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Arts

- We Were Born to Groove

- We’re Biased Against AI-Made Art

- Portrait of a Fractured Arctic

- Fishing Gear on the Fashion Runway

- What Should We Do With an Old Sea Shanty?

- Our National Parks in the Quiet of the Pandemic

Arts

We Were Born to Groove

Babies dig the beat, a new study shows, offering a cool insight into the origin of music.

By Henkjan Honing    December 26, 2023

In 2009, my research group found that newborns possess the ability to discern a regular pulse— the beat—in music. It’s a skill that might seem trivial to most of us but that’s fundamental to the creation and appreciation of music. The discovery sparked a profound curiosity in me, leading to an exploration of the biological underpinnings of our innate capacity for music, commonly referred to as “musicality.”

In a nutshell, the experiment involved playing drum rhythms, occasionally omitting a beat, and observing the newborns’ responses. Astonishingly, these tiny participants displayed an anticipation of the missing beat, as their brains exhibited a distinct spike, signaling a violation of their expectations when a note was omitted.

Yet, as with any discovery, skepticism emerged (as it should). Some colleagues challenged our interpretation of the results, suggesting alternate explanations rooted in the acoustic nature of the stimuli we employed. Others argued that the observed reactions were a result of statistical learning, questioning the validity of beat perception being a separate mechanism essential to our musical capacity. Infants actively engage in statistical learning as they acquire a new language, enabling them to grasp elements such as word order and common accent structures in their native language. Why would music perception be any different?

To address these challenges, in 2015, our group decided to revisit and overhaul our earlier beat perception study, expanding its scope, method and scale, and, once more, decided to include, next to newborns, adults (musicians and non-musicians), and macaque monkeys.

Newborns possess the ability to discern a regular pulse— the beat—in music.

The results, recently published in Cognition, confirm that beat perception is a distinct mechanism, separate from statistical learning. The study provides converging evidence on newborns’ beat perception capabilities. In other words, the study was not simply a replication but utilized an alternative paradigm leading to the same conclusion.

When we employed the same paradigm with macaque monkeys in 2018, we found no evidence for beat processing, only a sensitivity to the isochrony (i.e., regularity) of the rhythms. This suggests that the evolution of beat perception unfolded gradually among primates, reaching its pinnacle in humans and manifesting with limitations in other species like chimpanzees and various other nonhuman primates. It provides further empirical support for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis I outlined in my 2019 book The Evolving Animal Orchestra, a hypothesis that addresses the similarities and differences that are found in rhythm perception (and production) between human and nonhuman primates. It suggests the connection between the motor and auditory brain areas to be more strongly wired in humans as opposed to chimpanzees or gibbons, while mostly lacking in macaques.

What does this study say about the origins of music, and why does it matter? When we integrate the findings of the new study with our previous work, we now have converging evidence from two distinct paradigms indicating the functionality of beat processing in newborn infants. This adds weight to the argument for a biological foundation of beat perception itself. The study not only contributes to our understanding of the biological underpinnings of musicality but also underscores the intricate and multifaceted nature of our capacity to perceive and engage with rhythmic elements in the auditory environment. As such, music is not solely a cultural phenomenon but also possesses deep biological roots, apparently offering an evolutionary advantage to our species.

This article was excerpted from MIT Press Reader.

Lead image: hpphtns / Shutterstock

Henkjan Honing

Posted on December 26, 2023

Henkjan Honing is a professor of music cognition at the University of Amsterdam, author of The Evolving Animal Orchestra: In Search of What Makes us Musical, and editor of The Origins of Musicality.

Arts

We’re Biased Against AI-Made Art

And that could be a good thing.

By Deena Mousa    December 22, 2023

In 2022, a work of art generated by artificial intelligence won an art prize. Jason M. Allen of Colorado created the composition with MidJourney, an AI program that turns text prompts into digital paintings. Allen says his vision for the piece, which looks like an oil painting and pictures women standing in an ornate hall wearing Victorian dresses and space helmets, came to him while he was in a state of creative twilight—half dreaming, half awake. He reported trying 624 different prompts before he got the effect he wanted. The work took a blue ribbon in the category of digital art at the Colorado State Fair, but when word of his methods got out, Twitter (now X) exploded in outrage.

The creation and appreciation of art have long been considered uniquely human domains, separating us from the animals and uniting us with the gods. This view is complicated by the recent arrival of AI applications like Dall-E, MidJourney, and others that can create beautiful digital works, and even elaborate imitations of a particular artist’s style. But is it “art” if the creator is not human, and how do we evaluate human-AI collaborations?

We might be a little bit biased. According to a November 2023 article in Nature, people consistently assign less value to art labeled AI-made versus human-made—even when the work of art itself is held constant (labeling the same piece as human- or AI-made). In a series of six experiments with nearly 3,000 study subjects, researchers randomly assigned labels to 28 images describing the creator as AI or human and asked them to rate the images across a number of metrics: monetary value, skill, emotional intensity, complexity, color.

The authenticity of a human having made something can have so much meaning.

The study participants still rated works labeled AI-made as less valuable than works labeled human-made when they acknowledged that they often couldn’t distinguish between the two, and even when they believed the art labeled AI-made was produced collaboratively with a human. On the other hand, evaluations of complexity and emotional intensity in the works of art were less influenced by how the piece was labeled—and evaluations of value were less pronounced when participants were not asked to directly compare human and AI-made efforts.

The authors of the study first became interested in how we value AI-driven art when a fellow Columbia researcher began holding exhibitions of machine-made works in 2016. “People would receive it differently if he gave more credit to the machine for the work,” says first author Blaine Horton, a former performing artist and current doctoral student at Columbia Business School. “They’d say it was cool, but not terribly interesting or creative. But when he took more of the credit for the work, it appeared people responded more positively.”

How we feel about AI art may have something to do with our perception of “authenticity.” In his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick posed the concept of the experience machine. The experience machine is a hypothetical device that could replicate a perfectly optimal life based on the unique definition of whomever was attached. That person would not remember entering the device and would believe their experience was entirely real. On the surface, this seems ideal, but most people reject the proposal.

A 2018 paper, “Nozick’s Experience Machine: An Empirical Study,” quantified this finding. Researchers asked participants whether they would opt into various forms of Nozick’s experience machine and found that a majority, about 70 percent, would not. The authors attributed this attitude to what they call the “authenticity intuition”—or the idea that people value living their lives in contact with whatever they consider reality, independent of how pleasant that reality is.

Blaine notes that this is consistent with existing evidence that the origins or nature of an object can lend it worth, independent of its actual qualities. “There’s ample evidence to show that we as humans like things not necessarily because they are objectively better or worse but because of these essential stories around them,” he says. Perhaps we believe the work of humans is more authentic, and therefore more valuable, than the work of machines. “The authenticity of a human having made something can have so much meaning,” says Blaine.

The good news for human artists: Study subjects found images labeled human-made more creative when these were compared to images labeled AI-made. For Blaine, this suggests that human artists might actually benefit from having their work compared directly to pieces created by AI. Fears that cheaply-made AI art will flood the market and bring down the overall value of human work may be overblown, he says. “There’s this overwhelming doom and gloom perspective of AI being here to destroy human value,” says Blaine. “But if we’re careful about how we implement this technology, we can use it to make the lives of humans and human artists better.”

Lead image: KrerkStock / Shutterstock

Deena Mousa

Posted on December 22, 2023

Deena Mousa is an independent journalist with bylines in The Christian Science Monitor, Business Insider, and the Observer.

Arts

Portrait of a Fractured Arctic

What the melting permafrost looks and sounds like to a scientist.

By Katherine Harmon Courage    November 30, 2023

Mark Urban was not in the Arctic to study ice. He was looking for fish—tracing their travels from lake to stream and back again, as they navigate their changing world. But at all hours, in the field and in his campsite, he could hear it. Plink, plonk, plink. Pebbles subsumed in ice thousands of years ago being released from previously frozen lake banks, dropping into the water below.

Urban, an environmental ecologist and director of the Center of Biological Risk at the University of Connecticut, was conducting his experiments with colleagues at I-Minus Lake, in far northern Alaska. The lake is surrounded by permafrost that is now rapidly warming and melting, releasing its material to the unfrozen world around it. “All day and all night, you hear that melting of the ancient ice,” Urban says.

You see the land just disintegrate—almost before your eyes.

One morning he woke up to see the mesolithic mud that had melted the day before refrozen and was inspired to take this photo, which spans an area of about a couple of feet. The image, to him, captures a moment in time when “the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else in the world,” he says. “We’re seeing the landscape change before our eyes.” Each warm season, the area is losing 20 to 30 feet of its permafrost: frozen soil, rocks, and ice that have been encased for 10,000 years.

Courtesy of Mark C. Urban

Urban started traveling to this same field site more than a decade ago. “The Arctic is a really special place, built upon permafrost,” he says. “That’s what gives it its special properties, that’s why it looks the way it does and has this beautiful, stark landscape.”

With a scientist’s eye, he notes of climate change that, “we’re seeing it in the biology of species, we’re seeing it in the changes in weather patterns, we’re seeing it in the patterns of flow in the rivers. But to see the land just disintegrate—almost before your eyes—I think is one of those images that really strikes you and says, yes, this is really happening. And it’s happening quickly.”

But the image doesn’t relay the sounds. During fieldwork there, he says, “every once in a while, you’ll pause and hear that noise.” Plink. Plonk. Plink. “And you think, oh, what is that? Oh, it’s the melting of the permafrost.” Plonk. “It’s a somber soundtrack for watching the world fall apart.”

Lead image courtesy of Mark C. Urban

Katherine Harmon Courage

Posted on November 30, 2023

Katherine Harmon Courage is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Arts

Fishing Gear on the Fashion Runway

Ghost nets that ensnarl and kill ocean wildlife get an artistic makeover.

By Elena Kazamia    November 28, 2023

When Marion Gaemers and Lynnette Griffiths turned on the black lights in their studio not long ago, they were pleased. The discarded fishing gear they were using to create their latest work of art luminesced, giving it a ghostly oceanic glow. The wearable sculpture, which has 500 silvery sardines worked into its skirt, is meant to conjure an imaginary queen who lives beneath the sea—and to warn of the dangers of ghost nets.

