There were cameras literally everywhere, in London. So far, he’s managed not to think about them. He remembered Bigend saying they were a symptom of autoimmune disease, the state’s protective mechanisms ‘roiding up into something actively destructive, chronic; watchful eyes, eroding the healthy function of that which they ostensibly protected.

This summer Ron Fouchier’s lab in the Netherlands conducted an experiment as frightening for its simplicity as for its results. The team produced a human-transmissible version of  highly pathogenic influenza A (H5N1) or bird flu.

Rather than by reverse genetics, wherein a complex round robin of mutations are introduced in an effort to produce a human-specific bird flu, an approach which failed most recently at CDC, the Fouchier group let the virus converge on a solution all on its own. HPAI H5N1 was intranasally inoculated into a group of lab ferrets (whose immune response mimics humans’). Only ten infection generations later the virus went “airborne”—transmitted by respiration—while remaining as deadly as its field cousins (with a 75% case fatality rate). A repeat of the experiment reproduced the result.

As much of the coverage of the experiment put it, crazy ain’t it? But which part? Biosecurity experts, on the last fumes of post-9/11 funding, have raised bloody hell, warning the methodology and results alike would permit some James Bond villain, stroking an evil ferret, to reproduce the virus.

The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has asked science journals Nature and Science to censor the study, allowing only “responsible” scientists, whoever that might be, access to the study’s specifics. As if hundreds of lab jockeys around the world haven’t already figured them out on their own.

Redacting the new strain’s specific genetic sequence misses the crux of the experiment anyway, speaking more to the ways a civilization fetishizes a cipher than the virus’s actual biology. There are many molecular roads to a deadly pandemic (and this specific one may never prove the winner even if concocted in some nefarious cave lab).

Terrorist organizations needn’t bother bloating their R&D budgets in the meantime. The industrial countries have already undertaken the Big Science needed to kill their own populations. Since 9/11 hundreds of BSL-3 and -4 labs have been built across the world–many in urban areas–for studying pathogens terrorists might use. Accidents have been occurring in these labs with “alarming regularity,” as Laurie Garrett describes it. Any release of a bioengineered agent is likely to be self-inflicted. The biosecurity industry appears the very thing it claims it seeks to destroy. Al-Qaeda couldn’t have planned it better.

The irony hasn’t been lost on commentators, some of whom, channeling Lawrence Fishburne’s CDC official, have pointed out nature is capable enough of producing  a deadly virus. That is, of course, exactly the point of Fouchier’s experiment. Each of the five mutations his lab identified has been found in circulating H5N1 strains and, in my view, have likely already emerged together in combination, blocked from pandemicity only by the wrong local epidemiology, stochastic chance, or both.

Or was that the point? Lost in the brouhaha, which has confounded a pandemic’s cause and its etiological agent, is the infection’s actual source. Every one of the new human-specific influnezas have evolved out of poultry and livestock. Along with H5N1 and 2009′s H1N1, there are H1N2, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H9N2, in all likelihood H5N2, and perhaps some of the H6 series. This year alone two new swine influenzas have been discovered in the U.S. undertaking limited human-to-human transmission: a new H3N2 and a bizarre if attenuated H1N2 found here in Minnesota. Likely only two of a diverse and spatially expansive cryptic reservoir entwined with the hog industry’s commodity chains.

From WWII agribusiness, in what became known as the Livestock Revolution, globally reorganized husbandry into cities of monoculture pig and poultry, selecting for multiple virulent strains across pathogen taxa. We–not ‘nature’–have produced the conditions under which such strains can evolve and spread.

With the USDA and CDC firmly in agribusiness’ control–it is, after all, more important to protect a sector’s quarterly net than the lives of a billion potential victims–barely a peep of this open secret has made it into the public arena. Not even in our Contagion of spectacles. The biosecurity narrative serves opportunistic purposes beyond its proponents’ three-year funding horizons. With it we become unable to talk about influenza’s causes, which appears in part the point.

“‘Pig” refers to animals whom farmers deal, while “pork” is the meat we consume–and the class dimension is clear here: “pig” is the old Saxon word, since Saxons were the underprivileged farmers, while “pork” comes from French “porque,” used by the privileged Norman conquerors who mostly consumed the pigs raised by farmers.

Such a parallax–dual or dueling perspectives–can be found along other dimensions.  The kinds of social histories symbols and what they represent share can also be found in the mathematical modeling used to characterize these little piggies, their roast beef, and their wee pathogens all the way home.

The epidemiological formalisms deployed grew out of historical trajectories of their own, with all manner of interests–personal and political–shaping their inputs and  outcomes. We’re not talking here about acts of blatant corruption–how gauche!–but the way social presuppositions are built into modeling as ethically practiced.

Setting aside the obvious complications we are likely to encounter, in the interests of bringing the issue to a head, if you’ll excuse the hog pun, let me ask, Is there such a thing as a Norman modeling and its Saxon counterpart? Can we find Robin Hood in Sherwood Formalism?

I gave the following talk at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City October 17 as part of a Festschrift for my father, and collaborator, Rodrick Wallace. A Festschrift is a symposium held–and a book published–in honor of a scholar, often on his or her 70^th birthday. As opposed to a Gedenkschrft, held in memoriam (though there are some scholars who deserve the latter long before they’ve left for the great e-journal server in the sky).

I’ll start off with an old joke about Rod, in the de rigueur Boston accent. The joke runs like this: Equation 1. Equation 2. Equation 3. “We can see here an apartheid state entrains both oppressor and oppressed into a synergy of plagues.”

Equation 4. Equation 5. Equation 6. “It follows then that public health can be saved from a catastrophic vortex if and only if we smash the apartheid state.”

