Clarence Darrow, criminality, and free will

September 2, 2013 • 6:09 am

Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), a Chicago attorney who lived only two blocks from where I now reside, is one of my heroes. You’ll surely remember him as the defense attorney in the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925, the man who conducted a brutal cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan about the veracity of the Bible.

But the Scopes trial was only one case in a long and distinguished career, one in which Darrow fought relentlessly for the underdog, whether that be socialists, laborers, or blacks. He took on many unpopular causes, and was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union.

I don’t have the space to recount his many achievements, or explain why I admire him. If you want to learn about Darrow, read either the Wikipedia article or Douglas Linder’s Clarence Darrow Home Page. Better yet, read John Farrell’s excellent biography, Clarence Darrow, Attorney for the Damned. The following short video gives the highlights of his career.

Someone sent me a collection of Darrow’s speeches in and out of the courtroom, which had a title similar to that of the biography. The anthology is Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom, edited by Arthur Weinberg and with an introduction by William O. Douglas (late justice of the U.S. Supreme Court). Reading through it, I realized that Darrow’s entire philosophy of criminal justice hinged on his notion that criminals had no free will: they couldn’t choose to commit or refrain from crime, but were conditioned completely by their constitutions and environment.

This is relevant to the Leopold and Loeb case, one of the three most famous criminal trials of the twentieth century (the other two are the O. J. Simpson case, in which I was involved, and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping).

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two brilliant Jewish students at the University of Chicago, who, influenced by Nietzsche, decided to commit the perfect crime. On May 21, 1924, they kidnapped a 14-year-old named Bobby Franks, killed him by bludgeoning him with a chisel, and drove to a lake in nearby Indiana where they dumped Frank’s body in a culvert.

They almost got away with it, but someone discovered the body, and, a few days later, a policeman found a pair of Leopold’s glasses at the scene. They had an unusual frame, and only three pairs had been sold in Chicago. They traced the glasses to Leopold, who quickly cracked (as did Loeb), and both went to trial in August. Darrow was their attorney.

Knowing that the evidence was indisputable, Darrow had his clients plead guilty, hoping that by so doing he could save them from hanging. (Only one of dozens of Darrow’s murder clients was ever executed.) In a remarkable 12-hour speech, which I think was largely extemporaneous, Darrow pleaded for their lives to Judge John Caverly. His speech is reproduced in its entirety in the Weinberg collection, and you can see part of it online.

It did the trick. The judge, who apparently was weeping heavily at the end of Darrow’s elocution, sentenced both killers to life in prison plus 99 years. In 1936, Loeb was murdered in prison with a straight razor, probably by an inmate whose sexual advances were refused (it’s pretty clear that both Leopold and Loeb were gay). Leopold was released on parole in 1958, moved to Puerto Rico to avoid attention, and died in 1971.

Reading Darrow’s writings, and his closing argument in the Leopold and Loeb case, I was struck by how often Darrow brought up his view that criminals have no choice about their actions. This was mentioned in the Wikipedia article:

The Leopold and Loeb case raised, in a well-publicized trial, Darrow’s lifelong contention that psychological, physical, and environmental influences—not a conscious choice between right and wrong—control human behavior. The public got an education in psychology and medicine and, because Leopold was an admirer, the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

And Darrow’s philosophy is evident in his moving speech for Leopold and Loeb: “Closing argument: The State of Illinois v. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, delivered August 22, 1924″. I’ve put part of it in bold because it seems so prescient, as if Darrow realized that science itself rules out any kind of free choice:

Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood.

. . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain. But I do know that if back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power then it is an infinite chance which man cannot solve.

That was not a rhetorical strategy: Darrow really did believe that.

Here’s another quote from Darrow on the “delusional” nature of free will:

“There are a lot of myths which make the human race cruel and barbarous and unkind. Good and Evil, Sin and Crime, Free Will and the like delusions made to excuse God for damning men and to excuse men for crucifying each other.” – Clarence Darrow

Weinberg’s anthology begins with a remarkable speech, “Address to the prisoners in the Cook County Jail” (online). Weinberg first gives some background:

“The warden of the Cook County Jail in Chicago, who knew Clarence Darrow as a criminologist, lawyer, and writer, invited him to speak before the inmates of the jail. Darrow accepted the invitation. This was in 1902.

The prisoners marched into the auditorium where they heard what is today still considered one of the most extraordinary and unique speeches ever delivered to such an audience.”