They call the work the Birth of the Babel Fish. It’s loosely inspired by Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which a fictional species of fish called the babel fish tour the cosmos, helping to translate the various languages spoken by cosmic hitchhikers so they can communicate. Gaemers and Griffiths crafted the gown as an entry to the 2023 World of Wearable Art competition to spread the word about the threat posed by rogue fishing gear, also known as ghost nets, to all the living things in the ocean.

We want to make visible the hidden pollution.

The pair of artists have been creating environmental sculptures out of lost netting and fishing gear for a decade, and together run the Ghost Net Collective in Queensland, Australia, founded in 2020. These ghost nets ensnarl and kill ocean wildlife, posing a massive threat to biodiversity and marine ecosystems. Some 1,500 Australian sea lions die every year due to entanglement in fishing nets, for example. Ghost nets also attract other debris, coiling into leviathans that become a hazard even to shipping vessels. The problem has grown over time as fishing gear is increasingly designed with synthetic materials for durability. One 2018 report estimated that ghost nets, lines, and ropes accounted for almost half of the plastic found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

MARINE QUEEN:  Artists Marion Gaemers and Lynnette Griffiths spent five months crafting the babel queen’s gown by hand. Here, Val Schier, former mayor of the Cairns Regional Council in Queensland, models it on the beach.

Some ghost nets inevitably wash up on shore, and Gaemers and Griffiths collect them during beach clean-ups. The larger ghost nets they use in their art works come to them from Tangaroa Blue, a nonprofit organization based in Western Australia that monitors the impacts of marine debris along the coastline. Griffiths and Gaemers work all the material by hand, first hosing it down to remove sand and other rubble and then sorting the pieces by color. Once the ropes are detangled, they “deconstruct” them into threads and finally “felt” them into a fabric, says Gaemers. The fabric is woven into the sculptural pieces, using twining and plaiting techniques borrowed from basketry.

It’s arduous work: Griffiths and Gaemers spent five months crafting the babel queen’s gown by hand. But they had help, too: Most of the larger installations are completed collaboratively. Gaemers and Griffiths send out kits with ghost netting and instructions for how to weave marine critters to participants all over the world. They ask that their collaborators send the pieces back to them, and incorporate them as details into their larger projects, thus spreading the ownership of the installations and helping to educate the public about ghost nets. Volunteer collaborators created all of the sardines in the babel fish skirt, they say. “Each sardine takes about 22 minutes to sew,” Griffiths told me.

FEELING THAT GLOW: Artists Marion Gaemers and Lynnette Griffiths photographed their sculpted gown in blacklight for submission to the World of Wearable Art contest. The luminescent glow gives the gown an otherworldly oceanic feeling, in keeping with the ghost net theme and the story of their imaginary queen. Model: Val Schier.

The Birth of the Babel Fish is a singular creation, weaving together the quirks of the two artists. Gaemers describes herself as “a science-fiction enthusiast,” a big-time fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide and television series like Doctor Who, whereas Griffiths has long loved the world of fashion. The babel queen gown incorporates influences from the Elizabethan period, Griffiths says, a heyday of maritime exploration.

“We want people to be able to touch our work,” Griffiths told me. To the artists, ghost nets are a symbol for global environmental problems writ large, which generally lurk out-of-sight and out-of-mind. “The nets are silent, deadly killers, and through what we do in our work, we want to make visible the hidden pollution.” The Birth of the Babel Fish places that abstraction into a human context.

Photos courtesy of Lynnette Griffiths

Elena Kazamia

Posted on November 28, 2023

Elena Kazamia is a science writer from Greece. She has a master’s degree in conservation from University College London and a Ph.D. in plant sciences from the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

Arts

What Should We Do With an Old Sea Shanty?

Grappling with the complicated legacy of an unexpectedly

popular musical genre.

By Katy Kelleher    November 20, 2023

In an old church in Essex, Connecticut, a man with a curled gray beard that spills halfway down his red-and-white shirt takes a moment to adjust his suspenders before opening his mouth into a perfect O-shape and issuing a note so deep that the pews seem to shudder. He sings not of God or heaven or worship, but of tragedy on the water. No one joins in this ballad, though I know many of our odd congregation have the lyrics memorized. The summer air is still and warm. Tears gather in the eyes of my friends and I watch their faces surreptitiously. I’ve seen these men cry before, but not often, and never quite like this.

We went as a group to the Maritime Music Festival last June, an excursion that I suggested after spending long pandemic years in my home, listening to live recordings of folk music. Starved for physical intimacy, I found the inherent roughness of the genre comforting. I suspected my friends, most of whom I’ve known since childhood, would feel similarly. And, I should explain, I’m a romantic. Not in matters of the heart, but in matters of labor. Like so many people, I look backward with sepia-tinted binoculars. Nostalgic for lives I never (didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t have anyway) lived.

I forget sometimes that America was born of the water.

The age of the sail has ended, the age of the work song has largely passed, but certain genres of music persist, thanks in part to the work of activists and archivists. In early 2021, sea shanties became a viral trend, a coronavirus-infected meme that hopped platforms. Headlines followed, explainers were published, historians consulted, museum curators given a chance to speak. What was a sea shanty? Where did they come from? Why do they still matter?

In case you didn’t sing along at the time, here’s a brief primer on shanties. The word likely comes from the French chanter, meaning to sing. “Sea shanties” is redundant—all shanties are of the sea, that’s part of the definition—and within that maritime category, shanties specifically refer to work songs.

As might be gleaned from the name, work songs exist to help groups of people engage in coordinated physical labor: hauling up sails, rowing to shore, building a railroad. They function in the same way that military marching songs do and they can sound just as belligerent, though many are more lovely and haunting than the typical stomping left-left-left-right-left. Generally speaking, most of the surviving English-language shanties were formed via the process of “creolization,” taking influence from African slave songs, traditional English, Scottish, and Irish genres, popular European parlor music, and various other sources.

According to historian Stuart Frank, shanties emerged in the 1820s and 1830s and matured during the Industrial Revolution. Frank categorizes shanties into three distinct types distinguished by function. There are hauling songs (“used for pulling”) and then heaving songs (“used for pushing”) and finally ceremonial shanties, “employed for a few special purposes not necessarily related to the working ship.” Thematically, these songs vary widely. Some are about hot women in equally hot ports, some are about missing a homeland, some are about the hazards of life at sea, and some are about spotting, battling, and slaughtering whales. Some sound like strings of nonsense syllables to English-only ears but that’s because many shanties borrow heavily from other languages, and sometimes they sacrifice clear meaning for the sake of better rhythm.

To me, the most interesting work songs tend to be those that focus on the labor being performed. Singing them makes the past feel legible and alive, for although the nature of work has changed vastly, the fact of it has not. It’s still necessary for most of us to earn wages; and while we sometimes romanticize the workers of the past, we can also relate to them. Their concerns are not so dissimilar to ours. We’re all frustrated by our bosses, tired by the workday’s end, aching for home. But there’s one contemporary concern that I can’t help but insert into my understanding of shanties: I wonder about the whales.

THE SLAUGHTER: In the early 18th century, as many as 2 million sperm whales swam Earth’s ocean. Today their population numbers about 800,000, up slightly from their lowest point in the latter half of the 20th century.

Illustration by Thomas Beale / rawpixel.

My friends and I expected to have a raucous, silly, good time together at the Maritime Music Festival, drinking rum, eating fried cod, and shout-singing about drunken sailors. These goals were all achieved, but we also spent more time in reverent silence than I had anticipated. During these quiet times, I found myself imagining the lives of the men who once sailed from New England into the cold Atlantic—not to mention the women and children they left behind. I forget sometimes that America was born of the water.

Historians sometimes call the period between 1450 and 1800 “The Atlantic World.” The trade routes that flowed from the east coast of North America to Europe, Africa, and South America served, per the National Museum of American History’s account of the era, to “connect the peoples and nations that rimmed the Atlantic in a web of trade, conquest, settlement, and slavery.” Maritime commerce was at the core of this world; driving up and down the east coast, you can still see the aftereffects.

The “Northeast megalopolis” that dominates the land from Portland, Maine, to Washington, D.C., is an expansion of the early coastal ports that served as anchors for the watery web. Though we don’t often associate New England with slavery, the money that came from the trade of people was crucial to building every early American state. Off the spoils of capitalism, genocide, and slavery, our northern communities grew fat like ticks. Cities bloomed and prospered; centers of industry blazed bright, lit by oil. Not petroleum, not the dark dank syrup of the Paleozoic period, but a substance even more precious. The Atlantic World was illuminated by burning whales.

There’s little reason to continue to kill whales—yet we do so anyway.

It wasn’t the only option—people continued to use both candles and coal. But from the 1700s to the mid-1800s, whale oil was the preferred energy source in the United States. In 1846, American ships accounted for 735 out of the 900 whalers that sailed the globe.1 It was the fifth-largest industry in the country, one that only began to fail after the discovery of Pennsylvania’s petroleum fields in 1859.2

The legacy of this period remains with us in more ways than one might expect. New England visual style and culinary history have both been deeply shaped by sailors, whalers, and the transatlantic trade. The evidence is in our architecture, our museums, our restaurants, and even on our tables. It’s also shaped our aural culture. Although whaling songs are just one type of maritime music, they have lasted while others withered up and floated away.

The clip that kicked off ShantyTok—the favored term for this subgenre of social media video shared primarily on TikTok—featured Scottish singer Nathan Evans performing “Wellerman,” a song first recorded in the 1970s.3 Like many nautical ballads, “Wellerman” tells the story of a ship, the Billy O’Tea, and its doomed crew. It is sung from the perspective of another group of whalers awaiting the arrival of provisions, “sugar and tea and rum,” which they would receive in lieu of wages and were brought by a figure called the Wellerman.

This wasn’t an unusual setup. Exploitation was rife in whaling, which you can hear if you listen closely to the old songs. Many sailors started their outward journey in debt, and some finished it in debt, too. Frustration with working conditions was a common theme; every variation of “Across the Western Ocean,” an off-riffed shanty from the North Atlantic, contains similar complaints about “hard times,” “low grub,” and “foul winds.” Many versions of the tune also describe failing health and poor wages; quite a few even boldly lay the blame for the sailors’ suffering directly at the feet of their captain or his first mate.4

This is not the case in “Wellerman.” Here, the crew’s dissatisfaction is more obliquely expressed. Nestled within the song of waiting is a narrative of action. The lyrics are heavy with tension: not just the narrative type that comes from switching perspectives, but also the tension that arises when glorious lines fail to rise higher than brutal reality.

