Why do people take part in insurrections, like the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the storming of the presidential residence in Sri Lanka, or January’s sacking of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidential palace in Brazil?

Sometimes, that question is answered by pointing to precipitating events—elections and their results, protests that descend into anger, or the speeches of powerful demagogues. On other occasions, we blame insurrections on prejudices, or bigotries—racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, white nationalism.

I’d suggest that we think about insurrections differently—because they originate in our brains.

Indeed, I’d suggest that the insurrections in Washington, D.C. and Brasilia are due to overactivity in the limbic system in the brain—a primitive part of the brain that evolved millions of years ago, which we share with rats and cats and lizards and other creatures.

Social scientists used to focus on rational actions. But in recent years we have made great advances in understanding what goes on in the brain when we think politically. The biology of radical politics is no exception.

Scholars have explored why people rebel as long as there has been political science. In the early 1970s, one sociologist hypothesized that the reason was poverty, or “relative deprivation.” Political scientists and economists, using sophisticated mathematical models, also tried to explain rebellion, but found it hard to come up with a rational explanation. Very few people, the math showed, had any personal incentive to risk life and limb for the rather abstract benefits of overthrowing a government.

From a rational point of view, rebellions seem pointless. A political scientist even coined the phrase “the paradox of revolution.”

Enter neuroscience.

Since the early 2000s we have been able to look at what happens inside our heads when we think. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans which measure changing blood flow to brain cells, we can now see which parts of the brain get activated when we engage in various activities, like shopping, thinking about sex, and feeling remorse.

This perspective has also entered into the realm of political analysis—finally putting the “science” in political science. Of course, fMRI isn’t useful for studying rebellions in real time; there’s no way to scan people’s brains at the moment they storm the palace. But we can design experiments that observe how people who share insurrectionist views react to hate-speech and views that are articulated by politicians on the far right. Presenting subjects with statements about vulnerable minority groups during some brain scan studies, and showing them photos of political candidates they didn’t agree with during others, researchers could literally see what happened in would-be insurrectionists’ brains.

When neurologist Giovanna Zamboni and colleagues conducted such an experiment a little over a decade ago, they found that a part of the brain known as the ventral striatum, which is associated with the limbic system, was activated when individuals who were identified by psychological tests as “radicals” were exposed to hate-speech statements or other intolerant  assertions about other groups or minorities. These studies have been replicated in recent years and their findings confirmed and refined.

That the ventral striatum was activated is remarkable. This part of the brain is one of the oldest, in evolutionary terms. It is what makes animals respond positively to simple rewards in social situations and to negative stimuli in dangerous moments, such as fear that they might be attacked. The ventral striatum is linked with amygdala, the fight-and-flight center in the brain. When people hear statements about—or see images of—groups or individuals that they fear, the brain reacts as if it is attacked.

In contrast, study subjects who, based on personality tests, were identified as “moderate” or “conservative” used parts of the brain that only humans have evolved, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for planning and working memory and associated with listening, speaking, and reasoning. In another study, from 2011, young people with far-right views showed greater activation of amygdala, indicating that they were less likely to reflect on political statements and more likely to revert to fight-or-flight mode.

The most interesting part of this body of research: Generally, brains respond differently to politics than to policy. Scans show that when people think about politics—as in the rough and tumble partisan struggle—the fight-and-flight amygdala gets activated. But when people are exposed to questions about policy, they use the more advanced parts of the brain. In fMRI studies dating as far back as 2009, scientists found that the dorsolateral frontal cortex lit up in people exposed to arguments about economic policy.

I started out as a biologist before becoming a political scientist. Together, those two different academic fields offer a similar lesson: To prevent rebellions and insurrections, we should avoid angry and polarized debate. And when possible, we should avoid political hot-buttons and instead talk about the policy issues that affect our lives.

Biological research suggests the advantages of such an approach go beyond de-polarizing the public square. When we really listen to each other in debates about policy and related politics, we learn new things. And learning new things may make us less likely to develop degenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Humans are the product of 8 million years of evolution. We have the capacity to use the powers with which we have been endowed, namely to learn by being attentive, and through open deliberation. Human evolution hardwired us to process information, and make progress, through listening. But when we engage in hate speech and angry rebellion we revert to an evolutionarily primitive stage.

Neuropolitics shows us a way out of the current polarized debate and into a better future.

The post Blame the Brain, Not Bolsonaro, for Brazil’s Riots appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I was of the islands; yet I was not. My dad was from Chicago and my mom from Salt Lake City. Certainly, if anyone had asked me, I would have replied that I was a native—after all, I had kama’aina status—someone born there, literally “child” (kama) “of the land” (‘aina).

But then I wrote a book about the extinction and evolution of birds in Hawai‘i, including feathered immigrants from other lands as well as ones that had been resident in the islands for thousands of years. I also wrote about their status as natives, or not native. And in writing and thinking about birds, I felt a responsibility to investigate just what claiming native status actually has meant for humans on these islands as well.

In doing so, I stirred a great big muddy pot of understandings and misunderstandings about just what it means to say something or someone is a native of a place. It also got me to thinking differently—and more broadly—about what it signifies to claim native status.

Nativeness isn’t a fact, but a spectrum. Nativeness is a quality, I would argue, that is somewhat alchemical: influenced by scarcity or abundance, length of residency, charisma, evolutionary change, and usefulness to others. I say this despite protests from biologists who work from a traditional definition: A native is something that got to where it is under its own power—it flew, crawled, walked, wiggled, or otherwise arrived without any human help or agency. If something was brought by humans, then it’s a non-native. To many scientists, that bright line—around humanity—is the only line that matters. And so every living thing that did not involve human agency can be classified as a native, and everything else is introduced or downright invasive.

But the state of my birth reveals some problems with this notion. Everything in Hawai‘i comes from somewhere else, regardless of its route to the archipelago. Smoking volcanic rock rose out of the oceans between 400,000 years and nearly five million years ago, depending on the island, and everything living had to come to it. Even the word “lava”—the rooting force of the islands—is not of the islands; it is an Italian word.

The opposite of “under its own power” is “brought by humans.” Yet the pigs that came by canoe with the original Polynesian settlers of Hawai‘i—the pua’a—are a powerful symbol of nativeness in some corners of Hawai‘i; the pig’s name even appears in that most Hawaiian of land tenancy units, the ahupua’a—the wedge-shaped pieces of land that marked the political, economic, and cultural boundaries of every island. Each of the boundaries of the ahupua’a had an altar of stones topped by a carved pig’s head, and the altar was saturated with native rituals. The Hawaiians also had a mischievous pig-god—kamapua’a—that could take either human or pig form. Pigs—tasty, short-tempered, and with razor-sharp tusks—have been cultural icons in Hawai‘i for a millennium.

Another way these traditional notions of nativeness are overturned is via a biological route: evolution. Every living thing is in the act of turning into something else.

