Jorge Luis Borges

Along with Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka, the Argentine short-story writer Jorge Luis Borges is one of the few authors to inspire his own adjective. A "Borgesian" work is one that bends time and reality, often creating a fantasy world revealing unexpected historical connections. In The Library of Babel, Borges describes an infinite library that contains all possible texts. In The Babylon Lottery, he chronicles a lottery in which there are as many negative outcomes as positive; hence a winning ticket might carry a monetary prize while a losing ticket requires the loser's finger to be cut off. In Borges and I, he ponders his own identity, wondering whether his true nature is that of the famous writer or that of the humble man who walks the streets of Buenos Aires.

Darwin and Wallace　　Time Limit: 3 min. 40 sec.

Charles Darwin is commonly credited with being the father of the theory of evolution, which he first explained in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. The concept that species may evolve over time had been recognized in the early nineteenth century. But Darwin's great insight was to describe the mechanism that drives the evolutionary process: natural selection. The process of natural selection refers to the tendency for plants and animals to pass desirable traits to their offspring, encouraging the development of species that are well suited to their environment. At the same time, organisms that do not inherit favorable traits tend not to prosper. In that way, the advantageous traits are said to be "naturally" selected.

Darwin lacked training as a naturalist. Indeed, his education was a practical one, acquired on his five-year voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, during which he collected fossils and specimens of plants and animals and took careful notes of the differences he observed among living things.

Though he finalized his theory in 1844, many years before he published it, Darwin feared the storm it would cause in religious circles. The idea that humans evolved from primates conflicted with the tenets of traditional religion, which insisted that a divine being, God, must be credited with the guiding role in human creation.

Thus Darwin was content to keep quiet about his ideas. But he was upset in 1858 when he received a letter and draft of a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace, a young naturalist with whom Darwin had been corresponding. Darwin was stunned to realize that Wallace was preparing to publish a theory of evolution that mirrored Darwin's own key ideas, including the primacy of natural selection. He faced a dilemma: if he hurried to publish his paper, he would be perceived as taking advantage of the work of another; but if he allowed Wallace to publish first, Darwin would lose credit for his life's work just because he had been afraid to announce it.

The answer lay in a compromise. Darwin posed the problem to two fellow scientists, who suggested that both men's papers be presented at an 1858 meeting of a London scientific society. The papers attracted little notice at first. But the following year, Darwin's book was a sensation, and evolution became associated with him rather than with Wallace. This was due in part to Wallace's own good nature. He was willing to give Darwin most of the credit, even calling the theory Darwinism. Also, Wallace's reputation suffered later in his life when he pursued non-scientific subjects such as spiritualism and extraterrestrial life.

The Chicago School of Economics　　Time Limit: 3 min. 40 sec.

Over the past century, the University of Chicago's Department of Economics has been the preeminent source of economic thought in the United States. Its influence has been so pervasive that its theoretical approaches have come to be known in academic circles as the Chicago School, referring not only to the university department but also to a broader economic worldview. Adherents of the Chicago School may be found in many universities and governmental institutions around the world.

The Chicago School has passed through several historical stages, each characterized by its own unique perspective. It began in the 1920s with Frank H. Knight and Jacob Viner, who rejected the reigning empirical approach of economics, which derived conclusions by analyzing data about the performance of economic indicators. Knight and Viner denounced economic imperialism, which viewed all social forces as having an economic explanation, and they were suspicious of a laissez-faire approach, arguing instead for activist governmental policies to avoid recessions. But they rejected a full-scale Keynesian policy that would grant government a role in all phases of economic life. Rather, they were confident in the ability of neoclassical paradigms, with their focus on individual and group choices to maximize self-interest, to solve all economic problems.

The second great flowering of the Chicago School began in the 1960s under George J. Stigler and Milton Friedman. The Second Chicago School adhered to neoclassical economics and rejected a Keynesian exaltation of government regulation. In the macroeconomic sphere, it is best known for its stress on monetarism, as developed by Milton Friedman, with whom the Chicago School became most closely associated. Friedman's view, borrowed from the nineteenth-century "quantity of money" theory, was that price levels are directly related to the amount of money in circulation. Unlike Keynesianism, monetarism eschews direct government control by means of taxation and spending in favor of imposing limits on the nation's money supply. Friedman espoused a dominant role for the Federal Reserve, which can raise or lower interest rates as needed to put the brakes on inflation or to stimulate a stagnant economy. Another tool is the sale of United States treasury bonds, by which the government can obtain funds by selling bonds to citizens at stated interest rates.

On the microeconomic level, the Chicago School was led by George Stigler, who argued for preserving the neoclassical paradigm while extending it to new areas whenever possible. Resulting innovations in the microeconomic sphere include search theory, human capital theory, and property rights/transaction cost theory.

