At about dusk one night not long ago, I was closing the gate at my office and had a hallucination that took over my consciousness completely – if only for a moment. It was of my wife at home in the kitchen.
She was wrestling a rarely used vessel and an associated implement from the dusty far reaches of a deep cupboard. It had been a wedding present and I don’t think it’d seen the light of day since the birth of our first child nearly 30 years ago. It soon dissolved, I secured the gate, and drove home.
In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine there was an article by Daniel Smith entitled “Is there an Ecological Unconscious?” which addressed the stress and discomfort visited upon the psyche of those subjected to forced dislocation (e.g. Trail of Tears) or environmental degradation (e.g. exploitation of newly discovered nearby coal deposits).
January 21, 2010 by bgierke
In the highly esteemed journal 'Nature' this week was a report of recent research indicating men have evolved more rapidly than women*. The study compared the Y chromosomes (the bit that makes a man male, (you know XY instead of XX) of chimps and humans.
Chimps are our nearest living relatives and over the last six million years our genetic codes have only diverged about 2 percent. Except the Y chromosome which is some 30 percent different. That’s a big change in a relatively short period of time.
There are several possible explanations for the Y being “such an evolutionary powerhouse." One is that since the Y is a loner and not part of a pair like all of the rest and thus can mutate more easily. Another has to do with the randy attitude of female chimps in heat. Since they seek out many partners, there is huge evolutionary pressure on the males to produce the most and best sperm.
The Subtle Landscape