15453. (Matt Rid­ley) The Red Queen ― Sex and the Evo­lu­tion of Human Nature
15454. (Christo­pher Boehm) Hier­ar­chy in the For­est ― The Evo­lu­tion of Egal­i­tar­i­an Behavior
15455. (Richard Wran­ham & Dale Peter­son) Demon­ic Males ― Apes and the Ori­gins of
. . . . . Human Violence
15456. (Christo­pher Wal­drep) The Many Faces of Judge Lynch ― Extrale­gal Vio­lence and
. . . . . Pun­ish­ment in America
15457. (John Ham­mond Moore) Car­ni­val of Blood ― Duel­ing, Lynch­ing, and Mur­der in
. . . . . South Car­oli­na 1880–1920
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This is a well-writ­ten and inter­est­ing dis­cus­sion of the shifts in the­ory con­cern­ing the evo­lu­tion of sex­ual repro­duc­tion that took place in the 1970s and 1980s, after the old mod­el of “sex­ual repro­duc­tion opti­mizes vari­ety in the gene pool” began to be doubt­ed and under­mined. Some ot these con­tro­ver­sies are very abstruse, and Rid­ley did a good job of clar­i­fy­ing them for a non-pro­fes­sion­al read­er. It was pub­lished a decade ago, but from what I under­stand there has been no major shift in the the­o­ret­i­cal land­scape since then, so I wouldn’t say it was out­dated. The weak­est part of the book is where Rid­ley tried to apply the bio­log­i­cal find­ings to human soci­ety. For exam­ple, he rather mis­un­der­stood the “tragedy of the com­mons” the­sis and mis­ap­plied his bio­log­i­cal mod­el to a social ques­tion in which he had the facts wrong. [I think I’ll write more on this in a future blog, after I rus­tle up some sources]. But the book was still a good job of sci­ence pop­u­lar­iza­tion, and Rid­ley had the good taste not to turn the peo­ple he dis­agreed with into vil­lains and rec­og­nized that good sci­ence can be done by peo­ple on the wrong track (and bad sci­ence can be done by peo­ple on the right track).

15427. (Peter James) Cen­turies of Dark­ness ― A Chal­lenge to the Con­ven­tion­al Chronology
. . . . . of Old World Archaeology
15428. (Lawrence H. Kee­ley) War Before Civilization
15429. (Tim­o­thy Kyger) Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (ISS): Past, Present, and Future ― A
. . . . . Cri­tique [arti­cle]
15430. (Stephen Grey) Ghost Plane ― The True Sto­ry of the CIA Tor­ture Program
(Sea­mus Heaney –tr.) Beowulf ― A New Verse Translation:
. . . . 15431. (Sea­mus Heaney) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 15432. Beowulf [bilin­gual text; orig­i­nal Anglo-Sax­on and trans.by Sea­mus Heaney]
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Wiglaf’s speech in praise of Beowulf — I can’t iden­ti­fy the artist.

If you’re going to get any edi­tion of Beowulf, the ancient Anglo-Sax­on epic, get this one. Until now, I got along with the ser­vice­able trans­la­tion by Michael Alexan­der — noth­ing wrong with it. But this trans­la­tion by renowned Irish poet Sea­mus Heaney leaps from the page and sings. For the first time, a mod­ern read­er can expe­ri­ence the poem with the imme­di­ate plea­sure that they would get from read­ing a good-qual­i­ty con­tem­po­rary fan­tasy novel.

Take this sam­ple, cho­sen almost at ran­dom (I could have grabbed some­thing from any page).

Here’s the original:

Nis þæt feor heonon
mīl-gemearces, þæt se mere standeð
ofer þæm hon­giað hrinde bearwas;
wudu wyr­tum fæst wæter oferhelmað.
Þær mæg nih­ta gehwæm nīð-wun­dor sēon,
fyr on flōde; nō þæs frōd leofað
gume­na bear­na þæt þone grund wite.

Heaney ren­ders it:

A few miles from here
a frost-stiff­ened wood waits and keeps watch
above a mere; the over­hang­ing bank
is a maze of tree-roots mir­rored in its surface.
At night there, some­thing uncan­ny happens:
the water burns. And the mere bottom
has nev­er been sound­ed by the sons of men.

The Eng­lish of a thou­sand years ago is so extreme­ly dif­fer­ent from the mod­ern lan­guage that its ancient lit­er­a­ture is inac­ces­si­ble to us, except in trans­la­tion. Many bored stu­dents have been flogged through Beowulf as an oner­ous duty, but oth­er­wise the poem has not real­ly excit­ed the imag­i­na­tion of mod­ern read­ers. This won­der­ful trans­la­tion will change that. It has already become one of the most sur­pris­ing best­sellers on the NY Times list. I have to thank Skye Sepp for loan­ing me a copy. The paper­back, pub­lished by W.W.Norton, is hand­some. Heaney’s detailed pref­ace is illu­mi­nat­ing. I also have to thank Steve Muhlberg­er for draw­ing my atten­tion to it on his site, Muhlberger’s Ear­ly His­tory.

