extensive_reading[1].pdf

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ENGLISH FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES 215

THIS PART IS INTENDED TO PROVIDE

STUDENTS WITH ADDITIONAL

READING ARTICLES

TO ENHANCE

THEIR

READING AND ANALYTICAL

SKILLS

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INTRODUCTION TO EXTENSIVE READING

Extensive reading is meant to help you develop the habit of reading huge amounts in English. By

reading a lot, you can improve your English significantly, particularly your vocabulary. This will be

very useful to help you succeed in your studies at university.

In this course you are required to read 4 articles. The articles are arranged according to the number

of words each contains, from about 800 to 200 words. You should select and read two passages

before the mid-term test. Read the other two articles before the final test. Fill out an article review

form provided at the end of the book (Form–1) after reading each article and hand it in to your

teacher when you finish.

Happy Reading!

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HUMAN AGGRESSION Anthony Storr Penguin Books, 1971

Introduction

1 That man is an aggressive creature will hardly be disputed. With the exception of certain

rodents, no other vertebrate habitually destroys members of his own species. No other animal takes

positive pleasure in the exercise of cruelty upon another of his own kind. We generally describe the

most repulsive examples of man‘s cruelty as brutal or bestial, implying by these adjectives that such

behaviour is characteristic of less highly developed animals than ourselves. In truth, however, the

extremes of ‗brutal‘ behaviour are confined to man; and there is no parallel in nature to our savage

treatment of each other. The somber fact is that we are the cruelest and most ruthless species that has

ever walked the earth; and that, although we may recoil in horror when we read in newspaper or

history book of the atrocities committed by man upon man, we know in our hearts that each one of

us harbours within himself those same savage impulses which lead to murder, to torture and to war.

2 To write about human aggression is a difficult task because the term is used in so many

different senses. Aggression is one of those words which everyone knows, but which is nevertheless

hard to define. As psychologists and psychiatrists use it, it covers a very wide range of human

behaviour. The red-faced infant squalling for the bottle is being aggressive; and so is the judge who

awards a thirty-year sentence for robbery. The guard in a concentration camp who tortures his

helpless victim is obviously facing aggressively. Less manifestly, but no less certainly, so is the

neglected wife who threatens or attempts suicide in order to regain her husband‘s affection. When a

word becomes so diffusely applied that it is used both the competitive striving of a footballer and

also of the bloody violence of a murderer, it ought either to be dropped or else more closely defined.

Aggression is a portmanteau term which is fairly bursting at its seams. Yet, until we can more

clearly designate and comprehend the various aspects of human behaviour which are subsumed

under this head, we cannot discard the concept.

3 One difficulty is that there is no clear dividing line between those forms of aggression which

we all deplore and those which we must not disown if we are to survive. When a child rebels against

authority it is being aggressive; but it is also manifesting a drive towards independence which is a

necessary and valuable part of growing up. The desire for power has, in extreme form, disastrous

aspects which we all acknowledge; but the drive to conquer difficulties, or to gain mastery over the

external world, underlies the greatest of human achievements. So writers define aggression as ‗that

response which follows frustration‘, or as ‗an act whose goal-response is injury to an organism (or

organism surrogate)‘. In the author‘s view these definitions impose limits upon the concept of

aggression which are not in accord with the underlying facts of human nature which the word is

attempting to express. It is worth noticing, for instance, that the words we use to describe intellectual

effort are aggressive words. We attack problems, or get out teeth into them. We master a subject

when we have struggled with and overcome its difficulties. We sharpen our wits, hoping that our

mind will develop a keen edge in order that we may better dissect a problem into its component

parts. Although intellectual tasks are often frustrating, to argue that all intellectual effort is the result

of frustration is to impose too negative a colouring upon the positive impulse to comprehend and

master the external world.

4 The aggressive part of human nature is not only a necessary safeguard against predatory

attack. It is also the basis of intellectual achievement, of the attainment of independence, an even of

that proper pride which enables a man to hold his head high amongst his fellows. This is no new

conception. The historian Gibbon, in a famous passage, displays a very similar idea of human nature

to that which psychotherapists profess. Whereas the later refer to sexual instincts and aggressive

instincts. Gibbon writes of ‗the love of pleasure and the love of action‘:

… To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we

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may attribute most of the useful and respectable qualifications. The character in which both the one

and the other should be united and harmonized would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of

human nature.

Gibbon recognizes quite clearly that the most deplorable manifestations of aggression share identical

roots with valuable and essential parts o human endeavour. Without the aggressive, active side of his

nature man would be even less able than he is to direct the course of his life or to influence the world

around him. In fact, it is obvious that man could never have attained his present dominance, nor even

have survived as a species, unless he possessed a large endowment of aggressiveness.

5 It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities which have led to man‘s extraordinary success

are also those most likely to destroy him. His ruthless drive to subdue or to destroy every apparent

obstacle in his path does not stop short at his own fellows; and since he now possesses weapons of

unparalleled destructiveness and also apparently lacks the built-in safeguards which prevent most

animals from killing others of the same species, it is not beyond possibility that he may yet

encompass the total elimination of homo sapiens.

6 What follows are the reflections of a psychotherapist upon the aggressive component in

human nature. The view which are put forward are anything but dogmatic. All psycho-therapists

suffer from the fact that, although their knowledge of a few people may be rather profound, their

conclusions are necessary drawn from a limited and highly selected sample of the population.

Moreover, many of the theories which are available in the practice of psychotherapy are difficult to

substantiate scientifically, because the psychotherapist is endeavouring to deal with the person as a

whole. Psychologists working in laboratories can construct experiments in which, for example,

aggressive emotions can be more or less separately aroused and studied; and the conclusions which

they reach can be statistically expressed. The disadvantage of nearly all such experiments is that the

situations upon which they are based are so restricted that they are far removed from life as it is

lived. Aggression, for example, is inextricably mingled with fear and sex in many situations. It is

very much to be hoped that, in time, there will be a rapprochement between the precise but limited

viewpoint of the experimentalist, and the less defined but wider conceptions of the psychotherapist.

In the meantime, we must do the best we can with incomplete and unproved hypotheses.

7 The present preoccupation of Western society with the problem o aggression is, of course,

dictated by the fear of destruction by nuclear weapons which overhangs us all. The problem of war

is more compelling than ever before in history. The complexities of the circumstances which

provoke war are such that no one man and no one viewpoint can possibly comprehend them all.

Anyone who promised a solution to a problem so perennial is too arrogant to be trusted; and no such

solution will be put forward here. The author believes, however, that if stability in world affairs is

ever to be achieved, the psychological point of view deserves equal consideration with the political,

economic and other aspects. The study of human aggression and its control is, therefore, relevant to

the problem of war although, alone, it cannot possibly provide a complete answer.

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TAKING RESPONSIBILTY

Now that it has become absurd to continue to maintain the fiction that climate change in the

form of global warming is part of a natural cycle, it is time for industries—all industries—to

accept accountability for the footprint they leave on this planet, writes Patrick

Guntensperger.

