Wordcatcher Tales: biombo, subaru

Biombo – The Spanish term biombo ‘folding screen’ comes from Japanese byōbu (屏風 ‘wallwind’ or ‘screenwind’) for the same item. I first learned the term in the caption to Fig. 9 in the book I’ve been reading, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. The figure shows an oil-painted canvas biombo depicting “The Encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma” as imagined by the artist Juan Correa c. 1683. It goes on to describe biombo as “a popular Mexican artform introduced by the Japanese ambassador to Mexico City in 1614″! This left me skeptical because Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868) is far better known for its policy of national seclusion (sakoku) than for international outreach.

But in fact Tokugawa Japan did engage in a bit of outreach before the 1630s. In 1613, Date Masamune, first lord of Sendai, had Japan’s first galleon built in Ishinomaki (one of the cities hardest hit by the 2011 tsunami). Later christened the San Juan Bautista and laden with ceremonial gifts, it set sail for Acapulco in New Spain with Japan’s first ambassador to the Vatican, Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga (支倉六右衛門常長, also spelled Faxecura Rocuyemon in Spanish sources), who spent time in Mexico City in 1614 and again on his return trip in 1618. About 60 of his Japanese compatriots who remained in Mexico until his return were baptized there as Christians. Hasekura himself waited until he got to Spain before being baptized as Francisco Felipe Faxicura.

Subaru – I was shocked a few months ago to realize that I had never bothered to wonder what the name Subaru means in Japanese. The logo on Subaru cars should perhaps have given me a hint, but I only found out about the Japanese meaning from a linguist friend who was researching whether the position of the Pleiades marks a seasonal cycle in any languages I was familiar with in Papua New Guinea.

In Numbami, the two words used to translate English ‘year’ are damana, which also means ‘Pleiades’, and yala, which comes from German Jahr. According to Streicher’s (1982) Jabêm–English Dictionary entry for dam(o): “The Pleiades are the main constellation seen in Jabêm during the dry season (October to March), and governing their activities in their gardens, i.e. the felling of trees to clear the ground for new gardens; the burning and planting of fields is done according to the position of the Pleiades.”

In Japanese, ‘Pleiades’ is usually rendered into プレアデス星団 Pureiadesu seidan (= ‘star group’), but the older native Japanese name for the cluster is Subaru, and the Chinese character for it is 昴, pronounced BOU in Sino-Japanese. I’m not aware that the Pleiades play any role at all in Japan’s highly conventionalized seasonal cycles, but the constellation may be a convenient symbol of the five divisions of Fuji Heavy Industries that merged to create the Subaru car company.

Curing Capt. Cook’s Costiveness with Clysters

From: Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horwitz (Picador, 2002), pp. 218-219:

Cook resumed his polar probe during the next southern summer [1773], after wintering in Polynesia. The second approach to Antarctica proved even more wretched than the first. Livestock perished, tropical provisions ran out, and the men—eating little except weevil-ridden biscuits and salt rations—began to show signs of scurvy and depression.

“Salt Beef & pork, without vegetables for 14 weeks running, would probably cure a Glutton, even in England,” wrote William Wales, the ship’s astronomer. According to George Forster, even the resilient Cook became “pale and lean, entirely lost his appetite, and laboured under a perpetual costiveness [constipation].”…

Three weeks later, Cook collapsed. He doesn’t reveal much about this in his journal, except to note that he was confined to his cot for a week because of a gastric affliction he called “Billious colick.” George Forster makes it clear that the captain’s condition was much graver than Cook suggests. The captain suffered from “violent pains” and “violent vomiting,” Forster wrote. “His life was entirely despaired of.”

The treatment given Cook—opiates, clysters (suppositories), plasters on his stomach, “purges” and emetics to induce vomiting—probably didn’t help. When Cook finally recovered, his first meal in a week was the only fresh meat on the ship: the Forsters’ dog. “Thus I received nourishment and strength from food which would have made most people in Europe sick,” Cook wrote.

Capt. Cook, Guugu Yimidhirr, and Kangaroos

From: Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horwitz (Picador, 2002), pp. 182-184:

Guns weren’t the settlers’ only weapons. Aborigines had little resistance to Western disease, or to alcohol. Chinese immigrants introduced opium, which Aborigines consumed by mixing the drug’s ash with water and drinking it. The Guugu Yimidhirr, like many Aboriginal clans, appeared headed for extinction—a fate little mourned by white Australians….

