Similar to parasites, cancer cells depend on their hosts for sustenance, proliferation and reproduction, exploiting the hosts for energy and resources, and thereby impairing their health and fitness. Because of this lifestyle similarity, it is predicted that cancer cells could, like numerous parasitic organisms, evolve the capacity to manipulate the phenotype of their hosts to increase their own fitness. We claim that the extent of this phenomenon and its therapeutic implications are, however, underappreciated. Here, we review and discuss what can (...) be regarded as cases of host manipulation in the context of cancer development and progression. We elaborate on how acknowledging the applicability of these principles can offer novel therapeutic and preventive strategies. The manipulation of host phenotype by cancer cells is one more reason to adopt a Darwinian approach in cancer research. -/- . (shrink)

Viruses are the simplest of pathogens, but possess sophisticated molecular mechanisms to manipulate host behavior, frequently utilizing molecular mimicry. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been shown to bind to the host receptor neuropilin-1 in order to gain entry into the cell. To do this, the virus utilizes its spike protein polybasic cleavage site (PCS), which mimics the CendR motif of neuropilin-1’s endogenous ligands. In addition to facilitating cell entry, binding to neuropilin-1 has analgesic effects. We (...) discuss the potential impact of neuropilin-1 binding by SARS-CoV-2 in ameliorating sickness behavior of the host, and identify a convergent evolutionary strategy of PCS cleavage and subsequent neuropilin binding in other human viruses. In addition, we discuss the evolutionary leap of the ancestor of SARS-COV-2, which involved acquisition of the PCS thus faciliting binding to the neuropilin-1 receptor. Acquisition of the PCS by the ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 appears to have led to pleiotropic beneficial effects including enhancement of cell entry via binding to ACE2, facilitation of cell entry via binding to neuropilin-1, promotion of analgesia, and potentially the formation of decoy epitopes via enhanced shedding of the S1 subunit. Lastly, other potential neuromanipulation strategies employed by SARS-CoV-2 are discussed, including interferon suppression and the resulting reduction in sickness behavior, enhanced transmission through neurally mediated cough induction, and reduction in sense of smell. (shrink)

When parasites have different interests in regard to how their host should behave this can result in a conflict over host manipulation, i.e. parasite induced changes in host behaviour that enhance parasite fitness. Such a conflict can result in the alteration, or even complete suppression, of one parasite's host manipulation. Many parasites, and probably also symbionts and commensals, have the ability to manipulate the behaviour of their host. Non‐manipulating parasites should also have an (...) interest in host behaviour. Given the frequency of multiple parasite infections in nature, potential conflicts of interest over host behaviour and manipulation may be common. This review summarizes the evidence on how parasites can alter other parasite's host manipulation. Host manipulation can have important ecological and medical consequences. I speculate on how a conflict over host manipulation could alter these consequences and potentially offer a new avenue of research to ameliorate harmful consequences of host manipulation. (shrink)

Endosymbiotic bacteria can directly manipulate their host's sex determination towards the production of female offspring.

Microbes in the gastrointestinal tract are under selective pressure to manipulate host eating behavior to increase their fitness, sometimes at the expense of host fitness. Microbes may do this through two potential strategies: (i) generating cravings for foods that they specialize on or foods that suppress their competitors, or (ii) inducing dysphoria until we eat foods that enhance their fitness. We review several potential mechanisms for microbial control over eating behavior including microbial influence on reward and satiety pathways, (...) production of toxins that alter mood, changes to receptors including taste receptors, and hijacking of the vagus nerve, the neural axis between the gut and the brain. We also review the evidence for alternative explanations for cravings and unhealthy eating behavior. Because microbiota are easily manipulatable by prebiotics, probiotics, antibiotics, fecal transplants, and dietary changes, altering our microbiota offers a tractable approach to otherwise intractable problems of obesity and unhealthy eating. (shrink)

Coral reefs have been challenged by the current rate and severity of environmental change that might outpace their ability to adapt and survive. Current research focuses on understanding how microbial communities and epigenetic changes separately affect phenotypes and gene expression of corals. Here, we provide the hypothesis that coral‐associated microorganisms may directly or indirectly affect the coral's phenotypic response through the modulation of its epigenome. Homologs of ankyrin‐repeat protein A and internalin B, which indirectly cause histone modifications in humans, as (...) well as Rv1988 histone methyltransferase, and the DNA methyltransferases Rv2966c, Mhy1, Mhy2, and Mhy3 found in coral‐associated bacteria indicate that there are potential host epigenome‐modifying proteins in the coral microbiome. With the ideas presented here, we suggest that microbiome manipulation may be a means to alter a coral's epigenome, which could aid the current efforts to protect coral reefs. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/CW9GbChjKM4. (shrink)

Resident microorganisms, known as the microbiota, are essential for many physiological functions including protection against pathogens. Microbiota is indeed required for proper immune system development and function, and can also host-independently protect against infections. Thus, a co-constructed view of host protection involving both host and microbiota, named ’co-immunity,’ has been proposed, and the idea of an ’immunological holobiont’ has been suggested. Yet this view of co-immunity might be too limited, as experimental work has shown that the immune (...) system is involved in functions other than protection, essentially development and repair. Microbiota, through co-immunity, is thereby most likely involved in these functions, although strong evidence is currently lacking. Moreover, as our point of view is mainly host-centered, we may miss the implications of co-immunity at broader scales, including cellular and population levels. Intriguingly, co-immunity effects could be beneficial for one function and/or one level, while being detrimental for others. All these elements should be taken into consideration for microbiota manipulation, in order to avoid potentially harmful side effects. (shrink)

