Venus —

closer distances create thermal issues — or as far

away as Jupiter.

BOOM

SUNLIGHT

SAIL

PHOTON

SAIL

SOLAR

PANEL

SUN Solar Sail Range

1. The 6-kilogram spacecraft is

folded into a package measuring

approximately 10 centimeters on

a side by 33 centimeters long.

2. Once deployed, solar panels

swing open, exposing four tightly

folded sails stowed beneath.

3. Coiled springs extend four

4-meter booms, unfurling the

32-square-meter sail.

MERCURY

VENUS MARS

EARTH JUPITER

FRANK O’CONNELL/THE NEW YORK TIMESSource: The Planetary Society

By LINDSEY HOSHAW

ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,600kilometers northeast of Hawaii — Inthis remote patch of the Pacific Ocean,hundreds of kilometers from any na-tional boundary, the detritus of humanlife is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measure-ment.

Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrush-es, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces ofplastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, anarea of widely dispersed trash thatdoubles in size every decade and isnow believed to be about 1.4 millionsquare kilometers. But one researchorganization estimates that the gar-bage now actually pervades the Pacif-ic, though most of it is caught in whatoceanographers call a gyre like thisone — an area of heavy currents and

slack winds that keep the trash swirl-ing in a giant whirlpool.

Scientists say the garbage patchis just one of five that may be caughtin giant gyres scattered around theworld’s oceans. Abandoned gear likebuoys, fishing line and nets accountfor some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing intostorm drains and out to sea.

Plastic is the most common refuse inthe patch because it is lightweight, du-rable and an omnipresent, disposableproduct in both advanced and devel-oping societies. It can float along forhundreds of kilometers before beingcaught in a gyre and then, over time,breaking down.

But once it does split into pieces,the fragments look like confetti in the water. Millions, billions, trillions andmore of these particles are floating in

the world’s trash-filled gyres.PCBs, DDT and other toxic chemi-

cals cannot dissolve in water, but the plastic absorbs them like a sponge.Fish that feed on plankton ingest the tiny plastic particles. Scientists from the Algalita Marine Research Founda-tion say that fish tissues contain some of the same chemicals as the plastic.The scientists speculate that toxicchemicals are leaching into fish tissue from the plastic they eat.

The researchers say that when apredator — a larger fish or a person— eats the fish that eats plastic, thatpredator may be transferring toxinsto its own tissues, and in higher con-centrations since toxins from multiplefood sources can accumulate in thebody.

Charles Moore found the Pacificgarbage patch by accident 12 yearsago, when he came upon it on his wayback from a sailing race in Hawaii. Heis convinced that several similar gar-bage patches are undiscovered.

“Anywhere you really look for it,you’re going to see it,” he said.

Mr. Moore is the first person to havepursued serious scientific research bysampling the garbage patch. In 1999,he dedicated the Algalita foundationto studying it. Now the foundation ex-amines plastic debris and takes sam-ples of polluted water off the Californiacoast and across the Pacific Ocean. By dragging a fine mesh net behind his re-search vessel Alguita, a 15-meter alu-minum catamaran, Mr. Moore is ableto collect small plastic fragments.

Researchers measure the amountof plastic in each sample and calculatethe weight of each fragment. They alsotest the tissues of any fish caught in thenets to measure for toxic chemicals.One rainbow runner from a previous voyage had 84 pieces of plastic in itsstomach.

The research team has not testedthe most recent catch for toxic chemi-cals, but the water samples show that the amount of plastic in the gyre and the larger Pacific is increasing.

“This is not the garbage patch Iknew in 1999,” Mr. Moore said. “This is a totally different animal.”

In the current issue of AnimalBehaviour, researchers present evi-dence that domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and will use

their understanding of reflected images to in-vestigating their sur-roundings and locate their food.

