Philippa Kaur

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    in Humans

    Why insulting people's intelligence is incompatible with open debate

    We too often turn to insulting people’s brain power – and that closes off our ability to understand others, argues Melanie Challenger

    Humans | Comment 24 February 2021Michelle D’urbano
    BELITTLING the minds of others is commonplace. Stupid! Brainless! Imbecile! Dozy! Just scroll through the comments on pretty much any contentious article and you will find criticism by mental slander. Social media is littered with words like “unthinking” and “idiot”, especially when people are confronted with views with which they disagree.
    Indeed, Twitter is a lightning rod of prejudices about minds. Former US president Donald Trump was perhaps the kingpin here, before Twitter banned him. Not only did he routinely boast of his own mental prowess – “sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest” – but he persistently used mental slurs to silence critics: “dummy!”.
    Yet we can all be guilty of mental slander. Right-wing supporters frequently call those on the left “libtards”. Meanwhile, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s New Monitor Corpus, conservative voters in the US are often derided as “nutjobs”. Mental slurs are a fast and simple trick to silence an unwanted voice and to lower trust in evidence we resist. A growing body of research is allowing us to understand where this prejudice comes from.

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    Humans are group-living animals. Probing and judging other minds is a part of how we coordinate with each other, cooperate and make and break alliances. By the age of 5, children make assumptions about people’s mental states, such as understanding that someone can be mistaken in their beliefs. Particular parts of the brain are implicated: the medial prefrontal cortex, the temporal poles and the posterior superior temporal sulcus. These work in concert to enable us to detect and make judgements about minds – both our own and those of others.
    All this doesn’t stop at the neck. When we bond in a group – whether that is with kin or co-workers, friends or football fans – our bodies produce hormones like oxytocin that play a role in bringing us together. But, as psychologist Carsten De Dreu points out, these hormones don’t just unite us; they encourage exclusivity. This – directly or indirectly – can alter our views on other minds. In effect, we believe those in our group more readily, often exaggerating the mental abilities of those with whom we feel allegiance.
    What follows from this is that we can undervalue the intelligence of those whose views differ from our own. Even more troubling, we can find ourselves responding more slowly to signals of emotion or experience from outsiders. Social psychologists Susan Fiske and Lasana Harris have used neurological imaging and behaviour studies to show that we shut down the medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved in social cognition, when confronted with minds we wish to ignore. When we suspend parts of our brain key to recognising another’s mental and emotional states, we not only close our minds to one another, we cease to care.
    All this has real-world consequences for whom we listen to and whose voices we trust. In an age of political polarisation and misinformation, the echo chambers created by social media do more than just seal us off from diverse possibilities and points of view; they muffle our ability to care about those whose views we might not like.

    What can we do about it? First, we need to recognise the biases that prevent us from keeping one another in mind. We must make it less socially acceptable to use mental slander in the service of an argument. Beyond this, we would benefit from greater opportunities to hear one another out.
    This pandemic is a reminder that we have very few mechanisms for listening and deliberating together. That needs to change. But a more radical option lies in a much larger paradigm shift. Is it time for our species to stop using the idea of own superior cognition as validation?
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    in Humans

    Don't Miss: Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel about AIs and love

    Read
    Burn promises to change the way we think about food, exercise and life, as evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer brings his 20 years of research experience to bear on the mysteries of human metabolism. (Buy from Amazon)

    Watch
    The Big Freeze, the Scott Polar Research Institute’s arts festival, launches online on 4 March with the European premiere of Polar Self Portraits 2, a creative project connecting artists and their work from six continents.

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    Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2017. It tells the story of an artificial friend who is learning not to invest too much in the promises of humans. (Buy from Amazon)
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    in Humans

    How to spend a trillion dollars to fix climate change and end poverty

    Let’s imagine you have inherited a fortune and want to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Here’s the best way to spend your money to make a difference to climate change, disease and poverty

    Life 24 February 2021
    By Rowan Hooper
    Andrea Ucini
    MOST of us have had that conversation: what would you do if you won the lottery? Pay off the mortgage, quit your job, maybe start a small business doing something you have always dreamed of. But what if you acquired a truly vast fortune – not just a few million but a trillion dollars? And what if you had to spend it on making the world a better place?
    I know, a trillion dollars – a thousand billion dollars – sounds like a vast amount of money, especially during the twin crises of recession and pandemic. But in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t. A trillion dollars is about 1 per cent of world GDP. It is what Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is on course to be worth by 2026. The world’s richest 1 per cent together own $162 trillion in assets. And it’s just one-twelfth of what governments around the world found in 2020 alone for economic stimulus packages in response to the new coronavirus.
    What could you do with such a relatively modest sum, if charged to spend it on the world’s biggest challenges? This is the central question of my book, How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, in which I choose 10 megaprojects (all things scientists are working on now) and explore what could be achieved if we showered them with money. Here we examine three of the most urgent of those challenges: solving world poverty, halting runaway climate change and curing all disease.