UNFORTUNATE QUALITIES: Bowhead whales swim slowly and float when they die—traits that made them a favorite target of whalers. By the 1920s fewer than 3,000 bowheads survived. Illustration by Hein Nouwens / Shutterstock.

According to the legend, there was once a group of hardworking men, led by a noble captain—whose mind, we’re told, “was not of greed”—who became entangled in an epic battle with a beastly right whale. “She’d not been two weeks from shore / When down on her a right whale bore,” go the lyrics, shifting responsibility from the men to the whale, who tows the ship for “forty days or even more” as they wait for the animal to die.

It’s a simple enough story, one that starts out true to life and ends with the tall tale of an infinitely energetic whale, capable of surviving the most incredible odds. In order to get to the point where the whale is towing the ship, the men of the Billy O’Tea would have been lowered into rowboats from which they launched barbed harpoons into the whale’s side. Their ultimate goal was to pierce the lungs or heart, but first whalers focused on getting a harpoon lodged behind a flipper so they could tow the body behind their ship.

What happened to the Billy O’Tea’s crew, though, is a role reversal. Instead of dragging and dismantling the whale’s  body, the whale tips over their rowboats and pulls them off course. We’re to assume that many lives were lost in addition to property: “All boats were lost, there were only four / But still that whale did go.” As far as the singers know, “the fight’s still on,” implying that maybe no one survived, maybe none of this ever happened, maybe the monstrous cetacean was as much a fable as Melville’s white devil.

Though “Wellerman” describes whalers from New Zealand, it could also have been sung of whalers in the Atlantic and the Arctic. Here, too, whales were stabbed, stabbed again, dragged, dismembered. Here, too, men sang of their conquests. Dated to the 1850s, “Wild and Ugly” described a sailor’s frustration with his captain for making them hunt dangerous sperm whales rather than the smaller, weaker bowhead whales. “All these whales are wild and ugly,” he sings, “everywhere we stray.”

“The Weary Whaling Grounds” contains a particularly arresting image of carnage: “the blood in a purple flood / from the spout-hole comes a-flying.” Hearing these lines sung feels cathartic, much in the same way that watching a Quentin Tarantino film can evoke a sense of secondhand liberation, but it’s also frightening. How easily we can slip from one register to another, how quickly bodies can become objects, lifeblood transmuted into pure, glorious color.

Our surviving nautical songs tell us surprisingly little about the oceanic world. These are deck tunes; they infrequently go underwater and for the most part are human-focused, dealing with our vices and virtues and predicaments. When whales are mentioned, the relationship between man and animal is simple. The creatures are either improbable monsters or products. When living, breathing cetaceans do appear, they are shadowy figures: not individuals with lives of their own—there are no Moby Dicks here—but rather the whale, a thing to be hunted and conquered. The anonymous, unknowable leviathan.

“The concept of ‘the whale’ is something that really grates for me,” says Philippa Brakes, a New Zealand-based behavioral ecologist and research fellow with Whale and Dolphin Conservation. “It makes as much sense as calling the great apes, including us, ‘the ape.’ ” She argues that reducing an entire order to a single word allows us to create an “artificial separation” between humanity and nature. It flattens out our many complex relationships with creatures into one single drama. In reality, Brakes says, our relationships to cetaceans have always been complex and multilayered. Sometimes they’re commodities, sometimes they’re deities, sometimes they’re both or neither.

Do whales feel transcendence when they sing, as we sometimes do?

In the contemporary world there’s little reason to continue to kill whales—yet we do so anyway, with exploding harpoons, drive hunts, and ship strikes, despite our increasing fascination with their otherworldly existence. Brakes suggests that our strong emotions about these creatures comes from our noticeable similarities. Humans and whales are both warm-blooded, have long lives, and transmit information throughout our communities. Many species of whales coordinate and cooperate. They sing.

Do whales feel transcendence when they sing, as we sometimes do? I like to imagine this possibility. Maybe their songs can be, like ours, tools for achieving their goals. The important fact is that they do have culture. We are not separate from them; we exist in the same entangled web. Much of Brakes’ work tries to illuminate the strands that bind us to aquatic creatures. “It’s about bridging the gap between human exceptionalism and the rest of the world,” she explains. “Although we’ve held a dominant position for such a long time, we’re still part of a larger biological system, whether we like it or not.” Krista Tippett, host of the On Being podcast, uses the phrase “revelations of entanglement.” The world is full of communication, information exchange, and song. We’ve been able to hear it, but we’ve ignored it for far too long.

The shanty is a relic of a different era, one that gets romanticized and sugar coated. But it’s also a reminder of what song can do. It can bridge gaps, transmit information, and even unlock a sense of deeper connection. As we finish our conversation, I suggest to Brakes that perhaps what we need is a tune for the 21st century, one that will help us direct our desires and coordinate our efforts. “We live in this particular time when anything can go viral in an instant. That could be such a tool for change,” she agrees. “Maybe that’s what we need: the perfect work song. One that can stimulate us all to take the right individual action to reduce the temperature rising above 2 degrees.”

It strikes me as deeply ironic that ShantyTok took off during a time of social upheaval and massive protests. The summer of 2020 was a moment when change felt possible, when forward momentum felt like it might carry us somewhere new. But it’s been several years, and little has changed. Money continues to matter more than life, the globe is still warming steadily, and blood continues to flow, purple and red, into the water and onto the pavement.

Lead illustration courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Footnotes

1. Much of the information in this paragraph comes from a 2008 New York Times article by Peter Applebome entitled “They Used to Say Whale Oil Was Indispensable, Too.” “Like oil, particularly in its early days, whaling spawned dazzling fortunes, depending on the brute labor of tens of thousands of men doing dirty, sweaty, dangerous work,” wrote Applebome. “Like oil, it began with the prizes closest to home and then found itself exploring every corner of the globe. And like oil, whaling at its peak seemed impregnable, its product so far superior to its trifling rivals, like smelly lard oil or volatile camphene, that whaling interests mocked their competitors.”

2. A full timeline of “Yankee whaling” can be found on the website of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

3. It’s not entirely clear whether this song has deeper roots. Neil Colquhoun, a 20th-century New Zealand folk legend, claims that he heard it from a man in his 80s who learned it from his uncle. While some headlines claimed the “Wellerman” is a “centuries old” song, it might be only a few decades old—and the way that Evans performed it is unmistakably contemporary.

4. Library of Congress folklorist Stephen Winick suggests that the formation of shanties as a distinct genre might have had something to do with those bad wages and strict captains. “The shanty as a developed genre dates to the early to mid 19th century, when shipping companies were trying to deliver more cargo with fewer paid sailors, making it increasingly important to maximize the work they could get out of a few men,” he writes.

Katy Kelleher

Posted on November 20, 2023

Katy Kelleher is the author of The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption. She writes a free art and history newsletter, Color Stories, that focuses on peculiar pigments and obscure shades. She posts about her life in New Mexico on Instagram and sometimes on Twitter.

Arts

Our National Parks in the Quiet of the Pandemic

While everybody else seemed to be making sourdough bread, 70-year-old photographer Andy Katz hit the road to capture “America’s greatest idea” in a new light.

By Kristen French    November 15, 2023    Photos by Andy Katz

On my first hike through Olympic National Park one evening this past summer, I was so overwhelmed by the primordial textures and deafening hush that I had the urge to lie down on the trail just to collect myself. It was dusk in northwestern Washington State, and the light was blue and shadowy as I crept up an entirely empty path through the rainforest. The moss covering every branch and trunk, dripping in long ringlets toward the forest floor, gave the trees the appearance of hungry ghosts, waiting for something or someone to speak. Every turn in the path seemed to offer a new twist in a visual fairy tale.

Olympic National Park, Washington State

Something about moving through a wilderness landscape, one enlivened by the most elemental forces, more ancient than humankind, is uniquely transporting—even a wilderness that has been heavily shaped by human architects for more than a century, as our National Parks have been. The trees, mountains, rivers, flora, and fauna that share our brief circle of time provide an escape from the alienated lives so many of us live in cities of concrete and glass, and serve as  a reminder that we belong to the earth. The cliché rings true: “Nature” offers a balm for modern life.

Death Valley National Park, California

The numbers suggest a lot of people agree: 312 million people visited United States National Parks in 2022, just a few million visitors shy of 2019 numbers. Even at the height of the pandemic, when the whole world seemed to go into COVID-19 lockdown and most travel ground to a halt, the numbers of tourists to National Parks only dipped by 30 percent. While many were suffering with the disease or at home learning to knit and watching reruns of The Wire, a surprising number of people piled into vans and RVs—and  sought the comforts and thrills of our most treasured wide-open spaces.

Everglades National Park, Florida

Photographer Andy Katz was one of them. In 2020, rather than hunker indoors working on a retrospective of his work, the 70-year-old photographer decided to go full nomad and pursue a project he had been considering for a decade: A book of photos of the National Parks of the United States. Within 24 hours, he bought himself a campervan and two days later was on a flight to Denver to pick it up. His first stop was Rocky Mountain National Park. Then he hit the road for three years. The resulting book, A Walk in the Park, is a gorgeous contemplation of the majesty of the country’s wilderness captured during a time of widespread confinement.

Saguaro National Park, Arizona

Katz’s plan was very simple: Visit all 63 National Parks and photograph what he found beautiful there. He knows he wants to photograph a scene when the light is doing something spectacular. “The light is the glue,” he says, what gives his images their power, tunes the frequency toward awe.

Katz’s three-year tour of the parks left him with a feeling of pride. “They have long been revered as America’s greatest idea,” he says. Of course, communion with the land was sacred to the cultures of many Indigenous people who first occupied these geographies, long before the wilderness was organized into tidy chunks for tourists to explore. The beauty of the land is undeniable. Says Katz, “We can all agree that we live in a beautiful country if we can’t agree on anything else.”

Andy Katz has been shooting photographs for over 55 years. He has published 15 books to date of his work,  including his latest, A Walk in the Park.  His prints are featured in museums and galleries around the world, including his most recent exhibition in Aperture Estate in Healdsburg, California. You can learn more about his photography at his website.

Lead photo: Denali National Park, Alaska.

Kristen French

Posted on November 15, 2023

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus.