The finding isjust one in a series

of recent discoveries from the na-scent study of pig cognition. Other researchers have found that pigs are brilliant at remembering where foodstores are cached and how big each

stash is relative to the rest. They’ve shown that Pig A can almost instantly learn to follow Pig B when the second pig shows signs of knowing where good food is stored, and that Pig B will try to deceive the pursuing pig and throw it off the trail.

They’ve found that pigs are among the quickest of animals to learn a new routine, and pigs can do many tricks. Pigs are also slow to forget.

Recently, an international teamof biologists released the first draft sequence of the pig genome, the complete set of genetic instructions for making the ruddy-furred Duroc

breed of Sus scrofus. Even on a curso-ry glance, “the pig genome compares favorably with the human genome,”said Lawrence Schook of the Univer-sity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,one of the team leaders.

“Very large sections are main-tained in complete pieces,” he said,barely changed in the 100-million-plus years since the ancestors of hogs and humans diverged.

Dr. Schook is particularly eager to see if the many physiological and be-havioral parallels between humans and pigs are reflected in our respec-tive genomes. Pig hearts are like our

hearts, he said, pigs metabolize drugs as we do, their teeth resemble our teeth, and their habits can, too. “I lookat the pig as a great animal model for

human lifestyle diseases,” he said. “Pigs like to lie around, they like to drink, if given the chance, they’ll smoke and watch TV.”

Even in domesticity, pigs haveretained much of their foreboar’ssmarts. Richard W. Byrne, a profes-sor of evolutionary psychology at the University of St. Andrews, attributes pig intelligence to the same evolution-ary pressures that prompted clever-ness in primates: social life and food. Wild pigs live in long-term socialgroups, keeping track of one another as individuals. They also root aroundfor difficult food sources.

By DENNIS OVERBYE

About a year from now, if all goeswell, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 800kilometers above the Earth. There inthe vacuum, it will unfurl four trian-gular sails as shiny as moonlight andonly barely more substantial. Thenit will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars.

LightSail-1, as it is called, will atbest sail a few hours and gain a few ki-lometers in altitude. But those hours will mark a milestone for a dreamthat is almost as old as the rocketage itself: to navigate the cosmos on winds of starlight the way sailors for thousands of years have navigatedthe ocean on the winds of the Earth.

“Sailing on light is the only tech-nology that can someday take us tothe stars,” said Louis Friedman, di-rector of the Planetary Society, theworldwide organization of space en-thusiasts.

Dr. Friedman announced thismonth that over the next three yearsthe Planetary Society, with helpfrom an anonymous donor, will buildand fly a series of solar-sail space-craft dubbed LightSails, first in orbitaround the Earth and eventually to travel into deeper space.

The voyages are an outgrowth of a long collaboration between the so-ciety and Cosmos Studios of Ithaca, New York, headed by Ann Druyan, a

film producer and widow of the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan.Sagan was a founder of the PlanetarySociety, in 1980, with Dr. Friedmanand Bruce Murray, then director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

There is a long line of visionaries,stretching back to the Russian rocket pioneers Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Fridrich Tsander and the author Ar-thur C. Clarke, who have supportedthis idea. “Sails are just a marvelous way of getting around the universe,”said Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,New Jersey, “but it takes a long time to imagine them becoming practi-cal.”

The solar sail receives its drivingforce from the simple fact that lightcarries not just energy but also mo-mentum. The force on a solar sailis gentle, if not feeble, but unlike arocket, which fires for a few minutes at most, it is constant. Over days and years a big enough sail, maybe 1.5 ki-lometers on a side, could reach speedsof hundreds of thousands of kilome-ters an hour, fast enough to traversethe solar system in five years. Riding the beam from a powerful laser, a sailcould even make the journey to an-other star system in 100 years, that isto say, a human lifespan.

But Dr. Friedman said it wouldtake too long and involve too muchexposure to radiation to sail humans

to a place like Mars. He said the only passengers on an interstellar voyage were likely to be robots or perhapsour genomes encoded on a chip, aconsequence of the need to keep the craft light, like a giant cosmic kite.