All future generations have the right to expect that the current generation is not prospering by writing

environmental checks that will be drawn on our children‘s account. Everyone living has the responsibility of

leaving the planet in a condition that is acceptable to those who will inherit our environmental assets as well

as our planetary liabilities.

Resource-based industries—mining, oil and gas extraction, lumber and fisheries, and any other business that

gathers and sells the raw materials that exist on Planet Earth—can be said to have a special set of

responsibilities to the planet and the people who occupy it. A not unreasonable point of view is that those

industries take commodities that have been given to all the occupants of Earth and sell them at a profit to

their fellow occupants. Certainly those other occupants need those resources; certainly they benefit from

having them extracted, refined, and made available for use; nevertheless, those resources are a planetary

legacy from which a small segment of the planet‘s population is reaping enormous profits.

Among the renewable resources industries is the fishing industry. It is only reasonable to expect that those

who catch and sell the creatures from our oceans do so in a way that ensures the survival of the species they

capture. Simply decimating fish populations, as was done to the codfish of the eastern North American

coastal fishing grounds, is not merely short-sighted; it is bad economics and worse business. Worse still; it is

immoral. To eliminate a population of animals that were once so plentiful that they could literally be

gathered by dipping buckets over the gunwales is a demonstration of greed so monumental it is staggering.

Of course, the fishing habits in this region are nothing to brag about either. Even the small, independent

fishermen from outlying islands know that blasting coral reefs with dynamite or pouring cyanide into the

waters to fill their boats for the market is wrong. They know that, but they do it anyway because there is a

profit to be made, and that comes first.

For those who make their living from theoretically renewable resources, the responsibility attached to their

actions is clear: ensure that the resource is actually renewed. Take what can be taken in a sustainable way.

Those who make a living by taking a species from the sea must also be stewards, responsible for the

sustainability and well-being of that species.

The partially renewable resource industries include the lumber and pulpwood industries. These are described

as partially renewable because, while the forests can be replanted and continue to produce timber and

pulpwood indefinitely, the virgin, first-growth ecosystem that was destroyed to cut the first shipment is gone

forever. The wildlife habitat, the biodiversity, the rare species that once occupied that parcel of land will not

regenerate in our lifetime or in hundreds of lifetimes. Nevertheless, the world continues to demand wood and

paper products; that demand is not going to go away any time soon, and the industries that supply that

demand will be around as long as there are trees.

What is unconscionable, however, is the rape and pillage approach that too many forestry companies take—

and companies in Indonesia are the worst offenders in the world. For a company to wipe out a delicate

ecosystem by clearcutting millions of hectares of rainforest and then simply move on to the next virgin tract

of land, leaving nothing but a moonscape behind, has absolutely no acceptable justification.

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There are many ways to make forestry a truly sustainable industry. Selective logging, restricting the cut to

the annual growth rate, and above all, reforestation are all straightforward ways of using land that has already

been exploited and avoiding moving into the last few stands of untouched forest in the world.

The players in that partially renewable resource industry clearly have a responsibility to minimize the

devastation they cause. Equally clearly, they have an obligation to make the land that once contained

irreplaceable virgin forest into a sustainable source for harvesting timber in partial compensation for having

taken something that they can never give back.

The final category—nonrenewable resource-based industries—has an even more compelling and specialized

obligation. Those industries have a moral duty to develop alternatives to replace the resources they are

exploiting. International law ought to require that oil, gas, coal, and other non-renewable resource industries

spend a significant percentage of their revenue on the research, development, and deployment of alternatives

to their products.

To continue to extract a resource that will be totally depleted in the foreseeable future and yet upon which

the entire world‘s economy depends, without a foolproof backup plan is astonishingly irresponsible. Those

alternative sources exist in the form of hydrogen, wave, tidal, geothermal, wind, solar, and other absolutely

clean energy forms, and simply need a focused effort to be made practical.

To disregard them and continue to increase our use of and dependence upon fossil fuels, which are killing the

planet, is a fairly serviceable definition of insanity.

The Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, July 2007.

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LEARNING THE HARD WAY

In a developing country such as Indonesia, where many citizens still struggle to put food on

the table every day, getting an education is a lesser priority. Even for those who do all that

is supposedly required to educate and better themselves, it often is not enough. Maggie

Tiojakin reports.

The journey from childhood to adulthood is often defined by the education a person receives. The long road

that stretches from ‗here‘ to ‗there‘ is bound to come to several crossroads where crucial decisions are

required for the future. But what happens when the road ahead is nothing but a wasteland.

In a perfect world, each person would have unlimited access to education and schools would have adequate

funding and provisions from the government. For each goal accomplished, a reward would await; and no one

would be left behind.

Clearly, however, it isn‘t a perfect world—at least, not on this part of the globe, where public schools are

constantly struggling to stay afloat and the educational system keeps falling one hopeful student after

another. Jobs are scarce and the only thing many people have going for them is the hope that something will

eventually turn up.

There are an estimated 4 million Indonesians between the ages of 10 and 44 who are illiterate, placing the

country 95th among 175 countries surveyed in 2005 (UNESCO). And of the 78 million people up to 18 years

of age, 26 million have either dropped out of school, been expelled or have never seen the inside of a

classroom, according to 2006 data from the National Education Ministry.

―Have we failed the young generation? Maybe, maybe not,‖ says Ali Nurwan, the vice principal of one of the

more prestigious public schools in Jakarta. ―There are dozens of reasons why our system is not working

properly. Perhaps, in another, more promising, world…these children would lead totally different lives. They

would all go to school and get the education they deserve. At the same time, am I absolutely sure that if they

had gone to school their lives would change for the better? Unfortunately, no.‖

While having a degree under one‘s belt is no guarantee of a better life, the door is often firmly shut to job

seekers who lack either the prerequisites or the connections (or both).

Yudis is a university graduate who majored in economics. His father works a greengrocer, while his mother

is a part-time domestic servant who takes in laundry. On the day of his graduation, his parents did not have

time to come to the ceremony. He has been unable to find an office job and has become a Metromini driver.

―I paid for my own education by working different jobs,‖ he says quietly from behind the wheel. ―I thought

that once I finished school, I could finally get to work in an office or something. Make some decent money,

you know? But here I am.‖

His eyes appear dim under the brim of a green baseball cap. ―I guess my parents were right, school is a waste

of money.‖

A recent survey by the National Bureau of Statistics found more than 30 percent of high school graduates

resort to menial jobs and illegal occupations in order to support themselves, while 12 percent of college

students dwell in unemployment at any given time.

―Who should we blame?‖ asks Purwantoro, who teaches Child Development Studies at Atma Jaya

University in Jakarta. ―It‘s easy to yell at the government, but will it help create new job opportunities?

Everthing has to be reconstructed, from the quality of education to the morality of the educators and students.

How many years is that going to take? I‘ll tell you how many: a whole decade and more.‖

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Experiences such as Yudis‘ are part of the reason why some parents refuse to enroll their children in school,

and why the students themselves often choose to drop out. What‘s the point?

