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One hundred years of poems “counter, original, spare, strange”

Who doesn’t like a centenary? Whether solemn, festive, or celebratory, a centenary (or centennial, for North Americans) can be very instructive, whether conducted individually or collectively. It is a way of acknowledging—often honouring—the past and, at the same time, reassessing the present and imagining the future in the context of the previous event or exemplary person. One hundred years should be sufficient time for substantive reconsideration, both historical and cultural.

For the centenary-minded, 2018 offers almost too many occasions, including the horrific battles of World War I that culminated in the signing of the Armistice on 11 November, and the execution of the Romanov royal family (Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children) and their servants. One could celebrate, instead, one hundred years of women’s suffrage in Great Britain for most women over the age of 30 and Canada (for federal elections, and excluding women the province of Quebec). On 28 December 1918, Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz, a member of Sinn Féin, became the first woman elected to the British House of Commons (at the time, she was an inmate in London’s Holloway Prison for her role in the Easter 1916 Uprising). Americans may be unaware that it is the centenary of daylight savings time in their country (British Summer time had been enacted two years earlier—another war-time measure, like personal income taxes, that was never repealed).

Depending on one’s pleasures and cultural commitments, 1918 births to be commemorated include those of Louis Althusser, Pearl Bailey, Alec and Eric Bedser, Ingmar Bergman, Leonard Bernstein, Ray Charles, Rita Hayworth, Skitch Henderson, Katharine Johnson, Nelson Mandela, Spike Milligan, Birgit Nilsson, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Muriel Spark, Mickey Spillane, Ted Williams, and Hermann Zapf. Ardent readers may wish to mull over what it means to have had one hundred years of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, L. Frank Baum’s The Tin Woodman of Oz, Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr, Winston Churchill’s A Traveller in War Time, Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, and Marie Stopes’s Married Love, which was banned for “obscenity” until 1931.

There is also the centenary of Poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins to consider. When Hopkins died in 1889, his poetry had been read by a mere handful of friends and family members. He had submitted his magnificent ode, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, to The Month, a Jesuit journal, but the editor declined the opportunity to publish it. Otherwise, Hopkins, who had joined the Society of Jesus in 1868, refused to consider publication lest it detract from his religious responsibilities and spiritual commitments. The survival of Hopkins’s manuscripts was due to the stewardship of Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate in 1918, and a friend of Hopkins since their Oxford days. For Bridges, who did not entirely approve of Hopkins’s lavish experiments in meter, word usage, and genre—much less the way in which Hopkins marked up his poems to indicate how they should be read aloud—selecting, editing, and publishing Poems was a labour of respect and fellowship rather than admiration.

For Bridges, who did not entirely approve of Hopkins’s lavish experiments in meter, word usage, and genre—much less the way in which Hopkins marked up his poems to indicate how they should be read aloud—selecting, editing, and publishing Poems was a labour of respect and fellowship rather than admiration.

Bridges’s preface is cautious to the point of antagonistic. The reader is warned about Hopkins’s “peculiar scheme of prosody”, the “occasional affectation in metaphor”, rhymes that are either “peculiar” or “repellant”—or both—and lack of “a continuous literary decorum”.   Not only is the reader cautioned about Hopkins’ eccentricities, what Bridges terms the “Oddity and Obscurity” that can too easily offend or discourage, but told bluntly, “when he indulges in freaks, his childishness is incredible”.

Perhaps because of the editor’s trepidations, that first volume of Hopkins’s poetry, published with the help of Hopkins’s nephew Gerard Hopkins, an editor at Oxford University Press, was anything but a bestseller—the initial print run of 750 copies was never exhausted. For the discerning reader, however, the poems were a revelation. Demonstrated by her letters, Virginia Woolf, for example, couldn’t wait to share the startling texts with her friend and former Greek tutor, Janet Case: “Have you read the poems of a man, who is dead, called Gerard Hopkins? I liked them better than any poetry for ever so long[.]”  Six months later, Woolf loaned Case her copy of Poems, with the caution, “Some are very lovely and quite plain; others such a mix of beauty and horror that it takes hours to sort them—for instance the long one on the wreck”.  It was the second edition of Poems, begun by Bridges and completed by Charles Williams after Bridges’ death in 1930, that garnered the attention of academics such as Humphry House and marvelling young poets such as W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas; the response of established poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound was lukewarm at best. Currently, the poems are being re-edited for the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Featured image credit:  Old Books by jarmoluk. CC0 via Pixabay.

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The multigenerational struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States [timeline]

The Women’s Suffragist movement spans multiple generations. 72 years passed between the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. During that time, women skillfully organized, mobilized, and built a powerful social movement to achieve their long-sought goal. Let’s look back at the events that led up to that historical achievement nearly one century ago on 18 August 1920.



