editors

Tim Horvath received his MA in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, and will soon finish his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire. He taught high school English for nine years, and currently teaches Creative Nonfiction at UNH. Tim's story "The Understory" won the 2006 Raymond Carver Prize sponsored by Carve Magazine, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His interest in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology has led him to give talks at various conferences, including ones with Jason Ronstadt on the dreaming brain and literature. His novel-in-progress, currently entitled Goodbye in Many Languages, involves conservatory musicians, goth kids, chemists, potters, alienated actors, and rhesus monkeys. His stories have been published or are forthcoming in pacificREVIEW, Seventh Quark, The Journal of Caribbean Literatures, Cranky, and The Abiko Annual. He can be found at www.timhorvath.com.

When Alice coined the term “evolutionary tao” for this latest issue, my gut reaction was, Hmmm, catchy, but what does it really mean? I’m still not sure I know what it means, but as soon as I mouth the words, I feel them start to spar with one another, vying for something. What? A fundamental view of nature? Indeed, nature in an evolutionary perspective offers up a rather different template for joint-cutting than does Taoist nature. Randomness and natural selection are decidedly different forces from yin and yang, the dynamic tensions traced by Taoism. What they share is a perpetual flux, but the differences appear to be more salient than the common ground.
Still, maybe in spite of their foreignness to one another, maybe because of it, the juxtaposition of these words and ideas is worth pondering. Both terms are adept at mingling with other words, attaching themselves readily in the agora of ideas, altering whatever they come into contact with. Thus we get Evolutionary Politics, The Tao of Physics, Evolutionary Game Theory, The Tao of Sex, The Evolution of

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Considering that Tim's team of muses have been singularly occupied with his novel, Goodbye in Many Languages, there's no musing to spare this time around. In fact, the novel revolves around music, but that's another story. Here, however, is a brief passage that pertains to some of the themes of this 8th issue of Entelechy, in the point of view of Elena, a (somewhat-frustrated) chemist.

Let’s say you’re a writer, just suppose, that has heard a little something, or more than a little something, about evolutionary psychology. Maybe you tanked in high school science classes and found your niche on the school literary magazine, fled to a liberal arts school like a conscientious objector on draft day, and never took so much as Physics for Poets. Maybe you even lived with a bunch of science folks and, well, you kind of liked their approach, not necessarily to matters academic but to meal preparation, their way of perceiving the world around them, their wonderment at real, living things like bats and cormorants, the way they tricked you into eating raisins because they offhandedly told you they contained vasopressin, the memory hormone. Let’s say you picked yourself up from the toilet seat

Anyone but Lear, Schoner thinks. He hobbles across the pebbled path, toward the periphery of the woods, where he can still plant the walker almost flat. On he goes, “Let not…to true mind’s marriages…admit…impediments.” Even as he pitches himself forward on hard end-consonants, he senses the quote is off: the right author but the wrong words, the right words, the wrong play, maybe not even a play. Not only wrong but ironically wrong. Anyone but Lear, he has vowed for a long time, and he is none other.

As he pauses to survey the woods, he feels them staring back, judging, rejecting his desire for entrance. Like he is some illegal, trying to cross a border without the proper papers. The sun catches him as he curses the wood that he wants to be in. This is the most devastating part of age,

alice andrews | editor/publisher

An Evolutionary Mind

Alice is currently working on a book based on this essay, to be published as part of Imprint Academic's series:
"Societas: Essays in Political and Cultural Criticism."

Not that long ago, for about a year, I dated a cute, left-wing economist off-and-on (though mostly off). We found each other attractive and exotic and perhaps even fascinating, but we didn’t get along or get each other one bit. It was a frustrating and futile experiment in the chemistry and mathematics of pairing with someone so different in every way — even our horoscopes said we were disastrous for each other. (That a pretty smart girl like me would even mention the word horoscope in a piece for public consumption would probably make him cringe and clear his throat a few times.) But in the process of going toward something so foreign and at once attractive and repellant, I solidified my worldview that there really are two different kinds of minds.

