THE BAGUETTE

While I am in France, I have devised a morning walk to take the place of my four mile contitutional in Chapel Hill.  I walk along Boulevard St. Germain, past Brasserie Lipp, Cafe Flore, and Les Deux Magots, until I come to its end, just across the Seine from Place de la Concorde.  Then I turn right and make my way back along the quais, past the Assemble National, the Mint, the Musee D'Orsay, the Academie Francaise, the Louvre [across the river], and Place St. Michel, back to our little apartment.  Before returning home, I walk up rue Monge to the Keyser bakery, which is open even at 7 a.m., to get a fresh, warm baguette for breakfast.  This delicacy, among the best breads in the world, costs just one Euro 10, roughly $1.40 at today's exchange rate.  By way of comparison, a soft, flabby, tasteless Whole Foods knock-off of the French baguette in Chapel Hill costs maybe three times that.

How on earth do they do that?  Simple.  The state subsidizes the price of bread in France.  Why?  Well, it all goes back to the French Revolution, when the new government instituted bread subsidies, at a time when bread was a principal part of the diet of the masses.

I realize that I am being hopelessly romantic, but this just seems to me the way a state is supposed to act.  What I wouldn't give to be a citizen of a country whose people understood this notion and endorsed it.

OMNIUM GATHERUM FROM PARIS

1.    Susie and I set out yesterday morning at nine a.m. for Gare St. Lazare, to catch the 10:20 train to Vernon and Giverny.  It took us twenty-five minutes to snag a cab, and another agonizing thirty-five minutes in Paris traffic to get to the station, so I was very fearful that we would miss our train and have to cancel the trip.

Gare St, Lazare is enormous, and rather hard to negotiate if you don't already know it, as I did not.  I found some automatic ticket dispensing machines, but completely failed to decode them.  The line at the one ticket office wound around two stanchions and clearly was not going to move much before our train left.  Finally, in despair, I said to Susie, "Look, no one seems to be taking tickets.  Let's just get on the train and buy tickets when the conductor comes around.  If that is not allowed, they can throw us off at the first stop, but that is our stop anyway, so what the hell."

We climbed onto a very modern, very attractive, very crowded train and found seats pretty much as the train pulled out.  It turned out there was an intermediate stop -- Mente La Jolie -- but no conductor came through, so I figured there would be a turnstile at Vernon which would stamp everyone's tickets on the way out. We would have to pay up and talk our way through as clueless tourists.

No turnstile at Vernon.  We just got off the train and joined the long line for the shuttle bus to Giverny.  In wonderment, I said to Susie, "We just traveled from Paris to Vernon for nothing.  What on earth is going on?"

Four hours later, we took the shuttle bus back to the train station, where I dutifully bought two tickets [one-way] to Paris -- ten Euros each, once it was established that we are indeed senior citizens.  I slid the tickets into a bright yellow box which stamped them, as instructed by various signs, and when the train came, we got aboard.  Once again, no one asked for our tickets at either end.  Had I not bought the tickets, we could have made the entire round trip free.  I still do not know what was going on.  But is this anyway to run a railroad?

2.   I have for several days been engaged in a death struggle with France Telecom to get our TV set to work properly.  We pay 34 Euros a month [$42] for the privilege of not getting more than about six stations, and I decided the time had come to sort things out.  I shan't go into details -- the struggle is ongoing as I write -- but along the way, as I was doing my six kilometer walk this morning, I imagined myself trying to explain to a service technician in French what is wrong.  [My French is nowhere near good enough to have such a conversation with any confidence that I am communicating succssfully.]  Now, I do know that "brancher" means roughly "to plug in."  If you want to tell someone not to unplug an appliance, "Ne pas debranchez" ought to do it.  How would I say, I asked myself, that something was plugged in the wrong way -- clearly a possible cause for my inability to get the TV set to work properly.  Would I say, "Le TV est malbranche [acute accent on the final e]"?

And then, since I am stll nominally a philosopher, I of course thought of the 17th century proponent of Occasionalism, Father Malebranche.  "Hmm," I thought.  "Malabranche.  malbranche.  Do you suppose he was called Malebranche because he had his wires crossed?"  Just a thought.

