“How Flowers Changed the World” is an essay by the anthropologist and nature writer Loren Eiseley that appeared in his 1957 classic, The Immense Journey. I hereby steal Eiseley’s essay title by way of honoring him.

How did flowers change the world? “Once upon a time,” Eiseley writes, “there were no flowers at all.” No roses or dandelions or dogbane or dogwood. A complete list runs to more than 250,000 named species of angiosperms (flowering plants). With flowers the world got its blossoms, its bouquets, its perennial borders, its apple orchards, its peach fuzz, its wheat, its broccoli, its Georgia O’Keeffe flower paintings.

Flowers are sexual organs. Maybe that’s why we find them romantic. O’Keeffe denied that her flower paintings were in any way sexual, which is not too strange considering that she had to constantly deal with the stereotyping of her work due to the fact that she the artist was a woman. (O’Keeffe said, “The men liked to put me down as the best woman painter. I think I’m one of the best painters.”) Still, we must admit that flowers are sexual organs, beautiful sexual organs, and that O’Keeffe’s flowers magnify the details of beautiful sexual organs.

Here’s your flower lexicon for review. Petals. Sepals (the small leaves growing in a circle under the flower, which together make the calyx). Stamen—the male parts. They stick up within the flower, their tiny stems (filaments) each holding one rice-shaped anther, which keeps the pollen. The center part of the flower—that narrow-lipped vase that swells at the bottom—is the female part, the carpel. The top part of the carpel, the stigma, receives pollen. The stigma rests on the style, a hollow tube that leads to the ovary (the bottom of the vase).

Flowers evolved their colors to seduce the pollinators that evolved with them. Hummingbirds go for red flowers; honeybees for yellow or bright purple. A flower’s shape fits the body part used by its principal pollinator to scoop or suck nectar. The ruby-throated hummingbird has a long beak and prefers to dine from the deeply cupped red flower of the trumpet vine. The bird gets food and the flower gets fertilized as the bird spreads pollen from anther to style. Flower scents, too, work to attract. The carrion flower stinks of rotting flesh. The carrion fly, dizzy with the perfume of rotting flesh, lays its eggs in the wrong place (the flower) and pollinates it.

Flowering plants evolved out of non-flowering plants 150 million years ago. This was a very long time after the first land plants evolved 475 million years ago. Land plants evolved from green algae. All land plants have one and only one ancestor (they are monophyletic). First came nonvascular plants, like mosses, which can’t stand up and can’t move water around within their systems. Then came seedless vascular plants, like ferns, which can stand up, can conduct water, but have no seeds. They reproduce via spores, a single cell that can grow into an adult. The adult plant that develops from a spore looks nothing like a fern. It’s a “bisexual gametophyte” that produces a sperm and an egg, which somehow find each other (the sperm is mobile, the egg stays attached to the gametophyte). The fertilized zygote grows into a “diploid sporophyte”—our familiar fern.

Then came the angiosperms with their seeds. A seed is an embryo created via the mating of a male and female gamete, surrounded by food and protected by pod or shell or husk or skin. When pollen meets style, proteins interact, and a pollen tube begins growing down the style toward the egg. The pollen tube reaches the base of the carpel and two sperm exit. They pass through the wall of the ovule and enter the embryo sac. One sperm fertilizes the egg; the other fuses with cells to form the endosperm—the food part of the seed.

Today, looking out my window, I see flowers everywhere. Apple blossoms, cherry blossoms, the white-petaled star magnolia, pale-pink-flowered kinnikkinnick, and forsythia, camellia, huckleberry. Every day now more angiosperms come into bloom. Every day their flowers change the world.

One of the most important moments in my teaching career came about 25 years ago when I contemplated leaving it. I had just finished writing my first academic book, which applied family systems theory to 19th-century literature. My thesis was that ideas associated with family therapy could be brought to bear on domestic novels—revealing how the heroines reflected behavior patterns of daughters in 19th-century middle-class English families and how the novels themselves mirrored and reinforced cultural tendencies.

The book got me thinking about families to the point where I considered trading academia for family therapy. My interest in family systems and in literary heroines spoke to a need I felt to understand my interactions with my family and to help others understand theirs.

I applied to a University of Pennsylvania externship that allowed me to sit in on family therapy sessions and consider whether I wanted to pursue the field. I went to a clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, walking distance from my office at Drexel University. I was placed with a group of about eight students, all of them trained clinical social workers or psychologists. We spent one or two afternoons a week sitting behind a one-way mirror watching one of the students engage in therapy with a family.

The sessions gave me a glimpse of how poverty exacerbates family problems. And the technique they employed made an equally lasting impression. Whenever those of us watching behind the one-way mirror had a suggestion, we could call into the room and speak to the therapist. If the therapist was stumped about what to do next, they could call in to us for advice. I remember thinking how helpful this approach might be for a beginning teacher, if only it were feasible.

