In the top 1,500!

I am, that is. Among Amazon book reviewers. So, if you want to see what I like and dislike, beyond a few reviews I’ve recently posted on the blog, click the link!

Will the real Friedrich Schiller please exhume himself?

For almost a century, since a second skull was exhumed from a mass grave where German poet Freidrich Schiller was buried, German scientists and historians have debated which skull is genuine.

Now we have the DNA answer: Neither one.

Why I won't be renewing my DSO season tickets

First, even among “warhorse” composers, the DSO had neglected a number of them for years if not decades.

When is the last time it played a Chopin piano concerto? A Schubert symphony besides the Unfinished? Much by von Weber or Franck? A Verdi overture or two?

Amongst modern Americans, but of the no-longer-living, there’s PLENTY of folks besides Barber. That includes Roger Sessions, William Schumann, Walter Piston and Alan Hovhaness off the top of my head.

As for 20th-century composers, besides my beloved Alfred Schnittke, the DSO is out of the loop on Nikolai Myaskovsky, Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, and at least a snippet of Stockhausen, among others.

As for stuff to retire for at least five years?

Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations. If you must hear some variations on the Paganini Caprice, try Szymanowski’s.

Pictures at an Exhibition. If you most play it, use somebody’s orchestration besides Ravel’s. Try Stokowski’s for the lush Romantic sound. Or Sarasate for a more modern version than Ravel.

Brahms First Symphony. If you need Brahms, when was the last time his Second, not first, Piano Concerto was done here.

And, ticket prices continue to go up faster than at least the nominal rate of inflation. The Pick Four deal from this year didn’t get offered for 2008-09 or I might have sprung. Unfortunately, the Fort Worth Symphony doesn’t offer a smaller package than the full-season 10-concert deal.

They could stand to add two performances, as their rep continues to grow, and make it a 12-concert season with two split packages.

Oh, beyond that, though, and back to Dallas.

Audience behavior, such as coughing (by people who apparently think the cough drops in the lobby aren’t for them), shuffling of feet, etc., is getting worse, I think. How about adding this to the “turn off your cell phone” announcements?

Here’s my theory on the ‘enigma’ of Elgar’s Enigma Variations.

Having just gotten home from my final concert of this year’s Dallas Symphony Orchestra season, where Enigma was on the program, I offer these thoughts.

It’s a homage to, or reflection upon, rather than calling it a variation on, the Dies Irae opening.

Of course, in addition to some differences in note intervals, it’s in a major key.

That’s why each individual variation is named after a friend of Elgar’s. Rather than a reflection on their deaths, or last judgments, though, it’s a reflection on their lives, with the “positive” angle of the major key.

Haiku homage to Hume

Fleeting sensations
Momentary thought patterns
Consciousness wisps.

Like smoke, nothing is
Apprehendable; like fog,
Insubstanteous.

The wisps come and go
With no quantum gap between;
I can’t find myself.

Psychologist Hume
Metaphysician Descartes
A Scottish triumph.

With no I to think
Or outreason the Frenchman
What ‘Hume’ really won?

Ayala to IDers – ‘God is the greatest abortionist’

Francisco Ayala, one of the world’s greatest evolutionary biologists, AND one of the most renowned biological scientists openly defending the compatibility of evolution and religious belief, has been a busy man with the controversy over “Expelled.”

And, he’s not afraid to be as blunt with IDers as Richard Dawkins:

In fact, he said, evolution “is more consistent with belief in a personal god than intelligent design. If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for.”

Consider, he said, that at least 20 percent of pregnancies are known to end in spontaneous abortion. If that results from divinely inspired anatomy, Dr. Ayala said, “God is the greatest abortionist of them all.”

Or consider, he said, the “sadism” in parasites that live by devouring their hosts, or the mating habits of insects like female midges, tiny flies that fertilize their eggs by consuming their mates’ genitals, along with all their other parts.

For the midges, Dr. Ayala said, “it makes evolutionary sense. If you are a male and you have mated, the best thing you can do for your genes is to be eaten.” But if God or some other intelligent agent made things this way on purpose, he said, “then he is a sadist, he certainly does odd things and he is a lousy engineer.”

That is also the message of his latest book, “Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion.”

Ayala also offers his take on the “teach the controversy,” or similar statements, espoused by many evolution doubters from President Bush on down, as well as evolution denialists:

He dismisses the argument that it is only fair to teach both sides of the evolution/creationism controversy. “We don’t teach alchemy along with chemistry,” he said. “We don’t teach witchcraft along with medicine. We don’t teach astrology with astronomy.”

Ayala’s work on behalf of evolutionary biology is greatly appreciated.

But, his comments also underscore part of why I became an atheist.

If you accept the idea that God, in the Western monotheistic version, cannot be “all,” how much of a “less than all” do you accept and still find worthy of the label “God,” as far as powers or skills of design?

Or, second question – how much below “less than all” do you get until you recognize that your “God” is nothing but a “god of the gaps” and that these gaps have been being closed by both science and philosophy for 300 years or more?

Or transferring this issue beyond what philosophers call “natural evil” to “moral evil,” how much “inhumanity” (the older Mark Twain would say it’s quite human) do you accept as the production, whether active or passive, of a “morally less than all” divinity before junking the idea entirely?

And, that said, at the end of the NYT story, Ayala himself refuses to discuss whether he is still a religious believer or not.

Language can shape our perception of the world

This has been a back-and-forth in both philosophy and psychology ever since Benjamin Whorf mythically claimed the Eskimos had 100 different words for snow. (He didn’t, actually.) For a long time, in relatively recent years, well, ever since the discovery of DNA and the crumbling of Skinnerian behavioralism, Whorf’s ideas were cast by the wayside.

But now, a Cornell researcher has partially resurrected them.

At least with color discrimination, Gary Lupyan says a specific language background does make a difference:

Language helps us learn novel categories, and it licenses our unusual ability to operate on an abstract plane, Lupyan said. The problem is that after a category has been learned, it can distort the memory of specific objects, getting between us and the rest of the nonabstract world.

This fits well with the general idea of “man the category-making creature.”

But, not everybody is ready to buy into even a limited version of Whorfian linguistics redivivus.

On the contrary side? Evolutionary Psychologist (yes, with the double capital letters, see my tages) Steve Pinker. (That, of course, means there’s a good chance the theorizing is right and he’s wrong.)

This separation of language and thought is emphasized in a recent book by Steven Pinker, at Harvard University, a skeptic of “neo-whorfianism.” In “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature,” Pinker explores the complicated ways that language and thought relate to each other. He cautions against confusing the “many ways in which language connects to thought.” “Language surely affects thought,” he writes, but he argues that there is little evidence for the claims that language can force people to have particular thoughts or make it impossible for them to think in certain ways. With numbers, the importance of language evidence is much clearer. It appears that the ability to count is necessary to deal with large, specific numbers. And the only way to count past a certain point is with language.

He’s overstating the case. Lupyan didn’t say anything about forcing. Rather, as with human genes, we might say that in certain categories of reasoning, one language may create a predisposition (and perhaps no more than a mild one) toward reasoning in one way rather than another.