In principle, a solar sail can do any-thing a regular sail can do, like tack-ing. Unlike other spacecraft, it canact as an antigravity machine, usingsolar pressure to balance the Sun’sgravity and thus hover anyplace inspace. And, of course, it does not haveto carry tons of rocket fuel.

Those are visions for the long term. “Think centuries or millennia, notdecades,” said Dr. Dyson.

“We ought to be doing things that are romantic,” he said, but addedthat nobody knew yet how to buildsails big and thin enough for serious travel.

The LightSail sail is made of alumi-nized Mylar about one-quarter thethickness of a trash bag. The body of the spacecraft will consist of threeminiature satellites known as Cube-Sats, 10 centimeters on a side, which were first developed by students atStanford University .

Dr. Friedman said the first flight,LightSail-1, would be a success if the sail could be controlled for even asmall part of an orbit and it showedany sign of being accelerated by sun-light. “For the first flight, anythingmeasurable is great,” he said.

Sailing Into Space,Propelled by Light

LINDSEY HOSHAW FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Charles Moore, a boat captain, found a large trash patch in the

Pacific 12 years ago. He holds a bottle covered with barnacles .

MICHAEL URBANA/AFP — GETTY IMAGES

RICK STERNBACH/PLANETARY SOCIETY

NATALIE

ANGIER

ESSAY

Pigs Prove to Be Smart, and Slow to Forget

Open seas, far awayfrom civilization, but not its garbage.

Vast Islands of Trash Ride Pacific Currents

Pigs and humans share

several behavioral traits.

Repubblica NewYork

H E A LT H & F I T N E S S

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009 VII

By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

When Jessica Jochim returned towork after her three-month mater-nity leave, she was the envy of herco-workers at Babies “R” Us. Mrs.Jochim, who had gained 18 kilograms carrying her first child, steadilyslimmed until she was a size 4 again.Yet, exercise was a pre-baby relic.She wasn’t dieting, either. In fact,every two hours, she snacked as if on cue.

What was her secret? Breast-feed-ing her newborn James on demand,and using a breast pump to take milkhome to him.

“All the ladies at work started jok-ing they were going to go in backand pump so they could start losingweight like I was,” said Mrs. Jochim, a mother of three from Vancouver,Washington. “I had a baby suckling600 calories a day out of me.”

That breast-feeding gives mothers an edge shedding baby weight haslong been suspected. But lately, a pa-rade of celebrities has attributed theirpostpartum slimming to nursing,bringing this age-old topic back into the spotlight. Adding to the conversa-tion is a large study that suggests thatweight loss through breast-feeding isnot a myth.

Earlier this year, the actress Re-

becca Romijn called breast-feedingher new twins “the very best dietI’ve been on.” After Angelina Jolieposed for the November 2008 coverof W magazine nursing one of hertwins, she said that it had helped herregain her figure. (That cover in-spired a bronze statue of a nude Ms.Jolie double-nursing her newbornsthat was exhibited in London lastmonth.)

“Nobody wants to admit they aredoing it for themselves, or ‘I’m doing it to help myself look hot again,’ ” saidJesse Comer, from Portland, Oregon, whose main motivation to breast-feedwas her baby’s health. “It’s tough to admit to other people that everythingisn’t about the baby.” But Ms. Comer “felt like until the weight was off, Iwouldn’t feel myself.”

Last year, an epidemiological studyof 36,000 Danish women found thatthe more a mother breast-feeds, theless weight she retains six monthsafter birth. A few factors determinedhow much she lost: whether a woman was overweight before pregnancy,what she gained while expecting and duration of nursing, said Kathleen M.Rasmussen, an author of the studyand a nutrition professor at CornellUniversity in Ithaca, New York.