For a variety of reasons, I chose not to train as a family therapist, but I began to apply to my own family and to my classes some of the lessons I’d learned. Perhaps the most important of these was not to overly personalize my interactions with students. I had been the sort of teacher who got nervous and hurt when a student looked at her watch. A small indication of boredom or disinterest would break my rhythm and throw me off my line of thought. I came to see that much of what my students did—and my children, too, for that matter—had little to do with me. A student looking at her watch might be bored, but she also might have a doctor’s appointment in a half hour or a date with her boyfriend after class. Even if she were bored, would that be so bad? Her boredom might have to do with me, but then, it might not.

A few years after my externship, I started individual therapy. My mother was sick with an eventually fatal neurological illness that would last eight years, and it brought to my attention problems I could not deal with. Here, the experience was not positive. Where family therapy had affirmed and enlightened me, individual therapy individual therapy felt oppressive. Possibly, this was because in the former case I focused not on myself but on lifting ideas and techniques for my own use. But now, with my own life under scrutiny, I felt put on the spot and anxious.

I stopped going. Years later, I entered therapy again with a much better outcome. Some of the same problems that had precipitated my anxiety 25 years ago were still present, but this time, the therapist bridged awkward silences and gave advice that soothed me. Again, the therapy helped me as a mother, wife, and daughter, but just as much as a teacher. It used to be that I felt either loved or disdained by students—but talking it over, I discovered that neither was realistic. Yes, there would be students on occasion who would like me a lot and students who wouldn’t. But the turbulent ups and downs in my mood as a teacher leveled off. I still have that exhilaratingly good class, and I still have classes that don’t click—but a more general sense of well-being tempers the quasi-hysteria that used to accompany those feelings.

“We all believe in some goofy shit.” So said Trey Parker and Matt Stone a couple of years ago during their promotional appearances for The Book of Mormon. In other words, if the Latter-day Saints believe in the Angel Moroni, the golden plates, and Utah as the Promised Land—well, shucks, don’t we all accept things that are equally absurd? No, I thought, we don’t. That’s just the kind of brainless, PC split-the-differencism that forbids us from applying our intelligence to people’s belief systems, reducing the whole topic of religion to a bland, tepid, homogenized mush.

But lately I’ve been wondering if maybe they weren’t right. The physicist Lawrence Krauss, who has a sideline in antireligious skepticism, was on Bill Maher earlier this year. Tina Brown was also on, and Maher and Krauss spent several minutes ridiculing her for a cover story she had run in Newsweek. An excerpt of Eben Alexander’s best-selling Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, it was called “Is Heaven Real?” Never mind Alexander’s Gospel-according-to-my-coma, which is bad enough. What really stunned me was a remark that Krauss let drop in arguing his unbelief. “Lots of people have spiritual experiences,” he said. “I have one when I look at the Hubble Space Telescope images and see galaxies that are 10 billion light-years away with civilizations that are long gone.”

Hold on there just a minute, slugger. Civilizations that are long gone? Is there any proof of that? Krauss would no doubt claim that the probability is overwhelming that we aren’t the only civilization in the history of the universe. But we don’t have any way of knowing, and besides, that isn’t what he said. “Civilizations that are long gone” appears to be his own little piece of unexamined belief: comforting, irrational, a reprieve from the idea of a cold, indifferent universe, devoid of intelligence or feeling.

I’m also reminded of Thomas Nagel’s new book, Mind and Cosmos. Nagel—an esteemed philosopher and, yes, an atheist—argues, from what I understand, that scientific materialism cannot account for the existence of consciousness. Instead he posits a teleological explanation: the universe possesses an innate tendency to move in that direction. The cosmos wants, as it were, to become aware of itself, which it does through creatures like us. As for the idea that consciousness emerged through natural selection, Nagel simply says that it flies in the face of common sense. Well, science is built on the corpse of notions of what counts as common sense. Meanwhile, Nagel makes no attempt to explain how his teleological principle arose or might operate. It sounds a lot to me like God.

Krauss and Nagel’s views are hardly in the same league as the planet Kolob or the Book of Abraham, but they confirm our inability to rid ourselves of mystical beliefs. We just can’t seem to accept the fact that this is all there is. That’s what really needs to be explained.