It’s been well established that some bird species in Hawai‘i, introduced by humans but having been there for between 100 and 1,000 years, already have evolved into something unique to the islands. The common myna, for example, has experienced sufficient evolutionary change that it is now genetically different from its Asian cousins. The red-vented bulbul, in Hawai‘i for decades, now appears quite different from off-island congeners. Even the lowly house sparrow in Hawai‘i has demonstrated rapid differentiation over a hundred generations since its appearance in the 19th century.

When the myna arrived, changes in environment meant changes in behavior and resources, which led to natural selection, which led to evolutionary change—something that’s been taking place over shorter periods of time than evolution has been traditionally thought to occur. And change means that something becomes identifiably, morphologically, of a place. It’s our myna now.

As human beings, we form bonds with the plants and animals around us as they become part of our backyards, our weekend jaunts, our dinner tables and birdfeeders. They move in, as it were. And although some introduced species have been undeniably damaging because they compete with other organisms that have had a longer tenancy, others seem to have taken up residence in our yards as well as in our hearts. As writer Michael Pollan asked in a 1994 article in The New York Times about some species of introduced plants in New England, “Shouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on their alien status?”

This is not only a symptom of human emotion, but also of biology. Isolated populations, like humans, begin to change when they’re somewhere new. Monarch butterflies on the Big Island have a much higher incidence of albinism. Brush-tailed rock-wallabies on O’ahu are an important and distinctive population, different from their Australian mates. Does this make the house sparrow native? Well, kind of, it does, although most people in Hawai‘i would find that idea repellent. Perhaps it’s native in the way that I am also a native: birthed in the land, knowing no other home (in my case, until adulthood), and influenced by all of Hawai‘i bearing down on me, via the wind, sky, seas, geology, and my fellow residents.

Native status in Hawai‘i for humans is also confounding. In 1921, Congress passed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, in response to the declining populations of Hawaiians, many of whom had been forced to relocate from ancient homesteads because of commercial real estate pressures. The Act created a land trust comprising 200,000 acres, exclusively for use by those who could prove that they had at least 50 percent Hawaiian ancestry. But the system doesn’t work very well, for a variety of reasons.

For purposes of claiming publicly trusted land and to reap other benefits in the islands, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs will designate you as native Hawaiian (with a lowercase “n”). If you have some Hawaiian blood, but less than half, you’re a Native Hawaiian (with an uppercase “N”). As bloodlines have thinned in the last century, though, fewer and fewer people have been able to claim native status—excluding descendants of people who did qualify for homestead lands. And despite the precision required to claim that preferred, lowercase “native” status, the documentation required is not precise at all: People cart in photo albums, documents, scraps of family tales passed down, and other potentially questionable archival evidence of long tenancy in the islands that predates the arrival of Captain Cook.

I find this highly problematic. Not all bloodlines were considered equal even in ancient Hawai‘i. Various tribes and groups in the islands were often at war over issues of rulership, rebellion, island succession, and the right to control land, and genealogists on both sides of a conflict were “always busy exalting the purity of their champion’s bloodlines, and deriding the mean ancestry of the enemy,” writer Gavan Daws has noted. There were strong distinctions between commoners and those of royal blood, with many strata of status, and ancient Hawaiians had a caste system that provided various pedigrees and ranks, including leaders who could trace their ancestry back to the gods.

For these reasons, I don’t think the purity test holds up today, either for birds or for humans. People have various synonyms for being of a place. For instance, you hear the word “local” in countless contexts in Hawai‘i: a “local” boy; “local” food”; a “local” custom; all are “from” the islands, or “of” the islands, and in some seemingly immutable way. Once you’ve secured local or native status, it doesn’t seem revocable.

But again, things start to fall apart upon trying to pin specific examples to nativeness of some kind. Manapua, the Chinese-influenced, sweet pork-filled buns? Kimchi, the pickled Korean food? The loco moco, which consists of an egg over a hamburger patty and rice? All are typically described as “local” in the islands. But they’re from somewhere else, or a modern mashup, conditioned by the intense and longstanding cultural vectors that have passed through Hawai‘i. They’ve earned their reputation as local through affection, habit, and cultural inclusion. Purity as a notion is overrated, and over.

The other aspect of nativism in Hawai‘i, and everywhere, is that time changes everything. Even the most invasive, landscape-changing species will eventually, with a long enough arc into the future, modify, assimilate, and settle into a particular role in an ecosystem for which it will then be uniquely suited.

Today becomes tomorrow becomes another millennium. We will resist the so-called non-natives, and understandably, because of the risk of unintended consequences and the norms they upset. We will contemplate, guiltily or not, their eradication from our established ways of life, or we will rage against them. We will breathe a sigh of relief when they seem to assimilate without causing a commotion. And far in the future, as the spring of time’s clock unwinds, they will be a part of us that we can’t live without.

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Nearly 60 years later, this redefinition—of chimps, culture, and ourselves—continues. There are now seven chimpanzee field studies that span more than 25 years, as well as many shorter ones. These long-term studies have produced exciting new information on how chimps use simple tool technologies. The sum of all this work has given us a rich portrait of what a truly cultural species our closest relative is.

It’s one thing for an animal to use a simple tool. Sea otters place rocks on their chests and hammer shellfish on them as they float among the waves. Egyptian vultures use stones to crack open ostrich eggs.

In contrast, chimpanzees use tools in different ways from forest to forest across equatorial Africa. It’s clear that the differences—using sticks to fish for termites in one site and using stone tool hammers in another—vary as a result of local traditions, not differences in genetic programming.

Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing awareness of chimpanzee cultural behavior—and it’s not limited to tools. In the Mahale Mountains of Tanzania, two chimpanzees will clasp their right hands above their heads while their left hands groom their partners. Only 100 kilometers away at Goodall’s Gombe, the grooming partners grasp branches instead of hands. This sounds like a trivial difference, but primatologists believe the difference between the Gombe and the Mahale is analogous to the myriad little cultural differences in human societies. In Europe, moving your head side-to-side means no; in India, it can subtly signal agreement.

Only a highly intelligent species, to which learning is all-important, will show these sorts of variations. Now, when we find a new chimpanzee population in Africa, we’re not just finding a new gene pool. We’re also discovering a new culture.

As the number of long-term field studies of chimpanzees grew, so did our awareness of the scope of cultural diversity across Africa. Well into the fourth decade of chimpanzee field research, psychologist Andrew Whiten of St. Andrews University compiled the full complement of cultural variation across Africa, using information contributed by co-authors from each of the longest-term studies. They identified 39 behaviors across seven sites that appeared to be culturally and not environmentally induced. These included both foraging for food and more social traditions, like leaf-grooming.

Leaf-grooming is one of the few symbolic cultural traditions that varies from site to site and is practiced by many East African chimpanzee communities. The chimps pluck leaves and groom them as intently as they might pick through the hair of another chimp. Other chimps see the behavior and understand it as signaling the desire to groom or be groomed.

Another tradition that indicates symbolic communication is leaf-clipping. A male chimpanzee audibly clips the leaves from a plant stem using his fingers and teeth. This appears to signal a desire for sex with a particular female, and perhaps some sexual frustration.