The study’s convincing data

impressed experts like Cheryl A.Lovelady, a nutrition professor atthe University of North Carolinaat Greensboro. But, she said, refer-ring to the Danish women, “we don’tbreast-feed as long as they do.” Oth-er studies have found that breast-feeders don’t necessarily shed fatquicker than women who feed theirnewborns formula. A small double-blind randomized study conductedat Cincinnati Children’s HospitalMedical Center found that non-lactating women lost more body fatthan lactating women at six months,and at a faster rate. Karen Wosje, itslead author, suggested that the ap-petite stimulant prolactin could leadnursing mothers to overeat. Or thefact that non-lactating mothers wereable to exercise more vigorouslythan the nursing mothers in the first

half year may have tipped the scalein their favor.

What then to make of tales of prodi-gious eating among thinning breast-feeders? Dr. Lovelady suspects someof them who say they eat without con-sequence used to be “restrained eat-ers.” That is, they ate fewer calories than they expended — say, 1,700 calo-ries instead of 2,000 — which, counter-intuitively, slowed their metabolism.Once pregnant, they ate enough tokeep their metabolism humming for the sake of their baby. Postpartum,they are losing about half a kilograma week, Dr. Lovelady. Yet, “they areeating a whole lot more” since mak-ing milk requires about 500 calories daily.

Others suggest that women whoview breast-feeding as a dieting tool may have “deeper body issues,” saidClaire Mysko, an author of “Does ThisPregnancy Make Me Look Fat?”

Melissa Ramsay Miller, a nursing mother of 4-month-old Luella in SouthHadley, Massachusetts, is clear-eyedabout the limits of breast-feeding’sability to “get her body back.” She hastwo kilograms left to lose, but said shehas a “soft stomach.” “It doesn’t makesense it would go back to what it was before,” she said matter-of-factly.“I’m O.K. with that.”

By CAMILLE SWEENEY

With economic pressures affecting millions of people, dentists may havenoticed a drop in patients opting for a brighter smile, but they are seeing an-other phenomenon: a rise in the num-ber of teeth grinders.

“I’m seeing a lot more people thatare anxious, stressed out and veryconcerned about their financial fu-tures, and they’re taking it out ontheir teeth,” said Dr. Steven Butensky, a dentist with a specialty in prostho-dontics (aesthetic, implant and recon-structive dentistry) in Manhattan.

In San Diego, California, Dr. GeraldMcCracken said that over the last 18months his number of teeth-grinding cases had more than doubled. “We’re finding in a lot of double-income fami-lies, we have the people who have lost jobs and are worried, and then we havethe spouse, who still has the job, withthe added pressure and uncertainty,” he said. “This can cause some realgrinding at night.”

Ten to 15 percent of adult Americans moderately to severely grind theirteeth, according to Dr. Matthew Mes-sina, a dentist in Cleveland, Ohio, and a consumer adviser for the AmericanDental Association.

Because it is a subconscious activity, most grinders grind without realizingit, until a symptom such as a fragment-ed tooth or facial soreness occurs.

While many experts believe that ge-netics may play a role in bruxism (or teeth grinding), stress has long been known to set off clenching and grind-ing in some people, Dr. Messina said. “Stress, whether it’s real or perceived,causes flight-or-fight hormones torelease in the body,” he said. “Those

released stress hormones mobilizeenergy, causing isometric activity,which is muscle movement, becausethat built-up energy has to be releasedin some way.”

The most expensive option for re-building teeth damaged by grindingis with veneers, but this year, dentistssay many of their bruxism patients arerequesting one of the least costly treat-ments: a night guard, also known asan occlusal splint. Manufacturers saidsales of these devices had gone up.

Many teeth grinders interviewedsaid they would not go to bed without their night guards. “Sometimes I wakeup in the middle of the night and hav-ing my guard in makes me more awareif I’m tensing my body or gripping myjaw, and I can just take a moment torelax,” said Alisa Fastenberg, 50, agraphic designer in Manhattan.