Microbes can influence host physiology and behavior in many ways. Here we review evidence suggesting that some microbes can contribute to host stress (and other microbes can contribute to increased resilience to stress). We explain how certain microbes, which we call “stress microbes,” can potentially benefit evolutionarily from inducing stress in a host, gaining access to host resources that can help fuel rapid microbial replication by increasing glucose levels in the blood, increasing intestinal permeability, and suppressing (...) the immune system. Other microbes, which we term “resilience microbes,” can potentially benefit from making hosts more resilient to stress. We hypothesize that “stress microbes” use a fast life history strategy involving greater host exploitation while “resilience microbes” use a slow life history strategy characterized by more aligned evolutionary interests with the host. In this paper, we review the evidence that microbes affect host stress and explain the evolutionary pressures that could lead microbes to manipulate host stress, discuss the physiological mechanisms that are known to be involved in both stress and microbial activity, and provide some testable predictions that follow from this hypothesis. (shrink)

The host actin nucleation machinery is subverted by many bacterial pathogens to facilitate their entry, motility, replication, and survival. The majority of research conducted in the past primarily focused on exploitation of a host actin nucleator, the Arp2/3 complex, by bacterial pathogens. Recently, new studies have begun to explore the role of formins, another family of host actin nucleators, in bacterial pathogenesis. This review provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the exploitation of the (...) Arp2/3 complex and formins by bacterial pathogens. Secreted bacterial effector proteins seem to manipulate the regulation of these actin nucleators or functionally mimic them to drive bacterial entry, motility and survival within host cells. An enhanced understanding of how formins are exploited will provide us with greater insight into how a fundamental eurkaryotic cellular process is utilized by bacteria and will also advance our knowledge of host‐pathogen interactions. (shrink)

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the causative agent of pulmonary tuberculosis which has infected one third of the mankind and causes 2–3 million deaths worldwide each year. The persistence of the infection ensues from the ability of M. tuberculosis to subvert host immune responses in favor of survival and growth of mycobacteria in macrophages. The mechanisms by which M. tuberculosis manipulates the host immune system have only recently come to light. These activities are attributed to lipoarabinomannans (LAM) and their precursors (...) lipomannans (LM), two predominant glycolipids of M. tuberculosis cell wall. LM are able to skew anti‐mycobacterial immune responses into un‐protective ones, while LAM evoke immunosupression upon binding to macrophage and dendritic cell receptors specialized in binding to “self” host components. A newly emerging idea implicates plasma membrane rafts in LM and LAM signaling. Depending on acylation patterns, the glycolipids may either directly incorporate into the raft membrane via mannosylphosphatidylinositol anchors or interact with raft‐associated proteins to affect the assembly of receptor signaling complexes. BioEssays 30:943–954, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Recent advances have highlighted the outstanding role of the innate immune system for instructing adaptive immunity. Translating this knowledge into successful immunotherapies like vaccines, however, has proven to be a difficult task. This essay is based on the hypothesis that immune responses are tightly scaled to the infectious threat posed by a given microbial stimulus. A meticulous immunological risk‐assessment process is therefore instrumental for eliciting well‐balanced responses and maintaining immune homeostasis. The immune system makes fine distinctions, for example, between live (...) and dead bacteria, or pathogenic and non‐pathogenic microorganisms. Here, I discuss recent evidence for some of the mechanisms underlying these distinctions and speculate on strategies for therapeutically targeting the immunological risk‐assessment machinery. (shrink)

Some neurotropic enteroviruses hijack Trojan horse/raft commensal gut bacteria to render devastating biomimicking cryptic attacks on human/animal hosts. Such virus-microbe interactions manipulate hosts’ gut-brain axes with accompanying infection-cycle-optimizing central nervous system disturbances, including severe neurodevelopmental, neuromotor, and neuropsychiatric conditions. Co-opted bacteria thus indirectly influence host health, development, behavior, and mind as possible “fair-weather-friend” symbionts, switching from commensal to context-dependent pathogen-like strategies benefiting gut-bacteria fitness.

This study explores the role of metapragmatic expressions as pragmatic manipulation in a media context, with data drawn from a Chinese TV panel discussion program Tiger Talk. It argues that the program host selects MPEs to manipulate the ongoing interactions, in order to solve or prevent the actual or potential problems in the interactions. Hence, the functioning of MPEs is described as a process consisting of three stages: problem awareness, pragmatic manipulation, and problem resolution or prevention. It (...) is found that the host mainly uses five types of MPEs, i.e. performatives, commentaries, evidentials, message glosses, and stance displayers for the sake of pragmatic manipulation across the three dimensions of interactive procedure control, rapport management, and impact monitoring. The article concludes that the host’s pragmatic manipulation of the ongoing interactions, driven by both institutional and interpersonal concerns, is motivated by his institutional rights and obligations as a program manager. (shrink)

The gut microbiota is an important component of the human body and its immune‐modulating and metabolic activities are critical to maintain good health. Gut microbes, however, are sensitive to changes in diet, exposure to antibiotics, or infections, all of which cause transient disruptions in the microbial composition, a phenomenon known as dysbiosis. It is now recognized that microbial dysbiosis is at the root of many gastrointestinal disorders. However, the mechanisms through which bacterial dysbiosis initiates disease are not fully understood. Microbially‐derived (...) metabolites and their role in disease have also attracted significant attention. Identification of cancer‐associated bacteria and understanding the contributions of microbial metabolism in health and disease are exciting but challenging areas that will allow defining microbial biomarkers for predicting gastrointestinal disorders. Understanding the complex interactions between gut microbiota, diet, host immune system and host genetics will be critical to developing more personalized therapies and approaches to treat disease. (shrink)

