Big Think Interview With Nell Irvin Painter
Nell Irvin Painter, a leading historian of the United States, is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University. In addition to her earned doctorate in history from Harvard University, she has received honorary doctorates from Wesleyan, Dartmouth, SUNY-New Paltz, and Yale.
A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Nell Painter has also held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Antiquarian Society. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. Those presidential addresses have been published in the Journal of American History (“Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons” in March 2009) and the Journal of Southern History (“Was Marie White?” February 2008). The City of Boston declared Thursday, 4 October 2007Nell Irvin Painter Day in honor of her Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center in 2006.
A prolific and award-winning scholar, her most recent books are The History of White People (W. W. Norton, 2010, paperback, March 2011),Creating Black Americans (Oxford University Press, 2006), and Southern History Across the Color Line (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). A second edition of Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 and a Korean translation of Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbolappeared in 2008. Her other books are also still in print. For a complete list of her book and article publications and other honors and activities, please consult the CV on this website.
As a public intellectual, Professor Painter is frequently called upon for lectures and interviews on television and film. In January 2008 she appeared live for a three-hour “In Depth” program on C-SPAN Book TV. To see the program on the internet, go to the web page for “In Depth.”She has also appeared on Bill Moyers’s “Progressive America.” New Jersey Network’s “State of the Arts” documented her work as both a scholar and an art student.
Nell Irvin Painter: Okay, Nell Irvin Painter and I have two\r\ntitles. One is Edwards Professor\r\nof American History Emerita, Princeton University, and the other is lowly\r\ngraduate student.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: After so many\r\nhistories of nonwhite people by whites, does your book seek to correct the\r\nimbalance?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: It’s not an attempt to correct an\r\nimbalance, but I think it may function that way. For me it was an answering of questions. I started with a question I couldn’t\r\nanswer. Why are white people\r\ncalled Caucasian? You know\r\nwhy? So that was where I started\r\nasking questions and it went from one thing to another.
\r\n\r\n
Question: Where and when\r\ndid the concept of “whiteness” originate?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Yes, yes. Yeah, there are two ways of talking about it. one is just to notice that there is\r\nsome people who are kind of light skinned and other people who are kind of\r\nbrownish and other people who are kind of darkish, so people notice that you\r\nknow immediately, but since there wasn’t a lot of motion around from one’s town\r\nor one’s village that didn’t come up very much, so somebody like Herodotus for\r\ninstance, who did travel, he could say that for instance the Scythians, who\r\nmade quivers out of the arms, the skinned arms of the people they vanquished,\r\nthat man’s skin is very showy and white, so it was clear that people were light\r\nskinned, but to make it into something called a race or a variety, and then to\r\nendow that with certain characteristics, racial temperament for instance, that\r\nlatter kind of way of dealing with race, that’s an invention of the Enlightenment\r\nof the eighteenth century.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: How did\r\nEnlightenment-era notions of race develop?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Sure. Well when we think of science, science is a truth that is\r\ntrue no matter what, no matter when and for all time and science as the kind of\r\ngospel truth replaces the gospel, which was religion. Before science, before the eighteenth century, religion\r\nanswered the questions, and so in the nineteenth century for instance there was\r\na real jostling between science and religion over the truth and this is why\r\nDarwin was so controversial, but by the nineteenth and twentieth century\r\nscience and taxonomy had created categories, all sorts of things. Carolus Linnaeus, eighteenth century,\r\nis the father of taxonomy, that is of categorizing things and so that science\r\nof categorizing things comes out of the eighteenth century, comes out of the Enlightenment\r\nand counts up everything and gives it a name, including people.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: Before race\r\nbecame “taxonomized,” was there no racism as such?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Not so much racism because race hadn’t\r\nbeen invented yet, but the big differences were religious, so on the one hand\r\nthe Catholics and Protestants, on the other hand Christians, Jews and Muslims,\r\nso religion was the big defining factor before race and in fact, as we see in\r\nour own world religion still plays a very important part and it plays a part in\r\na way that race does in that you can say that somebody has a particular\r\nreligion and then that conjures up all sorts of other ideas about what is in\r\nthat person, how that person thinks, how that person goes through his or her\r\neveryday life, what it means to be a man or women, so there is lots that we\r\npack into these categories, whether they’re racial or religious.