Humans

By Adam Rutherford

Michelle D’urbano
UNSHARED science is of little value. The whole scientific endeavour relies on ideas, methods and data being available to all. The words we use are vital to making sure that we are all on the same page and our ideas are conveyed accurately. But in my field of genetics, the language we use isn’t up to scratch. Terms in common usage present problems ranging from being scientifically confused or ambiguous, to being rooted in a racist history that echoes in our present.
Every scientific discipline has its own jargon used to summarise or label the complexity of the world. And as our genome is the richest data set we have ever tackled, it is no surprise that human genetics is particularly burdened with terms that strive to encapsulate our ancestry and the secrets of our behaviour, evolution and disease.
Genetics is also a field with a pernicious history. Its origins are inextricably entwined with the 18th-century invention of race, then using pigmentation and skull measurements to hierarchically taxonomise people. With that came scientific racism marshalled into the justification of slavery and subjugation, and the eugenics projects of the early 20th century followed not far behind.Advertisement
Contemporary genetics has unequivocally demolished the attempts to use ancestry, anatomy and genetics to assert a biological basis for race. Although people around the world differ, the genetics underlying those differences doesn’t correspond to the racial classification that we use today. “Black” – meaning people of recent African descent – covers more than a billion people with more genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together. From a genetic point of view, it isn’t an informative term. Yet we use it. This is why we call race a “social construct” – race exists because we perceive it, but has no meaningful biological basis.
Nevertheless, the scientific language of the past resounds today. That is why I and colleagues in various fields of genetics are calling for a change in these language conventions, which, we argue, don’t serve scientific insight and shackle us to the prejudices of history.
Some examples are widespread. Caucasian, for example, is a word used today in official forms, public discourse and in many academic papers. Does it mean white European? Does it include people from south Asia or North Africa? Different definitions have included these populations and others. Furthermore, it was originally coined to indicate the “beauty” and “superiority” of white Europeans. It has no place in science today.
Other examples are arguably less prejudicial, but equally unsound. Bantu is often used to broadly describe people from southern Africa with a shared linguistic heritage. Yet the diversity of dialects in more than 400 million people renders their grouping imprecise and not inherently meaningful. Even terms like “ethnicity” and “ancestry” have subtly different meanings when used in different fields and by different people.
In the genetics community, there is growing recognition that we have to change our language. The American Society of Human Genetics stated in 2018 that “the invocation of genetics to promote racist ideologies is one of many factors causing racism to persist”.
Humans are all of one species, but people from around the world are different, and genetics reflects those regional adaptations and different evolutionary journeys. Grouping people is a necessary part of understanding similarities and differences in our DNA.
Our intention isn’t to police language, but to prompt it to evolve. Some genetics terms should be consigned to the dustbin; others will require thought and discussion. Our hope is to spark a conversation for changing to a lexicon that better serves our understanding of human diversity, and simultaneously frees us from a troubling history.

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Pavements date back some 2000 years, but are seldom built with pedestrians in mind. Here’s why reinvented sidewalks could benefit your joints — and the planet

Technology

7 July 2021

By Anthony King

Paving materials come in many forms (clockwise from top: granite, cement, marble, cobbles), but being hard makes them less than ideal for pedestriansTop: Gordon Scammell/Alamy; Bottom (L/R): Franck Legros/Getty Images; David Keith Jones/Alamy; The Photo Works/Alamy
WHEN Viveca Wallqvist first phoned a local asphalt company, she didn’t mince her words. “I have something to tell you,” she said. “Your material is really hard – too hard. People are getting hurt.” Her comments didn’t go down well. “They were like,’Who is this crazy scientist?,’” she recalls. Asphalt is supposed to be hard, they said. But a few days later, the company rang back. It was the beginning of a journey that could reinvent the ground we walk on.
Wallqvist’s passion is rare. It is more than two millennia since the Romans laid their first pavimentum, from where we get the word “pavement”. Since then, very few people have questioned the fact that the pavements we walk on are, in effect, extensions of the road surface, made of stuff with properties that almost exclusively reflected the needs of horse-drawn and then motorised vehicles rather than pedestrians. Wallqvist, a materials chemist at the Research Institutes of Sweden in Stockholm, is determined to change that.
Meanwhile, in London, plans are afoot to build a giant research facility to test new, spongier walking surfaces. It is the brainchild of Nick Tyler at University College London, who is also convinced that pavement pounding is harming us. The average person takes around 200 million steps in a lifetime, he notes, and we aren’t evolved to deal with such hard surfaces.
So, after waiting more than 2300 years for a pavement … More

New insights into the different states of human consciousness and where it occurs in the brain are helping us crack the mystery of what gives rise to felt experience

Humans

7 July 2021

By Emma Young

Eva Redamonti
What is consciousness?
In essence, consciousness is any kind of subjective experience. Being in pain; smelling onions frying; feeling humiliated; recognising a friend in the crowd; reflecting that you are wiser than you were last year – all of these are examples of conscious experiences. In a field fraught with disagreements, this is something that most, but not all, researchers agree on. Go any deeper, though, and the rifts open up.
The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes famously divided the universe into “matter stuff”, such as rocks and physical bodies, and “mind stuff”. In the 20th century, philosopher David Chalmers at New York University built on Descartes’s separation, known as “dualism”, and the work of later thinkers, to distinguish between “easy problems of consciousness” and “the hard problem”.
The easy stuff consists of explaining the brain processes associated with consciousness, such as the integration of sensory information, learning, thinking and being awake or asleep. Though we are making steady progress, these problems have yet to be cracked: they are easy only in the sense that the known strategies of cognitive and neuroscientific research should eventually provide full explanations.
The hard problem, which Chalmers introduced at a scientific meeting in 1994, is to explain why and how we have subjective experiences at all. “Consciousness poses the most baffling problem in the science of the mind,” Chalmers said. When we think and perceive, there is a “whir of information-processing” in the brain, as he put it, but also very distinctive subjective states of mind. The puzzle is how a 1.3 kilogram organ with the consistency of tofu can generate the feeling of being. … More

We are finally testing the ideas that quantum collapse in the brain gives rise to consciousness and that consciousness creates the reality we see from the quantum world.

