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he B.1.351 variant has already spread beyond South Africa to neighboring countries, the United States and Britain. Scientists believe one of its mutations may make it harder for antibodies to grab onto the virus and keep it from entering cells.Among scientists’ worries is that the variant first detected in Britain has acquired the same mutation, known as E484K, in some cases.

Because the trial participants in South Africa were relatively young and unlikely to become severely ill, it was impossible for the scientists to determine if the vaccine protected people from hospitalization or death. Immune responses detected in blood samples from vaccinated people suggest it could.

Like many developing countries, South Africa was relying on the relatively cheap and easy-to-store AstraZeneca shot — “the people’s vaccine,” as Ms. Taylor put it — to tamp down new outbreaks. When airport workers rolled vaccine crates out of the belly of an airplane last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa watched from the rain-soaked tarmac.

Given the proven safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and the hope that it might yet prevent hospitalizations and deaths from the new variant, Professor Venter said that health officials should consider offering it to anyone who wanted it.

The virus that became Omicron may have been contained in an isolated population that recently re-established contact with the outside world. It may have jumped into an animal and back out again.

over the nobody safe/everyone safe maxim

as the disease continues to circulate, everyone on Earth will sooner or later be exposed to covid and not just once, but often. One thing you can be sure of is that, given enough time, covid will reach Omega.

Vaccination may lower the frequency of these events. How much is unclear, but the EU has fully vaccinated 79% of over-12s and cases are nevertheless running at 2.5m a week.

a lot of virus is circulating in the EU—and mutating.

confused arguments can end up seeming manipulative and sanctimonious, weakening the very cause they are designed to support.

But Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he thought the more likely cause of the gene’s spread among East Asians was sexual selection. Thick hair and small breasts are visible sexual signals which, if preferred by men, could quickly become more common as the carriers had more children.

East Asians are sometimes assumed to have evolved in a cold environment because of their narrow nostrils, which conserve heat, and the extra eyelid fat that insulates the eye. But the Broad team calculates that the EDAR variant arose about 35,000 years ago in central China and that the region was then quite warm and humid. Extra sweat glands would have been advantageous to the hunter-gatherers who lived at that time.

The finding that the gene has so many effects raises the question of which one was the dominant trigger for natural selection. Dr. Sabeti said the extra sweat glands could have been the feature favored by natural selection, with all the other effects being dragged along in its train.

each of the effects of the EDAR variant may have been favored by natural selection at a different time. A series of selections on different traits thus made the variant version so common among East Asians. About 93 percent of Han Chinese carry the variant, as do about 70 percent of people in Japan and Thailand, and 60 to 90 percent of American Indians, a population descended from East Asians.

wolves themselves, and probably canids in general, represent a long-standing evolvable lineage. Rodents prove to be a second evolvable lineage (think mouse vs. porcupine) whereas, except for size, a cat is pretty much a cat across the board.

No one knows exactly how many people died from influenza in 1918; estimates range from 15 million to 100 million globally. Historians estimate that the virus killed about 675,000 people in the United States across three waves of the pandemic

confirmed cases. But in this global crisis, both the numerator and the denominator are fuzzy.

the rising rate may reflect the disease’s gradual progression, combined with discoveries of additional deaths.

The disease is far more likely to cause severe outcomes in older people, with the oldest cohorts the most vulnerable. That said, in every age group — even 85-plus — most people who contract the disease will recover.

One scholarly estimate finds that the 1918-1920 pandemic killed 218 out of every 100,000 people living in the world at that time

In Spain, the death toll already stands at 41 out of 100,000 people; in Belgium the number is 45. In New York state, it is 63, and that number rises even higher if you consider the “probable” death toll in New York City.

So is the coronavirus as deadly? “This depends on how long this continues,”

The “virulence” of the virus — its ability to cause illness — has been steadily coming into focus.

But more than a month later, the WHO number has gone even higher: On April 16, the WHO showed a global fatality rate of 6.6 percent among confirmed cases.

