What happened to Obama's passion?

Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory and the author of “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation,” writes about the importance of story-telling in this New York Times opinion piece:

It was a blustery day in Washington on Jan. 20, 2009, as it often seems to be on the day of a presidential inauguration. As I stood with my 8-year-old daughter, watching the president deliver his inaugural address, I had a feeling of unease. It wasn’t just that the man who could be so eloquent had seemingly chosen not to be on this auspicious occasion, although that turned out to be a troubling harbinger of things to come. It was that there was a story the American people were waiting to hear — and needed to hear — but he didn’t tell it. And in the ensuing months he continued not to tell it, no matter how outrageous the slings and arrows his opponents threw at him.

Photo, left: iStockphoto.com

The stories our leaders tell us matter, probably almost as much as the stories our parents tell us as children, because they orient us to what is, what could be, and what should be; to the worldviews they hold and to the values they hold sacred. Our brains evolved to “expect” stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought. Our species existed for more than 100,000 years before the earliest signs of literacy, and another 5,000 years would pass before the majority of humans would know how to read and write.

Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and “news stories” that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories; the holy books of the three great monotheistic religions are written in parables; and as research in cognitive science has shown, lawyers whose closing arguments tell a story win jury trials against their legal adversaries who just lay out “the facts of the case.”

When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters. Americans were scared and angry. The economy was spinning in reverse. … Americans needed their president to tell them a story about what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end.

Read the whole article in the New York Times.

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A wild view of apes of the planet

“It’s a very humbling experience to come face to face with an adult, male lowland gorilla,” says Emory primate disease ecologist Tom Gillespie. “They have a characteristic bluff.”

The male charges toward the perceived threat, says Gillespie, who has been charged often during in his research in Africa. “They put a leaf between their teeth, they beat their chest, and they move back and forth at very close proximity, just in front of you. You can smell their breath at times when they’re doing this. It takes all of your strength away. So it’s a very humbling experience.”

But despite their enormous physical power, gorillas don’t resort to violence unless it’s absolutely necessary to protect themselves or their families. “No one has been killed by a gorilla in any case where they didn’t provoke the gorilla,” Gillespie says. “There’s a misconception of what a gorilla is. Gorillas are extremely peaceful animals. They’re 100-percent vegetarian and they live in a family group that basically keeps to itself.”

What we know from studies of apes in the wild runs counter to the characteristics of the animals portrayed in the new movie “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” he says.

Even the more war-like behavior observed in chimpanzees in the wild might be less aggressive without human involvement, Gillespie says. “A lot of those things happened because we intervened. We went in there and fed a bunch of bananas to the animals. They changed their ranges, they got accustomed to getting bananas and then when we walked away and stopped giving them bananas, all the sudden they needed food and they started fighting over where they’re going to get the food.”

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Famine in Somalia driven by conflict

A worn-out tank sits abandoned in Somalia, where the central government has lacked control over much of the country since 1991. Credit: iStockphoto.com/ranplett.

“In the Horn of Africa, droughts are natural but famines are man made,” says Emory anthropologist Peter Little, who studies the politics, economy and ecology of the region. “The famine in Somalia is an unfortunate intersection of failed rain, politics and conflict.”

Drought occurs every five or six years in the Horn of Africa. In Somalia, which has lacked the control of a central government over much of the country since a civil war in 1991, the effects of the current drought have been greatly compounded by fighting, Little says.

The U.N. has declared famine in two regions of south Somalia where the Islamist group Al-Shabaab has been fighting to maintain control. “A phenomenal number of people have been displaced,” Little says. “People have been forced out of farming and livestock areas and have clustered around towns where there is a little bit of security.”

Fighting disrupts markets and trading, and complicates delivery of food aid. In an attempt to escape the situation in recent months, more than 350,000 Somalis have poured into northeastern Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp, which was designed to hold fewer than 100,000 people.

“Somalia is like a roller coaster, and right now it’s near the bottom of the hill,” Little says.

After years of being a failed state, things were beginning to look up for Somalia around 2003, when the World Bank put together an economic memorandum for the country. “People were actually becoming modestly optimistic about solutions,” Little says. “I was asked if I might be interested in joining a 2006 mission to Mogadishu, to look at long-term development, but things blew up again and it was cancelled.”

Since 2007, the situation has been steadily deteriorating, he says. “The food security situation has been awful for the past three years, particularly for the most vulnerable: Children, the elderly and women.”

Although the famine declaration in July brought Somalia back into the media spotlight, “the story has been bubbling for a long time,” Little says.

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Dinosaurs are booming in the Outback

Emory science majors pose with a life-sized statue of Muttaburrasaurus langdoni while crusing the Cretaceous of Queensland. Can you spot Paleontologist Barbie in this picture? You may have to click on the photo to enlarge it. Photo by Anthony Martin.

A dozen years ago, Australian rancher David Elliott came across a large bone while rounding up his sheep in the Queensland Outback. It turned out to be the femur of an 18-meter long sauropod – a piece of the largest dinosaur ever found in Australia.

The collecting bug bit Elliot, as more dinosaur fossils were dug up on his property. He and his wife, Judy, founded the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Center (AAOD) in Winton. The isolated Outback town, where poet Banjo Patterson wrote the classic tune “Waltzing Matilda,” is now a hub for dino tourism.

“Australia has often been regarded as ‘dinosaur poor,’” says Emory paleontologist Anthony Martin. “As a continent, there just hadn’t been a lot of material to study.”

Since Elliot’s initial discovery, the AAOD has amassed hundreds of bones, and more keep coming. “So far, they’ve named three new species of dinosaurs, and they suspect they have more,” Martin says. “There is a growing realization that a new age of dinosaurs is happening in Australia.”

Martin and geologist Steve Henderson of Emory’s Oxford College recently returned from leading nine students on a summer study abroad program in Australia. A highlight was a whirlwind paleo-tour of Queensland, including a stop at the AAOD.

“We wanted to give the students a taste of what life is like in the modern-day Outback, and 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period,” Martin says. “I hope they got an appreciation for the incredible natural history of Queensland, and the evolution of landscapes and life in that area of the world.”

Unlike the American West, which has a 100-year history of unearthing and studying dinosaur fossils, Queensland is at the beginning of uncovering a rich trove of the prehistoric past.

“You get to see the science as it's happening and feel the immediacy of discoveries,” Martin says.

Trish Sloan, the group’s guide at the AAOD, showed the students how to prepare a dinosaur bone, and gave them a glimpse of the center’s most recent finds. “I can’t talk about it, because it hasn’t gone through peer review yet,” Martin says. “But Trish was excited about new finds that may change people’s minds about the dinosaurs in the area.”

Read more about Down Under dinosaurs on Martin's blog The Great Cretaceous Walk.

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Do drones make killing too easy?

Dozens of countries are now producing unmanned aircraft known as drones, ranging from flying “spies” the size of insects to large planes equipped with missiles and bombs.

A soldier sitting at a computer in Nevada can be running lethal drones on the other side of the world.

“That to me is deeply problematic, when you make killing so easy, and when you remove the person so far from the site of the killing,” says Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Emory Center for Ethics. “The sense of having killed people becomes so abstract.”

Drone technology could develop to the point that enemy soldiers conduct entire battles against one another via computer, while sitting in fortified bunkers.

“This sort of strategy ends up protecting soldiers more, but exposing civilians more,” Wolpe says. “It will change the nature of warfare and raise a new kind of ethical calculus in the way in which warfare is conducted.”

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