Astronomy

- Earth May Not Be Toast

- Could the Universe Be Finite?

- Hello, Jupiter!

- The Cosmic Web and the Fate of the Universe

Astronomy

Earth May Not Be Toast

When our sun expands into a giant red star, it might not devour its third planet, after all.

By Jonathan O’Callaghan    December 28, 2023

Earth’s fate rests on a coin flip.

In 5 billion years, our sun will balloon into a red giant star. Whether Earth survives is an “open question,” said Melinda Soares-Furtado, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sure, Earth could be swallowed by the sun and destroyed. But in some scenarios, Earth escapes and is pushed farther out into the solar system.

Now, a nearby planetary system has offered clues to our planet’s cosmic hereafter. About 57 light-years away, four planets orbit a sunlike star that is 10 billion years old—twice as old as the sun, and already in the advanced stages of its life. Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist specializing in planetary habitability at the University of California, Riverside, recently modeled what might happen to the elderly system’s planets when the star becomes a red giant in a billion years. He found that most of the inner planets will be engulfed, but that the outermost known planet, which has an orbit similar to Venus’, might survive.

The star’s advanced age makes it easier to model its expansion and offers a more accurate forecast of our own planetary system’s future. “It’s a very interesting paper,” said Jonathon Zink, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology. “If we can find [more] systems at various phases of stellar evolution, we can probably piece together what’s going [to happen].”

Crispy Worlds

When a planet is engulfed, death can be swift. In 2022, Ricardo Yarza, a stellar astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, simulated what happens when a red giant swallows a planet. He found that if the planet starts out close enough to the star, its orbit rapidly decays. Gas in the star’s atmosphere creates a drag on the planet, and “the planet keeps plunging deeper and deeper into the star,” Yarza said. Within a few hundred years, most planets will be destroyed.

As our sun ages, it will swell into a star so big it might engulf (and destroy) Earth. Courtesy of MIT.

Until recently, these final moments of a doomed planet’s life “had never been observed directly,” said Kishalay De, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But in 2020, De’s team saw a star 12,000 light-years away temporarily become a few hundred times brighter. The flash was too dim to have come from a merger with another star. But it was just the right intensity to have been produced by a planet-size meal, De and his colleagues reported in May.

The team surmised that a planet a few times more massive than Jupiter had been caught up as the 10-billion-year-old star began expanding into a red giant. “This is the future of our solar system,” De said.

Our Evolving Star

When a main-sequence star like our sun—also called a G-type star or yellow dwarf—reaches the end of its life, it runs out of the hydrogen needed to power nuclear fusion in its core. As the star turns to other fuel sources and loses mass, its core gets hotter, and its atmosphere puffs up over millions of years. Eventually, our sun will grow more than 200 times as wide as its present size.

That swelling sun will consume Mercury and probably Venus, before growing so large it approaches Earth’s orbit—a distance known as one astronomical unit, or AU. But it could expand even farther. “In some models,” said Antonino Lanza, an astronomer at the Astrophysical Observatory of Catania in Italy, “it can engulf Mars.” The main uncertainty, he said, lies in how much mass the sun will lose as it ages; the more it sheds, the smaller its final radius will be. “That is poorly known,” he said.

For now, our best estimates suggest that the sun will grow to somewhere between 0.85 and 1.5 AU. But as the star loses mass, the weaker pull of gravity will increase Earth’s orbit, meaning our planet could escape engulfment.

Credit: Merrill Sherman/Quanta Magazine.

To see Earth’s future, astronomers turn to a crystal ball filled with alien planetary systems. Their goal is to find sunlike stars that will soon balloon (or have just ballooned) into red giants.

That’s why Rho Coronae Borealis, a nearby yellow dwarf star that’s thought to be reaching the end of its sunny life, caught Kane’s attention. Three of its four known planets orbit close to the star, well within Venus’ path around our sun. The outermost planet, with a year lasting 282 days, is similar in orbit to Venus.

Kane’s analysis, published last month, shows that the growing star will engulf the three inner planets. The innermost of those worlds, thought to be rocky and nearly four times the mass of Earth, will evaporate within a few hundred years. “The plasma superheats the planet and causes it to essentially break down,” Kane said. “Even the rocks on the surface will melt away.” The next world out, a Jupiter-mass gas giant, is so large that it will spiral inward and be ripped apart by the star’s gravity, rather than evaporating. The third planet, a smaller Neptune-mass world, will likely also be engulfed and evaporated.

STAR SEEKER: To learn more about how aging stars affect orbiting planets, Stephen Kane studied a nearby sunlike star that’s twice as old as our sun. Photo by Stan Lim.

But the outermost planet—also about the mass of Neptune—may survive. As the star expands, it will temporarily engulf the planet for several thousand years. During this time, extreme temperatures will roast the planet’s surface, but the planet itself should survive because the star’s atmosphere isn’t very dense at this distance. The star will then contract and expand once more, again engulfing the planet for several millennia. If the planet can survive being toyed with like a tomcat’s mouse, it could then emerge from the atmosphere as the star shrinks for a final time. “So it has an opportunity right at the end to escape,” Kane said.

Kane, for one, is sanguine about the planet’s chances and what they might mean for our own world. “I suspect that Earth will move outward, and it will survive,” he said.

The Great Escape

If a planet can escape engulfment, its chances for a longer life are promising. When a star like our sun expands into a red giant and sheds its outer layers, eventually the only thing left is a dense, white-hot stellar corpse known as a white dwarf. These objects contain as much as half the mass of the original star, packed into an area the size of Earth. They should continue to burn for trillions of years.

In the past two decades, scientists have found a handful of exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs, said Mary Anne Limbach, an exoplanet scientist at the University of Michigan. These planets survived their star’s red giant phase, although it’s not clear exactly how. Some of the worlds—which tend to be larger gas giants—were probably too far from their star to be swallowed, while others may have been pushed outward as the star huffed and puffed. (Astronomers have also seen evidence that some planets were not so lucky in the form of polluted white dwarfs, which are rich in elements associated with planets, such as magnesium and iron.) Ongoing observations by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are expected to turn up dozens more exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs.

As unusual as they might seem, these planetary systems could still be habitable, said Limbach, who leads some of the JWST white dwarf observations. “There is a place around a white dwarf where you can get liquid water” on a planet’s surface, she said. But “it’s a very challenging environment.”

More observations of evolved solar systems, and more models like Kane’s, could provide greater insight into the fate of our own. For now, the death of our planet is a roll of the dice away from certainty. Humans may be long gone from Earth’s surface, but anyone glancing in our direction 5 billion years from now might see our planet ride out our sun’s dying breaths—or, perhaps, disappear in a brief flash of light.

This article was originally published on the  Quanta Abstractions blog.

Lead image: Courtesy of MIT.

Jonathan O’Callaghan

Posted on December 28, 2023

Jonathan O’Callaghan is a freelance space and science journalist based in London. He writes regularly for a number of publications including The New York Times, Scientific American, New Scientist, Forbes, and Wired. You can read more of his work or get in contact at jonathanocallaghan.com, or find him on Twitter @Astro_Jonny.

Astronomy

Could the Universe Be Finite?

It’s not absurd to think the universe might endure forever.

By Eric Schwitzgebel & Jacob Barandes    December 15, 2023

On recent estimates, the observable universe—the portion of the universe that we can detect through our telescopes—extends about 47 billion light-years in every direction. But the limit of what we can see is one thing, and the limit of what exists is quite another. It would be remarkable if the universe stopped exactly at the edge of what we can see. For one thing, that would place us, surprisingly and un-Copernicanly, precisely at the center.

But even granting that the universe is likely to be larger than 47 billion light-years in radius, it doesn’t follow that it’s infinite. It might be finite. But if it’s finite, then one of two things should be true: Either the universe should have a boundary or edge, or it should have a closed topology.

It’s not absurd to think that the universe might have an edge. Theoretical cosmologists routinely consider hypothetical finite universes with boundaries at which space comes to a sudden end. However, such universes require making additional cosmological assumptions for which there is no direct support—assumptions about the conditions, if any, under which those boundaries might change, and assumptions about what would happen to objects or light rays that reach those boundaries.

A finite universe might have boundaries at which space comes to a sudden end.

It’s also not absurd to think that the universe might have a closed topology. By this we mean that over distances too large for us to see, space essentially repeats, so that a particle or signal that traveled far enough would eventually come back around to the spatial region from which it began—like how when Pac-Man exits one side of the TV screen, he re-emerges from the other side. However, there is currently no evidence that the universe has a closed topology.

Leading cosmologists, including Alex Vilenkin, Max Tegmark, and Andrei Linde, have argued that spatial infinitude is the natural consequence of the best current theories of cosmic inflation. Given that, plus the absence of evidence for an edge or closed topology, infinitude seems a reasonable default view. The mere 47 billion light-years we can see is the tiniest speck of a smidgen of a drop in an endless expanse.

Let’s call any galaxy with stars, planets, and laws of nature like our own a sibling galaxy. Exactly how similar a galaxy must be to qualify as a sibling we will leave unspecified, but we don’t intend high similarity. Andromeda is sibling enough, as are probably most of the other hundreds of billions of ordinary galaxies we can currently see.

The finiteness of the speed of light means that when we look at these faraway galaxies, we see them as they were during earlier periods in the universe’s history. Taking this time delay into account, the laws of nature don’t appear to differ in regions of the observable universe that are remote from us. Likewise, galaxies don’t appear to be rarer or differently structured in one direction or another. Every direction we look, we see more or less the same stuff. These observations help motivate the Copernican Principle, which is the working hypothesis that our position in the universe is not special or unusual—not the exact center, for example, and not the one weird place that happens to have a galaxy operating by special laws that don’t hold elsewhere.

Still, our observable universe might be an atypical region of an infinite universe. Possibly, somewhere beyond what we can see, different forms of elementary matter might follow different laws of physics. Maybe the gravitational constant is a little different. Maybe there are different types of fundamental particles. Even more radically, other regions might not consist of three-dimensional space in the form we know it. Some versions of string theory and inflationary cosmology predict exactly such variability.

But even if our region is in some respects unusual, it might be common enough that there are infinitely many other regions similar to it—even if just one region in 10^500. Again, this is a fairly standard view among speculative cosmologists, which comports well with straightforward interpretations of leading cosmological theories. One can hardly be certain, of course. Maybe we’re just in a uniquely interesting spot! But we are going to assume that’s not the case. In the endless cosmos, infinitely many regions resemble ours, with three spatial dimensions, particles that obey approximately the “Standard Model” of particle physics, and cluster upon cluster of sibling galaxies.

