Humans

To explain the paradox of a smart species that embraces fake news, conspiracy theories and paranormal woo, we need to rethink rationality, says psychologist Steven Pinker

Humans

8 December 2021

By Graham Lawton
Jennie Edwards
HUMANITY faces some huge challenges, from the coronavirus pandemic and climate change to fundamentalism, inequality, racism and war. Now, more than ever, we need to think clearly to come up with solutions. But instead, conspiracy theories abound, fake news is in vogue and belief in the paranormal is as strong as ever. It seems that we are suffering from a collective failure of rationality.
Steven Pinker doesn’t buy into this disheartening conclusion. In his new book, Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters, the Harvard University psychologist challenges the orthodoxy that sees Homo sapiens … More

By Sally Adee

Are we really just puppets being controlled by the words of those in charge?Shutterstock/SvetaZi
Outcast
Louise Carey
Gollancz 20 JanuaryAdvertisement

“YOU’VE exceeded everyone’s expectations.” These are words that Tanta, the hero of Louise Carey’s InScape series, hears often from her boss. The resulting dopamine rush is strong enough to make her knees tremble and to reinforce her total devotion to her employer, InTech.
InTech isn’t just any tech company. It is also the local government, a role it assumed in the wake of a global disaster that obliterated nation states. Civil rights have been replaced by end-user licence agreements, and violations of community guidelines get you executed.
Tanta, like most of her coworker-citizens, has internalised her company’s values so completely that the worst thing you can say about someone is that they are “not being very corporate”.
In Outcast, the second book in the series, Tanta has been assigned the task of finding the deeply uncorporate mole who is selling company secrets. But there is a twist: first, she needs to rid her mind of the phrases used by the corporate autocracy to command loyalty in its citizen-employees.
This is the point at which the series pivots to deft satire, skewering the cult-like employee culture that exists not only in Carey’s dystopian future but in our present, too. From Mark Zuckerberg’s exhortation to “move fast and break things” to Disney’s insistence that all its employees, down to the janitorial staff, identify as “cast members”, corporations already use certain phrases to get inside employees’ heads. Carey has a degree in psychology, which clearly informs her send-up of the way companies do this.
“In Outcast, your employer determines whether you live or die and you think that is good and fair”
In Battle of the Linguist Mages, Scotto Moore takes the idea of weaponised linguistics to the next level. In this world, human language began as an embedded sentient alien mind virus that colonised humanity back in the mists of time, shaping the way we communicated ideas. Then one human finds a way to weaponise these mind viruses into “power morphemes”, sounds that can bypass logic and motor control to evoke a particular feeling, action or belief.
This book won’t be for everyone. It veers wildly from one style to the next: one minute it reads as a snackable version of Ready Player One, the next it channels the loopy extravagance of Douglas Adams, then it abruptly skids into the style of a dense Wikipedia entry. In between the main plot, driven by a glitter-caked, disco-themed multiplayer game where bad guys are killed with a kaleidoscopic beam, Moore plunges into discursive ravines where he explores concepts like memetics and the weaponised persuasion tactics of the advertising industry.
These are very different books by very different authors, but the thread running through both is the unstoppable evolution of persuasion techniques. Using words as weapons is as old as advertising and politics, of course. The question is where the iterations will end. In Outcast, the endpoint is that your employer determines whether you live or die, and you think that is good and fair. In Battle of the Linguist Mages, others can use words to control your ability to think.
What’s scary is that if language as a form of mind control is even theoretically possible, you can be sure some executive has assigned a working group to it. This is the world we live in now. But at least we get to laugh at it through the medium of science fiction.

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StockFood/Jones, Huw
CREATING a gingerbread house is a fun festive activity, but shoddy construction can spoil the party and put any gingerbread inhabitants in serious danger. This recipe and some tips will help you avoid catastrophe.
First, create a design. It is helpful to draw the pieces for your house on paper, then cut these shapes out to use as templates. The quantities of ingredients listed will give you enough gingerbread to make a structure 30 centimetres tall with walls 20 cms wide.
Building requires a strong and stable biscuit. A dense dough with a low moisture content is ideal, so … More

Magnificent adventures are captured in this selection of photographic firsts, some of the earliest images from each location, taken by world-renowned photographers including Gertrude Bell, Carleton Watkins, Isabella Bird, Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley.