All kidding aside, we would make a mistake assuming Rod’s conclusions arise from his formalisms alone or—winky wink—vice versa. Instead, we should say they arise “and vice versa” and honestly so. Or better yet, inextricably so.

That’d be shocking if only because it would imply cultural and political precepts underlie mathematical mechanics. That the field’s formalisms are as much historical objects as many of the phenomena they address, as a number of commentators, including Wittgenstein and the ethnomathematicians, have ventured.

Indeed, as described by Dirk Jan Struik, on his days off Karl Marx parsed the historical variants of the differential—Newton-Leibnitz, D’Alembert, and Lagrange—in favor of one of his own—albeit 19th century—making. Marx thought the classical approaches tautological, each preparing the derivative before differentiation. In addition, he thought the derivative actually emerges only when the increment reached 0, not just on approach. In other words, differentiation isn’t merely approximately true, as it is still often taught today.

Although his conclusions were in line with his materialism, there’s little polemic on Marx’s part here, but such jabs could be worth the effort. Could we in our most skeptical moments trace political machination, however unintended, down even to the operators chosen?

Even a time-delayed Markov chain or its Monte Carlo variant,  for instance, can on its own whitewash the richness of the concept and implications of path dependency, whether as a historical constraint or as a creative force, depending on one’s perspective. A landscape’s historical present embodies a complex interplay between past and present, neither effortlessly remade independent of history nor enslaved to a static past.

Rod’s running buddy Peter Gould meanwhile wrote of the ways SIR systems of the Robert May school disappear social epidemiologies in favor of the Wellcome Trust program.

Better to openly grapple with such complications, whatever their political tilt, than to pretend otherwise. For underneath Rod’s training as a mathematician and physicist is a political geography which informs, or rather embroils, his sessions in Mathematica. You’ll find one such example on the cover of today’s program. But there are others. At the beginning of one 1999 paper he co-authored with Deborah Wallace and John Ullman, centered about a stochastic Markov matrix, Rod wrote,

In 1971 a trip to the Bronx Zoo by subway was unremarkable. The view from the train as it emerged above ground in the South Bronx was the usual New York City amalgam of densely packed old and new-law tenements interspersed with small industrial sites, public buildings, and wood-frame houses, encompassing a poor but lively community life.

Five years later the same vista resembled Dresden after the firebombing, with vacant burned buildings standing as monuments to a public policy of ‘planned shrinkage’ directed against minority voting blocks…

A bit later he writes of the coincidental collapse in American manufacturing across the Rust Belt,

A series of trips on the nation’s single ‘premier’ train, the Metroliner, which runs between New York City and Washington, DC, provides snapshots of decaying and abandoned industrial installations which are as compelling and horrifying as the visions of the South Bronx seen from elevated subway tracks.

The train conceit is the kind of integrative epistemology we would hope steers our best instincts as scholars. I found it had a profound effect on my own thinking.

*

In 2007 I helped produce the first statistical phylogeography for influenza, this one for bird flu H5N1. In the end, however, I could learn nothing from the genetic sequences used to produce the map why the virus emerged in southern China in 1997. As my loyalties lay first in answering questions than in disciplinarity, I moved to studying agriculture’s economic geography:

China’s economic liberalization over the past thirty years represents only the latest layer in the region’s deep cultural strata. The duck-rice-poultry niche best-associated with H5N1 persistence resulted from a series of changes to the agro-ecological landscape layered on over hundreds of years, with agricultural practices—ancient (rice), modern (duck), and present-day (poultry intensification)—melding in such a way as to support the evolution of many virulent influenzas. The details are as always critical, although today we’ll focus only on those of the last layer.

In the late 1970s, China began to move away from a Cultural Revolution policy of self-sufficiency, in which each region was expected to produce most foods and goods for its own uses.

In its place Beijing began an experiment centered about a reengagement with international trade in Special Economic Zones set up in parts of Guangdong, Fujian, and later the whole of what would become Hainan Province. In 1984, fourteen coastal cities were opened up as well, though not to the extent of the economic zones.

As a result annual foreign direct investment increased from zero in 1979 to 45 billion US dollars by the late 1990s, with China the second greatest recipient after the US. Sixty percent of the FDI was directed to manufacturing, and given the extent of China’s smallholder farming, little FDI was initially directed to agriculture.

That soon changed. Through the 1990s poultry production grew at a remarkable 7% per year. Production for domestic consumption and investments were not confined to chickens, given longstanding consumption of duck and goose. And yet poultry exports grew from six million US dollars in 1992 to 774 million dollars by 1996.

The changes were more than merely emergent. They were structured by new legislation and diplomatic efforts. For instance, China’s Interim Provisions on Guiding Foreign Investment Direction aimed to encourage FDI across a greater expanse of the country and in specific industries, agriculture included. Since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2002, with greater obligations to liberalize trade and investment, agricultural FDI has doubled.

By the late 1990s Hong Kong and Taiwan’s contribution to China’s FDI had declined to 50% of the total, marking an influx of new European, Japanese, and American investment.

Economic liberalization had a fundamental effect on regional husbandry, particularly on ownership structure and geographic integration within and beyond southern China. By 1997, and the first H5N1 outbreak in Hong Kong, Guangdong, H5N1’s source, home then to 700 million chickens, was one of China’s top three provinces in poultry production. Some of Guangdong’s poultry operations were by this point technically modernized for breeding, raising, slaughtering, and processing birds, and vertically integrated with feed mills and processing plants.

Foreign direct investment helped import grandparent genetic stock, support domestic breeding, and update feed milling. The majority of breeds used in industrial production were now imported, bred for profit and high rates of capital turnover. At times, production has been somewhat constrained by access to interprovincial grain and the domestic market’s preference for native poultry breeds less efficient at converting feed. Of obvious relevance, production also suffered from less-than-adequate animal health practices.