Under the assumptions so far, the Copernican Principle suggests that there are infinitely many sibling galaxies in a spacelike relationship with us, meaning that they exist in spatiotemporal regions roughly simultaneous with ours (in some frame of reference). We will have seen the past history of some of these simultaneously existing sibling galaxies, most of which, we assume, continue to endure. However, it’s a separate question whether there are also infinitely many sibling galaxies in a timelike relationship to us—more specifically, existing in our future. Are there infinitely many sibling galaxies in spatiotemporal locations that are, at least in principle, eventually reachable by particles originating in our galaxy? (If the locutions of this paragraph seem convoluted, that’s due to the bizarreness of relativity theory, which prevents us from using “past,” “present,” and “future” in the ordinary, commonsense way.)

Thinking about whether infinitely many sibling galaxies will exist in the future requires thinking about heat death. Stars have finite lifetimes. If standard physical theory is correct, then ultimately all the stars we can currently see will burn out. Some of those burned-out stars will contribute to future generations of stars, which will, in turn, burn out. Other stars will become black holes, but then those black holes also will eventually dissipate (through Hawking radiation).

Given enough time, assuming that the laws of physics as we understand them continue to hold, and assuming things don’t re-collapse in a “Big Crunch” in the distant future, the standard view is that everything we presently see will inevitably enter a thin, boring, high-entropy state near equilibrium—heat death. Picture nearly empty darkness, with particles more or less evenly spread out, with even rock-size clumps of matter being rare.

But what happens after heat death? This is of course even more remote and less testable than the question of whether heat death is inevitable. It requires extrapolating far beyond our current range of experience. But still we can speculate based on currently standard assumptions. Let’s think as reasonably as we can about this. Here’s our best guess, based on standard theory, from Ludwig Boltzmann through at least some time slices of Sean Carroll.

The universe might collapse upon itself in a Big Crunch, followed by another Big Bang.

For this speculative exercise, we will assume that the famously probabilistic behavior of quantum systems is intrinsic to the systems themselves, persisting post-heat-death and not requiring external observers carrying out measurements. This is consistent with most current approaches to quantum theory (including most many-worlds approaches, objective-collapse approaches, and Bohmian mechanics). It is, however, inconsistent with theories according to which the probabilistic behavior requires external observers (some versions of the “Copenhagen interpretation”) and theories on which the post-heat-death universe would inescapably occupy a stationary ground state. Under this assumption, standard probabilistic theories of what happens in high-entropy, near-vacuum conditions continue to apply post-heat-death. More specifically, the universe will continue to support random fluctuations of photons, protons, and whatever other particles remain. Consequently, from time to time, these particles will, by chance, enter unlikely configurations. This is predicted by both standard statistical mechanics and standard quantum mechanics. Post-heat-death, seven particles will sometimes converge, by chance, upon the same small region. Or 700. Or—very rarely!—7 trillion.

There appears to be no in-principle limit to how large such chance fluctuations can be or what they can contain if they pass through the right intermediate phases. Wait long enough and extremely large fluctuations should occur. Assuming the universe continues infinitely, rather than having a temporal edge or forming a closed loop, for which there is no evidence, then eventually some random fluctuation should produce a bare brain having cosmological thoughts. Wait longer, and eventually some random fluctuation will produce, as Boltzmann suggested, a whole galaxy. If the galaxy is similar enough to our own, it will be a sibling galaxy. Wait still longer, and another sibling galaxy will arise, and another, and another …

For good measure, let’s also assume that after some point post-heat-death, the rate at which galaxy-size systems fluctuate into existence does not systematically decrease. There’s some minimal probability of galaxy-size fluctuations, not an ever-decreasing probability with longer and longer average intervals between galaxies. Fluctuations appear at long intervals, by random chance, then fade back into chaos after some brief or occasionally long period, and the region returns to the heat-death state, with the same small probability of large fluctuations as before. Huge stretches of not much will be punctuated by rare events of interesting, even galaxy-size, complexity.

Of course, this might not be the way things go. We certainly can’t prove that the universe is like this. But despite the bizarreness that understandably causes some people to hesitate, the overall picture we’ve described appears to be the most straightforward consequence of standard physical theory, taken out of the box, without too much twisting things around.

Even if this specific speculation is wrong, there are many other ways in which the cosmos might deliver infinitely many sibling galaxies in the future. For example, some process might ensure we never enter heat death and new galaxies somehow continue to be born.

Alternatively, processes occurring pre-heat-death, such as the formation of black holes, might lead to new bangs or cosmic inflations, spatiotemporally unconnected or minimally connected to our universe, and new stars and galaxies might be born from these new bangs or inflations in much the same way as our familiar stars and galaxies were born from our familiar Big Bang.

Depending on what constitutes a “universe” and a relativistically specifiable “timelike” relation between our spatiotemporal region and some future spatiotemporal region, those sibling galaxies might not exist in our universe or stand in our future, technically speaking, but if so, that detail doesn’t matter to our core idea. Similarly, if the observable universe reverses its expansion, it might collapse upon itself in a Big Crunch, followed by another Big Bang, and so on in an infinitely repeating cycle, containing infinitely many sister galaxies post-Crunch. This isn’t currently the mainstream view, but it’s a salient and influential alternative if the heat-death scenario outlined above is mistaken.

We conclude that it is reasonable to think that the universe is infinite, and that there exist infinitely many galaxies broadly like ours, scattered throughout space and time, including in our future. It’s a plausible reading of our cosmological situation. It’s a decent guess and at least a possibility worth taking seriously.

Excerpted from The Weirdness of the World © 2024 by Eric Schwitzgebel. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Lead image: NASA

Eric Schwitzgebel

Posted on December 15, 2023

Eric Schwitzgebel is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures, Perplexities of Consciousness, and Describing Inner Experience? (MIT Press, 2019).

Jacob Barandes

Posted on December 15, 2023

Jacob Barandes is a lecturer in physics and co-director of graduate studies for physics at Harvard University. He is also an associated faculty member with Harvard’s Department of Philosophy and a faculty affiliate with the Harvard Black Hole Initiative.

Astronomy

Hello, Jupiter!

Striking images of the planet, its volcanic moon Io and its trippy atmosphere.

By Kevin Berger    December 15, 2023

NASA’s mission to explore the origin and evolution of our solar system’s giant is 12 years old and still returning remarkable data and images. This July, the spacecraft Juno completed its 53rd flyby of Jupiter and captured the planet and its moon lo (above), one of Jupiter’s four large “Galilean” moons. (The latest total count of Jupiter moons is 95.) You wouldn’t know it by the placid image, but lo is the most volcanically active body in the known universe, NASA scientists tell us: It’s home to “hundreds of volcanoes, some erupting lava fountains dozens of miles high.” In September this year, Juno beamed back data from Jupiter’s North Pole region. The phantasmagoric image (below) pictures the intricate cloud formations and atmospheric features of the massive planet composed of mostly gases and liquids.

For the record, the image with the spacecraft Juno, below, is an artistic recreation. The image of Jupiter and lo is processed from a raw image taken by the JunoCam instrument, enhancing the contrast, color, and sharpness. The North Pole region image is an artistic recreation of data captured by JunoCam.

Kevin Berger

Posted on December 15, 2023

Kevin Berger is the editor of Nautilus.

Astronomy

The Cosmic Web and the Fate of the Universe

Projects to map the universe are getting weird.

By Paul M. Sutter    December 11, 2023

In 1985, astronomers found something strange in the sky. After mapping the positions of thousands of galaxies in our neighborhood of the universe, they saw an unexpected pattern emerge: a stick figure. The galaxies clustered to form a central body that stretched for millions of light-years, a knobby head, two arched legs, and outstretched arms.

Resembling something out of the Lascaux cave, the “Stickman” drew immediate international attention. Not because it was an actual cosmic being, of course, but because it clearly showed what many astronomers were beginning to suspect: Galaxies are not scattered about randomly in our universe. Instead, they exist in a pattern, dubbed the cosmic web.

The cosmic web holds the vast majority of the contents of the cosmos—roughly 5 percent matter (such as gasses and solids), 27 percent dark matter, and 68 percent dark energy. And it spans the entire universe, traversing otherwise relatively empty cosmic voids. It serves as the scaffold responsible for carrying the plasma lifeblood of our universe. It is the reason we exist at all.

The story of dark matter and dark energy is written in the web of galaxies.

It is, however, devilishly hard to get a handle on. For one, it’s invisible. We can only begin to discern its filaments’ contours by spotting galaxies, as those that emerged in the Stickman. Also, it’s just really big. The cosmic web fills up the volume of the universe and contains up to 2 trillion galaxies, of which we’ve mapped far less than 1 percent.

But mapping the web wouldn’t just provide us with a better picture of our universe, it also promises to reveal tantalizing information about some of the biggest questions in cosmology about what dark matter and dark energy are, how they behave, and whether they change over time. And answering those mysteries might reveal the ultimate fate of our universe.

Efforts using tried-and-true astronomical models to develop a cartography of the cosmic web have continually come up flat. So astronomers are taking up some unconventional approaches, applying principles of origami, spiders’ webs, and even slime molds, to try to understand the structure of this life-giving network.

The cosmic web, the thinking goes, found its seeds in the earliest moments of the Big Bang, but began taking on its contemporary shape a few hundred million years later. The cause was nothing more than simple gravitational attraction. Initially the gas that filled the universe was almost perfectly uniform, with no big differences from place to place. But soon, even the tiniest of differences began to grow, with regions of higher density pulling on their surroundings, building themselves up and collapsing under their own gravitational weight.

But that collapse did not happen uniformly in all three dimensions. By random chance, one dimension will be slightly more unstable than the others and collapse first. With gravity doing the work of pulling the universe’s loose collections of matter into small, tight, dense balls, it will first pull on the matter in one direction, forming a wall, then on the second, creating a filament, and finally the third, forming a cluster—the birthplace and home of galaxies.

GALACTIC PAC-MAN: The unassuming slime mold Physarum polycephalum turns out to build networks eerily similar to those of the universe’s cosmic web. A computer algorithm, described in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in 2020, turned known galaxies into “food” for a hypothetical slime mold (yellow), and its paths to get them were a close match to cosmic filaments (purple) millions of light-years long. Credit: NASA / Wikimedia Commons.

