2010-11-12 1000: I was sad to read this morning that the composer Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki has passed away. I have a copy of his intensely moving Symphony No. 3, "Sorrowful Songs." The second movement of the symphony contains the following prayer, which was inscribed on the wall of a prison cell by a victim of the Gestapo: Mamo, nie płacz, nie. Niebios Przeczysta Królowo, Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie. Zdrowaś Mario. (No, Mother, do not weep, most chaste Queen of Heaven support me always. Ave Maria. )
2010-11-10 2145: I saw a wonderful episode of Nova this evening on public television, "Dogs Decoded." They explained how and why dogs have their unique relationship with humans.
It turns out dogs, unlike any other animal, are able to read human facial expressions and pick up on our emotional states. Humans in turn are able to accurately judge a dog's emotions by listening to recordings of its barking. Dogs also understand what humans mean when they point at something, even when they are young puppies; not even chimpanzees can do this. (Apparently, chimps are less cooperative than humans, and pointing to something like food would do a chimp no good, since the other chimp would try to get the food.) Wolves do not read human expressions (they don't pay much attention to human faces), or understand pointing, even when they are raised by humans as cubs as if they were puppies. (By about 8 weeks, wolf cubs become unmanageable for their human owners.) This is particularly interesting because it is now known that dogs are domesticated gray wolves and are 99.8% similar to them genetically (as shown by studies of mitochondrial DNA, which also show that the domestication process began as long ago as 100,000 years).
One particularly fascinating segment of the show concerned a 50-year-old on-going experiment in Russia to breed tame foxes. Foxes are closely related to wolves, and normally are hostile to humans. But after researchers selected for docility over a number of generations, the foxes became very tame and affectionate. It appears that what the researchers ended up doing was selecting for animals that have less adrenaline, which makes them less frightened of humans and less aggressive. One surprise from the study is that although the researchers were not interested in morphological traits of the animals they were breeding, they turned out to develop shorter tails, snouts and limbs; ears became floppy and tails more curly—exactly the traits seen in dogs. The surmise is that the researchers were also selecting, without realizing it, animals that were more juvenile (juveniles also have these traits as well as being more friendly than mature animals).
The show offered some speculation as to why dogs achieved their unique relationship to humans ("man's best friend"): like humans, wolves are social predators that hunt during the day. Researchers also suggest that without dogs, humans wouldn't have had much luck herding animals—the first step to civilization. Thus without dogs, humans would have remained as hunter-gatherers.
Anyway, I'm not much of a dog person, but the show was fascinating, and many of the dogs they showed were very appealing. I think for anyone who does love dogs, this show would be a must-see. (I suppose the web site for local public television would give upcoming airtimes, but some Nova episodes can be streamed on the PBS web site.)
2010-11-09 0900: I edited my previous post somewhat, removing the second paragraph. (I decided it was not convincing or needed.)
2010-11-08 2200: I am not especially happy to read this evening that the Democrats in the Senate appear to be abandoning efforts to repeal DADT (Don't Ask Don't Tell). It may well be that the Democrats do not have the votes to overcome a filibuster, and it may well be that staging a confrontation on this issue over the defense allocation bill (the vehicle for a repeal of DADT) would be disastrous politics for the Democrats. But I cannot help but thinking of this as a betrayal by the Democrats and by Obama himself. I remember what happened in the early 1990s: Bill Clinton raised $4 million from gay people in California, which helped him win the Democratic nomination for president, but then as president signed the Defense of Marriage Act (banning federal recognition of same-sex marriages)—and even ran radio ads in the South highlighting signing DOMA during his reelection campaign. I hope this isn't what's happening now.