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: How was the\r\nemerging notion of race tied to 18th-century scientific thought?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: For Linnaeus—and the great version of\r\nhis taxonomy was 1758—he did categorize people, so but he categorized them\r\naccording to where they were from, so they were categorized, there were four\r\ndifferent varieties, and they were categorized by their continent. They did have continental temperaments,\r\nso people from Africa were flighty and people from Europe were thoughtful, but\r\ntheir names had to do with where they were from. So Johann Friedrich Blumenbach writing in… actually\r\npublishing on the 11th of April, 1795 enlarged Linnaeus’ four categories into\r\nfive and called one of them Caucasian. \r\nNote that he is calling them varieties, not races. Race is… He wrote in Latin and so the translation becomes races and\r\nraces is the nineteenth-century word. \r\nSo for Blumenbach at the very end of the eighteenth century it was\r\nalready clear that these varieties shade from one to the other imperceptibly. He said you can’t draw a clear line\r\nthat all of this kind of person will be on one side and all of that kind of\r\nperson will be on another, and he also offered his readers several different\r\nnumbers of varieties. He said you\r\ncould choose. For instance, he\r\nsaid I know a person who says there’re only two. He didn’t name that person, but we know who it was—Christoph\r\nMeiners, who was his colleague—and Meiners’ two races were ugly and beautiful.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: How does the\r\nidea of “whiteness” intersect with European art history and aesthetic theory?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Yes, because drawing lines of varieties\r\nor races also is drawing lines about physical attractiveness, so for Blumenbach\r\n1795 Caucasian was his choice of name because it had to with the most beautiful\r\nskull in his skull collection. Now\r\nthe skull was actually from Georgia. \r\nIt was from a sex slave from Georgia, and so what this skull did was\r\nembed in the name Caucasian the idea of beauty because the idea was that the\r\nCaucasians or the Circassians or the Georgians were the most beautiful people\r\nin the world, and that’s why Blumenbach chose that name, but also female and\r\nsubjected, so the struggle in the nineteenth century was to pull the beauty\r\npart of Caucasian away from sex slaves into virile men, and that’s one of the\r\nthings that Ralph Waldo Emerson did.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: How do we\r\nreconcile Emerson the passionate abolitionist with Emerson the champion of the “Saxon”\r\nrace?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Well first of all, Emerson was not\r\npassionate about abolition. He\r\nwasn’t a passionate person. He was\r\na cool intellectual, and I think he probably was a little uncomfortable with\r\npassionate people, but he was against slavery. There is no question of that, but for Emerson the American\r\nwas the same as an Englishman and the Englishman was the same as a Saxon. Now when he said Saxon he didn’t mean\r\nSaxon from Saxony. If you’re\r\nfamiliar with Germany there is a well-known region called Saxony, which is in\r\nthe eastern part of today’s Germany, and the big cities there are Dresden and\r\nLeipzig and Weimar, which was the city of Goethe and Schiller, so that Saxony\r\nis a well known area and it was a very important area in the nineteenth\r\ncentury. That’s not what Emerson\r\nmeant. Emerson meant a kind of\r\nfloating area off to the west, kind of between the Netherlands and Denmark,\r\nmaybe Hanover is involved, so that’s where his Saxons, came from and he also\r\nmeshed them in together with Vikings, so it’s a kind of northern masculine\r\ninvention.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: Are Emerson’s\r\nracial ideas still embedded in our own?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Yes, in certain ways, but what American\r\nhistorians for instance have done is take Emerson’s concept of Saxon, and when\r\nEmerson used Saxon he was not including the Celts. The Celts were considered a separate race. The Irish were considered a separate\r\nrace and Catholicism was considered part of their separateness, so for him\r\nSaxon went back to these Protestant Germans and Englishmen. So what American\r\nhistorians have done is take the twentieth-century word white and read it\r\nbackwards and equate white with Anglo-Saxon, with Saxon, with “free white” for\r\ninstance in the census of 1790, whereas at the time, 1790 or 1856 those were\r\nnot the same meanings. They were\r\ndifferent terms because they meant different things.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: How have\r\nnon-Anglo-Saxon ethnicities been incorporated into, or excluded from, the\r\ndefinition of “white”?