Other treatments for teeth grinding include acupuncture, medical mas-sage, hypnosis and Botox injectionsinto the masseter muscle, which con-trols the jaw, to relax it enough to stop it from going into spasms.

But taking time before bed to de-stress can help.

“Good sleep hygiene goes a long wayto keeping the mind relaxed and the jaws from starting to smack together,”said Dr. McCracken. “We know that the stress center of the brain is directlynext to the part of the brain that con-trols teeth grinding. We’re not surehow it relates to the disorder, but it’s in-triguing. Lately, I even tell my patients,before they go to bed, not to watch thenews.”

By GINA KOLATA

The importance of cooling downafter exercise is enshrined in train-ing lore. It’s in physiology textbooks, personal trainers often insist on it,fitness magazines tell you that youmust do it — and some exercise equip-ment at gyms automatically includesit. You punch in the time you want to work out on the machine, and whenyour time is up, the machine auto-matically reduces the workload and continues for five minutes so you can cool down.

The problem, says Hirofumi Tana-ka, an exercise physiologist at theUniversity of Texas, Austin, is thatthere is pretty much no science be-hind the advice.

The cool-down “is an understud-ied topic,” he said. “Everyone thinksit’s an established fact, so they don’t study it.”

It’s not even clear what a cool-downis supposed to be. Some say you just have to keep moving for a few min-utes. Others say you have to spend

5 to 10 minutes doing the same ex-ercise, only slowly. Still others say a cool-down should include stretching.

And it’s not clear what the cool-down is supposed to do. Some say italleviates muscle soreness. Otherssay it prevents muscle tightness orrelieves strain on the heart.

Exercise researchers say thereis only one agreed-on fact about thepossible risk of suddenly stoppingintense exercise. When you exercise hard, the blood vessels in your legsare expanded to send more blood toyour legs and feet. And your heart ispumping fast. If you suddenly stop,your heart slows down, your blood ispooled in your legs and feet, and you can feel dizzy, even pass out.

The best athletes are most vulner-able, said Dr. Paul Thompson, a car-diologist and marathon runner whois an exercise researcher at HartfordHospital in Connecticut. “If you arewell trained, your heart rate is slowalready, and it slows down even fasterwith exercise,” he said.

That effect can also be deleteriousfor someone with heart disease, saidCarl Foster, an exercise physiologist at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, because blood vessels leadingto the heart are already narrowed,making it hard for blood to get in.

But does it matter for the ordinary, average athlete? “Probably not agreat deal,” Dr. Thompson said. And,anyway, most people don’t just stand there, stock still, when their workout is over. They walk to the locker roomor to their house or car, getting thecool-down benefit without officially“cooling down.”

The idea of the cool-down seems to have originated with a popular theo-ry — now known to be wrong — that muscles become sore after exercisebecause they accumulate lactic acid.In fact, lactic acid is a fuel. It’s a nor-mal part of exercise, and it has noth-ing to do with muscle soreness. Butthe lactic acid theory led to the notion that by slowly reducing the intensityof your workout you could give lactic

acid a chance to dissipate.In fact, Dr. Tanaka said, one study of

cyclists concluded that because lacticacid is good, it is better not to cool downafter intense exercise. Lactic acid wasturned back into glycogen, a musclefuel, when cyclists simply stopped.When they cooled down, it was wast-ed, used up to fuel their muscles.

As far as muscle soreness goes,cooling down doesn’t alleviate it, Dr. Tanaka said.

And muscle tightness?“There are no data to support the

idea that a cool-down helps,” Dr. Fos-ter said.

Exercise researchers say they acton their own advice.

Dr. Thompson says if he is doinga hard track workout he will jog fora short distance when he finishes to avoid dizziness.

As for Dr. Tanaka, he does not cool down at all. He’s a soccer player and,he says, he sees no particular reasonto do anything after exercising other than just stop.

JODI HILTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Yet another hazard in a bad economy: tooth grinding.