How do such traditions begin and spread? Primatologists are still engaged in a search for the social mechanisms by which these new traditions emerge and become entrenched. We don’t know yet whether such traditions appear infrequently and are then readily adopted by others, or if they pop up often but are rarely adopted. It’s even possible that the pattern of traditions we now see across Africa may actually reflect the fact that many local traditions have selectively gone extinct. Culture may emerge and spread within a community readily, but it’s possible that it disappears just as often.

Calling chimpanzee behavioral variation “culture” is controversial for some anthropologists. My colleagues in the human-oriented fields of anthropology and psychology don’t accept that many chimpanzee behaviors come about through social learning, even though they span activities from hunting to food-sharing, showing great geographic variation between communities with distinct behaviors. This reluctance to embrace chimpanzees as cultural animals may be healthy scientific skepticism. Or it may reflect the opposite: a certain obtuseness about chimpanzee uniqueness.

Cultural anthropologists tend to adopt an exclusive rather than inclusive definition and allow culture as a concept only among human societies. Culture is a human universal, so almost anything that we do that is not genetically hardwired could be called cultural behavior. Even when we’re talking about humans, culture is not easy to define.

But it’s possible to apply criteria used in studies of human culture to chimpanzees, which could help further the debate. In 1962, famed ethnographer Alfred Kroeber published a time-tested checklist for human culture. Recently, primatologist William McGrew of St. Andrews University applied Kroeber’s checklist to many chimpanzee studies and found that the same traditions applied—albeit with a simpler overall pattern. Chimpanzees use tools, but a simpler toolset is found; they show cross-populational differences in traditions, though on a simpler scale than seen among human cultures.

Cultural anthropologists claim symbolic behavior is at the heart of culture. That is, humans do things—and create things we call cultural artifacts—that have no concrete connection to the thing itself. We invent symbolic sounds called words that have no connection to the word’s meaning itself. For example, nothing in the word red tells you what something red looks like. And the anthropologists are right—language is a central aspect of human culture that goes far beyond anything that chimpanzees do in the wild or can be taught to do in captivity.

Yet new cultural differences in chimpanzee behavior across Africa are being uncovered every year. Some are subtle differences in the details of tool use or body language which appear patently cultural. Others involve behavior where the line between learned behavior and response to local habitat isn’t clear. Why do chimpanzees who live in Forest A prefer to catch baby monkeys rather than adults, but those in Forest B prefer to catch adult monkeys? Does the particular structure of each forest lend itself to one practice or the other? Or does each group perpetuate techniques that have been practiced by male hunters simply because older males had always hunted that way?

We are still a long way from understanding exactly why some traditions become entrenched for generations while others wink out of existence quickly, or fail to take hold in the first place. But in 2018, we can say that chimpanzees are defined by their cultural traditions in a way that is unmatched by any other animal on Earth, save their closest relatives—ourselves.

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He was right, especially about the brain’s divinity. As some of the brain’s secrets have been revealed, we’ve been able to see surprising connections between the evolution of the brain and the very human practice of seeing gods in charge of our universe.

I am a psychiatrist and researcher on schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Twenty years ago I started collecting postmortem brains to facilitate this research, and became interested in how our brains evolved. A century ago the German researcher Korbinian Brodmann published data showing which parts of the brain developed early in human evolution and which parts developed more recently. At that time, relatively little was known about how specific brain areas functioned, so it was not possible to interpret the evolution of the brain’s inner workings.

But over the past two decades, brain-imaging techniques—including functional MRI’s and diffusion tensor imaging—have allowed us to say with relative certainty which brain areas are responsible for specific cognitive abilities—and thus the order in which we acquired them.

Korbinian Brodmann (1868-1918), the German researcher who published data showing which parts of the brain developed early in human evolution and which parts developed more recently. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Take for example the fact, demonstrated by archaeological evidence from caves in South Africa, that approximately 100,000 years ago early humans began to adorn themselves with necklaces. They also began wearing more tailored clothing, as shown by studies of the evolution of body lice that attach to clothing. Early humans had become aware, for the first time, of what other people were thinking about them. Does my new bearskin look good on me? Will people like my necklace of seashells? The consumer economy had been born. And since we now know the specific brain areas that are involved in thinking about ourselves—introspective thinking, as it is called—we also know when those brain areas and introspective thinking developed in the course of human evolution. As a result, we now have an evolutionary timeline for the development of specific human cognitive traits.

I found this intriguing, particularly because I majored in religion as a university student. And because, over the years, I visited many of the world’s religious shrines, including Europe’s Gothic cathedrals, Peru’s platform mounds, Egypt’s pyramids, England’s stone circles and monumental earthworks, and Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe, discovered in 1995 and apparently built about 11,500 years ago as the world’s first known holy place. Now, with a timeline of human cognitive traits, another thought occurred: We might be able to track the development of human religious thought and specifically our beliefs about gods.

So I began to merge the new neuroscience of brain evolution with what is known archeologically regarding hominin behavior at different stages of development to get a sense of how our thinking about religion evolved. I also reviewed the anthropological literature regarding thinking about gods among contemporary hunter-gatherer societies. And finally, I consulted some theories on child development. As child development specialist Jean Piaget noted, “the development of thought in children closely parallels the evolution of consciousness in our species.”

Ultimately I concluded that human thinking about gods probably had its origin in brain developments that occurred about 35,000 years ago. At that time humans acquired the ability to project themselves backwards and forwards in time in a way not previously possible. Psychologists refer to it as having acquired an autobiographical memory. This period was marked by extraordinary advances in human behavior, including new tools and weapons, the first musical instruments, sculpted ivory figures, and thousands of drawings and paintings in the caves of Spain and France.

This period also saw the first unequivocal examples of human burials with valuable grave goods, indicating a belief in an afterlife. This was an important development because the acquisition of an autobiographical memory enabled modern humans to understand fully and for the first time that they were ultimately destined to die. Faced with such knowledge, we created an afterlife for ourselves so that death would not be our final end. The afterlife was peopled by those who had died in the past—our ancestors. Proof of their existence in an afterlife came from dreams in which our ancestors sometimes visited us. Even today in hunter-gatherer societies it is common for people to interpret their dreams in this manner.

Thus began the practice of ancestor worship, which posited that your deceased ancestors could help you. This was probably the main form of religion from about 35,000 years ago until the beginning of the agricultural revolution. As long as you had ancestors looking after you there was no need for gods.

All this changed about 10,000 years ago when people began to plant crops, domesticate animals, and settle on the land. Previously deceased members of the group had been buried wherever they had died, as demanded by a migratory lifestyle. However, the new settled lifestyle allowed relatives to be buried beneath the family’s house. In some cases, the skulls of deceased relatives were displayed in the house.

By 8,000 years ago some skulls were being painted and modeled with plaster so as to resemble a human face, suggesting that ancestor worship was becoming more elaborate and important. Human masks and human figurines, some three feet tall, also appeared.

As the agricultural revolution progressed, people began living together in villages, then towns, and finally cities. Each hunter-gatherer group had brought its ancestors to be worshipped, and as the towns increased in size a hierarchy developed among the ancestors, with some considered to be more important than others.