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Yes, mostly incorporated into. The dialogue changed. The discourse changed according to the\r\nneeds of the time, so in the middle of the nineteenth century when Emerson was\r\nwriting when he looked around his New England there were these very poor people\r\nwhom he did not consider Saxons. \r\nThey were Celts and they were immigrants. They were poor Irish immigrants. These were the famine immigrants, but the end of the century\r\nthose people had children and those children had gone to school and made their\r\nway up the economic ladder a little bit. \r\nThat was one side of it. \r\nThe other side was the turn of the twentieth century brought a wave of\r\nnew immigrants, people from Southern and Eastern Europe and the near east and\r\nso the former Celts as a separate race got tucked into American whiteness, not\r\nas Saxons, but as Nordics, so the twentieth century term is Nordics, which has\r\nto do with Europeans from the northwest of Europe, which includes Ireland, so\r\nthat was an incorporation of people who had been despised. So the early twentieth century saw\r\nsomething that we can only call racism against immigrants, poor immigrants from\r\nSouthern and Eastern Europe and by the time their children and grandchildren\r\nwere mobilized in the new deal in the Second World War and then allowed to buy\r\nhomes for white people only in the suburbs after the Second World War then they\r\nbecome white people, and there is a large sort of passé part of whiteness that\r\nincludes everybody and that’s the whiteness that we inherit in the twenty-first\r\ncentury. It’s a whiteness that has\r\nalso been buffeted around a bit.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: How have Jewish\r\npeople become incorporated into this definition?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: The taxonomist in the eighteenth\r\ncentury and the nineteenth century had a lot of trouble with Jews. Were Jews…? Well they were pretty much white people, but as we see in\r\nthe United States white was not enough to be the American or to be the right\r\nkind of American, but in taxonomical terms were Jews Europeans. Well yes, but, so in the early\r\ntwentieth century the reigning scientific knowledge said that there were three\r\nEuropean races, Teutonic, Alpine and Mediterranean. Now this left out two problems peoples. One was the Laps, who were in and out and in and out depending on the particular scheme, and the Jews, in and out and\r\nin and out depending on the particular scheme, so it’s really the Holocaust and\r\nthen suburbanization that took away the racial taint and I use taint because\r\nrace is not always a taint. It\r\ntook away the racial taint from Jewishness and left the quality of Jewish\r\nethnicity, but there is changes have been occurring throughout the second half\r\nof the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, so for instance,\r\npeople who are now the grandparent generation may well feel that they are not\r\ncompletely white or they’re white and Jewish or they’re mostly Jewish and they\r\ndon’t feel white. Their children\r\nprobably feel both, maybe more white than Jewish depending on how they were\r\nbrought up, but the grandchildren probably just think of themselves as white\r\npeople and if they have one parent who is Jewish and one parent who is\r\nsomething else, especially if it is something else as attractive as Italian\r\nthey may well identify as Italian-American.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: Will other\r\nethnicities become redefined as “white,” or will racial definitions change\r\naltogether?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Well, both. Both at the same time. \r\nThe idea of the American… \r\nFor Emerson there was not a problem. The American was a Saxon and he was a man and he was\r\neducated. By the twentieth century\r\nthe American you might kind of put women in, still pretty much male, but still\r\ndefinitely white, but not a Saxon anymore. We live in a world in which it’s harder to talk about the\r\nAmerican in the singular, so we’re a multi. We have several different people who represent the United\r\nStates, so in that sense whiteness, the salience, the importance of whiteness\r\nis kind of tamping down some. On\r\nthe other hand, the idea of blackness, that is poor dark-skinned people, I\r\nthink we will have that with us always, and when we particularly at this moment\r\nof economic crisis and this moment in which we have a small number of very rich\r\npeople and a lot of people who are kind of scraping by and then tremendous\r\ndifferences. We have a great\r\ninequality of wealth and income. \r\nThis group of people who are scraping by there will be a lot of them,\r\nbut they will probably be largely black and brown and that will tend to\r\nreinforce racial ideas. So on the\r\nupper strata, among these few people up here who are doing very well there will\r\nbe people of various colors and from various backgrounds, but they will\r\nprobably not be so racialized as the people who are not doing well.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: To what extent\r\nis the American notion of “whiteness” based on class and not race?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: I don’t think you have to make a\r\nchoice. I think in the United\r\nStates we’ll always have both together because as long as we continue to\r\nbelieve in race, kind of like people believe in witches, no matter how often it\r\ngets disproved that will have a kind of gut-level feeling for us that the\r\nnotion of class doesn’t. in\r\nBritain for instance, in England class has a gut-level feeling, but not in the\r\nUnited States, so they’re not the same thing and it’s not either/or, but you’re\r\nabsolutely right to think that race is less important when people are doing\r\nwell, so it’s not that somebody will look at somebody who looks like me and\r\nsay, “Oh my gosh, you’re white.” \r\nIt’s that it won’t matter so much anymore.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: Have American\r\nnotions of race been exported around the world?