Talk In New York

Wide ranging OMNI editor turned author dies on trek

Longtime companion Douglas plays Faure

Niel Sloane mathematician and Susanna visit

At OK Harris’s opening today (3pm-5pm, Saturday, Jan 29. 2012), we ran into noted ex-Bell Labs mathematician Neil Sloane, rock climber and sphere packer extraordinaire, attending Mark Chester’s slice of the latest gallery serving, a display of Chester’s well composed parallels, double displays of two photographs in one frame of well wrought images which share a common, often whimsical visual theme.

Neil’s wife, the poet Suzanna Cuyler, told us shocking news – two months ago, Kathleen “Kathy” Ellen Stein, OMNI Magazine’s remarkable interview editor and author of The Genius Engine, a 2007 book from Wiley studying the strange ways of the prefrontal cortex, had been killed in a fall into a deep ravine while hiking in wooded Pennsylvania with her longtime companion Douglas Stein.

They invited me to join them in visiting Douglas at Kathy’s Bowery loft, where he was engaged in packing up and moving the grand piano to a new residence in New Jersey, so after saying Goodbye to K, I went along Spring Street to the Bowery, crossed amid the evening traffic clogging the street and faced a metal door, where a light on the fourth floor of the building suggested Douglas was in.

After a wait, Douglas finally opened the door and, tall and silhouetted against the light of the hallway, recognized us with surprise after more a decade since our last meeting. We both served as interviewers for OMNI Magazine’s legendary Q and A section, which Kathleen Stein edited for years. He led us up three long stairs back to the apartment with its floor painted red where Kathy had lived and worked, still graced with the brown grand, with Faure’s Nocturne #4 on the music rest, the $2000 large size iMac on the work table, the nine feet tall potted plants, and the shelved and stacked books of science and poetry, including one precious author’s copy of The Genius Engine: Where Memory, Reason, Passion, Violence, and Creativity Intersect in the Human Brain still present.

A fatal fall

Placing the mail on the table under the Tiffany lamp – the latest subscription copy of the National Association of Science Writers “Science Writers” – the still shell shocked Douglas told me the story of what had happened, the event which had suddenly ended Kathy’s life and with it, most of his own, he said. “She was my life”.

The New York Times carried the obituary on Dec 4:

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“STEIN–Kathleen Ellen. Born June 9, 1944 in Chicago. Died November 13, 2011, age 67, from a fall while hiking in the Delaware Water Gap. Stein lived in New York City most of her life. Preceded in death by mother Margaret Bruce Stein and father Benjamin F. Stein, M.D., of Sarasota, Fla. Survived by longtime companion Douglas Stein of New York City, sister Julia Long (Randy) of Weekie Wachee, Fla., and brother John F. Stein (Beth) of Nashville, TN, niece Kim Long and nephews Jonathan Long (Jaime) and Tyler Stein. Stein received a B.A. from Bard College with extensive PhD work at Rutgers University, where she taught literature and writing. She began her journalism career covering rock music for Circus, Creem and others before joining Omni magazine as a founding editor and writer. Former Omni editor and friend Keith Ferrell writes, Stein, during her long tenureat Omni, became one of the very best writers on science, and particularly neuroscience, in the country. Her stewardship of the magazine’s legendary interviews is the prime reason they are legendary. She followed science with the assiduousness of a good reporter, and pursued its explication for general audiences with the enthusiasm of an evangelist. A widely published science and technology writer, Stein wrote for the New York Times, Biotechnology Newswatch and UPI, among others. Her book, The Genius Engine, on the complex role of the prefrontal cortex of the human brain was published in 2007. It received praise as a laudable work. A tremendous effort brought out with natural ease and Stein for her ability to present technical information in understandable terms, without being pedantic or overly simple. In addition to her love of writing, reading and good conversation, Stein was an avid hiker and accomplished sailor. There will be a memorial service at a later date. The family requests memorial donations be made to The Nature Conservancy, Bard College English Department or Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).”
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Douglas explained that they had both set off separately in the morning at 9.30 am, because Kathy’s recent problems with her feet had made her even less willing than usual to suffer the awkwardness of holding back her athletic partner from his natural pace. A painful bunion among other damage had compounded the lameness which marked Kathy’s life since at the age of 12, when she had fallen from a palm tree into too shallow water, resulting in a foot dragging gait which she had refused to allow to compromise her life in any way.

When she didn’t return, he went in search of her, following along the route he supposed she had taken, but in vain. He had called in the Park Rangers, who had eventually found her hat at the edge of a steep cliff abutting the nearby stream, and finally her body face down in the bottom of the ravine.

A musical link

When Neil and Suzanna arrived, Douglas invited us to rescue what we could from the books and other possessions of Stein’s which he was going to have to abandon in her apartment, and after we did so he sat down at the piano and with a gentle touch played the Faure Nocturne #4 in E flat Op 36 in a poignant farewell to Kathy and all that they had shared for some thirty years.

He broke off his playing before the virtuoso middle of the piece to talk some more, of Faure – “I think his stuff is underrated…” – and how this Nocturne seemed designed for Kathleen. “Let me see if I can play the end.”

He played to the end, only for the second time ever, he said, and he thanked us for it. “That happened! That actually happened! Thank you!”

” So you can see why I wanted play it, ” he said. He gently closed the lid. ” A number of times when I was practicing it, she was just, so present…” he said.

There was sadness in Suzanna Culyer’s voice too as she gathered her things, and declaimed:

“She will always be present in our memories. Anybody who knew Kathleen Stein took to her, and she took… as you said…if Kathy Stein liked you, you were in like Flynn. She had an uncaring knack for friendship and she was a wonderful, wonderful laconic woman, private, interesting and she will live in our memories beyond, long beyond others.”

“Yes”, said Douglas. “Exactly.”

“Maybe it was best, “said Susanna. “I mean you know, I think it is better. I mean if she was a 90 year old woman…. I mean she had a very, a very full life for 68 years.”

“So glad you could come. Great,” said Douglas.