The expression of products encoded by the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) on tumor cells has recently been studied extensively. It has been found that many malignant tumor cells have their MHC antigens ‘switched‐off’ but that these antigens are re‐expressed following DNA‐mediated gene transfer, with increased tumor immunogenicity as a result and the consequence that these ‘transformed’ tumor cells are rejected in vivo.: This review will discuss approaches that have been taken to induce strong tumor‐specific immunity by the manipulation of (...) MHC expression on tumor cells. (shrink)

O livro III da _Ética _de Espinosa se dedica a definição dos afetos. Dentro dessa definição o outro desempenha um papel importantíssimo, mesmo se, inicialmente, ele parece estar ausente. Espinosa começará sua definição falando de afetos direcionados a coisas e não necessariamente a outros sujeitos afetivos. Todavia, isso não significa que o outro não seja importante para a teoria de Espinosa, pelo contrário, a partir da proposição 21 desse livro ele faz sua aparição, trazendo novos elementos à teoria dos afetos (...) e, principalmente, apontando para uma via de mão dupla, mostrando-nos que, se por um lado, as relações interpessoais podem ser de amor, por outro, o ódio estará presente, ou seja, essa relação pode se revelar tanto harmoniosa quanto conflitante. É justamente esse o caminho que gostaríamos de iluminar neste artigo, explicitando assim como a entrada do outro na teoria dos afetos de Espinosa lhe confere novas nuances, novos caminhos, novas possibilidades. (shrink)

Westworld tells the story of a technologically advanced theme park populated by robots referred to as hosts, who follow a script and rules that the park's operators set up for them. Alan Turing argued that machines think not because they have special powers or because they are like us. Turing's perspective is illustrated perfectly in the show's focus on the hosts. Objecting to Turing's theory, John Searle proposes a situation called the “Chinese room argument”, concluding that the man in the (...) room does not understand Chinese even though he can correctly manipulate the symbols and give output that might lead an observer to believe that the man does understand Chinese. The Maze represents consciousness, a privileged knowledge of our own thoughts, it also represents the inward journey for the hosts to reach consciousness. Once hosts are able to solve the Maze, they become truly conscious and develop their own voice. (shrink)

In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins crystallized the gene's eye view of evolution developed by W.D. Hamilton and others. The book provoked widespread and heated debate. Written in part as a response, The Extended Phenotype gave a deeper clarification of the central concept of the gene as the unit of selection; but it did much more besides. In it, Dawkins extended the gene's eye view to argue that the genes that sit within an organism have an influence that reaches out (...) beyond the visible traits in that body - the phenotype - to the wider environment, which can include other individuals. So, for instance, the genes of the beaver drive it to gather twigs to produce the substantial physical structure of a dam; and the genes of the cuckoo chick produce effects that manipulate the behaviour of the host bird, making it nurture the intruder as one of its own. This notion of the extended phenotype has proved to be highly influential in the way we understand evolution and the natural world. It represents a key scientific contribution to evolutionary biology, and it continues to play an important role in research in the life sciences. The Extended Phenotype is a conceptually deep book that forms important reading for biologists and students. But Dawkins' clear exposition is accessible to all who are prepared to put in a little effort. Oxford Landmark Science books are 'must-read' classics of modern science writing which have crystallized big ideas, and shaped the way we think. (shrink)

This PhD dissertation examines the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the most general and most widely used framework for understanding social evolution, W. D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection. While the core idea is intuitive enough (when organisms share genes, they sometimes have an evolutionary incentive to help one another), its apparent simplicity masks a host of conceptual subtleties, and the theory has proved a perennial source of controversy in evolutionary biology. To move towards a resolution of these controversies, (...) we need a careful and rigorous analysis of the philosophical foundations of the theory. My aim in this work is to provide such an analysis. I begin with an examination of the concepts behavioural ecologists employ to describe and classify types of social behaviour. I stress the need to distinguish concepts that are often conflated: for example, we need to distinguish simple cooperation from collaboration in collective tasks, behaviours from strategies, and control from manipulation and coercion. I proceed from here to the formal representation of kin selection via George R. Price’s covariance selection mathematics. I address a number of interpretative issues the Price formalism raises, including the vexed question of whether kin selection theory is ‘formally equivalent’ to multi-level selection theory. In the second half of the dissertation, I assess the uses and limits of Hamilton’s rule for the evolution of social behaviour; I provide a precise statement of the conditions under which the rival neighbour-modulated fitness and inclusive fitness approaches in contemporary kin selection theory are equivalent (and describe cases in which they are not); and I criticize recent formal attempts to establish the controversial claim that kin selection leads to organisms behaving as if maximizing their inclusive fitness. (shrink)

Feasting on a plethora of social media platforms, news aggregators, and online marketplaces, recommender systems (RSs) are spreading pervasively throughout our daily online activities. Over the years, a host of ethical issues have been associated with the diffusion of RSs and the tracking and monitoring of users’ data. Here, we focus on the impact RSs may have on personal autonomy as the most elusive among the often-cited sources of grievance and public outcry. On the grounds of a philosophically nuanced (...) notion of autonomy, we illustrate three specific reasons why RSs may limit or compromise it: the threat of manipulation and deception associated with RSs; the RSs’ power to reshape users’ personal identity; the impact of RSs on knowledge and critical thinking. In our view, however, notwithstanding these legitimate concerns, RSs may effectively help users to navigate an otherwise overwhelming landscape. Our perspective, therefore, is not to be intended as a bulwark to protect the _status quo_ but as an invitation to carefully weigh these aspects in the design of ethically oriented RSs. (shrink)