In the case of the Guugu Yimidhirr, it was Cook who proved their salvation, albeit indirectly. A German translation of Cook’s voyages inspired a young Bavarian, Johann Flierl, to set off in the 1880s “as a missionary to the most distant heathen land with its still quite untouched peoples.” He created a Lutheran mission near Cooktown that became a refuge for Aborigines. Flierl named the mission Elim, after an oasis the Israelites found during their exodus from Egypt. As oases went, Queensland’s Elim wasn’t much: a sandy, infertile patch north of Cooktown. But it grew into a stable community, and its school educated scores of Aborigines, some of whom became nationally prominent.

One such success story was Eric Deeral, who served in the 1970s as the first Aboriginal representative in Queensland’s parliament. I tracked him down late one afternoon at his daughter’s modest bungalow a few blocks from Cooktown’s main street. A small, very dark-skinned man, he met my knock at the door with a wary expression and a curt “May I help you?” When I burbled about my travels, his face widened into a welcoming smile. “Come in, come in, I love talking about Cook!” After several days of conversing about little except “ferals,” rooting crocodiles, and rugby league, it was a relief to find someone who shared my passion for the navigator.

Eric showed me into a small office he kept at the front of the bungalow. The bookshelf included several volumes about Cook. Like Johann Flierl, Eric had been fascinated since childhood by the image of first contact between Europeans and native peoples untouched by the West. He’d quizzed Aboriginal elders about stories they’d heard of Cook and his men. “At first, our people thought they were overgrown babies,” he said. Aboriginal newborns, Eric explained, are often much paler than adults. But once the Guugu Yimidhirr saw the newcomers’ power, particularly the noise and smoke of their guns, they came to believe the strangers were white spirits, or ghosts of deceased Aborigines. “Lucky for Cook, white spirits are viewed as benign,” Eric said. “If they’d been seen as dark spirits, my ancestors probably would have speared them.”…

Listening to Eric, I felt the giddy thrill of unlocking small mysteries that had been sealed inside the English journals for more than two centuries. Blind Freddy might know the answers, but no books I’d read had provided them. Eric ran his finger down the list of native words Parkinson had collected. “If you read closely, you can almost see these men, groping to understand each other,” he said. Yowall, for instance, meant beach, not sand, as Parkinson had written. “One of our men probably pointed across the river at the sandy shore on the other side,” Eric said. Similarly, wageegee meant scar, not head—perhaps the man who had told it to the English was pointing to a cut brow when he said the word.

As for kangooroo, this was a fair approximation of the Guugu Yimidhirr word, which Eric rendered gangurru. But Aborigines, unlike Maori and Tahitians, didn’t have a shared language; living in small, widely scattered groups, they spoke scores of different tongues. The English failed to recognize this. The result was a comically circular instance of linguistic transmission. Officers of the First Fleet, familiar with the Endeavour‘s journals, used the words Cook and his men had collected in Queensland to try and communicate with Botany Bay Aborigines eighteen years later.

“Whatever animal is shown them,” a frustrated officer on the Fleet reported, “they call kangaroo.” Even the sight of English sheep and cattle prompted the Gwyeagal to cheerfully cry out “Kangaroo, kangaroo!” In fact, the Gwyeagal had no such word in their vocabulary (they called the marsupial patagorang). Rather, they’d picked up “kangaroo” from the English and guessed that it referred to all large beasts. So a word that originated with an encounter between Cook and a small clan in north Queensland traveled to England with the Endeavour, then back to Botany Bay with the First Fleet, and eventually became the universal name for Australia’s symbol. There was an added twist. The Guugu Yimidhirr had ten different words for the marsupials, depending on their size and color. “Gangurru means a large gray or black kangaroo,” Eric said. “If Cook had asked about a small red one, the whole world would be saying nharrgali today.”