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: The American sense of the importance,\r\nthe fundamental importance of the black-white dichotomy, comes out of societies\r\nfounded in the era of the African slave trade, so societies like ours, that is\r\nto say the western hemisphere, the Caribbean and so forth, we share a lot in\r\ncommon. In places like Germany or\r\nFrance the idea of black-white is not so much black-white but “our people and\r\nthem,” and “them” can be people from the near east like Turks or Muslims or\r\nNorth Africans, all of whom might well be considered white in the United\r\nStates.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: What has\r\nObama’s election changed about race in the U.S., and what hasn’t it changed?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Well here I can only act, speak as a\r\ncitizen, not as an expert of any sort, and it seems to me that the election is\r\nmore an outcome of changes that had been taking place since about the late\r\n‘90s. For instance, when I started\r\nworking on this book a century ago in 1999 very often I would get people\r\nsaying, “Well are you writing it as a black person?” And at first you know I took this rather… I mean I’m a professional\r\nhistorian. I do my research. I have a PhD. What does my race have to do with it? So I would say I’m writing it as a\r\nhistorian. Or, what are my options? Or, I’m writing it as a white man. I never got the right answer. I mean I never had the right\r\nretort. Let’s put it that\r\nway. But people stopped asking me\r\nthat. It became possible for\r\npeople, for Americans to imagine that a person in my body might have access to\r\nknowledge. That I think was a\r\nchange, so I think that American… \r\nAnd this is also subjective. \r\nI mean it’s all that is coming to me. I think that as I see it Americans are more able to talk\r\nabout race or think about race as having other qualities besides skin color,\r\nand that there might be knowledge that is useful and that white people might\r\nhave a race, so in the late twentieth century if you were white then you didn’t\r\nhave race. You were an individual\r\nand I think now large numbers of white people understand themselves as\r\nindividuals, but also as people who are raced. Now in terms of the possibility of electing a mixed race\r\nperson or a person identified as black, I never thought that would occur in my\r\nlifetime, I was very surprised. And very pleased I would add. So I think that\r\nalso reflects a shift in American values. \r\nNow could the black president be someone who had 100% native\r\nAfrican-American background? This\r\nI don’t know. It seems to me that\r\nwhen it comes to terms of difference that people are often more comfortable\r\ngetting an exotic, so the first woman to be Secretary of State was not born in\r\nthe United States. Madeline\r\nAlbright was an immigrant. So we\r\nwill see if these changes hold on, but my sense is there has been a kind of\r\nunclenching when it comes to ideas about race in the United States because in\r\npart the racial identity and the class identity in terms of black equaling\r\npoor, that is opening up. So I think when middle-class people see other\r\nmiddle-class people who are just as middle-class, but who are not white of skin\r\nthat kind of relaxes it a little bit. \r\nIt doesn’t help those people who are poor.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: Why did you\r\ntransition from emeritus history professor to graduate art student?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: At first it wasn’t hard. It’s gotten harder and harder. Being a graduate student is no fun and\r\nis hard, but I’m sticking with it. \r\nI love making art. Making\r\nart for me is not fun in the sense of la, la, la, la, but it’s something that I\r\nfind very absorbing and very satisfying and I have a hard time stopping, so\r\nit’s 11:00 and I need to go to bed and if I just do this one little bit of\r\nyellow. You know, it just goes on\r\nand on and on. Many, many years\r\nago when I was an undergraduate I kind of came to a fork in the road. My father had taught me how to\r\ndraw. My mother had taught me how\r\nto write. I come from an academic\r\nfamily in Oakland, California and I was majoring in art at the University of\r\nCalifornia Berkley and I took sculpture and sculpture was hard and I thought\r\nthis proves I haven’t got the talent. \r\nWell this of course was nonsense. \r\nThis was silly young person thinking. You need to do some work even if you have the talent. So I just went the way that was easier,\r\nthe way I knew what to do, but I have always had the pleasure of the eye. I’ve always enjoyed color. I’m a knitter. Actually I knitted this sweater I’m\r\nwearing, so the visual sense has always been with me. In the 1990’s I wrote a biography of Sojourner Truth and\r\nSojourner Truth did not read and write. \r\nShe had her photographs taken, so I needed to learn the meaning of\r\nphotographs, the history of photographs and I wrote a chapter on Sojourner\r\nTruth in photography. That took me\r\nover to the art history library at Princeton, which is a magnificent library\r\nand I really enjoyed that, so that was kind of the first nudge. Also my mother who died a little over a\r\nyear ago changed her career at 65. \r\nShe started writing books. \r\nIt took her 10 years to write and publish her first book, 10 years to\r\nwrite and publish her second book and she was working on a website when she\r\ndied at 91, so I thought well I can do that and if I’m going to live to be 91,\r\nI will have an art career too, as long as many successful artists who are with\r\nus today. So it was that kind of\r\nsense of possibility. They’re\r\ncalled encore careers.
