James' World 2

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Shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, President Jimmy Carter said, in a TV interview, that the assault “made a more dramatic change in my opinion of what the Soviets’ ultimate goals are than anything they’ve done in the previous time that I’ve been in office.”

Carter’s critics chortled at his belatedly acknowledged naïveté, but at least he admitted that he’d been wrong and took corrective actions—ending economic assistance to the USSR, suspending nuclear arms control talks, withdrawing his ambassador, pulling out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, stiffening defenses in southern Asia, and arming anti-Soviet insurgents (a move that had woeful consequences later on, but that’s another story).

Our current president, Donald Trump, has admitted that he’d overestimated his ability to end the Russia–Ukraine war and expressed puzzlement over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s continued bombardment of Ukrainian cities. But he hasn’t done much about it, and his view of Putin’s character and goals—which has always been, to say the least, rosy—hasn’t changed one whit.

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Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has been relentlessly attacked by President Trump.Credit…Amber Baesler/Associated Press

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1975

Earth Fires Seeds into Space

“Imagine that the earth has been watched over the aeons by an extremely patient extraterrestrial observer. Nothing, save a little hydrogen and helium, leaves the planet. And then, less than 20 years ago, the planet suddenly begins, like a dandelion gone to seed, to fire tiny capsules throughout the inner solar system. First, they go into orbit around the earth. Six capsules set down on the moon, and from each two small organisms emerge. Five little spacecraft enter the hellhole of Venus’s atmosphere. More than a dozen are dispatched to Mars. Two spacecraft successfully traverse the asteroid belt, fly close to Jupiter, and are ejected by its gravity into interstellar space.

It is clear, the observer might report, that something interesting is happening. We have entered, almost without noticing it, an age of exploration unparalleled since the Renaissance, when in just 30 years European people moved across the Western ocean to bring the entire globe within their ken. Our new ocean is the shallow disk of space occupied by the solar system. Centuries hence, our age may be remembered chiefly as the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. —Carl Sagan”

1925

Television via Radio

“C. Francis Jenkins, radio photographic experimenter of Washington, D.C., has demonstrated apparatus by which moving objects, including a Dutch windmill and motion picture film, were sent by radio for five miles and reproduced on a miniature screen, 10 by eight inches. The transmitter was set up at station NOF, near Anacostia, D.C., and the receiver in Jenkins’s laboratory. He predicts that the process will be perfected so that scenes at baseball games and prize fights can be broadcast over long distances.”

Clearly Written Books

“Below are some of the recent books that can be recommended for clearness of treatment, obtainable from the Scientific American Book Department.

Red-Lead and How to Use it in Paint, by Sabin
White-Lead. Its Use in Paint, by Sabin
The Science of Knitting, by Tompkins
Carbureting and Combustion in Alcohol Engines, by Sorel, Woodward, Preston
Evolution and Animal Intelligence, by Holmes
I Believe in God and in Evolution, by Keen
God or Gorilla, by McCann”

1875

Cincinnati is the Center of the U.S.

“The center of our population has traveled westward, keeping curiously near the 39th parallel of latitude, never getting more than 20 miles north or two miles south of it. In 80 years, it has traveled only 400 miles, and it is now found nearly 50 miles eastward of Cincinnati, Ohio.”

Spiritualist Rebuke

“Most of the organs of the spiritualists in this country are filled with insipid ghost matter, very tiresome and useless to all whose brains have not been softened by the spirit craze. The Spiritual Scientist, a weekly periodical, is an exception. Its editorial columns exhibit talent, while its conductors, with boldness, condemn as unworthy of true believers the printing of the unauthenticated trashy stuff delivered by common mediums. To its contemporary, the Banner of Light, it administers a severe rebuke for its agency in this matter, and alleges that for the past 10 or 12 years, that journal has poured out a weekly stream of pretended spirit communications, of which not more than two in a hundred had contained anything beyond childish nonsense.”

Huge Ganoids Ruled the Seas

“Professor J. S. Newberry gave descriptions of some newly discovered ancient fishes found in the rocks of Ohio. Among these was the entire bony structure of Dinichthys terrelli, the hugest of the old armor-plated ganoids. The dorsal shield weighed 30 pounds. Professor Newberry explained that the dipnoans of Africa and South America were descended from these ancient plated ganoids, and were the last remnants of a group of fishes which in the Devonian age not only ruled the seas, but were the most powerful and highly organized of living beings.”