Cook’s Endeavour: Victualled, Flogged, & Pickled

From: Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, by Tony Horwitz (Picador, 2002), pp. 16-17, 28-29:

ON MY FIRST night aboard the replica Endeavour, I sat down with my watchmates to a dinner advertised on galley blackboard as “gruel.” This turned out to be a tasty stew, with pie and fruit to follow It was also a marked improvement on the fare aboard the original Endeavour. Before leaving port. Cook complained to the Navy Board that the cook assigned his ship was “a lame infirm man, and incapable of doing his Duty.” The board granted his request for a replacement sending John Thompson, who had lost his right hand. Cook’s request for still another man was denied. The Navy gave preference to cripples and maimed persons” in its appointment of cooks, a fair indicator of its regard for sailors’ palates.

“Victualled” for twelve months, the Endeavour toted thousands of pounds of ship’s biscuit (hardtack), salt beef, and salt pork: the sailors staples. On alternate days, the crew ate oatmeal and cheese instead of meat. Though hearty—a daily ration packed 4,500 calories—the sailors’ diet was as foul as it was monotonous. “Our bread indeed is but indifferent,” the Endeavour‘s botanist, Joseph Banks, observed, “occasioned by the quantity of Vermin that are in it. I have often seen hundreds nay thousands shaken out of a single bisket.” Banks catalogued five types of insect and noted their mustardy and “very disagreeable” flavor, which he likened to a medicinal tonic made from stags’ horns.

On the replica, we also enjoyed a considerable luxury denied Cook’s men: marine toilets and showers tucked discreetly in the forward hold. Up on the main deck, Todd showed us what the original sailors used: holed planks extending from the bow, utterly exposed in every sense. These were called heads, or seats of ease. On Cook’s second voyage, an unfortunate sailor was last seen using the heads, from which he fell and drowned….

On our first-day tour of the replica, Todd had showed us a canvas bag; inside it was a heavy knotted rope—the cat-o’-nine-tails, so named for the number of its cords and the catlike scratches it left on a man’s back. This was also the origin of the phrases “let the cat out of the bag” and “not enough room to swing a cat.” The cat came out of the bag with depressing regularity during the Endeavour‘s long passage to the Pacific. On one day alone, three men were lashed, the last for “not doing his duty in punishing the above two.” Before the trip was over. Cook would flog one in four of his crew, about average for eighteenth-century voyages.

If Cook didn’t spare the lash, he also didn’t stint sailors their most treasured salve: alcohol. The Endeavour sailed with a staggering quantity of booze: 1,200 gallons of beer, 1,600 gallons of spirits (brandy, arrack, rum), and 3,032 gallons of wine that Cook collected at Madeira. The customary ration for a sailor was a gallon of beer a day, or a pint of spirits, diluted with water to make a twice-daily dose of “grog.” Sailors also mixed beer with rum or brandy to create the debilitating drink known as flip. Cook’s notes on individual crewmen include frequent asides such as “more or less drunk every day.”

Railroads and Other Baffling Innovations

From A Most Magnificent Machine: America Adopts the Railroad, 1825-1862, by Craig Miner (U. Press of Kansas, 2010), pp. 253-254:

Why do our clothes not fit so well? It results from a chain of circumstances the origins of which are obscure to most and the direction of which was partially accidental. Early in the nineteenth century, inventors came up with an automated loom, and businesspeople put these to work in England and in such American industrial cities as Lowell, Massachusetts, turning out cheap cotton cloth. This, along with the application of the cotton gin to cotton production, revitalized slavery as well as creating an incentive for inexpensive ready-made and therefore not specifically tailored clothing.

Such long-range deep impacts of technological and business developments have long been studied. Lynn White, in Medieval Technology and Social Change, documented the enormous impact of clocks, heavy harness and stirrups on population growth, shock warfare, and the age of exploration. Siegfried Giedion wrote in his Mechanization Takes Command of what he called “anonymous history.” Who can estimate the impact of the invention of the toilet, or the assembly line in food production, or household machinery on the status of women? Langdon Winner observed “Developments in the technical sphere continually outpace the capacity of individuals and social systems to adapt. As the rate of technological innovation quickens, it becomes increasingly important and increasingly difficult to predict the range of effects that a given innovation will have.”