The Chicago School's continued embrace of neoclassicism has led to criticisms that it encourages an imperialist view, in which all social and political phenomena are seen in terms of economic forces.

Transcendentalism　　Time Limit: 3 min. 40 sec.

Transcendentalism was a philosophy at the core of the American cultural renaissance of the mid-1800s. Centered in New England, the transcendental movement was signaled by Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1836 essay Nature, in which he wrote what was to be the rhetorical rallying cry of the new philosophy: "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds ... A nation of men will for the first time exist because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

Also in 1836, Emerson and his other transcendentalists sought a forum for their ideas by forming the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1840, the group began to publish their philosophy in a journal, The Dial.

The term transcendentalism was derived from a concept of the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who said that knowledge was "transcendent" when it was concerned not with reality but with the mode of knowing reality. By meditating and communing with nature, through work and art, we can transcend our senses and arrive at an understanding of truth and beauty. The doctrine rejects the idea that we can rely on our senses and experiences to attain knowledge; rather, we must look to our inner, spiritual essence as guideposts to the true nature of things.

The transcendentalists believed that the path to truth lay within ourselves. Society was a necessary evil, one that gave humans useful goods and the means of physical survival. But in order to lead a just life, people must ignore custom and social convention and rely on their own reason. Organized religion was an obstacle to this process, they believed, by interfering with one's personal relationship with God.

Transcendentalism exercised a profound influence on American literature and intellectual history. In his essays, such as Self Reliance, Emerson became the leading exponent of the movement. Henry David Thoreau's On Walden Pond insisted on humankind's ability to survive and prosper outside the constraints of society. The poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson revealed the universal truths that could be uncovered by studying nature.

Emerson conceded that a true transcendental life was impossible to attain. Nonetheless, the movement spawned utopian communities like the one at Brook Farm near Boston. Founded by George Ripley in 1841, Brook Farm was inspired by the socialist views of George Fourier, who believed that people of like beliefs could live together in harmony, sharing their material goods and growing food for all. But the farm was situated on poor soil that was not productive for agriculture. More successful were its schools, which gave the community its only income. A fire to the main building doomed the experiment, which ended in 1847.

White Flight　　Time Limit: 3 min. 40 sec.

America's large cities were founded and populated by whites. After the Civil War, blacks began moving to the northern cities for jobs in the factories. This black influx increased during Word War II, as blacks came seeking jobs in the war industries. A tight housing market resulted, and the birth of the Civil Rights Movement caused increased racial tension in the white-controlled cities. Whites with the economic means began moving away from these social problems into nearby suburban communities, a phenomenon known as white flight.

Americans traditionally had lived either in cities or on farms. But the spike in demand for post-World War II housing created the suburbs– ”residential communities, often built on former farmland, from which people commuted by automobile to their jobs in the cities. The suburbs were perceived by some whites as a peaceful haven, free from the urban turmoil caused by poor blacks and the decline of city schools.

Real estate agents played a crucial role in fostering white flight, often preying upon whites' negative attitudes toward blacks. The most pernicious technique used by realtors was blockbusting. Real estate agents would secretly sell a house in a white neighborhood, either buying the house themselves or using a white proxy and then reselling the house to a black family. When white homeowners saw a black family moving in, they would panic, thinking that the value of their homes would decline if the neighborhood were overtaken by blacks. Their fears were self-fulfilling; as soon as more homes were put on the market, the prices would decline. Often the only willing buyers were the real estate agents, who would then resell the homes at higher prices to new black families. In that way the realtors would reap not only their sales commissions but also the profits on their briefly owned houses.

In addition to altering the racial composition of cities, white flight has profoundly impacted public education. In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered that public schools be desegregated so that schools would no longer be mostly black or mostly white. That order triggered social upheaval, especially in the South, which had a long tradition of requiring separate schools for blacks. To overcome this resistance, later court decisions mandated the busing of students, so blacks might be bused many miles to a formerly white school and white students many miles to a black school.

White parents balked at having their children waste time riding on buses to a school that might not be as good as the one nearby. Their solution was to enroll their children in private schools, which, because they received no tax money, were free to operate without being subject to racial apportionment.

Thomas Hunt Morgan　　Time Limit: 3 min. 40 sec.

In the early part of the twentieth century, scientists were struggling to discover the physical basis of heredity. They knew that traits were inherited, but they did not know the mechanism by which the traits were passed to later generations. One candidate was the chromosome, the thread-like structure in the nucleus of a cell that had been discovered in 1888. But no one had performed the experiments needed to demonstrate the precise role of chromosomes in conveying genetic information.

