Old Maid

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Paradise Observed: Taxonomic Perspective in Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago

In 1869, the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace—co-founder with Darwin of the evolutionary theory of natural selection—published an account of the eight years he had spent in the Malay Archipelago. Just five years beforehand, in 1864, Wallace delivered a paper to the Anthropological Society of London, in which he declared that “the same great law of ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’” was resulting in “the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact”. The 1864 and 1867 documents paint a sinister scenario indeed, casting interracial relations as an “unequal” and violent “struggle for existence” between the superior European races and the non-European races, whose mental, moral, and physical degradation doomed them to extinction. Representative of prevailing scientific opinions at the time, these observations stand in sharp contrast to The Malay Archipelago’s observations of happy and harmonious interracial relations in the archipelago, not to mention its praise of the physical and moral attributes of the “savages” there. For the humans of Wallace’s archipelago, life appears to be as Edenic as the natural environment they inhabit. The question I would like to address here is, why did Wallace emphasize the virtuous qualities of the very races he had described as lowly in almost every respect? And why did he concentrate on the interracial harmony in the region rather than the deadly interracial struggle he expressed belief in only a few years before

Dissecting the Shared Genetic Architecture of Suicide Attempt, Psychiatric Disorders, and Known Risk Factors

Background Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide, and nonfatal suicide attempts, which occur far more frequently, are a major source of disability and social and economic burden. Both have substantial genetic etiology, which is partially shared and partially distinct from that of related psychiatric disorders. Methods We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of 29,782 suicide attempt (SA) cases and 519,961 controls in the International Suicide Genetics Consortium (ISGC). The GWAS of SA was conditioned on psychiatric disorders using GWAS summary statistics via multitrait-based conditional and joint analysis, to remove genetic effects on SA mediated by psychiatric disorders. We investigated the shared and divergent genetic architectures of SA, psychiatric disorders, and other known risk factors. Results Two loci reached genome-wide significance for SA: the major histocompatibility complex and an intergenic locus on chromosome 7, the latter of which remained associated with SA after conditioning on psychiatric disorders and replicated in an independent cohort from the Million Veteran Program. This locus has been implicated in risk-taking behavior, smoking, and insomnia. SA showed strong genetic correlation with psychiatric disorders, particularly major depression, and also with smoking, pain, risk-taking behavior, sleep disturbances, lower educational attainment, reproductive traits, lower socioeconomic status, and poorer general health. After conditioning on psychiatric disorders, the genetic correlations between SA and psychiatric disorders decreased, whereas those with nonpsychiatric traits remained largely unchanged. Conclusions Our results identify a risk locus that contributes more strongly to SA than other phenotypes and suggest a shared underlying biology between SA and known risk factors that is not mediated by psychiatric disorders.Peer reviewe

Rising rural body-mass index is the main driver of the global obesity epidemic in adults

Body-mass index (BMI) has increased steadily in most countries in parallel with a rise in the proportion of the population who live in cities(.)(1,2) This has led to a widely reported view that urbanization is one of the most important drivers of the global rise in obesity(3-6). Here we use 2,009 population-based studies, with measurements of height and weight in more than 112 million adults, to report national, regional and global trends in mean BMI segregated by place of residence (a rural or urban area) from 1985 to 2017. We show that, contrary to the dominant paradigm, more than 55% of the global rise in mean BMI from 1985 to 2017-and more than 80% in some low- and middle-income regions-was due to increases in BMI in rural areas. This large contribution stems from the fact that, with the exception of women in sub-Saharan Africa, BMI is increasing at the same rate or faster in rural areas than in cities in low- and middle-income regions. These trends have in turn resulted in a closing-and in some countries reversal-of the gap in BMI between urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries, especially for women. In high-income and industrialized countries, we noted a persistently higher rural BMI, especially for women. There is an urgent need for an integrated approach to rural nutrition that enhances financial and physical access to healthy foods, to avoid replacing the rural undernutrition disadvantage in poor countries with a more general malnutrition disadvantage that entails excessive consumption of low-quality calories.Peer reviewe

Environmentalism and civilizational development in the colonial British histories of the Indian Archipelago (1783-1820)

This article argues that the British Histories of the Indian Archipelago written by William Marsden, Thomas Stamford Raffles, and John Crawfurd can be read as documents advocating better care and protection of the natural environment in the region. Extant scholarship has tended to discourage such a reading, although the writers express many beliefs and sentiments that suggest their ascription to what have been identified as early environmentalist views. The environmentalism of the Histories, however, rests on the belief that human cultivation was necessary for nature’s well being—a belief now seen as antithetical to the values of modern-day environmentalism

Excerpt from The More Known World

Chapter 10 of Tiffany Tsao’s The More Known World is republished with permission from the copyright holder, Tiffany Tsao

Excerpt from The More Known World

Chapter 10 of Tiffany Tsao’s The More Known World is republished with permission from the copyright holder, Tiffany Tsao

The tyranny of purpose: religion and biotechnology in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Critics and reviewers of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go (2005) have often compared it to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but have failed to explore their similarities in a more in-depth manner. A detailed and sustained comparison of the two novels reveals further connections between Ishiguro’s novel and Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), yielding surprising insight into the deeply theological nature of Never Let Me Go and what it has to say about religious life and biotechnological creation. As it turns out, we may be sorely mistaken about the very features of religion and biotechnology that we tend to perceive as merits: namely, religion’s ability to provide its adherents with a sense of purpose, and the benevolent purposes for which biotechnological research is undertaken