Wakino, who works as a driver for a family in the capital, complains of his oldest son‘s decision not to finish

his high school education. When Wakino demanded an explanation, his son replied, ―Every good career

opportunity has been filled by someone with a better education than what I can offer—why bother finishing

school if I‘m going to get stuck with the rest of the people who never even learned how to read?‖

―Public education is a very complicated issue,‖ says Nuraini Hasan, a member of the school council at a

public school in East Jakarta. ―Do you know that there are schools out there which are on the brink of getting

shut down each month because they can‘t make ends meet?‖

This may be hard to believe in an age of chat rooms and digicams, but many—if not most—public schools

outside of Jakarta can‘t even afford a computer. A laboratory often consists of an old microscope, a small

surgical table for biology experiments and dusty glass tubes which look as though they have never been

touched, much less used. In smaller regions and towns that you will never find by looking at a map, a

classroom is little more than a tent under which students huddle every morning behind termite-infested

desks.

Poor public school facilities contribute to a number of issues that plague the educational system, which

include students‘ inability to access information (library), practice their knowledge (laboratory) and follow

up on their own studies (bare necessities, such as notebooks, pencils, and rulers).

According to the Asian-South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education and the Global Campaign for Education,

Indonesia finished 10th out of 14 countries in the Asia Pacific evaluated for their educational system. Score-

wise, it achieved 42 out of 100—or a big, fat F. Sri Lanka, a country that has endured a devastating three

decades of civil war and which visiting Indonesians are quick to point out does not boast the big-building

development of their homeland, still beats Indonesia on the education front with a B (Republika daily, 2005).

A survey by the Human Development Index found 60 percent of Indonesian elementary school teachers, 40

percent of middle and high school teachers and 34 percent of skill-oriented teachers are rated as incompetent

to teach at a national level. In addition, 17 percent of all teachers nationwide do not have the credentials to

teach their particular subjects.

The statistics are brutal, but what about the reality of things? With international schools increasing in number

in recent years, Indonesia can‘t be that desperate—can it?

―International schools are the top dogs in our country,‖ responds Ali. ―They are backed by a system that has

been proven to work in first-world countries. Their methods of teaching follow the Western curriculum,

relying on a different process of studying. We can‘t adopt this in our public schools because we lack the

manpower as well as funding.‖

―We need to raise the bar higher,‖ says Nuraini, speaking candidly in her second-floor office. ―The

curriculum has to be changed in a way that will accommodate the students‘ interest rather than force them to

excel at anything.‖

Purwantoro disagrees. ―I believe the first thing we need to do is train the educators. If we manage to get

qualified teachers out there, then we may have ourselves some kind of hope. If we want to educate the next

leaders of this country, we must first understand what it means to lead.‖

The way the system is designed, all three of the education levels—elementary, secondary and tertiary—

should prepare students to compete on a higher and more professional level. In universities, the playing field

should change form and status, aiming to create a learned generations who possess enough knowledge to

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enter the global competition. Yet, in order to achieve such goals, everyone involved—from the National

Education Ministry to curriculum administrators and parents—has to play an active role.

―Of course, it‘s all good on paper,‖ notes Ali, ―but, in reality, there‘s a huge gap between the desired status

and the actual status.‖

―This is why education is complex, because it cuts across the board and everyone is a part of it.‖ Purwanto

says. ―Once we have that, once we can get everybody on the same page—or at least the majority of them—

then we‘re good to go. The rest will fall into place.‖

The Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, May 2008.

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Emotional Intelligence

The following reading is adapted from 77ie Author Talks About Emotions—Success Depends on Self-Control, He Says

by Patricia Holt. Reprinted with permission from the San Francisco Chronicle © 1995.

Daniel Goleman is discussing his famous 'impulse control' test at a San Francisco

lecture and has the entire audience's attention. Goleman, a psychologist and science

writer, is the author of the best-seller Emotional Intelligence, a fascinating book

about recent discoveries in brain research that prove emotional stability is more

important than IQ in determining an individual's success in life. One of the

highlights of the book, that Goleman explains to his audience of foundation leaders, educators, and grants

donors, is a test administered thirty years ago that Goleman calls 'The Marshmallow Challenge.'

In this experiment, four-year-old children were individually called into a room at Stanford University during

the 1960s. There, a kind man gave a marshmallow to each of them and said they could eat the

marshmallow right away, or wait for him to come back from an errand, at which point they would get two

marshmallows.

Goleman gets everyone laughing as he describes watching a film of the preschoolers

while they waited for the nice man to come back. Some of them covered their eyes

or rested their heads on their arms so they wouldn't have to look at the marshmallow, or played games or

sang to keep their thoughts off the single marshmallow and waited for the promised double prize. Others—

about a third of the group—simply watched the man leave and ate the marshmallow within seconds.

What is surprising about this test, claims Goleman, is its diagnostic power: A dozen years later the same

children were tracked down as adolescents and tested again. "The emotional and social difference between

the grab-the-marshmallow preschoolers and their gratification-delaying peers was dramatic," Goleman says.

The ones who had resisted eating the marshmallow were clearly more socially competent than the others.

"They were less likely to go to pieces, freeze or regress under stress, or become rattled and disorganized

when pressured; they embraced challenges and pursued them instead of giving up, even in the face of

difficulties; they were self-reliant4 and confident, trustworthy and dependable."

The third or so who grabbed the marshmallow were "more likely to be seen as

shying away from social contacts, to be stubborn and indecisive, to be easily upset

by frustrations, to think of themselves as unworthy, to become immobilized by stress, to be mistrustful or

prone to jealousy, or to overreact to certain situations with a sharp temper."

And all because of a single marshmallow? In fact, Goleman explains, it's all because of a lone neuron in the

brain, only recently discovered, that bypasses the neocortex—the area of the brain where rational decisions

are made—and goes straight to the amygdala, or emotional center of the brain. It is here that quicker, more

primitive 'fight or flight' responses occur, and are stored for future use. The more that emotional memories

involving temper, frustration, anxiety, depression, impulse, and fear pile up in early adolescence, the more

the amygdala can "hijack the rest of the brain," Goleman says, "by flooding it with strong and inappropriate

emotions, causing us to wonder later, 'Why did I overreact?'"

But if the emotions stored in the brain are those of restraint, self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation,

empathy, hope, and optimism, then we become endowed with an 'emotional intelligence' that serves rather

than enslaves us for the rest of our lives.

The bad news, says Goleman, is that a widely praised but disturbing study from out of the University of

Vermont has shown a "decline in emotional aptitude among children across the board." Rich or poor, East

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Coast or West Coast, inner city or suburb, children today are more vulnerable than ever to anger, depression,

anxiety— what he calls a massive 'emotional malaise.' The good news, however, involves another recent

discovery—that the amygdala takes a long time to mature, around fifteen or sixteen years, which means to

Goleman that "emotional intelligence can be taught, not only in the home but perhaps, more importantly, in

school."

Goleman's own story is as intriguing as his book. The author or co-author of nearly a dozen other books

involving brain research and behavior, he experienced steady but modest sales until Emotional Intelligence

hit the stores. Later came the cover of Time magazine and appearances on television, such as the Oprah

Winfrey show.