A recent touring art exhibit called “The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam” reaffirmed the impact of that technology on perceptions of life and landscape. “The application of steam power to motion,” the catalog noted, “came as a startling turn of events.” Some found it wondrous, but “for others it heralded a frightening, almost demonic energy.” There was something supernatural about it, even extraterrestrial. It made middle-class people “physically and psychologically susceptible to impersonal and potentially lethal industrial machines.”…

Think of the social and psychological changes wrought by the telegraph, electricity, the phonograph, the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, the computer, the Internet, the long-playing record, video games, the cell phone, fast food, the shopping mall, and the iPod. And think of how “baffled,” in many ways, we are by them and how they should fit in with the rest of our existence. These devices have become ubiquitous parts of modern life. An age when they did not exist is nearly unimaginable to many, while an age where they do exist is unendurable to others.

Drosophila spp.: Guinea Pigs with Wings

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 127-128:

Sun filtered down through the trees, rustling in a steady wind: wonderful weather for humans, [David] Foote said, but terrible for flies. “These are the worst possible conditions—I just want to warn you.” Of all the Hawaiian insects, the dearest to Foote is the family Drosophilidae, the pomace flies, better known, not entirely correctly, as fruit flies. Included in the family Drosophilidae is the genus Drosophila. Among genetics researchers, Drosophila is the organism of choice. Its chromosomes are few and big and easily extracted from its salivary glands; it reproduces at ten days of age, so genetic changes unfold observably from generation to generation, which means you can wrap up an experiment in a matter of weeks. Also, flies don’t eat much—not like mice or lab rats, which will quickly chew a hole in one’s departmental budget. Over the past century, the science of genetics has grown up around one drosophila species in particular, Drosophila melanogaster, a tiny red-eyed orange fly so ubiquitous that scientists simply shrug and call it “cosmopolitan.” Drosophila melanogaster is a guinea pig with wings. It has been scrutinized and forcibly mutated, crossbred, back-bred, inbred. Scientists have created drosophilas with extra-long life spans (sixty days, instead of thirty), drosophilas with superior maze-navigating abilities, drosophilas dumb as posts; drosophilas with no legs, with legs sprouting from their heads, even—I saw their photograph a few years ago on the front page of The New York Times—with extra, ectopic eyes peering out from where their knees should be. A great deal of what we know about ourselves has been gleaned from monkeying with this pale orange fly.

In contrast, the drosophilas of Hawaii owe their oddity entirely to the whims of natural selection. They are a tribe unto themselves: oversize, with elaborate stripes and colorations and strange and intricate mating rituals. To prove their sexual worth, males of the species Drosophila heteroneura butt heads, which are elongated like those of hammerhead sharks. Males of the closely related Drosophila silvestris stand on their hind legs and grapple like boxers in the clinch. If you want to understand the genetics of colonization, isolation, and speciation in a nonlaboratory setting, the Hawaiian drosophilas are your subject; they are honeycreepers for entomologists. There are some six hundred species of Drosophila in Hawaii, one-fifth of all the Drosophila species in the world—the progeny of flies that tumbled from earlier Hawaiian islands and have been doing so for forty-two million years, ever since the one fly from which they are all descended blew in from somewhere else, to an island that long ago submerged. From one strange and alluring species to the next, drosophila are themselves a sort of archipelago of biodiversity.

And as surely as the honeycreepers are indicators of environmental change in Hawaii, so too are the drosophilas, perhaps more so. Ecologists sometimes describe an ecosystem as a sort of pyramidal hotel of energy consumers, built up of successive trophic layers of feeders and fed-upons: plants, which draw their energy from light; grazers, which draw their energy from plants and span a range of organisms from leaf-mining insects to fruit-eating bats to Jersey cows; and predators, like tigers, feral cats, Tyrannosaurus rex, and bird-eating brown tree snakes. It is a loose schema, with numerous exceptions and outstanding questions. (Which story, for example, do carnivorous army ants inhabit in the Amazonian rain forest pyramid?) The drosophilas occupy a janitoral closet near the base of this building. They subsist largely on decaying plant material-bark, branches, leaf litter. They are composters, thriving on the senescence and misfortune of their fellow hotel guests. Most everything ends with them. The drosophilas are so ubiquitous in Hawaiian rain forests and their microhabitats so varied that their seemingly minor fates in fact closely reflect the spectrum of disruptions and alterations unfolding above and around them-including but not limited to the damage caused, or said to be caused, by feral pigs. If your quarry is the pig, it pays to follow the flies.