There’s much, much more to the story, including the means and manner by which the agro-ecological edge density changed with the landscape, a story you can find in our 2010 chapter. But suffice it to say for our purposes today, the sum effect for the Pearl Delta, and further afield across southern China, includes the possibility that poultry intensification and the pressures placed on the agro-ecological matrix have squeezed a diversifying array of influenzas long-circulating year-round through something of a virulence ratchet.

The resulting viral crop—for 1997, H5N1 by molecular happenstance—is subsequently exported by international trade via Hong Kong and China’s diasporic capital.

*

China, of course, is no ultimate source. We see such dynamics recurring elsewhere. Mexico, for one, the presumptive geographic origin of 2009′s H1N1 swine flu, offers a parallel story, if somewhat different in its specifics (here and here).

As Tim Wise shows, NAFTA, neoliberalization of another kind, precipitated an onslaught of grain and meat dumping which forced Mexican domestic producers to either sell off to American agribusiness or consolidate into regional powers able to withstand such market manipulation—with fundamental effects on livestock landscapes and the extent of their commodity chains.

The scale of transport now required under such a model increases the likelihood previously isolated influenzas can trade genomic segments—a globalized version of southern China. Indeed, three of the new virus’s segments appeared to originate in the classical swine influenza (HA, NP, NS), three from a North American H3N2-avian-swine recombinant (PB2, PB1, PA), and two from a Eurasian swine recombinant (NA, M) that originated in birds. In short, every one of the new H1N1’s genetic segments is most closely related to those of influenzas circulating among swine, together originating on wholly different continents.

So a globalizing agribusiness model appears integral to influenza’s spread and evolution. I talk through more of the details in my 2009 paper. But the trick now rests in merging natural and social scientific approaches to better tease out the mechanisms by which livestock influenzas evolve in a world of our own making. Because of the time I’ll offer only one example from our research program.

We hypothesize localities differ in their agro-ecological resilience. That is, in this context they may differ in the capacity to mitigate influenza outbreaks in such a way that the system overall doesn’t shift ecological regimes.

To derive measures for such capacity, we applied a first-order multivariate autoregressive model to a number of national-level livestock production and human demographic time series: chicken output/input (as a market of production intensity), agricultural population, duck density, and chicken density. Does an impact on one variable broadcast to the others? And what does that say about the nature of the system?

We tested whether a number of the measures we derived from the series correlated with H5N1 human caseload and persistence in poultry.

The results showed two measures were indeed related to persistence. However, the direction of the correlation was inverse to what we initially hypothesized. We expected the worst-affected countries, primarily in Asia, here in red, to be the least resilient, not, as we discovered, the most resilient.

The unexpected finding offers new hypotheses about influenza’s dynamics. Human cases may accrue despite, or even because of, resilience. The nest of loose agro-ecological ties across host types may allow the virus local host switching even as the impact of the outbreaks is staunched at the system level.

In contrast, outbreaks in Western countries characterized by vertically integrated filieres and classified as ‘less resilient’ in our model may more easily spread save only for their rigid biosecurity and biocontainment.

Such interventions, applied at great cost, may account for H5N1’s failure to persist in intensive farming. However, failures in biocontainment have been described and the production model may remain an important source from which the virus is regionally spread, including to less prepared places. In other words, the absence of persistent outbreaks in these operations is not synonymous with an inert epidemiology.

A related explanation centers about the economic transitions many of the developing countries are undertaking, as shown in these intensification trajectories, particularly in Asia and in Egypt. Under such transitions traditional and intensive agricultures coexist.

Mosaic landscapes of multiple host types and agricultural sectors, interconnected via loose ecological ties, may allow highly pathogenic influenza strains to avoid extirpation when the number of susceptibles of any one host type decline from disease mortality, culling, or vaccination. Circulating strains are at one and the same time able to locally percolate among smallholders, and by intensive farming, with access to regional food markets, broadcast farther afield. Such mixed landscapes may offer the worse of both worlds.

*

The take-home here is that pathogen dynamics often arise from a multitude of causes interacting across biocultural domains. Study and intervention, it follows, must be based on a multidimensionality public health problems themselves manifest.

Otherwise, many epizootics remain intractable no matter what innovative pharmaceuticals are deployed. Indeed, returning full circle, many researchers allow their discipline-specific methods to determine the questions they address–already half the battle–even as those methods are themselves historically dependent.

If only by example Rod has rejected what in some quarters are the natural sciences’ pretenses of the end of history, while also rejecting social sciences’ positivist phobias. We are scientists living and working in this place at this point of history. And we should own up to it. Our historicity is, after all, whether we know it or not, part of our investigations from the get-go.

Richard Levins pointed out that by serendipity October 17, this day, marks the Day of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the patron saint of unappreciated scholars. I would say if we assimilate anything today I hope it is that we refrain from the Imperium’s imprint in mind and methodology, other than as a target, a historical legacy, and at times a useful technocratic source.

That is, I hope we, a people fighting to be free, begin to accept our scientific heroes, and our scientific selves, on our own terms.

I stood at the window and watched a house on a hill above Sunset implode, its oxygen sucked out by the force of the fire.

This summer’s fires outside Austin reminded me of a recent escape.

One Sunday behind the Orange Curtain in the fall of 2007 I searched for a newspaper on Fashion Island, a hideous high-end mall for the vulgar riche built into the Newport Beach embankment. Like looking for a priest in a whorehouse. Although you can find at least one of whatever you’re looking for eventually, isn’t that right, Father?