“Glad you played, ” we said.

“Sometimes you can play it,” said Douglas.”I kind of got it at the end, it wasn’t there… but I wanted to play the end, because it was so like her.”

Much later, going through old copies of OMNI to catalog them, we found that the first issue of that remarkable science magazine, which first infused science writing with the emotional color that the female of the human species is unafraid to include, had a piece by Kathleen Stein.

Dated October 1978, its title was Some Of Us May Never Die.

(More images, and a video of the above performance, are at Onlygoodphotos: In Memoriam Kathy Stein)

Claudio makes final appeal to judge in vain

Neighborhood pitched in to aid one of its own

As we have noted earlier, Claudio “The Barber” Caponigro has to vacate his storied East Harlem premises before the New Year, according to the agreement he signed last July, after his new Chinese landlord reduced his rent increase from $1650 to $1200, still double the rent that Claudio had been paying before his little building extension on 116St off First Avenue was taken over, unbeknownst to him, a year and a half ago. But yesterday he made a last ditch effort to stay longer, which failed.

The neighborhood rallied round and helped him move his stuff to his new premises, a frontage basement owned by a Mt Sinai surgeon, Alex Greenstein, who bought a nearby house recently on the same side of 116St but nearer the center of the block. A local carpenter and other neighbors helped undo the mirrors from the wall that had been dowelled there 110 years ago, when the barber ship first started up, eventually to become a gathering place for the wise guys of the neighborhood when it was mostly Italian.

Claudio came across from Italy when he was 19 63 years ago and two years later was working at the shop, which eventually became his when his partners retired. He has never shown the slightest desire to leave, his loyalty to his premises, his neighborhood and his clientele as high as that of his customers. It is not just that he has kept his price at the pre 1980 level of $10, clearly, but that he liked his way of life and became rooted in it.

After all, he was king of all he surveyed, in his territory. He could close down and sleep in his armchair during the day if he wanted; he could refuse and sometimes did refuse customers he didn’t like, sending them around the corner on some pretext that his scissors needed sharpening or somesuch. He could leave and come on his own terms, without having to coordinate with other barbers using other “chairs” in the same shop.

He formed his connections throughout the neighborhood and further, as the Italians started leaving for the suburbs, but would return for their haircuts as they checked in with other old friends. The network crossed generations, too, as fathers brought in their children as early as age one.

And given that the place became a social node for the East Harlem version of the Godfather, this led to an embarrassment – best forgotten as far as Claudio is concerned – of the Feds insisting that he identify from photos the customers who were involved. When he naturally claimed the professional privilege of barbers to keep the confidence of their clients as much as psychiatrists and priests they then included him in the trial, a dastardly act which resulted in Claudio standing his ground and being convicted and out on probation for standing in the way of law enforcement.

All in all, it seems that Claudio the Barber’s chief character virtue is immovability, and faithfulness to his past, a trait which has resulted in him becoming an oasis amid the tawdry landscape of cheap storefronts that have taken over his neighborhood, including a number of unisex hair salons where the tool of choice is the machine clipper rather than the skillful use of scissors. In this regard it seems clear that Claudio has now become one of the very few people in Manhattan outside a few hotels who knows how to give a man a decent, layered but conservative cut, suitable for people of high station such as bank presidents and Wall Street.

Add that to his anachronistic price and it is clear that his appreciative clientele will remain loyal even after the moves to his new, smaller, basement level but newly painted and cleanly installed and outfitted premises. But it didn’t prevent Claudio from making a last ditch attempt yesterday to save himself from moving from his current shop with its window sign in attractively traditional font visible from a hundred yards in any direction, even though even the huge candystick spiral red CKCK and white pole outside his door had been dug up and prepared for reinstalling along the street.

According to Tommy the owner of the pet store next door and also of Italian heritage, when Claudio returned from his trip downtown yesterday, he was “a beaten man.” After five hours, including a three hour recess taken by the judge before he would hear the case, Claudio pled his case without a lawyer and it was summarily rejected. He had already signed his agreement to move, and he didn’t know any lawyerly tricks to extend his time in his old place. Parking cost him $40, and eh spent $25 for lunch, and he lost all his afternoon business. But as Tommy advised him, he could now accept his fate, secure in the knowledge that he had done everything he could.

Today, we found Claudio in a much more cheerful mood. Charles Rangel had come by in support and to enjoy a last haircut in the old place before it was turned into a Chinese takeout, to join the 15 or so Chinese takeouts within striking distance (though opinion in the neighborhood is that its quality may be higher than the rest). Local news crews and reporters from NY1 and Channel 7 Eyewitness News had come and interviewed him at length, as well as the good surgeon who will be his new landlord (at $1050 a month, less than he is now paying).

He greeted us with a glad cry (having accompanied him uptown after his first cpourt appearance, we earned his undying respect and gratitude by showing him the Lexington subway Canal Street stop, which he realized would save him driving down and paying a parking fee (yesterday Alas he was unable to save because he had to carry a passenger down in the form of the customer who encouraged him to make a final stand). Would we like to see his new place?

He took us up the street and unlocked the grill (which will be done away with) and we took pictures of him with Felix, a young man who uses him every one or two weeks to keep his hair length the absolute minimum. Claudio, shorn of his space and some of the convenience of his location, will nonetheless stay in business until he decides for himself when enough is enough, and a man in his eighties, though young in spirit, perhaps doesn’t want to stand on his feet for ten hours a day.

But till then, he has been rescued by the neighborhood he served for so long.

ABC Eyewitness News Video and Transcript

Nice Op Ed piece in the Times today (Nov 24) by Herbert Gans (No, that’s not Herman Kahn) who points out that the old ways of getting rid of surplus workers in this extreme capitalist economy – wars, poverty, disease, prison, and other useful institutions – are not doing their job these days, as more and more activities need fewer and fewer workers, particularly in this country as more and more jobs flow overseas.