Gaining the right to vote was a huge accomplishment, but it did not automatically guarantee women other political rights (running for office or serving on juries), nor did it rectify many other discriminatory practices embedded in the law. Moreover, restrictions and violence prevented African American women (and men) from voting for decades, especially in the South. While winning the right to vote did not guarantee all American women full equality, it did recognize their fundamental right of self-representation, permanently changed the composition of the polity, and provided the necessary foundation for subsequent achievements.

Featured Image: American Labor Party teach other women how to vote, 1935. Credit: CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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Oral disease or random object? [quiz]

How can medical professionals tell whether individuals have a disease? The simple answer is that body tissues are examined under the microscope, but the long answer involves reams of research and hours of study and intense examination. The study of the causes and effects of disease is called pathology, and is practiced in concern with all areas of the body, including the mouth. Oral pathology covers a wide range of diseases—from ulcers to cancerous tumours, and is practiced by most dental clinicians. The ability of dental clinicians to recognize and identify oral diseases ensures that patients can be referred to specialists quickly and efficiently, which may in turn limit the damage caused by diseases. This is much easier said than done, however, as the world of pathology, only really accessible by microscope, can be extremely difficult to navigate. What may be a sign of disease may look just like healthy tissue to the untrained eye, or it may even look like something else entirely—an object or picture from the world outside the microscope.

This quiz gives you the chance to try your hand at identifying oral diseases as seen under the microscope. Each question will give you two images to choose from: one is oral tissue affected by disease, the other is a random object. See how adept your pathological skills are, and learn all about the diseases that you’re identifying!

 

Featured image credit: Fig. 2.30 from Soames’ and Southam’s Oral Pathology, by Max Robinson, Keith Hunter, Michael Pemberton, and Phillip Sloan, (OUP, 2018). Used with permission.

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Revolutionary Music and the Social Fabric of Rebellion

Rebels are central actors in civil wars. However, their perspectives and lifeworlds remain little understood. In fact, many studies on civil war suffer from what Ranajit Guha criticised as the “prose of counterinsurgency”: scholars often infer the logic of rebellion from second-hand accounts, many of which are produced in the interest of state power. Insofar as scholarship has been interested in the rebel perspective, it mostly focuses on the strategic calculus of revolutionary elites. Understanding the aspirations of rank-and-file rebels and grassroots supporters of rebel movements however is important. They form the social foundations of rebellion and rebel leaders rely on their support. This makes them an important part of revolutionary politics.

Karaoke is a favourite pastime amongst young people in the country’s war-torn Kachin State. The Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) – one of Asia’s oldest and strongest rebel movements – has tapped into the popularity of karaoke for mobilising against the ethnocratic state of Myanmar and propagating its own ethno-nationalist ideology surrounding the creation of a homeland for the oppressed Kachin minority.

In recent years, the KIO has produced professional karaoke-style music videos, which feature scrolling subtitles that help viewers to sing along. Some of them are remakes of decades-old revolutionary songs that have been used to mobilise Kachin communities since the 1960s. One refurbished classic from the 1970s is called “Shanglawt Sumtsaw Ga Leh,” which means “The Love for the Revolution.” Its lyrics are about courageous rebel soldiers calling on beautiful young women to marry them after graduating from school. While the modern remake features nationalist and revolutionary symbols—including dashing uniforms and minority costumes – the video also reminds of modern pop/rock clips produced by boybands elsewhere. Handsome young men with sunglasses and blue jeans are flirting with pretty girls wearing make-up and fashionable clothes.

The Kachin rebellion also produces new songs, many of which reflect a changing depiction of social norms, including traditional gender roles. A music video that can be found on a recent KIO recruitment DVD for instance portrays a young Kachin couple. He wakes up in a large bed next to an Apple laptop and starts into his day in a modern urban environment. She awakes in camouflage in a frontline position, braving the hardships of war as a frontline soldier of the Kachin rebellion. Many songs and music videos depict idyllic modernity and revolutionary heroism, aspirations that resonate with local Kachin youth, many of whom live in depressed contexts characterised by violence and social problems, including widespread disillusionment about the dire state of the local economy. Analysing the audio-visual aesthetics of revolutionary music videos enables for a better understanding of this emotional dimension of rebellion, that is, its appeal to affect rather than reason.

That said, local communities are not only passive consumers of rebel propaganda that converts young people into gun-toting rebel soldiers. Merging visual method with ethnography reveals how many young Kachin actively and creatively engage with revolutionary music by performing rebellion in karaoke bars and producing their own music in independent studios. This provides a rare window into the hidden social fabric of political violence, including the formation of revolutionary subjectivities and revolutionary discourse at large. Analysing the practice of karaoke – understood as a scripted simulation of rebellion – in fact demonstrates the performative aspect of identity formation. Playful performances of rebellion can be a powerful vehicle for youth in Kachin State to escape everyday marginality and to exercise agency against state domination. At the same time, reiterated performance of Kachin nationalist discourse forms revolutionary subjectivities within a new set of disciplinary constraints.