Suddenly, my head a moment out of the boosterism, I found myself in an ash downpour. The housing bubbles along the Irvine hills–Foothill Ranch, Modjeska Canyon, Silverado Canyon, Portola Hills–were all Halloween/orange and chimney red. A monstrous black cloud of smoke, spurred seaward by the Santa Anas, blotting out eight-figure views of the ocean, passed judgment on the county in which I found myself jailed 3-5 pending probation.

Earlier in the year just south, Jeff Bowman, San Diego’s fire chief, quit in frustration. Bowman was incensed at his city’s refusal to provide the funding for the manpower and fire companies needed to, uh, fight fires. San Diego, with only fifty fire companies, capable now only of chaperoning its own firestorms to the ocean, left a single fire company to cover the rest of the city. Bowman and his family would flee their threatened home, a victim of his own premonitions.

For decades Carey McWilliams, Joan Didion, Mike Davis and many others have sketched the Southland’s fire socioecology. It’s a ritualized burnt offering for Californian commentators. But there’s something else to living in it. Squeezed between a line of fire and the sea. Walking through the open air maze of Anthropologies and Louis Vuittons with a headache from the smoke and a nagging suspicion the manicured ground underneath–a simulated biome laid atop the desert floor—might melt away on the next step.

Now fires have always been a part of the natural cycle. But how did we get here, where many multiple fires simultaneously threatened to burn through, burn down, and burn out Southern California, one of the most extensive and densely populated commuter networks in the country? The plumes of smoke were visible from space.

*

Fire is defined by a number of properties. The source of the fuel consumed may differ across the forest canopy. A surface fire burns on low-lying plants and grasses. A crown fire consumes the upper portions of the canopy. Some soils contain so much organic material that they can support fires of their own—ground fires.

Fires are also defined by their intensity: low, moderate, or high. The severity and geographic extent of a fire can be determined by the history of an area. A series of fires have burned through Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado with increasing frequency: 1972, 1989, 1996, 2000, and 2002. A fire atlas shows the fires there partitioned—no overlaps—as each eats only the ripest load of tinder available. On the other hand, in many places some spots are hit more frequently than others. So a documented history of fires can help determine where in a fire-prone region the next might begin.

Fires can structure the phylogenetic and age structures of a forest. In burning down the forest at whatever stage of its succession, typically at its catastrophe climax, fires reset the clock and succession begins anew. Fast-growing annual pioneer species make a living on bouncing from one burnt region to another before producing conditions which promote their own replacement by perennials.

Some pioneer species are in their way always present. Once fire clears out a mature forest, new pioneer plants germinate from a resident seed bank. Fire-stimulated germination can begin with enough heat. Other plants, as in the Western Australian Blue Lechenaultia, germinate with just enough of a ‘whiff’ of the chemicals in smoke.

Fire can mold the life history of organisms. Many a tree species can escape frequent fires by growing to a size refuge. Only when the trees are large enough will they be able to survive a burn. That kind of demographic bottleneck puts a premium on growth rates in the early life of the tree.

Avoiding debilitating damage is one way to go. Other chaparral plants promote fire outbreaks. Dylan Schwilk and David Ackerly searched for correlations in fire-promoting characteristics across a phylogeny of different types of pine. A negative correlation between serotiny (releasing non-dormant seeds from a cone upon exposure to fire) and self-pruning (dropping dead branches) proved the most interesting relationship. Those pines that retain such branches provide more fuel for fires. So plants which don’t self-prune—that is, which fuel fires—also open their cones upon a fire.

Arson as a reproductive strategy.

*

Fire, then, isn’t merely ecologically tolerated or taken advantage of by native plants, but also–the trees brag–regularly promoted. What happens, though, when such fires are anthropogenically suppressed? Southwest U.S. fire outbreaks have precipitously declined since the turn of the 20th Century (see figure 5 here). More fuel for fire accumulates. And when fires do occur they’re orders of magnitude larger than the natural ecology has typically selected.

Fire suppression has gone hand-in-hand with regional housing booms. In this round, the exurbs—way out beyond the suburbs and up into the mountains—were until the most recent bust undergoing expansion right up against (and sometimes through) the last of the true forest. These relatively wealthy but ecologically precarious communities put considerable political pressure on local governments to prohibit fires from occurring at all.

The results are as ugly as they are ironic. With enough wood fuel and spurred on by seasonal Santa Ana winds, the conflagrations, as I witnessed in the Santiago fire, are increasingly unstoppable. Maps of Jeff Bowman’s fire further south in San Diego County, showed the county end-to-end splayed by active fires, smoking ruins, and mandatory evacuation zones. The world gone afire.

Bottom line—such an Americanism—who and what are responsible for the fires? We can blame the arsonists. But so much fuel accumulates such fires are bound to happen, if only by lightening strike. We could look to California’s changing climate. Southern California is now marked by increasing droughts. We could blame the bore and bark beetles, killing as many as 90% of oak and pine trees in some areas of San Diego County.

Much attention has certainly been paid to the fires as a criminal matter—targeting pyromaniacs human and otherwise—or even as a political Rorschach—Arizonians this summer blamed their wildfires on immigrants, some of whom served heroically on firefighting units saving rows of McMansions guarding the border—but almost none has been directed at the developers and city fathers who overbuilt into areas until recently left untouched.

Fire suppression remains tightly entwined with the imperatives of what was treated as ceilingless growth in the real estate market, and the political opportunism found in protecting such a run. Mrs. O’Leary’s cash cow.

As in any large ecosystem in which humans are deeply integrated, the causes and effects of such a disturbance are multifactorial and track back deeply into our social structure and political economy. That said, you gotta hand it to them. It takes considerable ingenuity to maneuver a forest fire into laying literal siege to a major American city.

I left California for good soon after.