5-4

I returned from Giverny to discover that Obama had scored a huge political victory with the Supreme Court's upholding of the Affordable Care Act.  The decision was, in several ways, rather odd, and I will leave it to those far more knowledgeable than I to parse it and explicate it.  But the political significance is, I think, unambiguous and of major importance.  I actually believe that ths decision will very materially aid Obama in his quest for a second term.  We shall see.  For the time being, it is enough to savor the relief and the pleasure.

TIME ZONES

When I arise in the morning in Paris, it is barely past midnight in Chapel Hill.  For the most part, this bizarre disarrangement of the normal order of things is manageable, but every so often, something is happening in the United States that really matters to me, and then I must hang about all day until the East Coast pulls itself together and gets up.  Today is one of those days.  Some time not too long after ten a.m. in Washington, the Supreme Court will announce its decision in the Affordable Care Act case. An enormous amount hangs on the decision of this deeply flawed collection of geezers, but I cannot know what they have decided until some time after four in the afternoon Paris time.  You would think that some techie would figure out how to get over this lag, but no.  What to do?

Well, I have just read Linda Greenhouse in the NY TIMES [the TIMES helpfully posts the new day's edition shortly after midnight, so that it will be available for me when I arise -- well, all right, not so it will be available for me -- I mean, I know all about post hoc ergo propter hoc and all that, but the effect is the same].  She knows more about the High Court than anyone, and she says they are going to uphold the law.  God, I hope she is right.

But there is no use snivelling, so today, Susie and I will pass the long hours before Paris catches up with Washington by going to Giverny to see Monet's famous gardens.  This is one of the principal out-of-Paris tourist attractions in the northern part of France, and for Susie, who was a botanist and has been a fanatic gardener all her life, it holds an irresistible appeal.  Giverny, the village in which Monet lived and painted, is in the town of Vernon west of Paris, a forty-five minute train ride from Gare St. Lazare.  We shall take the 10:20 train, spend the day at Giverny, catch the 4:53 or 5:53 back [depending on when Susie can tear herself away], and log onto the internet shortly thereafter to find out what the Supremes have done.

Not a bad way to spend time while waiting to find out whether disaster has struck.

WHAT FUN

My blog post about E. O. Wilson's book has already triggered an interesting series of comments.  I followed the link to Richard Dawkins' extremely negative review, and then read with enjoyment some of the many, many comments attached to it.  This is, for me, pure fun. I don't have anything at stake in this fight, so I can just sit back and enjoy it.  I have read with great pleasure books by both Dawkins [THE ANCESTOR'S TALE] and Wilson, and I simply have no idea which of them is right.  Dawkins thinks Wlson does not understand the mathematics in the 2010 paper Wilson co-authored with two mathematicians, and the commentators to Dawkins' review think he doesn't understand it either.  I am tempted to look up the paper and see whether I can understand it!  Anyway, I welcome comments, both from amateurs like me and from any pros out there who may be reading my blog.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING?

There are, to the best of my knowledge, three English language bookstores in Paris, all within walking distance of our apartment.  The closest, and by far the best known, is Shakespeare & Co., on a Left Bank quai cattycorner across from Notre Dame de Paris [our neighborhood church.]  As readers of my Autobiography will know [Volume One, Chapter Three], I spent a good deal of time hanging out there in the Spring of ’55, when it was called Le Mistral.  The second, also quite well known among Americans in Paris, is The Village Voice [no kidding!], on rue Princesse in the 6^th.  The Village Voice, which is more of a real bookstore and less of a tourist magnet than Shakespeare & Co., hosts readings by visiting English language authors, several of which Susie and I have attended.  The third is a tiny second hand bookshop on a back street up behind Odeon, which Susie and I discovered when we were wandering around one day after seeing a movie at one of the three cinemas in the Odeon area.

Several days ago, I walked to the little secondhand bookstore, where I found a serviceable Dave Brown schlock spy story, which occupied me for a day [not bad for 2 Euros.]  Then Susie and I went to rue st. Julien le Pauvre to have a bite at an English style tea house we favor, after which we walked around the corner to Shakespeare & Co. to look for something to read.  I bought another schlock spy book, by Steve Coonts, but Susie, whose tastes are somewhat more elevated than mine, opted for E. O. Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth.  The Coonts took me all of two days, and there I was again looking for something to read.