    Eradicate world poverty

    Perhaps the most important thing we could do for human welfare would be to alleviate poverty. According … More

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    in Humans

    What could we do for the climate and health if money were no object?

    Bill Allsopp/Loop Images Ltd/AlaSOME readers might remember the 1985 movie Brewster’s Millions. Richard Pryor’s character has to spend $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit a $300 million fortune. This week, we update the conceit, inflating the sum to a cool $1 trillion, and set a few ground rules: the money has to be spent on projects to improve human welfare, to restore the environment and to advance science.
    It is the premise of How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, a new book by New Scientist‘s podcast editor Rowan Hooper that takes 10 megaprojects and costs them out. It is a … More

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    in Humans

    Earliest American dog hints pets accompanied first people in Americas

    By Karina Shah
    A bone fragment, found in south-east Alaska, belonging to a dog that lived more than 10,000 years ago
    Douglas Levere / University at Buffalo
    Dogs were domesticated at least 27,000 years ago, and they have been tagging along with humans ever since. Now, we may have the strongest evidence yet that early dogs even accompanied the first Americans as they moved along the Pacific coast.
    Charlotte Lindqvist and her colleagues at the University at Buffalo in New York extracted DNA from the oldest known dog remains found in the Americas, and found the genetic signature is consistent with the idea that dogs first arrived in the region between 17,000 and 16,000 years ago – which is also roughly in line with the currently accepted time for the arrival of the first Americans.

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    The small bone – a piece of the dome-like head of a thighbone – measures 1 centimetre in diameter and was originally found in the late 1990s in Lawyer’s cave, a site in south-east Alaska.
    About 15 years ago it was carbon dated to a little more than 10,000 years old, although at the time the small bone fragment was assumed to have come from a bear. Only when Lindqvist and her colleagues studied DNA from the specimen did they realise it belonged to a dog, which makes it the earliest evidence of dogs found so far in the Americas.
    The team isolated mitochondrial DNA from the bone to understand the dog’s genetic history. “The mitochondrial DNA gives us a history of the dog’s mother because it contains maternally inherited DNA,” says Lindqvist.
    The DNA sequence showed that the ancient Alaskan dog was closely related to the lineage of domestic dogs that were living in the Americas before European contact and colonisation. In detail, the exact lineage the Alaskan dog belonged to branched off from these “precontact dogs” about 14,500 years ago. The genetic data also showed that the Alaskan dog’s lineage branched off from dogs living in Siberia roughly 16,700 years ago.

    “This dog belonged to a descent of very early dogs that moved into the New World soon after the ice age around 17,000 years ago,” says Lindqvist.
    Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests humans also moved into the Americas roughly 17,000 years ago – several thousand years earlier than once thought. This has led to a reassessment of how they did so.

    Originally it was thought early Americans migrated along an internal corridor between the two large ice sheets that were covering the land after the last peak in glacial activity. This would have seen them enter what is now the lower 48 states of the US via what is now Montana. But this route didn’t become viable to travel through until 13,000 years ago, so the very first Americans must have taken a different route.
    Many researchers now think the early Americans travelled along the coast of what is now Alaska and British Columbia, probably because the ice sheet at the North Pacific coast began retreating earlier and provided an ice-free coastal corridor. If dogs also moved into the Americas about 17,000 years ago, they presumably did so with these coastal human communities.
    “Humans must have moved over Siberia and Alaska into the New World via a route along the coast, and they brought their dogs with them,” says Lindqvist.
    The dog bone found in south-east Alaska is around 250 years older than the previously confirmed earliest dog remains reported from a site in Illinois in 2018. “I am very happy to lose our record for the earliest dogs in the Americas, as this new Alaskan dog represents an important piece of the puzzle,” says Angela Perri at Newcastle University, UK, who led the research in 2018 and wasn’t involved in this new study.
    Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2020.3103
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    in Humans

    Australia's oldest known rock art is a 17,000-year-old kangaroo

    By Alison George
    A colour-enhanced image of the ancient kangaroo artwork
    Damien Finch
    A life size kangaroo painted in red ochre around 17,300 years ago is Australia’s oldest known rock art. This indicates that the earliest style of rock art in Australia focused on animals, similar to the early cave art found in Indonesia and Europe.
    Thousands of rock art sites are found all over Australia, with the Kimberley region of Western Australia containing a particularly rich record. But dating the images is challenging as the minerals and organic material needed to determine when the art was created are hard to find.