You can read the whole speech, if you want, but here’s an excerpt from it, emphasizing not only the criminal’s lack of free will, but also the environment of greed and capitalism that drove so many men to crime. Darrow was an ardent socialist at a time when that simply wasn’t on in polite society. Remember, he’s telling this to convicted criminals (again, my emphasis):

If I looked at jails and crimes and prisoners in the way the ordinary person does, I should not speak on this subject to you. The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is because I really do not in the least believe in crime. There is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral condition of the people in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other. The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can avoid being outside. I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible.

. . . Let us see whether there is any connection between the crimes of the respectable classes and your presence in the jail. Many of you people are in jail because you have really committed burglary. Many of you, because you have stolen something; in the meaning of the law, you have taken some other person’s property. Some of you have entered a store and carried off a pair of shoes because you did not have the price. Possibly some of you have committed murder. I cannot tell what all of you did. There are a great many people here who have done some of these things who really do not know themselves why they did them. I think I know why you did them — every one of you; you did these things because you were bound to do them. It looked to you at the time as if you had a chance to do them or not, as you saw fit, but still after all you had no choice. There may be people here who had some money in their pockets and who still went out and got some more money in a way society forbids. Now you may not yourselves see exactly why it was you did this thing, but if you look at the question deeply enough and carefully enough you would see that there were circumstances that drove you to do exactly the thing which you did. You could not help it any more than we outside can help taking the positions that we take.

. . . There is one way to cure all these offenses, and that is to give the people a chance to live. There is no other way, and there never was any other way since the world began, and the world is so blind and stupid that it will not see. If every man and woman and child in the world had a chance to make a decent, fair, honest living, there would be no jails, and no lawyers and no courts. There might be some persons here or there with some peculiar formation of their brain, like Rockefeller, who would do these things simply to be doing them; but they would be very, very few, and those should be sent to a hospital and treated, and not sent to jail, and they would entirely disappear in the second generation, or at least in the third generation.

There’s an afterword to the talk that includes this:

“Too radical” was the comment of one prisoner when a guard later asked him what he thought of the speech.

Darrow was prescient in realizing that the lack of free will had serious implications for the criminal justice system. If you want to read more about his views on free will, see Tamler Sommers’ short essay, “Darrow and determinism: giving up ultimate responsibility.”

There aren’t many videos of Darrow in which he actually speaks. Here’s one, from around 1932, in which he’s “interviewed” (it’s really a monologue). It shows not only his eloquence, but also his views on free will and criminality.

Here’s Darrow speaking at the trial of Leopold and Loeb. The pair are to Darrow’s right, with Loeb, wearing a bowtie, looking at the camera. Leopold sits to Loeb’s right with slicked-down hair, staring straight ahead.

Here are Leopold and Loeb’s mugshots when they were put in Joliet prison (they were later transferred to Stateville Penitentiary.)

Finally, here are Darrow and Bryan at the Scopes trial:

Here’s a photograph of Darrow’s famous interrogation of Bryan on July 20, 1925. The trial was moved outside because of the heat in the courtroom. This was a rare case in which the defense attorney actually put the prosecuting attorney on the stand, but Bryan, who was a showman, considered himself an expert on the Bible and wanted to be questioned. That was a serious mistake, as you’ll see from the transcript of his testimony.

A flower hints at the appearance of an extinct bee

September 2, 2013 • 4:46 am

I’ve written before about “bee-mimicking orchids,” whose petals have evolved into a shape roughly resembling that of a female bee or wasp. Randy male hymenopterans, lured by the shape (they can’t see very well), and, I believe, by the flower’s fragrance—which in some cases has also evolved to resemble insect pheromones—land on the flower and try to copulate with it. They fail, of course, but during their fornicatory struggles the flower’s pollinia (sacs of pollen) detach from the flower and affix themselves to the insect’s head.

The frustrated insect flies away, but not long thereafter is fooled again by another flower of the same species. When it lands and tries to copulate again, the pollinia from the previous flower are transferred to the new orchid and pollinate it. In this way flowers have evolved to use the insect as a sort of flying penis, a way to effect pollination through trickery. Here’s a short video in which David Attenborough shows how it works:

Today’s xkcd describes such an orchid, Ophrys apifera, which is found throughout Europe. The kicker here is that, according to the comic (but see below), the pollinator has gone extinct, though its appearance can still be discerned through the appearance of the flower. Since there’s no insect around to pollinate it, the flower has evolved self-pollination (that is, those individuals that were able to self-pollinate were the only ones to pass their genes to the next generation).