Despite having spent a curious and informative afternoon with E. O. Wilson in his Harvard office a quarter of a century ago [Autobiography, Volume Two, Chapter Five], I have long been suspicious of the field he fostered, Sociobiology, while remaining quite impressed by his extraordinary work on ants.  But pressed for something to read, I decided to try his new book.  To my surprise and delight, I found it engrossing and utterly charming.  Or at least that was my reaction to the first three-fourths of the book, but I will get to that in a bit.

The subject of the book is the evolution of eusociality in animal species, including homo sapiens, and the transformation of eusociality into culture in humans.  Wilson defines eusociality as “the condition of multiple generations organized into groups by means of an altruistic division of labor.”  “Altruism” here has a quite specific meaning, namely behavior that does not increase, or even decreases, an organism’s probability of reproducing.  Such behavior is extremely common in ant colonies, in many, if not most, of which there are so-called “worker ants” and “soldier ants” whose actions contribute to the “queen” ant’s ability to reproduce, even though they themselves do not, indeed perhaps cannot, reproduce.  Wilson has been studying ants all his life, and has an endless supply of fascinating examples drawn from the thousands upon thousands of species and genera of ants.  [In the 1950’s, when my sister was doing her doctorate in Biology at Harvard, Wilson was one of her fellow graduate students.  Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould were the star students, of course, and Wilson was very much the odd man out, since in those days no one who was fated to be anyone studied so-called “social insects” – ants, termites, and bees.]

You can see the problem that altruistic behavior, thus defined, presents to an evolutionary biologist.  How on earth can natural selection select the genes that code for altruistic behavior, when such behavior has no reproductive edge, and may even greatly diminish or even eliminate the probability that the organism bearing those genes will reproduce at all?  In theory, such genes should be selected against and disappear from the genome as soon as mutations produce them. 

According to Wilson, evolutionary biologists have been debating and investigating this question intensely for several decades, and Wilson is once again the odd man out.  The dominant explanation is something called “inclusive fitness,” according to which what natural selection selects for is the number of genes that are passed on globally – i.e., by any organism – rather than for the reproduction of any one organism carrying that gene.  The idea [see Richard Dawkins’ influential book, The Selfish Gene] is something like this:  If brother ants on average share fifty percent of their genes [because of the mechanisms of chromosomal reproduction], then one of them will improve the chances of its genes being passed on to the next generation if it takes a less than fifty percent chance of failing to reproduce in order to up the chances of its brother reproducing [by feeding it, for example, or protecting it from a predator] by more than fifty percent.  Cousins will be less likely to sacrifice for one another, and so on for even more distant relatives.  Ants don’t know any of this, of course, but natural selection operates as though they do.  Elaborate Game Theoretic models have been developed to defend this explanation for the evolution of “altruistic” behavior in eusocial species.

Against this theory, which he claims has proved to be both mathematically and experimentally disconfirmed [in this book he does not give details], Wilson offers a theory of group selection, according to which it is not individual organisms but groups of organisms – colonies, nests, extended families – that compete against one another with natural selection determining which group – and hence which assemblage of genes – survives and reproduces most successfully.

The real delight in the book is Wilson’s repeated extended comparisons of hominid evolution with ant evolution.  There are a variety of animal species that have developed eusocial behavior:  ants, of course, and termites and bees, and naked moles [who knew?], and a rare species of shrimp [this one is a real outlier, as we shall see], and, of course, the pre-hominids and hominids leading to homo neanderthalensis and homo sapiens.  From his extensive study of and reflection on these instances of eusociality, Wilson comes to the conclusion that there were three facts about the early hominds – “preadaptations,” as he calls them – that prepared them for the possibility of making the leap from eusociality to culture [which is the real subject of his book.]  Rather unexpectedly, these are: first, the shift from an herbivorous to an omnivorous diet, which is to say the regular hunting for and eating of meat;  second, the possession of flat, soft appendages [i.e., fingers, as opposed to talons or claws] suitable for working materials like stone, shaping them, and manipulating them;  and finally, the successful mastery of controlled fire.  It is this last that has forever barred highly intelligent creatures like dolphins or octopi from ever evolving culture.