So what astronomers have detected as the cosmic web today is actually bits of matter all caught in various stages of collapse, with the strand-like filaments as an intermediate step between initial general unstructuredness and the finality of a cluster. For example, the Stickman’s head is a completely collapsed cluster, and its limbs are filaments still in the process of formation.

Earlier this year, pulling from new data gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of researchers discovered a baby filament containing just 10 galaxies that likely formed a mere 830 million years after the Big Bang, confirming that these filaments were important structures right from the earliest days of the universe.

In addition to the gravitational pull of normal matter, there are of course, the forces of dark matter and dark energy at work, shaping the cosmic web. Combined, dark matter and dark energy make up 95 percent of all the energy contents of the universe—there’s no way that the web won’t be influenced by them. Dark matter provides the gravitational backbone that allows the web to form in the first place, while dark energy is slowly starting to unravel it. Observations of the web, especially its evolution over the past few billion years, will hopefully reveal this push-pull dynamic that plays out on the cosmic stage.

In other words, the story of dark matter and dark energy is written in the web of galaxies that stretches across the universe. We just have to untangle it.

The earliest attempts to map out the filaments relied on stacking. Find pairs of clusters and map out all the galaxies between them. Repeat as many times as your survey will allow, which was precisely the approach that first gave us the Stickman. Each individual filament will not tell you much about any of the grand cosmic mysteries, but dozens or hundreds of filaments stacked on top of each other will give you some generic sense of their behavior. From there, astronomers can build a very broad sense of their properties, which in turn relate to the fundamental cosmological properties of the universe, such as the amount of dark matter or the rate of cosmic expansion. However, this is a very rudimentary approach that lacks the statistical rigor required for precision analysis.

Since most of the universe (that is, dark matter and dark energy) are invisible to direct observations, we have to rely on computer simulations to establish the links between these hidden components of the web and the populations of galaxies that we can see. And so it’s essential to develop reliable web-mapping techniques that work both in simulations and in real surveys, to allow us to fully understand the role that the web and its components play in the universe’s evolution. Which is where the surprising art- and nature-inspired models are coming in handy.

From what we do understand of the cosmic web, much of its shape can be explained by the mathematics of origami folding. If you take a sheet of paper and start folding it, you will find a series of nodes and filaments. The filaments are the simple creases, and the nodes are the places where the creases intersect. Mathematicians have studied the relationships of the creases and folds of origami structures (because that’s the kind of stuff that mathematicians like to do), and astronomers have taken that language and applied it to the cosmic web.

You can imagine the clusters of galaxies as the cores of slime mold colonies.

It’s a little hard to think about, because the formation of the cosmic web already takes place in three dimensions, but if you imagine all the matter of the universe as a perfectly smooth sheet, you can fold that sheet in a specific way to recreate the cosmic web, with empty expanses of voids scattered throughout. This allows astronomers to use that same mathematical language to identify and classify components of the web—where the filaments are, how long they are, how far apart the nodes are, etc.—which in turn might start to give us new insights about the fundamental nature of those sneaky shaping-forces, dark matter and dark energy.

The term “cosmic web,” of course, isn’t just a turn of phrase. It also closely matches the topology—i.e., the general properties, like the relationships among the various holes—of a spider’s web, and the mathematical description of one mirrors the other. A spider web consists of nodes that can support the threads against destructive forces—gravity, wind, interlopers—through tension. If you imagine the clusters of the cosmic web trying to network themselves together with tension-carrying ropes, it turns out, you get the correct structure and distribution of galactic filaments.

YOU ARE HERE: This visualization, from an international team of researchers, attempts to capture the scale and complexity of the universe’s cosmic web. Spanning about 2.4 billion light-years of distance, it zooms in to a single cluster of galaxies. The challenge is, we can’t really “see” the real web because it is largely composed of dark matter, dark energy, and gas. Credit: Springel et al. (2005).

The spider’s web and origami research tell us that there is a deep mathematical structure hidden within the pattern of filaments that make up the web. In turn, those mathematical structures are related to the properties of the cosmic filaments we are interested in, like their sizes and shapes and behavior, and how those properties connect to the big and vexing questions we are trying to answer. In particular, the researchers who explored the spider web model showcased mathematical tools for measuring the rotational flows within filaments, a property that has thus far been difficult to measure but is very dependent on the nature of dark matter.

And then there are the slime molds. The organism Physarum polycephalum searches for its food by starting from nodes and building interconnected networks, all while using as few resources as possible to do so. The end result is a compact network that, mathematically at least, resembles the topology of the cosmic web. Enterprising astronomers have already begun incorporating networks inspired by slime molds into their classification of galactic filaments.

The Stickman’s head is a completely collapsed cluster.

The mathematics of slime mold networks provided the researchers with a powerful and efficient platform for identifying filaments and more precisely quantifying their shapes, allowing them to bridge the gap between theoretical simulations and real observations. In this case, you can imagine the clusters of galaxies as the cores of slime mold colonies, and the filaments between them as the networks connecting them in their search for food. While the evolution of slime molds doesn’t mirror the actual physical formation mechanism of the cosmic web, it gives a surprisingly accurate way to classify and characterize the parts of the cosmic web, especially its filaments. Astronomers hope to use this classification to extract more useful information from the structures of the web about dark matter and dark energy.

In the meantime, scientists are also deploying machine learning methods—and of course the latest telescopes—to try to look straight into the distant reaches of the web itself in other wavelengths of light. For example, astronomers recently identified filaments not in traditional galaxy chains, but also in the faint absorption of ultra-hot gas. The next major space observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, expected to launch in 2027, will pinpoint the locations of millions of galaxies in visible and infrared wavelengths, allowing it to map a much broader and deeper portion of the cosmic web than ever before. And the Vera Rubin Observatory, a gigantic ground-based telescope expected to begin operating in 2025, will provide a map of more than 20 billion galaxies—far more than the mere millions scientists have charted so far.

As detailed maps of Earth’s continents and their behavior helped elucidate the forces at work on our planet as well as its geological past and future, these cosmic maps promise something similar; namely, getting to the core of the mysterious dark forces of our universe, whose dynamics are both subtle and large-scale. Like the movement of continents or the slow expansion of a seafloor, they only affect the motions of galaxies at the very biggest scales.

And those big scales just happen to have created the right conditions for us to be here now, hanging in our small part of the vast cosmic web. Which makes mapping it seem like a worthy expedition, even if we have to lean on a humble slime mold to help find our way.

Lead image: HAMONT / Shutterstock

Paul M. Sutter

Posted on December 11, 2023

Paul M. Sutter is a research professor in astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He is the author of Your Place in the Universe: Understanding our Big, Messy Existence.

Communication

- The Most Beautiful Science of the Year

- AI Can Help Democracy

- How a New Database Can Help Protect the Ocean

Communication

The Most Beautiful Science of the Year

These are a few of our favorite things from 2023.

By Nautilus Editors    December 22, 2023

As editors our eyes are glued to the page all day, focused on one story, sometimes one tricky passage, and often, when it comes to writing headlines, one word! It’s amazing to look up at the end of the year and see what we’ve produced. We are so happy to have shared with you such wonderful writing and insights. Here are 25 passages that we love on their own, portals into another year of beautiful science in Nautilus.

Within the emptiness that dominates the volume of an atom and the volume of the universe, physicists found something. Far from the sedate aether of yore, this something is strong enough to be tearing our universe apart. The void, it turns out, is alive.

It might seem like a paradox to say the artist of the unconscious was deeply engaged in science, where conscious precision rules. Not so. The late Cormac McCarthy’s fiction captures the life force that is the very subject of science. In this exquisite passage from 1979’s Suttree, the narrator, on a “hushed and mazy” Sunday afternoon, lies down on a cot in his houseboat on the river: “The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad’s pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop.” That is science. And art.

Illustration by Mark Belan

Biochemist Ting Zhu in China has made it his mission to create mirror-image versions of the key molecular ingredients of life. In principle, it might be possible to assemble those components into synthetic cell-like entities that can replicate and metabolize: a kind of primitive form of life, but inverted relative to every known organism, and therefore the first truly non-natural life form.

Stars are highly musical, ringing nonstop in response to the fusion energy pouring out of their cores. When all those good vibrations wriggle to the top, they make the star flicker slightly, by about one part in 1,000. That innate “twinkling” provides outward evidence of the processes generating the waves hundreds of thousands of miles below: sound translated into light.

Photo by Piotr Naskrecki

Pangolins are almost entirely harmless. When this bashful animal is frightened, it curls up into a tight ball, the scales offering its first—and, really, only—line of defense. Sadly, it’s that defense mechanism that makes them so susceptible to traffickers. As poachers drive pangolins into the open, the stunned animals roll up and become as compact as a medicine ball, making them easy to scoop up and shove in a sack.

Before our evolutionary ancestors had a brain—before they had any organs—18 different cell types got together to make a sea sponge. Remarkably, some of these cells had many of the genes needed to make a brain, even though the sponge has neither neurons nor a brain.

Thanks to Einstein, we know one thing about consciousness: It’s inside your head. If you’re in Dallas wearing a hat, your consciousness is in Dallas, under your hat. Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that qualia, the elements of subjective experience, must be in the same place as their neural correlates, the brain events constituting or immediately causing them.

Illustration by Deena So’Oteh

Plants’ abilities to sense and respond to their surroundings lead to what seems like intelligent behavior. Their roots can avoid obstacles. They can distinguish self from non-self, stranger from kin. If a plant finds itself in a crowd, it will invest resources in vertical growth to remain in light; if nutrients are on the decline, it will opt for root expansion instead. Leaves munched on by insects send electrochemical signals to warn the rest of the foliage, and they’re quicker to react to threats if they’ve encountered them in the past. For plants, we say, it’s biochemistry, just physiology and brute mechanics—as if that’s not true for us, too.

Gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime itself—can be created when accelerating masses, such as pairs of black holes, begin to merge. As these gravitational waves plow through the universe, they stretch and squeeze all the fabric of spacetime itself, causing everything to oscillate like a pair of swing dancers as they pass through, onto their next partner.