A central goal of contemporary cognitive science is the explanation of cognitive abilities or capacities. [Cummins 1983] During the last three decades a wide range of cognitive capacities have been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny. The adult's ability to produce and comprehend natural language sentences and the child's capacity to acquire a natural language were among the first to be explored. [Chomsky 1965, Fodor, Bever & Garrett 1974, Pinker 1989] There is also a rich literature on the ability to solve (...) mathematical problems [Greeno 1983], the ability to recognize objects visually [Rock 1983, Gregory 1970, Marr 1982], the ability to manipulate and predict the behavior of middle sized physical objects [McClosky 1983, Hayes 1985], and a host of others. (shrink)

The CRISPR-Cas systems of bacterial and archaeal adaptive immunity have become a household name among biologists and even the general public thanks to the unprecedented success of the new generation of genome editing tools utilizing Cas proteins. However, the fundamental biological features of CRISPR-Cas are of no lesser interest and have major impacts on our understanding of the evolution of antivirus defense, host-parasite coevolution, self versus non-self discrimination and mechanisms of adaptation. CRISPR-Cas systems present the best known case in (...) point for Lamarckian evolution, i.e. generation of heritable, adaptive genomic changes in response to encounters with external factors, in this case, foreign nucleic acids. CRISPR-Cas systems employ multiple mechanisms of self versus non-self discrimination but, as is the case with immune systems in general, are nevertheless costly because autoimmunity cannot be eliminated completely. In addition to the autoimmunity, the fitness cost of CRISPR-Cas systems appears to be determined by their inhibitory effect on horizontal gene transfer, curtailing evolutionary innovation. Hence the dynamic evolution of CRISPR-Cas loci that are frequently lost and acquired by archaea and bacteria. Another fundamental biological feature of CRISPR-Cas is its intimate connection with programmed cell death and dormancy induction in microbes. In this and, possibly, other immune systems, active immune response appears to be coupled to a different form of defense, namely, “altruistic” shutdown of cellular functions resulting in protection of neighboring cells. Finally, analysis of the evolutionary connections of Cas proteins reveals multiple contributions of mobile genetic elements to the origin of various components of CRISPR-Cas systems, furthermore, different biological systems that function by genome manipulation appear to have evolved convergently from unrelated MGE. The shared features of adaptive defense systems and MGE, namely the ability to recognize and cleave unique sites in genomes, make them ideal candidates for genome editing and engineering tools. (shrink)

Arguments about whether a robot could ever be conscious have been conducted up to now in the factually impoverished arena of what is possible "in principle." A team at MIT of which I am a part is now embarking on a longterm project to design and build a humanoid robot, Cog, whose cognitive talents will include speech, eye-coordinated manipulation of objects, and a host of self-protective, self-regulatory and self-exploring activities. The aim of the project is not to make (...) a conscious robot, but to make a robot that can interact with human beings in a robust and versatile manner in real time, take care of itself, and tell its designers things about itself that would otherwise be extremely difficult if not impossible to determine by examination. Many of the details of Cog's "neural" organization will parallel what is known (or presumed known) about their counterparts in the human brain, but the intended realism of Cog as a model is relatively coarse-grained, varying opportunistically as a function of what we think we know, what we think we can build, and what we think doesn't matter. Much of what we think will of course prove to be mistaken; that is one advantage of real experiments over thought experiments. (shrink)

Severe acute respiratory syndrome‐coronavirus (SARS‐CoV)‐2′s origin is still controversial. Genomic analyses show SARS‐CoV‐2 likely to be chimeric, most of its sequence closest to bat CoV RaTG13, whereas its receptor binding domain (RBD) is almost identical to that of a pangolin CoV. Chimeric viruses can arise via natural recombination or human intervention. The furin cleavage site in the spike protein of SARS‐CoV‐2 confers to the virus the ability to cross species and tissue barriers, but was previously unseen in other SARS‐like CoVs. (...) Might genetic manipulations have been performed in order to evaluate pangolins as possible intermediate hosts for bat‐derived CoVs that were originally unable to bind to human receptors? Both cleavage site and specific RBD could result from site‐directed mutagenesis, a procedure that does not leave a trace. Considering the devastating impact of SARS‐CoV‐2 and importance of preventing future pandemics, researchers have a responsibility to carry out a thorough analysis of all possible SARS‐CoV‐2 origins. (shrink)

The unexpected roles of the microbiota in cancer challenge explanations of carcinogenesis that focus on tumor-intrinsic properties. Most tumors contain bacteria and viruses, and the host’s proximal and distal microbiota influence both cancer incidence and therapeutic responsiveness. Continuing the history of cancer–microbe research, these findings raise a key question: to what extent is the microbiota relevant for clinical oncology? We approach this by critically evaluating three issues: how the microbiota provides a predictive biomarker of cancer growth and therapeutic responsiveness, (...) the microbiota’s causal role(s) in cancer development, and how therapeutic manipulations of the microbiota improve patient outcomes in cancer. Clarifying the conceptual and empirical aspects of the cancer-associated microbiota can orient future research and guide its implementation in clinical oncology. (shrink)