This is fits in with the contempt banks seem to have for the ranks of average depositor, who get more fees than interest whatever account type they choose, unless they have $10,000 or more to spare to sit getting the lowest interest rate possible short of zero.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Age of the Superfluous Worker
By HERBERT J. GANS
Published: November 24, 2011

AMERICA, like other modern countries, has always had some surplus workers — people ready to work but jobless for extended periods because the “job creators,” private and public, have been unable or unwilling to create sufficient jobs. When the number of surplus workers rose sharply, the country also had ways of reducing it.

However, the current jobless recovery, and the concurrent failure to create enough new jobs, is breeding a new and growing surplus pool. And some in this pool are in danger of becoming superfluous, likely never to work again.

The currently jobless and the so-called discouraged workers, who have given up looking for work, total about 15 percent of the work force, not including the invisible discouraged workers the government cannot even find to count.

In the old days — before Social Security, welfare and Medicaid — poverty-caused illnesses killed off or incapacitated some of the people who could not find jobs. Even earlier, some nations sold their surplus workers as slaves, while the European countries could send them to the colonies.

In addition, wars were once labor-intensive enterprises that absorbed the surplus temporarily, and sufficient numbers of those serving in the infantry and on warships were killed or seriously enough injured so that they could not add to the peacetime labor surplus.

The old ways of reducing surplus labor are, however, disappearing. Decades of medical and public health advances, as well as Medicare and Medicaid, have reduced the number of poverty-related deaths. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have left many more service members injured than killed.

Over the past quarter-century, one very costly way of decreasing the surplus has been the imprisonment of people, mostly dark-skinned men, for actual and invented offenses. Felons are not often hired when they leave prison. Many, at least those who do not become recidivists, become surplus and then superfluous labor. As incarceration becomes less affordable for financially strapped states, inmates will reach surplus or superfluous status at a younger age.

Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing and of services not requiring hands-on human contact. Continuing increases in worker productivity add yet more to the surplus. So does the unwillingness of employers to even consider hiring people who have been unemployed for a long time.

When the jobless recovery ends and the economy is restored to good health, today’s surplus will be reduced. New technology and the products and services that accompany it will create new jobs. But unless the economy itself changes, eventually many of these innovations may be turned over to machines or the jobs may be sent to lower-wage economies.

In fact, if modern capitalism continues to eliminate as many jobs as it creates — or more jobs than it creates — future recoveries will not only add to the amount of surplus labor but will turn a growing proportion of workers into superfluous ones.

What could be done to prevent such a future? America will have to finally get serious about preserving and creating jobs — and on a larger, and more lasting, scale than Roosevelt’s New Deal. Private enterprise and government will have to think in terms of industrial policy, and one that emphasizes labor-intensive economic growth and innovation. Reducing class sizes in all public schools to 15 or fewer would require a great many new teachers even as it would raise the quality of education.

In the long run, reducing working time — perhaps to as low as 30 hours a week, with the lost income made up by unemployment compensation — would lead to a modest increase in jobs, through work sharing. New taxes on income and wealth are unavoidable, as are special taxes on the capital-intensive part of the economy. Policies that are now seemingly utopian will have to be tried as well, and today’s polarized and increasingly corporate-run democracy will have to be turned into a truly representative one.

Whatever the costs, they would be a small price to preserve America as a healthy society. A society that has permanently expelled a significant proportion of its members from the work force would soon deteriorate into an unbelievably angry country, with intense and continuing conflict between the have-jobs and have-nones. America could become a very sick society, just when it needed to be stronger than ever to flourish in the global economy.

Herbert J. Gans, an emeritus professor of sociology at Columbia, is the author of “Imagining America in 2033.”

Who is Herbert Gans?

Herbert J. Gans (from Amazon)
Herbert J. Gans (born May 7, 1927) is an American sociologist who has taught at Columbia University since 1971, retiring in 2007. One of the most prolific and influential sociologists of his generation, Gans came to America in 1940 as a refugee from Nazism and has sometimes described his scholarly work as an immigrant’s attempt to understand America. He trained in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he studied with David Riesman and Everett Hughes, among others, and in social planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied primarily with Martin Meyerson. Although Gans views his career as spanning six fields of research, he initially made his reputation as a critic of urban renewal in the early 1960s. His first book, The Urban Villagers (1962), described Boston’s diverse West End neighborhood, where he mainly studied its Italian-American working class community.

How precisely the corporations of this world are expected to stay in business when the consumers they seek are jobless, homeless, and bust is hard to fathom, especially since the great boom of the 2000s and earlier was based mainly on extreme spending by the same economic animal, which since their real incomes were more or less flat for thirty years were only enabled by ballooning credit card debt and massive borrowing against their houses, most mortgages of which are now underwater.

Do the rich plan to sell only to the rich?

Further reading: Herbert Gans Imagines America in 2033 (BroadStreetReview)”>

One of the most forceful personalities and minds in science was suddenly taken from us by a stroke today (Tues Nov 22 2011). Lynn Margulis was an unusually strong character and for a biologist she had an unusually muscular mind, and her early marriage to Carl Sagan was the least of her accomplishments. She was very young when she began to demonstrate the lame inadequacy of the standard idea of how evolution works and the origin of species, which is that random tiny mutations are converted by Darwininian competition to emerge as dominant features if these are advantageous to survival, and even give rise to new major forms or species if they are particularly helpful.

Margulis was one of the few scientists who immediately see that this theory is conceptually inadequate at the fundamental level and not much more than a silly biological version of modern capitalist thinking a la Ayn Raynd where nature is entirely a jungle where only the strongest survive, and that evolution at the level of creating new species (which standard Darwinism utterly fails to explain) was far more likely a cooperative venture of some kind.

This revisionism took shape in her ideas about symbiogenesis where at the most basic stratum of life in which single celled forms existed at the beginning, it was likely that such cells merged, and that explained the appearance of cells with a nucleus of which most larger life forms are now made up, including ourselves. From the Margulis point of view we are all essentially agglomerations of cooperating bacteria, and that explains also how new species can arise – from the merging of disparate cells which thus form new living entities with more powerful survival processes than either progenitor.

