Philippa Kaur

We are more aware of how “unconscious” biases work than ever before, says neuroscientist Lasana Harris – and we can use our conscious brains to override them

Humans 26 August 2020
By Lasana Harris

Stephanie Singleton

WHY are we prejudiced? What happens in our brains when we make assumptions about people who look or speak differently to us? As movements such as Black Lives Matter work to expose the systemic racism in the US and Europe, such questions are taking on new and long overdue urgency. If we are to overcome our biases, we need to understand their neural and psychological roots.
Lasana Harris, a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at University College London, is among those striving for such an understanding. His research focuses on how we think about other people’s minds, known as social cognition, and more specifically on how we perceive others. Working with Susan Fiske at Princeton University, his research on the brain mechanisms underlying dehumanisation has revealed the surprising ease with which we can stop ourselves from having empathy for the plights of others.
Such insights have informed his thinking on racism, too. Harris views what many people call unconscious bias as an inevitable result of the associations we learn and the way our brains react to perceived threats. Rather than something we engage in unconsciously, he argues that it is something we know we are doing but struggle to control.
Here he tells New Scientist why societies condition people to be prejudiced and what the science says we can do about it.
Daniel Cossins: Dehumanisation is a horrifying word and yet your work suggests it is something we all do. Why is that?
Lasana Harris: Firstly, if I want to do something to another human being that is something I don’t typically like doing to human beings, then I’m … More

By Colin Barras
This ancient burial style is difficult to understand
A.M. Herrero-Corral, et al.

AN UNUSUAL 3700-year-old grave unearthed in Spain shows how little we know about some ancient burial practices.
At the Humanejos site, 20 kilometres south of Madrid, there are about 100 ancient tombs. None is quite as strange as grave 31.
Inside the 1.2-metre-deep grave, the body of a 15-year-old youth was placed, sitting upright. He was then partially buried, leaving his head and shoulders exposed to the elements. Eventually, the body decayed and the youth’s upper body collapsed – at which point more dirt was added to the … More

By Douglas Heingartner
In the DESIGMA-Advanced test, a respondent must work out which shape logically comes next in several series like the ones shown here
Benedikt Schneider

People who are given instructions on how to succeed at a widely used type of IQ test end up with far higher scores than those who take the test without learning these tips beforehand – throwing into question the validity of these kinds of tests and contributing to critiques of IQ tests in general.
That’s the main finding of a study that looked at “progressive matrices”, a kind of IQ test that displays a series of changing … More

Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes explains how modern techniques are helping us to better understand Neanderthals, as well as where we fit in to the family tree

Humans 19 August 2020
By Simon Ings
Neanderthal art in Spain, painted between 43,000 and 65,000 years ago
Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images

Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Bloomsbury Sigma

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HOW we began to unpick our species’ ancient past in the late 19th century is an astounding story, but not always a pretty one. As well as attaining tremendous insights into the age of Earth and how life evolved, scholars also entertained astonishingly bad ideas about superiority.
Some of these continue today. Why do we assume that Neanderthals, who flourished for 400,000 years, were somehow inferior to Homo sapiens or less fit to survive?
In Kindred, a history of our understanding of Neanderthals, Rebecca Wragg Sykes separates perfectly valid and reasonable questions – for example, “why aren’t Neanderthals around any more?” – from the thinking that casts our ancient relatives as “dullard losers on a withered branch of the family tree”.
As an archaeologist with a special interest in the cognitive aspects of stone tool technologies, Wragg Sykes paints a fascinating picture of a field transformed almost beyond recognition over the past 30 years.
Artefacts at well-preserved sites are no longer merely dug and brushed: they are scanned. High-powered optical microscopes pick out slice and chop marks, electron beams trace the cross-sections of scratches at the nano-scale and rapid collagen identification techniques can determine an animal from even tiny bone fragments.
The risk with any new tool is that, in our excitement, we over-interpret the results it throws up. For example, while Neanderthals may have performed some funerary activity, they may not have thrown flowers on their loved ones’ graves as we once thought.
Other stories continue to accumulate a weight of circumstantial evidence. We have known for a few years that some Neanderthals tanned leather; now it seems they may also have spun thread.
“The significance of Neanderthal art may simply be that Neanderthals had fun making it”