Ultimately a few very important ancestors broke through the celestial barrier and came to be regarded as gods. This probably happened between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago since by 6,500 years ago, when the Mesopotamians were using a written language for the first time, they recorded the existence of several gods. This was the origin of modern gods and religions.

Given our new technology for studying the brain, we are on the threshold for better understanding how and why it works as it does. Just as our genome includes DNA inserted thousands and millions of years ago, so too our brains include ancient functions. By better understanding the evolutionary origins of such functions perhaps we can improve our species.

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And when it did appear, “empathy” was a translation from the German Einfühlung, literally “in-feeling,” with the surprising meaning of projecting one’s own feelings into nature and objects of art.

This meaning is strange to us now. But the feeling we call “empathy” has shifted dramatically over the last century from a description of an aesthetic response, to a moral and political aspiration, to a clinical skill, and today, to the firing of neurons. Returning to empathy’s roots—to once again think about the potential for “in-feeling” with a work of art, a mountain, or a tree—invites us to re-imagine our connection to nature and the world around us.

James Ward, one of two psychologists who brought “empathy” into English. Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Aesthetic empathy was first described in the 1870s, when father and son art historians Friedrich and Robert Vischer expounded on Einfühlung to explain how we imaginatively bend, stretch, or shrink ourselves to inhabit forms we perceive. To “feel into” a Doric column was to feel it reaching upwards; to feel into a winding road was to sense it hesitating; and to feel into a heavy weight sitting on a pillar was to experience it straining earthwards.

With Einfühlung or empathy, one experiences beauty by unconsciously melding one’s feelings and impulses of movement with the object. To imagine a mountain rising is to project my own feelings of striving upward into it. Psychologists vigorously debated whether the phenomenon engaged actual movements of muscles and limbs, or was merely a mental exercise that made use of “the mind’s muscles.”

As it happened, the same decades that saw Einfühlung become vital to art psychology also saw the rise of the new field of experimental psychology. Students from all over the world flocked to German psychological institutes and laboratories to carry out experiments evaluating sensation and perception. It soon became imperative to translate German terms into English. It was thus in 1908 that two British psychologists, Edward Titchener and James Ward, coined “empathy” for Einfühlung.

Titchener, director of the Cornell psychological laboratory, fashioned the term empathy on analogy to sympathy, but distinct from it. Sympathy, a much older term, was touted by moral philosophers of the 18th century as an in-born moral sentiment. Adam Smith, famous for his free-market economics, called sympathy a means of “changing places in fancy with the sufferer.” But if sympathy meant one felt with or alongside of another, Titchener explained that with empathy one entered into the object and experienced it from the inside.

Empathy was first described in these years as a kind of “aesthetic sympathy.” But empathy soon expanded to take over the territory formerly covered by sympathy. German and American psychologists debated the merits of empathy between individuals, and empathy for objects became less popular.

Edward B. Titchener, one of two psychologists who brought “empathy” into English. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As a means to understand others, empathy gained cultural influence after the Second World War. Soldiers suffering from war trauma and neuropsychiatric injuries put clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in high demand. Some clinicians turned to empathy as a therapeutic skill that required the therapist to put aside judgment in order to see the world more fully from the client’s perspective.

Furthermore, the war had exposed social fault lines between those of different races, religions, and cultures. Social scientists began to take a new look at empathy as a way to improve interpersonal relations. Experimental psychologists developed tests of empathy as a capacity which, similar to intelligence, could now be measured and quantified. A variety of empathy scales were designed to chart who possessed more, and who had less, of the ability.

In popular journals and newspapers of the 1950s, advice columnists touted empathy to better connect husbands and wives, mothers and daughters. Performers such as Lucille Ball spoke of empathy with their television audiences, and psychologists studied empathy between workers and managers in industrial settings. The concept of “cultural empathy” circulated in the 1960s to forge links between those with different ethnic, racial, and national identities.

Only recently, however, has empathy garnered new attention as a hard-wired capacity in the brain. In 1996, scientists in a neurophysiology laboratory in Parma, Italy, announced the discovery of “mirror neurons.” These neurons, wired up in a macaque monkey’s prefrontal lobes, fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but also when the monkey perceived another monkey performing that action. Neuroimaging experiments soon determined that humans possessed a mirror neuron system spread across different areas of the brain.

The use of neuroimaging techniques to test social psychological abilities has exploded over the past decades in the interdisciplinary field of social neuroscience. Empathy is now frequently identified as a pattern of neural firing. Social, cognitive, and neuro-scientists still struggle to precisely define empathy’s many varieties, and debate how it can be measured in the laboratory. Some neuroscientists argue that empathy is a complex social response that relies on both emotional and rational components, and can best be appreciated in real world settings.

The discovery of mirror neurons gave empathy research a new prominence. Image courtesy of PLOS Biology.

But these debates don’t question that empathy is an interpersonal connection. The very design of “mirror neurons” experiments reveals that we regard empathy only as a way to understand other humans.

We’ve come a long way from a sense of “empathy” that celebrates our ability to enter into divergent forms, and non-human, even inanimate, objects. Today, we discount the capacity to inhabit objects with our imaginative power. We even fault this kind of projection of the self’s feelings as a naïve humanizing of things and nature. To say, as Vischer did, that “a tree bends and shakes its head like a weary human being,” sounds to contemporary ears to be an unscientific anthropomorphism.

And yet, there may be a pressing reason to see ourselves in nature once again. Aesthetic empathy might help to bridge the cleft between humans and our natural environment. We might consider how to cultivate an ability to live within and animate our natural world, as these early theorists described.

Doing so might offer a vital emotional and imaginative spur to efforts to avert climate change. What if we bolster a rational grasp of the scientific consensus that we are rapidly moving toward climate catastrophe, with an engaged, empathic immersion in nature? If we can perceive that a tree wearily shakes its head, can we also sense the pain that might be felt by melting icebergs, eroding shorelines, and devastated coral reefs? Artists and aesthetic psychologists celebrated this powerful human capacity over a hundred years ago. It might be time to revive it.

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Then scurvy would break out—as it has recently in a mental hospital in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and at a clinic for diabetics in Sydney—with typical lesions on the skin and mucous tissue, aching joints, and various kinds of vascular damage. Once this happens, vitamin C (ascorbate) has to be ingested immediately to prevent sustained damage to the bones, the blood vessels, the network of nerves, and the brain. Teeth fall out, cartilage disappears, and internal bleeding begins. The heart is under pressure, and the brain can start to hemorrhage. At the same time, scurvy sufferers experience either stupor or powerful dreams and hallucinations. Untreated, scurvy will kill you.

The story of our mutated gene bears strong similarities to the Biblical account of the fall of man, with one important difference. Fruit then was the cause of original sin and our mortality, and fruit (lemons and oranges) now is what infallibly will cure scurvy. But in both scenarios choice of food is a life and death issue.

“Govern well thy appetite, lest sin/ Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death,” Raphael warms Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost, first published in 1667.