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1975, Sun Loops: “Loops on the sun are shown in a false-color picture made with the Harvard College Observatory ultraviolet spectroheliograph aboard the Skylab crewed orbiting satellite. The loops, which are part of the inner corona, extend some 150,000 kilometers from the sun’s western edge. Black and blue areas represent the least intense radiation, yellow and magenta the more intense, and red the most intense.” Scientific American, Vol. 233, No 3; September 1975

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The New York attorney general’s office sued Donald Trump and his real estate business in 2022, accusing them of inflating his net worth to obtain favorable loan terms. Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

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It was the telegram exchange that sparked an identity crisis for humankind. In 1960, a young Jane Goodall, working in a remote forest in Tanzania, observed a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard using blades of grass and twigs to fish nutritious termites out of their nest. The primatologist wrote to her mentor, Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, to tell him about her observation, which flew in the face of the conventional wisdom that held that only humans made tools. Leakey replied: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.

”For decades—centuries, even—scholars have attempted to draw a hard line between our kind and the other organisms with whom we share the planet. They have argued that only humans have culture—sets of learned behaviors, such as toolmaking, that are passed down from generation to generation. They have proposed that only humans think symbolically, using signs to represent objects or ideas. That our species alone is self-aware, capable of planning for the future and experiencing emotions such as joy and fear, love and grief. That only humans are conscious, possessed of an inner world of subjective experience.

For his part, Charles Darwin, writing in the late 1800s, opined that nonhuman animals have the same cognitive abilities and emotions that humans have and that any differences were a matter of degree and not kind. In the absence of any way to reliably read animal minds, however, scientists who studied animal behavior and cognition took the position that ascribing human thoughts, feelings, and motivations to animals—anthropomorphism—was a cardinal sin. But in recent decades, examples of other species demonstrating these capabilities have emerged from across the tree of life. The findings have spurred fresh thinking about what, exactly, distinguishes Homo sapiens, with our vaunted intellect, from every other species on Earth.

Let’s look first at our evolutionary nearest and dearest. We, H. sapiens, possess much larger brains than our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos, do—around three times as large. The brain requires 20 percent of our energy budget despite making up only 2 percent of our body mass. Naturally, anthropologists have wondered why we evolved such energetically expensive brains. At the same time, we know that H. sapiens is the sole surviving member of what was once a diverse group of humanoids. Surely our big brains and all the clever things they allow us to do were a major reason for our success as a species, a vital factor in why we alone went on to spread across the globe and thrive in every ecosystem we set our sights on, outcompeting other branches of humanity until we were the last hominin standing.

Yet virtually every trait that anthropologists have identified as one that might have set our kind apart has subsequently been found in another member of the family. Our closest evolutionary cousins, the Neandertals, left behind decorations that suggest they used symbols, which may indicate a capacity for language. The same goes for our smaller-brained relative Homo erectus. And some 3.3 million years ago, long before brain size began to expand in our lineage, an unknown hominin—possibly Australopithecus afarensis—shaped basalt cobbles into cutting tools, demonstrating an understanding of the material properties of stone and a vision for how to transform a lump of rock into a useful implement.It’s not just our closest hominin and great ape relatives that share our powers of cognition. Humans were long thought to be the only moral animals, uniquely equipped with a sense of right and wrong. But we now know that is not the case. The late primatologist Frans de Waal and Sarah F. Brosnan found in laboratory experiments that brown capuchin monkeys would decline a reward of a slice of cucumber if they observed another monkey receiving a better treat (a grape) for the same task. The monkeys’ rejection of unequal payment for equivalent work demonstrated that they have a sense of fairness and experience moral outrage when they get a raw deal.

Other animals exhibit other elements of morality—including empathy. Mice, for instance, can share the emotional state of another individual, exhibiting increased sensitivity to pain if they see a companion showing signs of pain. Dogs recognize distress in their owners and will offer consolation. Rats will sacrifice their own gains to alleviate the suffering of a conspecific, forgoing a food reward if taking the food means inflicting pain on another rat.

Empathy and other complex emotions were long considered beyond the experience of nonhuman creatures. But mounting evidence indicates that they are widespread among mammals. Some of the most striking examples involve emotional responses to death. In 2018, an orca known as Tahlequah made headlines around the world when she carried her dead calf with her for 17 days while she swam 1,000 miles across the Salish Sea. In 2024, Tahlequah lost another calf. This time, she held on to its corpse for at least 11 days before releasing it. Researchers characterized the mother orca’s reaction to these losses as grief.

Apes, monkeys, and elephants have been observed to mourn the loss of bonded individuals, too. It’s not just large-brained mammals that appear to express sorrow, however. Barbara King, who is known for her research and writing on animal cognition and emotion, has described compelling examples of grief in peccaries, donkeys, and ferrets, among others.

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Sam Falconer

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