This discourse itself however is also coproduced at different levels of the Kachin society. Independently produced music videos show how young Kachin musicians actively impact on this revolutionary discourse. By singing against harmful mega-development projects or the local narcotics crisis, Kachin musicians give voice to the concerns of local communities and mobilise social resistance. The rock band Blast produced one of the most famous independent Kachin songs in 2007, at the time of mounting resistance against the Chinese hydropower dam project at the Myitsone confluence of the Mali and N’mai Rivers. Their song Mali Hka [Mali River] encapsulated a wide-spread fear that the dam poses an existential threat to the Kachin society and nation. In merging environmentalism with Kachin revolutionary nationalism, it functioned as a major rallying cry against “foreign” “self-interests” that threaten the Kachin “life-line,” and urges resistance: “patriotic people, let us protect our precious treasure with all our might!”

Against the background of mounting social resistance against the Myitsone dam, the KIO started to oppose the project, even though it had previously condoned the construction of other Chinese hydropower dams. This is not to suggest that a single protest song changed KIO strategy. The example rather helps to illustrate how Kachin revolutionary music is much more than top-down propaganda. In fact, revolutionary music can become a cultural site of contestation itself through which popular aspirations, including calls for social justice, can be expressed. This creates pressure on the elites of EAOs and impacts on wider dynamics of conflict and peace. It also suggests the need for different modes of analysis in the study of conflict in Myanmar and elsewhere. Specifically, my enquiry into revolutionary music and karaoke in Kachin State urges: a) a relational analysis of rebel politics in order to appreciate the social foundations of armed resistance and highlight the reciprocal and dispersed nature of power that emerges from the interdependencies between revolutionary grassroots and elites; and b) the development of critical methods and the use of alternative sources of data that can capture the hidden social fabric within which conflict and violence takes place beyond our usual prism of elite politics.

Featured image credit: Close Up Photography of Microphone by Suvan Chowdhury. Public domain via Pexels.

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Can the auto industry improve spinal fusion surgery?

Systems science is the study of how component parts of a system interact with each other. It may seem counterintuitive to consider that medical care and systems science are linked, but in fact the component parts of a care cycle are infinitely complex. An in-patient admission for a patient receiving back surgery involves a single hospital, many different practitioners from multiple different departments: radiology, pathology, pharmacy, rehabilitation, surgery ad infinitum, all with individual processes, inefficiencies, and errors. Scaling this example up (or down) just reveals increasing system complexity: this in-patient admission is a single hospital among many different institutions, even within a city, and many more across the state. The state’s medical care lies within a larger network of similar regional states and, ultimately, within the massive medical system of the United States.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the health share of United States GDP in 2016 was 17.9%. This equates to $3.3 trillion, or $10,348 per person. The health share of GDP is expected to grow to 19.7% by 2026. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement has promoted the so called Triple Aim, a mission to improve population health, improve patient experience of care, and reduce per capita cost of health care. These ambitious goals have inspired a national culture of continuous quality improvement. The goal is not simply cost reduction but is instead improved value of healthcare; this means improving patient outcomes while decreasing cost.

There is no simple answer to blunt the rising cost of US healthcare, but by focusing on small parts of this complex system, we can create meaningful change.

A main process improvement tool used by medical practitioners to improve the value of healthcare is Lean production and was adapted from the Toyota Motor Corporation. Lean production philosophy is simple; it empowers all individuals contributing to a process to identify potential intrinsic waste and eliminate it while optimizing the product. The mechanism of improvement follows a Plan/Do/Study/Act cycle:

Plan phase, a problem or process that needs improvement is identified.

Do phase, the process is observed and measured to identify wasteful and valuable components. The process map is used at this stage to define valuable and wasteful component steps.

Study phase, the process is analyzed and component steps are determined to be valuable or wasteful.

Act phase allows for process improvement by enacting strategies or solutions to minimize wasteful or non-value added steps

Image credit: Spinal fusion by PumpingRudi. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Lean principles have been very effective in decreasing inefficiencies in mass production. Factories and assembly lines are designed to minimize time and material waste. For example, installing a door onto the vehicle prior to finishing the interior would be a source of waste, as workers would be constantly opening and closing the door to install parts into the interior of the car. Similarly, Lean principles have been used in the surgical realm to enhance perioperative efficiency by improving the punctuality of on-time first start morning cases and decreasing turnover time between surgical cases. Surgical workflows themselves have classically been thought to be resistant to standardization. Surgeons have been traditionally viewed as independent entities that cannot or are unwilling to be modified.