Recently, the New York Times ran an article titled “The Political Brain.” The piece suggested that the liberal mind and the conservative mind are quite different and that this difference is related to the differences in the way their limbic systems (in particular, the amygdala) respond to particular stimuli — particularly suffering and violence. The author made clear to point out that it was difficult to parse if liberals were born with more sensitive/reactive amygdalae or if their experiences, etc., shaped the patterns of response; and that indeed it was probably a little of both, as these things often are.

Of course, in the game ‘the nature/nurture debate,’ where anyone over the age of 13 knows the answer is: “it’s both,” you are really being asked: To which side do you lean or, perhaps, which side do you defend? And in this game my answer is nature; though I consider myself an interactionist; and am informed by an epigenetic, adaptationist

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Playing with Myself: On Trine Erotic

A self-interview about Alice's novel.

Q. What are some of the major questions you try to deal with in Trine Erotic?

A. Well, there are quite a few: Is there free will? What is ‘the will’? What is and is there a single ‘I’? — a self? Are we determined by our genes? Can we (and how and what affect does it have to) go against our ‘nature’? What is the unconscious? Is it what evolutionary psychologists refer to as our universal human nature? Or is it something else? And how does it work? And is there a universal human nature? How does culture influence us? What is art? What is love? And is there something beyond our evolutionary, deep reflexes — some kind of ‘global brain,’ as Howard Bloom suggests, that is motivating us?

Q. You dedicate the book to every woman’s desire and the art within her and to alpha males everywhere. Does that mean it’s not for other males — say, beta?

Alice on Myspace

Meta-Commentary: A Response to Ben A. Barres' "Does Gender Matter"

sophie andrews 2006

Alice's response to Barres' commentary published in Nature 442, 133-136(13 July 2006), where he explains "what's wrong with the hypothesis that women are not advancing in science because of innate inability."

I agree with Barres. But I also agree with Pinker.

How can this be?

Many of us get uncomfortable with fuzzy unreconciliation because when we're in this place ourselves, it feels awful. We are also distrustful of such a position--we want to know where a person stands--are they in the in-group or out-group? If you are sitting on the fence, or worse, enjoying fruits on one side of the fence and going through the gate and enjoying them on the other side too, well then, you really can't be trusted. I think that's fair to say, actually, from a practical standpoint. But we are all often in these states at one time or another; and through a dialectical process we try to reconcile the opposing positions. I think Colin Talbot, who wrote The Paradoxical Primate (I reviewed it, see www.metapsychology.net ) might call this fuzzy state a paradoxical state. As we know, this culture’s good at ‘either-or’ but not so good at ‘both-and’ when dealing with dichotomies.

Sometimes we’re lucky enough to go through a Hegelian triadic dialectical process, where we pass through thesis to antithesis to synthesis. It's a very male and positivist thing to want to do--and I understand it, as well as I do wanting to stay in the land of abeyance, in the land of the murky, in the land of the unsure; that fairly feminine land of making no claims, wielding no power, trying to make nice with everyone, trying to have it all, wanting to cooperate. I'm very much of the belief that it's my nature that I'm like this, but I know that I can learn to go against this natural tendency. And I try sometimes. And will here.

As an open-minded and free-speech loving evolutionary feminist, I was initially unhappy with

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Pesticide-free New Paltz

Not Alice's musing, but Alice's "brainchild."

Lawn care
Environmental Commission seeks pesticide ban in village
by Erin Quinn

Members of the village's Environmental Conservation Commission (EnCC) are calling for a lawn-care pesticide ban in the Village of New Paltz as well as the "immediate reduction of -- and eventual phase-out of -- consumer and agricultural pesticide-use in Ulster County." In its request, the commission added that it understands that this call for a prohibition of lawn-care pesticides in the Village of New Paltz represents a first step towards this goal.

Citing many adverse impacts to health, the commission is currently sending out a petition that within only a few days has more than 100 signatures. To read the entire petition, which notes that "pesticides are poisons....many of them are known carcinogens, neurotoxins and hormone disruptors," log onto www.ipetitions.com/petition/pesticide-freeNP.

The move to eliminate pesticide use is the brainchild of Alice Andrews, a village resident, faculty member at SUNY-New Paltz and volunteer on the village's EnCC. Andrews said she was pondering the vast number of

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Meta Review: Reactions to a Review of The Blank Slate

A dialogue, of sorts, between Jeff Miller and Alice Andrews, on the merits of EP.