The same woman has cut my hair for the last 21 years, since I arrived in Oregon and found her tiny shop and her brisk and friendly self, and we get to talking yesterday, as she edits my head in her usual brisk and friendly fashion, and she tells me about her craft. Well, men tip more than women, although women spend much more money than men, she says. In general a man wants you to cut his hair as quickly and efficiently as possible, ideally without overmuch chat, for which service he will tip generously, whereas women want me to spend a lot of time with them, and talk about everything, or more accurately listen to them talk about everything, for which privilege they generally will not tip generously, but they will buy all sorts of products, which the men never do. The women generally want me to be their friend, whereas the men want me to cut their hair. The more hair a man has the less time he wants you to spend on it, generally. Yes, we occasionally sell the hair we cut. If it’s longer than eight inches, and it is its original color, and it’s male hair, it’s eligible for wigs—men’s hair is thicker, and they don’t color it as much as women do. Occasionally we have had people come in and buy cut hair to put in their gardens to fend off deer and moles. No, I don’t know if that works or not. Yes, I cut my children’s hair and my husband’s and mine, too. That’s how I started as a cutter of hair. I was a teenager and my parents wanted us to have long hair and there came a day I didn’t want to so I cut it myself. Yes, that caused a ruckus. But it turned out I was good at it and rather liked it.

When I came to this country I went to beauty school and then went into business. First I rented a chair in a shop and eventually I bought the shop. In the time I owned the shop I employed probably a hundred cutters of hair from probably 20 countries. Do I ever get tired of cutting hair? Not really. I get tired, after a very busy day, but it’s a friendly job, and very rarely do you encounter someone really rude. People fall asleep while I am cutting their hair, yes. Almost always men. There’s something peaceful about the experience, I think. It’s quiet, and the shop is warm, and there’s something soothing about sitting still and being covered with a cloth and not having to actually do anything or think or even speak. Also I think something about getting a haircut reminds people of when they were children.  Unless I slice your ear or something, it’s a peaceful gentle few minutes, or should be. Plus then when you arise you are slightly different, and people like that. Men will often say they feel taller, which I think they like, feeling taller. There are some men who come in slightly too often for haircuts and I wonder if they come because they want to feel taller that day.

You are at the edge of a steep cliff. Look down, if you can stand it, at the thumbnail ripples of the sea far below you. Now imagine yourself at the bottom of that cliff, lolling lazily in a boat, staring up at where you once stood.

Does the cliff seem taller from the top looking down, or from the bottom looking up? It is, of course, the same height no matter your reference point, but according to Russell Jackson at the University of Idaho and Lawrence Cormack at the University of Texas, Austin, it doesn’t appear that way.

The two have made a compelling case for what they call “evolved navigation theory” or E.N.T. All else being equal, the theory has it, we prefer short paths to longer ones. This preference comes into play as we navigate our terrain. If our goal is to reach the other side of a mountain or forest, a route that takes us there faster—thereby exposing us as little as possible to predators or to the elements—is a no-brainer. Natural selection has since capitalized on this preference: instead of perceiving distances accurately, we’ve actually evolved to perceive unsafe routes to be longer—less tempting—than safer ones.

How might this theory play out? In our scenario, the cliff is deemed taller from above than below—empirical studies suggest by as much as 30 percent—because descending is more dangerous than ascending. When we climb up a surface, we are generally in control. But all bets are off for the gravity-propelled trip down.

Now put yourself back on the edge of the steep cliff. This time, however, you are facing inward, focusing your eyes on a white line about a dozen feet in front of you. Walk to the white line and about face. From which perspective—the edge looking in or inward looking out—does the distance between line and abyss appear longer?

This one is trickier. My intuition screams that, if natural selection had an ounce of common sense, we’d have evolved to underestimate the distance between ourselves and the edge of a cliff we are actively peering over: better safe than sorry! But E.N.T. predicts (accurately, according to new research) the opposite. Compared to the reverse path to safety, the route toward the cliff’s edge appears longer. After all, according to the theory, were the reverse to be true the cliff’s edge would beckon to us like a siren.

I’m not sure what to make of E.N.T., despite its elegance and ability to explain (and even predict) visual phenomena. Why the skepticism? We can never know for certain whether natural selection is indeed what shaped us to unconsciously overestimate unsafe routes. There is always an alternative explanation. What if the threats we perceive in unsafe routes simply fluster us to the point of measuring them inaccurately?

But I’ll be the first to admit that my skepticism might be misplaced. In an email, researcher Russell Jackson identified a fatal flaw with this particular alternative explanation: mere inaccuracy should produce both overestimates and underestimates. “However,” he writes, “we find systematic overestimates and not underestimates.” And even had he not found fault, he makes another fair point: “Skepticism of any explanation because the explanation utilizes evolution by natural selection is ignorant and short-sighted.” That is, just because evolutionary explanations have a reputation for being ad-hoc Just So stories, they should nonetheless be evaluated on their own terms. After all, writes Jackson, “natural selection provides more accurate insights about the biological world than any other idea in the history of humanity.”