It’s a nice story, and the part about the extinct pollinator and the evolution of self-pollination is probably true, but I’m not sure one can discern the appearance of the extinct pollinator from the flower’s appearance. The Orchids Wiki notes this:

The flowers are almost exclusively self-pollinating in the northern ranges of the plant’s distribution, while pollination by the solitary bee Eucera occurs in the Mediterranean area. The sepals are marginal and spread out, coloured mauve to pink, often with a greenish central line. The flower lip is furry to the touch and is quite variable in the pattern of coloration, but is usually brownish-red with yellow markings.

The pollinia are produced on the inner face of a greenish column overhanging the lip, ready to deposit the pollen on visiting bees. Eucera bees in the past have influenced the evolution of bee orchids. Male bees, over many generations of cumulative orchid evolution, have favoured plants with the most female-bee-shaped lip through trying to copulate with flowers, and hence carrying pollen.

The flowers have a generalized shape, and I’m not sure whether individuals of O. apifera in southern Europe, where they mimic an extant insect, differ in appearance from those in the northern part of the range, where they’re self-pollinated and supposedly resemble a “ghost insect.” If they don’t differ, then we can’t say, as the cartoon does, that the shape of flowers in, say, England tells us something about the appearance of the extinct pollinator. There must be work on this, but I don’t know of it.

It would also be worth studying whether the northern flower still retains a hymenopteran-like fragrance and, if so, whether it differs from the fragrance of southern flowers that attract Eucera bees.

Regardless, today’s xkcd is poignant, and does impart a nice lesson about biology and evolution.

h/t: David, infiniteimprobability

Two of Us

September 1, 2013 • 12:01 pm

“Two of Us”, from 1969, is one of the few songs I like from the Beatles’ “Let it Be” album (the title song is another), but it’s a good one. And it’s clearly McCartney all the way. It ranks #54 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs, which adds that it’s about McCartney’s romance with Linda Eastman (note that the sheepdog Martha, described below, was the inspiration for the White Album song “Martha My Dear”):

This sweet, mostly acoustic number seems to be McCartney’s tribute to his long-standing friendship with Lennon — especially when you look at the rehearsal clip of the song that appears in the Let It Be movie, showing Lennon and McCartney reprising their old habit of singing into the same microphone. In fact, it’s about McCartney and Linda Eastman, who were married six weeks after the song was recorded. “We used to send a lot of postcards to each other,” she said. The two of them liked to go for long drives together, with McCartney’s sheepdog, Martha, in the back seat, heading off for nowhere in particular.

The session that yielded the album version of “Two of Us” (as well as the basic tracks for “Let It Be” and “The Long and Winding Road”) was held the day after the Beatles’ rooftop concert and wrapped up the Get Back experiment — a messy month of filming and recording. The “bass” part of “Two of Us” is actually played by Harrison on the low strings of an electric guitar, and the whistling at the end is provided by Lennon.

Here’s the recorded version; the album was produced not only by George Martin, but also by Phil Spector, which peeved McCartney when Spector made some of the songs (e.g., “The Long and Winding Road”) overly lush.

Here’s a live version from God knows where (it may be overdubbed with the recorded version). Lennon is sitting in front, huddled with Yoko.

And here’s the live version from the movie “Let it Be”. I love McCartney’s Roy Orbison imitation about 30 seconds in:

Wikipedia adds this:

The song was originally titled “On Our Way Home”. McCartney claimed it was dedicated to his wife-to-be Linda Eastman, though the lyrics (e.g.: “you and I have memories/longer than the road that stretches out ahead” or “you and me chasing paper/getting nowhere”) sounded to author Ian MacDonald like they were actually addressing Lennon.

An early performance of the song, in a guitar-driven rock style, can be seen in the Let It Be film. Unsatisfied with this style, which McCartney described as “chunky”, the band reworked the song around acoustic guitars. The Beatles performed a finished version of the song live at Apple Studios on 31 January 1969; this performance was included in both the Let It Be film and album.

Perhaps a reader who has a copy of McCartney’s biography, Many Years from Now, can settle what the song was really about, since the book apparently gives Paul’s take on how a lot of Beatles songs originated.

