The Parthenon in Athens: its facade is said to be circumscribed by golden rectangles, although some scholars argue this is a coincidence. Photograph: Katerina Mavrona/EPA

From Leonardo da Vinci to Le Corbusier, the golden ratio is believed to have guided artists and architects over the centuries.

Leonardo is thought to have used the golden ratio, a geometric proportion regarded as the key to creating aesthetically pleasing art, when painting the Mona Lisa. The Dutch painter Mondrian used it in his abstract compositions, as did Salvador Dali in his masterpiece The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

Now a US academic believes he has discovered the reason why it pleases the eye. According to Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, the human eye is capable of interpreting an image featuring the golden ratio faster than any other.

Bejan argues that an animal’s world – whether you are a human being in an art gallery or an antelope on the savannah – is orientated on the horizontal. For the antelope scanning the horizon, danger primarily comes from the sides or from behind, not from below or above, so the scope of its vision evolved accordingly. As vision developed, he argues, animals got “smarter” and safer by seeing better and moving faster as a result.

“It is well known that the eyes take in information more efficiently when they scan side to side, as opposed to up and down. When you look at what so many people have been drawing and building, you see these proportions everywhere.”

Many artists since the Renaissance have proportioned their work in accordance with the golden ratio or “divine proportion”, particularly in the form of the golden rectangle, which has informed Leonardo’s work. It describes a rectangle with a length roughly one and a half times its width.

Works most usually associated with it are the Mona Lisa and the Parthenon in Athens, although Swiss architect Le Corbusier relied on it for his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion and Dali explicitly used it in The Sacrament of the Last Supper. The Parthenon’s facade is said to be circumscribed by golden rectangles, though some scholars argue that this is a coincidence.

According to Bejan, these arguments are academic. Whether intentional or not, the ratio represents the best proportions to transfer to the brain. “This is the best flowing configuration for images from plane to brain and it manifests itself frequently in human-made shapes that give the impression they were ‘designed’ according to the golden ratio,” said Bejan.

“We really want to get on, we don’t want to get headaches while we are scanning and recording and understanding things,” he said. “Shapes that resemble the golden ratio facilitate the scanning of images and their transmission through vision organs to the brain. Animals are wired to feel better and better when they are helped and so they feel pleasure when they find food or shelter or a mate. When we see the proportions in the golden ratio, we are helped. We feel pleasure and we call it beauty.”

Bejan, an award-winning engineer who developed a new law of physics governing the design of matter as it moves through air and water in 1996, believes this “constructal law” governs systems that evolve in time, from cars in traffic to blood in the circulation, to how vision develops.

Vision and cognition evolved together, he said. “Cognition is the name of the constructal evolution of the brain’s architecture, every minute and every moment,” Bejan said. “This is the phenomenon of thinking, knowing, and then thinking again more efficiently. Getting smarter is the constructal law in action.”

Earlier this year, in a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Bejan demonstrated how this law was behind his theory of how elite athletes had got taller, bigger and thus faster in the past 100 years. His latest application of constructal law to explain the golden ratio is published online in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics.

Jasper Schuringa probably didn’t think twice before dismantling Northwest Airlines Flight 253’s would-be bomber. But before telling his story, he wanted money, and he got it. From major news outlets who pay up and lie about it. Here’s the proof:

Yesterday Mediaite and TV Newser reported on Schurnga’s two wares he’s got for sale: the first, a blurry picture of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The second is himself, for interviews. CNN got to him first. They also got an interview.

This is the interview Jasper did. You can watch the entire thing, but it only gets good around 6:45, when Schuringa appears to be looking off-camera, trying to end the interview, and in doing so, preserving his product for further sale.

Mediaite’s Steve Krakauer deftly explains how things like this go down:

The practice of paying a “licensing fee” rather than a direct exchange is a way networks who claim to never pay for interviews can get around the issue. By paying for images and video, they are free to say no money was exchanged hands for the actual interview – which is still viewed as unseemly for news outlets not named the National Enquirer or TMZ. But paying for something to secure an interview happens quite a bit.

Steve was dead-on. This is what happened:

All the media organizations found Schuringa’s company website, which had his cell phone number on it. By the time he finally got to Miami, his final destination, CNN and The New York Post had gotten to him.

Once the Post and CNN got through to Jasper, he handed over all negotiations to his friend who lives in Miami who he came to the U.S. to visit. His name is Shai Ben-Ami. He’s an Israeli guy who’s in the restaurant business, as a Google search would turn up. He owns some kind of Pick Up Stix imitator. Though their Orange Chicken sounds good about now.

Schurnga sold the “TV Rights” of the first of his two photos to CNN for $10K.

The “print rights” went to the Post for $5K.

Later, Schuringa was paid upwards of $3K by ABC News for a second photo, which Schuringa tried to sell to other local news outlets for $5K, unsuccessfully.

Jasper Schuringa made at least $18,000 from two shitty, blurry photos.

Why?

Because the only way to get interviews with this guy was to pay him, so CNN and The New York Post ponied up. Fox News used the Post’s interview, because they’re part of Murdoch-stan. NBC apparently didn’t pay, because they don’t have their own interview. Neither does the New York Daily News or the New York Times. But the New York Daily News did take CNN’s photo (albeit watermarked) and interview quotes for their story in this morning’s paper for the low price of free-ninety-nine. Thrifty!