\r\n\r\nQuestion: Which artists\r\ninspire you most?
\r\n\r\nNell Irvin Painter: Absolutely. I can tell you two or three artists whose work I\r\nadmire. I think someone who has\r\nbeen with me for sometime is Robert Colescott, who died a couple of years ago.\r\nColescott was an African-American artist who was deeply engaged in the history,\r\nof art history and so his work did have a lot of cultural meaning and\r\nhistorical meaning and also he was really a riotous painter with a great sense\r\nof color and kind of… I hate to\r\nuse the word riotous again, but his compositions also were like that, that he\r\nwould pull together images that would seem not to fit together, images that\r\nwere uncomfortable, but I found them very satisfying, so Robert Colescott has\r\nbeen someone who inspires me and has inspired me. At the moment I am very inspired by Maira Kalman who does\r\nthe blogs in The New York Times, has done books. Kalman began as an illustrator. She wrote 12 children’s books. She is still writing children’s books. She did two very well regarded\r\nbooks. One she illustrated, Strunk\r\nand White’s Elements of Style, and the other it was Principles of Uncertainty,\r\nwhich came out of her New York Times blog. What I really like about Maira Kalman is that she uses\r\ntext. She uses text. She used drawings, paintings and she\r\nuses photographs together, so for me that is very inspiring. I am nowhere near her abilities, her\r\nskill, her imagination and her humor, but to see what she does with these three\r\ndifferent kinds of representations is very illuminating. And then somebody like Charline von\r\nHeyl, who is actually an abstract painter, but I like her work very much. Denyse Thomasos is also an abstract\r\npainter, an African-American… a Canadian painter actually, who does\r\narchitectural compositions with a great sense of energy, and so even though her\r\nwork is abstract you can see a kind of sense, not of figuration because she\r\ndoesn’t put figures in, but of representation. So these are just four artists, but there are many others\r\nwhose work I like very much.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nA conversation with the professor of American history at Princeton.
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‘Designer baby’ book trilogy explores the moral dilemmas humans may soon create
How would the ability to genetically customize children change society? Sci-fi author Eugene Clark explores the future on our horizon in Volume I of the "Genetic Pressure" series.
- A new sci-fi book series called "Genetic Pressure" explores the scientific and moral implications of a world with a burgeoning designer baby industry.
- It's currently illegal to implant genetically edited human embryos in most nations, but designer babies may someday become widespread.
- While gene-editing technology could help humans eliminate genetic diseases, some in the scientific community fear it may also usher in a new era of eugenics.