Preliminary research indicates that the virus is not mutating significantly as it spreads, and so there is no evidence that some countries are dealing with a more virulent strain of SARS-CoV-2.

the median age of patients in Italy is 63 or 64 years; the median age of patients in Germany is 47. The mortality is much lower [in Germany] because they avoided having the older population affected.”

“If, in fact, the case fatality rate is higher than the 1918 flu, then this one has the potential to kill even more people,

“We saw it everyday. African Americans have three times the rate of chronic kidney disease that Caucasians have, and 25 percent higher heart disease. They’ve got higher rates of diabetes, hypertension and asthma,” Duggan said. “I fully expect that when people are hit hard and they are on a ventilator to breathe and their body needs to fight the infection, that people who already have compromised hearts or kidneys or lungs are that much more in jeopardy.”

Also critical is the nature, and robustness, of the national health system. For instance, Japan, where the current case fatality rate is 1.6 percent, and Singapore are reporting extremely high rates of hospitalization for coronavirus patients, at 80 percent and higher, figures that are unheard of in the United States. But this probably helps improve treatment and also reduces disease spread by isolating patients. The result is fewer deaths.

Several of the countries with low fatality rates — Germany, South Korea, Norway — have very high rates of coronavirus testing. This gave them a better look at the disease within their borders.

San Francisco General Hospital, noted that the hospital nearly tripled the capacity of its intensive care unit by adding doctors, nurses and technicians while the city adopted social distancing measures shortly ahead of New York.

“We were ready for a surge that never happened,” Balmes said. “They’re every bit as good as we are in intensive care in New York, but the system was overwhelmed. We did physical distancing just a few days earlier than New York, but it was a few days to the good.”

in a news conference that the global case fatality rate was 3.4 percent. That was treated as a revelation about the innate deadliness of the disease, but in fact was simply the WHO’s crude mortality ratio for confirmed covid-19 cases up to that point in time.

The other major factor in mortality is chronic disease. Most people hospitalized with severe cases of covid-19 have chronic health conditions such as diabetes, lung disease and heart disease. Where there is a high percentage of noncommunicable diseases like high blood pressure, the coronavirus will also be more deadly

A new study from researchers at Stanford, not yet peer-reviewed, looked for coronavirus antibodies in a sample population in Santa Clara County, Calif., and concluded that the actual infection rate in the county by early April was 50 to 85 times greater than the rate of confirmed cases.

“The story of this virus is turning out to be more about its contagiousness and less about its case fatality rate,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a University of Pennsylvania professor of pediatrics. “It’s less fatal than we thought, but it’s more contagious.”

Where extensive testing has been done, estimates for the case fatality rate are often below 1 percent, The Post has found, suggesting these countries are getting closer to a rate that takes into account all infections

In Iceland, which has tested over 10 percent of the population, vastly more than other countries, the fatality rate is just 0.5 percent.

Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch has written that he and most experts suspect the fatality rate is about 1 to 2 percent for symptomatic cases. A 1 percent fatality rate is 10 times the average fatality rate for seasonal flu.

“It’s probably about an order of magnitude higher for covid-19,” said Viboud, the NIH epidemiologist. “It’s more severe in terms of mortality than the pandemics we’ve seen since 1918.”

His was a revolutionary agenda, designed to turn the world order upside down, rooted deeply in romantic and even avant-garde sensibilities. To see fascism as stemming ultimately from liberalism might sound surprising, but this is true of both socialism as well as fascism, because finally it is liberalism’s principle of human perfectibility from which these impulses derive.

the myth of American exceptionalism is just that, a myth, and that we have traveled so far from our national founding impulses that other tendencies, namely forms of what used to be considered peculiarly European anxieties, have now become the defining features of our polity.

1. Fascism rechannels economic anxiety

. Especially after the Russian Revolution, the urgent question for all of Europe became: Was socialism the right path, or capitalism? And in either case, was a new political order required?

For the elites who propagated the “Washington consensus” in the 1990s, supported by such popularizers as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, there was nothing complicated about globalization: Incomes would rise around the world, inequality would fall and liberal tolerance would flourish. This rosy picture is so far from reality as to be laughable

Thus the question arises again, with as much urgency as in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution: What shall be the world’s economic order? Is it possible to conceive, at this late date, of globalization with a human face? Or is something more revolutionary needed?