"But I think the book also points out the real strength in what has been a feminine preserve in this culture,"

claims Goleman. "Girls are raised to be emotionally astute and perceptive, but sons learn little about

emotions except how to control anger. Women are absolutely more empathic than men on average, but

they've felt powerless to bring up the idea of emotions as a serious topic."

The irony, Goleman feels, is that if he had written a book about women and emotions, school reform,

emotion-based leadership in business, or child psychology, "the book wouldn't have gotten much attention.

As it happens this is a book about all those things, but women and children and school reform are

marginalized in this society. So I come along with a lot of scientific data that says, 'Hey, this stuff is

consequential'; and maybe some doors are opening in our society."

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Wanted: Mars . . . Dead or Alive?

The following reading is taken from Wanted: Mars . . . Dead or Alive? by Geoffrey A. Landis. Adapted from

ODYSSEY'S January 2001 issue: 2001: A Space Odyssey, © 2001, Cobblestone Publishing Company, 30 Grove Street,

Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Cams Publishing Company.

When Mariner 4 flew past Mars in 1965, scientists on Earth got the first-ever close-up view of the Red

Planet. What they saw came as a surprise and a disappointment. The Mars that Mariner's cameras revealed

was a cratered desert with an atmosphere so thin that it was barely more than a vacuum.

The planet was bitterly cold and dry, held no trace of life—not even microscopic plants—and appeared to

have no water.

The news was shocking, for up until the Mariner pictures, scientists had thought that Mars was a planet a lot

like Earth, only somewhat colder. The Red Planet has always fascinated astronomers. It is certainly the most

earthlike of all the planets in the solar system—far more hospitable than the furnace of Venus or the

hydrogen clouds of Jupiter and Saturn. But the Mariner spacecraft found that Mars was not so much like

Earth after all.

As revealed by Mariner and its later cousins, Mars is a planet of stunning superlatives. Its great volcano,

Olympus Mons, reaches up almost 25 kilometers above sea level (or the limit where sea level would be, if

Mars had a sea). That's like three Mount Everests stacked on top of each other! Valles Marineris is a canyon

so huge that if it were placed on Earth, it would stretch from New York to Los Angeles. Even the sky of the

Red Planet is different—a pinkish yellow instead of a bright blue. For all these marvels, it's even more

disappointing that Mars doesn't have any life. Or does it?

The robotic spacecraft that followed Mariner to Mars gave us a somewhat modified view of the planet. Mars

is inhospitable now, but was it always cold and dry? Photographs taken in orbit show many features on the

planet surface that look like dry riverbeds. Mars could not have dry riverbeds unless it once had rivers.

Scientists think that long ago, Mars had liquid water, like the Earth. They also speculate that billions of years

ago, Mars had a much thicker atmosphere, which made it warmer than it is now.

Further evidence supporting the theory that Mars once had water recently came from the Mars Global

Surveyor. The craft has mapped the altitude of the Red Planet's surface, which shows that a large area in its

northern hemisphere is very low compared to the rest of the planet. This low area is smooth—much

smoother than the highlands and mountains in the planet's southern hemisphere. Some scientists think that

the low area is the basin of an ancient ocean that once existed on Mars. However, other scientists disagree,

and think

that there is not enough evidence to be certain.

But let's assume that the scientists are correct about the ocean. On Earth, in every habitat where liquid water

can be found, there is some form of life. So, if Mars once had liquid water, it might once have supported life

as well.

Could life still exist there? On Earth, living things are very tenacious. From the polar snows to the ocean

depths, life has learned to survive no matter how extreme the environment. So, if life started on Mars when

it was warm and wet, maybe as it slowly grew cooler and drier, life forms adapted to survive.

But those life forms would have had some serious adapting to do, since we know that the surface of Mars

today is extremely harsh. Besides no water and a very thin atmosphere with no oxygen, the planet's surface is

flooded with ultraviolet light, which kills bacteria.

Perhaps life on Mars is hidden deep underground in hydrothermal springs. Perhaps the water on Mars is very

salty. Since salt water freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water, it could still be liquid even at Mars'

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temperatures. Recently, scientists found places on Mars where, according to their analysis, water had burst

up from underground aquifers and flowed across the planet's surface in geologically recent time.

If there is underground water on Mars, it is possible that there are forms of bacteria living in these springs.

Such life would be very primitive, perhaps like the extremophile1 bacteria that live in underground springs

on Earth. If we do find life on Mars, even simple bacteria, we will know that life is not unique to Earth, but

exists on two planets—and perhaps is common across the galaxy.

You may wonder if we will ever find out for certain whether life exists on Mars. Although robot 'rovers'

continue to help scientists discover more about the Red Planet, some people think that question will only be

answered for sure when human astronauts venture onto its surface. The astronauts would use microscopes to

examine soil samples taken from many spots on the surface, and drill down into the aquifers. They would dig

into dried lakebeds and look for frozen life in the polar caps. In fact, right now, some scientists are

proposing plans for an expedition to Mars in fifteen to twenty years time. This question might finally be

answered in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

1Extremophile: organism that exists at its best in extreme environments, e.g., extremes of temperature

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The Exodus of Languages

The following reading is adapted from the article The Exodus of Languages: How the loss of languages is much like the

loss of a species by Jessica Kwik © 1998. Reprinted from Imprint Online with permission from the author.

"I have made an impression on this first group of Inuit people. My arrival to arctic Canada was a cold

one, but I'm warmed thinking of the events that will someday be stories to tell. The Inuit were surprised to

see my white skin and they told rather humorous jokes about me in Inuktitut.' They stopped laughing

though, when they heard my rebuttal in a dialect of their own tongue. I think I will enjoy this journey from

Greenland to Siberia."

It is doubtful that Knud Rasmussen

1 made such a diary entry on his travels, but these events did take place in

the 1920s. Inuit communities throughout arctic Canada understood the Inuktitut spoken by the Greenland-

born Rasmussen. Since the dialects had a common core that could be understood, the diverse dialects show a

common origin, or the same mother language. This divergence of language contrasts with the converging of

languages today that is endangering languages worldwide.

Languages seem to be converging to a smaller number, as languages like English seem to eat up regional

ones. The three languages used the most by first language speakers today are Mandarin Chinese, English,

and Spanish. English is being used more and more as the main language for business, science, and popular

culture. Evidence suggests that the dominant languages are squeezing out the local tongues of various

regions in the world. Linguists estimate that of the approximately 6,500 languages worldwide, about half are

endangered or on the brink of extinction. According to some linguists, the estimated rate of language

extinction is one lost in the world every two weeks. If this sounds like the world is losing a species, in a way

it is.

When a language is lost, meaning no living person can teach another, a world perspective is lost. Some

foreign language expressions simply cannot be translated. Colloquial phrases are pleasant to the ear, not only

because they are familiar, but also because they reflect a unique aspect of a culture. Aboriginal languages in

Canada and other countries such as Australia have words that reflect a way of life that is connected closely to

the Earth. There are fifty different words that mean 'snow' in one Canadian native language, and in the

Eastern Arrernte language of Central Australia the word nyimpe translates to 'the smell of rain.'