But off-camera the real DiCaprio, the actor, the man, the quintessential Hollywood liberal, driven from one sound stage to another even between films, appears caught in a dream within a dream. An active environmentalist and creative force behind a documentary on climate change, DiCaprio serves as a board member for World Wildlife Fund, whose aim ostensibly is to save the biosphere. In reality the conservation NGO is spearheading convoluted efforts to destroy it.

WWF has organized a heinous line-up of agribusiness under the presumption those who own the world’s food value chains are the only ones who can ecologically modernize them.

It turns out merely an effort to greenwash the pith helmet: Environmental crises and threats to biodiversity, of agribusiness’ own making, are laundered inside a declensionist colonial narrative. Agribusiness must take over African farmland or Indonesian rain forest to save it, the argument goes. It’s an environmentalism which serves only as due cause for expanding dispossession, pushing subsistence farmers and the indigenous off their lands. Only another iteration of the neoliberal program, which brought about the environmental crises in the first place.

If only DiCaprio would turn into an old man, filled with regret.  Some  sudden sentience somehow. Two years after Nolan’s set wrapped, DiCaprio’s totem spins on. Like many a bourgeois environmentalist he’s still stuck in capital’s inception.

Today we are asking for a touch more.

We’ve just launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for completing a book based on the blog–largely on influenza and agribusiness. We are asking for contributions through our RocketHub site (which works a lot like Kickstarter).  We are also asking that you share the site’s link through your social media: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and–old school–your friends around the lunch table.

Your contributions will help finish a project long underway. We’re about six months from completion and have lined up a major name to write the preface.

Where do the new influenzas come from?
As many of you who regularly read the blog already know, the influenza scares of the past decade aren’t going away anytime soon. Bird flu H5N1 and swine flu H1N1 are only two of a veritable menagerie of xenospecific influenza strains now circulating: H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H9N2, in all likelihood H5N2, and perhaps some of the H6 series.

To a one these have emerged out of livestock, and with good reason.

The livestock sector has been increasingly organized worldwide under an agribusiness model that has reorganized stockbreeding in its entirety. Genetic monocultures. Confined animal feedlots. Consolidated megafarms. Vaccines and antibiotics. Sped-up finishing times. Globally extended commodity chains. Highly capitalized operations vertically integrated from fertilization to freezer. Price spikes fueled by equity speculation, threatening farmers and food security alike.

There is considerable evidence the new influenzas have emerged hand-in-hoof with the new agriculture. Considerable evidence but little discussion out in the open.

All welcome!
Your support would be appreciated and any contribution is welcome. We’ll be offering rewards for your help, including an excerpt before publication, a signed copy upon publication, access to an intimate reading in one of a number of cities, and, finally, special thanks in the book itself.

Perhaps more importantly, your contribution will make it your book! Once published it will likely have an impact on the debate about agriculture and disease.

We dodged a bullet when swine flu H1N1 proved less virulent than first feared. We may not be so lucky next time, and there will almost certainly be a next time. An unlikely event with near-infinite chances across metropolises of pig and poultry becomes nigh on inevitable. Supporting a book which aims arguments directly at the source of the problem betters the odds.

Thank you for your support!

Thank you for your support and feedback. We’ll be back soon, promise, and in all likelihood will drop a post now and again. Agriculture, disease and evolution are unlikely to enter any hibernation while we step out for a bite.

–Landlady…

The tiger will see you a hundred times before you see him once. –John Vaillant (2010)

One explanation proposed for Arab Spring, riffing off the work of Emmanuel Todd, is demographic in nature.

Rejecting claims of poverty, inequality, food prices, and unemployment, Andrey Korotayev and Julia Zinkina argue Egypt’s economic transition out of the classic Malthusian trap placed it into another,

[Hosni] Mubarak’s administration was well aware of the threat hidden in the growing gap between declining death rate and stably high birth rate, and almost since the beginning of Mubarak’s reign (1981) it started taking measures aimed at bringing down the birth rate (see, e.g., Fargues 1997: 117–118). However, only in the second half of the 1980s the government managed to develop a really efficient program of such measures…

[T]he absolute population growth rates reached their maximum in 1985–1989. Extracting 1985–1989 out of 2010 we obtain 21–25, which is the age of the numerous generation of young Egyptians who came out to the Tahrir Square in Cairo in January 2011…

In absolute numbers the growth of this cohort is really astonishing, as it almost doubled during 15 years. Namely this cohort enters the labor market in more or less developed societies (including Egypt), so even for a fast-growing economy it was virtually impossible to create millions of workplaces necessary to absorb the young labor force.

Demographics can clearly shape historical trajectories. A country with a large majority below 30 at one and the same time may be subject to the kind of despair, aspirations and ideas that foment revolutions. A country with high infant mortality or, alternatively, a low birth rate or sex bias may be steered in other directions.

But demography is as much effect as cause. A kleptocracy can by virtue of its theft and murder produce severe infant mortality or, not unrelatedly, high birth rates. A structurally adjusted health system can increase chronic morbidity across age groups.

Imperial designs can deny any demography’s destiny, should such an intrinsic property exist. Many of the Middle Eastern and African countries–e.g., Iran, Iraq–were democracies until U.S. interventions overthrew them. The murder of Patrice Lumumba and Mobutu’s installation set Congo’s trajectory for a half-century running.

For that reason we would do well to investigate the political economy of any demographic approach that holds injustice at arm’s length. Cui bono? Who benefits from, and pays for, such work?

Korotayev and Zinkina, for one, acknowledging Egypt’s repressive police state and Tunisia’s example only in passing, argue that in sharply decreasing crude death rates, particularly infant and child mortality, Mubarak’s neoliberal policies produced an ungrateful fate,

Without these successes many young Egyptians vehemently demanding Mubarak’s resignation (or even death) would have been destined to die in early childhood and simply would not have survived to come out to the Tahrir Square.