2. Liberal institutions have already been fatally weakened

We are currently lamenting Trump’s evisceration of the media and other institutions of democracy, but he would not be having such success, at least with half of the population, if those institutions were not already seriously compromised

They may now be reacting viscerally against Trump, because of the crude way in which he takes on their shallowness, but it doesn’t mean anything to his supporters.

The Italian parliamentary system was marked by a tendency toward transformismo or “transformism,” to which our strongest parallel would be Bill (or Hillary) Clinton’s triangulation.

4. Fascism keeps mutating

3. Internal strongmen tussles don’t mean anything

There were always more assertive fascists around than Mussolini — for example, Roberto Farinacci, the ras (or leader) of Cremona

10. Racism is inherent to fascism

its chameleon-like tendency to absorb the ideas of the opposition and to neutralize them and make them invisible leaves a profoundly disillusioning aftertaste. Ideology desperately wants to make a comeback

Mussolini, though an inveterate atheist, made peace with the Vatican, in the famous Lateran Accords of 1929, abandoning his most cherished beliefs in order to gain the complicity of the Catholic church. Earlier in the 1920s, he installed corporate-friendly ministers to work with Italy’s industrialists to enact an agenda they could be comfortable with. Such mutations are par for the course for fascists, they’re nothing to get excited about.

6. Of course it’s a minority affair

To note that Trump did not win the popular vote (as was true of George W. Bush in 2000), does not take away from the power of fascism

Mussolini, though he established his regime on the myth of the March on Rome, was actually appointed by King Victor Emmanuel III when Mussolini seemed like the only figure, compared to the discredited liberal politicians, who could bring order to the country

Only a small minority need give overt consent. The rest can be quiet, or complacent, or complicit

7. There is an ideology behind the chaos of ideologies

Italian historians after the fact claimed that fascism was an aberration

8. Its cultural style makes no sense to elites

Trump and his successors will have to work with less potent stuff. So-called conspiratorial thinking is a unifying strand — I already mentioned Alex Jones — which connects many of the strands of ultra-conservative ideology throughout the past century. The Reds become Jews and then Muslims; the substitutions are not that difficult to make.

faux masculinity — is an important part of this cultural style

9. Fascism leads inexorably to suicidal war

Once the façade of virile domesticity starts getting exposed, war becomes the only option to keep the regime going

11. No form of resistance works

What this shows is that fascism is highly adaptable to different needs and conditions, just as its opposite, democracy, is similarly flexible.

The thing to notice is that fascism, in all the places it’s been known to arise, converts an admittedly minority point of view into a mass energy that soon overwhelms every civilized instinct. Perhaps Trump doesn’t need to do this footwork; perhaps much of this foundational work was already accomplished in the Bush era. What should really concern us is that fascism now seems to have a certain stability that we have not seen in earlier models that relied on a single charismatic leader. Despite the Obama interlude, Trump has resumed where George W. Bush in his most feverish mood had left off. This suggests that fascism has become permanently stabilized in this country. It is the most worrisome aspect of the present situation.

One remarkable similarity — among many others — between Trump and Mussolini is their total preoccupation with coverage in the media

Several states in the Northeast also have among the country’s worst outbreaks now. Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, among others, are all experiencing marked rises in case counts, and labs have identified both the B.1.1.7 variant and large shares of another variant, B.1.526.

The B.1.526 variant, which first appeared in New York City in samples from November, appears in two forms: one with a mutation that may help the virus evade antibodies and another that may help it bind more tightly to human cells.

The outbreak in the Northeast is currently much worse than it is in California, but California faces a variant of its own that makes up a large share of cases.

Studies have indicated the variant first discovered in California, B.1.427/B.1.429, may also be more transmissible than earlier forms of the virus, but it does not appear to spread as quickly as B.1.1.7.

Like the variant first discovered in New York City, the B.1.427/B.1.429 variant has also been seen in high levels in neighboring states, including Arizona, but does not yet make up a significant number of cases outside the region.