“The drosophilas are decomposers in this ecosystem,” Foote explained to me one afternoon on the Big Island. “They’re responsible for breaking down the organic matter in plants and allowing the nutrients to be cycled up into the forest again. These particular species breed on plants that are some of the most sensitive to disturbance by pigs, cattle, and rats. So we’re very concerned about their status.”

Fumigating the Polynesian Voyagers, 1995

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 65-66:

In 1995 three Hawaiian canoes sailed south to the Society Islands, met a contingent of three other South Pacific canoes, then sailed to the Marquesas and north again to me Big Island of Hawaii, for the first time retracing the original route of discovery of the Hawaiian Islands.

This historic voyage encountered only one significant problem. Three days before the canoes were due to arrive home, the crew radioed Honolulu with news that they were suffering the painful bite of some undetected insect. Entomologists were consulted. The suspects were narrowed to three: the nono, a tiny, vicious blackfly that plagues beaches of the Marquesas and doomed those islands’ resorts; the punkie midge, a no-see-um half the size of the nono that also haunts the Marquesas; and a biting midge known in French Polynesia as the white beach nono. The first is native to the Marquesas; the latter two arrived in Polynesia sometime between 1920 and 1950. All three are functionally identical—with mouths like scissors, they bite holes in the victim’s skin, producing welts that if scratched can quickly fester. A single nono fly can inflict five thousand bites in an hour. After securing a blood meal, the fly retreats to a crevice in any nearby decaying organic matter—waterlogged wood a coconut husk, the hull of a Polynesian voyaging canoe—to reproduce. Its larvae emerge several days later to begin the cycle anew. With these facts in mind, Honolulu newspapers treated readers to several days of midge coverage, disagreeing only as to whether the midges posed a worse threat to the tourist industry than the brown tree snake, or merely an equivalent one. Cynics whispered of a midge conspiracy, of midges planted aboard the canoes by an environmental group eager to publicize the dangers of alien species in Hawaii.

Riding a strong headwind, a biting midge can cross fifty miles of open ocean. To forestall such an event, and despite prime sailing conditions the six voyaging canoes were ordered to a halt some two hundred miles south-southwest of Hawaii’s Big Island, Hawai’i. The following morning, after much wrangling over which government agency should take responsibility for a nuisance insect that is neither an agricultural pest nor strictly speaking, a public-health threat, and which in any event now sat in international waters, a Coast Guard plane dropped thirty-six aerosol cans of pyrethrin, an insecticide made from daisies, into what were now heavy seas. The canoes’ holds were emptied, clothes and equipment sprayed with disinfectant, the hulls scrubbed four times with seawater, the sails keelhauled. Everything organic was tossed overboard: religions carvings, palm-frond baskets, breadfruit seedlings wrapped in coconut husks, and traditional foods like sweet potato, taro leaf patties, and poi—which crew members perhaps were happy to see go, as they later confessed a preference for sausage and Spam. Inspectors from the Hawaii Department of Health then boarded the canoes and sprayed everything again. A series of triumphal celebrations had been planned to mark the voyage’s end. Instead, the canoes were escorted into Hilo Harbor, sprayed once more, and enclosed in fumigation tents. A crowd of two dozen, including several customs and immigrations officials, greeted them.

Health and agriculture inspectors still do not know what sort of midge they nearly encountered; the cleaning, spraying, scrubbing, and fumigation had left no trace of them. Other survivors were discovered, however, including four species of fly, two species of ant, a cockroach, two spiders, a book louse, a parasitic wasp, a beetle, several snails, some live shrimps, a gecko, two species of eye gnat, and a scale insect that in some parts of the world is considered a serious agricultural pest. Some time afterward the chief of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture was heard expressing nostalgia for the days when state inspectors could walk down the aisles of arriving aircraft and fumigate freely, as they still do in New Zealand. As for the canoes, they reached their destinations. The Hawaiian crews sailed to warm homecomings on Maui, Molokai, and Oahu. The Cook Islanders disembarked, showered, and dried off with one hundred and fifty donated towels. The Tahitian voyagers, though they had a fine canoe, never arrived; in fact, they never embarked. They had failed to apply for U.S. visas, and were gently advised to stay home.

