The New York Times has a really bizarre story up about The Game of Thrones television series, For ‘Game of Thrones,’ Rising Unease Over Rape’s Recurring Role. Here’s a flavor:

But, she added, “At a certain point, you get the feeling that you can’t walk through a chapter without expecting something horrible — almost always to a female character — just to prove that this is indeed a very scary and dark piece of literature.”

Mr. Martin said that his philosophy as a writer is to show and not tell, and doing so requires “vivid sensory detail.”

“When the scene in question is a sex scene, some readers find that intensely uncomfortable,” he said, “and that’s 10 times as true for scenes of sexual violence. But that is as it should be. Certain scenes are meant to be uncomfortable, disturbing, hard to read.”

This was a problem for many with the books when they first came out. Some readers did not appreciate the darkness which made the world that George R. R. Martin created much more gray in a metaphorical sense than traditional high fantasy, which J. R. R. Tolkien established the template for in The Lord of the Rings. But the coarse character of the narrative wasn’t by chance, Martin has explained in detail that he wanted to create a world with more ethical ambiguity, spare of magic, and a verisimilitude which belies the idea that fantasies can become pure escapism. Who would want to escape to the Dark Ages? Even the high and mighty have blood on their hands in Westeros, as they do in this world of ours.

But let us observe that in many ways Martin’s brand of morally complex fantasy which we may find “problematic” probably has much deeper cultural roots that Tolkien’s antiseptic world of immortal elves and unremittingly evil orcs. If you read the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Iliad there are many passages and events which modern sensibilities might find objectionable. For one, the ancients took slavery to be an uncontroversial institution. Their ethical universes were different. In many ways they were more brutal. Even the Germanic mythos which Tolkien drew upon to create Middle Earth was more harsh than the glow he gave to the Men of the West.

For those who wish a more elevated and clean high fantasy where the halls of the good are bright and shiny, and darkness is absolute in its opacity, there’s always Brandon Sanderson. He’s certainly a great writer who can deliver on plot which comes to life, and world-building which is exceedingly rich. But his characters also reflect more classical archetypes of good, and the sexuality is relatively absent, perhaps reflecting his Mormon religious orientation (his protagonists tend not to do the “dirty” unless their relationship has been solemnized somehow). Perhaps it says something about mainstream American culture today that they’d rather HBO produce programs that could pass muster in a Mormon seminary? Fantasy which glorifies the cultural values of someone like Amanda Marcotte or Michele Bachmann probably wouldn’t be too popular, but perhaps like salads on the menu at Wendy’s people just want it to be there to make them feel better about themselves when they indulge.*

P.S. I wonder how the shrinking violets who write for The New York Times would feel about Lord Foul’s Bane?

* I bring up Bachmann because conservative evangelicals have produced their own popular culture, which glorifies their particular values, explicitly to challenge the mainstream. To not put too fine a point on it most of it is crappy schlock, which even many evangelicals are embarrassed by. This isn’t to say that art has to be nihilistic, but there’s a fine line between imparting values in the context of a vivid artistic texture, and putting the moral of the fable before the fable itself.

What goes on in the world?

Over the past week or so the perpetual argument about whether we were “superior” to Neandertals or not has cropped up again, thanks to a new paper in PLoS ONE, Neandertal Demise: An Archaeological Analysis of the Modern Human Superiority Complex. In it the authors utilize material remains to infer that no, in fact Neandertals were not “inferior”, and their demise was more a matter of demographic assimilation than competitive exclusion and extinction. To get the “other perspective” in a measured fashion I recommend this interview of Chris Stringer in National Geographic.

As I suggest above this debate has gone back and forth for a long time, and seems subject to fashion as much as empirical results. Ten years ago the Stanford paleoanthropologist Richard Klein published The Dawn of Human Culture, which laid out very cogently the dominant perspective of the time that Neandertals were not humans as we understand humans, and were superseded by a neo-African lineage which was gifted with the bio-behavioral capacity for exceedingly flexible and protean cultural adaptability. Klein’s central conjecture is that ~50,000 years ago a subset of ancient humans in Africa developed the biological capacity for cultural creation on a scale unprecedented before in the hominin lineage. He appealed in a rather hand-wavy fashion to punctuated equilibrium to serve as the basis for what was basically a model of modern human origins out of a single saltation event. Though not perhaps in every exact detail, the broad outlines of Klein’s thesis were accepted as part of the “Out of Africa” canon which had crystallized over the previous 20 years. Modern humans came, they saw, they conquered.

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In 1996 David Brin wrote a piece for Wired, The Transparent Society. Later turned into a book of the same name, Brin’s article asks us to imagine a world 20 years into the future…in other words, 2016. The key thesis of Brin’s argument is that it is critical to watch the watchers. After the recent revelations of the NSA‘s activities, this would seem a wise prescription. And there has been some democratization of information. Though police officers seem to chafe and resist it, it seems likely that in the near future ubiquitous video technology will allow the public to record them, just as they are no doubt watching us. But it isn’t just the authorities, as Brin himself imagined the decline of street crime due to surveillance. A recent article in The New York Times reports on the growing trend of people tracking their stolen iPhones, and retrieving them from thieves. Though the piece highlights the worries of authorities about vigilantism, it is obvious that in many jurisdictions petty theft is a crime which can be committed with impunity because it is too low on the priority list.

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Signature Genomic Laboratories to close by mid-2014:

Signature Genomic Laboratories, a pioneering Spokane-based tech company that once had 120 workers, will close by mid-2014.

Tuesday’s announcement by parent company PerkinElmer means the company, formed in 2003, will shut its doors and lay off around 80 employees.

The north Spokane company provides scientific, DNA-based tests to identify genetic disorders in embryos or babies.

PerkinElmer, based in Massachusetts, paid $90 million for Signature Genomics in 2010, and said it’s halting future tests by the Spokane firm at the end of the week.

An email from PerkinElmer’s communications company said: “Changing market conditions, including a highly unfavorable reimbursement environment, combined with a significant decline in demand for invasive procedures due to the uptake of non-invasive prenatal testing, contributed to this decision.”

The last paragraph:

Newer tests developed by a variety of other companies now use blood draws for DNA testing. While noninvasive, those blood based tests are limited to identifying far fewer conditions than the more than 100 that microarray tests cover.

This event shows you how fast genomics is moving. Signature actually does have a chip that includes SNPs as well, but only 60,000 to look for absence of heterozygosity. I know for a fact that they amplify enough DNA from CVS procedures that they could run a much denser SNP-chip, or even do whole genome sequencing. But really that’s not where the low hanging fruit is. Rather, most of the worry from parents has to do with karyotype abnormalities, and the non-invasive methods which involve a blood draw are sufficient for that. But that doesn’t mean that that will be the end of the story. I imagine that whole genome sequencing of fetuses from DNA derived from blood draws from the mother will be totally conventional within 10 years. The future is here. Deal with it