In Michigan, Covid-19 hospitalizations are already more than three times higher than they were a month ago. Other states with rising cases are also seeing significant increases in hospitalized Covid-19 patients.

The vaccine rollout continues to speed up, and recent studies confirm that vaccines are effective against the coronavirus in the real world, giving experts hope that an end may be in sight. But with increased transmission, they say, comes a renewed need for caution in the immediate term.

“I think we’ve got to hang on just a little bit longer, being conservative and getting more people vaccinated,” Dr. Martin said. “I’d hate to see us having another hospital surge when we’re getting so close to being done with this. I’m definitely worried about it.”

Researchers who have studied the E484K mutation say it may make the existing Covid-19 vaccines less effective against the new variant, but is unlikely to be totally resistant to the shots.

Laboratory experiments have shown that the E484K mutation can make the virus resistant to some important antibodies the body uses to fight off Covid-19.

“The challenge like here in [South Africa] is in knowing whether reinfection is more likely with these variants,” said Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist at the KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, “or whether they are just seeing reinfection with these variants because they are the viruses circulating at the moment and immune responses from first episodes have waned.”

South Africa expects to get its first one million doses of a vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and AstraZeneca PLC this month, with the second shipment of 500,000 doses due in February.

“I want to stress that we are deeply concerned that this strain is more transmissible and can accelerate outbreaks in the U.S.

Covid cases and deaths have broken record after record across the country, with a peak number of deaths, 4,400, announced on Tuesday. At least 3,973 new deaths and 238,390 new cases were reported on Thursday, and the nation is nearing a milestone of 400,000 deaths.

The new variant, called B 1.1.7 was first identified in Britain, where it rapidly became the primary source of infections, accounting for as many 60 percent of new cases diagnosed in London and surrounding areas.

In the new report, C.D.C. scientists modeled how quickly the variant might spread in the United States, assuming about 10 percent to 30 percent of people have pre-existing immunity to the virus, and another 1 million people will be vaccinated each week beginning this month.

It’s not yet clear what makes the new variants more contagious. They share at least one mutation, called N501Y, that is thought to be involved. One possibility, researchers said, is that the mutation may increase the amount of virus in the nose but not in the lungs — potentially explaining why it is more contagious, but not more deadly.A higher amount of virus in the nose means anyone infected would expel more virus while talking, singing, coughing or even breathing, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle

Federal health officials sounded the alarm Friday about a fast spreading, far more contagious variant of the coronavirus that is projected to become the dominant source of infection in the country by March, potentially fueling another wrenching surge of cases and deaths.

The variant is not known to be more deadly or to cause more severe disease. But the dire warning — hedged by limited data about just how prevalent the variant first identified in Britain has become — landed in a week where the nation’s nascent vaccination campaign was hampered by confusion and limited supplies as demand grew among growing numbers of eligible people

Only 76 cases of the variant have been identified so far in the U.S., but the actual number is believed to be higher and is expected to spiral upward in the next few weeks, officials said.

One in 860 Americans have died of Covid-19 in the last year, according to new figures released by the C.D.C. But the burden of deaths has not fallen equally across racial, ethnic lines and geographic regions, and there is concern that vaccines will not reach the hardest hit communities, where access to health services is limited and distrust is rampant. Editors’ PicksFor Pro Athlete Leading Social Justice Push, a Victory and UncertaintyJames Comey’s View of Justice — and How It Differs From Donald Trump’sHow ‘Orwellian’ Became an All-Purpose InsultAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyImage

But spikes in cases threaten to cripple already overwhelmed hospitals and nursing homes in many parts of the country. Some are at or near capacity. Others have faced troubling rates of infection among their staff, causing shortages and increasing patient loads.

If the variant is about 50 percent more contagious, as suggested by data from Britain, it will become the predominant source of all infections in the United States by March, the model showed. A slow rollout of vaccinations will hasten that fate.

Dr. Brannon Traxler, the department's interim public health director, said that the variant's arrival is an important reminder that the fight against COVID-19 is far from over.

Noting the limited supply of vaccines, she added, "Every one of us must recommit to the fight by recognizing that we are all on the front lines now. We are all in this together."