Included among the presumptions underlying the argument are that even capitalism’s failures stem largely from its success, history is the plaything of the powerful, and, in this case, Mubarak’s offensive paternalism was really an expression of a literal fatherhood for which Tahrir Square should have shown gratitude instead of shoes.

Such fallacies aside, what use of a principle, even assuming good intentions, when it routinely falters even on its own terms? Countries expressing the same demographic trajectories routinely produce different political outcomes. And vice versa.

Demography and history appear then–to mix parlances–a conditional dialectic, whose causal relationship continually changes in strength and direction in different parts of the parameter space. We need continually check in when causes act as markers, makers causes, or, better yet, back and forth, as each other’s input. Perhaps to the point they exist at times as a single object or, in the other direction, unmoored off each other entirely.

A demographic theory of history more broadly reflects ecology’s identity crisis: how do we draw general principles from population processes which by their nature are characterized by dynamic variation, feedbacks, and contingencies?

Clearly we can and do, but for any given ecology it appears we must also allow room in our analyses for place-specific idiosyncracies, which, perhaps counterintuitively, requires at one and the same time a finer sampling scheme and a higher-order abstraction. We must do so not merely for the sake of completeness, but by fundamental necessity.

Otherwise we confuse our tigers. To either our oblivious ridicule, or worse–without a self-consciousness, without an understanding of the scientist’s place in the political economy–caught by capitalism dumbfounded in our own tracks.

For others, on the other hand, who know exactly on what side their bread is buttered, fuck all that. Procrustes in tweed, they write their reports to fit a paycheck. Biweekly nibbles that lead them into a Cheshire maw. They are eaten alive by their captains of industry.

It’s Jamie Oliver’s

Hoards line up for the latest smartphone. Bevies for Justin Beaver tix. Me, I’m gonna run my broke ass downtown for a copy of Manning Marable’s Malcolm X book.

Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review turned Manning Marable’s Malcolm X back into Alex Haley’s.

Kakutani seemed intent on saving Malcolm from his radicalism, as if a service to her Times readership, a position to which Marable was explicitly reacting in the first place.

Dead, Marable displays more understanding of the American sociopolitical fabric in his still-growing fingernails than can be found in Kakutani’s complete oeuvre.

Saw Marable speak at the City College of New York about, hmm, ten years ago. He asked us afterward where the subway station was. A few of us offered him ironic but kind directions. He was, after all, the only Columbia cat who would bother turning up on the other side of Harlem Heights. Most at Columbia don’t know what CCNY means–as acronym or as parable–much less where the fuck it is.

The book begins surprisingly: a sociogeographic history of the Audubon Ballroom.

Ninety amazing pages in. Even the ten pages on the origins of Islam and its American variants, topics for which I thought I had little inclination, are worth the price of admission.

Malcolm Little took ‘Detroit Red’ to differentiate from fellow redhead and Jimmy’s Chicken Shack employee ‘Chicago Red’, John Elroy Sanford, later Redd Foxx. Y’know, ‘Sanford and Son’, “You hear that Elizabeth? I’m coming to join you, honey.”

Much has been made over the Nation of Islam’s variance with traditional Islam, eventually by X himself. But Marable describes the conditions under which NOI converged upon many Shi’a tenets.

The origins of a Kanye West line. When X marched hundreds of Nation of Islam members in formation around a Harlem station to free three NOI beaten and jailed by police, one officer, groping for an explanation, remarked, “No one man should have that much power.”

Medgar Evers investigated racist crimes. In Mississippi. In the 1950s.

Here’s one for Paul Krugman and other liberals waiting for the real Barack Obama to show up,

Malcolm…denounced the Eisenhower administration, particularly its failure to support the desegregation of public schools across the South. “The root of the trouble…is in Washington, D.C., where the modern-day ‘Pharaoh’s Magicians’ are putting on a great show, fooling most of the so-called Negros by pretending to be divided against each other.” The worst offender was Eisenhower himself, ‘the ‘Master Magician’ who was “too busy playing golf to speak out–and with the expert timing of a master general, when he does speak out, he is always too late.”

American electoral politics: Changing the locks every four years still keeps a people imprisoned.

Malcolm’s African conversion began long before his break from the NOI. Indeed, both Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad were profoundly affected by trips taken there years previous. Each attempted upon his return to better square the circle, trying to align NOI with traditional Islam and Pan-Africanism.

Both ultimately failed, less by virtue of errors on their parts than the extent to which–speaking in broad generalities–African Americans were isolated and alienated. It is truly a painful thing to be the very point you are making.

Beatnik placard greeting Castro on his first trip to the U.S.: “Man, like us cats dig Fidel the most. He knows what’s hip and bugs the squares.”

If you’ll allow me a ‘big thought’ 200 pages in. Black history has long run against a dysgenic headwind, if I may ironically appropriate Murray and Herrnstein. It is the notion on which whites across the political spectrum daily act–that their opinion is how the world works.

Race is hardly the only axis along which this assumption operates, but I can think of no more painful or vexing problem if you’re caught on the wrong side of the line.

In the midst of an Autobiography session with Alex Haley, Malcolm, reminiscing on Detroit Red, began scatting “re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam” and lindy-hopping with a piece of pipe.

The 1963 Malcolm engaged in a personal Mexican standoff–at one and the same time engaging an internationalist Islam, leading an emergent secular black radicalism, and holding off a recalcitrant internal NOI opposition with red meat about blue-eyed devils. The latter he was expected to curry with a cautious loyalty to the American republic!