These various views of the world are essential for science to help create new ways of understanding and new

connections between the human and the natural world. Botanists have discovered new species of plants by

digging deeper into the meaning of Aboriginal names of flora that seemed identical. Archaeologists are also

using languages to track migrations of historical cultures. University of Waterloo Professor Robert Park

knows that the ancestral origins of the present Canadian Inuit communities can be partly explained by the

language spoken by the Inuit today. The Thule culture spoke the same Inuktitut of present-day Inuit to a

greater or lesser degree. Dr. Park knows the prehistoric Thule migrated east from Alaska and eventually to

Labrador and Greenland by the evidence of the mutually intelligible, living dialects of today.

Languages are much like living creatures that become endangered when numbers dwindle. Local natural

disasters, war, and famine are some of the reasons languages slip through the cracks of history. The

language that bore the different daughter languages for the Eskimo and Inuit was almost wiped out after

World War II. The mother language, Proto-Eskimo Aleut, was under siege when the Aleut people were

forced to leave their land. Fortunately, some Proto-Eskimo Aleut, which originated 6,000 to 8,000 years ago,

is still spoken. Languages also so become endangered when they are not passed on to children or when a

metropolitan language dominates over others.

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Some groups are taking action in preserving languages. Revival of languages such as Irish is gaining ground.

There is an Irish-language television channel and the largest age group of fluent Irish speakers is now the

under-twenty-fives. International organizations are mobilizing for the cause as well: UNESCO has mapped

the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger of Disappearing in 1996. The editor of the atlas believes the

preservation of moribund languages, which are spoken only by the elderly, should be a priority since they are

on the brink of extinction.

Preservation can occur in two ways. First, linguists can study moribund languages and seek to preserve the

components of the language: the sounds, the vocabulary, the grammar, and the traditions. The second way is

to teach children the language and have linguists advise on language maintenance. An example of this latter

method is the Maori language of New Zealand. It has seen a resurgence in the number of speakers from the

1960s and 1970s when there was virtually no parent to child transmission. New Zealand has since set up

'language nests' in early childhood centers to teach children Maori, exposing 100,000 children to their native

tongue so far.

For many linguists, preserving endangered languages is vital; a loss in global languages means a loss of the

diverse ideas and cultures those languages once held.

---------------- 1Knud Rasmussen: A Danish explorer and ethnologist who extensively researched Inuit culture.

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Alien Species: Fitting In The following reading is adapted from Alien Species Often Fit in Fine, Some Scientists Contend by Mark Derr.

Copyright © 2001 by the New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission.

Governments, private groups, and individuals spend billions of dollars a year trying to root out non-native

organisms that are considered dangerous to ecosystems, and to prevent the introduction of new interlopers.

But a number of scientists question the assumption that the presence of alien species can never be acceptable

in a natural ecosystem. While applauding efforts to banish harmful organisms—like the brown tree snakes

that have destroyed most of Guam's native species of forest birds, or the star thistle (a prickly weed that is

toxic to horses, and has invaded much of the West)—they say that portraying introduced species as

inherently bad is an unscientific approach.

"Distinctions between exotics and native species are artificial," said Dr. Michael Rosenzweig, a professor of

evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, because they depend on picking a date and calling the

plants and animals that show up after that 'exotic.' Ecosystems free of species defined as exotic are, by

default, considered the most natural. "You can't roll back the clock and remove all exotics or fix habitats,"

Dr. Rosenzweig said. "Both native and exotic species can become invasive, and so they all have to be

monitored and controlled when they begin to get out of hand."

At its core, the debate is about how to manage the world's remaining natural

ecosystems and about how, and how much, to restore other habitats. Species

that invade a territory can harm ecosystems, agriculture, and human health. They can threaten some native

species or even destroy and replace others. Next to habitat loss, these invasive species represent the greatest

threat to biodiversity worldwide, many ecologists say.

Ecologists generally define an alien species as one that people, inadvertently or deliberately, carried to its

new location. Across the American continents, exotic species are those introduced after the first European

contact. That date, rounded off to A.D. 1500, represents what ecologists consider to have been a major shift

in the spread of species, including crops and livestock, as they began to leapfrog with humans from continent

to continent.

"Only a small percentage of alien species cause problems in their new habitats," said a professor of ecology

and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee. "Of the 7,000 alien species in the United States—

out of a total of 150,000 species—only about 10 percent are invasive," he pointed out. The other 90 percent

have fit into their environments and are considered naturalized. Yet appearances can deceive, ecologists

caution, and many of these exotics may be considered acceptable only because no one has documented their

harmful effects. What is more, non-native species can appear innocuous for decades, then turn invasive.

One example is the Brazilian pepper, which landscapers introduced into South Florida in the late nineteenth

century. It started to spread widely in the 1950s and has now crowded out native vegetation throughout the

Florida Everglades. Once a species begins to run amok, it is extremely difficult to eradicate.

Faced with such uncertainty, many ecologists argue for strong steps to be taken,

stressing the need to actively take precautions to prevent exotic species from

becoming problematic. Their approach is to remove exotics from natural ecosystems. But a number of

experts question the scientific wisdom of trying to roll back ecosystems to a time when they were more

natural.

"Defining which species belong in an ecosystem is based less on science than on historical, cultural, moral,

geographic, and theological arguments," said Dr. Mark Sagoff, who studies the issue at the University of

Maryland's Institute for so Philosophy and Public Policy. "Science cannot judge an ecosystem with exotics to

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be worse, or less natural, than one without them," he said, "without also taking into account [all] the effects

of those species on their environments."

Even many ecologists who would like to rid ecosystems of all exotics admit that this goal is impractical.

According to the director of conservation programs at a nonprofit group called Nature Conservancy, a return

to pre-settlement ecosystems simply cannot be accomplished. "For one thing," he said, "many exotic species

have become so integrated into ecosystems that [other] animals, some endangered, rely on them for food and

shelter."

"This is not the only problem that can result from the removal of exotics," Dr. Rosenzweig said. In

Australia's Northern Territory, for example, the eradication of the non-native water buffalo that were

ravaging vegetation led to the explosive growth of a little-noticed plant—the giant mimosa—which was

introduced from Central America in the 1890s. This shrub has been more destructive and harder to remove

than the water buffalo.

In an issue of the science journal Evolutionary Ecology Research, Dr. Rosenzweig, the editor, challenges the

prevailing view that invasive alien species reduce biodiversity. The exotics increase the number of species in

the environment, he wrote. Even if alien species cause extinctions, the extinction phase will eventually end,

and new species may then begin to evolve, he explained.

"Ecologists should focus on managing the environments that include exotic immigrants," Dr. Rosenzweig

said, "and creating new ones where necessary to enhance species' survival and biodiversity."