But the one first seen in South Africa has more mutations in its spike protein than the one from the United Kingdom. Several of its mutations are also present in a variant that was first identified in Brazil.

Earlier this week, Moderna said its COVID-19 vaccine offers protection against new variants of the coronavirus — but that the vaccine is more effective against the strain first identified in the U.K. than the one found in South Africa.

The company said that when its vaccine was used against the variant from South Africa, the vaccine produced levels of virus-fighting antibody titers that were around six times less than when it's used against other variants.

As a result, Moderna said it will test booster doses of its vaccine, including one that would be tailored to fight strains that have recently emerged.

The coronavirus variants have alarmed public health experts in recent months, posing a new challenge even as vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have raised hopes in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Researchers have found growing evidence that both of the variants circulating in South Africa and Brazil may be capable of evading the body's immune system, heightening the risk of reinfection, as NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff recently reported.

The first U.S. case of the strain from Brazil was identified earlier this week in the Minneapolis metro are

Scientists say that a national surveillance program would be able to determine just how widespread the new variant is and help contain emerging hot spots, extending the crucial window of time in which vulnerable people across the country could get vaccinated.

That would cost several hundred million dollars or more. While that may seem like a steep price tag, it’s a tiny fraction of the $16 trillion in economic losses that the United States is estimated to have sustained because of Covid-19.

With such a system in place, health officials could warn the public in affected areas and institute new measures to contend with the variant — such as using better masks, contact tracing, closing schools or temporary lockdowns — and do so early, rather than waiting until a new surge flooded hospitals with the sick.

Experts point to Britain as a model for what the U.S. could do. British researchers sequence the genome — that is, the complete genetic material in a coronavirus — from up to 10 percent of new positive samples

But the U.S. falls far short of that goal now. Over the past month, American researchers have only sequenced a few hundred genomes a day,

In March, Britain started what many American experts yearn for: a well-run national program to track mutations of the new coronavirus. The country invested 20 million pounds — roughly $27 million — to create a scientific consortium that enlisted hospitals across the country, giving them standard procedures for sending samples to dedicated labs that would sequence their viruses.

Using cloud computing, experts analyzed the mutations and figured out where each lineage of the virus fit on an evolutionary tree.

“What the U.K. has done with sequencing is, to me, the moonshot of the pandemic,”

“They decided they were going to do sequencing and they just stood up an absolutely incredible program from scratch.”

In the U.S., a constellation of labs, mostly at universities, have been analyzing coronavirus genomes since the spring. Many of them spend their own modest funds to do the work

ost scientists say that people who have had Covid-19 gain some immunity to the virus that causes it. What they don’t know is whether that protection lasts a few months, a few years or a lifetime.

The immune system wards off infections by producing antibodies that fight invaders. A range of hereditary and environmental factors, including diet and sleep patterns, typically affect the strength and longevity of those defenses.

Immunity also depends on the pathogen. For example, infection by the virus that causes measles confers lifelong immunity. Others, like the influenza virus, can mutate so rapidly that protective antibodies might not recognize them during a reinfection.

The novel coronavirus mutates more slowly than the influenza virus. That gives researchers hope that any natural immunity, or vaccine, would offer more lasting protection. Even if someone gets sick again, researchers believe a second infection might be milder than the first.

Data are scant, but preliminary research shows antibodies can emerge within days or several weeks of the onset of symptoms. A study involving 34 hospitalized cases in China found that two patients, both in their 80s, produced antibodies within three days of symptom onset. The rest produced them two weeks after symptoms first surfaced.

A group of Chinese researchers reported in March that they had infected four rhesus macaques, allowed them to recover and then tried to reinfect two of them with the same strain of the virus. Neither became sick again.

Then why are some people testing positive again? South Korean health officials are refraining from labeling them as “reinfections.” Korean doctors involved in a continuing government review believe that those patients likely harbored low levels of the virus that diagnostic polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests failed to pick up. In later stages of the disease, the virus settles into the lungs where it can elude detection. The virus, they say, hadn’t been fully cleared from the body.

ow do I know I’ve fully recovered? Clinicians have mixed views on what constitutes recovery because long-term data aren’t yet available. Guidelines vary across the globe, and even within countries. In a peer-reviewed study published last month, researchers in Hong Kong detected the virus in the feces of Covid-19 survivors even as their respiratory samples tested negative. Viral fragments can linger in the body after symptoms disappear, but it doesn’t mean that a person is infectious, or that the disease will make a comeback.