We decided to apply Lean principles to a heterogeneous set of low back spinal fusion surgeries to see if process improvement was possible in this paradigm. We chose these procedures because these are very common neurosurgical procedures performed in the US. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of spinal fusion surgeries increased from 288,000 per year to 488,000 per year (a 70% increase). This trend continues to this day.

Image credit: Figure by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) via the US Department of Health & Human Services.

We began in the Plan phase by creating a process map where we defined similar modular steps within each surgical procedure. This included the surgical exposure, discectomy/decompression (removing the intervertebral disc or removing parts of the bone which are causing symptomatic compression of nerves), hardware placement, and surgical closure. The Do phase involved tracking the time and waste for each modular step. In the Study phase, we analyzed these results, and in the Act phase we implemented improvement strategies.

Operating room efficiency is a natural target for process improvement aimed at improving the value of care overall. The operating room is a system within itself; nurses, students, technicians, anesthetists, and surgeons all work together to provide the best care they can. Despite best intentions, every system has inefficiencies which can be improved upon to lower cost. It often takes a shift in the organizational culture for individuals to identify wastes and enact meaningful change. Increasingly, comparative data benchmarks medical care among competing systems. This consumer transparency has become a main driver of iterative process improvement. Adopting Lean principles is straight forward, even when applied to neurosurgical procedures, and will facilitate all healthcare providers and caregivers to deliver the highest value healthcare. There is no simple answer to blunt the rising cost of US healthcare, but by focusing on small parts of this complex system, we can create meaningful change.

Featured image credit: Operating by Piron Guillaume. CC0 via Unsplash.

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The multifaceted art of lying

In 1882, Mark Twain gave a short speech titled “On the Decay of the Art of Lying,” not his best or wittiest. I assume that Oscar Wilde did not miss the published text of that speech, for seven years later, he brought out  a kind of treatise in the form of a dialogue with a similar title, namely, “The Decay of Lying—An Observation,” one of his most powerful and brilliant (as always, too brilliant) essays.  (There is really no dialogue there, for it resembles some of Plato’s dialogues, with Plato’s shedding words of paradoxical wisdom, while his interlocutor keeps nodding assent and admiring the teacher’s infinite wisdom. Wilde’ participants have the names of his sons, Vivian and Cyril, at that time little boys.) In 1891, he revised the text, and we know it as it appeared in his book Essays.

Image credit: Mark Twain photo portrait via The Library of Congress. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.Image credit: Oscar Wilde by Napolean Sarony. CC0 1.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Mark Twain did speak about blatant and inept lying, while Oscar Wilde’s lying meant “creativity,” and he bemoaned its decay. In this blog, I don’t aspire to such heights of ethics or aesthetics, but it might interest our readers to know where the word lie came from, or rather what the word meant when it was coined (I’ll pass by the reconstruction of the unattested *leugh– root). Etymologists are down to earth, meat and potatoes (that is, meaning and phonemes) people. Once they hitch their wagon to the asterisked sky of the protolanguage, they usually crash in a nearby swamp.

In the posts for April 12 and 19, 2017, I discussed the origin of the word sin, and that took me to the complicated history of truth. Not unexpectedly, lying is a related subject. Truth, as explained two springs ago, in the past was mainly a legal concept: it designated “evidence confirmed by witness testimony.” “Lie” also belonged to the vocabulary of the judicial process and referred to the opposite of “truth,” or “lack of evidence”—thus, not the distortion of truth, let alone a deliberate distortion of it. In medieval literature (especially Icelandic), as long as a tale could not be refuted, it was called “a lying story.” The vague term verisimilitude covered both truthful and “lying” stories. The speaker did not have to prove the veracity of the narrative. If the listeners failed to give him or her the lie in our sense of this phrase, the tale remained within the bounds of porous truth.

No doubt, lie and truth are antonyms. Yet even today, a lie is not a simple negation of truth. Half a millennium ago, Michel de Montaigne wrote: “If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.” Montaigne was right (as always).

Concealment is the clue to our today’s plot. Image credit: Veil by Zivya. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is common knowledge that words modify and change their meanings. Anyone who has read an annotated edition of Shakespeare has been told on every page that hundreds of our meanings do not fit Shakespeare’s context. Some changes are dramatic (for instance, still means “always”; one could not say I still live in Stratford with the implication “…as before”); others are small but important, for instance, as when think means “brood, mope”). The same holds for lie. Already in the Middle Ages, this verb could signify what it signifies today, and this complicates our understanding of old texts, but then the same can be said about Shakespeare’s usage: in his English, think did not always mean “mope”!

