Humans

Failing fringe electro band Cosmic String have got a strange new gig, writes winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Adrian Tchaikovsky in his new short story Difficult Times

Humans 16 December 2020
By Adrian Tchaikovsky

Lucy Jones

“There’s a gig,” says Clawhammer Dougie Jones, or at least his little homunculus trapped in its window on my laptop.
“What gig?” In the window next door, our vocalist Alana Domingo mirrors my utter disbelief. “There aren’t any gigs, Doug. The gig economy left the building.”
Doug blinks at us, that beatific way he has. Like he’s some guru of wisdom about to change your life with a handful of words; like the colossal hit of mescaline he took on that US tour 20 years ago never wore off.
“My people,” he tells us, an opening that has never, in the history of music, … More

Watching TV and staring at flickering flames produce similar physiological effects, offering intriguing clues to the enduring power of entertainment – and the origins of sociability

Humans 16 December 2020
By Colin Barras

Getty Images

LAST year, it was Frozen. This year, it might be Eight Below. A holiday during the long, cold Michigan winter is a chance for my family to spend some quality time together. And what better way to enjoy our evenings than by watching movies on TV?
Some might call this a waste of time. Anthropologist Christopher Lynn begs to differ. He believes there is a good reason why many of us like gathering around the idiot box. Far from being frivolous, it is a legacy of a behaviour that arose to help humans survive the unforgiving Stone Age world.
It is tempting to see human evolution through the prism of technological breakthroughs that brought tangible material benefits. When our ancestors learned to make projectile weapons, for instance, they could hunt more effectively and secure more reliable sources of meat. Softer aspects of life, such as the ways we socialise, might seem less important to the success of our species. But Lynn, who is based at the University of Alabama, says we socialise not because we like to, but because we need to.
That may seem obvious to anyone who has struggled with isolation during lockdown this year. But Lynn goes further still. He thinks that the pleasure we gain from relaxing around the TV with friends and family might help explain why humanity became so social in the first place. It all began, he says, when our ancestors learned to control fire.
We have known for decades that the use of fire transformed life for early humans. It allowed them to cook food, for … More

By Donna Lu

Nonglak Bunkoet/Legrand/Alamy

With the coronavirus pandemic causing a sharp rise in unemployment, one idea is rapidly growing in popularity: universal basic income (UBI), in which the government pays people a regular sum, no strings attached.
A Finnish study published in May (although carried out in 2017 and 2018) with 2000 unemployed people found that UBI boosted recipients’ financial well-being, mental health and cognitive functioning, and also modestly improved employment rates.
People who received €560 per month, rather than regular unemployment benefits, reported higher levels of confidence in being able to control their future. The researchers involved say that regular guaranteed … More

By Adam Vaughan
There is increasing awareness of racial inequality in science funding
Skynesher/Getty Images

Just 10 senior researchers who received public funding in the UK during 2018-19 were Black, the first breakdown of UK science funding by individual ethnic groups reveals. The number, just 0.5 per cent of the total, was described as “profoundly upsetting” by the government body in charge of funding.
Racial inequalities in funding by the UK’s seven research councils, which coordinate around £8 billion of government cash, have come under growing scrutiny in the past year. But the disparities between ethnic minorities have been masked by lumping individual ethnicities together under the banner of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME).
Researchers can apply for three categories of funding, in descending seniority: principal investigator (PI), co-investigator or fellow. Today, data published by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which coordinates the research councils, shows that just 10 Black researchers were awarded PI funding. Out of the total 2045 PI roles funded, 210 went to people from an ethnic minority.

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Of the fellows who received funding, just 60 were from an ethnic minority, compared with 250 white fellows. The number of Black fellows is so low – between one and four – that UKRI didn’t release the number for fear of identifying individuals. That picture isn’t new, the organisation says: between 2014 and 2019 there has always been fewer than five Black fellows each year.
As the UKRI points out, both of these proportions are below the proportion of Black people in academia and the wider labour market, while the figures for co-investigator were more in line.
“It shows that funded Black applicants are vanishingly small,” says Izzy Jayasinghe at the University of Sheffield, UK, who is a member of The Inclusion Group for Equity in Research in STEMM (TIGERS). The figures show that Black applicants are underfunded by at least three times what would be expected given their wider labour market proportion, she says.
Michael Sulu at University College London, also a member of TIGERS, says: “It tells you everything you would assume, which is essentially that black staff must work with others to gain funding as a co-investigator and are unlikely to be leaders.”

By comparison, researchers of Asian ethnicity received a higher proportion of funding compared to the proportion of Asian people in academia and the wider jobs market. This appears to be the driving force behind the proportion of ethnic minority co-investigators growing between 2014 and 2015. From 2016-17 onwards, those researchers exceeded the ethnic minority proportion of academia and the labour market.