An exciting aspect of this book is the way it refreshes our ideas about our own place in hominin evolution.
Rather than congratulating other species when they behave like us, Wragg Sykes shows that it is much more fruitful to see how human talents are related to behaviours exhibited by other species.
Take art. We tend to ask questions like: were the circular stone assemblies discovered in a cave near Bruniquel in southern France in 2016 meant by their Neanderthal creators as monuments? What is the significance of the Neanderthal handprints and ladder designs painted on the walls of three caves in Spain?
In both cases, we would be asking the wrong questions, says Sykes. While striking, Neanderthal art “might not be a massive cognitive leap for hominins who probably already understood the idea of representation”.
Animal footprints are effectively symbols and tracking prey this way “requires an ‘idealised’ form to be kept in mind”, she writes.
Human infants, given painting materials, enjoy colouring and marking surfaces, though they aren’t in the least bit invested in the end result of their labours. The same is also true of captive chimpanzees. Why, then, should we see Neanderthal art with any significance, beyond the possibility that Neanderthals had fun making it?
Neanderthal DNA contains glimmers of encounters between them and other hominin species. Recent research suggests that interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, was effectively the norm. Like modern cattle and yaks, we were closely related species that varied in bodies and behaviours, yet could also reproduce.
Neanderthals were part of our family, and though we carry some part of them inside us, we will never see their like again.
Who were the Neanderthals?Hear Rebecca Wragg Sykes talk about our ancient cousinsFor details about this virtual event visit newscientist.com/events
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Watch
Unknown Origins sees a murderer recreate superhero origin stories in an entertaining caper set in Madrid. During production, comic fans mobbed its comic-book store set, thinking it was real. On Netflix from 28 August.
Read
Terra Incognita by Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah features “100 maps to survive the next 100 years”, showing how people, cities, wars, climates and technology are changing Earth.

Leonardo Santamaria for NPR

Listen
Invisibilia tells sumptuously produced tales of scientific wonder as Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin explore the hidden forces shaping our behaviours, ideas and beliefs in this NPR podcast.
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A film about electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla makes interesting creative choices, such as imagining an alternative future. But it spends too much time focusing on Thomas Edison

Humans 19 August 2020
By Bethan Ackerley
Tesla leaves you more interested in Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan)
IFC FILMS

Tesla
Michael Almereyda
Out 21 August

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TO MANY, Nikola Tesla is a folk hero. He is a steady fixture in science fiction, and his role in the war over whether alternating or direct current should be used to transmit electricity in the late 19th century has cemented him in the popular imagination as a slayer of giants. Take that, Thomas Edison.
In Tesla, director Michael Almereyda makes hay out of that war and other events from the visionary inventor’s life, but not without including a few fantastical turns of his own.
The film begins with Tesla (Ethan Hawke) working at Edison Machine Works, where he butts heads with his employer over funding. Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) is bullish and xenophobic, asking Tesla, who was born in what is now Croatia, if he has ever eaten human flesh.
The depictions of Edison’s attempts to discredit alternating current, from using it to kill animals in public demonstrations to the botched electrocution of a prisoner, is well-trodden ground for people familiar with his ruthlessness.
Yet the film achieves more nuance in its brief flashes of Edison’s personal life than it ever does with Tesla’s. A biopic that leaves you more interested in the subject’s rival has gone wrong somewhere.

Part of this failure comes from the moments that the film prioritises. Tesla’s poverty after leaving Edison’s firm and being swindled by his own business partners is mentioned only briefly, for instance, in favour of repetitive demonstrations of his induction motor that have none of the visual dynamism such a revolutionary invention deserves. “No sparks,” one observer notes.
“Tesla’s poverty after leaving Edison’s firm and being swindled is mentioned only briefly”
The story is periodically interrupted by Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), the daughter of one of Edison’s principal investors, who sits with a laptop and offers up pithy, fourth-wall-breaking context.
The film is also peppered with farcical metaphors, including ice-cream fights, rollerblading accidents and even an anachronistic rendition of Everybody Wants To Rule The World.
While these choices confuse as often as they delight, it is fitting for a Tesla biopic to take risks and display such imagination. One poignant scene asks us to envisage a world in which Edison apologises to Tesla and suggests a partnership. What could Tesla have achieved with the commercial guidance of “an enlightened hustler” like Edison?
Hawke plays Tesla as a morose workaholic, bristling with social discomfort. Though there is a degree of truth in that portrayal, Tesla was reportedly well-liked when he did socialise and had a variety of interests, with one contemporary describing him as “a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink”.
Such qualities are barely touched on, save for a sequence in which he is deeply moved by actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), who becomes a figure of fascination. It is in his interactions with her that Hawke is finally given something to do; Bernhardt witnesses Tesla’s humiliation at the hands of Edison and the shame breaks through his taciturn shell.
Ultimately, the film rarely finds the will to be interested in the man Tesla actually was. Coupled with its incoherent – if striking – aesthetic, this means Tesla too often feels like an empty frame, or a motor without the power to keep it running.
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What do we risk by expanding recklessly into the multiverse? Stephen Baxter’s World Engines series is gripping but frustrating, says Sally Adee

