Humans

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

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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 Adam Vaughan
There is increasing awareness of racial inequality in science funding
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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.”
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According to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universe is constantly dividing and taking you with it – so would you recognise your other selves if you met them?

Humans 9 December 2020
By Daniel Cossins

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Is there more than one of you?
BIOLOGICALLY speaking, there is definitively only one you (see “How likely are you?”). Physics might give you pause for thought, however. The most bewildering argument against your uniqueness comes from quantum mechanics, the fundamental theory that describes the often counter-intuitive behaviour of subatomic particles. It might imply not only that there are multiple, identical versions of you, but even that there are an infinite number of yous out there.
The quantum realm is notoriously fuzzy: quantum objects such as particles are described in terms of probabilities, encoded in mathematical widgets called wave functions that give you the odds on any number of different states the object might be in. Only when you observe or measure it does the object take on one of those states, at least from your perspective.
“Quantum theory might imply there are an infinite number of yous out there”
The truth of what happens at this point – and indeed what, if anything, the wave function itself is trying to tell us about reality – divides physicists. Many stick with a cop-out known as the Copenhagen interpretation: essentially, that we can never know what is happening in this fuzzy pre-measurement realm. In other words, quantum theory makes predictions about reality, but says nothing about what goes on under the hood.
That isn’t good enough for some. Physicists who subscribe to the rival “many worlds” interpretation insist that all the possibilities encoded in the wave function are real, and that they continue to exist in different universes that split off from ours every time a quantum … More

Quantum information can never be destroyed, so some of the essence of you could live on after death – but it’s not going to help the physical you

Humans 9 December 2020
By Joshua Howgego
Is death the end, or does part of us live on?
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What happens when you die?
MICHELLE FRANCL-DONNAY will never forget 15 April 1987. Her husband Tom was due to pick her up from an evening meeting, but decided to take a swim first. He had an undiagnosed heart condition, and while in the pool had a catastrophic aneurysm. Michelle rode with him in the ambulance. That was the last time she spoke to him.
“When I saw Tom’s body the next morning, he clearly wasn’t there anymore,” says Francl-Donnay, a chemist at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory who writes extensively on both science and spirituality. Over the years, she found herself mulling a question humans have asked for a long time: where had he gone?
Even those of us who rationally reject the idea of an afterlife have trouble letting go of the idea. That might be down to our theory of mind. Because we habitually put ourselves in other people’s shoes and imagine their thoughts and feelings, it can be hard to believe that those thoughts and feelings can just cease to be when ours still feel so real.
Yet we have no evidence for anything different. When you die, blood stops flowing, the muscles cool and consciousness, whatever that is, slips away. If your body were simply let be, other organisms would rapidly digest it, from microbes already living inside you to newly arrived blowflies.
Human burial rites just change the timescale or manner of your physical disappearance: if your remains are cremated, for instance, the … More

By Claire Ainsworth

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LARS IGUM RASMUSSEN and his mates were going large. Donning their lederhosen, the three middle-aged men headed into Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, the world’s biggest folk and beer festival. There, each proceeded to quaff an average of 7.5 litres of beer a day, for three days. It was a spectacular bender.
Getting hammered wasn’t the main aim of the exercise, however: Rasmussen is health correspondent for Danish magazine Politiken and was writing a story exploring the physiological effects of binge drinking. To understand what was happening to him and his friends, he had enlisted the help of metabolic physiologist Filip Knop at the University of Copenhagen. While Rasmussen was interested in finding out what havoc excessive boozing wreaks on the bodies of middle-aged men, Knop had another motive for getting involved. He and his colleague Matt Gillum had been itching to test a new idea about people’s appetite for alcohol – but couldn’t, in good conscience, solicit anyone to partake in a binge of this magnitude. “It would give the ethics officer a heart attack,” says Gillum. Volunteers, however, were a different matter.
What Knop and Gillum discovered is helping to build a picture of how our bodies control our boozing habits, from the amount we drink to when we stop. The research is homing in on a hormone that partly explains the huge variation in our social drinking habits: why some people are teetotal or can’t drink much, while others are lushes. It also points to the startling idea that our livers have more say in directing our behaviour than anyone imagined.
Of course, people choose to … More

How do humans feel living in a world where robots outperform them, asks The Preserve by Ariel S. Winter. Clare Wilson says it’s a great thought experiment

Humans 9 December 2020
By Clare Wilson
How would we react if machines dominated the world?
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The Preserve
Ariel S. Winter
Simon & Schuster
WHEN AI that is truly sentient finally emerges, the big question is how humans will fare. Will machines try to hunt us to extinction, as in the Terminator films, or will their omnipotence mean life for humans can be the kind of extended party of Iain M. Banks’s Culture series?
In Ariel S. Winter’s The Preserve, the robots have reached a stage somewhere in the middle. The book is set in the not-too-distant future, when human populations have dwindled … More

Gary Ellis Photography/Alamy
“KNOW thyself.” The first of three maxims said to have been inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi sounds grand. What it actually means has been a matter of debate for millennia, and when it comes to knowing ourselves, modern science has made things deliciously more complex, too.
How the physical substance of our bodies creates our sense of being a consistent entity, and what it means to have that sensation, is a long-standing puzzle. Debates about this relationship between matter and mind were meat and drink to the Ancient Greek philosophers, but … 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
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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