Another lame attack on evolutionary psychology

September 1, 2013 • 6:46 am

Someone called my attention to a short post about evolutionary psychology at Pharyngula:

Well, ignoring the obligatory and customary reference to “douchebags,” I was curious about the article that inspired this post. Clicking on the link, I found a piece at the science/tech site io9 called “The rise of the evolutionary psychology douchebag” by Annalee Newitz.

Newitz happens to be the editor-in-chief of io9, so I guess she can write anything she wants. Unfortunately, she decided to take on evolutionary psychology. That was a mistake. Her post is godawful: a combination of tarring evolutionary psychology with a few ad hominems that have nothing to do with the field as a whole, and then a poorly informed argument for the impossibility of studying the evolutionary roots of human behavior.

Let me first give a disclaimer. I’ve been a critic of evolutionary psychology, particularly some of its earliest excesses, and attracted some attention with my two published and highly critical reviews (one co-authored with Andrew Berry) of Palmer and Thornhill’s dubious theory that the human brain contains a “rape module” prompting males to rape isolated females. That was a bad example of the genre, largely because their work was tendentious and because the authors twisted their statistics in an inappropriate way to support the supposed “adaptive” nature of rape.

But the field has moved on and improved, and has made some important advances. I’ve detailed some of these in a previous post, “Is evolutionary psychology worthless?“. These belie the claim that “The fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology is worthless.” As I’ve pointed out, that “fundamental premise” is only this: “the human brain, like the human body, still shows traces of its evolutionary ancestry.” Disputing that on principle is equivalent to disputing evolution as a whole, for it would be odd indeed if our behavior did not reflect at least some of the selective pressures that molded it during the 6 million years of hominin evolution preceding the rise of civilization. Evolutionary psychology shows enormous promise for helping understand where we came from.

That said, there is of course still a bad strain in the field, one mainly seized upon by the popular press, which loves stories about how this or that behavior reflects our ancient evolutionary history. And some evolutionary psychologists, like Satoshi Kanazawa, have catered to this appetite, eroding their credibility in the process. But dismissing an entire field because of a few miscreants is a serious mistake, for it waves away the possibility that we can really learn something about what evolutionary forces molded our behavior. It’s like dismissing evolutionary morphology in humans because, after all, how could it be possible that modern bodies reflect ancient selection pressures? Remember, brains are part of our body.

Nevertheless, Newitz wants to brush aside the whole field as fatally flawed. Her reasons are fatuous:

1. Two evolutionary psychologists committed fraud. As she notes:

Evolutionary psychology has often been a field whose most prominent practitioners get embroiled in controversy — witness the 2010 case of Harvard professor Marc Hauser, whose graduate students came forward to say he’d been faking evidence for years. Then there was the case of Diederik Stapel, whose social psychology work shared a lot of territory with evopsych. He came forward in late 2011 to admit that most of his data was sheer invention.

I don’t know much about the story of Stapel, but I do know about the Hauser tale, and the fact is that he was caught by fellow evolutionary psychologists, who (like Frans de Waal) called him out for his misdeeds.

But this is just dumb, for scientists in many other fields have committed fraud as well. It’s like dismissing molecular biology because at least a dozen practitioners have committed fraud. Newitz is simply smearing a field for bad reasons—probably ideological ones.

2. One evolutionary psychologist made a stupid remark on Twitter. That was Geoffrey Miller from the University of New Mexico, who made this misguided tweet that Newitz reproduces:

Yep, that was stupid, and Miller was rightfully called out on it. But what on earth does it have to do with evolutionary psychology? Nothing. Newitz is making a purely ad hominem argument here. If one stupid remark by a scientist is sufficient to denigrate a field, then the entirety of science should be discarded. Newitz also notes that Miller has published some other hypotheses that seem bizarre, and I’ll agree with her here: sometimes I think Miller speculates far beyond the bounds of data, as he did in his book The Mating Mind. But that doesn’t mean that human thoughts and behaviors weren’t molded in part by sexual selection. Lots of scientists toss out bizarre hypotheses (Bill Hamilton in evolutionary biology was one of these), but sometimes they turn out to be correct.