There is much, much more in the first three-quarters of the book, all of it fascinating, and some of it – the occasional autobiographical bits – quite charming.  Here is just one passage that gives something of the flavor of Wilson’s authorial voice:

“[I]n 1967, I received a piece of fossil metasequoia amber that two amateur collectors had picked up in a New Jersey stratum of Late Cretaceous age, about 90 million years old.  Present together were two beautifully preserved worker ants in the transparent amber.  They were almost twice as old as the most ancient ant fossil previously known.  As I held the piece in my hand, I knew I was the first to look back into the deep history of one of Earth’s two most successful insect groups.  It was among the most exciting moments of my life (and I can understand if the reader does not appreciate my reaction to a fossil insect.)  In fact, I was so excited that I fumbled and dropped the piece.  It fell to the floor and broke into two fragments.  I froze and stared down in horror, as though I had just bumped into and shattered a priceless Ming Dynasty vase.  However, fortune continued to favor me that day.  There remained one undamaged ant in each fragment, and each could be polished separately.”  [pp. 121-122.]

And so it goes, until, on page 232, things turn horribly wrong, and the book more or less falls apart.  The elaborate and fascinating discussions of ants and termites, hominids and homo neanderthalensis, have all been the merest prolegomenon to Wilson’s real subject, the evolution of culture.  The final one-quarter of the book is devoted to a discussion of the evolution of language, cultural variation, morality, honor, religion, and the creative arts.  And here, despite having a number of quite interesting things to say [about color perception, for example], Wilson wanders outside the sphere of his indisputable mastery and reveals his limits. 

Discussing the famous debate between B. F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky in 1957, Wilson completely breaks tone by quoting an extremely technical passage from Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s book, which he then mocks, as if to say, “How can jargon like this possibly tell us anything about language?”  Now, Wilson has for more than two hundred pages been skimming over some equally technical stuff in evolutionary biology, repeatedly saying that he is simplifying it for a non-specialist audience, but instead of quoting any of the many quite lucid informal explanations Chomsky has given of his influential theories, Wilson adopts a know-nothing attitude that would do credit to an evangelical Christian.  I was so affronted by the passage that had it not occurred late in Wilson’s exposition, I would have simply thrown down the book in exasperation and refused to continue reading.

So, I warmly recommend the first three-quarters of Wilson’s new book as an engrossing and extremely informative treatment of a rich subject.  I you can find a second-hand copy in which the last sixty-five pages have been torn out, so much the better.

REPORT FROM PARADISE

Susie and I had dinner Friday evening with Anne Berry and Philip Minns, two old friends who live in the Paris suburb of Sevres.  Anne and Philip are both professional simultaneous translators, a profession which I cannot even imagine being able to pursue.  We were discussing the Socialist Party victory in the parliamentary elections, and I remarked that France once again had a socialist government after two decades.  Philip then told me something of which I was completely unaware.

France, like America, has four levels of government -- the city or municipal level,what we would call the county and state levels, and then the national level.  As in America, elections at the various levels are staggered, occurring in different years. When Francois Mitterand, the last Socialist President, was in office, he actually faced a hostile majority in the National Assembly and right wing administrations at the lower levels, right down to some of the major cities.  But Francois Hollande not only now has a majority in both the National Assembly and the mostly ceremonial Senate, he also has Socialist governments at every other level of the French political system.   France is, at least for the next several years, officially a socialist country.

So what is it like living in paradise?  Well, the weather has been awful for months, putting a damper on Fete de la Musique, and last nignt Spain eliminated France from the quarterfinals of the Europe Cup, so the sans-culottes are not dancing in the streets.  Indeed, Susie has observed, as we sit in our little cafe, that the current fashion among French women is skin-tight leggings under very short skirts, so perhaps "sans culottes" is not an entirely appropriate term.

It is, of course, a trifle early to form a reasoned judgment concerning the new government.  The second round of elections for the National Assembly was only seven days ago.   But as one who has spent most of the last three-quarters of a century having private fantasies of democratic socialism, I cannot help but have hopes.

The local opinion is that taxes will go up.  If they are imposed on the more affluent to pay for social services for the poor, I say let them go up.  I pay two sorts of taxes on my little apartment, and I consider every Euro of them a Euro well spent.  Now, if Holland can only somehow browbeat Angela Merkel into allowing a modest rate of inflation and moderating her calls for austerity in the face of economic recession.  That really would be something to cheer about.