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Issues

Volume 5, Issue 3

September 28, 2020

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September 28, 2020

Critical Essays

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On the Futility of Contact Tracing
Jay Bhattacharya & Mikko Packalen
[short_description] Contact tracing may be useful when the number of cases in an epidemic is very small, and only if it is applied aggressively. In cases that do not fit this description, it may make an outbreak worse.
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The Dark Matter Enigma
Jean-Pierre Luminet
[short_description] Unveiling the nature of dark matter is one of the biggest challenges in astrophysics. Jean-Pierre Luminet confronts the many unresolved questions that obscure this perplexing aspect of our universe.
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Cosmology without Design
Lawrence Krauss
[short_description] Does the remarkable fit between living things and their environment suggest that life was designed by an intelligent creator? Lawrence Krauss argues that such an inference is not well founded.
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Disinformed
Adam Garfinkle
[short_description] Deepfakes create an illusion of reality more convincing than any produced in the past. Now is a time in which the line between reality and spectacle have already been blurred, Adam Garfinkle argues.

Review Essays

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Mathematical Virology
Reidun Twarock
[short_description] Models of viral geometry help explain how viruses spread and evolve, and can point the way to novel antiviral solutions. Reidun Twarock shares her work on the icosahedral symmetry of virus casings.
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Black Holes and Quantum Gravity
Aurélien Barrau
[short_description] The search for a quantum theory of gravitation is seen as one of the most difficult and important problems in theoretical physics. Might black holes provide a key? Aurélien Barrau makes their case.
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Babbling Birds
Riny Huybregts
[short_description] At first sight, the chestnut-crowned babbler’s capacity to communicate seems comparable to the way humans form words from phonemes. Should this claim be taken seriously, or is this one for the birds?
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The Arabic Grammatical Tradition
Kees Versteegh
[short_description] In large parts of the Islamic world, children are taught Classical Arabic, which can differ greatly from their local dialect. Kees Versteegh recounts the history of teaching Classical Arabic grammar.
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Between Two Evils
Mikhail Shifman
[short_description] When scientists fled to the USSR to escape Nazism, the Western press followed in detail with the information at hand. But the reality was much worse than they could have imagined.
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Talk Is Cheap
Iris Berent
[short_description] Speech and language are so tightly linked that they are often considered inseparable. But what of sign language? Iris Berent sheds some light on this oft-neglected branch of linguistics.
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The Social Cetaceans
Kieran Fox
[short_description] Though separated from humans by tens of millions of years of independent evolution, whales and dolphins are recognizably like us, if only in ways that we can sense but cannot quite measure.

Book Reviews

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From Genes to Genomes
James Shapiro
[short_description] In his review of Genome Chaos: Rethinking Genetics, Evolution, and Molecular Medicine by Henry Heng, James Shapiro charts the history of the ideas Heng furnishes, and applauds his novel approach.
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Evolution in Revolution
Denis Noble
[short_description] With The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life, Paul Davies joins the distinguished company of physicists who have contributed to fundamental biology.
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Rethinking Justice
Mark Goodale
[short_description] What drives humans to commit inhuman acts? Alexander Laban Hinton looks for answers in Man or Monster? The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer and The Justice Facade: Trials of Transition in Cambodia.
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Madness in Numbers
Christine von Oertzen
[short_description] Theodore Porter’s book Genetics in the Madhouse describes the somewhat surprising origins of the study of human heredity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century lunatic asylums.
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Beyond Dignity
Sophia Catalano
[short_description] Pico della Mirandola is today wrongly considered “a prophet of human dignity”—a title that Brian Copenhaver believes was thrust upon the Renaissance philosopher through the lens of subsequent ideas.

Experiment Reviews

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The Origin of Novel Genes
Richard Buggs
[short_description] A series of studies finds that novel genes do not accumulate with Darwinian gradualism in the phylogeny, but can be gained through radical overhauls. How this might be accomplished is a mystery.
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The Internal Language of Proteins
Zachary Ardern
[short_description] Could proteins share a common language across the major branches of life? A new paper investigates the arrangements of protein domains, considering them as a kind of ordered grammar.
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Sights Unseen
Renaud Bachelot
[short_description] Can we make mice see the invisible? Renaud Bachelot reviews new developments in the emergent field of nano-optics and nanophotonics—particularly, results which explore making infrared visible to mice.