A geneticist at Columbia University, Thomas Hunt Morgan, chose a tiny fly as the subject of his quest to understand the chromosome. Fruit flies, formally called the Drosophila melanogaster, were ideal for Morgan's project because 1) they were inexpensive to keep and feed, 2) they could be bred in large numbers in a small space, 3) they became adults in just ten days, and 4) they had only four chromosomes, which made them easy to study.

Working out of a small laboratory at Columbia, appropriately called the Fly Room, Morgan and his team began breeding fruit flies by the millions. The process was a painstaking one, as each fly had to be captured with tweezers and examined under a magnifying glass for any variations in inherited traits. Morgan tried to produce variations, also called mutations, by exposing the flies to radiation, growing them in either bright light or total darkness, spinning them in centrifuges, and baking them in ovens. Morgan worked diligently for six years, but he had no success in finding mutations that he could try to reproduce in a fly's offspring.

Just as he was about to give up, in 1910, he found a fly with white eyes instead of the usual red ones. That mutation reappeared in later generations, implying that it had been passed by inheritance. Morgan learned how to track traits from generation to generation, allowing him to show how particular traits were linked to particular chromosomes. In this way, he finally established that chromosomes were the carriers of hereditary factors. Those factors were later determined to be genes, or chain-like molecules of nucleic acid.

Morgan's results led him to explain sex-linked inheritance, meaning that some traits pass only to one or the other sex. He also discovered that genes are arranged on a chromosome in a fixed linear order, occupying a specific place on the chromosome. His insights made possible the recent success of the Human Genome Project, which, when completed, will map out the sequence and location of all human genes. Armed with that knowledge, scientists will be able to identify the genes that carry certain diseases, and they may be able to remove the defective genes and replace them with healthy ones.

The Muckrakers　　Time Limit: 3 min. 30 sec.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, magazine writers and newspaper reporters began to write reports exposing the abuses and corruption in politics and business. Among their targets were child labor, unsafe practices in food processing plants, fraudulent claims by drug companies, prostitution, labor racketeering, and inhumane prison conditions.

One of the most famous of these reformers was the novelist Upton Sinclair, who, in The Jungle, dramatizes the unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry. Another was Jacob Riis, a newspaper reporter and photographer who revealed the misery in the slums of New York City.

The public's enthusiasm for these reports was inspired mainly by a 1903 series in McClure's Magazine, which published investigations of corruption in city government by Lincoln Steffens and of the Standard Oil Company by Ida M. Tarbell.

This brand of socially conscious journalism was originally embraced by President Theodore Roosevelt. He persuaded Congress to pass reform laws such as the Pure Food and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act. But in 1906, David Graham Phillips wrote a series of articles in Cosmopolitan magazine that alleged political corruption by some of Roosevelt's allies. Roosevelt fought back. In a speech, he compared some of the journalists to the character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who worked with a muck-rake, always looking down into the muck, or animal dung, and never looking up at the world around him. While praising writers who showed a genuine concern for correcting injustices, he condemned those who were interested only in uncovering filth and sensationalizing the misbehavior they had found. He called them muckrakers.

Responsible investigative journalists felt betrayed by Roosevelt's unsavory label. Lincoln Steffens, one of the reformers respected by Roosevelt, was furious with the speech. The day after he told Roosevelt, "Well, you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you."

In fact, Roosevelt's verbal attack did lead to the demise of what was generally considered to be a positive movement, one that had drawn attention to and cured many of society's ills. Nonetheless, while it flourished, especially between 1900 and 1915, the muckraking movement achieved important successes, including dissolving corporate monopolies, ending child labor, adopting workers' compensation laws, and improving food-processing safety.

Later in the twentieth century, the term muckraker became associated with any author or filmmaker who focused on the public dangers that the politicians were unwilling to confront. Recent muckrakers include Ralph Nader, the author of an expos?? on unsafe automobiles, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the chroniclers of the Watergate scandal, and Morgan Spurlock, the maker of a film about the fast-food industry.

religious controversy　natural selection　Alfred Russel Wallace

the theory of evolution　On the Origin of Species

the Federal Reserve　Milton Friedman　Chicago School

regulating the money supply　the leading center of economic thought

Nature　 transcendentalism　an understanding of nature

design towns　New England

earn more commissions　after World War II　blockbusting

decline in school systems　ordering the busing of school children

chromosomes　fruit flies　the fly's offspring

a chain of molecules　the body passed traits

political corruption　President Theodore Roosevelt　politics and business

the muckrakers　public corruption or business misbehavior

Cambrian Explosion

All animal species found on Earth today can be traced to forms that first appeared about 570 to 530 million years ago. During that relatively short time, there occurred an unprecedented surge in the variety of life that is found in the fossil record. As this rapid evolution happened during the Cambrian period of geological history, it is known as the Cambrian explosion.