This obituary in the Times suggests that the details of her thinking are still obscure to the average Timesman and other non specialists, but it is very clear in giving her the credit she deserved after years in the trenches fighting for her truths. No less a fellow heretic than Richard Dawking famously complimented her highly on her determined resilience in the fact of the standard hostility and envy of lesser minds who occupied higher positions in the ruling system when she started out as a young woman of originality and superior sense.

In other words Margulis was a heretic of great ability who could be counted on to guide lesser mortals as to other heretics in science and which were or are bone fide future Nobelists and which are fueled by too much imagination. In this respect she was one of the first to recognize the distinction of one of the most eminent naysayers in science, Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, who has been subjected to political attacks for a quarter century for pointing out from the beginning that as the putative cause of AIDS HIV is in fact a non starter, as every year that passes confirms.

Margulis saw immediately that Duesberg’s analysis was correct and that HIV/AIDS is a nonsense from every point of view, and she had no compunction in saying so. How rare is her kind of unrestrained seeking after better truths in science and how sorely we need more of it was never better shown than in her life of great achievement in the face of mass conformity and political resistance in the new world of institutionalized and now corporate science that has grown into an almost immovable pyramid since the Second World War.

Now we have lost one more rare voice of skeptical creativity.

Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 24, 2011

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”

A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”

Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.

She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.

Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.

Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.

In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; three half-brothers, Robert, Michael and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.

“More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.”

Further reading: Dick Teresis (ex OMNI editor) talks to Margulis, a neighbor in:
Discover: April 2011 issue; published online June 17, 2011

Discover Interview:
Lynn Margulis Says She’s Not Controversial, She’s Right
It’s the neo-Darwinists, population geneticists, AIDS researchers, and English-speaking biologists as a whole who have it all wrong.
by Dick Teresi; photography by Bob O’Connor

A conversation with Lynn Margulis is an effective way to change the way you think about life. Not just your life. All life. Scientists today recognize five groups of life: bacteria, protoctists (amoebas, seaweed), fungi (yeast, mold, mushrooms), plants, and animals. Margulis, a self-described “evolutionist,” makes a convincing case that there are really just two groups, bacteria and everything else.
That distinction led to her career-making insight. In a 1967 paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Margulis suggested that mitochondria and plastids—vital structures within animal and plant cells—evolved from bacteria hundreds of million of years ago, after bacterial cells started to collect in interactive communities and live symbiotically with one another. The resulting mergers yielded the compound cells known as eukaryotes, which in turn gave rise to all the rest—the protoctists, fungi, plants, and animals, including humans. The notion that we are all the children of bacteria seemed outlandish at the time, but it is now widely supported and accepted. “The evolution of the eukaryotic cells was the single most important event in the history of the organic world,” said Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the last century. “Margulis’s contribution to our understanding the symbiotic factors was of enormous importance.”
Her subsequent ideas remain decidedly more controversial. Margulis came to view symbiosis as the central force behind the evolution of new species, an idea that has been dismissed by modern biologists. The dominant theory of evolution (often called neo-Darwinism) holds that new species arise through the gradual accumulation of random mutations, which are either favored or weeded out by natural selection. To Margulis, random mutation and natural selection are just cogs in the gears of evolution; the big leaps forward result from mergers between different kinds of organisms, what she calls symbiogenesis. Viewing life as one giant network of social connections has set Margulis against the mainstream in other high-profile ways as well. She disputes the current medical understanding of AIDS and considers every kind of life to be “conscious” in a sense.

Margulis herself is a highly social organism. Now 71, she is a well-known sight at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she is on the geosciences faculty, riding her bike in all weather and at all times of day. Interviewer Dick Teresi, a neighbor, almost ran her over when, dressed in a dark coat, she cycled in front of his car late at night. On the three occasions that they met for this interview, Teresi couldn’t help noticing that Margulis shared her home with numerous others: family, students, visiting scholars, friends, friends of friends, and anybody interesting who needed a place to stay.
Most scientists would say there is no controversy over evolution. Why do you disagree?

All scientists agree that evolution has occurred—that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
And you don’t believe that natural selection is the answer?

This is the issue I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection. If you want bigger eggs, you keep selecting the hens that are laying the biggest eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly legs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.
That seems like a fairly basic objection. How, then, do you think the neo-Darwinist perspective became so entrenched?

In the first half of the 20th century, neo-Darwinism became the name for the people who reconciled the type of gradual evolutionary change described by Charles Darwin with Gregor Mendel’s rules of heredity [which first gained widespread recognition around 1900], in which fixed traits are passed from one generation to the next. The problem was that the laws of genetics showed stasis, not change. If you have pure breeding red flowers and pure breeding white flowers, like carnations, you cross them and you get pink flowers. You back-cross them to the red parent and you could get three-quarters red, one-quarter white. Mendel showed that the grandparent flowers and the offspring flowers could be identical to each other. There was no change through time.
There’s no doubt that Mendel was correct. But Darwinism says that there has been change through time, since all life comes from a common ancestor—something that appeared to be supported when, early in the 20th century, scientists discovered that X-rays and specific chemicals caused mutations. But did the neo-
Darwinists ever go out of their offices? Did they or their modern followers, the population geneticists, ever go look at what’s happening in nature the way Darwin did? Darwin was a fine naturalist. If you really want to study evolution, you’ve got go outside sometime, because you’ll see symbiosis everywhere!
So did Mendel miss something? Was Darwin wrong?

I’d say both are incomplete. The traits that follow Mendel’s laws are trivial. Do you have a widow’s peak or a straight hairline? Do you have hanging earlobes or attached earlobes? Are you female or male? Mendel found seven traits that followed his laws exactly. But neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change—led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
What kind of evidence turned you against neo-Darwinism?