This is the essen­tial book on the sub­ject, which is too depress­ing for me go into in detail. If you have the stom­ach to learn just how pro­foundly evil the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion in the Unit­ed States is, and the dis­gust­ing Con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment that cre­ated it, then read this book. Until this issue is resolved, prefer­ably by try­ing George W. Bush and his gang­ster chums for trea­son, Amer­i­cans will nev­er be able to look any­one straight in the eye.

If, like me, you’ve been con­fused by NASA’s con­stantly shift­ing plans for a space sta­tion, this brief arti­cle will clear up the fog. Those of us who grew up want­ing to see a sus­tained and log­i­cal pro­gram of space explo­ration, not for imme­di­ate polit­i­cal and social motives, but for the long-term ben­e­fit of the human race, have always expe­ri­enced some frus­tra­tion with NASA. It’s as if we were gen­uinely reli­gious peo­ple who dis­cov­ered that their church was more inter­ested in pro­mot­ing bin­go and church bazaars than in serv­ing god. Tim’s paper pro­vides many details that explain why manned space explo­ration has had such a lurch­ing, unsat­is­fac­tory progress. Unmanned space explo­ration, by com­par­i­son, has a his­tory of rel­a­tively smooth, log­i­cal pro­gres­sion. Hope­fully, Tim will write anoth­er paper to explain why this is so.

I rec­om­mend this study of war­fare in pre­his­toric soci­eties, based on archae­o­log­i­cal work and com­par­isons with anthro­po­log­i­cal stud­ies of non-state (trib­al and hunter-gath­er­er) soci­eties. When Kee­ley began his work, his field was dom­i­nated by a kind of “neo-Rousseau-an” ortho­doxy that in pre­his­toric soci­eties with­out cen­tral­ized states, war­fare was unim­por­tant, triv­ial in its effects, and, if extant, more rit­ual than in earnest. This ortho­doxy was not based on any­thing more sub­stan­tial than wish­ful think­ing. Even when it held sway, the weight of archae­l­og­i­cal and anthro­po­log­i­cal evi­dence con­tra­dicted it. But it was so strong a notion that Kee­ley could not get a grant to study pre­his­toric fortress­es, with clear­ly evi­dent moats, pal­lisades, and skele­tons of bat­tle vic­tims, until he renamed them “enclo­sures”.

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15347. (Adju­tor Rivard) Chez Nous, Our Old Que­bec Home [tr. W.H. Blake, ill.A.Y. Jackson]
15348. (Jean Pierre Waltz­ing) Étude his­torique sur les cor­po­ra­tions pro­fes­sion­nelles chez
. . . . . les Romains, vol.1
(Nel­ly Han­na –ed.) Mon­ey, Land and Trade: An Eco­nom­ic His­to­ry of the Muslim
. Mediterranean:
. . . . 15349. (Nel­ly Han­na) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 15350. (Nico­las Michel) The Indi­vid­ual and the Col­lec­tiv­i­ty in the Agricultural
. . . . . . . . Econ­o­my of Pre-Colo­nial Moroc­co [arti­cle]
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The above three titles are essen­tial read­ing for any­one inter­ested in the his­tory of democ­racy. When Steve Muhlberg­er and I wrote Democracy’s Place In World His­tory, Majum­dar (writ­ten in 1918) and Altekar (writ­ten in 1949) were impor­tant sources for us. The first book alert­ed us to the sig­nif­i­cance of the ancient Indi­an republics, which had become an unfash­ion­able area of study, and were lit­tle known to his­to­ri­ans out­side India. The sec­ond pro­vided a seri­ous analy­sis of them, and demon­strated con­clu­sively that they had to be tak­en just as seri­ously as the polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions of ancient Athens. Ancient India was home to many hun­dreds of city-states, ter­ri­to­r­ial states, leagues, and con­fed­era­cies, and many of these were demo­c­ra­tic, or pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic, in the same sense as the poli­ties of Greece. They involved far greater pop­u­la­tions, were con­tem­po­rary with the Greeks, out­lasted them, and prob­a­bly pre­ceded them. Greek trav­el­ers had no dif­fi­culty see­ing their close resem­blance to their own.

It has been very grat­i­fy­ing to see that our lit­tle essay has con­tributed to a renewed inter­est in this sub­ject. G.P. Singh’s 2003 book is an exam­ple of the renew­al of schol­arly atten­tion. It’s a com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey of the exist­ing doc­u­men­tary evi­dence, with some­thing on every loca­tion that can be con­nected to pro­to-demo­c­ra­t­ic, oligrachic, or con­cil­iar insti­tu­tions. This back­ground knowl­edge is essen­tial if any analy­sis is to take place, and Singh pro­vides up-to-date infor­ma­tion on these sources. It by no means replaces Altekar’s State and Gov­ern­ment in Ancient India, which attempts more analy­sis and inter­pre­ta­tion of the data. Altekar’s analy­sis, in my opin­ion, usu­ally hits the mark. His recon­struc­tion rings true.

Anoth­er book that was an impor­tant source for us was J.P. Sharma’s Republics in Ancient India c. 1500BC-500BC, but I haven’t reread it (I intend to). So if you have any inter­est in the republics of ancient India, start with these four books.