Biographies

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Edsger Dijkstra
The Man Who Carried Computer Science on His Shoulders
Krzysztof Apt
[short_description] Little known outside his field, Edsger Dijkstra was a highly influential and often controversial figure in computer science. He was a pioneer and a genius whose work shaped the field like few others.
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Ibn al-Zarqālluh
Andalusian Astronomy in the Eleventh Century
Julio Samsó
[short_description] The eleventh-century astronomer Ibn al-Zarqālluh has been long established as the most important astronomer of the Islamic West. His ideas remained influential in Europe into the fifteenth century.

Letters to the Editors

######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Confusions Regarding Quantum Mechanics
Gerard ’t Hooft
[short_description] Though strong evidence supports the validity of the Standard Model up to the TeV domain, we do not understand why this model would be all there is to describe what happens beyond that scale.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Reflections on a Revolution
John Iliopoulos
[short_description] Gauge theories brought about a profound revolution in the way physicists think about the fundamental forces. It is this revolution that is the subject of Sheldon Lee Glashow’s essay.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Further Questions for Glashow
Goran Senjanović
[short_description] In “The Yang–Mills Model,” Glashow has described one of the greatest chapters in the history of physics, the story of a beautiful mathematical concept transformed into a theory for all seasons.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On the Origins of Life
Helen Hansma
[short_description] The perspective Brian Miller and Jeremy England bring to their essay on the origins of life is that of physics. Yet the origins of life are, ultimately, chemical and biological.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Terms of Endearment
Juan Uriagereka
[short_description] The situation may be even worse than Evelina Leivada alluded to, whether we are speaking of parameters, features, or, for that matter, rules, as linguists did in the not-too-distant past.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Core Concepts and Terminology
Anna Maria Di Sciullo
[short_description] Although terminology issues are raised at the forefront, the crux of the matter with Evelina Leivada’s essay is not terminology per se, but different views of core concepts in linguistics.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Language Evolution
José-Luis Mendívil-Giró
[short_description] Another expression—language evolution—is often misused in linguistics, due to the fact that the same word is used to designate the languages spoken by people and the capacity of language as such.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### A Collective Action Problem
Martin Haspelmath
[short_description] All linguists are aware that our terminology is often unclear, and sometimes downright confusing. What is wrong with linguists? If it is not a case of scientific neglect, what then is the problem?
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Terminology and Toothbrushes
Kleanthes Grohmann
[short_description] It may be the case that linguists “would rather share each other’s toothbrush than each other’s terminology”—but so what? There are many situations that might prompt the sharing of toothbrushes…
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Attitudes toward Terminology
Fahad Rashed Al-Mutairi
[short_description] Out of the ten key notions that Evelina Leivada focuses on, her discussions of three seem highly problematic: Universal Grammar, faculty of language in the narrow sense, and grammaticality judgment.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### The Reductionist Paradox
Subir Sarkar
[short_description] Reading is hard work, and writing even harder. We aspire toward deep truths but often end up making sweeping generalizations which bear little resemblance to the complex realities that we experience.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Life and Fate
Avi Loeb
[short_description] As life on earth speeds toward an undesirable end, is there a way we might seize the controls and shape our future at will, adding a surprising twist to the cosmic plot? The solution is space travel…
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Inner Speech and Memory
Uli Sauerland
[short_description] Speakers generate inner speech and then may externalize it to share their thoughts with others. But communication is only one function of language. Another function is inner monologue as a memory aid.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Language before Thought
José Manuel Igoa
[short_description] Do inner and overt speech share all their properties except articulation? Are all inner speech episodes composed of words, phrases, and sentences, or can some inner speech episodes be wordless?
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### Cooper’s Ferry Revisited
Stuart Fiedel
[short_description] Contrary to the assertions made by Loren Davis et al., the evidence of a pre-13,500 cal. BP occupation at Cooper’s Ferry is meager and does not prove a Pacific Rim migration took place.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Cultural Connections
Loren Davis & David Madsen
[short_description] The authors provide further comments to clarify the larger picture of what their research at Cooper’s Ferry might mean for the topic of the Pleistocene peopling of the Americas.
######### Card Letter *XXX* ######### On Theory and Practice
Scott Simpson
[short_description] While Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius were indeed enormously influential in shaping modern architecture, noteworthy designs being done today prove that the International Style is no longer dominant.
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