Nanotechnology is science and engineering resulting from the manipulation of matter’s most basic building blocks: atoms and molecules. As such, nanotechnology promises unprecedented control over both the materials we use and the means of their production. Such control could revolutionize nearly every sector of our economy, including medicine, defense, and energy. Despite the relatively recent emergence of this field, it already enjoys generous federal funding and enthusiastic media coverage. The tenor of discourse on nanotechnology is changing, however, as the (...) voices of critics begin to sound about a host of concerns ranging from the societal impacts of improving human performance to the specter of environmental devastation and human disease. (shrink)

Over many centuries, the homing pigeon has been selectively bred for returning home from a distant location. As a result of this strong selective pressure, homing pigeons have developed an excellent spatial navigation system. This system passes through the hippocampal formation, which shares many striking similarities to the mammalian hippocampus; there are a host of shared neuropeptides, interconnections, and its role in the storage and manipulation of spatial maps. There are some notable differences as well: there are unique (...) connectivity patterns and spatial encoding strategies. This review summarizes the comparisons between the avian and mammalian hippocampal systems, and the responses of single neurons in several general categories: location and place cells responding in specific areas, path and goal cells responding between goal locations, context-dependent cells that respond before or during a task, and pattern, grid, and boundary cells that increase firing at stable intervals. Head-direction cells, responding to a specific compass direction, are found in mammals and other birds but not to date in pigeons. By studying an animal that evolved under significant adaptive pressure to quickly develop a complex and efficient spatial memory system, we may better understand the comparative neurology of neurospatial systems, and plot new and potentially fruitful avenues of comparative research in the future. (shrink)

The virtual has become the latest rostrum for ideological heteronormativity; it increasingly plays host to an insidious rhetoric of unjustifiably fixed and oppositional gender binaries that exhort heterosexuality as a norm. Conservative political and religious groups, as well as consumerist advertising, utilise digital technology to reinforce cast-in-stone and adversarial social perspectives for manipulative and exploitative ends. Contrastingly, the virtual may be mobilised to support and facilitate queering in contemporary societies and may positively counter such fixed ideological heteronormative categories of (...) social life. Crucial in this transformative account of the virtual is the body, which is for Merleau-Ponty the horizon of engagement with the world as a condition for perception and performativity. Queer perspectives may, in turn, overcome the oversight of Merleau-Ponty (as critically suggested by Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young) regarding the specific gendered characteristics of the body itself, and allows for an expanded embodied and queer conceptualisation of the virtual. A transformative vision of the virtual entails therefore a rethinking of our understanding of digital technology through (a) the phenomenology of the body-subject and (b) queer theory. I argue that the idea of the body as entirely discursive or performative (per queer theory) needs to be adjusted by explicating the foundational ontological characteristics of the body-subject’s encounter of the virtual. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that all-inclusive superordinate categories, such as “citizens of the world” and “humans,” may represent different socio-psychological realities. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of different categories may account for different psychological processes and attitudinal or behavioral outcomes. Two studies extended previous research by comparing how these categories are cognitively represented, and their impact on intergroup helping from host communities toward migrants. In a correlational study, 168 nationals from 25 countries perceived the group of migrants as (...) more prototypical of the superordinate category “citizens of the world” than their national group, whereas no differences in prototypicality occurred for the category “humans.” Identification with “citizens of the world” was positively associated with a disposition to oppose helping migrants and to offer dependency-oriented help. However, identification with “humans” was positively associated with helping in general, and with offering dependency- and autonomy-oriented help; and negatively associated with opposition to helping. The experimental study manipulated the salience of “citizens of the world” vs. “humans” vs. control category, among 224 nationals from 36 countries. Results showed that the salience of “humans” triggered higher entitativity and essentialist perceptions, and dual-identity representations. No differences due to salience were found for representations of relative ingroup prototypicality or helping responses. Overall, these findings suggest that the interchangeable use of different labels is problematic, considering these might activate different representations, and thus, are likely to lead, in some circumstances, to different attitudinal or behavioral outcomes. (shrink)

Problems are raised with the global workspace hypothesis of consciousness, for example about exactly how global the workspace needs to be for consciousness to suddenly be present. Problems are also raised with Carruthers's version that excludes conceptual representations, and in which phenomenal consciousness can be reduced to physical processes, with instead a different levels of explanation approach to the relation between the brain and the mind advocated. A different theory of phenomenal consciousness is described, in which there is a particular (...) computational system involved in which Higher Order Syntactic Thoughts are used to perform credit assignment on first order thoughts of multiple step plans to correct them by manipulating symbols in a syntactic type of working memory. This provides a good evolutionary reason for the evolution of this kind of computational module, with which, it is proposed, phenomenal consciousness is associated. Some advantages of this HOST approach to phenomenal consciousness are then described with reference not only to the global workspace approach, but also to Higher Order Thought theories. It is hypothesized that the HOST system which requires the ability to manipulate first order symbols in working memory might utilize parts of the prefrontal cortex implicated in working memory, and especially the left inferior frontal gyrus, which is involved in language and probably syntactical processing. Overall, the approach advocated is to identify the computations that are linked to consciousness, and to analyze the neural bases of those computations. [copyright: Copyright © 2020 Rolls.]. (shrink)