The etymology of lie is obscure, seemingly unknown. The word has exact cognates in every Germanic language: Dutch liegen, German lügen, Icelandic ljúga, and so forth. The Slavic cognates also mean “lie” in the modern sense of the Germanic verb, but the Baltic analogs, which usually correspond to the Slavic ones quite well, mean “to request,” and this discrepancy has never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction.

The words for lying exist in all the Indo-European languages, and not a single one of them has a clear origin. I’ll give a short list of the usual conjectures and opinions on the etymology of such words. Greek (to which we owe pseudo-): no clue; Latin: perhaps “something thought up”; Celtic: possibly, “fall, destruction”; Germanic: no clue (the idea that Germanic borrowed its word from Celtic is shaky; sometimes “lie” has been connected with the concept of winding); Baltic: perhaps from the idea of “bent”; Indo-Iranian: a possible connection with “erodedness” and “injury.”

Nothing but the truth. Image credit: Witness impeachment by Eric Chan. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is a curious fact that the nouns for “truth” are usually derived from adjectives (like Engl. tru-th and German Wahr-heit), while those for “lie” are “pure roots.” True and its Indo-European synonyms also pose hard questions to etymologists, but those words are usually not so impenetrable. Does it say something about the age of lie and its synonyms elsewhere? Is lying the more ancient concept, comparatively speaking? I am not sure, but the fact is curious.

Strangely, the light on lie may come from Gothic, a fourth-century Germanic language. The verb we need sounds there as liugan, almost like Dutch and Icelandic liegen and ljúga (see them above). But the Gothic verb has an astounding homonym: liugan “to marry.” Opinions on this fact are divided: all the modern sources call liugan1 and liugan2 homonyms, with liugan “to marry” being traced to Celtic with much greater certainty than liugan “to lie.” Several legal terms were indeed taken over by the early speakers of Germanic from the neighboring Celts (oath and free are among them).

But Jacob Grimm, the elder of the two fairytale brothers and the great founder of Germanic philology, thought differently. He always attempted to trace old homonyms to a single ancient root. In this case, he pointed out that marriage presupposed the veiling of the bride at the wedding. He cited a few convincing parallels from Latin and Spanish and concluded that the original meaning of liugan was “to conceal, to veil,” whether facts or the bride. “Lie,” an eternal partner of “truth,” appeared as a body of concealed information. Although the whole argument took one short paragraph in a huge volume, J. Grimm’s hypothesis was noticed (like everything he ever said) and endorsed by a few distinguished scholars. But, surprisingly, later, it was forgotten, reinvented without reference to Grimm, and buttressed up by much weaker arguments. For instance, there was an attempt to explain both verbs as a relic of ancient magic (a most unconvincing idea). Yet in 1927 it was given a boost; surprisingly, no one joined the club.

Baron Munchausen, the greatest liar in world literature. Too bad, our children rarely know anything about his delightful adventures. Image credit: Münchhausen’s ride on the cannonball. Engraved by August von Wille. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I think Jacob Grimm was right (he shared Montaigne’s enviable quality of being almost always right), even though at present I have no allies. His explanation is elegant and persuasive. Perhaps the Goth understood the basic idea of both verbs, and it did not inconvenience them: concealment is concealment.  We ask for something we don’t possess, the object of our desires is hidden, as it were. Is this the shaky bridge from Germanic and Slavic to Baltic?

To be sure, liugan “to marry” is a legal term, but it does not follow that it could not be native. In light of Grimm’s etymology, “truth” and “lie” begin to look like well-married partners, and I hope that his etymology has long legs. A cognate of Gothic liugan “to marry” does not exist elsewhere, but many words disappear and are replaced. Besides, who said that a Gothic word had to have exact analogs in the rest of Germanic?

Featured Image: “Pinocchio Parco Di Pinocchio Collodi Italy Tuscany” by Schreib-Engel. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Regifting ideas: How an obscure idea from animal breeding helps us to understand genome evolution

One of the more satisfying aspects of science is that an often fairly technical or obscure idea from one field can later turn out to be a key guiding principle in another, rather distant, field. One such example is a historical result from the theory of animal breeding that now provides critical insight into the way evolution structures genomes.

One of the early observations from DNA sequencing studies was the finding that regions where the rate of gene exchange between chromosomal pairs (recombination) is low tend to show much less variation. The mechanism initially proposed for this removal of variation was the fixation of favorable new mutations. When a beneficial mutation sweeps through a population, it results in nearby chromosomal sites all tracing back to the rather recent common ancestral sequence on which the original mutation arose. This shorter time back to a common ancestor results in much less time for new variation to arise via mutation. However, it was later pointed out that the same observation of an inverse correlation between rates of variation and recombination could be generated simply by the removal of deleterious new mutations by selection. Hence, both adaptive (fixing new good mutations) and status-quo (removing new deleterious mutations) processes could generate such a pattern. As whole genome sequencing progressed, more fine-scale patterns were observed (such as differences in the use of preferred codons), not just over regions of chromosomes, but on a much smaller scale, such as within single genes.

