Humans

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.”
More on these topics: More

Foreign cells within our bodies help determine our mental states and even contribute to our immune defences – making it tricky to define where you end and the others begin

Humans 9 December 2020
By Graham Lawton

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Where are your boundaries?
“Studies show we think of ourselves now and in the future as different people”
DELINEATING where a person begins and ends used to be quite simple. While philosophers might have tied themselves in knots trying to define the self, and biologists still struggle to locate its steering mechanism (see “Where is your self?”), what it encompassed, at least, was more clear-cut.
Their traditional definition comprises three elements, says Thomas Bosch at the University of Kiel, Germany: the mind, the genome and the immune system. Each of us is a self-contained organism defined by our mind and genes, with the immune system patrolling our borders and discriminating between self and non-self. Me, myself and I.
Then we looked more closely, and our relationship status went from “threesome” to “it’s complicated”.
For starters, we are chimeras: some parts of us are human, but genetically not “us”. Most, if not all, of us contain a few cells from our mother, our grandmothers and even elder siblings that infiltrated our bodies in the uterus.
Women who have carried children host such cells too. “Something like 65 per cent of women, even in their 70s, when autopsies were performed, had cells in their brains that were not theirs,” says David Linden at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Chimeric cells have been found to contribute to both good and bad health, for example promoting wound healing but also triggering autoimmune disease.
A handful of people even turn out to be true chimeras, created from a merger in the uterus of two non-identical, “fraternal” twins. We don’t know how common this … More

Understanding how individual we all are means grappling with genetics and neuroscience. Unique: The new science of human individuality by David Linden is a great place to start

Humans 9 December 2020
By Clare Wilson
Studying twins has shed light on the heritability of people’s personality
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Unique: The new science of human individuality
David Linden
Hachette
IN 1979, the US public was fascinated by news coverage of the “Jim twins”, a pair of identical twin brothers who were adopted at birth by different families, only to find each other at the age of 39.
The coincidence of their matching first names wasn’t their only similarity. They weren’t mirror duplicates of each other, in looks or temperament, but both worked in law enforcement and their hobby was carpentry. Both owned Chevrolets and took … More

According to the laws of physics, everything we do follows inevitably from what happened before – and yet we’re convinced we can change the world. Can we?

Humans 9 December 2020
By Richard Webb
If you don’t want to read this, put the magazine down now
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Are you predetermined?
WHAT are you doing right now? Reading these words. Why? Presumably because you chose to. Even if you didn’t – if you are encountering them years in the future lining a forgotten box of crockery in the attic, say – you can always choose to look away now. You possess the nebulous quality of human free will.
Nebulous because, despite debating it for millennia, philosophers have been unable to pin it down – and although we are pretty convinced we have it, at some level it must be an illusion, rather like our sense of self is (see “Are you always the same person?”).
Let’s start with the physics. Whenever you decide something, a certain pattern of neurons fires in your brain to turn your thought into action – moving towards the kitchen to make coffee, perhaps, or formulating an utterance you will come to regret. Ultimately, that is all down to pulses of electrons – fundamental particles that follow the cast-iron laws of physics, under which everything is determined by what happened immediately before.
That doesn’t leave much room for free will, apparently. “Physical laws, if they’re deterministic, tell me that everything that I do, everything that happens in the world, including everything that I do, including every decision I ever made, follows logically from the laws of nature [and] the initial conditions of the universe,” says philosopher of physics Jenann Ismael at Columbia University in New York. Since we control neither the laws of nature nor the initial conditions of the universe, we … More

It’s easy to be disheartened by the puniness of our existence – yet perhaps for the first time in human history, everything depends on decisions each one of us makes

Humans 9 December 2020
By Joshua Howgego

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Do you matter?
LET’S start with the big picture: if it is significance on this Earth you are looking for, then the numbers are increasingly against you.
Go back 2000 years and there were fewer than 200 million people on the planet. When the industrial revolution kicked in from the 18th century, however, new methods emerged of feeding vastly more people and combating the infectious diseases that had kept our numbers in check. Our numbers began to shoot up, reaching nearly 7.7 billion now. Today, you are, to a greater extent than in all history, just a face in a crowd.
That doesn’t mean you matter any less to your closest friends and family. And perhaps you or your offspring may be one of those few who change the world for better (or for worse). But that is statistically unlikely. Even in spheres where we like to think we are important, such as parenting, the evidence suggests individuals don’t matter that much. Geneticist Robert Plomin at King’s College London has pointed out, for instance, that identical twins brought up in different families generally end up with the same level of cognitive ability.
It isn’t just about you
But there is another, contrary, line of thinking, that collectively all of us can make a difference on a grand scale. In the broad sweep of human history, these are pivotal times. With the development of nuclear weapons in the mid-20th century, humanity reached a point where we can destroy ourselves. In this century, existential risks have only increased thanks to the threat of catastrophic climate change, … More

Covid-19 continues to split some people along party lines. We are now beginning to work out why, writes Graham Lawton

Humans | Comment 9 December 2020
By Graham Lawton

REUTERS/Mike Blake

LIKE the majority of people in my local area, I follow the rules on face coverings. It’s an inconvenience, but I consider putting on a mask a small sacrifice to protect my health and that of other people. Every day, I see many people – more than could possibly have a legitimate exemption – flagrantly flouting the rules and it really gets up my nose.
The refuseniks annoy me on multiple levels. They are selfishly putting me and other people at risk. They think they know better than experts. They often fall for conspiracy theories. And even if they are … More

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