Humans

7 July 2021

By Anil Ananthaswamy

If physical processes in a brain create consciousness, what are they?Victor de Schwanberg/Science Photo Library
If physics explains all the phenomena in the universe, and if consciousness is part of the universe, then is seems that physics can explain consciousness.
Of course, this assumes that consciousness isn’t separate from the material reality that physics explains – which runs counter to René Descartes’s dualist view of mind and matter. Some have no problem with that. They include Daniel Dennett at Tufts University in Massachusetts and Michael Graziano at Princeton University, who argue that our intuitive sense that consciousness needs an explanation that goes beyond objective descriptions of the physical world is misplaced. Consciousness is a mirage produced by sophisticated neural mechanisms in the brain, they contend, so we need no new physics to explain it. Rather, we need a better understanding of how the brain creates models: of the world, of a self in the world and of a self subjectively experiencing the world.

Other non-dualists don’t outright deny that consciousness may have unusual properties that need explaining. If they are correct, then quantum mechanics may offer an explanation.
Quantum systems can exist in a superposition of all possible states simultaneously, and classical reality emerges when this superposition collapses into a single state. One idea is that this happens when the mass of a quantum system … More

By New Scientist

Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard
Richard Lewontin, the geneticist and evolutionary biologist whose research showed that humans from different ethnic backgrounds aren’t as genetically different as appearances might suggest, has died at the age of 92.
Lewontin’s work revealed that nearly 85 per cent of humanity’s genetic diversity is seen between individuals of a single population, such as those of a single nation. A further 8 per cent occurs between such populations that might have been put into the same racial category. Differences between ethnic groups accounted for just 7 per cent of genetic diversity. Simply put: two people are different because they are … More

By James Urquhart

An aerial view of coastal area of Llanos de Challe National Park in the Atacama Desertabriendomundo/Getty Images
When coastal hunter-gatherers settled inland to begin farming about 3000 years ago in the Atacama desert, their violence became more gruesome, often with intent to kill, according to a study of human remains from the time.
Vivian Standen at the University of Tarapacá in Chile and her colleagues studied signs of violence in the remains of 194 adults buried between 2800 and 1400 years ago in a coastal desert valley of northern Chile.
The team … More

By Michael Marshall

FOR many of the people reading this, tropical forests are remote places. A few may have visited the Amazon on holiday, or ventured into the Bornean rainforests to see orangutans, but for most, tropical forests seem far removed from everyday life.
In Jungle, his first book for a general audience, archaeologist Patrick Roberts sets out to tear down the barriers and show us how our lives are intertwined with tropical forests, “to convince you that the history of tropical forests is your history too”.
To do so, Roberts has written a history of the world according to the tropics and their jungles. He begins with the first land plants and the origins of trees, sketching how they affected the dinosaurs, early mammals and first primates.
The middle third of the book is devoted to the role of tropical forests in human evolution. A key message is that tropical forests aren’t inhospitable: people have lived in them for hundreds of thousands of years. Roberts attacks the long-standing idea that our ancestors left the trees to live on grasslands. Early hominins clearly spent less time up trees than apes such as chimpanzees, but the evidence suggests that our ancestors lived in many places, from the most open savannah to dense forests. More recently, people living in tropical forests have built city-like settlements, as in the Amazon.
Roberts moves on to document how the European empires of the past few centuries wrought havoc on the people and ecosystems of the tropics: for instance, by setting up the global trades in sugar and rubber, and exploitative labour systems such as slavery on which they relied. He brings the story up to date by outlining the multiplying threats the forests face from climate change, agriculture and wildfires, ending with pleas for their preservation. If we don’t save the tropical forests, warns Roberts, “climate change, declining food sources, economic catastrophe, political instability, mass migration and an explosion of pandemic diseases will very soon be knocking at your own door”.
In short, Jungle is enormously ambitious for a first popular book: it spans hundreds of millions of years and ranges across many disciplines. Does Roberts pull it off? Sort of.
On an intellectual and factual level, he unquestionably succeeds. Jungle is deeply researched, and moves with great skill from ecology and evolution to history and politics. Roberts handles them deftly, rarely putting a foot wrong.
Where the book does fall down is its writing style. This is so dry and complicated it might as well be an academic text. Sentences routinely run over five lines and paragraphs sprawl over whole pages. Vast arrays of facts and figures are hurled at the reader, largely unleavened by humour, anecdote or anything else.
This is compounded by a generally grim tone. Even the early chapters on evolution and dinosaurs, in which you might expect joy, thrills or awe before the serious stuff kicks in, are tough going. And the final five chapters, where Roberts outlines how modern capitalism abused tropical forests and its peoples, are an almost unbearable trudge through what feels like an endless series of atrocities.
“Jungle is enormously ambitious for a first popular book: it spans millions of years and many disciplines”
I am not suggesting Roberts should have dialled back his message: why should he, when he is so plainly correct? Moreover, some readers may not mind the style, while students looking for a panoramic and detailed survey of tropical forests will get a lot out of Jungle. But its difficult style and dourness will limit the appeal, which is a shame because its message should be heard.
For me, Jungle‘s biggest problem is that while it does a superb job of conveying the factual and rational reasons why we should all care about tropical forests, it doesn’t make you feel it in your bones.

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