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    Stylistically, Australian rock art has been categorised into five different phases, with the oldest thought to be the so-called naturalistic phase depicting mainly animals and sometimes plants such as yams. But with no firm dates, no one knew for sure.
    Now, Damien Finch at the University of Melbourne and his colleagues have dated the images in eight rock shelters in Balanggarra Country, which lies in the north-eastern Kimberley region. Finch and his colleagues worked with the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, which represents the Traditional Owners of the land, and members of the Corporation reviewed their research paper.
    They dated the images by measuring the radiocarbon signal from ancient wasp nests that lie beneath and on top of the artwork.

    They discovered that a kangaroo image (pictured above) on the ceiling of a rock shelter containing thousands of ancient mud wasp nests was painted between 17,500 and 17,100 years ago. “This is an amazing site, with wonderful paintings all over the place,” says Finch. And, crucially for the dating, “wasps have been building nests at this site pretty much consistently for 20,000 years“, he says.
    This kangaroo painting is around 2 metres long, with details of its fur depicted within an outline of its shape.
    “The dating of this oldest known painting in an Australian rock shelter holds a great deal of significance for Aboriginal people and Australians and is an important part of Australia’s history,” said Cissy Gore-Birch, Chair of the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, in a media statement.

    Analysis of 15 other images, including a 3-metre-long snake and a lizard-like creature, as well as other kangaroo-like animals, showed that this naturalistic style of animal paintings proliferated between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.
    After this, it seems to have been superseded by the so-called Gwion style of rock art, which predominantly features images of humans. A 2020 study by Finch, also using wasp nest dating, showed that this style of art proliferated from around 12,000 years ago.
    The kangaroo is unlikely to be Australia’s oldest painting. Humans may have reached Australia as early as 65,000 years ago and the researchers have studied a tiny number of images in the rock art. “We have only worked on a fraction of the Kimberly. The chances are we haven’t found the oldest painting,” says Finch.
    Journal reference: Nature Human Behaviour, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-01041-0
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    in Space & Astronomy

    Signs of a hidden Planet Nine in the solar system may not hold up

    Planet Nine might be a mirage. What once looked like evidence for a massive planet hiding at the solar system’s edge may be an illusion, a new study suggests.
    “We can’t rule it out,” says Kevin Napier, a physicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “But there’s not necessarily a reason to rule it in.”
    Previous work has suggested that a number of far-out objects in the solar system cluster in the sky as if they are being shepherded by an unseen giant planet, at least 10 times the mass of Earth. Astronomers dubbed the invisible world Planet Nine or Planet X.
    Now, a new analysis of 14 of those remote bodies shows no evidence for such clustering, knocking down the primary reason to believe in Planet Nine. Napier and colleagues reported the results February 10 at arXiv.org in a paper to appear in the Planetary Science Journal.