Breast-Feed the Baby, And Skip the Dieting?

When StressTakesA TollOn Teeth

Cool-Down Not Vital After Hard Workout

EVAN SUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Melissa Ramsay Miller

doesn’t expect nursing

to help her regain her

toned figure.

Walking to the

locker room or

car may be a

sufficient cool-

down for most

exercisers.

Repubblica NewYork

A R T S & S T Y L E S

VIII MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2009

There are any number of character-istic Nicolas Cage scenes in Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” interludes you watch with a now-familiar mixture of

genuine appreciationand more than a touchof bewilderment.

Mr. Herzog’s film isvery loosely based on a 1992 movie simply called “Bad Lieuten-ant,” directed by Abel

Ferrara and starring Harvey Keitel.The two films feature performances

that make you wonder where thecharacter leaves off and the man play-ing him has taken hold, a slippagethat can lead to greatness, but also to moments of such excess and evengrotesque comedy that they leave yousquirming.

Mr. Cage revels in that slippage,though it was only after seeing “BadLieutenant” that I was reminded of how freaky he can be.

Seduced by Mr. Herzog’s baroquenarrative style and the perfect syn-chronicity of a star going all out, Ibegan to look at Mr. Cage anew. Therehave been enough weird and wrongturns in his career that it was easy todevelop a sense of his talent and itslimits early on. In part that’s becauseright from the start — he played a love-lorn punk in “Valley Girl” (1983), hisbreakout role — there have been entirefilms where his grandiose gesturesand weird vocalizations have gottenthe better of him. On occasion the re-

sults have seemed transparently ter-rible, as in “Captain Corelli’s Mando-lin” (2001), in which Mr. Cage, whoseuncle made the “Godfather” movies,employs a hopeless Italian accent.

Most actors navigate the space be-tween professionally serviceable andexceptionally adequate, rarely reach-ing into the beyond. What makes Mr.Cage such an unusual screen presenceand an even more atypical movie staris that he’s habitually very good andvery bad from movie to movie, andsometimes scene to scene in a singlefilm. Unlike most movie stars, whosestardom is partly predicated on a rec-ognizable, coherent, stable personaand the ability to deliver a similarly co-herent, stable performance, Mr. Cageis reliably unreliable.

This insistent watchable quality —perhaps the most critical prerequisiteof stardom, and certainly more essen-tial to its brightness than either actingtalent or even physical beauty — wasthere from the beginning. Journalistssoon learned that Mr. Cage was also acolorful off-camera character, makingmuch of his immersive preparations.

A chronicle of his early years invari-

ably includes the story about how he had some of his teeth pulled, appar-ently without anesthetic, to grasp the pain of a Vietnam veteran for his role in “Birdy” (1984), along with a reference to the very live, very wiggly water bug he swallowed on camera for “Vampire’s Kiss” (1989).

After a while these early excesses began to cling to him, even define him,making it difficult to separate the man, the method and the madness.

The transformation from the kindof actor who earns critical notice for the likes of David Lynch (“Wild at Heart,” 1990) while paying his bills with a “Top Gun” knockoff (“FireBirds,” also 1990) occurred when after picking up his Oscar, he soon showed

up in “The Rock,” the first of six (and counting) movies he has made for theüber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Directed by Michael Bay with the usual orange fireballs and spatiotem-poral confusion, “The Rock” didn’t putMr. Cage into the same box-office com-pany as Tom Cruise. But for the firsttime Mr. Cage was showing real actionmuscle in a Top 10 box-office title.

Over the past decade additionalblockbuster success in “Con Air,”“Gone in 60 Seconds” and both “Na-tional Treasure” movies have alsoturned Mr. Cage into one of the most dependable stars for both Mr. Bruck-heimer and for Disney.