Reads like a psychological political thriller, with the genre’s lead-up and pacing. Marable is clearly sympathetic toward his flawed hero’s dangerous quest but begs little of Malcolm’s bullshit.

If we can draw a lesson from Marable’s conceit of continual rebirth it is that the left, while sticking to its principles, would do well to embrace the right to learn and grow. Certainly circumstances conspire but imbuing history itself with a moralistic frustration corners many into thinking changing one’s mind is a sign of weakness.

How else would we attract ‘adherents’, goes the finely honed instinct, if we ‘vacillate’?

Revising strategies and tactics needn’t introduce the danger of co-option if principles and objectives are defined.

Easier said than done, with the game so rigged. But the reward of play is adaptation–the ability to respond to changing circumstances, including, we would hope, of our own making.

People become revolutionized when they find the space to give birth to themselves together.

The 1964 Malcolm, now ejected from NOI, appears at one and the same time fragile and free(er). He is in many ways still in the NOI (and now with no money) but even pre-Hajj begins to better integrate mind and message on his own terms.

On hajj Malcolm was able to better integrate self and politics into an albeit burning serenity. White supremacy at home needn’t be reflected back in black separatism but refuted by Islamic integration.

Wherever you go there you are. Wherever you go there is the world.

Not a counsel of despair. Indeed, even a means of liberation. The solutions found in one place can be hacked elsewhere. Geography can be our friend.

I just went Cabral on yo’ ass.

Malcolm gives Obamerica something to chew on: “It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism.”

Malcolm’s second trip to Africa is a triumph, tinged with ambiguity and even melancholy. To the State Department’s (and the CIA’s) surprise and annoyance Malcolm succeeds in securing widespread support across Africa, including a number of open denouncements of American racism, a difficult task abroad during the Cold War.

He also ices NOI out of international Islam.

At the same time he must balance competing factions across Africa and the Middle East, including neocolonialists who wine and dine him, the kind of negotiation his ongoing reinvention makes difficult even among his own supporters at home.

His African success pushes the NOI and USG elements to independently(?) conclude “such a man is worthy of death.”

And Malcolm knows this as he steps on the plane back to the States.

Funny, the guy’s been dead longer than he was alive and groups across the political spectrum are still trying to get Malcolm’s attention. No fools, he dead.

Obviously, as Marable writes between the lines, this has something to do with more than one man, whose metaphysical journey included many a pit stop now posting signs, “Malcolm slept here.” No one would bother with such a post except Malcolm’s metamorphosis, as an object unto itself, remains for many at one and the same time fascinating and offensive.

Upon Che Guevara’s New York visit Malcolm declares, “We’re living in a revolutionary world and in a revolutionary age…[We must realize] the direct connection between the struggle of the Afro-American in this country on the struggle of our people all over the world…”

“You’ll never get Mississippi straightened out. Not until you start realizing your connection with the Congo,” where the U.S. sponsored Patrice Lumumba‘s assassination.

Al Jazeera offers a fascinating debate about Manning Marable’s book one would never find on a national broadcast here:

This is indeed Marable’s Malcolm, but are the critics quibblers? Haven’t reached the allegedly problematic sections, although Marable’s integrationist Malcolm, even on multiple detours, is so far no liberal.

X strikes me as all over the place even pre-post-NOI. Exploring a variety of ideological and strategic pathways, courting diverse allies, speaking to multiple (kinds of) audiences.

With his house–and almost his family–firebombed by NOI, Malcolm, living, in his own words, “like a man who’s already dead,” makes a damning and empathetic diagnosis of his murderers: “It takes madness almost to deal with a power structure that’s so corrupt.”

Shades of Fanon and Memmi. But leaving aside the intellectual framework we see the deepest of existential pain: a man who knows he’s been killed, like his father before him, by the sum totality, the runaway momentum, of a country which finds its meaning in savaging itself.

Only a few pages in but Marable’s investigation of Malcolm’s death is riveting. Of course, Malcolm was killed many times over, including, as we discussed previously, before his death. Apropos Sunday [when the assassination of Osama bin Laden took place], his murder was also followed by character assassination, a revealing reveling in America’s sacred anxieties.

Time Magazine wrote,

Malcolm X had been a pimp, a cocaine addict and a thief. He was an unashamed demagogue. His gospel was hatred…[The Audubon program started late because] characteristically [Malcolm] had kept his followers waiting for nearly an hour while he lingered over tea and a banana split at a nearby Harlem restaurant.

How, then, did he ever get on a stamp? The feds can stretch a big tent over a graveyard.

And so Malcolm is killed. Even in death he walks among his followers (and his killers), through their thoughts, passions and dreams:

Ossie Davis delivers a eulogy for the ages, written at a kitchen table.

Mosque 7, Malcolm’s old NOI temple, is burned to the ground.

NOI is itself eventually razed once Wallace Muhammad, on Elijah’s death, turns it toward traditional Islam and changes its name. Today’s NOI is an offshoot of Louis Farrakhan‘s own founding.

Malcolm’s conservative half-sister Ella takes control of his organizations and runs off his supporters.

Two of his accused assassins make for the border. There is another death, a strange one in the Mexican desert, the identity of the victim as mysterious as the killer.

A Boston-based Farrakhan, who, denying a role in Malcolm’s death in spite of pronouncing his once-mentor “a man worthy of death,” speaks three hours after the assassination at the Newark mosque Malcolm’s killers attended.

Years later Farrakhan speaks to a gray-haired Malcolm in a dream, informing Malcolm he failed Elijah Muhammad’s test. When it’s the visitor who listens, revelation is turned into rationalization.

Like Alex Haley, Bayard Rustin attempts to mainstream Malcolm into a pragmatic integrationist America could put on a stamp, ironically enough a machination with which Marable himself would be charged by critics in search of a certain kind of radical Malcolm.