If anything, the reverse has been the case: responses to the pandemic sharply diverged, even within entities like the European Union, ostensibly committed to common policies.

Mercifully, it has not all been a zero-sum game. In late March 2021, 25 world leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, Johnson, Mario Draghi, Angela Merkel, Cyril Ramaphosa, Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the head of the European Council, Charles Michel, as well as the prime ministers of South Korea, Fiji, Thailand, Chile, Senegal and Tunisia – but, depressingly, missing the leaders of the US, Japan, Russia and China – issued a statement explicitly acknowledging the chain linking human and non-human lives and destinies. Invoking the multilateralist idealism of the years following the second world war that sought a reconnected world through the United Nations and agencies like the WHO, they proposed a legally binding international treaty to deal with future pandemics. Such a treaty would embody “an approach that connects the health of humans, animals and our planet”

two years’ experience of the pandemic, in particular the unpredictable incidence of recurring outbreaks and viral mutations, has made the locking off of discrete zones of exclusion all but impossible. The need for an alternative, transnational approach to containment, mitigation and protection, coordinated by the WHO, has never been more urgent

Before long, any possibility of a clear and honest understanding of the common worldwide conditions that allowed such disasters to happen, not least the biological consequences of environmental degradation, became swallowed up by this default vocabulary of competitive nationalism.

To some extent, the raising of walls, psychological and institutional, is understandable. The instinctive reaction to contagion breaking out somewhere distant is to erect barriers against its importation

This moment in world history is no less fraught for being so depressingly familiar: the immemorial conflict between “is” and “ought”; between short-term power plays and long-term security; between the habits of immediate gratification and the prospering of future generations; between the cult of individualism and the urgencies of common interest; between the drum beat of national tribalism and the bugle call of global peril; between native instinct and hard-earned knowledge

If it is a happy answer you want to the question as to which will prevail, it is probably best not to ask a historian. For history’s findings are more often than not tragic, and its boneyard littered with the remains of high-minded internationalist projects.

The appeals of idealists fill whole-page declarations in earnest broadsheets and win funds from far-sighted philanthropic foundations. But the plans and the planners are demonised by the tribunes of gut instinct as suspiciously alien, hatched by cosmopolitan elites: the work of foreign bodies.

It does not take into account the differing protection offered by various covid vaccines, natural immunity, the impact of population density on transmission or covid treatment options for immunocompromised people. Estimating the number of immunocompromised people is itself hard: the model the data was based on includes only a few conditions. Others, like severe type-1 diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis, were absent. Nor is everyone with such conditions immunocompromised. But the study still offers insight into where to look for future variants—and where to focus efforts on increasing the supply and take-up of vaccines.

at least in business, women and men in China operate largely on a level playing field. “Sixty years of communism,” said Yu, “did one really good thing: bring true equality between the sexes. I think people in China are brought up believing that women are just as capable as men.”

China’s political sphere remains male-dominated: women are starkly underrepresented in China’s Parliament and the Communist Party’s Central Committee. In fact, many young Chinese women, disillusioned about their prospects in an economy many see as navigable only by those with money or connections, say the best hope for a woman is “to marry a rich man.” On a popular TV dating show, a model rebuffed an endearing but poor suitor by saying, “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back seat of a bicycle.” In a survey of more than 50,000 single women, as reported in China Daily, 80 percent agreed that “only men who make more than 4,000 yuan [$634] a month deserve to have a relationship with a woman.”

the Mao era was a deviation for China: anti-intellectual, anti-Confucian, collectivist rather than family-oriented. Thus, as China sheds its communist mantle, it is not only Westernizing but also Sinicizing, rediscovering its traditional values.