Around the same time, Robert Hooke, an eminent member of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, remembered the warning when anticipating the great improvements to life and health that experimental science was about to deliver: “And as at first, mankind fell by tasting of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, so we, their Posterity, may be in part restor’d by the same way … by tasting too those fruits of Natural Knowledge, that were never yet forbidden.”

Hooke’s optimism about human ingenuity didn’t blind him to the fact that we all carry in our bodies the seed of mortality, of which that mutated gene is the physical specimen and scurvy, the specific proof. From Hooke’s era to ours, the biological defect we share with guinea pigs and fruit bats has been a constant in our lives, and for much of that time we have been ignorant of what we need to make us whole. We are none of us perfect, being unable to extract from otherwise nourishing food the vital principle without which we shall die: fat, protein, carbohydrate, and sugar don’t contain it, neither do preserved fruits or boiled vegetables.

Like goiter and rickets, scurvy is a nutritional disease. You don’t catch it, like Ebola or bubonic plague. It waits for an interruption in the ingestion of fresh food, and then—if the interruption is long enough—makes its fatal appearance. On hearing that she had scurvy last year, a patient in the Sydney clinic for diabetics, with a scorbutic ulcer on her leg cried out, “I didn’t realize you could be obese and malnourished at the same time.” A lot of people don’t realize this, which explains why scurvy will always be with us.

A survey of college students in North America found 14 percent with ascorbate below the level for good health. In the Sydney clinic where the outbreak of scurvy occurred, 60 percent of the target group was in a more dire state of depletion. Amnesia about our peculiar gene isn’t limited to people who choose to eat badly. According to The Guardian, since the onset of austerity economics in Britain five years ago, “the number of bed days accounted for by someone with a primary or secondary diagnosis of malnutrition,” including many elderly people, has risen 44 percent.

There is however another reason why alertness or indifference to the dangers of scurvy is part of our history. The difference between neo-Platonic and empirical beliefs about the perfection of the human entity was exhibited when Hooke started inventing machines designed to supplement the deficiencies of the senses. He designed microscopes for the eye, hygrometers (to measure moisture) for the nose, a sort of telegraph for the ear.

John Locke, the Enlightenment philosopher, was incredulous: Why be dazzled, suffocated, and deafened by impressions our nature was never intended to feel?

Hooke thought we needed the supplement of machines if we were ever to feel things as they truly are, and shed our sin and mortality. Locke, on the other hand, was an empiricist to the extent he believed that all we know comes to us via the senses, but like Descartes and Plato he believed we needed no additional help in order for our perceptions to be perfect—or as perfect as was consistent with God’s will. His empiricism was flexible enough to accommodate Plato’s and Descartes’ belief that truly good and wise humans are never in a state of becoming, but already complete in their faculties unless seduced and enslaved by false representations. Margaret Cavendish, the 17th century English aristocrat and scientist, was of the same opinion and, later, so was Locke’s pupil, the elegant philosopher-earl Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury.

Hooke thought we needed all the prostheses we could lay our hands on if we were to regain what we lost in Paradise; so he ably abetted his friend, Robert Boyle, in the management of an air-pump, a sort of artificial lung, in his efforts to discover the vital principle of air.

And Hooke’s colleagues Thomas Willis and Walter Charleton, two great 17th century specialists on scurvy, came as close as any scientists, before the isolation of vitamin C in 1933, to the secret of the vital principle of food. They called it a nitrous salt, a latex, a nutritive sap which, they showed, directly affected the efficiency of the nerves as well as the scaffolding of the body. They knew it added nothing to body mass, but that without it even the most robust constitution would fail.

Almost a hundred years after their hypotheses were confirmed by bio-chemical proofs, a significant fraction of the population remains at risk of diseases that supervene when ascorbate levels are low—a risk that can in many cases be minimized with a healthy dose of vitamin C. It has recently been discovered that large intravenous injections of vitamin C will reduce deaths from sepsis by three-quarters. Current research at Vanderbilt University indicates that seizures are much more likely when the body is carrying insufficient ascorbate. A colleague assured me that five years of his life were lost to chronic fatigue syndrome until he started intensive doses of vitamin C.

It is not for nothing that the first outbreak of scurvy in Australia in almost 200 years occurred at a clinic for diabetics. Type 2 diabetes is largely caused by a poor diet cooperating with oxidative stress, a major factor in depleting reserves of ascorbate.

Is it because we thought we were perfect that scorbutic imperfection dogs us? Or is it that artificial perfection is too tedious to attain, and we would rather dally with our sin?

The post Why Scurvy Is Still a Snake in Our Nutritional Lost Paradise appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These all-female amphibians clone themselves to make eggs—all girls—and they’ve survived this way for five million years. A real-life lineage of Amazonian amphibians, they achieve the seemingly impossible, generation after generation. Whatever your deepest beliefs about what is natural, normal, or even conceivable with sex and reproduction, these seven-inch salamanders blow them out of the water.

What’s more, grasping exactly what they’re up to could help us understand how climate change will affect northern ecosystems.

Unisexual salamanders seem rare, but they are abundant from the east coast as far west as the Great Lakes. Where I live in New England, the person who studies them, as part of what’s called the Blue Spotted Salamander Complex, is Kristine Hoffmann, an energetic PhD candidate at the University of Maine. I tried to talk with her in the fall, but her rigorous daily schedule of visiting her radio-tagged salamanders in their damp woodsy hideouts kept us from finding a time until late December, after the salamanders had crawled away to sleep off the winter in their burrows.

“I grew up in a vernal pool,” Hoffmann told me, referring to the 100-foot-long seasonal wetland situated behind her childhood home in Massachusetts. She spent hours there as a kid, looking at wood frogs, salamanders and the whole ecosystem of creatures that gravitated there to breed, lay eggs, and mature before leaving in search of a hidden place to hang out when the pool went dry.

Hoffmann, in waders and giant gloves, checks some salamander breeding cages in a small vernal pool still partly covered with ice. It was raining. Big Night is more fun for amphibians than it is for people. Courtesy of Kristine Hoffmann.

In 2012 Hoffmann came to Maine to study how urbanization was impacting vernal pools and the blue spotted salamanders. In Maine, salamanders may be the most abundant vertebrate—certainly more populous than people or moose. Scientists have estimated that in Maine the total weight of the salamander population actually exceeds that of people, but that is partly a function of Maine’s small human presence and vast woodlands. In any case, salamanders are a rarely seen but critical part of the ecosystem, in particular in the early spring when they are a feast of “little hamburgers” for hungry owls, skunks, and even just-out-of-hibernation bears who eat their eggs.

Hoffmann quickly realized that these salamanders, for all their importance, were scientifically mysterious. “Nobody had ever just followed a blue spotted salamander and seen where they lived and what types of wetland they liked.” So Hoffmann got to work hiking to dozens of wetland sites, trapping and measuring and releasing scores of salamanders and then using statistics to compare their preferences. Her survey became so ambitious she ended up asking groups of Upward Bound high schoolers from Maine to design cheap new live traps. (Watch a video.) With the new traps, she and a crew monitored 42 wetlands over the course of two years.