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Centuries before the pharaohs emerged in Egypt, the local elites used a thick porridge-like beer in their ceremonies

Humans

3 December 2021

By Jason Arunn Murugesu
Reconstruction of beer cups and jars from early EgyptDr. Renee
The elite members of early Egyptian society – before the emergence of the pharaohs – probably drank beer, which they transported around in six-litre jars.
Jiajing Wang at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire and her colleagues analysed fragments of pottery found at Hierakonpolis, an archaeological site in southern Egypt. The fragments date back to between 3800 and 3600 BC, about 600 years before Egypt was united into one state under Narmer, the first pharaoh.
The fragments were found in an area that served as … More

Until around 150 years ago, humans were relatively short – but our recent growth spurt may have more to do with social factors than dietary ones

Humans

2 December 2021

By Michael Marshall
A man measures a woman’s heightImage Point Fr/Shutterstock
For most of our history, humans have been short, a study has found. Until around 150 years ago, few people grew taller than 170 centimetres – not even the most privileged individuals, who had ready access to food. This discovery adds to growing evidence that stunting – being unusually short – isn’t a wholly reliable indicator of malnutrition. Instead of being a sign of a good diet, growing taller may instead reflect competition for dominance in some societies.
Christiane Scheffler at the University of Potsdam and paediatrician … More

Josie Ford
Load of old…
The stereotype of scientists as unfeeling automatons is lazy and, in Feedback’s experience, entirely inexplicable. On the contrary, the passions the pursuit of knowledge bring to the boil often froth over in raw, all-too-real emotion.
We feel this with a 2020 paper in the journal ACS Nano from Martin Pumera at the Center for Advanced Functional Nanorobots at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague that our science fiction columnist Sally Adee sends us, entitled “Will any crap we put into graphene increase its electrocatalytic effect?”Advertisement
Ah graphene, that two-dimensional carbon wonder-repository of hopes, dreams and the UK government’s entire industrial strategy. As far as Feedback can discern, the bone of contention this paper is tearing hunks of raw meat off is whether you can boost energy-producing chemical reactions within hydrogen fuel cells and the like by adding a pinch of other chemical elements to their graphene-surfaced electrodes.
“To make our point of the meaninglessness of efforts to co-dope graphene with various elements experimentally, we evaluate in this work if guano-doped graphene poses any advantages over nonguano-doped graphene,” the researchers write, with forthrightness of both word and intent. Having basted graphene in bird poo, they conclude that it does.
Feedback is impressed, although not entirely surprised: after all, back in the day nations went to war over guano for its nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur content, prized for making fertiliser and gunpowder. Now just add it to the list of clean energy’s potential dirty secrets (13 November, p 38). Unless of course the whole thing’s a pile of old crap. We say this entirely without feeling.
King bee
Joyously, Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London, takes to Twitter with a picture of a subscription communication from chez nous. “For years, the New Scientist addressed me as Queen L Chittka – probably an AI conflation of my name and address,” he writes. “Now some automatism has added ‘Her Royal Highness’.”
We ascribe this not to automatism, Lars, but the ghost in our machine’s appreciation of your cutting-edge research on the sensory and navigational capabilities of bees, a world in which there is only one description for the top, errm… dog. We think it’s rather sweet, but if you want us to try to unjam said machine, do let us know.
Horny problem
Many thanks to most of Canada, and also, pleasingly, John Burman of Port Macquarie, Australia, who write in pointing out the only news of real significance last week: Air Canada’s announcement that, in response to the devastating floods that cut key supply links to southern British Columbia, it would be temporarily adding goods capacity into Vancouver airport “equivalent in weight to approximately 860 adult moose”.
We add this to our towering pile of “Culturally relevant measurement units (Canada)”, while idly wondering what 43 score moose translate to volumetrically. This raises the interesting problem of optimal moose tessellation, which may require more mathematical firepower than our speculative doodles of interlocking antlers. The related question of how many adult male African elephants the moose convert to is of course only relevant if they are flying in a jumbo jet.
Uncertain times
Feedback understands that the nature of quantum reality and the location of the boundary between its fuzzy realm and our solid, classical world are active areas of research, if only for a certain, small value of “understands”. Seeking further enlightenment, we have for many years been an eager student of quantum overspill effects into the classical realm.
“Please enter thru both doors,” a board with arrows pointing right and left instructs Jonathan Stoppi in the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney, British Columbia. “Please have your proof of vaccination and photo ID ready to present.”
This second part in particular rather puzzles us. Even supposing an individual’s quantum trajectory can be recombined behind the doors, what does a positive proof of vaccination there tell us about vaccination status before they pass through the doors? Possibly for the purposes of the Mary Winspear Centre this doesn’t much matter, but we think we should be told.
Viro-robo-cop
More signs of the times, as a paper in PLoS One details a robot than can enforce social distancing. Using lidar and a depth camera, Soditbot – as no one has called it, yet – can remotely detect groups of people breaching a safe 2-metre distance in crowded environments and glide in, displaying a stern message on a laser display screen.
This is admittedly not an entirely new idea – Feedback recalls the robodog that patrolled a Singapore park broadcasting social distancing messages via a loudhailer last year, and similar, less cute robot enforcers in the island city state. Nevertheless, we agree with a colleague who suggests that if this is really to work, the robot needs to be equipped with a water pistol or Nerf gun. We just hope Soditbot is regularly wiped, so as not to become a vector itself.
Got a story for Feedback?You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