Winslow Long (1922-2013)

My father, who died at 12:20 a.m. on the morning of April 27, 2013, cared about animals, particularly dogs, and he cared about plants. He spent several decades as a dairyman on a commercial farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He loved poetry, especially Robert Frost and unbowdlerized Emily Dickinson, and committed many poems to memory. On his 90th birthday last year he declaimed Frost’s “Birches,” not a short poem, to the assembled celebrants.

After moving to Seattle five years ago with his German shepherd, Toby, my father became a familiar figure in the vicinity of Green Lake, which he walked around almost daily. He loved math and studied it right up until the week of his death. He read novels and he read science and became this column’s most devoted reader. His own writing consisted largely of lists of plants, but he did write the following piece, which I hereby present in his memory as this week’s essay. 

To Identify a Tree

A friend—with a Ph.D. in economics or maybe sociology—once asked me to identify a tree. “Just tell me the common name—don’t bother with the scientific name.”

All right. Black Locust, Pea Flower Locust, Yellow Locust, White Locust, Green Locust, Whya Tree, False Acacia, Silver Chain, Common Locust, Shipmast Locust, Red Locust, Post Locust, Honey Locust, Bastard Acacia—take your pick.

If she accepted the botanical name there would be just one. Robinia pseudoacacia. Not only is there only one name for the species, but no other plant species can share that name.

There is some botanical grammar, however, which is not too difficult. The scientific name is a binomial—that is it is made up of two words. The first is the genus to which it belongs—always capitalized. The second is the specific epithet (not the species; the species is the two names together). It is always correct to use lower case letters for this—it may be capitalized if it is named for a person or another plant.

Since the binomial is in Latin (or Latinized), a foreign word, it must be in italics or bold print when printed. If it is handwritten it must be underlined. After the binomial, there is often a name or letter. This is the author—the person who discovered and named the plant. It is part of the name but not always used. If the author is well known, such as Linnaeus, only the initial L is used. If the botanist is not well known his whole name is used.

Many people don’t like botanical names because they are unfamiliar. However some have gotten into the common vocabulary and they do not bother us, such as Aster, Rosa, or chrysanthemum. —Winslow Long, December 28, 2010

Psychiatrist Irvin Yalom won the 2000 Oscar Pfister Prize, awarded by the American Psychiatric Association for important contributions to religion and psychiatry. Although Yalom is an atheist, he explores the emotional and intellectual nourishment that belief in God gives people and tries to find other ways it might be obtained. He calls his psychiatric practice “existential”—which is to say that it involves an examination of the meaning of life for the patient in therapy.

What about existential teaching? This would connect the subjects being taught to larger questions, prompting students to think about their role in the world, consider why they are studying what they are studying, and inevitably lead them to the ultimate questions of life and death.

This sort of teaching might be a challenge in certain subjects—calculus, for example. Certainly, in the realm of physics and biology, big ideas are always lurking. The turn toward Creationism in schools in some parts of the country reflects the need to think of larger issues alongside the study of particulars. But to slap God on as an addendum or twist the facts of science to suit a fundamentalist reading of scripture undermines deeper thinking about existential questions.

Literature, my subject, also lends itself to larger questions. Why would someone choose to write a story, even a bad one? What is the creative impulse that fuels a poem? What do the best stories and poems tell us about the meaning of life? Students are hungry for this kind of conversation—not necessarily for answers but for the chance to ask the right questions. They want to connect with writers or with fictional characters struggling with the same issues. They want a connection in uncertainty to others readers. This allays their existential isolation, while also asserting its validity. If nothing more, it helps them feel less isolated in their own existential uncertainty.

I have a confession to make. I used to feel a bit of sympathy for Goldman Sachs—a flicker of indulgence, a little soft spot, a gentle tug of identification, even. I know, it’s ridiculous. I’m supposed to be a lefty, and Goldman is the worst of the worst. It’s just because I have a friend who worked there once. For a year or two, whenever I heard the name “Goldman,” I automatically thought of her. Over and over the connection was forged, creating an association that lingered for years: after she left, after the crash, even after CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s infamous remark about “doing God’s work.”

Susan worked at Goldman, went the thought, so it can’t be as bad as the others. Or not the thought—the feeling, the reflex. The thought was, you’re being an idiot. And the most ironic part is that she loathed the place—couldn’t stand the macho competitive bullshit, got out as soon as she had the opportunity. We were once discussing the report that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are psychopaths (a finding, I should say, that’s been debunked). That may be true, she said, but 90 percent of those 10 percent are at Goldman.