She also implanted tiny radio transmitters in some salamanders so she could follow them. Some, she discovered, could walk as far as 400 meters in a week. (In Ohio labs some salamanders have walked nine miles on a treadmill. Poor things.)

The salamanders’ new year begins on what Hoffmann and other scientists call Big Night, the first warm night of spring when it is raining and the air smells like mud even though there is still ice in the tops of the vernal pools. On that night all of amphibians are on the move, which is why so many frogs end up getting smashed on roadways. The salamanders wake up in their burrows and head downhill to the pool. If they find one that’s too small it will dry up before their babies metamorphose. If it’s too big it’ll have fish that eat their eggs. But, if they’re lucky, they end up in a vernal pool that’s just right.

A mating frenzy begins. Male frogs and female frogs pair up. A male blue spotted salamander, whose blackish gray back is peppered with attractive pale blue spots, approaches a female blue spotted salamander, nudges her with his snout, hugs her from behind, and then rubs his chin over her snout while vibrating his hind limbs alongside hers. Eventually he lets go of her and drops some sperm packets in the mud and she picks them up with her cloaca and then the sperm and eggs combine and divide. Blah blah blah.

Well, that’s how the straight salamanders do it anyway. Amidst the frenzy, the female unisexual salamanders—who look almost identical to the blue spots—sneak in and steal some sperm packets. These sperm then stimulate their cloned eggs to divide, but the genes in the sperm may or may not be taken up by the dividing eggs. So some embryos will have two sets of chromosomes from their mother, and others will have three sets, including one from dad. There’s a name for reproducing via sperm-stealing: kleptogenesis.

A male blue spotted salamander. His sperm is used by the unisexual salamanders to stimulate the development of their eggs. Courtesy of Kristine Hoffmann.

Self-cloning seems exotic but recent research shows it’s surprisingly prevalent. At least 80 different fish, reptiles, and amphibians reproduce via parthenogenesis, Greek for “virgin birth.”

This suggests that it’s we sexual reproducers who are the weirdos. Why devote so much energy to finding partners if there’s another way? The unisexual salamander is a compelling data point in this argument. People used to think that parthenogenesis “cost” organisms by making them more vulnerable to parasites and predators and more inclined to go extinct. But the unisexual salamanders have survived lo these five million years—ever since two salamanders of different species met in some ancient pool and did their thing. When their chromosomes didn’t line up exactly their offspring produced eggs with two chromosomes, not one. As time went on, these salamanders swapped out their original genes with new ones from nearby salamanders. So the unisexual salamanders who descended from this ancient pair are part of other “complexes” with other salamanders across North America.

Rather than being evolutionary dead ends, unisexual salamanders thrived. While sexual salamanders produce between one and ten eggs, the unisexual ones produce as many as 30. And studies of a group of unisexual salamanders in Ohio (who steal sperm from a different species of salamander than the Blue Spotted) found that they regrow their tails 1.5 times faster than regular salamanders. (If anyone can figure out a half decent pun about unisexual salamanders getting more tail, or tails, um, please drop me a line.)

“Salamanders are kind of strange,” observes Hoffmann. “Usually animals have a set of rules for unisexual reproduction, but salamanders don’t follow them.” Some of the unisexual salamanders she’s found have not just two or three sets of chromosomes but four or even five.

And in the vernal pools, things get even stranger. In other salamander complexes, the usual ratio between unisexual salamanders and their sperm donors is 2 to 1 or 3 to 1. But in the Maine vernal pools that Hoffmann surveyed there are 78 unisexual females for every blue spotted male. That’s a ratio that’s theoretically impossible because it’s thought that a blue spotted male only has enough sperm packets for 7-35 females. Are the males producing a lot of sperm? Are the females reproducing without males? “They’re doing something theoretically impossible and we don’t know what it is,” she says.

This spring Hoffmann will do a series of studies of salamanders to see how they’re reproducing, but the question isn’t just academic. The blue spotted salamanders are at the bottom of their geographic range, and as the climate warms, they may move further north. If it turns out that the unisexual salamanders can reproduce even without male sperm, then Maine may still have lots of these salamanders to feed our bears, eat our mosquitos, and outweigh us. If not, well, the woods may change right beneath our feet.

The post What Self-Cloning Salamanders Say About Climate Change appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

All winter, frogs crouch hidden in the leaves, their outsides frozen so hard they’d make a “clink” if you dropped them. They survive because the interior of their cells are propped up by a sugary antifreeze peculiar to frogs. As the weather warms up, they unfreeze and reanimate, like something from a fairy tale. And then they find themselves a nice muddy spot and begin singing.

Frog songs are meepy and beepy, some clattery, others deep. If you have a big enough collection of frogs, the puddles around you will vibrate with a whole froggy symphony, heavy on the percussion. There’s a pond near my house in Maine that fills with spring peepers, whose high-pitched chirps make a loud cacophony that sometimes organizes, for a few seconds, into something like a pattern, before separating. I wonder whether the frogs really sync up, or whether my brain is working overtime to organize the sound. The racket at the pond seems to hijack my brain—thoughts of grocery lists, taxes, and politics are replaced by the seething urgency of frog talk.

Scientists have counted about 7,000 species of frogs worldwide, but modern life is tough on them. Since 1995, 168 species have gone extinct and nearly 2,500 species’ populations are in decline. Frogs respond to small environmental changes: They are sensitive to chemical pollution in water and noise pollution near their breeding puddles. Invasive bullfrogs eat up tasty smaller frogs, the chytrid fungus has devastated frogs in the West, and a parasite that lives in snails has caused deformed frogs. And there is climate change. There are many reasons to mourn the frogs (and even more reasons to save them!) but what I appreciate about them is that their songs give us one of the clearest experiences of what it’s like not to be human. Stop and listen to the choruses in the spring and you get an infusion of froggy priorities: the mad biological cycle of mating, egging, morphing, and frogging.

One winter evening about five years ago, my boyfriend played me his CD of New England frogs. The first songs on the recording were the spring peepers. Then we heard the mournful foghorn of the bullfrogs, the duck-like chuckle of wood frogs, the implosive green frog, the dreamlike trill of the American toad. Listening revealed two things.

First, frogs sing for a purpose. The peepers’ song serves almost like a puffy profile on a dating website: “Here I am! I’m big! My genes are excellent.” When a female hears this call from her species, she’ll hop or swim in that direction. When the male senses a female in front of him, he will give her a big long hug from behind, and try to transfer that package of genes. At this point, the female may realize she’s being hugged by the wrong species of frog and she’ll shout a call that says, “Whoops! Wrong Frog. Release me.” Males who suddenly find themselves hugged by another male also have a “Release me” call. If you grab a frog in a suggestive way with your fingers, the croak you’ll hear is “release me.” If you’re a halfway decent frog, you’ll let that one go. Frogs are often confused, but they aren’t boorish.