Ottoline Leyser at UKRI said in a statement: “These data spotlight the stark reality of the persistent systemic racial inequalities experienced in the research and innovation system. They are profoundly upsetting, but perhaps the most upsetting thing about them is that they are not surprising.”
More on these topics: More

We’re slowly beginning to unpick the complex interplay of genes, environment and experience that make you who you are – and like no one else who ever existed

Life 9 December 2020
By Clare Wilson
Birth is only a waymarker on the road to becoming you
Kieferpix/Getty Images

How likely are you?
CHILDREN are generally fascinated by tales of how they came to be. Even young ones can often grasp the mind-boggling implication if the events of the story leading up to their existence had been any different: they wouldn’t be there to hear it.
Your you-ness is a precarious thing. Rerun the experiment of you with a different sperm and egg from the same people, and “you” would be as different from your current self, genetically, as siblings are from one another. If the egg were the same, but through some random fluctuation a different sperm won the race, you would also be distinctly different. For a start, depending on whether the sperm bore an X or a Y chromosome, you could have ended up another sex. “That’s a pretty big difference, right there,” says David Linden, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and author of Unique: The new science of human individuality.
The potential for being a different you didn’t stop once destiny set your founding sperm and egg on their collision course, either. A lot of what makes you what you are is down to how your brain is connected. But your DNA doesn’t encode a precise wiring diagram: it is more like a rather hand-wavy recipe or set of instructions. Even genetically identical twins don’t end up with the same neuronal network. “A pool of cells in the developing brain might receive instructions that say: ‘About half of you move across the midline of the brain’, ” says Linden. “In one twin, 40 per … More

The point when you began depends on the scale you look at and how you define a person – in one sense you’re as old as the universe, in another you’ve hardly begun at all

Humans 9 December 2020
By Daniel Cossins
Arguably, you only become a person when you can reflect on other people’s view of you
Daisuke Takakura

When did you begin?
YOU almost undoubtedly know the date, possibly even the hour, you were born. Whether you are past celebrating rather depends. But reflect on the big picture, and the truth about when you began is too epic, and possibly a little too confusing, to be captured by a terse entry on a birth certificate.
That story begins in the deep cosmos. As anyone with a passing interest in Joni Mitchell’s back catalogue knows, we are stardust. It’s a nice line, and it also happens to be true, says Karel Schrijver, an astrophysicist at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in California.
Most of your body’s trillions of atoms, from calcium in your bones and carbon in your genes to iron in your blood, were forged by nuclear reactions in ancient stars, either when they were burning or when they ended in fiery supernova explosions. Those atoms were recycled through the births and deaths of more stars until, at some point, they escaped for a while. “Our solar system captured these elements to make Earth and everything on it,” says Schrijver – including you.
In that sense, we can’t know exactly when we began: it depends how many generations of stars our atoms cycled through. But each of us is at least 4.6 billion years old, the age of the solar system, and perhaps as ancient as the universe’s first stars, which appeared some 13.7 billion years ago, just 100 million years after the big bang. The hydrogen within … More

“Know thyself” is a piece of wisdom handed down from the ancients – but a slew of delusions and biases means you might be better off asking someone else

Humans 9 December 2020
By Alison George
The delusional Don Quixote and his faithful squire Sancho Panza in the 2018 film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Alamy Stock Photo

Can you ever truly know yourself?
DON QUIXOTE is one of the most celebrated characters in literature. The hero of Miguel de Cervantes’s novel, first published in 1605, decides to act out his knightly aspirations, performing acts of great chivalry and righting wrongs. So he thinks, anyway. Sadly, the gulf between his self-perception and how the world views him is vast – so much so that the word “quixotic” has come to describe delusional behaviour.
But here is a troubling thought. What if we are all more quixotic than we allow for? We might think that with our privileged access to our every thought and motivation, we are the best judge of our own character, but what if we aren’t?
In recent decades, psychologists have revealed that we are beholden to all sorts of biases and mental blind spots that put a positive spin on our characters. In one study from the 1960s of drivers hospitalised by car accidents, for instance, all judged their driving ability to be better than average.
This “illusory superiority” bias has been demonstrated many times since. Indeed, it turns out that the worse we are at a particular task, the less likely we are to recognise our own incompetence – something known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. And we are crashingly unaware of all of this: while we recognise the impact of bias in other people’s judgements, we miss it in our own.
It isn’t all bad news though. In a seminal study a decade … More

Most of us instinctively think that our sense of self is located in our head – but experiments show that our brains aren’t working alone in creating our sense of self

Humans 9 December 2020
By Alison George

Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Where is your self?
FOR the Ancient Egyptians, it was the heart. For philosopher René Descartes, it was somewhere entirely separate from the body. According to the Buddhist concept of anatta, it isn’t anywhere, because the thing concerned doesn’t exist.
But what does modern science say about where your self – your “soul”, if you like – resides?
At first pass, that might not seem a particularly scientific question. Regardless, most of us have an intuitive answer. When, in as-yet unpublished work, Christina Starmans and her colleagues showed people from the US and India pictures of flies circling around a person, and asked which flies they thought were closest, the results were striking: regardless of cultural background, most people pointed to flies near a person’s eyes. “This suggests there is a universal sense of the self being located in the head, near the eyes,” says Starmans, a psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada.
Subjectively at least, the eyes being windows to the soul checks out. “The sense of where in our bodies we are located is informed by our dominant experience of the world,” says Starmans. “Almost all of our input from the world comes in through our head.”
What our heads do with these inputs is certainly incredible, and key to our feeling that we are coherent beings. Our brains take a hotchpotch of electrical messages from our sense organs – eyes, ears, nose, skin – and combine them with memories to create a vivid, unified sense of conscious experience that is continuous in time.
How exactly this happens is still something of a mystery. But … More