These values, however, are mutating. The traditional Chinese family, for example, was a pyramid, with a few revered elders at the pinnacle and many younger generations below. In a typical Chinese family today, the pyramid has been inverted, with a “little emperor” only child at the bottom, doted on and catered to by parents and grandparents. At the same time, while the intense competitive pressures of Confucian China have returned, the countervailing Confucian values—selflessness, compassion, honor, and rectitude—have not. As a result, many worry that the China emerging from communism will know no values other than wealth and materialism.

“When we were growing up,” says Yang, “we wanted to be nurses, doctors, astronauts, teachers. Today people are suspicious of anything noble or grand. Kids just want to be rich or powerful.” In 2009, schoolchildren in Guangzhou City were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. A viral Internet video—later blocked and deleted—showed an adorable 6-year-old giving her answer: “A corrupt official.”

the four women I interviewed are a new breed. Progressive, worldly, and open to the media, they are in many ways not representative of China, past or present. Perhaps they are merely the lucky winners of the 1990s free-for-all in China, a window that may already be closing. Or perhaps they are the forerunners of a China still to come, in which paths to success are far more open.

Such information would allow detection of so-called Mendelian disorders, like cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease and Marfan syndrome, which are caused by mutations in a single gene.

The answer was a more modest approach — one that prizes diplomacy, puts limits on engagement and raises doubts about whether Mr. Obama would ever again use military force in a region convulsed by conflict.

Ms. Rice’s team asked the most basic questions: What are America’s core interests in the Middle East? How has the upheaval in the Arab world changed America’s position? What can Mr. Obama realistically hope to achieve? What lies outside his reach?

The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.

Mr. Obama drove the process, officials said, asking for formal briefings in the Situation Room and shorter updates during his daily intelligence briefing in the Oval Office. He gave his advisers a tight deadline of the United Nations’ speech last month and pushed them to develop certain themes, drawing from his own journey since the hopeful early days of the Arab Spring.

In May 2011, he said the United States would support democracy, human rights and free markets with all the “diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal.” But at the United Nations last month, he said, “we can rarely achieve these objectives through unilateral American action — particularly with military action.”

Tamara Cofman Wittes, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The argument that we can’t make a decisive difference, so we’re not going to try, is wrongheaded.”

It was a tight group that included no one outside the White House, a stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan review in 2009, which involved dozens of officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Rice said she briefed Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel over weekly lunches.

other goals appear to have been dictated as much as by personnel as by policy. After vigorous debate, the group decided to make the Middle East peace process a top priority — even after failing to broker an agreement during the administration’s first term — in part because Mr. Kerry had already thrown himself into the role of peacemaker.

But Germans are no longer so ready to be put on the moral defensive or to view the Nazi era as the defining episode of their past. Even non-Germans seem willing to move on. Recent books like “Germania” and “The German Genius” suggest that English-language publishing may be entering a post-swastika phase. Germany still atones but now also preaches, usually on the evils of debt, the importance of nurturing industry and the superiority of long-term thinking in enterprise. Others are disposed to listen. “Everyone orients himself towards Germany,”

A third of Germans think the country is overrun by foreigners, according to a newly published poll; a majority favour “sharply restricting” Muslim religious practice. Over a tenth would even welcome a Führer who would govern with “a strong hand”—a sign that the embers of extremism still glow.

the Bavarian sister party of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), declared this month that Germany needs no further immigration from Turkey or the Arab world. Germany is “not an immigration country”, he insisted, contradicting a hard-won consensus among conservatives.

the Berlin republic is a different sort of character from its westward-leaning, Bonn-based predecessor. Scholars had struck several awkward coinages to describe war-chastened Germany: it was a “tamed power” engaged in “attritional multilateralism”. These no longer seem apt for today’s more confident and self-willed Germany. But its identity is still unformed

Despite their economic strength, Germans fear the worst. They believe their country “has passed its zenith”, says Mrs Kocher, the pollster. This pessimism shapes Germany’s dealings with the rest of the world. Unlike most countries, Germany is not driven by any great ambition, but rather by the fear that “things could fall apart if they don’t hold on to stability,”

These unEuropean outbursts startled not just Greeks, who brandished swastikas in response, but Europeans generally. They had grown up believing that the Germans saw their own interests as inseparable from those of their fellow Europeans. Now they glimpsed a different, ugly German, smug about his economy and untroubled by his past.