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Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up? (1)

Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americans—at least,

as measured by I.Q. tests—were getting smarter. This fact had been obscured for years, because the people

who give I.Q. tests continually recalibrate the scoring system to keep the average at 100. But if you took out

the recalibration, Flynn found, I.Q. scores showed a steady upward trajectory, rising by about three points

per decade, which means that a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American

population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third. Some of that effect, no doubt, is a simple by-product

of economic progress: in the surge of prosperity during the middle part of the last century, people in the West

became better fed, better educated, and more familiar with things like I.Q. tests. But, even as that wave of

change has subsided, test scores have continued to rise—not just in America but all over the developed

world. What's more, the increases have not been confined to children who go to enriched day-care centers

and private schools. The middle part of the curve—the people who have supposedly been suffering from a

deteriorating public-school system and a steady diet of lowest-common-denominator television and mindless

pop music—has increased just as much. What on earth is happening? In the wonderfully entertaining

"Everything Bad Is Good for You" (Riverhead; $23.95), Steven Johnson proposes that what is making us

smarter is precisely what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture.

Johnson is the former editor of the online magazine Feed and the author of a number of books on

science and technology. There is a pleasing eclecticism to his thinking. He is as happy analyzing "Finding

Nemo" as he is dissecting the intricacies of a piece of software, and he's perfectly capable of using

Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence to discuss the new creative rules of television shows. Johnson wants

to understand popular culture—not in the postmodern, academic sense of wondering what "The Dukes of

Hazzard" tells us about Southern male alienation but in the very practical sense of wondering what watching

something like "The Dukes of Hazzard" does to the way our minds work.

As Johnson points out, television is very different now from what it was thirty years ago. It's harder.

A typical episode of "Starsky and Hutch," in the nineteen-seventies, followed an essentially linear path: two

characters, engaged in a single story line, moving toward a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of

"Dallas" today is to be stunned by its glacial pace—by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships,

by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of "The Sopranos," by

contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot.

Modern television also requires the viewer to do a lot of what Johnson calls "filling in," as in a "Seinfeld"

episode that subtly parodies the Kennedy assassination conspiracists, or a typical "Simpsons" episode, which

may contain numerous allusions to politics or cinema or pop culture. The extraordinary amount of money

now being made in the television aftermarket—DVD sales and syndication—means that the creators of

television shows now have an incentive to make programming that can sustain two or three or four viewings.

Even reality shows like "Survivor," Johnson argues, engage the viewer in a way that television rarely has in

the past:

When we watch these shows, the part of our brain that monitors the emotional lives of the people around

us—the part that tracks subtle shifts in intonation and gesture and facial expression—scrutinizes the action

on the screen, looking for clues. . . . The phrase "Monday-morning quarterbacking" was coined to describe

the engaged feeling spectators have in relation to games as opposed to stories. We absorb stories, but we

second-guess games. Reality programming has brought that second-guessing to prime time, only the game in

question revolves around social dexterity rather than the physical kind.

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How can the greater cognitive demands that television makes on us now, he wonders, not matter?

Johnson develops the same argument about video games. Most of the people who denounce video

games, he says, haven't actually played them—at least, not recently. Twenty years ago, games like Tetris or

Pac-Man were simple exercises in motor coördination and pattern recognition. Today's games belong to

another realm. Johnson points out that one of the "walk-throughs" for "Grand Theft Auto III"—that is, the

informal guides that break down the games and help players navigate their complexities—is fifty-three

thousand words long, about the length of his book. The contemporary video game involves a fully realized

imaginary world, dense with detail and levels of complexity.

Indeed, video games are not games in the sense of those pastimes—like Monopoly or gin rummy or

chess—which most of us grew up with. They don't have a set of unambiguous rules that have to be learned

and then followed during the course of play. This is why many of us find modern video games baffling:

we're not used to being in a situation where we have to figure out what to do. We think we only have to learn

how to press the buttons faster. But these games withhold critical information from the player. Players have

to explore and sort through hypotheses in order to make sense of the game's environment, which is why a

modern video game can take forty hours to complete. Far from being engines of instant gratification, as they

are often described, video games are actually, Johnson writes, "all about delayed gratification—sometimes so

long delayed that you wonder if the gratification is ever going to show."

At the same time, players are required to manage a dizzying array of information and options. The

game presents the player with a series of puzzles, and you can't succeed at the game simply by solving the

puzzles one at a time. You have to craft a longer-term strategy, in order to juggle and coördinate competing

interests. In denigrating the video game, Johnson argues, we have confused it with other phenomena in teen-

age life, like multitasking—simultaneously e-mailing and listening to music and talking on the telephone and

surfing the Internet. Playing a video game is, in fact, an exercise in "constructing the proper hierarchy of

tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence," he writes. "It's about finding order and meaning

in the world, and making decisions that help create that order."

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Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up? (2)

It doesn't seem right, of course, that watching "24" or playing a video game could be as important

cognitively as reading a book. Isn't the extraordinary success of the "Harry Potter" novels better news for the

culture than the equivalent success of "Grand Theft Auto III"? Johnson's response is to imagine what cultural

critics might have said had video games been invented hundreds of years ago, and only recently had

something called the book been marketed aggressively to children:

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—

which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-

scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of

words on the page…..

Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social

relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him

or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. . . .

But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You

can't control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This

risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they're powerless to change

their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it's a submissive one.

He's joking, of course, but only in part. The point is that books and video games represent two very

different kinds of learning. When you read a biology textbook, the content of what you read is what matters.

Reading is a form of explicit learning. When you play a video game, the value is in how it makes you think.

Video games are an example of collateral learning, which is no less important.

Being "smart" involves facility in both kinds of thinking—the kind of fluid problem solving that

matters in things like video games and I.Q. tests, but also the kind of crystallized knowledge that comes from

explicit learning. If Johnson's book has a flaw, it is that he sometimes speaks of our culture being "smarter"

when he's really referring just to that fluid problem-solving facility. When it comes to the other kind of

intelligence, it is not clear at all what kind of progress we are making, as anyone who has read, say, the

Gettysburg Address alongside any Presidential speech from the past twenty years can attest. The real

question is what the right balance of these two forms of intelligence might look like. "Everything Bad Is

Good for You" doesn't answer that question. But Johnson does something nearly as important, which is to

remind us that we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that explicit learning is the only kind of learning that

matters.

In recent years, for example, a number of elementary schools have phased out or reduced recess and

replaced it with extra math or English instruction. This is the triumph of the explicit over the collateral. After

all, recess is "play" for a ten-year-old in precisely the sense that Johnson describes video games as play for

an adolescent: an unstructured environment that requires the child actively to intervene, to look for the

hidden logic, to find order and meaning in chaos.

One of the ongoing debates in the educational community, similarly, is over the value of homework.

Meta-analysis of hundreds of studies done on the effects of homework shows that the evidence supporting

the practice is, at best, modest. Homework seems to be most useful in high school and for subjects like math.

At the elementary-school level, homework seems to be of marginal or no academic value. Its effect on

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discipline and personal responsibility is unproved. And the causal relation between high-school homework

and achievement is unclear: it hasn't been firmly established whether spending more time on homework in

high school makes you a better student or whether better students, finding homework more pleasurable,

spend more time doing it. So why, as a society, are we so enamored of homework? Perhaps because we have

so little faith in the value of the things that children would otherwise be doing with their time. They could go

out for a walk, and get some exercise; they could spend time with their peers, and reap the rewards of

friendship. Or, Johnson suggests, they could be playing a video game, and giving their minds a rigorous

workout.