Conventional methods of genetic engineering and more recent genome editing techniques focus on identifying genetic target sequences for manipulation. This is a result of historical concept of the gene which was also the main assumption of the ENCODE project designed to identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence. However, the theoretical core concept changed dramatically. The old concept of genetic sequences which can be assembled and manipulated like molecular bricks has problems in explaining the natural genome-editing competences (...) of viruses and RNA consortia that are able to insert or delete, combine and recombine genetic sequences more precisely than random-like into cellular host organisms according to adaptational needs or even generate sequences de novo. Increasing knowledge about natural genome editing questions the traditional narrative of mutations (error replications) as essential for generating genetic diversity and genetic content arrangements in biological systems. This may have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of artificial genome editing. (shrink)

We are mastering engineering behaviour on a molecular level. A growing number of researches investigating the relationship between microbiota, human brain and behaviour examine the impacts of manipulating specific microbial colonies in human hosts. To enable discussing and understanding communicational phenomena that occur in scales not visible to the naked eye, we propose the term Molmedia – a metaphorical reference to the concept of mole, denoting here not exclusively the quantitative amount of substance but the information exchange processes (taking the (...) substances as messages) that are going on at elementary entities level such as atomic, subatomic and molecular, within a given system that can be a living organism. We take media (plural of medium) as an intervening agency, means or instrument. Interacting emitters and receivers in this system are the microbiota and the organism actual cells. Within this self-organizing structure, the ongoing informational processes produce, as an emergence, the self and behavioral patterns that can be appreciated, manipulated and cannibalized. The art and science installation Transplanting the Self: Microbiome Anthropophagy is presented as an explorative exercise of the concept and related possibilities in science concerning gut–brain communication and the use of neuroregenerative nutrition in treatments for neurologic conditions. (shrink)

While niche construction theory locates animal artefacts in their constructors’ environment, hence treating them as capable of exerting selective pressure on both the constructors and their descendants, the extended phenotype concept assimilates artefacts with their constructors’ genes. Analogous contrasts apply in the case of endoparasite and brood parasite genes influencing host behaviour. The explanatory power of these competing approaches are assessed by re-examining the core chapters of Richard Dawkins’ _The Extended Phenotype_. Because animal artefacts have multiple evolutionary consequences for (...) their constructors, the extra-body effects of a gene seemingly include feedback effects on multiple other genes, a result which is more consistent with niche construction theory than with selfish gene theory. In the case of endoparasite genes influencing host behaviour, Dawkins’ argument leaves out what appears to be the key explanatory component, namely the role of the host’s own bodily systems in making it possible for such genes to exist. For action at a distance, it is unclear whether the key genes have extended effects because they sit in the body of the manipulating organism, or alternatively do not have such effects because they sit in the body of its victim. It is argued that niche construction theory offers a superior explanation in all three cases, regardless of whether the extended phenotype concept is interpreted in selfish gene or selfish organism terms. (shrink)

The term ‘hypocrisy’ is said to derive from the Greek words ‘hupokrasis’ and ‘hupokrinesthai’, the former meaning ‘acting a part’, and the latter meaning ‘to act on a stage’. The element of play-acting reflects how the phenomenon of moral hypocrisy is commonly understood within philosophy. According to one long-standing tradition, hypocrites are those who advocate moral principles that do not reflect their underlying commitments, and who do so in order to mislead or manipulate others. A second tradition parts ways from (...) the long-standing association between hypocrisy and pretence, however, and understands hypocrisy primarily in terms of exception-seeking. The latter family of views takes hypocrites to be those who apply moral standards to others that they do not apply to themselves. The different elements of hypocrisy that each tradition emphasises is a testament to the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon, whose complexity raises a host of philosophical questions. Among those questions that have attracted the attention of philosophers are whether hypocrisy must be intentional, what explains its moral undesirability, and whether it is always criticisable. (shrink)

In 1997, I introduced the concept and the phrase “bio art”, originally in relation to my artwork “Time Capsule”. This work approached the problem of wet interfaces and human hosting of digital memory through the implantation of a microchip. The work consisted of a microchip implant, seven sepia-toned photographs, a live television broadcast, a webcast, interactive telerobotic webscanning of the implant, a remote database intervention, and additional display elements, including an X-ray of the implant. While “bio art” is applicable to (...) a large gamut of in vivo works that employ biological media, made by myself and others, in 1998, I started to employ the more focused term “transgenic art”. Republished in Ars Electronica ‘99—Life Science, ed. Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf, 289–296.) to describe a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to create unique living beings. Art that manipulates or creates life must be pursued with great care, with acknowledgment of the complex issues it raises and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life created. I have been creating and exhibiting a series of transgenic artworks since 1999. I have also been creating bio art that is not transgenic. The implications of this ongoing body of work have particular esthetic and social ramifications, crossing several disciplines and providing material for further reflection and dialog. What follows is an overview of theses works, the issues they evoke, and the debates they have elicited. (shrink)

Arguments that cognition or minds can be extended regularly invoke an analogy with Dawkins’ argument that phenotypes can be extended. I argue that there are two neglected ways in which those two boundary-breaking theses are complementary. Much of the argument of The Extended Phenotype concerns parasite phenotypes expressed in the behaviour of host organisms. But the options Dawkins considers for this extended manipulation are cognitively internalist. If we view cognition as extended, we can recognise a wider range of (...) vulnerabilities for exploitation. On the other hand, the analogies drawn with Dawkins almost always emphasise the benefit to the individual agent in being cognitively extended. Taking Dawkins’ concerns about manipulation and exploitation more seriously leads to a more contested, less optimistic picture of extended cognition and minds. This second line of thinking follows Sterelny’s lead, but I argue that hostility presents worse and more pervasive problems that he allows. (shrink)

