More Yellowing Articles

More things to burn:
http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/21/science/how-the-brain-might-work-a-new-theory-of-consciousness.html?scp=1&sq=how%20the%20brain%20might%20work&st=cse
The sensations of one instant of a spring morning have thus become represented by millions of activated cells in many different regions of the cortex. That much is known. A still baffling question for scientists is, how does the brain bind these fragmented pieces of information into a single coherent image? The nature of the reassembly process, known as the binding problem, is intimately related to the age-old question of consciousness, since an answer to the binding problem would go far to defining the physical basis of the conscious mind.
The first step to understanding, brain scientists say, is to realize that there is no Cinemascope screen in the brain where all the pieces come together. But if there is no screen, on what physical principle is consciousness organized? A growing number of scientists say the answer must lie in some form of timing. An image may be reconstructed from all cells that are firing in a particular rhythm at a particular instant.



Purdy by Vidal:
I first heard of James Purdy a half-century or so ago on a bright spring day in London. Edith Sitwell had asked me to lunch. We drank martinis while she put the finishing touches on a letter to The Times of London; D. H. Lawrence's novel ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was under attack for obscenity. Although Edith disliked Lawrence for having, she thought, caricatured her brother Sir Osbert in the novel, as the gin took its effect on each of us, I boldly assured her that the offending book was not actually the work of Lawrence but of Truman Capote. The red-rimmed eyes atop the long Gothic face narrowed: ''Surely the dates are not right.''
''Capote,'' I said, ''will never see 90 again.''
She sighed contentedly. ''That would explain the dreadful style.''

On the genetic basis for homosexuality:
Natalie Angier:

As it happens, the evidence for a genetic basis for homosexuality remains slender and incomplete. What Mr. Hamer reported in 1993 was that in families having two gay brothers, 33 of the 40 pairs of brothers shared a piece of the X chromosome, significantly more than the 20 pairs of brothers who would have been expected to inherit the same chromosomal terrain by chance alone. Mr. Hamer also found that a gay man was much likelier to have gay male relatives on the maternal side of the family than on his father's side, further evidence of something of interest on the X chromosome, which in men is always passed along from the mother. The molecular and genealogical evidence together suggested that a gene or genes embedded in the wilderness of the X chromosome somehow contribute to male sexual orientation.
However, the specific "gay gene" -- as Mr. Hamer calls it in a reluctant bow to popularization -- has yet to be found. He has no idea how the gene could possibly work to influence a man's erotic nature. Nor does he know how many people out there may carry the trait; whether the trait invariably or only occasionally leads to homosexuality; whether it operates solo or in conjunction with many other genes, and so on. In short, the genetics of sexual orientation is in an utterly embryonic stage, as is our grasp of the biological underpinnings for any interesting human characteristic.


More on The Bell Curve:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CEEDC123DF935A25753C1A962958260&scp=1&sq=what%20is%20intelligence%20and%20who%20has%20it?%20bbrowne&st=cse