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August 5, 2002

ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY

The Naked Face Can you read people's thoughts just by looking at them? (1)

Some years ago, John Yarbrough was working patrol for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. It

was about two in the morning. He and his partner were in the Willowbrook section of South Central Los

Angeles, and they pulled over a sports car. "Dark, nighttime, average stop," Yarbrough recalls. "Patrol for

me was like going hunting. At that time of night in the area I was working, there was a lot of criminal

activity, and hardly anyone had a driver's license. Almost everyone had something intoxicating in the car.

We stopped drunk drivers all the time. You're hunting for guns or lots of dope, or suspects wanted for major

things. You look at someone and you get an instinctive reaction. And the longer you've been working the

stronger that instinctive reaction is."

Yarbrough was driving, and in a two-man patrol car the procedure is for the driver to make the approach and

the officer on the passenger side to provide backup. He opened the door and stepped out onto the street,

walking toward the vehicle with his weapon drawn. Suddenly, a man jumped out of the passenger side and

pointed a gun directly at him. The two of them froze, separated by no more than a few yards. "There was a

tree behind him, to his right," Yarbrough recalls. "He was about seventeen. He had the gun in his right hand.

He was on the curb side. I was on the other side, facing him. It was just a matter of who was going to shoot

first. I remember it clear as day. But for some reason I didn't shoot him." Yarbrough is an ex-marine with

close-cropped graying hair and a small mustache, and he speaks in measured tones. "Is he a danger? Sure.

He's standing there with a gun, and what person in his right mind does that facing a uniformed armed

policeman? If you looked at it logically, I should have shot him. But logic had nothing to do with it.

Something just didn't feel right. It was a gut reaction not to shoot-- a hunch that at that exact moment he was

not an imminent threat to me." So Yarbrough stopped, and, sure enough, so did the kid. He pointed a gun at

an armed policeman on a dark street in South Central L.A., and then backed down.

Yarbrough retired last year from the sheriff's department after almost thirty years, sixteen of which were in

homicide. He now lives in western Arizona, in a small, immaculate house overlooking the Colorado River,

with pictures of John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, and Dale Earnhardt on the wall. He has a

policeman's watchfulness: while he listens to you, his eyes alight on your face, and then they follow your

hands, if you move them, and the areas to your immediate left and right-- and then back again, in a steady

cycle. He grew up in an affluent household in the San Fernando Valley, the son of two doctors, and he is

intensely analytical: he is the sort to take a problem and break it down, working it over slowly and patiently

in his mind, and the incident in Willowbrook is one of those problems. Policemen shoot people who point

guns directly at them at two in the morning. But something he saw held him back, something that ninety-nine

people out of a hundred wouldn't have seen.

Many years later, Yarbrough met with a team of psychologists who were conducting training sessions for

law enforcement. They sat beside him in a darkened room and showed him a series of videotapes of people

who were either lying or telling the truth. He had to say who was doing what. One tape showed people

talking about their views on the death penalty and on smoking in public. Another featured a series of nurses

who were all talking about a nature film they were supposedly watching, even though some of them were

actually watching grisly documentary footage about burn victims and amputees. It may sound as if the tests

should have been easy, because we all think we can tell whether someone is lying. But these were not the

obvious fibs of a child, or the prevarications of people whose habits and tendencies we know well. These

were strangers who were motivated to deceive, and the task of spotting the liars turns out to be fantastically

difficult. There is just too much information--words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth--and it is impossible

to know how the various cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together, and in any case it's all

happening so quickly that you can't even follow what you think you ought to follow. The tests have been

given to policemen, customs officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers from

the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms-- people one would

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have thought would be good at spotting lies. On average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they

would have done just as well if they hadn't watched the tapes at all and just guessed. But every now and

again-- roughly one time in a thousand--someone scores off the charts. A Texas Ranger named David

Maxwell did extremely well, for example, as did an ex-A.T.F. agent named J.J. Newberry, a few therapists,

an arbitrator, a vice cop-- and John Yarbrough, which suggests that what happened in Willowbrook may

have been more than a fluke or a lucky guess. Something in our faces signals whether we're going to shoot,

say, or whether we're lying about the film we just saw. Most of us aren't very good at spotting it. But a

handful of people are virtuosos. What do they see that we miss?

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All of us, a thousand times a day, read faces. When someone says "I love you," we look into that person's

eyes to judge his or her sincerity. When we meet someone new, we often pick up on subtle signals, so that,

even though he or she may have talked in a normal and friendly manner, afterward we say, "I don't think he

liked me," or "I don't think she's very happy." We easily parse complex distinctions in facial expression. If

you saw me grinning, for example, with my eyes twinkling, you'd say I was amused. But that's not the only

way we interpret a smile. If you saw me nod and smile exaggeratedly, with the corners of my lips tightened,

you would take it that I had been teased and was responding sarcastically. If I made eye contact with

someone, gave a small smile and then looked down and averted my gaze, you would think I was flirting. If I

followed a remark with an abrupt smile and then nodded, or tilted my head sideways, you might conclude

that I had just said something a little harsh, and wanted to take the edge off it. You wouldn't need to hear

anything I was saying in order to reach these conclusions. The face is such an extraordinarily efficient

instrument of communication that there must be rules that govern the way we interpret facial expressions.

But what are those rules? And are they the same for everyone?

In the nineteen-sixties, a young San Francisco psychologist named Paul Ekman began to study facial

expression, and he discovered that no one knew the answers to those questions. Ekman went to see Margaret

Mead, climbing the stairs to her tower office at the American Museum of Natural History. He had an idea.

What if he travelled around the world to find out whether people from different cultures agreed on the

meaning of different facial expressions? Mead, he recalls, "looked at me as if I were crazy." Like most social

scientists of her day, she believed that expression was culturally determined-- that we simply used our faces

according to a set of learned social conventions. Charles Darwin had discussed the face in his later writings;

in his 1872 book, "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," he argued that all mammals show

emotion reliably in their faces. But in the nineteen-sixties academic psychologists were more interested in

motivation and cognition than in emotion or its expression. Ekman was undaunted; he began travelling to

places like Japan, Brazil, and Argentina, carrying photographs of men and women making a variety of

distinctive faces. Everywhere he went, people agreed on what those expressions meant. But what if people in

the developed world had all picked up the same cultural rules from watching the same movies and television

shows? So Ekman set out again, this time making his way through the jungles of Papua New Guinea, to the

most remote villages, and he found that the tribesmen there had no problem interpreting the expressions,

either. This may not sound like much of a breakthrough. But in the scientific climate of the time it was a

revelation. Ekman had established that expressions were the universal products of evolution. There were

fundamental lessons to be learned from the face, if you knew where to look.

Paul Ekman is now in his sixties. He is clean-shaven, with closely set eyes and thick, prominent eyebrows,

and although he is of medium build, he seems much larger than he is: there is something stubborn and

substantial in his demeanor. He grew up in Newark, the son of a pediatrician, and entered the University of

Chicago at fifteen. He speaks deliberately: before he laughs, he pauses slightly, as if waiting for permission.