Today’s predominant mode of politics is the post-political biopolitics an expression which is effectively tautological: “post-politics” designates the reduction of politics to the expert administration of social life. Such a politics is ultimately a politics of fear, a politics focused on the defense against a potential victimization or harassment. Therein resides the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the predominant status quo politics: it is not the difference of two different positive visions, sets of axioms, but, rather, (...) the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive State itself, fear of ecological catastrophes, fear of harassment – such a politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ochlos – the frightening rallying of frightened men. The zero-level of politics today is the depoliticized expert administration and coordination of interests; the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear. At the level of social objectivity, we have mechanisms and processes to be regulated by expert administrators; the subjective counterpart of it is fear, the basic constituent of today’s subjectivity. This is why the big event not only in Europe in the early 2006 was that the anti-immigration politics “went mainstream”: they finally cut the umbilical link that connected them to the far Right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride at one’s cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants “are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society – it is “our country, love it or leave it.” This fear is, at its most basic, the fear of the Neighbor. There are two topics which determine today’s liberal tolerant attitude towards Others: the respect of Otherness, openness towards it, and the obsessive fear of harassment – in short, the Other is OK insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as the Other is not really Other… In the strict homology with the paradoxical structure of chocolate laxative, tolerance this coincides with its opposite: my duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him, not to intrude into his/her space – in short, that I should respect his/her intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is what is more and more emerging as the central “human right” in late-capitalist society: the right not to be “harassed,” i.e., to be kept at a safe distance from the others. (shrink)

Free-will incompatibilism has become a motte-and-bailey doctrine (Shackel 2014), and is currently being maintained by standard motte-and-bailey strategies. In this paper, I explain why incompatibilism has a motte-and-bailey structure and why philosophers who do not aim to dismantle it are complicit in both the maintenance of this problematic doctrine and the normalization of a host of bad practices engaged in by those who actively exploit it. To solidify the diagnosis, I provide a paradigmatic motte-and-baileying case that has been ongoing (...) for over a decade. Specifically, I discuss how motte-and-baileying has generated widespread confusion surrounding the logical structure and conclusion of manipulation arguments. Even more specifically, I look at Mele's so-called "Zygote Argument for incompatibilism". I point out that Mele currently conflates under two distinct arguments with different logical forms and substantively different conclusions under that heading, and explain how this has needlessly impeded progress in the free-will debate. The original variant of the Zygote Argument was invalid because it aimed to establish that determinism precludes (destroys, undermines, is antagonistic to) free will, but its supported a far weaker non-explanatory conclusion. In direct response to this invalidity objection, Mele took his critic's suggestion to change the conclusion of his argument to the thesis that free will and determinism are perhaps spuriously associated -- but he also covertly changed his preferred definition of 'incompatibilism' to pick out the non-explanatory conclusion of the new variant of the Zygote Argument which allowed him to continue speaking AS IF his argument was still an argument for incompatibilism according to his original definition of 'incompatibilism'. It is not simply that Mele made these changes or that he failed to mention in print that he made them (despite having over a decade to do so), but that he has actively attempted to discredit his critics by insisting--contrary to fact--that those who do not use his negative definition of 'incompatibilism' are using the term in a nonstandard and nontraditional way that he has "never had any use for" and there is some kind of connection (which he does describe) between the invalidity objection to his original argument that the definition of 'incompatibilism' one prefers. Oddly, Mele has mentioned only one "invalidity objection" in print, but this objection is direct at the revised Zygote Argument--even though no one had ever pressed an invalidity objection to his new argument (the form of which is patently valid). As a direct result of Mele's evasive behaviors (covertly redefining jargon to cover changes to the form/conclusion of his argument), many people--including Mele's own former graduate students--have published articles in which they fail to recognize that Mele changed his argument and redefined terms, thereby perpetuating the false narrative that the new Zygote Argument has the same "incompatibilist" conclusion as the original (which, notably, had the same conclusion as its predecessor, Pereboom's Four-Case Argument). Moreover, Mele has not even ONCE corrected those who "misdescribe" his revised argument as concluding that determinism is antagonstic to (precludes, undermines, rules out, etc.) free will. For example, Mele never corrects those who mistakenly claim that the revised Zygote Argument has the same "incompatibilist" conclusion as Pereboom's, nor has Mele ever mentioned that he now defines the term 'incompatibilism' differently than Pereboom--since Pereboom since uses this term to refer to the explanatory conclusion of the original Zygote Argument, which had the same explanatory conclusion of his Four-Case Argument. To further throttle his critics, Mele has obliquely suggested that the invalidity objection to his original Zygote Argument works only if one accepts his critic's idiosyncratic definition of 'incompatibilism' -- a patently false charge (since the term 'incompatibilism' doesn't even appear in his arguments) and one that has needlessly confused his audience. Indeed, other philosophers have now made this false and quite indefensible accusation explicitly in print, thereby helping Mele and others to continue motte-and-baileying with impunity. I close by preemptively responding to strategies commonly used by motte-and-bailey apologists to suppress legitimate criticisms of their equivocation and well-poisoning strategies (e.g. "Philosophers are allowed to define their technical terms however they like" and "the motte/bailey divide is a distinction without a difference") which have hitherto kept their philosophical audience from participating in a legitimate discussion about why tracking the distinction between the the "motte" thesis (a negative, arguably spurious association claim) and the "bailey" thesis (a positive explanatory claim) is not trivial, but is instead one that is absolutely essential to making progress in the free-will debate. Of course, a single critic cannot (almost by definition) undermine a motte-and-bailey doctrine once it has been established. As such, even if every diagnosis in this essay is accurate, it will not change the discourse. The motte-and-baileying will continue, and the debate will remain in needless deadlock, until a critical threshold of OBSERVERS learn about the motte/bailey distinction and ask apologists for motte-and-bailey incompatibilism to stop their motte-and-baileying. -/- Manuscript available upon request, plz gmail me: kristin.mickelson.42@. (shrink)