By Simon Ings
Getty Images/iStockphoto
The first rule of popular science is to reveal the wonder and mystery of the world. For that reason, Sentient (Picador), written by photographer and wildlife film-maker Jackie Higgins, is my personal pick of the year. It reveals how the 86 billion nerve cells in the human nervous system afford us not just five, but more than 30 distinct senses, all served by dedicated receptors. Here is a thought suitable for the season: did you know that mammals have a special touch receptor dedicated to cuddling?
Bodies and brains
Science writers found many more unexpected wonders to share with us this year. Delicious (Princeton University Press) raises the idea that our ancestors wiped out all manner of psychoactive treats as they worked their way through mammoths, mastodons, bison, Jefferson’s ground sloths, giant camels and many more now-extinct species. The diet of the Clovis peoples of North America is a menu that husband-and-wife team Rob Dunn and Monica Sanchez describe as “a tally of a lost world”. They go on to explain how we came by such a varied appetite and how our dinners robbed the world of so many large animals.Advertisement
For inspiration on how modern humans can avoid doing the same, Jane Goodall’s collaboration with publisher Douglas Abrams is a good place to start. In The Book of Hope (Viking), Abrams interviews Goodall, whose positive philosophy has been honed over a lifetime of commitment to the natural world. “It’s mostly because people are so overwhelmed by the magnitude of our folly that they feel helpless,” says Goodall. The Book of Hope is both a memoir of a well-lived life and a compendium of stories of “people who succeed because they won’t give up”.
New Scientist writer Graham Lawton spent a year keeping a diary of his “minor health woes”. He ratcheted up more than 100, which he explores in detail in Mustn’t Grumble (Headline). It’s a romp through the science behind common ailments that ponders whether our day-to-day gripes are the best indicators of future health.
From healthy bodies to healthy minds. In Move! (Profile), Caroline Williams, another New Scientist regular, explores how moving our bodies can act as “a hotline to the brain”, affecting the way we think and feel for the better.
Meanwhile, in Ginny Smith’s Overloaded (Bloomsbury Sigma), we learn how the way we feel and even our sense of reality depend partly on how certain chemicals behave in our brains. As Smith explains, we often don’t know how these substances work. But where there is clarity to be had, Smith brings it with aplomb, revealing the chemistry behind how we sleep, what we fear, who we love and even what we remember.
“Our ancestors may have wiped out all manner of psychoactive treats as they killed off species”
Not content with this wonderful chemical world, meddling with our brain chemistry, often by ingesting plants, is a favourite pastime of humans and other animals. Many evolved as a form of plant defence, including the sedative morphine, found in the opium poppy; the stimulant caffeine, found in tea and coffee; and the hallucinogen mescaline, found in certain varieties of cacti. In This is Your Mind on Plants (Allen Lane), Michael Pollan weaves tales of drug experimentation into a historical account of our long relationship with them.
Climate of change
In a tricky year for the climate, hope is something that Michael Mann has a surprising amount of. In 1999, he published a graph showing the rapid post-industrial rise in global temperatures. Two decades of harassment and death threats later, Mann remains convinced that we can prevent runaway climate change. The New Climate War (Scribe) sets out a common-sense approach to carbon pricing and a revision of the well-intentioned, but flawed, Green New Deal.
Of course, there are still many who deny that climate change is even happening. In Saving Us (Simon & Schuster), Katharine Hayhoe argues that this isn’t necessarily a problem. A Canadian climate scientist living in Texas who is also an evangelical Christian, Hayhoe argues that since facts can be so easily manipulated and ignored, we should focus on our shared values, beliefs and enthusiasms instead. We may find we have more in common than we think.
Inspiring memoirs
“I was always proud of my work,” writes celebrated NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson in My Remarkable Journey (Amistad), “but for Pete’s sake, I didn’t do anything alone”. Johnson, who came to public attention at age 91 with the publication of Margot Lee Shetterly’s 2016 book Hidden Figures, focuses on those who encouraged and championed her career and helped her become a Black female pioneer in a field, and indeed a society, dominated by white men.
Physicist Kate Greene is another ground-based space trailblazer. She grew up wanting to be an astronaut and in 2013 she (almost) got her wish. Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars (Icon Books) is her tale of spending four months in a geodesic dome in Hawaii, with five other people, to mimic living in a colony on another planet.