Tribalism and discrimination
<p>One question the "Genetic Pressure" series explores: What would tribalism and discrimination look like in a world with designer babies? As designer babies grow up, they could be noticeably different from other people, potentially being smarter, more attractive and healthier. This could breed resentment between the groups—as it does in the series.</p><p>"[Designer babies] slowly find that 'everyone else,' and even their own parents, becomes less and less tolerable," author Eugene Clark told Big Think. "Meanwhile, everyone else slowly feels threatened by the designer babies."</p><p>For example, one character in the series who was born a designer baby faces discrimination and harassment from "normal people"—they call her "soulless" and say she was "made in a factory," a "consumer product." </p><p>Would such divisions emerge in the real world? The answer may depend on who's able to afford designer baby services. If it's only the ultra-wealthy, then it's easy to imagine how being a designer baby could be seen by society as a kind of hyper-privilege, which designer babies would have to reckon with. </p><p>Even if people from all socioeconomic backgrounds can someday afford designer babies, people born designer babies may struggle with tough existential questions: Can they ever take full credit for things they achieve, or were they born with an unfair advantage? To what extent should they spend their lives helping the less fortunate? </p>Sexuality dilemmas
<p>Sexuality presents another set of thorny questions. If a designer baby industry someday allows people to optimize humans for attractiveness, designer babies could grow up to find themselves surrounded by ultra-attractive people. That may not sound like a big problem.</p><p>But consider that, if designer babies someday become the standard way to have children, there'd necessarily be a years-long gap in which only some people are having designer babies. Meanwhile, the rest of society would be having children the old-fashioned way. So, in terms of attractiveness, society could see increasingly apparent disparities in physical appearances between the two groups. "Normal people" could begin to seem increasingly ugly.</p><p>But ultra-attractive people who were born designer babies could face problems, too. One could be the loss of body image. </p><p>When designer babies grow up in the "Genetic Pressure" series, men look like all the other men, and women look like all the other women. This homogeneity of physical appearance occurs because parents of designer babies start following trends, all choosing similar traits for their children: tall, athletic build, olive skin, etc. </p><p>Sure, facial traits remain relatively unique, but everyone's more or less equally attractive. And this causes strange changes to sexual preferences.</p><p>"In a society of sexual equals, they start looking for other differentiators," he said, noting that violet-colored eyes become a rare trait that genetically engineered humans find especially attractive in the series.</p><p>But what about sexual relationships between genetically engineered humans and "normal" people? In the "Genetic Pressure" series, many "normal" people want to have kids with (or at least have sex with) genetically engineered humans. But a minority of engineered humans oppose breeding with "normal" people, and this leads to an ideology that considers engineered humans to be racially supreme. </p>Regulating designer babies
<p>On a policy level, there are many open questions about how governments might legislate a world with designer babies. But it's not totally new territory, considering the West's dark history of eugenics experiments.</p><p>In the 20th century, the U.S. conducted multiple eugenics programs, including immigration restrictions based on genetic inferiority and forced sterilizations. In 1927, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that forcibly sterilizing the mentally handicapped didn't violate the Constitution. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote, "… three generations of imbeciles are enough." </p><p>After the Holocaust, eugenics programs became increasingly taboo and regulated in the U.S. (though some states continued forced sterilizations <a href="https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/" target="_blank">into the 1970s</a>). In recent years, some policymakers and scientists have expressed concerns about how gene-editing technologies could reanimate the eugenics nightmares of the 20th century. </p><p>Currently, the U.S. doesn't explicitly ban human germline genetic editing on the federal level, but a combination of laws effectively render it <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">illegal to implant a genetically modified embryo</a>. Part of the reason is that scientists still aren't sure of the unintended consequences of new gene-editing technologies. </p><p>But there are also concerns that these technologies could usher in a new era of eugenics. After all, the function of a designer baby industry, like the one in the "Genetic Pressure" series, wouldn't necessarily be limited to eliminating genetic diseases; it could also work to increase the occurrence of "desirable" traits. </p><p>If the industry did that, it'd effectively signal that the <em>opposites of those traits are undesirable. </em>As the International Bioethics Committee <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wrote</a>, this would "jeopardize the inherent and therefore equal dignity of all human beings and renew eugenics, disguised as the fulfillment of the wish for a better, improved life."</p><p><em>"Genetic Pressure Volume I: Baby Steps"</em><em> by Eugene Clark is <a href="http://bigth.ink/38VhJn3" target="_blank">available now.</a></em></p>These are the world’s greatest threats in 2021
We look back at a year ravaged by a global pandemic, economic downturn, political turmoil and the ever-worsening climate crisis.
Billions are at risk of missing out on the digital leap forward, as growing disparities challenge the social fabric.