Regardless, it’s journalistically irresponsible to smear a field the way Newitz has done. So let’s get to her only “substantive” argument against evolutionary psychology:

3. Humans evolve too fast to bear behavioral traces of ancient evolution.

This is all part of [Miller’s] and many other evopsych researchers’ project to prove that humans haven’t changed much since we were roaming east Africa 100,000 years ago. Evolutionary biology researchers like Marlene Zuk have explored some the scientific problems with this idea. Most notably, humans have continued to evolve quite a lot over the past ten thousand years, and certainly over 100 thousand. Sure, our biology affects our behavior. But it’s unlikely that humans’ early evolution is deeply relevant to contemporary psychological questions about dating, or the willpower to complete a dissertation. Even Steven Pinker, one of evopsych’s biggest proponents, has said that humans continue to evolve and that our behavior is changing over time.

But the classic evopsych douchebag, like Miller, absolutely wants to believe that humans are still in thrall to the same psychological forces that shaped our behavior much earlier in Homo sapiens evolution.

This is not only disingenuous, but reflects Newitz’s ignorance of evolution.

First of all, no evolutionary psychologist claims that human behavior hasn’t evolved at all since we roamed the savannas. Indeed, Pinker has pointed that out, and I can give my own examples. Within the last 10,000 years, for example, pastoral populations—those that raise sheep, goats, or cows for milk—have evolved a tolerance for lactose, for animal milk provides a valuable source of nutrition. They’ve achieved this by simply accruing mutations that keep the “lactase” enzyme turned on, an enzyme that is usually inactivated after humans finish weaning. Genetic analysis shows, too, that this inactivation occurred within the last 10,000 years. So if you consider “milk drinking as an adult” as a behavioral trait (which it is, militated by our physiological tolerance for milk), then yes, it’s evolved recently. And surely other traits have, too. But remember that lactose intolerance is a behavior that many humans frequently show, and one that is an evolutionary holdover from our past—a time when milk was available only to babies from their mother’s breasts, and when it was probably disadvantageous to produce an enzyme beyond the time when it was needed. Anybody who is lactose intolerant and avoids milk, then, is showing a behavior that is an evolutionary holdover from our ancestors.

Our penchant for fats and sweets can be seen the same way. It’s certainly not good for us—at least those of us who live in carb- and fat-laden cultures—but we still crave that stuff. This is an evolutionary holdover from a time when fat and sugar were valuable resources. Contra Newitz, this behavior almost certainly does reflect the deep relevance of early evolution to contemporary behavior.

The fact is that we diverged from our common ancestor with chimps about 6,000,000 years ago, but “civilization” with its novel selective pressures has been around only 20,000 years. That’s only 0.3% of the total time encompassed by our lineage. If one estimates, say, 20 years per generation, that’s about 1000 generations of human evolution: an eyeblink compared to the three hundred thousand generations in which we experienced selection within small bands of hunters and gatherers. Do we really expect that one thousand generations will completely efface behaviors evolved during 99.7% of the duration of the hominin lineage?

One way to answer this question is to look at whether we retain morphological traits that are holdovers from our “early evolution.” If that’s the case, then one can infer that we probably still show behavioral holdovers from our past as well. And the answer here is unequivocal. Here are some morphological traits no longer seem adaptive but haven’t yet evolved away, or can’t because of evolutionary constraints.

wisdom teeth
bad backs
fetal yolk sacks (which are empty)
our tailbone
goosebumps (adaptive in our relatives for erecting hairs)
skin fold at the corner of our eye (remnant of nictitating membrane)

I could go on, but the point is that these morphological traits are not useful (some are positively harmful), but persist as evolutionary remnants.

Why shouldn’t behavior be the same? After all, evolved behaviors actually reflect evolved morphology: morphological and developmental patterns of our brain’s wiring. Here are a couple of behavioral traits that, I think, reflect our deep evolutionary past:

Higher variance in male than in female reproductive success due to differential behavior of the sexes
Weaning conflict between mothers and their infants
Preference for relatives over nonrelatives (kin selection), and xenophobia (useful for when we lived in small groups)
Fear of spiders and snakes

Some of these can in principle be tested: for example one could do studies to show whether the fear of spiders is innate or learned. And there are other tests as well, and also some evolutionary psychology theories that have been falsified.

It’s simply nonsense to dismiss the field on the grounds that there’s no way that human behavior could show traces of its deep evolutionary past. We already know that some behaviors apparently show such traces, and morphology certainly does. Yes, it may often be hard, or even impossible, to show with great certainty that some of our behavior reflect ancient selection pressures. But are we really going to say that evolutionary psychology is bunk?