Courtesy of Public Domain Review

We had the tools to limit the spread of the coronavirus, but we didn’t. It wasn’t because of a comet’s malign influence, as might have been said 500 years ago. It was because we couldn’t agree on the story. Scientists, physicians, and public health officials had one story, painstakingly cultivated, and developed over time. Too many people in power told a different story, to deflect responsibility for the crisis. Millions of people, meanwhile, fell prey to the cognitive trap that led people in the past to blame comets for the calamities of their times—to project a story onto the natural world, to provide a sense of control when everything around them seemed out of control.

After centuries in repose, volcanoes may reawaken, clear their throats, let off steam, and, if provoked, explode. As in human fits of rage, a volcano’s violent outburst is often self-amplifying: Their response to a small disturbance can feed on itself, spiraling into a tantrum.

People have been thinking about “garbage patches” all wrong. These regions of the ocean are not impoverished spaces. They’re ecosystems. Ecosystems that we’ve clumsily named after something we did to them—“garbage patches”—rather than what they may actually be.

In a parallel reality where most of us live, Harry had been diagnosed with psychotic delusions, many of them seemingly borrowed from the YouTube videos he obsessively watched. His family convinced him to visit a mental health clinic. There, he enthused to his clinician that he was “the happiest man in the world.”

Photo by AgriTech / Shutterstock

Consider the dragonfly, zigging and zagging over a lake in summer like a runaway rainbow, seeming to defy gravity and logic. How can such delicate wings carry aloft that long body at such great velocities? They generate aerodynamic force equal to over four times their own body weight. Dragonflies are so adept at flying that some researchers have begun studying them to help design tiny aircraft that can monitor hazardous environments remotely.

Ceres, along with the other dark asteroids, was born in the solar system’s outer rim long after planet formation was underway. It stayed colder than most other planetesimals, remaining water-rich and porous, and stayed home. But the dynamical shakeup from the giant planet instability was too much, and it was—luckily for exploration-obsessed primates—pulled toward the sun. Unlike most of its brethren, which were ejected into interstellar space, Ceres was trapped by a trick of orbital mechanics and stranded in the outskirts of the asteroid belt, shining darkly for the last 4.5 billion years unseen, until an Italian priest spotted it in 1801.

Some orchids have evolved to mimic the mate of their preferred pollinator, or their favorite snack through looks, scent, and the release of special chemicals. Unknowing insects show up on their flower crown hoping to get lucky, and get duped into picking up the flower’s pollen instead.

Image by Tasnuva Elahi; with images by Daniel Prudek / Shutterstock and Wikimedia Commons

For Nikola Tesla, nerves in the brain had to work by the principle of resonance, which meant thoughts were things we could all tune into, given the right device. He thought he could create a technology that would allow everyone around the globe to resonate with one another. We no longer think of our brains as wireless telegraphs or thoughts as things that can be transmitted by brain waves; now we think of brains as computers and thoughts as things that can be uploaded to the cloud.

Mother Nature hasn’t given common frogs, Rana temporaria, much time for courtship. Just a few days in the spring—so competition is fierce. Several males often cling to one female, forming “mating balls” in the water, which can drown the female. So females employ a few clever tactics to throw off the unwanted suitors, including feigning death—stiffening with arms and legs outstretched from the body, sometimes for hours.

Illustration by Jennifer Bruce

This parasitic fungus took over the bug’s body and commandeered its brain, maneuvering the caterpillar into the perfect place, just below the surface of the soil, before consuming it from the inside. At just the right time in the spring, the fungus blasted a stroma out of the caterpillar’s head and up from the soil.

Is climate change an existential risk? Of course, that’s a silly question to ask. It depends on a whole bunch of other outside factors. Three degrees of warming in a world marked by equality, trust in public institutions, good adaptive technology and governance, and multilateral cooperation, we could navigate that. Three degrees of warming in a world marked by multilateral conflict, war, dangerous new technologies, polarization, and inequality—that becomes a much more calamitous prospect.

“The sciences tend to think of themselves as something as far away as possible from religion, as having freed themselves from God,” says Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a professor of religion and science in society. “But in the process, they tend to generate big stories, big mythologies, about the origins and the ends of the world. And conjure characters who are heroes, gods, and monsters. A couple centuries ago, we would have called that religion.”

Image by fran_kie / Shutterstock

The way Robert Sapolsky sees it, you can’t escape the biological and cultural forces and environmental factors that preceded you and shaped you. “There’s not a crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in free will,” he said. “When you look at every contemporary argument for free will that’s not invoking God or fairy dust or something, at some point, one must assume a step that bypasses the antecedent causes. But that violates the laws of how neurons work, atoms work, and universes work. Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before.”

In the vast, bleak, windswept surface of our planet’s polar seas, buried within drifting slabs of sea ice, life is indeed not only present, but multitudinous. Bacteria, archaea, fungi, algae, viruses. All making their way in the otherworldly environment of polar sea ice, swimming in brine pockets, gobbling up carbon, feeding the food web in the depths below.

Illustration by John Hendrix

Anyone can have a hero’s journey if you think about your life in a new way.

Once we let go of the comforting fiction that all this complexity is orchestrated by some master plan in the genetic sequence in our chromosomes, as if simply reading out a recipe, then we have to wonder where the organization comes from. For complex organisms like us, control is decentralized and distributed across many levels, each of them largely insulated from the finer details of what happens on the levels below. It’s simply bewildering that insensate matter—atoms and molecules, the same stuff from which rocks and air and stars are made—can do this. It is our remarkable good fortune to inhabit such a creative, generative universe, able for a time to spin up little centers of organization that awaken to their own existence.

Lead collage by Tasnuva Elahi and others as noted above

Nautilus Editors

Posted on December 22, 2023

Communication

AI Can Help Democracy

Talking politics in a polarized society can get heated fast. Chatbots could help us keep our cool.

By Jim Davies    December 13, 2023

Political conversation is the soul of democracy. Evidence suggests it helps us refine our views, concoct solutions to common problems, minimize violent conflict, and get to the voting booth. But as political views become increasingly polarized and hostile in the United States, and as political debate migrates online, many of us are either having aggressively uncivil and unproductive conversations with our political opponents, or avoiding these conversations altogether.

Human facilitators have had some success mediating divisive online political conversations—but so many of these conversations are happening simultaneously all over social media that hiring a brigade of human experts to intervene would be expensive and difficult to scale. So social scientist Lisa Argyle and colleagues at Brigham Young University, Duke University, and University of Washington set out to see if artificial intelligence could help. For their recent study, the researchers developed an AI chat assistant using GPT (the same AI behind ChatGPT) and found it improved the civility of political discussions online, where they so often quickly fall apart.

“There is a lot of evidence that people are uncomfortable with disagreement,” says Ethan Busby, a political psychologist at Brigham Young and one of the authors of the study. For instance, one 2019 study found that people expect more compensation for participating in research when engaging with an ideological opponent than when engaging with someone on the same side. “They avoid political discussions because they don’t like to disagree,” says Busby, “and because they’re not sure how it’s going to go.” Online interactions can also bring out the worst in people.

The AI was told to make subjects’ communications friendlier.

Argyle, Busby, and their colleagues recruited 1,574 participants with varying opinions on a controversial matter of public policy—in this case, gun control—to pair up for a discussion with, or without, GPT’s rhetorical aid. The researchers devised “prompts” for their GPT chatbot that aimed to help make subjects’ responses to each other more civil. (In the AI chatbot’s message-like interface, you can prompt GPT in all sorts of ways—for example, by telling it to describe the plot of a movie in Elizabethan English.)

Only one of the two partners in any given conversation was paired with a chatbot who offered suggestions. When that individual drafted a reply to a conversation partner, the GPT would offer tweaks to make the reply friendlier. This included restating what their opponent had said in slightly different words (“I understand that you value guns…” for instance), validating that it’s fine to hold different views (“I appreciate that you want to protect democracy…”), or simply rephrasing a response to make it more polite (“I think maybe you haven’t considered this…”). The study subjects aided by GPT then considered whether to use any of the three suggestions to modify their response to a conversation partner. The AI group was divided into four subgroups, which received more or less of the chatbot’s intervention as the conversation progressed (1, 2, 3, or 4 or more recommended conversational tweaks). Ultimately, the study subjects in the AI group used GPT’s tweaks—restating, validating, and rephrasing for tact—about two-thirds of the time, and used each one roughly equally.

The intervention seemed to work. When a subject had GPT’s help (versus when they didn’t), their partners rated their chat on a survey as being higher quality—defined as a perception of feeling understood by their partner and of the respectfulness of the conversation—by four points (out of 100), the researchers found. Although this is a modest impact, “it’s comparable to the same types of effects we observe in other types of conversation experiments,” says Busby. According to Busby and his colleagues, these results suggest that “more exposure to the intervention generates larger effects.”

Both conversation partners in the AI group, compared to those in the non-AI group, “felt like the experience was better, which is something valuable in and of itself,” Busby says, “because you’ve got to remember—these people are talking to other individuals who disagree with them about gun regulation, and that’s not an easy kind of conversation to have.”

Busby and his colleagues concluded that the results provide “compelling evidence” that inviting a chatbot into the conversation, a simple yet versatile intervention, has the power to improve conversations and also “enhance commitment to democratic reciprocity,” the idea of being able to respect someone who disagrees with you. Notably, the conversations didn’t sway anyone’s opinion. “That was intentional,” Busby says. “We wanted this to be about improving people’s experiences with disagreement.”

Busby is excited by AI’s potential to scale online, across different discussion platforms. “We didn’t have to train a bunch of people, and have them sitting on phones waiting for people to have a conversation,” Busby says.  Perhaps AI coaches that nudge us to rephrase comments we might regret could help repair the soul of democracy, one text bubble at a time.

Lead image: Ormalternative / Shutterstock

Jim Davies

Posted on December 13, 2023

Jim Davies is a professor at the Department of Cognitive Science at Carleton University. He is co-host of the award-winning podcast Minding the Brain. His latest book is Being the Person Your Dog Thinks You Are: The Science of a Better You.

Communication

How a New Database Can Help Protect the Ocean

The Navigator project centralizes data about marine protected areas—and places with lesser protections—from around the world.

By Sarah DeWeerdt    November 28, 2023

Setting aside 30 percent of Earth’s lands and waters by the year 2030: This goal dominates much of the current conversation about global biodiversity conversation. It’s an inspiring idea, something tangible to reach for. Yet even as countries claim that more than 8 percent of the ocean is currently protected, a comprehensive new mapping and database tool shows that protections are robust in just 3.4 percent of the ocean.