So why do I disclose this shameful secret? Because it furnishes some insight into the workings of the oligarchy. If I’m susceptible to the influence of a personal connection within the business community, then what must it be like for politicians, who are virtually marinating in them? You can be as analytic as you want (as our president famously is), but relationships inevitably play a role in shaping your sympathies, and thus your policies. The bankers got a bailout, but homeowners didn’t. Washington is focused on the debt, which merely threatens the bondholders, but not on unemployment, which is doing active harm to workers.

One expects no different from the GOP, which makes a point of branding itself as the party of business. Dick Cheney is close personal friends with the former head of ExxonMobil. Mitt Romney was unable to imagine that there are college graduates who can’t just borrow money from their parents to start a business. That much is no surprise. But the meritocracy is such that Democratic leaders tend to travel in environments that are almost as circumscribed. Of the last 10 major-party presidential nominees (going back to the first Bush), nine went to elite colleges; of the previous 14 (going back to Harry Truman), only five did. The ranks of appointed officials are undoubtedly, if possible, even more homogenized. We talk about the dangers of groupthink in Washington, the fact that our policymakers dwell within a tightly bounded, self-reinforcing intellectual universe. But what about their emotional universe? What about, as we might call it, groupfeel, which leads to the assumptions that the people you know are basically decent and that what’s good for them is good for everybody? New ideas aren’t enough. We also need new sentiments.

One of the first dignitaries I met when I came to work for the university where I still work 20 years later was a man who had been not only governor of a state but a senator from that state; but what he wanted to talk to our students about was not politics (he was a liberal Republican), or religion (he was a Baptist), or himself (interesting and many-faceted as he was), but war and peace. On these matters he knew what he was talking about: he had been in the Navy during the Second World War, and had landed at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and was one of the first Americans to walk through what had been the city of Hiroshima, and “wasn’t, anymore,” as he said to a standing-room-only politics class. “It wasn’t where it used to be. I have seen terrible things with my own eyes. I have seen utter destruction. I have seen what war does to men—to boys. We were just boys. And then to see an entire city vanished like that—not a soul, not a building, not a bird, nothing. There’s no reason that should ever happen again. I never voted for war the rest of my life. I voted against the war in Vietnam. I voted against nuclear weapons. I voted against a bigger military. A bigger military doesn’t make the nation more secure. Smart, healthy, educated, creative, motivated citizens make a nation secure. I was in the military. I saw what armies and bombs do. Once you’ve seen death and horror like that, you stop thinking that war is necessary. It isn’t. It’s stupid. We’re smarter than that. I’m an old man now and my voice is getting faint, but you young people ought to shout against wars. Don’t let yourself be fooled by people who insist on war. Those people were never in wars, and they don’t know what they are talking about. Wars are the worst conceivable ways to solve problems. Use your brains and your hearts to find other ways. Insist on peace as a right every bit as valuable and necessary to our country as voting and free speech.”

Right about then his aide made a gesture, and Senator Mark Hatfield laughed and said as usual he was slightly late and had to go to his next appointment, but he hoped with all his heart that we would remember what he said, which I did.

To be fair, I often don’t mind them. When the local boutique gym’s WOD includes HIIT and the instructions “AMRAP,” I saunter by that temple of sweat and steam in blithe ignorance. You, fancy gym, are an intricate world I need never understand. But then my bank or my utility company or my insurance agent contacts me with an acronym-studded entreaty and—now forced to decode a series of unfamiliar letter strings, lest something dire happen to my loan or electric bill—my serenity vanishes.

Acronyms have their place. “Both in bureaucracy and in technology, there are lots of precisely-defined entities and concepts for which there are no single English words,” writes Language Log’s Mark Liberman, who contends that acronyms are the most practical way of referencing such entities, so long as care is taken to properly introduce unfamiliar ones.

But I find it curious just how often such care is not taken. (Or if the communicative effort is long and arduous, retaken; I have read books in which an acronym will appear 90 pages after it was introduced.) I wonder: might our tendency to treat familiar acronyms like regular words be to blame?

When a community—be it the local gym, the American Accounting Association, or the United States of America—replaces an unwieldy phrase with an acronym, it does so for the ease of its membership. Who wants to waste time advertising a “workout of the day” featuring a “high-intensity internal training session” with “as many reps as possible” when WODs and HIITs and AMRAPs will suffice? But does this process succeed so completely that, for people in the know, the acronym gradually transitions from being a stand-in for an entity to being a legitimate word for that entity—often the word for that entity?

Both behavioral and neurological studies confirm that we at least superficially treat familiar acronyms—but not unfamiliar ones—much the same as other words. In the most thorough of these investigations, psychologist Morton Ann Gernsbacher finds that both an acronym’s literal meaning (that FBI stands for the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and its conceptual meaning (that FBI is a criminal justice and intelligence agency) are processed when we encounter them. At first the literal meaning is more activated in memory. But over the next second or so the pattern seems to reverse, and the conceptual meaning—the acronym’s word-like quality—comes into its own. And it is easy to imagine that, over much longer periods of time, the more familiar an acronym becomes, the more—and the earlier—we rely on its word-like quality. (Sometimes the transformation is completed: anyone remember when scuba stood for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus?)