He is the sort to make lists, and number his arguments. His academic writing has an orderly logic to it; by the

end of an Ekman essay, each stray objection and problem has been gathered up and catalogued. In the mid-

sixties, Ekman set up a lab in a ramshackle Victorian house at the University of California at San Francisco,

where he holds a professorship. If the face was part of a physiological system, he reasoned, the system could

be learned. He set out to teach himself. He treated the face as an adventurer would a foreign land, exploring

its every crevice and contour. He assembled a videotape library of people's facial expressions, which soon

filled three rooms in his lab, and studied them to the point where he could look at a face and pick up a flicker

of emotion that might last no more than a fraction of a second. Ekman created the lying tests. He filmed the

nurses talking about the movie they were watching and the movie they weren't watching. Working with

Maureen O'Sullivan, a psychologist from the University of San Francisco, and other colleagues, he located

people who had a reputation for being uncannily perceptive, and put them to the test, and that's how

Yarbrough and the other high-scorers were identified. O'Sullivan and Ekman call this study of gifted face

readers the Diogenes Project, after the Greek philosopher of antiquity who used to wander around Athens

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with a lantern, peering into people's faces as he searched for an honest man. Ekman has taken the most

vaporous of sensations-- the hunch you have about someone else-- and sought to give them definition. Most

of us don't trust our hunches, because we don't know where they came from. We think they can't be

explained. But what if they can?

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Paul Ekman got his start in the face-reading business because of a man named Silvan Tomkins, and Silvan

Tomkins may have been the best face reader there ever was. Tomkins was from Philadelphia, the son of a

dentist from Russia. He was short, and slightly thick around the middle, with a wild mane of white hair and

huge black plastic-rimmed glasses. He taught psychology at Princeton and Rutgers, and was the author of

"Affect, Imagery, Consciousness," a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between

those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was

brilliant. He was a legendary talker. At the end of a cocktail party, fifteen people would sit, rapt, at

Tomkins's feet, and someone would say, "One more question!" and they would all sit there for another hour

and a half, as Tomkins held forth on, say, comic books, a television sitcom, the biology of emotion, his

problem with Kant, and his enthusiasm for the latest fad diets, all enfolded into one extended riff. During the

Depression, in the midst of his doctoral studies at Harvard, he worked as a handicapper for a horse-racing

syndicate, and was so successful that he lived lavishly on Manhattan's Upper East Side. At the track, where

he sat in the stands for hours, staring at the horses through binoculars, he was known as the Professor. "He

had a system for predicting how a horse would do based on what horse was on either side of him, based on

their emotional relationship," Ekman said. If a male horse, for instance, had lost to a mare in his first or

second year, he would be ruined if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the lineup. (Or something

like that-- no one really knew for certain.) Tomkins felt that emotion was the code to life, and that with

enough attention to particulars the code could be cracked. He thought this about the horses, and, more

important, he thought this about the human face.

Tomkins, it was said, could walk into a post office, go over to the "Wanted" posters, and, just by looking at

mug shots, tell you what crimes the various fugitives had committed. "He would watch the show "To Tell the

Truth,' and without fault he could always pick the person who was lying and who his confederates were," his

son, Mark, recalls. "He actually wrote the producer at one point to say it was too easy, and the man invited

him to come to New York, go backstage, and show his stuff." Virginia Demos, who teaches psychology at

Harvard, recalls having long conversations with Tomkins. "We would sit and talk on the phone, and he

would turn the sound down as Jesse Jackson was talking to Michael Dukakis, at the Democratic National

Convention. And he would read the faces and give his predictions on what would happen. It was profound."

Ekman's most memorable encounter with Tomkins took place in the late sixties. Ekman had just tracked

down a hundred thousand feet of film that had been shot by the virologist Carleton Gajdusek in the remote

jungles of Papua New Guinea. Some of the footage was of a tribe called the South Fore, who were a peaceful

and friendly people. The rest was of the Kukukuku, who were hostile and murderous and who had a

homosexual ritual where pre-adolescent boys were required to serve as courtesans for the male elders of the

tribe. Ekman was still working on the problem of whether human facial expressions were universal, and the

Gajdusek film was invaluable. For six months, Ekman and his collaborator, Wallace Friesen, sorted through

the footage. They cut extraneous scenes, focussing just on closeups of the faces of the tribesmen, and when

the editing was finished Ekman called in Tomkins.

The two men, protégé and mentor, sat at the back of the room, as faces flickered across the screen. Ekman

had told Tomkins nothing about the tribes involved; all identifying context had been edited out. Tomkins

looked on intently, peering through his glasses. At the end, he went up to the screen and pointed to the faces

of the South Fore. "These are a sweet, gentle people, very indulgent, very peaceful," he said. Then he pointed

to the faces of the Kukukuku. "This other group is violent, and there is lots of evidence to suggest

homosexuality." Even today, a third of a century later, Ekman cannot get over what Tomkins did. "My God!

I vividly remember saying, "Silvan, how on earth are you doing that?' " Ekman recalls. "And he went up to

the screen and, while we played the film backward, in slow motion, he pointed out the particular bulges and

wrinkles in the face that he was using to make his judgment. That's when I realized, "I've got to unpack the

face.' It was a gold mine of information that everyone had ignored. This guy could see it, and if he could see

it, maybe everyone else could, too."

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Ekman and Friesen decided that they needed to create a taxonomy of facial expressions, so day after day they

sat across from each other and began to make every conceivable face they could. Soon, though, they realized

that their efforts weren't enough. "I met an anthropologist, Wade Seaford, told him what I was doing, and he

said, 'Do you have this movement?'" --and here Ekman contracted what's called the triangularis, which is the

muscle that depresses the corners of the lips, forming an arc of distaste-- "and it wasn't in my system,

because I had never seen it before. I had built a system not on what the face can do but on what I had seen. I

was devastated. So I came back and said, 'I've got to learn the anatomy.' " Friesen and Ekman then combed

through medical textbooks that outlined each of the facial muscles, and identified every distinct muscular

movement that the face could make. There were forty-three such movements. Ekman and Friesen called

them "action units." Then they sat across from each other again, and began manipulating each action unit in

turn, first locating the muscle in their mind and then concentrating on isolating it, watching each other

closely as they did, checking their movements in a mirror, making notes of how the wrinkle patterns on their

faces would change with each muscle movement, and videotaping the movement for their records. On the

few occasions when they couldn't make a particular movement, they went next door to the U.C.S.F. anatomy

department, where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the

recalcitrant muscle. "That wasn't pleasant at all," Ekman recalls. When each of those action units had been

mastered, Ekman and Friesen began working action units in combination, layering one movement on top of

another. The entire process took seven years. "There are three hundred combinations of two muscles,"

Ekman says. "If you add in a third, you get over four thousand. We took it up to five muscles, which is over

ten thousand visible facial configurations." Most of those ten thousand facial expressions don't mean

anything, of course. They are the kind of nonsense faces that children make. But, by working through each

action-unit combination, Ekman and Friesen identified about three thousand that did seem to mean

something, until they had catalogued the essential repertoire of human emotion.

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