What you’d like to see is a good case for gradual change from one species to another in the field, in the laboratory, or in the fossil record—and preferably in all three. Darwin’s big mystery was why there was no record at all before a specific point [dated to 542 million years ago by modern researchers], and then all of a sudden in the fossil record you get nearly all the major types of animals. The paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould studied lakes in East Africa and on Caribbean islands looking for Darwin’s gradual change from one species of trilobite or snail to another. What they found was lots of back-and-forth variation in the population and then—whoop—a whole new species. There is no gradualism in the fossil record.
Gould used the term “punctuated equilibrium” to describe what he interpreted as actual leaps in evolutionary change. Most biologists disagreed, suggesting a wealth of missing fossil evidence yet to be found. Where do you stand in the debate?

“Punctuated equilibrium” was invented to describe the discontinuity in the appearance of new species, and symbiogenesis supports the idea that these discontinuities are real. An example: Most clams live in deep, fairly dark waters. Among one group of clams is a species whose ancestors ingested algae—a typical food—but failed to digest them and kept the algae under their shells. The shell, with time, became translucent, allowing sunlight in. The clams fed off their captive algae and their habitat expanded into sunlit waters. So there’s a discontinuity between the dark-dwelling, food-gathering ancestor and the descendants that feed themselves photosynthetically. 

What about the famous “beak of the finch” evolutionary studies of the 1970s? Didn’t they vindicate Darwin?

Peter and Rosemary Grant, two married evolutionary biologists, said, ‘To hell with all this theory; we want to get there and look at speciation happening.’ They measured the eggs, beaks, et cetera, of finches on Daphne Island, a small, hilly former volcano top in Ecuador’s Galápagos, year after year. They found that during floods or other times when there are no big seeds, the birds with big beaks can’t eat. The birds die of starvation and go extinct on that island.
Did the Grants document the emergence of new species?

They saw this big shift: the large-beaked birds going extinct, the small-beaked ones spreading all over the island and being selected for the kinds of seeds they eat. They saw lots of variation within a species, changes over time. But they never found any new species—ever. They would say that if they waited long enough they’d find a new species.
Some of your criticisms of natural selection sound a lot like those of Michael Behe, one of the most famous proponents of “intelligent design,” and yet you have debated Behe. What is the difference between your views?

The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or “God did it.” They have no alternatives that are scientific.

You claim that the primary mechanism of evolution is not mutation but symbiogenesis, in which new species emerge through the symbiotic relationship between two or more kinds of organisms. How does that work?

All visible organisms are products of symbiogenesis, without exception. The bacteria are the unit. The way I think about the whole world is that it’s like a pointillist painting. You get far away and it looks like Seurat’s famous painting of people in the park (jpg). Look closely: The points are living bodies—different distributions of bacteria. The living world thrived long before the origin of nucleated organisms [the eukaryotic cells, which have genetic material enclosed in well-defined membranes]. There were no animals, no plants, no fungi. It was an all-bacterial world—bacteria that have become very good at finding specialized niches. Symbiogenesis recognizes that every visible life-form is a combination or community of bacteria.
How could communities of bacteria have formed completely new, more complex levels of life?

Symbiogenesis recognizes that the mitochondria [the energy 
factories] in animal, plant, and fungal cells came from oxygen-respiring bacteria and that chloroplasts in plants and algae—which perform photosynthesis—came from cyanobacteria. These used to be called blue-green algae, and they produce the oxygen that all animals breathe.
Are you saying that a free-living bacterium became part of the cell of another organism? How could that have happened?

At some point an amoeba ate a bacterium but could not digest it. The bacterium produced oxygen or made vitamins, providing a survival advantage to both itself and the amoeba. Eventually the bacteria inside the amoeba became the mitochondria. The green dots you see in the cells of plants originated as cyanobacteria. This has been proved without a doubt.
And that kind of partnership drives major evolutionary change?

The point is that evolution goes in big jumps. That idea has been called macromutation, and I was denigrated in 1967 at Harvard for mentioning it. “You believe in macromutation? You believe in acquired characteristics?” the important professor Keith Porter asked me with a sneer. No, I believe in acquired genomes.
Can you give an example of symbiogenesis in action?

Look at this cover of Plant Physiology [a major journal in the field]. The animal is a juvenile slug. It has no photosynthesis ancestry. Then it feeds on algae and takes in chloroplasts. This photo is taken two weeks later. Same animal. The slug is completely green. It took in algae chloroplasts, and it became completely photosynthetic and lies out in the sun. At the end of September, these slugs turn red and yellow and look like dead leaves. When they lay eggs, those eggs contain the gene for photosynthesis inside. Or look at a cow. It is a 40-gallon fermentation tank on four legs. It cannot digest grass and needs a whole mess of symbiotic organisms in its overgrown esophagus to digest it. The difference between cows and related species like bison or musk ox should be traced, in part, to the different symbionts they maintain.
But if these symbiotic partnerships are so stable, how can they also drive evolutionary change?

Symbiosis is an ecological phenomenon where one kind of organism lives in physical contact with another. Long-term symbiosis leads to new intracellular structures, new organs and organ systems, and new species as one being incorporates another being that is already good at something else. This major mode of evolutionary innovation has been ignored by the so-called evolutionary biologists. They think they own evolution, but they’re basically anthropocentric zoologists. They’re playing the game while missing four out of five of the cards. The five are bacteria, protoctists, fungi, animals, and plants, and they’re playing with just animals—a fifth of the deck. The evolutionary biologists believe the evolutionary pattern is a tree. It’s not. The evolutionary pattern is a web—the branches fuse, like when algae and slugs come together and stay together.
In contrast, the symbiotic view of evolution has a long lineage in Russia, right?

From the very beginning the Russians said natural selection was a process of elimination and could not produce all the diversity we see. They understood that symbiogenesis was a major source of innovation, and they rejected Darwin. If the English-speaking world owns natural selection, the Russians own symbiogenesis. In 1924, this man Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky wrote a book called Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, in which he reconciled Darwin’s natural selection as the eliminator and symbiogenesis as the innovator. Kozo-Polyansky looked at cilia—the wavy hairs that some microbes use to move—and said it is not beyond the realm of possibility that cilia, the tails of sperm cells, came from “flagellated cytodes,” by which he clearly meant swimming bacteria.
Has that idea ever been verified?