Image: Global Risks Report 2021
<h3>Widespread effects</h3><p>"The immediate human and economic costs of COVID-19 are severe," the report says. "They threaten to scale back years of progress on reducing global poverty and inequality and further damage social cohesion and global cooperation."</p><p>For those reasons, the pandemic demonstrates why infectious diseases hits the top of the impact list. Not only has COVID-19 led to widespread loss of life, it is holding back economic development in some of the poorest parts of the world, while amplifying wealth inequalities across the globe.</p><p>At the same time, there are concerns the fight against the pandemic is taking resources away from other critical health challenges - including a <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/charts-covid19-malnutrition-educaion-mental-health-children-world/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">disruption to measles vaccination programmes</a>.</p>Columbia study finds new way to extract energy from black holes
A new study explains how a chaotic region just outside a black hole's event horizon might provide a virtually endless supply of energy.
- In 1969, the physicist Roger Penrose first proposed a way in which it might be possible to extract energy from a black hole.
- A new study builds upon similar ideas to describe how chaotic magnetic activity in the ergosphere of a black hole may produce vast amounts of energy, which could potentially be harvested.
- The findings suggest that, in the very distant future, it may be possible for a civilization to survive by harnessing the energy of a black hole rather than a star.
The ergosphere
<p>The ergosphere is a region just outside a black hole's event horizon, the boundary of a black hole beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. But light and matter just outside the event horizon, in the ergosphere, would also be affected by the immense gravity of the black hole. Objects in this zone would spin in the same direction as the black hole at incredibly fast speeds, similar to objects floating around the center of a whirlpool.</p><p>The Penrose process states, in simple terms, that an object could enter the ergosphere and break into two pieces. One piece would head toward the event horizon, swallowed by the black hole. But if the other piece managed to escape the ergosphere, it could emerge with more energy than it entered with.</p><p>The movie "Interstellar" provides an example of the Penrose process. Facing a fuel shortage on a deep-space mission, the crew makes a last-ditch effort to return home by entering the ergosphere of a blackhole, ditching part of their spacecraft, and "slingshotting" away from the black hole with vast amounts of energy.</p><p>In a recent study published in the American Physical Society's <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.103.023014" target="_blank" style="">Physical Review D</a><em>, </em>physicists Luca Comisso and Felipe A. Asenjo used similar ideas to describe another way energy could be extracted from a black hole. The idea centers on the magnetic fields of black holes.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Black holes are commonly surrounded by a hot 'soup' of plasma particles that carry a magnetic field," Comisso, a research scientist at Columbia University and lead study author, told <a href="https://news.columbia.edu/energy-particles-magnetic-fields-black-holes" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Columbia News</a>.</p>Ergosphere representation
<p>In the ergosphere of a rotating black hole, magnetic field lines are constantly breaking and reconnecting at fast speeds. The researchers theorized that when these lines reconnect, plasma particles shoot out in two different directions. One flow of particles shoots off against the direction of the spinning black hole, eventually getting "swallowed" by the black hole. But the other flow shoots in the same direction as the spin, potentially gaining enough velocity to escape the black hole's gravitational pull.</p><p>The researchers proposed that this occurs because the breaking and reconnecting of magnetic field lines can generate negative-energy particles. If the negative-energy particles get "swallowed" by the black hole, the positive particles would theoretically be exponentially accelerated.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Our theory shows that when magnetic field lines disconnect and reconnect, in just the right way, they can accelerate plasma particles to negative energies and large amounts of black hole energy can be extracted," Comisso said. "It is like a person could lose weight by eating candy with negative calories."</p>Black hole
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
<p>While there might not be immediate applications for the theory, it could help scientists better understand and observe black holes. On an abstract level, the findings may expand the limits of what scientists imagine is possible in deep space.</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"Thousands or millions of years from now, humanity might be able to survive around a black hole without harnessing energy from stars," Comisso said. "It is essentially a technological problem. If we look at the physics, there is nothing that prevents it."</p>Archaeologists identify contents of ancient Mayan drug containers
Scientists use new methods to discover what's inside drug containers used by ancient Mayan people.
- Archaeologists used new methods to identify contents of Mayan drug containers.
- They were able to discover a non-tobacco plant that was mixed in by the smoking Mayans.
- The approach promises to open up new frontiers in the knowledge of substances ancient people consumed.
PARME staff archaeologists excavating a burial site at the Tamanache site, Mérida, Yucatan.
Credit: WSU
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