Guam: New Predator, New Prey

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 31:

In simple ecological models, the relationship between a predator and its prey is straightforward, Malthusian. In the classic model, there are rabbits and there are lynxes eating rabbits: the lynxes thrive, reproduce, spawn more hungry lynxes—so many that soon there are fewer and fewer rabbits, fewer lynx meals, eventually fewer lynxes. The lynx population declines, the rabbits slowly recover their numbers, and the cycle of eating and eaten, supply and starvation, begins again. The situation on Guam is altogether different. Even after the forests were emptied of birds, the snake continued to thrive. Its numbers are down: approximately twenty-four snakes per hectare, from a hundred per hectare in the late 1980s. That is a major drop, yet twenty-four snakes per hectare is still four times more dense than even the most snake-infested plot of Amazon jungle. Campbell said, “That’s like having a gob versus a big gob.” Now the snakes subsist on skinks and geckos. And the skinks and geckos are not disappearing. In fact, because they are no longer preyed upon by birds, they are more abundant than ever. The snakes have found a renewable resource, the gustatory equivalent of solar energy. And there is evidence to suggest that the snakes are reproducing faster too, giving birth at a younger age. Few biological invaders, once they have gained such a solid foothold in their new habitat, subsequently disappear from it entirely. Any hope that the snake would eat itself out of existence appears equally groundless.

In On the Origin of Species, Darwin meditated on the impact that house cats might be having on the surrounding countryside. If there were more cats, there would be fewer mice. With fewer mice burrowing into the hives of their favorite snack, the bumblebee, there would perforce be more bees buzzing about, gathering nectar, pollinating the local blossoms—most notably the blossoms of Trifolium pratense, the common red clover, which depends exclusively on the bumblebee to complete its reproductive cycle. In short, more cats would mean more red clover. “Plants and animals, most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations,” Darwin wrote.

The Zen of Ecological Niches

From Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, by Alan Burdick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), pp. 135-136:

For Charles Elton and many of his successors, biological invasions were a way to probe and characterize the way that ecological communities are assembled and held together. The ecosystem was studied as a sort of organic machine—a system—of semi-interchangeable parts, or, to borrow another analogy, a kind of corporate economy maintained by organisms with defined ecological jobs. By studying the arrival of foreign workers and the consequent displacements, the notion went, a scientist could figure out the overall corporate structure: the various job descriptions, the interoffice competition, the company bylaws, the glue of market success and longevity. Critical to this schema is the job itself, the ecological niche—a concept that has receded from meaning over the years with every new attempt to clarify it. Today, one can speak of a habitat niche (the range of habitats in which a species can and does occur) or a functional niche, the “role” or “place” of a species in a community—a notion further divisible into trophic niche (the relationship of the species to its food and enemies) and resource niche (which spans things utilized by the species, like nesting sites). As a conceptual tool, the niche has effectively dropped from the modern ecologist’s belt. “Niche,” Mark Williamson summarizes in his book Biological Invasions, “is useful in a preliminary, exploratory description, but becomes difficult to pin down in particular situations.”

Whatever a niche is exactly, successful invasion, in Elton’s schema, allegedly involves occupying an empty one. But, many biologists counter. what does it mean for a niche to lie “empty”? If a niche is an ecological job that takes up food or resources, and such a job is going unfilled in an ecosystem, the community would show side effects; it would soon be overwhelmed by waste or unused food. So for such a job opening to exist yet not harm the community, by definition it must be a job that involves no interaction whatsoever with other community members—like one of those jobs the boss’s kid fills on summer vacation, only less productive. But if that is the case. any invader entering this empty non-job would have no impact on the system—which clearly isn’t what happens with many invaders. “If you take the view that there are no empty niches,” Williamson writes, “the invasion of communities cannot involve occupying empty niches,” Some ecologists contend that in saving that an invader occupies a vacant niche, what is meant is that an invader plays a new functional role in the community, not that it doesn’t use resources previously used by other species. The brown tree snake fits this definition; in coming to Guam, it declared itself top predator of an ecosystem that for eons had run perfectly well without such a top executive. Under these terms, Williamson writes, successful invasion becomes a matter of always, often, or sometimes entering a niche that can be full, empty, partly full, or partly empty—terminology that begins to suit the term itself. Williamson concludes, “It is to some extent a matter or the meaning you want to put on the word ‘empty.’”