The experiment revealed many of the pitfalls future pioneers will face: “The same people, same seats at the table, same clothes, same smells, same routines, same view outside the one-and-only window looking out onto the same rocks. No sunshine on our skin, no fresh air in our lungs.” Greene turns the longueurs and frustrations of her mission into a moving and compelling story.
Machines and minds
Meanwhile, on actual Mars, there is a spot that will be forever known as Larry’s Lookout. It is named after Larry Crumpler, a geologist and part of the Mars Exploration Rover project, who reversed the Spirit rover up to this spot in 2005 to photograph the Gusev crater. His book Missions to Mars (William Collins), studded with full-colour photographs taken by rovers and NASA satellites, shows how robot technology has helped us see our planetary neighbour as never before.
Back on Earth, the robots are almost as smart. This, says Kate Darling in The New Breed (Allen Lane), means we should give some serious thought to our future relationships with them. Darling celebrates our ability to bond with those outside our own species (soldiers have mourned the loss of bomb disposal robots, and Darling mentions one trooper who sprinted under gunfire to rescue a fallen robot). But she reminds us that robots, unlike animals, are designed by people, and could be used to exploit our better nature.
A final note of caution about our technological future comes from Kate Crawford. In Atlas of AI (Yale University Press), she reveals the hidden costs of artificial intelligence, from the consumption of natural resources to the more subtle costs to our privacy, equality and freedom.
A year of great sci-fi
In a year with so many reasons to seek out escapism, we were spoiled for choice with sci-fi books.
Deep Wheel Orcadia (Picador) by Harry Josephine Giles was one of the best. It’s a tale of a community of space miners faced with the possibility that the mysterious resources they have been extracting are actually sentient. Versed in Orkney dialect with an English translation, it is also perhaps the most unusual sci-fi offering of the year.
In the hyper-connected future of Skyward Inn (Solaris), humanity has spread to the stars, colonising inhabited planets as it goes. This is how a broad-chested, curly-haired extraterrestrial called Isley has ended up running a pub in England’s west country, serving a native liquor that brings good memories to mind.
Isley is happy; so, by all accounts, is his planet. So why is there a mob gathering in neighbouring Simonscombe? What do they know that the rest of the world doesn’t? In this book, Aliya Whiteley cements her reputation as one of our most exciting new novelists.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since winning the Nobel prize in literature covers more familiar territory, with a recognisable yet slightly off-kilter version of our world. Klara and the Sun (Faber) tells the story of an intelligent, self-aware “artificial friend” who is navigating a dystopian world of human users who seem to have forgotten how to form attachments to each other and have lost sight of what really matters.
In an even more eerily familiar world, Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing (Hachette) ponders whether corporate instant-messaging apps like Slack will ultimately suck your soul out of your still-living body. The result is a riotous techno-horror-comedy whose protagonist Gerald wakes one day to find his consciousness has been uploaded into his company’s Slack channel. Will he escape? Will he want to? And will his bosses care either way? Since he started “working from home”, there’s been a leap in Gerald’s productivity, after all…
More psychological insights are to be found in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shards of Earth (Tor). In this universe, interstellar travel requires zipping through a dimension called “unspace”, which, while convenient, wreaks a psychic toll that only a few, genetically enhanced humans can survive. On the plus side, it proves useful for those who need to bargain with planet-wrecking aliens.
Finally, Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Tor) is set on a moon called Panga, which is half protected wilderness, half industrial hellscape. Robots live in the wilderness and humans leave them alone. Then, Sibling Dex, a human “tea monk” (a kind of travelling therapist) heads into the wilds and makes contact with a robot, Mosscap.
It’s the first time humans and robots have met in centuries and, amid all the dystopian science fiction on offer, their developing relationship offers a joyful interlude that brings a warm, fuzzy feeling that is perfect for the time of year.

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