Humans 19 August 2020
By Sally Adee
Why do we risk so much in the hope of colonising space?
Gorodenkoff/Getty Images

REID MALENFANT wakes up from a cryogenic coma in the year 2469. It was 2019 when he crashed a space shuttle and entered medical deep freeze, just as Earth’s citizens were taking their first steps to colonise the solar system. The world he wakes in 450 years later is unrecognisable. We burned all our fossil fuels for the space race and the consequences are in full bloom: London, New York, Florida and many coastal areas are drowned, and the planet is tropical.
Those are just the cosmetic changes in World Engines: Destroyer, the first in Stephen Baxter’s series. The human project has ended – we retreated from the solar system, recognising our inability to thrive outside our biosphere. We retreated on Earth too, with a population fallen below 100 million, both as a result of centuries-long destruction and as a way to let nature heal.
As Malenfant digs deeper, though, he discovers another contributing factor. A solar system-rending cataclysm has been foreseen in about 1000 years, so Earth is in a period of managed decline. It isn’t a bad existence for the people. There is no pollution and no waste, with every car, cup and plate made to last generations. Universal basic income (UBI) means no one is poor. People still have children. But there is no drive to do more than exist in this Eden.
“In one universe, Richard Nixon created a Star Trek-like programme that had boots on Mars by 2005”
Yet the 25th century woke up Malenfant for a reason, of course. That reason takes him to the Martian moon Phobos, which has been displaying idiosyncracies that turn out to be a hatch to other universes. By the end of the first book, Malenfant has set out to discover who built the portal and what kind of entities play snooker with entire solar systems.
It is these questions that are addressed in the second book, World Engines: Creator, and their answers leave deeper questions about humanity’s relentless obsession with expansion. What do we risk by embarking recklessly into the solar system, the universe or even the multiverse? What is this impulse to colonise? Are the only choices eternal expansion or managed decline?
Many readers may have given up on the first book after some 200 pages because of Malenfant, a jerk ripped straight from the pages of 1960s sci-fi at its most toxically masculine. But the clue is in the name. Soldier on and it is clear that Baxter has written Malenfant to reflect our current condition as a species: selfish, greedy and full of toxic individualism.
As Malenfant begins to evolve, the books hit their stride, asking questions that telescope out into brain-exploding territory. Baxter has an encyclopedic knowledge of early space and military history that he remixes into delightful mash-ups. In one universe, instead of sinking in the Watergate scandal, US president Richard Nixon set up UBI, leading the world to follow suit – and to the creation of a Star Trek-like space programme that had boots on Mars by 2005.

In another, Winston Churchill is ousted by his opposition rival, Neville Chamberlain. This creates a British-led dominance of space in steampunk space behemoths, spreading diamond-cut accents and Victorian repression.
Other books have grappled with our place in the multiverse, but few have Baxter’s vision and ability to work at very different scales. World Engines: Creator isn’t always evenly paced, gets bogged down in science pedantry and can be exasperatingly opaque at times, but I am crossing my fingers for a third book.

Sally also recommends…
Book/Comic
The Space Between Worlds
Micaiah Johnson’s stunning debut is impossible to put down. It nails the stakes of the multiverse and employs a beautiful character transformation arc.
The Number of the Beast
Robert A. Heinlein’s book is the first and best in this genre.
Infinite Vacation
Nick Spencer’s comic world puts alternate versions of you up for sale. You choose the version you prefer that day, but there is always a price.

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