Secondly, frog songs make an excellent date night soundtrack. We still put the froggy “mix tape” on and sit side by side on the couch, holding hands. After 300 million years, it’s no surprise that frogs have game.

I called the maker of the CD, frog listener Lang Eliott. He started recording frog songs in southern Missouri in the early 1970s using the same kind of massive reel-to-reel tape recorder that Nixon used for the Watergate tapes. Since then, recording equipment has gotten much smaller, but Elliot has continued to stand up to his neck in swamps both warm and cold to get close to his singers.

Observation is what he does (his master’s thesis was on chipmunk behavior) but observation also possesses him. In 1988, he realized that recording soundscapes of frogs and birds was his calling. “I’m not doing them for scientific or documentary purposes but for their effect on the human psyche. Which is something you get immersed in, hypnotic, relaxing.” He wants listeners to “dissolve” when they put on headphones.

Elliot makes all of his best recordings at night, when there are no planes overhead, no cars in the vicinity, and it’s dark. “It’s a fabulous time to experience in part because you don’t get distracted by seeing. The soundscape is most poignant,” he says. He describes weeks in Florida where he sleeps by day and works in the swamps by night, alone with the sounds. Sometimes, at dusk or at dawn, the birds will sing against the background of the frogs.

The best way to sneak up on a frog, Elliott says, is to avoid getting in the water—frogs sense wavelets. A small frog chorus will immediately get quiet if you come near. (One reason for frog declines is road noise, which discourages frog courtship.) But a really big frog chorus, at the height of breeding season, in an otherwise quiet area, simply cannot be stopped. At that time, you can find specific frogs in the pond by bringing a friend and two flashlights. If you stand at different places and aim your flashlights towards the croak, the spot where your beams cross is where the frog is. Alternatively, you can look for the reflection of their white neck pouch on the water that seems to go in time with the calls.

I asked Elliot if frogs sing in sync. He acknowledged that our brains are always looking for patterns, but explained that frog songs are basically random, though every frog is on a similar rhythmic schedule. In musical terms, they’re not trying to play in unison but they wait the same number of beats between croaks. As a result, they sometimes fall into sync and then fall out again. In addition, some frogs do counter-singing, and some seem to follow each other. Elliot says that if you can sing like a frog you can sometimes get them to follow your lead.

Elliott hasn’t seen signs of the big changes happening with frogs around the world in the mostly eastern frogs he records. Still, climate is having an impact: A study from upstate New York found that the first song of the spring peepers is now 11 days earlier than it was in 1949.

Life as the frog listener has changed Elliot so that his seasonal rhythms skew amphibian. He describes himself as “spring centric.” “I live for it. My mind is planted there.” The spring is the most intense time for him, as he listens as the frogs and birds get louder, “blooming with sound,” and then taper off to the buzz of bugs in the summer. He now sees the entire year as part of spring. “You know what’s a good sign of spring? The first frost.” The first frost starts the winter bird breeding, which leads, inevitably, to spring.

We spend most of our days driving past lovelorn frogs at 65 miles per hour. Spring offers a chance to listen to that great organizing principle of nature—chance: the thin, teeming boundary between the survival of one’s genes and the end of them. In the syncing and separating of the frog symphonies, in their chorus of “pick me” and “release me,” you can hear the combination of randomness and striving that is the history of everything.

The post When Frogs Sing Their Evening Song, Listen for Nature’s Greatest Lesson appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Long before you drove a car or ordered a drink, you declared your independence by embracing E. coli. Just a few hours after you were separated from your mother, this strain of bacteria swam into your intestines and set up housekeeping. While you slept, it triggered vital elements of your immune system, and prepared the environment for the arrival of other good bacteria. It also set about manufacturing vitamin K, and keeping harmful bacteria at bay.

You might think that E. coli exerts its will through big numbers, but that’s not the case. It is much less than one percent of your gut’s 9 trillion microbial cells. You have just a billion E. coli, each merely one micrometer wide and two micrometers long. (For comparison, a human hair is between 17 micrometers and 181 micrometers thick.) As for the toxic E. coli, it takes hardly any of those to make a person mortally ill. Ten will do do the trick. Ten! One of E. coli’s recipes for success is reproducing really quickly, sometimes doubling population in 20 minutes.

Another of E. coli’s tricks is sharing code—like open source software developers and DJs. E. coli has a fancy toolkit for acquiring and trading DNA, including viruses and pieces of circular DNA that, Frisbee-like, can transfer DNA from one bacterium to another.

When microbiologist Dr. Pina Fratamico joined the USDA in 1990, she started researching a newly discovered E. coli strain that lived harmlessly in cows’ intestines but caused terrible diarrhea and kidney failure in humans. O157:H7, as the strain is named, had picked up the code for the kidney toxin from a virus (aka bacteriophage) had the ability to invade bacteria. Meanwhile other pieces of DNA, a group of genetic recipes for increased virulence called “pathogenicity islands,” had made their way into the cell. Rather than riding in on a virus, the problematic DNA was either inserted into the cell’s chromosome or remained as DNA rings, and the codes (virulence genes) carried by this newly acquired DNA made the bacterium more dangerous.

In 1993, O157:H7 showed up in hamburger at Jack In the Box, sickening more than 600 people and killing four children. That outbreak caused the USDA to declare the O157:H7 an “adulterant” in beef, and processors and restaurants changed their practices.

As humans changed their behavior, E coli kept on switching DNA and evolving. In 2011, a batch of bean sprouts in Germany harbored a new strain of E. coli carrying a toxin and novel way to adhere to intestinal cells sickened 4,000, caused kidney failure in more than 800, and killed 53 people. That strain was resistant to antibiotics. In 2012, the USDA began testing beef trimmings for six new toxic strains in addition to O157:H7. Keeping a few steps ahead of her nemesis is Dr. Fratamico’s job, so now she’s looking into another type of E. coli that may spend time in poultry before causing urinary tract infections and pneumonia in humans. “E. coli are very intelligent about illness. They want to survive,” says Dr. Fratamico. “We’re always trying to find the emerging strains and develop methods to detect them, but they’re smarter than we are.”

E. coli’s resourcefulness, and its willingness to dance with humans in laboratories has, ironically, given us the super-human power of recombinant DNA. The lab strain K-12 was isolated from the stool of “a convalescing diphtheria patient” in Palo Alto, California, in 1918. K-12 then went to Stanford and (along with three other strains) became the pet of labs around the world, leading to 11 Nobel prizes. More importantly, scientists learned to take advantage of those Frisbee-like plasmids to insert DNA that would trick E. coli into producing useful things, including insulin that diabetics can use.