At the very least, invasion biology has made it clear that the conflicts and interactions that transpire between species in an ecosystem are too fluid and dynamic to be meaningfully described by a static term like niche. To introduce niche theory is to propose a koan: Does an ecological niche exist before on invader arrives to fill it? Meditatively interesting, perhaps, but useless in forecasting. “We are still unable to recognize a vacant niche except by carrying out the tautological experiment of introducing a species and seeing if it becomes established,” one biologist notes. Williamson adds, “The extent to which a niche is vacant is, in practice, a post hoc explanation. Post hoc explanations are neither intellectually satisfying nor much use in prediction.”

This book is engagingly written, but contains a lot of little factual errors.

Mawdudi and “Theodemocracy”

From: Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World, by Vali Nasr (Free Press, 2009), Kindle Loc. 2645-76:

The fundamentalist founders argued that the decline of Islam began not, as popular wisdom held, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, but much earlier, in 661 C.E., when the Umayyad dynasty rose to power and turned the caliphate into a monarchy. Muawiyah who founded the Umayyad caliphate was not a companion of the Prophet or respected for his religious standing. He was a general who strong-armed his way to the top to rule an empire that he then passed on to his son. From that time on, went the argument, clerics had betrayed the faith by submitting to the will of religiously unqualified rulers who in turn sustained them through patronage. They had allowed for religion to be separated from politics, which fundamentalists thought ran counter to the religion’s intent. “The chief characteristic of Islam,” wrote Pakistan’s Mawdudi, “is that it makes no distinction between spiritual and secular life.”

Mawdudi was particularly effective in articulating this vision of history and politics. He taught that Islamic history after the seventh century was therefore “un-Islamic”—a shocking assertion, rejecting as it did centuries of impressive achievements of Islamic society in the sciences and arts, culture, and the building of powerful empires. Those achievements did not impress him, and he found fault with the manner in which, throughout history, as Islam spread to new regions of the world, it had found expression through local cultures. Such compromises he thought had altered the true meaning of Islam. He also dismissed the moral efforts and spiritual accomplishments of the countless Muslims who had lived by and handed down their faith’s teachings across all those centuries.

Mawdudi did not preach violence; on the contrary he argued that the goal of an Islamic state would be achieved by a steadfast process of proselytizing. To Mawdudi fundamentalism was all about a practice of educating; he would write and give speeches, argue and persuade, and his followers would do the same. The process would be slow and tedious, but by this means, more and more believers would be converted, until everyone was in the fold. The Islamic state would then follow naturally. He told his followers in 1941, “we desire no demonstrations or agitations, no flag waving, slogans, or the like … [for us] such display of uncontrolled emotions will prove deadly. … You do not need to capture your audience through impassioned speeches. … but you must kindle the light of Islam in your hearts, and change those around you.” There was more than a pinch of elitism here. Mawdudi wished first to convert the educated—professionals, bureaucrats, and intellectuals; the same class upon which Ataturk and Reza Shah had pinned their hopes. If the best and brightest converted to Mawdudi’s cause, then an Islamic state could not help but follow, he argued, as the educated elite would be running the state.

His teaching was also not expressly antidemocratic. The Islamic state was not conceived of as a true democracy, but through tautological reasoning, Mawdudi and his followers did claim that their Islamic state would be democratic. If democracy is a cherished quality in a state, then the Islamic state must by definition have it too, so Mawdudi described his imaginary republic as a “theodemocracy” or a “democratic caliphate.” The state’s duty was not however to enact the will of its citizens but to make sure that its citizens followed religious dictates in their daily lives. Mawdudi assumed that this in itself would win the state popular support. After all, he argued, in a gemlike example of the closed-circuit rhetoric at which fundamentalists excel, if a state truly reflects God’s will and its citizens are good Muslims, then how could they possibly want otherwise or disagree with their rulers? If you offered sovereignty to the people, they would give it right back, assuming they had been properly educated in what is expected of them. Fundamentalism is therefore not, in its own mind, antidemocratic; it merely thinks democracy is irrelevant.

Mawdudi doesn’t sound all that different from a million other revolutionaries—religious or secular—who have no use for democracy until everyone is properly (re)educated and therefore can be expected to vote the approved way.