For instance, Marable thinks Malcolm, on a “personal journey…toward peace and away from violence” would condemn September 11 as a rejection of Islam’s core. Perhaps uncomfortably an oversimplification which trades in tactics for ethos, scoring one for Marable’s critics.

Ah, and them critics. Most scathing from the black nationalist left. Karl Evanzz’ unpublished review, scotched by an e-zine headed by Henry Louis Gates who advanced-blurbed the book, scores some points in between ad hominem attacks on Marable. A man with Washington Post on his CV, however, shouldn’t spin another’s professional successes as a character flaw.

There are some elements of truth in there, however: Ella and Betty are really roughed up. And Marable’s treatment of Malcolm’s sexuality, among other elements, is at best speculative. But whatever minor errors or variances in interpretation there may be, and there will always be such, are being used to bludgeon the book’s paradigm-shifting merits. A bait-and-switch.

So peaceable statesman Malcolm wasn’t. But a decades-dead Malcolm is also pressganged into someone else’s war: Al-Qaeda’s new boss Ayman al-Zawahiri attempts to maneuver Malcolm against ‘house Negros’ Obama, Powell and Rice.

As Martin Luther King would discover on his own, following Malcolm’s radical road two years later, the campaign for Malcolm’s life wasn’t green-lit for his advocacy of tactical violence or separatism but, tellingly, once he turned to a socialistic internationalism.

A thing none of the major players in this story–FBI, NYPD, State Department, NOI, MMI, civil rights movement–cared for. At the risk of his own life Malcolm was truly cutting his own path, as Ossie Davis put it, “because he loved us so.”

Although I have more to say, this will conclude my tweets about the new book. My version of Marable’s Malcolm. The Reinvention is an exceptional work, whatever its flaws, which, given its scope and effort, are in my admittedly outsider view relatively minor.

As he’s been as much an object as subject, I think it best to end with Malcolm speaking for himself. To turn the tables, from whence comes Malcolm’s Marable (or Evanzz)?

First, excerpts from the founding rally of the Organization of African-American Unity in June 1964 and, if you’ll excuse the commercials, a lengthy excerpt of the man’s remarks at a debate at Oxford University in December 1964, two months before his death.

The clips demonstrate Malcolm’s dangerousness was located in his ability to use his education, a jailhouse degree, on his own terms–for the liberation of his people. He never aimed at merely making the machine work better, which many of us maneuver ourselves into thinking is the best that we can do.

Malcolm, however, was well aware of the costs he, or anyone else, must be willing to pay for such a liberation, for revolution.

“The price of freedom is death.”

Your research will cover any area of evolutionary biology, including adaptation, phylogenetics, population genetics and environmental genomics. You should be using advanced data acquisition and/or analytical approaches (e.g., high-throughput sequencing or other “omics”, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics).

I have no prima facie quarrel with the omics or the Bayesian, both of which I have used. Nor do I object to an interview process with criteria. No smelly sociopathic ecologists need apply.

But the notice assigns such tautologies to scientific practice–despite its face-saving ‘e.g.’–as to drop evolutionary biology down an epistemological gravity well. Knowledge is forced to circle very local disciplinary hills (or drains for the more cynical).

In the course of explaining the rise of experiment-free string theory, Lee Smolin summarizes what such path-dependent hiring practices have done to physics,

Universities stopped growing in the early 1970s, yet the professors hired in previous eras have continued to train graduate students at a steady rate, which means that there is a signifiicant overproduction of new PhDs in physics and other sciences. As a result there is a fierce competition for places in research universities and colleges at all levels of the academic hierarchy. There is also much more emphasis on hiring faculty who will be funded by the research agencies. This greatly narrows the options for people who want to pursue their own research programs rather than follow those initiated by senior scientists. So there are fewer corners where a creative person can hide, secure in some kind of academic job, and pursue risky and original ideas.

Related to this is the fact that the universities are now much more professionalized than they were a generation or two ago. Whereas university faculties have stopped growing, there has been a marked increase in the number and power of administrators. Thus, in hiring, there is less reliance on the judgment of individual professors and more on statistical measures of achievement, such as funding and citation levels. This also makes it harder for young scientists to buck the mainstream and devote themselves to the invention of new research programs.

Intellectual devolution is entwined into a broader economy.

Students are increasingly entrapped in predatory loans for degrees which, in this new economy, despite the political rhetoric, offer little  access to the earning power to pay them back. Student debt is meanwhile bundled into and traded as lucrative subprime securities. As these derivatives are backed by preemptive bailouts and the loans by mandatory remittance, only students, rarely investors, carry the risk.  Unlike homeowners, students are now blocked by law from declaring debt-driven bankruptcy, their wages, Social Security and unemployment benefits to be garnished in perpetuity.

As Malcolm Harris describes it, the resulting university bubble, like its housing predecessor, feeds on itself,

The loans and costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it.

But the new money rarely makes its way to education, ostensibly the university’s raison d’etre. Indeed it paradoxically pumps resources out, with classes taught by grad students and recent grads, itinerant labor cornered by the hiring clog and their own debt into teaching for subminimal wages. To where then flows the funding?

When you hire corporate managers, you get managed like a corporation, and the race for tuition dollars and grants from government and private partnerships has become the driving objective of the contemporary university administration. The goal for large state universities and elite private colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have, in [Marc] Bousquet’s words, “the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!”

Even in a day of dying tenure and informal labor, or rather, given the increasingly capital-securitized nature of universities and the kinds of money needed to house industrial sequencers, because of such shifts, at its highest heights evolutionary biology advances at a stately pace.

One dean’s retirement at a time.