The real reason why people like Newitz and others (that includes P. Z., I think) dismiss evolutionary psychology in toto is because they find it ideologically unpalatable: they don’t like its supposed implications. They presume that evo-psych somehow validates misogyny or the marginalization of women and minorities. They will deny this to their dying breath, of course, and pretend that it’s purely a scientific issue, citing a few anecdotal studies that are indeed laughable. But I think we know where these people are coming from. Evolutionary biology itself has been used to justify racism or the sterilization of supposedly “defective” humans, but we don’t dismiss evolutionary biology because of that. Likewise, we shouldn’t dismiss evolutionary psychology just because some cranks draw “oughts” from “is”s.

When you read a statement like this:

“Developmental plasticity is all. The fundamental premises of evo psych are false”,

then you know you are dealing with ideology rather than science. The fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology is simply that some modern human behaviors reflect an ancient evolutionary history. It would be odd if that were completely false. And developmental plasticity is not all. If that were the case, then why do we still have wisdom teeth and bad backs?

David Frost died

September 1, 2013 • 4:51 am

I’ve just learned from CNN and the Guardian that British journalist and broadcaster David Frost has died at age 74. The Guardian notes that he died of a heart attack while on a cruise ship—the Queen Elizabeth that was sailing from London to Lisbon. As the Guardian reports:

The 74-year-old, whose programmes included That Was The Week That Was and The Frost Report, was to give a speech on board the Queen Elizabeth, which is believed to have set sail from Southampton on Saturday on a cruise to Lisbon.

. . . Frost, who was knighted in 1993, helped establish London Weekend Television and TV-am, and was famed for his political interviews, most notably with Richard Nixon in 1977, in which the US president for the first time conceded some fault over Watergate.

In the U.S. we know him mainly for his four television interviews with Richard Nixon in 1977, during which Frost finally got the old rogue to confess that he’d behaved unethically during l’affaire Watergate. As Wikipedia notes, “The premiere episode drew 45 million viewers, the largest television audience for a political interview in history — a record which still stands today.”

But of course Frost had a long and distinguished career.

After going from a grammar school to Cambridge University, Frost was active in student journalism and the Footlights theatrical revue. From there he became a trainee at independent television before finding fame as the host of That Was The Week That Was, the pioneering TV political satire show. Frost’s distinctive delivery of his catchphrase, “Hello, good evening and welcome,” soon became instantly recognisable and much mocked.

The programme ran on the BBC during 1962 and 1963, before transferring to the US.

From then on Frost was a regular TV figure on both sides of the Atlantic, with shows including The Frost Report and Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life.

In later years, Frost hosted the Frost on Sunday talkshow on ITV, before returning to the BBC for the first time since the early 1960s in 1993 for Breakfast with Frost, which ran until 2005.

For many years he also hosted Through the Keyhole, which by coincidence returned to ITV on Saturday night under a revamped format.

After Breakfast with Frost ended, the broadcaster made a surprise move to al-Jazeera, where he interviewed political figures.

Frost’s interviews with Nixon were made into a terrific movie by director Ron Howard in 2008: “Frost/Nixon,” which you should see if you haven’t already (Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 92% rating from the critics, which is very high).

Here’s a short clip with scenes from the first interview (there are several others on YouTube). I tell you, I’m not a fan of the “trigger warning” trope, but, having lived through the Nixon era and the debacle of Watergate, I think I’d need a trigger warning for something like this—”Warning: Video of Richard Nixon.” His resignation was one of the high spots of my youthful period of antiwar activism.

International Cat Day: Readers’ cats

September 1, 2013 • 4:04 am

We have, I believe, about seven more days of readers’ cats, assuming I put up three at a time. Posting of these be sporadic, though, and will stop for two weeks while I’m in Poland (Sept. 3-18).

First up is the moggie of reader Ruth, a librarian in London:

This is a picture of 1-year-old Pip, who’s probably not a real cat – as he’s a total darling without a bad bone in his body. Here he’s pictured being dried off in a baby towel, slowly getting over his outrage at having been caught in an unexpectedly heavy English summer downpour.

Yet another black and white cat, this one from reader SeanK:

This is Lightning. She makes sure I say good-bye before leaving on my trip.

Finally, a curmudgeonly cat from reader Darrell:

This is Coco Chanel displaying her “you’re not going to bother me are you (?)” look. My wife and kids got her from the Humane society while I was out of town, and sent me the following text, “Oh my god, we found the perfect kitty!”