One reporter reached Shai just before Jasper went on CNN, and was told that after they were done with CNN and worked out a contract with ABC, they’d talk to the reporter about the print rights to the second photo, and Jasper would talk to reporters if—and only if—the reporter decided to buy it.

“He was quite upfront about it,” we’re told. “He made it clear that Jasper was only talking to news organizations that paid.”

And he made it clear over emails. Which look like this. Emphasis mine:

The post and times still talking about photo 2 what can you offer forit!? I feel bad dropping with you after you have been cool with us …
Sent from my BlackBerry® on the MetroPCS Network

You might have to run it only for monday cuz abc wants to use it aswell for tv news and they stressed if we could hold off till monday with paper ? Would that work …
Sent from my BlackBerry® on the MetroPCS Network

Others numbers are extremly higher
Sent from my BlackBerry® on the MetroPCS Network

They have exclusive rights for photo 1, that is a final, for photo 2
they are offering 3k, we are going with them soon if I don’t hear back
from you on equal contract … Thanks for all …
Sent from my BlackBerry® on the MetroPCS Network

Welcome to the wonderful world of Checkbook Journalism. Have you seen the photo? It looks like this.

It’s nothing.

Neither is the other photo, which is just more of the same. Again, these major news networks aren’t really paying for the photo, they’re paying for the thing that comes with the photo: an interview.

Here’s the “funny” thing: CNN admitted to Mediaite and TV Newser that they paid for the photo, but wouldn’t comment on the interview. When pressed, will they cop to it?

CNN tells Mediaite they paid a “licensing fee” for the exclusive cell phone image, which they have been using throughout the day…CNN clarifies the network did not pay for the actual interview during CNN Newsroom.

Of course not. Because they’re a news organization, not tabloid scum.

So:

Technically, did they pay for the interview? Probably not.
Categorically, did they pay for the interview? Absolutely.

When CNN wanted to talk about Balloon Boy a few weeks back? They wanted the goods—the exclusive—but they didn’t want to pay, be seen as paying, or refer to the story as anything but allegedly true. So they got the next best thing: my boss, talking about the story!

Looks like they learned their lesson.

Checkbook journalism is back, and here to stay. Media critics who lambast some news organizations for paying for sources are going to have to deal with the cold, hard fact that getting a scoop has gotten a lot more competitive these days.

Not only that, but the mainstream outlets who hold themselves in higher regards than those (like ours) who openly admit to ponying up for a story are doing the same thing themselves, the sole difference being: We don’t feel the need to lie about it. Why do they?

Send an email to Foster Kamer, the author of this post, at sbfgre@tnjxre.pbzfoster@gawker.com.

How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for?

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Illustration by Timothy Goodman

THE FAITH INSTINCT

How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures

By Nicholas Wade

310 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95

Nicholas Wade’s book “The Faith Instinct” is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. According to Wade, a New York Times science writer, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources.

Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution (or, if you’re a dyspeptic atheist, an unhappy one). He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene.

So how did this God gene flourish? Wade’s counterintuitive answer repurposes an old social-scientific analysis of religion as a saga of biological survival. Rituals take time; sacrifices take money or its equivalent. Individuals willing to lavish time and money on a particular group signal their commitment to it, and a high level of commitment makes each coreligionist less loath to ignore short-term self-interest and to act for the benefit of the whole. What are gods for? They’re the enforcers. Supernatural beings scare away cheaters and freeloaders and cow everyone into loyal, unselfish, dutiful and, when appropriate, warlike behavior.

Wade walks us briskly through the history of religion to show how our innate piety has adapted to our changing needs. Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and, shamans aside, had direct access to the divine. But when humans began to farm and to settle in cities and states, religion became hierarchical. Priests emerged, turning unwritten rules and chummy gods into opaque instruments of surveillance and power. Church bureaucracies created crucial social institutions but also suppressed the more ecstatic aspects of worship, especially music, dance and trance. Wade advances the delightfully explosive thesis that the periodic rise of exuberant mystery cults represent human nature rebelling against the institutionalization of worship: “A propensity to follow the ecstatic behaviors of dance and trance was built into people’s minds and provided consistently fertile ground for revolts against established religion,” he writes.

There’s a safari-hatted charm to Wade’s descriptions of what he calls, a little jarringly, “primitive” religion, filled with details of the rites of tribes cut off from the modern world but still available for anthropological observation. But his ­sketches of Judaism, Christianity and Islam rush by quickly and confusingly and offer only superficial accounts of the spread of those faiths, which was in each case a dicier process than Wade makes it sound. (What if Constantine had held out against the Roman Empire’s Christian factions, instead of converting?) Judaism’s strict moral codes, he argues, held together the rival states of Israel and Judah in Biblical times and provided comfort to Jews in exile, but failed to accommodate the more diverse Jews of the first-century Hellenic world. Early Christians adapted Judaism’s attractive but exclusivist mores to a society that had outgrown tribalism, succeeding “so well that they captured an empire and defined a civilization.” Wade embraces a radically revisionist approach to Islam, which holds that it evolved out of a Syriac branch of Christianity whose members believed that Jesus was human and rejected the Trinity. This sternly monotheistic remnant was Arabized when a new dynasty needed to differentiate itself from a previous one. If the revisionist version of Islam is correct, Wade writes, it “furnishes a case study of how a religion can be adapted with great success to a state’s purposes.”

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Judith Shulevitz’s book, “The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time,” will be published in March.

Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Books (11 of 28) » A version of this article appeared in print on December 27, 2009, on page BR16 of the New York edition.