The sense organs of vertebrates have modified cilia: The rods and cone cells of the eye have cilia, and the balance organ in the inner ear is lined with sensory cilia. You tilt your head to one side and little calcium carbonate stones in your inner ear hit the cilia. This has been known since shortly after electron microscopy came in 1963. Sensory cilia did not come from random mutations. They came by acquiring a whole genome of a symbiotic bacterium that could already sense light or motion. Specifically, I think it was a spirochete [a corkscrew-shaped bacterium] that became the cilium.
Don’t spirochetes cause syphilis?

Yes, and Lyme disease. There are many kinds of spirochetes, and if I’m right, some of them are ancestors to the cilia in our cells. Spirochete bacteria are already optimized for sensitivity to motion, light, and chemicals. All eukaryotic cells have an internal transport system. If I’m right, the whole system—called the cytoskeletal system—came from the incorporation of ancestral spirochetes. Mitosis, or cell division, is a kind of internal motility system that came from these free-living, symbiotic, swimming bacteria. Here [she shows a video] we compare isolated swimming sperm tails to free-swimming spirochetes. Is that clear enough?

And yet these ideas are not generally accepted. Why?

Do you want to believe that your sperm tails come from some spirochetes? Most men, most evolutionary biologists, don’t. When they understand what I’m saying, they don’t like it.
We usually think of bacteria as strictly harmful. You disagree?

We couldn’t live without them. They maintain our ecological physiology. There are vitamins in bacteria that you could not live without. The movement of your gas and feces would never take place without bacteria. There are hundreds of ways your body wouldn’t work without bacteria. Between your toes is a jungle; under your arms is a jungle. There are bacteria in your mouth, lots of spirochetes, and other bacteria in your intestines. We take for granted their influence. Bacteria are our ancestors. One of my students years ago cut himself deeply with glass and accidentally inoculated himself with at least 10 million spirochetes. We were all scared but nothing happened. He didn’t even have an allergic reaction. This tells you that unless these microbes have a history with people, they’re harmless.

Are you saying that the only harmful bacteria are the ones that share an evolutionary history with us?

Right. Dangerous spirochetes, like the Treponema of syphilis or the Borrelia of Lyme disease, have long-standing symbiotic relationships with us. Probably they had relationships with the prehuman apes from which humans evolved. Treponema has lost four-fifths of its genes, because you’re doing four-fifths of the work for it. And yet people don’t want to understand that chronic spirochete infection is an example of symbiosis.
You have upset many medical researchers with the suggestion that corkscrew-shaped spirochetes turn into dormant “round bodies.” What’s that debate all about? 

Spirochetes turn into round bodies in any unfavorable condition where they survive but cannot grow. The round body is a dormant stage that has all the genes and can start growing again, like a fungal spore. Lyme disease spirochetes become round bodies if you suspend them in distilled water. Then they come out and start to grow as soon as you put them in the proper food medium with serum in it. The common myth is that penicillin kills spirochetes and therefore syphilis is not a problem. But syphilis is a major problem because the spirochetes stay hidden as round bodies and become part of the person’s very chemistry, which they commandeer to reproduce themselves. Indeed, the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS.
Wait—you are suggesting that AIDS is really syphilis?

There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. Yet the same symptoms now describe AIDS perfectly. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator.” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis [winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing, and well known for his unconventional scientific views] said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”

Syphilis has been called “the great imitator” because patients show a whole range of symptoms in a given order. You have a genital chancre, your symptoms go away, then you have the pox, this skin problem, and then it’s chronic, and you get sicker and sicker. The idea that penicillin kills the cause of the disease is nuts. If you treat the painless chancre in the first few days of infection, you may stop the bacterium before the symbiosis develops, but if you really get syphilis, all you can do is live with the spirochete. The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient’s genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing.

Is there a connection here between syphilis and Lyme disease, which is also caused by a spirochete and which is also said to be difficult to treat when diagnosed late? 

Both the Treponema that cause syphilis and the Borrelia that cause Lyme disease contain only a fifth of the genes they need to live on their own. Related spirochetes that can live outside by themselves need 5,000 genes, whereas the spirochetes of those two diseases have only 1,000 in their bodies. The 4,000 missing gene products needed for bacterial growth can be supplied by wet, warm human tissue. This is why both the Lyme disease Borrelia and syphilis Treponema are symbionts—they require another body to survive. These Borrelia and Treponema have a long history inside people. Syphilis has been detected in skull abnormalities going back to the ancient Egyptians. But I’m interested in spirochetes only because of our ancestry. I’m not interested in the diseases.
When you talk about the evolutionary intelligence of bacteria, it almost sounds like you think of them as conscious beings.

I do think consciousness is a property of all living cells. All cells are bounded by a membrane of their own making. To sense chemicals—food or poisons—it takes a cell. To have a sense of smell takes a cell. To sense light, it takes a cell. You have to have a bounded entity with photoreceptors inside to sense light. Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life and still are running the soil and the air and affecting water quality.
Your perspective is rather humbling.
The species of some of the protoctists are 542 million years old. Mammal species have a mean lifetime in the fossil record of about 3 million years. And humans? You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? 
The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.
Do we overrate ourselves as a species?

Yes, but we can’t help it. Look, there are nearly 7,000 million people on earth today and there are 10,000 chimps, and the numbers are getting fewer every day because we’re destroying their habitat. Reg Morrison, who wrote a wonderful book called The Spirit in the Gene, says that although we’re 99 percent genetically in common with chimps, that 1 percent makes a huge difference. Why? Because it makes us believe that we’re the best on earth. But there is lots of evidence that we are “mammalian weeds.” Like many mammals, we overgrow our habitats and that leads to poverty, misery, and wars.
Why do you have a reputation as a heretic?

Anyone who is overtly critical of the foundations of his science is persona non grata. I am critical of evolutionary biology that is based on population genetics. I call it zoocentrism. Zoologists are taught that life starts with animals, and they block out four-fifths of the information in biology [by ignoring the other four major groups of life] and all of the information in geology.


