The Y Chromosome, Fixing Newton's First Law, Demolishing Criminal Architecture - Dinner Table Digest № 62
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It seems that I have had a flurry of productivity, sending out several posts in short succession. The truth is much more banal, in that all my drafts seemed to reach their natural conclusions at about the same time.
This Digest starts with a piece on how the recent revelations about the Y chromosome, apparently one of the last and most difficult parts of the human genome to sequence, can help us do away with stigma around supposed genetic predispositions to violence. I follow it up with an example of a philosopher of language’s pedanticism paid off with respect to our understanding of Isaac Newton. The Digest finishes with a piece about how a half-hearted attempt at creating social housing in post-war Naples backfired, instead becoming a symbol of the stranglehold of organized crime. The Vele di Scampia, as it was known, was the setting for Roberto Saviano’s book on the rise of the Neapolitan Camorra, Gomorrah, later made into a film and a TV series of the same name.
Sections: The Y Chromosome / The Word ‘Unless’ in Newton’s Principia / The Legacy of Vele di Scampia
The Complete Human Y Chromosome Marks an Opportunity to Move Away from Stigma - Christopher Donohue, Anna Rogers - Scientific American
The Y Chromosome has long puzzled scientists, even as it has assumed a larger-than-life explanatory role in social problems, leading some, for example, to ascribe it an outsized causal role in a supposed genetic predisposition to criminality.
"Proponents of eugenics obsessed over “subnormal” individuals, an ableist characterization of intellectual and developmental disability. From the 1930s through the 1990s, poorly founded studies reported that the Y chromosome was tied to intellectual disabilities. This swiftly led to the belief that individuals with two Y chromosomes were “subnormal,” and over the years other social traits were unscientifically ascribed to these individuals. Double Y syndrome, also known as Jacobs syndrome, was first observed in 1961 and affects about 1 in 1,000 male individuals (this may be underreported because many people are unaware that they have additional sex chromosomes). XYY individuals were quickly dubbed “supermale,” however, and simplistic views of sex, gender and masculinity helped form a spurious and stigmatizing image of people with double Y syndrome. In the same era, many researchers searched for biological explanations for complex societal “dilemmas,” such as the origins of violence and aggression. Some scientists supposed that aggression is natural, perhaps even “evolutionarily desirable,” and therefore must have a genetic origin. When coupled with sexist beliefs that men are inherently aggressive, this led to routes of inquiry that tied aggression and violence to the Y chromosome.
Beginning with a handful of unscientific studies, most notably one described in a 1965 issue of Nature, researchers falsely connected double Y syndrome to violence and criminality. These conceptions were not only applied to people with additional Y chromosomes. Y chromosomes naturally vary in size among different individuals, and some researchers attempted to develop metrics based on the misguided assumption that a significantly physically larger Y chromosome was correlated to criminality and “antisocial behavior.” These studies lacked scientific rigor, relying on highly selective samples, such as those from maximum security correctional hospitals. They also ignored how “delinquency,” as it was then called, largely grew from social and environmental conditions rather than genetics."
Virginia Tech philosopher rights wrong done to Isaac Newton - Randy Walker - Cardinal News
It can be easy to assume that philosophers of language spend their time obsessing over trivial and insignificant words, words that end of not meaning much of anything. But every once in a while all that obsessing ends up casting light on a translation quirk that impacts how we understand the physics great Isaac Newton.
"Daniel Hoek, assistant professor of philosophy at Virginia Tech, holds a copy of Newton’s “Principia.” This translation by Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman has the correct wording of Newton’s law of inertia. Photo courtesy of Daniel Hoek. The law is written in Latin like the rest of Newton’s 1687 opus “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.” Most modern translations go something like this: A body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion remains in motion, at constant speed and in a straight line, unless acted on by an external force.
It’s that word “unless” that bothered Hoek, who, as a philosopher, is attuned to fine shades of meaning. In fact, something about the first law has bothered Hoek since he was a high school student who took physics — as well as Latin — in his hometown of Utrecht in the Netherlands. He pondered the moon. It doesn’t go in a straight line because the earth’s gravity is pulling on it. “And then, at some point, you think, ‘Well, then, what does this law do? When does an object move in a straight line?’ It turns out that actually … never, at least never in the actual world. I think I actually talked to my teacher about that at the time and he said, ‘Well, the law says that if there were a body that wasn’t subject to forces, then it would go in a straight line. “But I always thought that’s still strange, to make your first law of one of the most famous principles of physics about these imaginary bodies.” In other words, why bother to make a law — and make it the first law — about bodies that don’t exist? ...
The difference between Cohen/Whitman’s “except insofar” and Motte’s “unless” isn’t trivial, says Hoek, who specializes in the philosophy of language. The new wording, unlike the old, does not suggest that bodies untouched by external forces exist. A good paraphrase, according to Hoek, would be: “Every change in a body’s state of motion is due to forces impressed from the outside.” Hoek gave a real-world example of the first law. A hockey puck sliding on ice moves uniformly in a straight line, except insofar as resistance from the ice and air slows it down. So the first law really applies to real-world objects. It is not just about imaginary situations."
Naples is demolishing Le Vele, symbol of its Camorra past. But I’m not celebrating - Roberto Saviano - The Guardian
An extension of my current hyper fixation on Italian organized crime, I started reading a little bit about the Neapolitan Camorra, which operates in the Italian province of Campagna. This led me to Roberto Saviano, who's book Gomorrah was made into a very successful Italian TV show in the mid-2000's. I'm two episodes in, and I can say this much: it's going to give The Wire a run for its money as my favorite show about inner-city organized crime.
The book and show are set in the northern Naples suburb of Scampia, in a social housing complex known as Le Vele Di Scampia, so named because they are supposed to look like sails. First proposed in the 1960s, Le Vele was intended to be a full service social housing complex, containing not only housing but also recreation, education, and commercial opportunities.
Unfortunately, while the housing component was built, many of the attendant amenities were never built. Over the years, Le Vele became an ostentatious example of the failure of government social policy in Italy, along with the ability of organized crime clans to capitalize on the social needs of the population, aided in part by the architecture of the building complex. In 2020 Saviano wrote an op-ed for The Guardian in which he talks about how the Italian government has learned the wrong lessons from the Le Vele experiment. With all but one of the complexes now demolished, Naples wants to put the Camorra experience behind it. But unless the Italian government pays attention to the social needs of its most marginalized communities, the tragedy of Le Vele will simply happen again in another neighborhood.
"Within 40 days the Vele are to be pulled down, but no new path has been laid. Voluntary associations that have sprung up in the area over the years do a wonderful job; volunteers came to the rescue on many occasions, but the real change, that the arrival of companies bringing work for the people here would generate, never materialised. So knocking down the Vele is a symbolic gesture that recalls the failure of a project, or rather of several projects: the initial one being to build a new neighbourhood on a human scale, and to return these structures to the community by making them become university spaces, state buildings.
We forget what Gomorrah really is: Gomorrah is not a mere synonym with Camorra, Gomorrah is an economic system wherein everything is missing, where there are no investments, no opportunities, no education, no jobs, no resources, no businesses.
When infrastructure struggles against a constant lack of funds and resources – that is Gomorrah. To be Gomorrah is not just about toting weapons, threats and extortion, drug-dealing, killing, dumping garbage and money laundering. And to not be Gomorrah isn’t simply being outraged and angry. To not be Gomorrah means working to find a cure, to never stop looking for the antidote to this poison. The antidote to Gomorrah means forging a new path, which is not a vacuum, not devastation, not neglect, not rubble."
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