In the Precambrian period, before about 600 million years ago, evolution had produced few life forms, and they were simple in structure. But a sudden burst of complexity and variety appeared during the Cambrian explosion. The evidence lies in fossils, remains or impressions of living things preserved in rock or soil. The reason for such an acceleration in evolution continues to puzzle scientists today.

The Cambrian explosion posed a special problem for Charles Darwin, who, in 1859, published his explanation for how living things evolved. Darwin's theory proposes that the current diversity of life had emerged after a very long time. Natural selection needed a long period to work the small changes that produce the species we see today. That idea required that evolution occur gradually and that the fossil record show this gradual change. But the record in fact showed that the beings that arose during the Cambrian explosion could not be found in the Precambrian period. Darwin himself conceded that this missing fossil record could be used as an argument against the validity of his theory. Indeed, that argument is asserted today by those who believe in Creationism or Intelligent Design, the view that life was created at one time by a divine being.

Darwin got around this objection by suggesting that Precambrian evolution did occur but is not shown in the fossil record. In other words, there may not have been an explosion at all. Rather, the phenomenon may be explained by the fact that the Precambrian stages of evolution involved organisms that were too fragile to be preserved as fossils.

Not all organisms become fossilized. Two conditions must be met. First, the organisms must have parts that are hard enough to leave a trace in the rock and dirt in which they died. Precambrian life forms may not have developed such rigid parts, as did the shellfish that appeared in the Cambrian period. Second, the remains must be buried in a non-hostile environment, one in which the parts will not dissolve or decay. Thus many Precambrian specimens may have simply disappeared.

Nonetheless, most scientists agree that the Cambrian period witnessed greater and faster changes than before. They have offered several explanations for this speeding up of the evolutionary process, some external and some internal to the organisms themselves. One theory points to the increase of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere just before the Cambrian period. Low oxygen levels limit the capacity of animals to become more diverse and complex. Another external cause might have been radical movements of the Earth's crust, causing populations to be separated from one another and to evolve into different species.

Internal explanations include gene development; animals cannot evolve into different forms until they achieve a certain minimum complexity of genes.They need a sufficient genetic toolbox to generate more diverse forms. Perhaps it was not until the Cambrian period that this toolbox became effective.

The Beat Movement

The Beat Generation is a label applied to a non-conformist social movement begun in New York City in the 1950s. Its message was carried by a group of writers who used stream-of-consciousness forms to express the insights and longings of those who rejected the mainstream values of the times. Although the Beat writers produced few lasting works, their attitudes inspired rock music artists and social movements of the 1960s and beyond.

The term beat was coined in 1946 by Herbert Huncke. He meant it to be a synonym for tired or down and out. In 1948, the word was used by Jack Kerouac in his phrase Beat Generation, by which he changed the reference to mean upbeat or beatific. The phrase finally entered public consciousness in 1952 with John Clellon Holmes's article in the New York Times Magazine called "This is the Beat Generation."

The original Beats were a group of friends from New York City who met in the mid-1940s. They included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and William S. Burroughs. That core group moved to San Francisco, where they were joined by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many others.

The first famous work of Beat literature was the long poem, Howl, by Allen Ginsberg. In 1955, Ginsberg read the poem aloud at a gallery in San Francisco, causing a stir with its portrayal of drug use and homosexuality. Its fame was fueled by the obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who sold the poem in his bookstore. But Ferlinghetti was acquitted when the judge ruled that the work did have "redeeming social importance" and thus was not obscene.

The most successful Beat novelist was Jack Kerouac. In his best novel, On the Road, published in 1957, Kerouac described an automobile trip around the United States by a character based on himself, Sal Paradise, and Dean Moriarty, based on Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady. The novel made Cassady into a cultural icon known for his irresponsible lifestyle, womanizing, amorality, and lust for life.

On the Road became known as much for how Kerouac wrote it as for its content. Kerouac allegedly was high on pills while he wrote it, and he typed it on a continuous scroll of paper so that he would not have to interrupt his thoughts by changing paper. He is said to have believed that "the first thought is the best thought," and he claimed that he never revised what he wrote. Though he said that he wrote the book in just three weeks, the truth is that he had been planning the novel for years and that he wrote several drafts.

Also influential was a novel by William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, which also survived an obscenity trial. In that work, Burroughs, who was a drug addict himself, tells of his drug-induced fantasies and his travels among addicts and criminals.

In the 1960s, those who followed Beat philosophy became known as hippies or yippies. Their culture was centered in San Francisco, which became a center of rock music, drug culture, and protest against the war in Vietnam.

The Beat Generation's lasting contribution to literature is that it encouraged writing on more personal topics, including those showing the unpleasant sides of human nature and of society. It validated expression through informal, conversational language and made profanity a permissible tool for revealing human feelings.