You have attacked population genetics—the foundation of much current evolutionary research—as “numerology.” What do you mean by that term?

When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. 
Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
Do you ever get tired of being called controversial?

I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.

Insofar as the so-called AIDS virus HIV has been shown by Nancy Padian to be utterly uninfectious, and yet HIV/AIDS researchers happily produce surveys and studies year after year which use infectiousness as a premise and seem to show it as a result, in changing rates of infection, Margulis is the only major HIV skeptic who has come up with a possibility in syphilis as a cause which accounts for this phenomenon, which otherwise has to be explained by the wide ranging cross reaction achieved by multiple versions of the HIV test.

But though everything else she believed about HIV/AIDS was quite right according to our own research in the literature over a quarter decade, we never quite saw her point on syphilis as being the best answer as to what causes AIDS, since although it might be sufficient it wasn’t necessary, ie the symptoms of syphilis were not as far as we know common to all or even many AIDS patients. Nor has AIDS ever shown any sign of being infectious in the general population. Now at least we have her public answer to this objection, in this exchange.

We congratulate Teresi however on making sense of her ideas in his interview, which we would have liked to do ourselves, and planned to do, but Alas found Margulis too preoccupied on more important research when she visited New York, research which was changing biological theory as she did it.

Monday night bash hottest in New York

Open mike adds talent and surprise

The hottest spot in New York Monday night without question is a well kept secret from all except blues aficionados and the few tourists lucky enough to stumble upon it deep in the underground space of the great 42nd Street jazz/blues/rock/reggae/dance club B.B.King‘s (www.bbkingblues.com 237 West 42St 997 4144), which is between 7th and 8th Avenue on 42nd, amid the garish daylit power of the neon extravagance of the modern mall whose central strip might seem to hold nothing but tawdry tourist attractions and services, from a sparkling Macdonalds housed in an old cinema to the Hard Rock Cafe to skyscraper hotels to the news strip necklacing the central Times Square tower, an area long abandoned by the New York Times to its funfair noise.

The blues mountain peak I refer to is the Lucille Grill. Running into bass guitarist and blog virtuoso Amy Madden (www.writerless.blogspot.com) last night on the crosstown bus on 96th and being apprised that her famous Monday session was going to be in full swing from 8pm to 1am at BBKing’s intimate Lucille Grill, I dropped down there are 20 min past eight, walking through the surging crowds and down the stairs to the Lucille Grill, briefly visiting the main stage space to watch Yellowman performing briefly, as he stood on the big stage presenting what sounded to be frank rather undistinguished dancehall post reggae loud enough to cover a nuclear explosion nearby. But a few steps across the way and down allowed me to enter blues paradise.

I bought a $8 beer and commandeered a ringside seat for what proved to be an almighty blues blast that was still going strong when I left three hours later. After endlessly rolling locomotive blues had warmed the crowd into a slow frenzy a late open mike drew vibraphonist Charles Thompson (845-249-9064) whose miniature silvery notes cut clear thru the drum and guitar roar, a hot guitarist straight out of the ad featuring the caveman, namely the great Joe Berger (646 537 1569), a Monday evening regular, and a splendidly round youthful Big Mama belting out the blues with the best of them – all together, in the finale which climaxed the evening for me.

As an unexpected American Idol moment the open mike session was even led off by a young black singer from Rochester, Josh (585 503 8996) 23, singing “Falling in love with you is the best thing that Happened to me”, his own tribute to a love lost to death.

Blues super trio

But the great and reliable star talent at Lucille on Mondays is the house trio. Alan Child’s seasoned, generous drumming and Amy Madden’s throbbing, warming bass form endlessly satisfying propulsion for Jon Paris’s guitar and harmonica riffs which Paris can take as far out as Jimmy Hendrix if he feels like it, yet never leave the firm ground of classic blues form behind.

There are few players who can match Jon Paris’s feel for and mastery of this classic music, which, let’s face it, in hand with jazz is the greatest contribution America has made to world culture (www.jonparis.com).

And all you have to do to hear this supremely entertaining soul food is to drop into the Lucille Bar any Monday night. No cover, no minimum, beer from $8 and food good enough if you’re hungry. And a stage, bar and table layout of the perfect scale and shape for blues listening – and a bit of dancing, if you feel like it, see below.

The dancers are Josh the a capella singer and Erica, whose favorite drink is a Mabylene (pictured), which at the Lucille bar is Absolut Wild Tea Vodka, St Germain eidenflower liqueur and Rose’s Lime Juice.

Other visitors from faraway included anaesthiologist Augstein Svedahl and neurologist Kanna Svedahl from mid-Northern Norway, who like Erica had stumbled across this little musical paradise more or less by serendipity, ie a basic recommendation to visit BBKing’s, with no special instruction to make it Lucille’s Grill.

But that’s the free ticket to look for at BBKing’s, at least on Monday nights. While the food is no better than it should be, the Svedahl’s agreed, it matters nothing. The scene is a little bit of blues heaven.

Excellent British author on WWII again

Rose asks pertinent questions

Charlies Rose had a fine British type on tonight, Jun 16, an amiable military historian and author so well versed in his topic that his voice never rose above the cheerful reasonableness of his pleasingly Oxbridge patrician background. That’s what one discerned, anyway, as Andrew Roberts answered some very good questions from Charlie, who was either very well briefed or, it seemed more likely, a student of the topic himself who knew the key questions to ask – such as Could Hitler have won the War? Who was the greatest general of the War? (the brutal Marshal Zhukov, who defeated the Germans, killing four out of the five the Allies killed in total). Did Hitler resent his failure as a painter? Enormously, it seemed.

The key question is why after his early successes, including the Blitzkrieg across to the Channel which put France out of the War in six weeks, which Hitler approved of despite the reservations of most of his generals, did Hitler end up failing, primarily by opening the Eastern front, his big mistake? According to Roberts, whose The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, is obviously a fine guide to the best thinking on the topic, because he kept putting his ideology first rather than the best military strategy. In the early phase, there was every reason to believe he would have won.