There were also romantic roles,some more convincing than others, in-

cluding “Leaving Las Vegas,” the 1995drama for which he won the Academy Award for best actor as a Hollywooddropout who drinks himself to death.In recent years Mr. Cage’s lack of dis-crimination (or taste) has threatenedto overshadow the sweep of his career, which is understandable if you’veseen him wearing a bear costume inthe laughable remake of “The Wicker Man” (2006).

Yet after “Bad Lieutenant” I wonder if the narrative that many of us havegrafted onto his career — the early iferratic promise, the mature success-es, the dire midlife choices — does him an injustice. The truth is that he getsthe job done in entertainments like“National Treasure” and “Knowing” (2009), which assumedly give him the financial freedom to cut loose with a director like Mr. Herzog.

Mr. Cage has made a habit of failure and frequently sold out his talent. And yet, as “Bad Lieutenant” shows,he remains the same Nicolas Cageof his early, later and most critically lauded career: the man of a thousand facial tics, a student of all accents and a master of none, a star who, for bet-ter, worse and sometimes both, gives us reason after reason to go to themovies.

By CHARLES McGRATH

Alexis de Tocqueville, the au-thor of the landmark “Democracyin America,” was in many ways atypical Frenchman. Practically the minute he got off the boat, in New-port, Rhode Island, on May 9, 1831, he started making generalizations:the only thing Americans really careabout is making money. Americanwomen are good homemakers butboring wives. Americans drink nowine but stuff themselves with stu-pefying amounts of food.

But Tocqueville was also unusual,especially for a Frenchman of hisclass and background, in imme-diately warming toAmerica, a countrythat most Europeantravelers considereduncouth, and Ameri-cans in turn warmed tohim. His letters homefairly bubble with en-thusiasm.

“Here we are trulyin another world,” hewrote to his brotherÉdouard, and in a let-ter to his father hesaid, “This population is one of the happiest inthe world.”

Most of Tocqueville’s letters from America, which werewritten between the spring of 1831and February 1832, have never been published in English, but FrederickBrown, a biographer of Flaubert andZola, has collected and translatedthem for a volume that Yale Univer-sity Press is to release next year. A sample of the letters reveals a Toc-queville different from the one weknow, or think we know, from “De-mocracy in America.”

He’s much younger-seeming. Toc-queville was 30 when he published “Democracy in America” but only 25when he made his nine-month trip,and his letters have a boyish ebul-lience. He writes about dancing on the deck of Le Havre, the ship thatcarried him here, and crawling out on the bowsprit to watch the foambreak.

Ostensibly, Tocqueville and hisfriend and traveling companion,Gustave de Beaumont, were here to

study the American prison systemfor the French government.

But almost from the start of histrip Tocqueville seems to have imag-ined another kind of book, a study of Americans themselves.

The letters are like field notes for “Democracy in America.” In them, Tocqueville likes pretty much every-thing he sees except for slavery andthe forced resettlement of the Indi-ans. The most moving passage in thesample is a description of Choctawsboarding a riverboat in Memphis.

“The whole spectacle had an air of ruin and destruction,” he writes.“It spoke of final farewells and of no

turning back.”Most of the letters,

Mr. Brown said, havea tautness and an ele-gance that derive fromTocqueville’s educa-tion in 18th-centuryprose. They were writ-ten in part as enter-tainments, to be readaloud by his familyback home.

Yet if the lettersa ren’t roma nt ic ,they’re often exuber-ant.

“This trip was hisgreat escape,” he said.

“I think he felt imprisoned by hisfamily and the past. He came from the ancien régime, from a royalistfamily, and the Revolution of 1830more or less consigned his fatherto retirement. Alexis was a younglawyer and very much of two mindsabout the constitutional monarchy. He wanted to keep his job, and that required pledging loyalty to Louis-Philippe. On the other hand he feltlike a traitor to his family. In Amer-ica he imagined a world without that kind of conflict, without a past.”

Once he got to America, Toc-queville was dazzled by the coun-try’s sheer expansiveness, Mr.Brown said, and found in all thatphysical space a sense of inner spaceand freedom.