Science is at its most exciting when it harvests from a number of apparently disjoint fields, but this is often hampered by a low rate of exchange of ideas between fields.

Moving from the whole-genome sequencing of this century back to 1966, two animal breeders, Bill Hill and Alan Robertson at the University of Edinburgh, were interested in the impact on a gene under selection (either favorable or deleterious) from additional selection at a nearby (linked) site. Their rather esoteric theoretical study, for which the authors never envisioned having any hard data to fully vet, was concerned with the rates of advance of favorable traits under artificial selection by breeders. Their finding, now called the Hill-Robertson (HR) effect, was that selection (of any type, positive or negative) at one site makes selection at nearby sites less effective. Hence, if there is nearby selection, a favorable allele is slightly less likely, and an unfavorable allele is slightly more likely, to spread through a population. In regions of the genome where the rate of recombination is reduced, the reach of this effect is more extensive.

This key principle is now being applied to examine how the strength of evolutionary forces varies across a genome. Regions with a history of being under stronger selection often tend to show more divergence between populations. The HR interpretation of this result is an increase in the fixation of slightly deleterious mutations due to reduced efficiency of selection from the impact of nearby selected sites. Likewise, numerous features, such as differences in the codon preferences rates within genes (lower bias within some long genes) is now viewed through the HR lens, in that selection, either for newly favorable mutations or to remove nearby deleterious mutations, makes selection less effective overall, allowing weakly deleterious mutations to behave as if they are effectively neutral. Ironically, the HR effect suggests that more genes within a genome perform as if they are essentially selectively neutral because selection is so widespread in the genome

The most extreme manifestation of the HR effect comes back full circle to its breeding roots, in examining the impact of domestication. When ancestral progenitors are compared, whole-genome sequencing often shows an excess of deleterious alleles in the domesticated species. This is especially true in plants such as rice that are largely selfing (and hence have a large chromosomal range over which HR effects can operate due to a reduction in the effective recombination rate). Selection for domestication genes by ancient breeders resulted in a reduction in the efficiency of selection on nearby weakly selected sites (most of which were deleterious). The result is a cost of domestication, wherein a domesticated genome may be enriched (often significantly so) for deleterious mutations that are otherwise weeded out of natural populations. As a result, many of our domesticated species are burdened with deleterious alleles that are very uncommon in natural populations. The use of gene-editing to replace these deleterious copies with more fit alleles from wild populations may offer a rapid path for crop improvement.

Quantitative genetics, the field of the genetics and evolution of traits determined by variation in a number of genes coupled with environmental variation, contains many such examples wherein ideas from one field enhance our understanding of another. For example, human geneticists can gather important insight on the genetic structure of disease genes from the extensive gene mapping studies in maize, and important principles of evolution in natural populations can be gleaned from plant and animal breeders. Science is at its most exciting when it harvests from a number of apparently disjoint fields, but this is often hampered by a low rate of exchange of ideas between fields. In this age of ever-increasing specialization, training our next generation of scientists to be more widely read is both a challenge and an exciting opportunity.

Featured image credit: ‘girl-young-person-beautiful-3211146’ by severyanka. CC0 1.0 via Pixabay.

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Democracy and political violence: the case of France

Does democratic politics eliminate political violence? Are citizens of a democracy prepared to resolve their political differences solely at the ballot box? The fighting at Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 suggests that these are questions as relevant today as at the highpoint of European political confrontation during the interwar years.

The French Third Republic, a democratic parliamentary regime that lasted from 1870 until 1940, provides a relevant case study with which to examine such issues. During the 1920s and 1930s, an array of violent political groups confronted each other in the streets and meeting halls of France. Extreme right-wing paramilitaries threatened to smash their enemies and bring an end to the hated parliamentary regime. Communists and socialists promised to halt the march of French fascism with the fists of the proletariat. Dozens of people died in political confrontation during the interwar period. Historians have, however, dismissed French political violence as unserious, confined largely to rhetorical bluster in the press and macho posturing in the street. Consequently, Serge Berstein termed the bitter political conflict of the period a ‘simulated’ confrontation, arguing that French democratic political culture left no room for physical aggression.

My research suggests otherwise. Examining violent encounters in a number of settings from the streets to the factory floor, I have investigated the frameworks by which contemporaries understood, justified, and condemned political violence. In the street, armed and uniformed political activists frequently clashed. Many confrontations rested on ideas of territory. For a right-wing militant to enter an area claimed by the left was perceived as a daring display of bravado and heroism and a challenge laid down to the enemy. Such a challenge could not go unanswered and the eviction of the invader was framed a point of honour.

