Paternal Bonds, Special and StrangeBy NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, June 14, 2010
Not long ago, Julia Fischer of the German Primate Center in Göttingen was amused to witness two of her distinguished male colleagues preening about a topic very different from the standard academic peacock points — papers published, grants secured, competitors made to look foolish.
“One of them said proudly, ‘I have three children,’ ” Dr. Fischer recalled. “The other one replied, ‘Well, I have four children.’
“Some men might talk about their Porsches,” she added. “These men were boasting about their number of children.” And while Dr. Fischer is reluctant to draw facile comparisons between humans and other primates, she couldn’t help thinking of her male Barbary macaques, for whom no display carries higher status, or is more likely to impress the other guys, than to strut around the neighborhood with an infant monkey in tow.
Reporting in the current issue of the journal Animal Behaviour, Dr. Fischer and her co-workers describe how male Barbary macaques use infants as “costly social tools” for the express purpose of bonding with other males and strengthening their social clout. Want to befriend the local potentate? Bring a baby. Need to reinforce an existing male-male alliance, or repair a frayed one? Don’t forget the baby.
( Read More... )
Are Killer Viruses, Rendered in Glass, Also Things of Beauty?By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, June 14, 2010
In a gallery in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, balanced delicately on mirrored surfaces and quivering slightly with each passing truck, is a lineup of history’s greatest killers: smallpox, influenza, H.I.V.
They are all beautifully rendered in blown glass, their shining, spiky capsids (you have to wonder how they get the Windex into those delicate crevices) encasing their destructive RNA or DNA cores, which are rendered as spiraling dots of milky glass. They are beautiful hand grenades, the illusion heightened by their precarious perches over a hard floor.
Medical journals have cooed over them, and a rendition of the AIDS virus by the artist, Luke Jerram, is in the collection of the Wellcome Trust, Britain’s equivalent of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But as someone covering infectious disease, I found myself offended: I’ve watched people dying of these things now rendered as $10,000 paperweights. There’s something unseemly about celebrating the beauty in something that does such ugly things — in a way that I don’t feel when Steuben does it to a snail.
( Read More... )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}