“But what’s remarkable,” he wenton, “is how open he was to every-thing. He wasn’t snobbish at all. All right, so Americans spit — it justdidn’t bother him very much.”

By CARLOS H. CONDE

QUEZON CITY, Philippines — Itwas an improbable sight: a slightlyhunched man with a gait that sug-gested either his age (72) or infirmity (a bad back and knees that requiredreplacement surgery), beating up ataller opponent no older than 30.

The older man cut down the young-er one with a right to the abdomen and a left hook to the face. Then anotheropponent got smacked in the face and kicked in the midsection with one ofthose bad knees. Yet another camealong and he, too, went down.

“I missed doing this,” the older man,Joseph Estrada — longtime actor and onetime president of the Philippines— said moments after the directorcried “Cut!” Mr. Estrada then walkedtoward the gate of the bus terminalwhere the movie was being shot andgreeted a gawking crowd.

“Don’t forget me, O.K.? We willtake back Malacañang!” he hollered.The crowd responded by chantinghis nickname: “Erap! Erap!” Thatis pare, or buddy in Filipino, spelledbackward.

Malacañang is the presidential pal-ace, and Mr. Estrada managed to staythere for less than half of his six-yearterm. He was driven from office in2001 after a Senate impeachment trial on allegations of corruption — includ-ing accusations that he took kickbacksfrom gambling lords — was cut short

by attempts by Mr. Estrada’s allies tosuppress evidence, sending Filipinos to the streets in protest.

Last month, he announced that hewould run again for president nextyear, calling it his “final, final perfor-mance.” The news flummoxed his po-litical opponents and upset the Philip-pines’ already rambunctious politics.

Mr. Estrada’s return to moviesfollows a break of more than twodecades, including the six years hespent in prison for corruption. His re-

turn to politics — despite his promise to President Gloria Macapagal Ar-royo when she pardoned him in 2007that he would never again seek elec-tive office — is a chance to take careof unfinished business. Mr. Estradasaid he had decided to run again “soI can clean up my name and prove to those who removed me that they were wrong.”

Whether he can accomplish that isnot clear. The Philippine Constitution

prohibits a president from seeking an-other term. His opponents vow to takethe issue to the Supreme Court.

Many people still adore Mr. Es-trada, but many others are offendednot just by his audacity but also byhis insistence that what happened in2001 was an illegal coup staged by thecountry’s elite.

“It is only in the Philippines wherea disgraced president who was oustedby a people’s uprising would dare run for the presidency again,” Benjie Oli-veros, a political columnist, wrote.

Mr. Estrada made more than 100films in a career spanning three de-cades, often portraying poor menseeking justice. These roles endearedhim to voters, he said, enough for them to elect him first as mayor for 17 years of San Juan, a suburb of Manila, then as senator, vice president and finally president.

He also impressed nationalistswhen he produced and starred in the 1989 film “In the Claws of the Eagle,” which was highly critical of UnitedStates military bases.

That the movie he is making now,“One and Only Family,” is a comedyabout a jeepney driver who gives hisdaughter’s boyfriend a hard time — inother words, a movie with no obvious political significance — is hardly anissue with Mr. Estrada.

“I enjoy doing this, and I missed do-ing this,” he said.

Madness or Method, Tough to Tell

In a career of wrong turns, Nicolas Cage’stalent abides.

From One Slugfest in Film to Another in Politics

America’s Earliest Admirer

REUTERS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY NACHO HERNANDEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Driven from office in disgrace, but adored by fans.

UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE

Alexis de Tocqueville

visited America in

the 1830’s.

MANOHLA

DARGIS

ESSAY

Nicolas Cage, seen with

Elisabeth Shue, won an

Oscar for ‘‘Leaving Las

Vegas’’ in 1995.

Joseph Estrada,

right, a former

movie star and

president, is

attempting a

comeback at 72.

Repubblica NewYork