Another scientist who has revealed the powers of E. coli is Richard E. Lenski of Michigan State University. Nearly 28 years ago today, on February 24, 1988, Lenski thawed a frozen sample of E. coli from his lab’s freezer, and put 0.1 milliliter in each of 12 little flasks. Overnight, the E. coli in the flasks snarfed up all the glucose in their broth while producing seven generations of E. coli. The next day, Professor Lenski removed 0.1 milliliter again from each flask and put them in 12 clean flasks with more glucose broth. Unlike many wild strains of E. coli, the strain that Lenski studied didn’t have plasmids and phages that allow cells to exchange genes. So when he put them in their flasks it was as though he’d taken away all of their smartphones and GameBoys and other toys and left them in a bare room with only a gulp of sugary drink. Lenski hoped to see how they evolved using only random mutations and natural selection, not gene sharing. “Evolution is like a game that combines luck and skill and perhaps bacteria could teach me some new games,” he wrote. The experiment was supposed to last 2,000 generations or about a year.

But it still hasn’t stopped. Twenty-eight years and 64,000 generations later, the experiment is still going. It’s not just an evolutionary casino, though, it’s also a time machine because every 500 generations the lab froze a sample from each of the 12 vials. Lenski has always wondered what it would be like if he could bring a Neanderthal back to life and and have him try to play chess or football—these frozen samples are his tiny time travelers.

When the project started, Lenski thought that evolution would go quickly at first, as the bacteria evolved to fit into their flask-niche environment, and then plateau. But what Lenski and his team found is that the bacteria kept evolving and improving with a curve describing their fitness trending ever-upward. Evolution is a bottomless well of innovation.

And something else really interesting happened. E. coli normally lives on glucose. Every night, the growing population in the flask would gobble up all the glucose, oblivious to the fact that there happened to be another food in the broth called citrate. Lenski calls it a “lemony dessert,” and until 2003 the bacteria skipped dessert. And then in one of the 12 flasks, they had a mutation and those bacteria started sitting down to lemon merengue pie every night.

Lenski’s long-running experiment became a sort of petri dish for smart students with skills in mathematics, modeling, and genetics, drawn to his 12 flasks and thousands of frozen samples. One of them, Zachary Blount, realized that they could trace the lemony-simpatico mutation back through the frozen samples and re-evolve it. It was like they were playing Groundhog Day with the bacteria, giving the Bill Murray character chance after chance. And in the process they were able to run evolution backwards and forwards, trying to find its underlying physics.

The research is more than theoretical: the type of work that Lenski and his students and colleagues have done has helped the FBI identify genetic differences between strains after the 2001 anthrax attacks and is helping others learn how bacteria evolve in the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis.

As Lenski reflected on his years with the experiment, he said, “How exciting is life in one tiny glass flask!” That got him thinking about the teeming activity that takes place on Earth: If every human, and a lot of cows and pigs and so on, have a billion or so E. coli in our guts, then there are more than a hundred quintillion E. coli or more out there—all mutating and evolving madly, full of potential.

The post E. Coli Is Your Oldest Friend appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first step for a paleontologist looking for a certain type of fossil is to find a new place to hunt for it. Using what he called “the paleontology playbook,” Shubin looked for a place with three things: rocks of the right age (in this case, about 375 million years old); rocks of the right type (that preserve fossils and that are where this sort of creature lived); and rocks that are on the earth’s surface. Eventually, up in the Canadian Arctic—one of the most northern patches of land in the world—Shubin and his colleague, Ted Daeschler, discovered the fossil of a creature intermediate between life on land and life in water: a flat-headed fish with fins, tiktaalik roseae.

So what can this part-fish, part-amphibian teach us about humans? “Every time you bend your wrist or your neck you can thank tiktaalik and its cousins,” said Shubin. Fossils like tiktaalik show us powerful connections between human life and life on the rest of the planet—as well as the history of the universe. Every gene of our body, said Shubin, contains over 13 billion years of history—and there’s evidence for that in fossils, in DNA, and in embryos.

The atoms that make up our bodies were generated as part of the aftereffects of the Big Bang. We know, said Shubin, that the elements that make our body, from smallest to largest, were present in other parts of the universe before they came together as humans. When we die, they will become part of other parts of the universe.

“What are our ties to the solar system that are inside our body?” he asked. “Some of them are truly fundamental to our biology.”

One example is our innate 24-hour clock. Even when we are disconnected from light and darkness, humans—as experiments have shown—stay on a 24-hour clock, as do flies, hamsters, and other mammals. In fact, “every cell of our bodies contains a clock inside it,” said Shubin. “Inside of us lie over 2 trillion clocks, each of which is tuned to a 24-hour cycle.” These clocks drive our health, our mood, and our susceptibility to disease. They also reveal our connections to other animals on our planet, and to the solar system—our planet’s rotation.

The origins of human life, too, can be traced back to the solar system. Looking at the full fossil record, you can see that in certain periods of time, many species die out virtually simultaneously around the world. One of these cataclysms took place 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs died out. One explanation for this mass extinction is that an asteroid hit the planet. And although small mammals existed before this cataclysm took place, it’s only after the dinosaurs died out that there were larger mammals—or larger mammals that left any evidence.  “If it wasn’t for an asteroid, our lineage wouldn’t even be here,” said Shubin. Mammals might just be tiny animals living at the feet of dinosaurs.

So was it inevitable that human beings came to exist on Earth?

We could prove this definitively if we were to meet space aliens who looked just like us, with a fossil record just like ours, said Shubin. But short of that, we have to measure probability and chance against the predictability of evolution. A species survives a cataclysm thanks to completely random features, so there’s a degree of chance involved. Yet similar features crop up in all types of plants and animals, said Shubin—different species exhibit the same solution to different problems. This parallel evolution, he said, may be the manifestation of something important in our genes, which are shared between worms, flies, and people.

We know, thanks to these shared genes, that our species isn’t as distinctive as we once thought it was—just as science has taught us that our planet isn’t so special as to be at the center of the universe. We know that we originated thanks to a combination of chance and necessity, predictability and contingency. And we know, too, he said, that we’re connected to the rocks on our planet, to the rest of our solar system, and to the universe beyond.

In the question-and-answer session, audience members pressed Shubin on how special he thinks homo sapiens are, on what our future evolution holds, and why the culture wars between science and religion refuse to end.

Shubin said that studies are showing—and he believes will continue to show—that animals have a larger degree of consciousness than we give them credit for. And he thinks that our level of consciousness has increased thanks to a positive feedback loop—one in which consciousness spreads more consciousness.

Are we still evolving? “The answer is absolutely yes,” said Shubin, and the proof lies in changing mortality and fecundity among different groups. He noted that socioeconomic and cultural factors affect how evolution is happening to us. Shubin believes that in a thousand years, “the primary drivers of human performance will not be Darwinian selection but our ideas and our culture.”

Given all we know about science, history, fossils, and evolution, asked one audience member, how is science still challenged by religious ideology? The crowd laughed as Shubin paused to consider the question, which he said he thinks “is a really important question of our age.” Shubin thinks that the disconnect between known science and what we believe is a result of science phobia as much as religious dogma. “I think they exist in our society in equal measure,” he said.

Shubin said that he works to combat people’s fear of science by telling stories of discovery—human stories of people taking chances and making mistakes, persisting over time and getting lucky. A story of discovery transforms the conversation: making it accessible, human, and harder to argue with.

The post Human Life Was <em>Partly</em> Inevitable appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.