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    The idea of a distant planet lurking far beyond Neptune received a surge in interest in 2014, when astronomers Chad Trujillo of Northern Arizona University and Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science reported a collection of distant solar system bodies called trans-Neptunian objects with strangely bunched-up orbits (SN: 11/14/14).
    In 2016, Caltech planetary scientists Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin used six trans-Neptunian objects to refine the possible properties of Planet Nine, pinning it to an orbit between 500 and 600 times as far from the sun as Earth’s (SN: 7/5/16).
    But those earlier studies all relied on just a handful of objects that may not have represented everything that’s out there, says Gary Bernstein, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania. The objects might have seemed to show up in certain parts of the sky only because that’s where astronomers happened to look.
    “It’s important to know what you couldn’t see, in addition to what you did see,” he says.
    To account for that uncertainty, Napier, Bernstein and colleagues combined observations from three surveys — the Dark Energy Survey, the Outer Solar System Origins Survey and the original survey run by Sheppard and Trujillo — to assess 14 trans-Neptunian objects, more than twice as many as in the 2016 study. These objects all reside between 233 and 1,560 times as far from the sun as Earth.
    The team then ran computer simulations of about 10 billion fake trans-Neptunian objects, distributed randomly all around the sky, and checked to see if their positions matched what the surveys should be able to see. They did.
    “It really looks like we just find things where we look,” Napier says. It’s sort of like if you lost your keys at night and searched for them under a streetlamp, not because you thought they were there, but because that’s where the light was. The new study basically points out the streetlamps.
    “Once you see where the lampposts really are, it becomes more clear that there is some serious selection bias going on with the discovery of these objects,” Napier says. That means the objects are just as likely to be distributed randomly across the sky as they are to be clumped up.
    That doesn’t necessarily mean Planet Nine is done for, he says.
    “On Twitter, people have been very into saying that this kills Planet Nine,” Napier says. “I want to be very careful to mention that this does not kill Planet Nine. But it’s not good for Planet Nine.”
    There are other mysteries of the solar system that Planet Nine would have neatly explained, says astronomer Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina in Canada, who was not involved in the new study. A distant planet could explain why some far-out solar system objects have orbits that are tilted relative to those of the larger planets or where proto-comets called centaurs come from (SN: 8/18/20). That was part of the appeal of the Planet Nine hypothesis.
    “But the entire reason for it was the clustering of these orbits,” she says. “If that clustering is not real, then there’s no reason to believe there is a giant planet in the distant solar system that we haven’t discovered yet.”
    Batygin, one of the authors of the 2016 paper, isn’t ready to give up. “I’m still quite optimistic about Planet Nine,” he says. He compares Napier’s argument to seeing a group of bears in the forest: If you see a bunch of bears to the east, you might think there was a bear cave there. “But Napier is saying the bears are all around us, because we haven’t checked everywhere,” Batygin says. “That logical jump is not one you can make.”
    Evidence for Planet Nine should show up only in the orbits of objects that are stable over billions of years, Batygin adds. But the new study, he says, is “strongly contaminated” by unstable objects — bodies that may have been nudged by Neptune and lost their position in the cluster or could be on their way to leaving the solar system entirely. “If you mix dirt with your ice cream, you’re going to mostly taste dirt,” he says.
    Lawler says there’s not a consensus among people who study trans-Neptunian objects about which ones are stable and which ones are not.
    Everyone agrees, though, that in order to prove Planet Nine’s existence or nonexistence, astronomers need to discover more trans-Neptunian objects. The Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile should find hundreds more after it begins surveying the sky in 2023 (SN: 1/10/20).
    “There always may be some gap in our understanding,” Napier says. “That’s why we keep looking.” More

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    in Humans

    Soil safely filters 38 million tonnes of human waste each year

    By Priti Parikh
    A pit latrine toilet in Kayunga District, Uganda
    Sean Sprague/Alamy
    Nature sanitises around 38 million tonnes of human waste per year – the equivalent of around £3.2-billion-worth of commercial water treatment.
    Alison Parker at Cranfield University in the UK and colleagues looked at 48 cities in Africa, Asia, North America and South America. They analysed how much human waste is produced and where it ends up by reviewing existing data from interviews, observations and direct field measurements.

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    The team looked at waste management not connected to sewers. This included pit latrines and septic tanks where waste is primarily contained on-site – in a hole below the ground for pit latrines and in box tanks for septic tanks.
    Liquid waste from pit latrines and excess water from septic tanks can gradually filter through soil – a process that cleans it before it reaches groundwater. However, this doesn’t happen in cities where the water table is shallow or where large volumes of waste are discharged in a crowded area. Instead, the liquids can contaminate ground water, posing a health risk.
    With 892 million people, predominantly in low and middle income countries, using this type of waste management, the researchers estimate that nature safely treats around 38 million tonnes of human waste per year. The team did not look at how much waste is not safely treated.
    More than 4 billion people don’t have access to safe sanitation services, with one-third living in low income countries. Unsafe sanitation is responsible for 775,000 deaths each year.
    “Sanitation that involves the ground naturally treating waste can be part of the solution,” says Parker. However, pit latrines, septic tanks and other natural waste management options only work if the soils can filter the waste or if the waste dumped in rivers can be diluted safely without causing harm to the environment, which is not always the case.
    Duncan Mara at the University of Leeds, UK, says that approaches like this cannot be the “be-all and end-all” as every person on this planet should be given access to sanitation which is safe for the environment and protects human health. This should include also sewers in crowded areas as they are safer.

    Journal reference: Cell Press: One Earth, DOI: S2590-3322(21)00049-X
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