Place de la Concorde 7 février 1934 by unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The violent clashes that resulted were interpreted according to shared notions of “manly” behaviour. Much depended on understandings of a fair fight. Opponents were required to face each other in the open, in even number, and engage in hand-to-hand combat alone. To fall short of these standards were considered cowardly. Of course, enemies regularly accused each other of not fighting fairly. The extreme right believed that communists preferred to ambush their adversaries, attacking under the cover of darkness. Antifascists claimed that French fascists regularly fired their revolvers and wore knuckledusters under their leather gloves.

All groups considered offensive violence to be undesirable. To attack without provocation revealed a dangerous lack of self-control, an absence of sang-froid and a propensity to fly into a rage; all understood to be “feminine” qualities. Groups on the left and right therefore advised their followers to remain calm under the provocation of their enemies. Violence, however, was legitimate if perpetrated in self-defence. Defensive violence, even when disproportionate to the alleged provocation, was framed as a necessary corrective to the unmanly conduct of the attacker. However, notions of self-defence were ambiguous. Self-defence manuals from the period recommended that, if a citizen felt threatened with attack, pre-emptive violence was the best course of action; it was ‘better to kill the devil than be killed by him’, one guide recommended. Political groups shared this idea and so all violence, including offensive violence, was framed as committed in self-defence.

The democratic politics of interwar France certainly offered a means of political competition for a variety of groups. However, this political culture sat alongside a violent subculture based on deeply-held and shared understandings of masculine behaviour. These standards could work to prevent violence yet they also enabled its deployment, too. Notions of fair play were in evidence across society, from conflict in the street, to the sports field, and the courtroom. In fact, trials by jury frequently saw men and women accused of violence acquitted as jurors brought their own idea of popular justice to proceedings. Research into political violence in Germany suggests, too, that activists followed a code of unwritten rules when they engaged in and interpreted violent confrontations. All this suggests that violent subcultures, especially those grounded in gendered ideals, prove remarkably stubborn.

Featured image credit: French Election: Celebrations at The Louvre, Paris by Lorie Shaull. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr .

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Editing The Scarlet Pimpernel

Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) is one of those popular novels that we tend to assume we already know without having read it. This tale of the French Revolution has been adapted many, many times, for the stage, small and large screens, and radio, and it has been frequently parodied over the decades, most famously, perhaps, by the Carry On team with Don’t Lose Your Head (aka Carry on Pimpernel). We have some general sense there is more than a touch of the superhero about Sir Percy Blakeney, who is an idle dandy at home in England, but the daring protector of imperilled aristocrats in Revolutionary France. He does not possess any literal superpowers, but his nerves of steel and his extraordinary ability to disguise himself, allow him time and time again to rescue aristocrats from the thirsty blade of the guillotine. They also get him out of a series of impossible situations; just when we think his mirthless French nemesis, Chauvelin, finally has him in his clutches, our quintessentially English hero always finds some almost magical way out.

But the 1905 novel is not, perhaps, quite what we expect. There is, for one thing, quite a lot less of derring-do and swashbuckling in the central chapters of the novel, and we see much more of our hero’s French wife, Marguerite than of himself. Long seen as a children’s classic, it is in fact, a story for grown-ups, in that it deals with an unhappy marriage as much as with adventure. The novel’s French heroine does not realize that her apparently feckless clothes-horse of a husband, is really the brilliant counter-revolutionary English hero the Scarlet Pimpernel, and she has come to rather look down on him as an agreeable fool. But his love for her has also been shaken by the knowledge that she once volunteered information about a French aristocrat that led to his execution; Marguerite and Chauvelin are in fact old acquaintances. To complicate matters further, her loyalties are divided by her deep affection for her brother, André, himself once on the side of the revolutionaries. How she comes to see her husband as he really is, risking her own life by crossing the Channel to save him, provides the main narrative thread of the novel.

The Scarlet Pimpernel’s greater surprise, perhaps, is that on closer inspection it tells us as much about 1905 as about the French Revolution. The novel’s period details, the mingling of real figures among the fictional, the Georgian slang, the quizzing glasses, fichus, and minuets thinly conceal its contemporary resonances. Its origins actually lie in two short stories Orczy had written about turn-of-the-century continental anarchists, “The Red Carnation” and “The Sign of the Shamrock.” Despite the costume drama, The Scarlet Pimpernel turns out to be much closer kin than one might suspect to such pre-WW1 political thrillers as Edgar Wallace’s Four Just Men (1905), Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), and William Le Queux’s Spies of the Kaiser (1909), tales that channeled fears about foreign revolutionaries, terrorism, and enemies within. The Scarlet Pimpernel‘s preoccupation with refugees and its deployment of Jewish stereotypes also link it to British concerns about Ashkenazi immigrants from Czarist persecution. Those concerns ultimately issued in the Aliens Act, designed to block Eastern European immigration, which was passed in the same year that The Scarlet Pimpernel was published. In this light, Sir Percy’s appearance at the end of the novel disguised as a grubby and spineless Jewish trader seems a loaded choice, and the novel’s projection of anti-semitism as a French trait rings somewhat hollow. England itself, we are told in chapter 28, remains the”land of liberty and hope,” but we suspect that might be true only for the right kind of people. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to add that the novel’s preoccupation with national identity, with refugees, terror, and border controls mark it as a novel of 1905, but also link it to our own historical moment.