The crisis has created a new pecking order, at least temporarily. Germany, with its high-competitiveness, low-debt economy, is on top. The rest are having to adjust, including France, traditionally a joint leader of the European project. This is unsettling. “You get an enormous sense of German self-righteousness, which is very difficult to take, especially when there are solid foundations for it,” says François Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. France, which has lagged behind Germany in making structural reforms, feels its influence waning. “France has to do its homework to be able to restore some level of influence in Europe,

Germany’s brightest business prospects do not involve its slow-growing neighbours but the charismatic economies of Asia and Latin America. A German acceptance of Turkish membership of the EU looks less likely than ever.

“Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And the Acropolis while you’re at it,” demanded Bild, a popular tabloid

Germany’s overall direction is obscure. It is torn, intrigued by its new possibilities but painfully aware that alone it does not count for much in the world. Its population is already shrinking. Europe will lose economic and demographic bulk relative to China, India and Brazil. The EU was virtually ignored at last year’s Copenhagen summit on climate change, even though it had taken the lead in setting targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. This was “an enormous shock”, says Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who now leads the liberals in the European Parliament. “It shows we need one voice.” Fear of war launched the European project; he hopes that fear of irrelevance will drive it forward.

in military terms, Germany remains a midget compared not just with America but with Britain and France, which together account for 70% of the EU’s military research and development and 60% of its deployable forces.

His theory draws upon many of the most prominent views of how humans emerged. These range from our evolution of the ability to run long distances to our development of the earliest weapons, which involved the improvement of hand-eye coordination. Dramatic climate change in Africa over the course of a few tens of thousands of years also may have forced Australopithecus and Homo to adapt rapidly. And over roughly the same span, humans became cooperative hunters and serious meat eaters, vastly enriching our diet and favoring the development of more-robust brains. By themselves, Wilson says, none of these theories is satisfying. Taken together, though, all of these factors pushed our immediate prehuman ancestors toward what he called a huge pre-adaptive step: the formation of the earliest communities around fixed camps.

“When humans started having a camp—and we know that Homo erectus had campsites—then we know they were heading somewhere,” he told me. “They were a group progressively provisioned, sending out some individuals to hunt and some individuals to stay back and guard the valuable campsite. They were no longer just wandering through territory, emitting calls. They were on long-term campsites, maybe changing from time to time, but they had come together. They began to read intentions in each other’s behavior, what each other are doing. They started to learn social connections more solidly.”

“The humans become consistent with all the others,” he said, and the evolutionary steps were likely similar—beginning with the formation of groups within a freely mixing population, followed by the accumulation of pre-adaptations that make eusociality more likely, such as the invention of campsites. Finally comes the rise to prevalence of eusocial alleles—one of two or more alternative forms of a gene that arise by mutation, and are found at the same place on a chromosome—which promote novel behaviors (like communal child care) or suppress old, asocial traits. Now it is up to geneticists, he adds, to “determine how many genes are involved in crossing the eusociality threshold, and to go find those genes.”

Wilson posits that two rival forces drive human behavior: group selection and what he calls “individual selection”—competition at the level of the individual to pass along one’s genes—with both operating simultaneously. “Group selection,” he said, “brings about virtue, and—this is an oversimplification, but—individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition.

“Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed,” Wilson told me in a telephone conversation. “But in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection.” Taking in newcomers and forming alliances had become a fundamental human trait, he added, because “it is a good way to win.”

If Wilson is right, the human impulse toward racism and tribalism could come to be seen as a reflection of our genetic nature as much as anything else—but so could the human capacity for altruism, and for coalition- and alliance-building. These latter possibilities may help explain Wilson’s abiding optimism—about the environment and many other matters. If these traits are indeed deeply written into our genetic codes, we might hope that we can find ways to emphasize and reinforce them, to build problem-solving coalitions that can endure, and to identify with progressively larger and more-inclusive groups over time.