If he had just left the Russians, and the Jews, alone, he would have, it seems clear. One wonders what on earth Europe would have looked like today.

Here’s Robert Service in the Observer:

It is a safe bet that at any given moment there is someone in the United Kingdom writing a general history of the Second World War. Andrew Roberts’s latest offering is a sparkling addition to the groaning shelves. The British have almost a monopoly in the subject. Go into any bookshop in Italy and there are always plenty of publications about the fighting in the Apennines. In Warsaw, the same is true of the Soviet massacre of Polish troops in the Katyn forest. Russian military historians produce an annual stream of books on the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. American authors write endlessly about FDR, Patton and even Churchill. But it is in this country that most accounts have appeared about the war as a global phenomenon from September 1939 right through to the Japanese surrender in August 1945.

There is an obvious reason for this. Once Hitler had invaded Poland, it was the British and the French who opened hostilities against him. In less than a year, France had fallen. The United Kingdom fought on alone against Germany and Japan (sic – corrected later) at a time when the USSR had a near-alliance with the Third Reich and American internal politics prevented Roosevelt from entering the conflict. This changed in 1941 after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the Japanese air force attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbour. Immediately, the “Big Three” – America, the Soviet Union and Britain – came together to smash militarist imperialism west and east. Russian rulers to this day have dealt with their country’s less than glorious history before Operation Barbarossa by focusing on the “great patriotic war” of 1941-1945 to the exclusion of the years of collusion with German power.

Roberts offers refreshing judgments on the politicians and commanders in lively prose and his denunciation of the murder of millions of Jews is as measured as it is moving. His pride in the British national performance is frequently on display, but he is not shy about puncturing the bubble of reputations. General Montgomery’s foibles are exposed alongside his virtues as a field commander. Roberts also freely acknowledge the importance of the American military contribution without failing to point out the scary vanity of General Patton. He also refrains from the conventional praise for Marshal Zhukov, instead highlighting how brutally he and fellow Soviet commanders treated their troops.

The thread binding the book together is the question of historical contingency. Roberts indicates how often Hitler would have done better, and even won the war, if he had made different choices. This is not an original thought, nor is it claimed as such. No one in 1940 needed to tell Churchill that the Germans stood a good chance of crushing the United Kingdom. In the long summer of 1941, as the German armies streamed as fast as their tanks could carry them towards the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, it was the belief of nearly every Soviet citizen that the USSR was on the brink of complete defeat. Such was Roosevelt’s feeling that the Third Reich was about to gain definitive victory in Europe that he twisted arms in the Washington political establishment to send food and armaments to the United Kingdom even before America’s entry into the war.

Hitler as a military leader was Stalin’s blood twin. He accepted only forward movement from his generals and regarded tactical withdrawal as a shameful betrayal of the Fatherland. When advancing, he often lost his sense of strategic realism. Thus he foolishly fiddled around with the planned distribution of his forces on the Eastern Front in August and September 1941, when a more sensible idea would have been to amass German strength for a decisive thrust against Moscow. If Stalin had had to evacuate his capital, the damage to Soviet morale, communications and industrial capacity would have been tremendous.

Then there was Hitler’s disastrous handling of operations around and in Stalingrad. His insistence that Paulus’s army should fight on and die rather than save themselves and their equipment by effecting a temporary retreat consigned hundreds of thousands of Germans and their allies to their graves or to the gulag.

As Roberts emphasises, Churchill could not resist poking fun at “Corporal Hitler” for his ineptitude. Hitler had form as an inflexible commander. When Rommel, outnumbered in men and tanks, wanted to undertake a strategic withdrawal in North Africa in 1942, he got short shrift from the Führer. Large quantities of experienced German and Italian soldiers fell into captivity who could otherwise have fought the enemies of the Third Reich in Italy.

Hitler also damaged his cause through his political management. The book makes the interesting point that German Jews would probably have fought patriotically in his army if only he had not spurned them. A feeling that Germany, after the Versailles treaty of 1919, deserved to expand its territory again was not peculiar to the Nazi party. The scientists who invented the American atomic bomb included several Jewish refugees from the Third Reich. It is also well known that many Ukrainian villages in 1941 greeted the German invaders with the traditional welcome of bread and salt. The Germans allowed churches and private shops, closed under Soviet rule, to be reopened. For a while, it looked as though the Third Reich was exploiting “the national question” in the USSR to great advantage. But Ukrainians soon learnt the truth about Hitler. Grain requisitioning by the Germans was as ruthless as under Stalin. Young, able-bodied people were conscripted for labour service in German factories. Mass executions of Jews, Roma, communists and other suspect groups became a routine affair.

Whether it would have been possible to govern Ukraine gently while continuing to impose a brutal occupation of neighbouring Poland is not clear. But Roberts makes a strong case that Hitler’s interventions turned eastern Europe against him. He puts the same arguments about the Japanese army in the Asian territories it conquered from the north Pacific down to Burma. Colonial peoples who might have welcomed them as liberators from white imperial rule were savagely suppressed and exploited.

The British, French and Dutch did poorly in the initial stages of the war in the east. But American manpower, technology and guts proved greater than anyone in Tokyo or Berlin had imagined possible. After Pearl Harbour, Roosevelt had little difficulty in carrying his people with him in aiming at a total triumph over Japan and its ally Germany. Although his health declined in 1944-1945, he never lost sight of this objective. He made mistakes, especially by failing to deal more robustly with Stalin, but he played a crucial role in enabling Britain to survive its ghastly isolation in 1940.

The central character in the book’s drama, inevitably, is Hitler. Roberts’s suggestion seems to be that he could only have won the war if he had not allowed it to spiral into a global struggle. Hitler missed his chance to knock out the USSR early on and provoked the US into entering the ring on the side of the opposition. He may have won the war if he had kept it as “the First European War”; the gamble that did not pay off was to make it global.