Eric Patterson

Why Do Dolphins Carry Sponges

Tool use is rare in wild animals, but of widespread interest because of its relationship to animal cognition, social learning and culture. Despite such attention, quantifying the costs and benefits of tool use has been difficult, largely because if tool use occurs, all population members typically exhibit the behavior. In Shark Bay, Australia, only a subset of the bottlenose dolphin population uses marine sponges as tools, providing an opportunity to assess both proximate and ultimate costs and benefits and document patterns of transmission. We compared sponge-carrying (sponger) females to non-sponge-carrying (non-sponger) females and show that spongers were more solitary, spent more time in deep water channel habitats, dived for longer durations, and devoted more time to foraging than non-spongers; and, even with these potential proximate costs, calving success of sponger females was not significantly different from non-spongers. We also show a clear female-bias in the ontogeny of sponging. With a solitary lifestyle, specialization, and high foraging demands, spongers used tools more than any non-human animal. We suggest that the ecological, social, and developmental mechanisms involved likely (1) help explain the high intrapopulation variation in female behaviour, (2) indicate tradeoffs (e.g., time allocation) between ecological and social factors and, (3) constrain the spread of this innovation to primarily vertical transmission.

War Gaming Peace Operations

Today’s military personnel fight against and work with a diverse variety of nonstate actors, from al-Qaeda terrorists to major nongovernmental organizations who provide vital humanitarian assistance. Furthermore, the nontraditional battle spaces where America and its allies have recently deployed (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq) include a wide range of activities quite different from classic military campaign. How can the United States and its allies train its military personnel to think through the intersection of issues regarding working alongside and against nonstate actors, particularly in culturally sensitive environments? This article describes one such approach, the development of a war game for peace, designed for U.S. military officers and now utilized in the classrooms of several military colleges. More specifically, the article describes how reconstruction and stabilization operation decisions are modeled and worked through in the highly religious environment of contemporary Afghanistan through the use of an innovative board game, suggesting that this model can be applied to many other scenarios and classroom environments.

The Enduring Value of Christian Realism

Christian realism is a “community of discourse” launched by Reinhold Niebuhr and his contemporaries that remains relevant today providing thoughtful perspective on contemporary policy challenges in the foreign policy analysis strand of the formal study of International Relations. The essay lays out some of the basic principles that unite Christian realists, considers whether or not it can be considered a strain of academic “International Relations Theory”, suggests areas for the growth of Christian realist discourse in applied political thinking today, and concludes with some differences between Niebuhrian and Kuyperian approaches.

Presidential Leadership and Democracy Promotion

Presidents since Woodrow Wilson have lectured about the need for democracy promotion, but the historical record is clear: Regardless of party, the rhetoric has not been matched with deeds. President George W. Bush likewise articulated a Freedom Agenda of human liberty and democratic institutions. This essay elucidates the moral claims that Bush made in his Freedom Agenda. It considers whether his administration followed through with concrete action. The discussion concludes that the Freedom Agenda was an integral part of the Bush administrations foreign policy, and that it was funded and institutionalized by Congress in the Advance Democracy Act (2007) and National Security Presidential Directive 58 (NSPD-58) largely because of his presidential focus and leadership.

Approaching the War of Ideas

War is political philosophy by other means. Politics is merely the process by which institutions—rules—distribute society’s benefits and obligations according to the philosophical ideas upon which people, leading their collective lives, have conferred legitimacy. The War of Ideas is a battle for this perception of legitimacy and accompanying popular support. Simply put, political philosophy is a hypothesis: if condition, then outcome. If a polity is organized according to a particular philosophical narrative and structure, then justice, security, and human flourishing will result. Plato, for example, advocated a rightly ordered society of philosopher kings, an auxiliary or guardian class, and producers—that is, rulers, those supporting and guided by the rulers, and the ruled. Plato supplemented this social organization with the “Noble Lie” or “Myth of the Metals,” claiming the respective social classes have gold, silver, and brass in their souls. Of course, those on the lower end of society’s benefits and privileges would believe they were not deprived as a result of some political or earthly injustice, just the harsh reality of the condition of their birth. These people are less likely to revolt.

Introduction: The Reagan Manifesto—Reflections on “A Time for Choosing” at 50

Ronald Reagan’s October 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech cemented his status as a national figure, a political conservative with a strong grasp of domestic and international issues, and as a new Republican leader. At the time, none of this was necessarily apparent: his candidate, Barry Goldwater, was about to be crushed in the election, and the Republican establishment did not take seriously this second-rate actor, union president, and recent Democrat. Nonetheless, fifty years later, “The Speech” has been an inspiration to two generations of conservative thinkers and activists in the USA and beyond. This introduction provides context to the speech and outlines the contours of this volume.

First Steps Toward a Pentecostal Political Theology

It seems as if it was just a few years ago that Pope John Paul II was warning the Catholic leadership of Latin America of an“invasion of sects” within their borders. The pontiff was reacting to the tens of millions who have left the Catholic Church and the Catholic identity of their ancestors and converted to evangelical Protestantism since the 1970s. The breadth of this change throughout the region is incredible. A generation ago professing Catholics made up 95–98 percent of all citizens in Latin America. Today, pentecostalized Protestants, or better“evangelicos” as they often call themselves, make up 20–30 percent of the population in a number of Latin American countries.1 Studies also indicate that the vast majority of new Protestants are pen-tecostal or charismatic in denomination and/or in practice, making this a theologically distinct group from the Catholic majority.2

The Declaration of the United Colonies: America's First Just War Statement

Was the American War for Independence just? In July 1775, a full year before the Declaration of Independence, the colonists argued that they had the right to self-defense. They made this argument using language that accords with what we can broadly call classical just war thinking, based, inter alia, on their claim that their provincial authorities had a responsibility to defend the colonists from British violence. In the 1775 Declaration of the United Colonies, written two months after British troops attacked colonial citizens, such arguments are made. This essay carefully looks at the historical context of the 1775 Declaration, the arguments made by the colonists, and the philosophical and theological underpinnings of those claims, and concludes that the colonists made a compelling argument commensurate with just war thinking.

WHAT THEY SAY AND DO: RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AS A NATIONAL SECURITY LENS

Counterintuitive to the traditional national security expert, who still tends to focus only on “hard power” factors rather than “soft” issues like human rights, religious freedom can be newly envisioned as a comprehensive framework through which to analyze the ideational impulses and resulting policies of leaders and regimes that pose risks to US national security. By looking at (a) a countrys political pronouncements, (b) how it treats its own people, (c) how it acts in its neighborhood, and (d) how it acts on the international stage regarding religious liberty, the US can achieve a thoughtful, additional lens for evaluating security concerns.

Akbar Ahmed, Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam

A review of Akbar Ahmed, Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam [paperback] (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2011).