We’re generally excellent at tracking information about who knows what—information known to linguists as common ground. We don’t explain the strange holiday known as “Thanksgiving” to our American friends; neither do we expect our coworkers to know our brother’s birthday. But maybe we let befuddling acronyms slip into our communications because they’re not a fact about a thing so much as the way we’ve encoded the thing itself. (Question for another day: might we on some level want the insider status acronyms confer upon us?)

It is in everyone’s best interests to avoid (or explain) unfamiliar acronyms. But, at least for unedited communication over email or the phone, is this realistic? Would doing so be the equivalent of asking someone to avoid using adjectives, or words that begin with the letter p?

Now it can be told. I am 2.9 percent Neandertal. I’ve had my genome inspected at the firm 23andMe, and, yes, it’s true. I’m quite pleased. But I am not satisfied. I wish I knew the particulars of the coming together of my ancient Neandertal ancestor with my ancient Homo sapiens ancestor. This union (or these unions) would have occurred some time between 40,000 and 28,000 years ago. Time is a thick veil.

Still, during the past decade, studies of bones and genes have been remarkably rewarding. The human species Homo erectus evolved out of earlier human forms 1.8 million years ago and survived until 143,000 years ago. He and she walked on two feet and used tools and gradually spread over Africa and western and eastern Asia. Out of Homo erectus evolved, it is thought, Homo heidelbergensis. This common ancestor of both Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens existed from 400,000 to 350,000 years ago. Homo heidelbergensis used fire and was the first to build shelters as opposed to just finding shelter, although they did that too. The European branch of Homo heidelbergensis evolved into the Neandertals 300,000 or more years ago. The Neandertals were big-bodied, light-skinned, cold-adapted humans. Some, at least, were redheads. The African branch of Homo heidelbergensis evolved into Homo sapiens—us—200,000 years ago. We were slighter-bodied. We had narrower hips and darker skin. (For a great short course on human evolution, check out the Smithsonian Institution website What Does It Mean to Be Human?).

Homo sapiens began moving out of Africa to the Near East 40,000 years ago. There they encountered a southern remnant of Neandertals. Most of that species had long since gone extinct. But we shared the region for 15,000 years, until the Neandertals disappeared. Fifteen thousand years is a long time.

What happened to the Neandertals? The conventional view used to be that they were basically stupider and did okay as long as we (Homo sapiens) were not there to outwit them or wipe them out or out-hunt them or whatever. But this view is now hotly disputed.

A “growing body of evidence indicates that Neandertals were savvier than they have been given credit for,” writes Kate Wong in a recent special issue, “What Makes Us Human,” of Scientific American. Contrary to previous suppositions and speculations, Neandertals ate a varied diet including not only large mammals like mammoths but also birds, rabbits, and seafood. They possessed the “language gene,” just as we do, and likely communicated in some sort of language. They manufactured tools, although not in as great a variety as we did. They decorated their bodies and wore jewelry—an index of symbolic cognition. They likely adorned themselves with feathers.

Because they had bigger bodies, they required more calories to survive than we do. They may have lacked sewing skills. Neither Neandertals nor Homo sapiens lived long (the rare 30-year-old Neandertal was old), but at some point, for reasons not really understood, the life spans of Homo sapiens began to increase. More longevity provided a grandparent generation to impart knowledge, skills, and more resources to the group.

Another discovery bearing on the subject are the extreme climate fluctuations that occurred between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago. The Neandertals had bodies and cultures adapted to ice and snow. This time of fluctuation involved such rapid climate change that in one lifetime “all the plants and animals that a person had grown up with could vanish and be replaced with unfamiliar flora and fauna,” writes Wong. The environmental stress may have decimated their ranks to below zero population growth.

Another possibility is that as we interbred, our gene pool swamped out their gene pool.

The Neandertals are long gone. But they have not disappeared entirely. They live on—in me, and, very likely, in you.

Discussing Act V of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, my class arrived at the point in the play where the mistaken and disguised identities of the characters fall away and there follows a last-minute pairing off into couples. Students questioned the quickness with which the main characters agreed to transfer their love to others in place of their original preferences.

One student noted: “It’s weird that Olivia agrees to be married to Sebastian, Viola’s brother, when she’s been in love with Viola all the time. Even if Viola was dressed as a man, it’s not like Sebastian is the same person.”

“It’s a very random idea of love,” agreed another student.