Best mimicry ever

August 31, 2013 • 11:58 am

From Real Monstrosities via Ed Yong via Matthew Cobb comes one of the best cases of mimicry I’ve ever seen. Natural selection has been a fantastic artist here, giving a perfect illusion of three-dimensionality. In fact, this may be the most astonishing case of mimicry I know.

It’s a moth from eastern Asia: Uropyia meticulodina—a fantastic dead-leaf mimic:

As the RM site notes:

It’s not just brown like a dead leaf, it’s brown like a curled up, dead leaf.

And it’s not just brown like a curled up, dead leaf, it depicts a leaf catching the light, with shadows in all the right places and you can even see the veins casting tiny shadows along the curled underside. It’s like one of those optical illusions that still work even when you know it’s a trick.

dead_leaf_moth — Image: enyagene via Flickr

Here are two videos of the beast. The most amazing part of this illusion, which you’ll see below, is that the wings aren’t curled at all—they’re flat!

In slow motion:

It’s all done with color and shading: nature’s smoke and mirrors.

Tomorrow Never Knows

August 31, 2013 • 9:53 am

Another great song from Revolver (1966)—the album’s last cut—and what I see as the quintessential psychedelic song, an attempt to musically reproduce the LSD experience. It’s enormously complicated and creative: a deliberate tour de force.

It comes in at #18 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 100 greatest Beatles songs. I can’t tell you how many times I listened to this song in various states of consciousness. Lacking other drugs, I’d sometimes steal one of my father’s cigarettes and inhale huge gusts of smoke, holding them in my lungs till I got dizzy, while turning on a lamp whose bulb I’d replaced with a red one. Ah, youth!

Rolling Stone describes its genesis and impact:

All of a sudden, the poetic advance and rustic modernism of Rubber Soul — issued only five months before these sessions, in December 1965 — was very old news. Compared to the rolling drone, tape-loop effects and out-of-body vocals that dominate Lennon’s trip here, even the rest of Revolver sounds like mutation in process: the Beatles pursuing their liberated impulses as players and writers, via acid, in pop-song form. There was no other place for this track on the album but the end. “Eleanor Rigby,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” “Love You To” and “She Said She Said” were all bold steps toward the unknown — “Tomorrow Never Knows” was the jump from the cliff.

. . . It took them only three tries to come up with a master take of the rhythm track, driven by Starr’s relentless drumming. (McCartney suggested the tumbling pattern Starr uses.) Most of the otherworldly overdubs were created and recorded on the night of April 6th and the afternoon of the 7th — a total of about 10 hours. There is nothing on “Tomorrow Never Knows” — the backwards guitar solo, the hovering buzz of Harrison on sitar, Lennon’s vocal drifting on what feels like the other side of consciousness — that was not dosed beyond plain recognition. The spacey, tabla-like quality of Starr’s drumming was just him playing on two slackly tuned tom-toms, compressed and doused in echo. Loops were created using a Mellotron imitating flute and string tones; the cackling seagull sounds were either an altered recording of McCartney laughing or a treated slice of guitar.

Lennon hoped to sound nothing like his usual self. “I want my voice to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a mountaintop, miles away,” he proclaimed in the studio. Engineer Geoff Emerick achieved that effect by running Lennon’s voice through the rotating speaker of a Leslie cabinet, which had been hooked up to the Hammond organ at Abbey Road. The result was heaven and earth combined: a luxuriant and rippling prayer, delivered in Lennon’s nasal Liverpool-hard-boy tone. “That is bloody marvelous!” Lennon exclaimed repeatedly after hearing his effect. McCartney’s reaction was equally joyful: “It’s the Dalai Lennon!”

Wikipedia gives a bit more about how Lennon conceived this song:

John Lennon wrote the song in January 1966, with lyrics adapted from the book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, which in turn was adapted from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. AlthoughPeter Brown believed that Lennon’s source for the lyric was the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself, which, he said, Lennon read whilst consuming LSD, George Harrison later stated that the idea for the lyrics came from Leary’s, Alpert’s and Metzner’s book and Paul McCartney confirmed this, stating that he and Lennon had visited the newly opened Indica bookshop — Lennon was looking for a copy of The Portable Nietzsche — and Lennon had found a copy of The Psychedelic Experience that contained the lines: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream”.

Lennon bought the book, went home, took LSD, and followed the instructions exactly as stated in the book. The book held that the “ego death” experienced under the influence of LSD and other psychedelic drugs is essentially similar to the dying process and requires similar guidance.

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