The inherent humanity of old age: a critique of ‘post-humanist’ gerontology

John and George Keats-Man of Genius and Man of Power, to use John's words-embodied sibling forms of the phenomenon we call Romanticism. George's 1818 move to the western frontier of the United States, an imaginative leap across four thousand miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream, created in John an abysm of alienation and loneliness that would inspire the poet's most plangent and sublime poetry. Denise Gigante's account of this emigration places John's life and work in a transatlantic context that has eluded his previous biographers, while revealing the emotional turmoil at the heart of some of the most lasting verse in English. In most accounts of John's life, George plays a small role. He is often depicted as a scoundrel who left his brother destitute and dying to pursue his own fortune in America. But as Gigante shows, George ventured into a land of prairie fires, flat-bottomed riverboats, wildcats, and bears in part to save his brothers, John and Tom, from financial ruin. There was a vital bond between the brothers, evident in John's letters to his brother and sister-in-law, Georgina, in Louisville, Kentucky, which run to thousands of words and detail his thoughts about the nature of poetry, the human condition, and the soul. Gigante demonstrates that John's 1819 Odes and Hyperion fragments emerged from his profound grief following George's departure and Tom's death-and that we owe these great works of English Romanticism in part to the deep, lasting fraternal friendship that Gigante reveals in these pages.

![Figure][1] CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES An awareness of one's position and the relationships of others in a group is a rarity among vertebrate species, yet it has proved so spectacularly influential in just one species—our own—that it has become a major factor in determining the ecology of an entire planet. Although we can describe behavior patterns and speculate about their evolutionary advantage, we also need to understand their contribution to a species' reproductive success. A new wave of research is investigating the primate social brain within this evolutionary context, often through studies of wild primates. This special issue of Science explores the adaptive advantages of group life and the accompanying development of social skills. Science 's Greg Miller visited a chimpanzee sanctuary in Uganda to examine how researchers take advantage of these semiwild habitats to explore the cognitive abilities of our primate cousins (p. 1338). Just how valuable these opportunities can be is illustrated by the massive experimental study of physical and social cognition described by Herrmann et al. (p. [1360][2]). Silk (p. 1347) describes how research on sociality in baboons and other Old World monkeys is beginning to reveal the long-term relationship between social bonds and the fitness of individuals. In their book Baboon Metaphysics , reviewed by Jolly (p. 1326), Cheney and Seyfarth further illustrate the value of field studies. One of the most striking evolutionary trends among primates has been the expansion of brain size. Many competing theories have been invoked to explain this physiologically costly size shift. Dunbar and Shultz (p. 1344) review the evidence suggesting that it is the computational requirements of the special social lives of primates, in particular the requirement for pair bonding, that have driven the evolution of the human brain. An expanded capacity gives human beings unique cognitive skills, yet our primate cousins are quite capable of discriminating between necessary and superfluous actions, as described by Wood et al. (p. [1402][3]). Our brains give us extraordinary powers of imagination and sophisticated cultural adaptation; for instance, humans can undertake mental time travel and anticipate the consequences of actions. Gilbert and Wilson (p. [1351][4]) review the psychology and neuroscience of prospection; that is, how we predict future emotional experiences and how thinking about the future in the present can lead us astray. One of the most recent manifestations of our social brains has been the imaginative leap taken into the construction of virtual worlds. Our reporter Greg Miller undertook another field trip, this time to Second Life, and describes the progress researchers are making in using and understanding this new dimension of the human social experience (p. [1341][5]). It will be fascinating to learn how humans will cope with our increasingly virtual societies. We can only hope that our growing evolutionary insight into social behavior will help us to distinguish reasonable expectations of human society from those that are implausible. [1]: pending:yes [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1146282 [3]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1144663 [4]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1144161 [5]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.317.5843.1341

To “Throw Off the Cloak of Representation”

This essay discusses three Holocaust graphic novels: Will Eisner's A Life Force , Joe Kubert's Yossel: April 19, 1943 , and Pascal Croci's Auschwitz . It considers how effectively each work portrays the Holocaust by comparing them to the best-known and most celebrated Holocaust graphic novel, Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale . The essay argues that Eisner's is the most effective of the group, because Eisner recreates a distanced perspective on the Holocaust. In contrast, when Kubert and Croci attempt to recreate the Holocaust itself, the imaginative leap required to envision an atrocity so outside the realm of ordinary human experience overwhelms their artistic powers. The essay also briefly considers the mainstream comics of both Eisner and Kubert as well as Eisner's The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . The author concludes that, while these graphic novels have virtues, none of them take the aesthetic and thematic risks found in Maus . In closing, Gonshak argues against the widespread critical view that the Holocaust defies artistic representation.