“It might be Shakespeare is saying we can adjust to loving who we need to love, if we have to.”

“But Sebastian is Viola’s brother. The play makes a big point of saying how they come from the same father.”

“But sisters and brothers can be very different,” observed someone else.

There was a general murmur of assent.

“But she probably copied her brother in playing the role of the boy, Caesario, so maybe she acted even more like him than she acted like herself.”

“If she was playing at being him, then Olivia sort of fell in love with Sebastian more than she fell in love with Olivia.”

“Or maybe Sebastian was enough like Viola for Olivia to be satisfied. He wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but close enough.”

Then an Indian student raised his hand. He didn’t usually talk much, but on this subject he shared an insight: the marriage of Olivia and Sebastian was like an arranged marriage, he said. Indian parents sometimes attempt to match their children with the sort of person the child has been interested in in the past. My student acknowledged that the practice is not prevalent—especially since many Indian children try to hide premarital relationships from their parents for fear of displeasing them—but it does happen and, indeed, had occurred within his own family.

What an interesting way to understand the union of Sebastian and Olivia. In life, after all, we don’t get just what we want and often have to settle for an approximation.

In a recent column, David Brooks extolled the virtues of life in the Orthodox world. Communities are strong; existence is ordered; everyday acts are infused with a higher significance; the burdens of modern individualism are lifted in favor of commitment to collective purpose. It all sounds really great, especially the part about the upscale kosher grocery store.

As a refugee from modern Orthodoxy, I have almost too much to say about this, and certainly too much to feel. I won’t pretend to be objective. But I do have a slight advantage over Brooks and other secular Jews who idealize Orthodoxy from a safe distance. (The sentimental celebration of traditional life on the part of those who’d never touch it in a hundred years is not confined to Jews, of course.) I actually know what existence is like within those paragons of harmony.

Brooks quotes a prominent rabbi to the effect that following the thousands of regulations that govern daily life within Orthodoxy is akin to learning the piano. At first it seems like drudgery, “but mastering the technique gives you the freedom to play well and create new songs.” I wish that Brooks had pushed a little on the metaphor, because I’ve no idea what those “new songs” are supposed to be. The point of learning the rules, in Orthodoxy, is not to adapt or improvise upon them, the way it is in art. It is to follow them exactly and unstintingly. You don’t “create new songs”; you sing the same ones over and over and over. And they aren’t songs.

Brooks remarks that the laws of Orthodoxy “moderate religious zeal” by “making religion an everyday practical reality.” The statement is astonishingly thoughtless. Never mind the zeal that’s on continuous display, to disastrous effect, in Israel. The Orthodox are no less immune to competitive virtue than other religious (or nonreligious) groups. The laws are the objects of the zeal, which means they have a tendency to grow increasingly strict. As it has responded to the threat of secular modernity, Orthodox Judaism, like other traditional religions, has drifted inexorably rightward. And as in those traditions, the ones who bear the greatest brunt are women. Men compete to heap restrictions on their wives and daughters.

But the greatest limitations are those on the mind. Jews are constitutional lawyers, says another rabbi Brooks refers to, endlessly litigating the divine commandments. Lawyers, yes, but not philosophers. Debate revolves around the minutia of practice; broader questions of meaning and purpose—the ones that naturally arise when people think about the world—are out of bounds. Orthodox Judaism, by and large, is a spiritually undernourished place (one reason, it’s been said, that Jews have been so drawn to Buddhism). I didn’t even understand what spirituality is until many years after I had left that world and discovered my own form in the arts. “Warmth” is not spirituality. Lighting candles is not spirituality. If you ask an Orthodox Jew what the meaning of Passover is, chances are they won’t say freedom, certainly not freedom understood as a general human concept. They’ll say the meaning is that God took us out of Egypt. The meaning is we don’t eat bread. Orthodox Jews, in my experience, tend to have incisive minds but stunted personalities. What’s finally off limits, in the tradition, are major portions of the self.

Gazing at the families at the grocery store, Brooks tells us, “I notice how incredibly self-confident they are. Once dismissed as relics, they now feel that they are the future.” Why? Because although only a third of New York Jews are Orthodox, over 60 percent of Jewish children are. Soon the Orthodox will predominate. But fertility is not an argument, and smugness is not self-confidence. I have no doubt that Orthodoxy is a source of great joy and comfort for many of its adherents. But modernity happened for good reasons. The kinds of restrictions that Brooks professes so much admiration for (but would scarcely tolerate a single Sabbath of) are exactly what we sought to leave behind. Let’s not kid ourselves about them.