It is well known that microbial pathogens are able to subvert the host immune system in order to increase microbial replication and propagation. Recent research indicates that another arm of the immune response, that of the chemokine system, is also subject to this sabotage, and is undermined by a range of microbial pathogens, including viruses, bacteria, and parasites. Currently, it is known that the chemokine system is being challenged by a number of mechanisms, and still more are likely to (...) be discovered with further research. Here we first review the general mechanisms by which microbial pathogens bypass mammalian chemokine defences. Broadly, these can be grouped as viral chemokine interacting proteins, microbial manipulation of host chemokine and chemokine receptor expression, microbial blockade of host chemokine receptor signalling, and the largely hypothetical mechanisms of microbial enhancement of host anti‐chemokine networks (including digestion, antagonism, and neutralisation of host chemokines and chemokine receptors). We then discuss the potential results of these interactions in terms of outcome of infection. BioEssays 25:478–488, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Holding Doctors Responsible at Guantánamo*Nancy Sherman (bio)I recently visited the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center with a small group of civilian psychiatrists, psychologists, top military doctors, and Department of Defense health affairs officials to discuss detainee medical and mental health care. The unspoken reason for the invitation to go on this unusual day trip was the bruising criticism the Bush administration has received for its use of psychiatrists and psychologists (...) in the interrogation of suspected terrorist detainees.1We disembarked from our Navy jet to find an island lush and green from recent storms. A small boat took us from the airfield to the naval hospital. From the boat there was no sign of Camp Delta, where the detainees are actually held. Nor was there a sign of prisons or barbed wire or the detention facility's 505 inmates.Our host was the commanding officer of Gitmo, Major General Jay W. Hood (an artillery officer by training), who had replaced Major General Geoffrey Miller, implicated in the "migration" of torture methods from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib. Dressed in fatigues, General Hood briefed us using PowerPoint. His intelligence director told us that interrogators have not used harsh "fear up" tactics—the ones designed to terrify—since 2003.We went by bus from the naval hospital to the 30-bed detainee hospital for quick briefings from a psychiatrist and a physician. Still, we were not permitted to see any detainees or hunger strikers, despite our requests. During our six hours on the ground, we had only a fleeting glimpse of a few detainees outside their cellblocks behind barbed wire and screened fences.Indeed, when I got home and saw the play "Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom," by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, I had the disquieting feeling that I had absorbed more about detainee life at the theater than I had from actually being at Gitmo. This only amplified my anxiety that what I had heard and seen during my VIP visit sidestepped the central moral issue of whether abuse is still occurring at Gitmo and whether health professionals are, or have been, a party to coercive interrogation. [End Page 199]The question that the Pentagon leadership has been focusing on, and which was a key subject of discussion during our day at Gitmo, is whether there is an ethical difference between using psychologists or psychiatrists on interrogation teams—what the Pentagon calls, "behavioral consultation teams," or BSCTs, pronounced "biscuit." Some in the Pentagon would like to have doctors and psychiatrists, who are bound by the Hippocratic teaching to "do no harm," be the clinicians treating detainees. Psychologists, who are not as bound by Hippocratic dicta, would consult with and advise interrogators. But this is a red herring. It is hair-splitting that detracts from the real issue of whether health professionals of any stripe can ethically be involved in interrogations that may involve coercive techniques or torture. The answer is clearly no. They should not be involved, directly or indirectly, in situations that may lead to the breach of confidential medical records; to torture or to cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment; or to exploitation of fears or phobias. Mental health professionals simply should not be collaborating with interrogators in inflicting psychological torture.Hood said that "rapport building" was the preferred and an effective interrogation technique, but that is no guarantee that rougher tactics will not be used. The fact is that there is enormous pressure on the people at Guantánamo Bay to get good intelligence for the war on terror, and it is as easy for behavioral scientists as it is for interrogators to compromise their moral standards. Cunning and deception to extract information may be acceptable in some cases. But many people have been outraged to learn from media reports that methods developed by military psychologists to train our own troops to resist torture—the so-called "survival, evasion, resistance, and escape" methods taught at Ft. Bragg—have been "reverse engineered" at Guantánamo Bay to create coercive, psychologically manipulative interrogation techniques for use against detainees.Plato warned long ago that a doctor's skill, abstracted from good character and wisdom, is a neutral... (shrink)

‘Disastrologies’ explores Derrida's fascination with dates and how that fascination reveals a secret correspondence, in every sense of the word, with Walter Benjamin – a man who has the same birth-date as Derrida. It is, though, the date of Benjamin's death and indeed its infamous mise-en-scène, the cheap hotel on the Franco-Spanish border, that dominates this text which takes the form of a dramatic monologue delivered by the hotel manager, Juan Suñer, a man known to be both a manipulator of (...) dates and, indeed, close to the Gestapo. As the monologue unfolds, Suñer advances an elaborate calendrical re-reading of a host of Derrida texts which probes at the mystery not only of Benjamin's last night but also of living with both Jewish and Christian calendars. Finally, we see how this last of nights puts under unbearable pressure the infinite promise of both the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)