Feature image: “Run on the Tuileries on 10. Aug. 1792 during the French Revolution” by Jean Duplessis-Bertaux. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Putin’s stability becomes Russia’s stagnation

Russia may seem to be on the march globally, but at home Russia is running in place.

This inertia is the flip side of Putin’s domestic image as stability tsar, bringing an end to the “wild 90s” that followed the Soviet collapse.  Back in 2010, Putin credited his policies with Russia’s successful bid to host the World Cup. “In Russia there is political and socio-economic stability,” he crowed. “This gave us the chance to win.”

Now, Russia’s World Cup has come and gone, but stability has given way to stagnation. Putin’s obdurate mentality and an outmoded governance model are holding Russia back.

For Russians, stability is no longer enough after Putin’s 18 years in power. The number of citizens who think the country needs “fundamental changes” has doubled in the last 6 years.  A recent poll showed that a majority of 56 percent of respondents opt for reform, compared to 44 percent who think that “stability is more important than change.”

It’s easy to explain this growing demand for change. During Putin’s first nine years in power (2000-2008), the economy grew at almost 7 percent per year, and incomes more than doubled. In the last nine years (2009-2017), however, growth has been anemic, less than 1 percent per year.  Russia’s economy is now smaller than Canada’s.

This trend is not likely to change. Russian and foreign experts predict that for the next 6 years growth will be no more than 1-2 percent, below the world average. Putin has been forced to embrace painful reforms he once vowed never to support, such as raising the country’s pension age. He has promised a “decisive leap forward” in his fourth term as president, claiming that he will create a “modern system of effective governance.”

But his new government looks a lot like the old one, with many of the country’s key positions occupied by old loyalists from either St. Petersburg or the KGB, including Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the National Security Advisor, the chief of the powerful Federal Security Service, the heads of state gas and oil giants Gazprom and Rosneft, and many other posts.

It’s the same old crew and, more importantly, the same old mindset. Since early in Putin’s rule, his team has been guided by a relatively fixed mentality. This worldview stresses the need for a strong state to protect Russia against internal and external enemies; it prioritizes the group over the individual and order and tradition over change and reform. This core idea is reinforced by habits of control and loyalty acquired under the Soviet state, especially within its security organs, and gut-level resentment about Russia’s global loss of status.

This Putinist outlook has powerfully shaped Russia’s political – and economic – trajectory.  It explains Putin’s two-decade campaign to restore what he sees as Russia’s rightful place in the world, but also inhibits any possible domestic breakthrough going forward.

Russia frequently lags behind its peers – not just traditional Western rivals like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, but also rising middle-income countries like China, India, Malaysia, and even struggling Brazil – in cross-national measures of good governance.  Low productivity and investment make an economic breakthrough unlikely, particularly given a shrinking labor force.

Putin’s need to be in the driver’s seat – he once called for a long period of “manual steering”– and his fear of disorder means that societal innovation and entrepreneurship are stifled by an overbearing state.

As a result, Russia is simultaneously underperforming at home and overambitious abroad.

Russians have generally welcomed the stability that Putin has brought, and see no alternative to his rule – in part because the Kremlin has made sure that no viable contenders can get any traction. Putin is secure in the Kremlin, at least for now.

Two unalterable factors, however, make Putin more vulnerable to unexpected challenges as time goes on: his advancing age (he will turn 66 later this year) and his lame-duck status (he cannot seek re-election in 2024 under the Constitution). Both the search for a successor and attempts to alter the rules of the game to keep the ruling group in power have been catalysts for domestic upheaval and regime change elsewhere in Eurasia – most recently in Armenia in May 2018.

Predicting revolution is a mug’s game.  And given his remarkable run in power, it would be foolish to count Putin out, especially at a time when the Western international order is in such disarray. Continued stagnation seems the most likely outcome. Even so, breakdown seems at least as likely as Putin’s promised breakthrough. 18 years of Putinism show that he is incapable of casting off his resentments, his need for control, and his rigid and statist worldview to embrace the meaningful change that a majority of Russians now say they want.

Featured image credit: Vladimir Putin image by  Dimitro Sevastopol. Public domain via Pixabay.

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