Like many Americans, I was raised in a small town, and though my town had all the usual civic and commercial entities, from church to store to library to garbage dump, it also had all the quiet and secret civic and commercial entities that we residents knew of but did not acknowledge publicly. Such as, for example, the various places where you could, using the right signals and code words, buy illicit substances, ranging from marijuana to malt liquor to racy magazines. Or the places where a man might purchase amorous company. Or the two bars, one on either end of town, where policemen and detectives gathered at the ends of their shifts to discuss dark and intricate matters. Or the large house at the north end of town where the Hindu community, such as it was, gathered for its rituals and social events. Or the auto body shop, where guns of every caliber could be bought without the flutter and fidget of registration papers. Or the mysterious warehouse behind the shopping center, owned by men with guns and dark cars who knew guys who knew guys. Or the shop that sold secondhand clothing in the front room and tattoos and debt-collection services in the back room. Or the delicatessen in which zoning variances and building permits were offered for sale or barter on Tuesday mornings. Or the third window at the post office, where a former Navy man would for a fee adjust various forms of identification as long as they did not entail photographic work, which he declined to do for legal reasons. Or which priest to avoid at all costs, especially when the parish offered day trips to the carnival upstate or—God help us all—the annual overnight tour of the seminary for prospective enrollees. Or which of the nine small beaches at the state park was the one for you if you wished to engage in amorous adventure—heterosexuals to the west, homosexuals to the east. Or which librarian to ask if you genuinely wanted to read Henry Miller for literary purposes. Or which dock to fish from without having to bother the owner for permission.

The thought occurs to me that my town was actually quite normal, and that your town also consists of the town you can see and the town behind the one you can see, and that perhaps there are endless towns in a town, composed of all sorts of stories in all sorts of languages. That wouldn’t be so unusual, would it?

A baby hears the chair in the presence of a chair and attempts to map language onto the world. But, as most famously illustrated by philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, what in the world is the chair? Is it an armrest? A cushion? The elongated, chair-shaped shadow on the wall? Given the complexity of our environments, how are such mappings ever successful?

Language-acquisition researchers have given this question plenty of attention. Some argue that infants are born ready to map labels to entire objects, rather than parts or features of objects. Others suggest that encountering words many times, in many contexts (a phenomenon I describe here), helps infants home in on correct mappings. But the reverse question is less often raised: Which word should be mapped to said object? Speech to children rarely consists of isolated words, with nouns often pairing with articles. So is the chair called chair or the?

Ruling out the would be trivial if infants had some way of knowing which words are so-called function words. (Instead of describing concepts, function words—which also include prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions—describe grammatical relationships between concepts; hence their meanings map only uneasily onto objects in the world.)

Function words do sound somewhat different from other words—they tend to be very short and unstressed—so infants could theoretically use this characteristic to discount the words as potential object labels.

An even more promising avenue is frequency. Function words are among the most common in languages. A growing body of research—including a study published this year by Harvard University’s Jean-Rémy Hochmann—indeed suggests that infants may resist labeling objects with very common syllables.

In Hochmann’s study, 17-month-olds listened to a stream of artificial speech consisting of syllables, some of which occurred frequently and the rest infrequently. After two minutes of this, the babies then heard a nonsense word composed of a high-frequency syllable (vo, for instance) and a low-frequency one (mu). Vomu vomu vomu: the infants heard this word over and over again. All the while, a strange-looking 3D object rotated slowly on a monitor. (One such object looked not unlike a plus sign made of balloons; another resembled the torso of the Michelin man.) Before long, the infants had learned to associate vomu with the object.

But say vomu wasn’t a single word at all. Say it was an article like the, followed or preceded by a noun like chair. Would babies, if given evidence of this, prefer to treat the low-frequency mu as the object label over the high-frequency vo?

To test this, Hochmann created two new nonsense words, one containing the high-frequency syllable and the other containing the low-frequency one (e.g., gimu and vona). The words were played for the babies in the presence of two 3D objects, one of which they’d seen earlier. The infants better preferred the familiar object when it was paired with gimu than vona, suggesting that they considered mu—the lower frequency syllable—the superior object label.  (A follow-up study found a similar effect even when the lower frequency syllable occurred at the beginning of the training word, the equivalent of chair the.)

From where might this tendency arise? Perhaps infants become overly familiarized to the high-frequency syllables and simply tune them out, much as we do the humming of lights or the whooshing of cars down a busy street. Or perhaps these familiar syllables serve as mental bookends of sorts, allowing the babies to distinctly perceive and remember where other words—potential object labels—begin and end. Or perhaps by 17 months, children have already formed the grammatical category “function words” in their language, learned that function words tend to be common, and now expect all highly frequent syllables to be function words. To know for sure, we’ll have to go younger. Open question: Do babies younger by half—old enough to understand language to be referential, but still in the earliest stages of recognizing function words—also refrain from searching the world for the’s?