Those discrepancies illustrate the challenge posed by the 30×30 initiative, agreed to by nearly 200 nations in December 2022 as part of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Canada. They also illustrate the gulf that may exist between sweeping claims about safeguarding vast swaths of the ocean and nitty-gritty, in-the-water realities.

Making these analyses possible is the ProtectedSeas Navigator, which was launched in June and is free to use. Navigator emerged from a recognition that a necessary step in improving ocean protections is knowing what’s already in place—but that information is often difficult and time-consuming to assemble. “People hear ‘regulations’ and ‘legal’ and think: ‘Oh, snore,’ right?” says Jennifer Sletten, an attorney at ProtectedSeas, a program of the conservation nonprofit Anthropocene Institute. “It’s really a cornerstone of protection.”

“To a biologist like me who does not want to dive into legal texts, it’s a gift.”

Other databases of marine protection lack Navigator’s global scope—it includes information about more than 21,000 locales, from coastal waters to the high seas—or only delineate the boundaries of protected areas without providing details about how they are regulated and managed. For someone trying to figure out if a vessel is fishing illegally or if a whale population’s entire range is stringently protected, existing resources are not always helpful.

To help whale advocates, fishing monitors, and other people who need to know about a particular marine locale, the Navigator’s database includes formal Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) as well as places with intermediate levels of protection, such as fisheries management areas where some human use is allowed but with restrictions aimed at preventing overfishing. That’s useful for Kristina Boerder, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University who studies how MPAs affect fisheries and vice versa.

The boundary of an MPA “is a very literally fluid boundary. And the fish don’t know where it is,” says Boerder, who consulted with ProtectedSeas on the Navigator’s development and now uses it in her own research. “We need to consider all the policies because the ocean is a very complex and dynamic space, and to be able to manage it properly one needs to have the overview.”

REGULATORY PATCHWORK: A high-level view in ProtectedSeas Navigator of various protected areas and territorial waters, each with its own set of rules about what is allowed and what is protected. Courtesy of Navigator.

That overview took eight years and a total of 42 person-years worth of labor to produce. To characterize those more than 21,000 protected and managed areas, the ProtectedSeas team drew on reference material ranging from online information made available by countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Palau, and the Maldives to a photo of a sign at the Batalang Bato Marine Sanctuary in the Philippines. They even referenced “scans of typewritten documents with handwritten margin notes in Swedish,” recalls ProtectedSeas director Virgil Zetterlind. More than 2,400 of the areas had not been digitally mapped; the team painstakingly digitized their boundaries from legal descriptions.

“We’re hoping we save a lot of other organizations the work of doing this research,” Zetterlind says, ultimately speeding up efforts to assess existing marine protection measures and strengthening proposals for new ones. Earlier this year, the team analyzed sea turtle protections in the Caribbean using the Navigator’s data—a task they completed within weeks that would previously have taken months of slogging through legal texts.

“People hear ‘regulations’ and ‘legal’ and think: ‘Oh, snore.’”

Although the Anthropocene Institute does not advocate for specific protection measures, styling itself as “a neutral purveyor of information,” the new tool could be used to identify gaps in ocean protection, flag areas where regulations might be over-complicated, and prioritize where small changes could have the biggest impact. It might point to where existing protections are not having the desired effect because of poor design, poaching, or unrelated biological factors. And it could help advocates identify so-called “paper parks” where protections exist in name only.

The team also developed a five-level rubric to assign a “Level of Fishing Protection” to each area included in the database, representing the first time a unified such analysis has been applied at a global scale. “To a biologist like me who does not want to dive into legal texts, it’s a gift,” says Boerder, who has used the resource in a preliminary analysis of protections for highly migratory species such as sharks and tuna.

Navigator’s maps are already integrated with Global Fishing Watch, an organization that tracks the location of fishing vessels, which could enable real-time detection of illegal fishing activity. ProtectedSeas is also working with the International Hydrographic Organization, which sets global standards for electronic navigational charts, to develop a Marine Protected Area data format for use in future charting.

The next steps, according to Zetterlind, are to develop procedures to keep the database up-to-date and track the evolution of ocean protections over time. ProtectedSeas wants to add information about locally and Indigenous-managed areas, and assess whether regulations are being followed and enforced. That latter goal will require extensive collaboration with local organizations, but “it is sort of the natural next question,” he says.

Navigator could also be used to track progress toward the 30×30 goal. But others could track progress differently, cautions Angelo Villagomez, a marine conservation specialist with the Center for American Progress. Historically, environmental groups have taken a stricter view of what counts as “protected,” while industry groups tend to favor a more expansive definition. Although Villagomez calls Navigator “a really great resource,” its numbers could be crunched in various ways.

“How much of the ocean is protected? It really depends on who you’re asking,” Villagomez says. “And so the benefit of the Navigator and the data that they’ve collected is really going to depend on how it ends up being used.”

Lead image: Misbachul Munir / Shutterstock

Sarah DeWeerdt

Posted on November 28, 2023

Sarah DeWeerdt is a freelance science journalist in Seattle covering biology, medicine, and the environment. Follow her on Twitter.

Environment

- Tame Your Climate Anxiety in 2024

- How Dust Could Help Solve Crimes

- A Dubious Cure for Ocean Plastics

- A Cyclone, a Flood, and a Very Big Park

Environment

Tame Your Climate Anxiety in 2024

A poet invited people to share their climate fears. What she found surprised her.

By Katharine Gammon    December 28, 2023

Almost a decade ago, a small booth appeared in a public park in Providence, Rhode Island. It sported a sign that read: “Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.”

The project was the brainchild of writer and activist Kate Schapira. She had been feeling a lot of dread herself and noticed her conversations with friends were dead-ending. Schapira, who teaches nonfiction writing at Brown University and is a poet, says her own anxieties arose from her imagination more than from her experience. So she figured perhaps she could help ground others—just by talking.

One of the first people who came to speak with her that day was also addled by his imagination. He told her that he was carrying an image in his mind of a world melted and burnt, devoid of clean water—but he had kept this to himself. “He had this very catastrophic, apocalyptic nightmare vision,” Schapira recalls, and he had never told anyone about it.

Over the next nine years, Schapira had more than 1,200 conversations with people about their climate fears in the booth, which she stationed at county fairs, farmers’ markets, film festivals, and environmental conferences and events.

She recently wrote a book about the experience, her advice for people struggling with climate anxiety, and her prescriptions for collective action, called Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose In an Endangered World. After six books of poetry, it’s her first work of nonfiction. We caught up with Shapira to talk about her new book and the project.

What did you learn from spending time in the booth?

I learned how much of people’s emotion around climate change is rooted in feeling isolated—they felt alone with this nightmare fear. The climate is, by definition, a shared experience. This crisis is affecting everything and everyone in the world, albeit in very different ways. And yet people’s experience was one of loneliness.

What did you find most surprising about your encounters with people?

I expected to get bothered by more climate deniers, especially when I started. But that was very rare: Maybe one in 50 people saw this as a chance to be a pain in the ass. I also noticed that conversations about climate change, and climate anxiety in particular, tend to be a little circular: they go around and around and come to no conclusions.

People felt alone with this nightmare.

What’s the way out of that circularity?

Looking for ways to participate in climate action in a concerted collective way. For me, that has taken two forms: advocacy and organizing, which have some overlap in their skill sets and activities. But I think you need to identify the place where your capability meets the larger-scale need. That can mean different things for different people in different places. My book is devoted to helping people identify those overlapping moments of: Oh, yeah, I’m good at this, and I kind of like doing it.

If someone is struggling with climate anxiety, what steps can they take to lessen it?

Paying attention to what tends to set off your anxiety is a good first step, because just creating that observational state of mind can help you avoid the tailspin. I would also recommend practicing talking about it with someone. It could be just saying: I’m weirded out by how warm it is. I’m scared that the fire is going to come this way. I’m thinking about my kids growing up with this. I think the practice of mentioning it—even if the people you talk to do not want to hear it—is a good practice. You can even tell them, You don’t need to do anything about it, but this is what’s going on for me.

What would you like to change in the bigger conversation around the climate crisis?

I think a lot of the conversation about climate change places the power out there—both in the sense that the processes that we’ve set in motion are so huge, and that the major drivers of these processes are also huge. But the power to make change happen is actually in our conversations, in our relationships, and in our towns. It’s in our hands, more than we believe.

Lead image: Malchevska / Shutterstock

Katharine Gammon

Posted on December 28, 2023

Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California, who writes about environment, science, and parenting. You can find her on Twitter @kategammon.

Environment

How Dust Could Help Solve Crimes

Hold the vacuum cleaner! There’s evidence in those motes.

By Katharine Gammon    December 11, 2023

You can put back anything but dust,” says fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in the British TV drama Sherlock. “Dust is eloquent.” We may know dust as a substance of little consequence. It’s infinitesimal, scattered by the winds of time, accumulating in snarls under the bed or neglected corners of our living rooms. But dust has fascinated criminologists and sleuths for over a century due to the way it moves and the elemental and biological particles it carries with it.

Now some scientists have devised new methods for using the tiniest particles of dust to help solve crimes. DNA and biochemical analysis of dust collected from a person’s shoes, clothing, or body could help forensic investigators match those particles to samples from a crime scene or an existing reference database, according to a study recently published in FSI Genetics. The scientists examined samples of airborne particles of soil, about 70 microns across—equal in size to the diameter of a human hair or the thickness of a sheet of paper—which can easily get blown around and stick to our skin and apparel.

Dust just opens a whole new door.

“If you were to go for a walk or go outside, you might take home dust in the zipper lining of your bag,” says Nicole Foster, now a postdoctoral environmental DNA researcher with the Smithsonian Institution. “That’s the stuff that gets stuck on things. It’s what gets blown around. When you go somewhere, it’s what you take with you.”

Austrian jurist Hans Gross was the first to propose using dust as a forensic evidence tool back in 1893, when he published the original practical guide to investigating a crime scene. Inspired by Gross and Sherlock Holmes, French criminologist Edmond Locard, who created Europe’s first police laboratory, took this a step further in the early 20th century. He proposed that forensic experts photograph interesting accumulations of dust at a crime scene, collect it with a special vacuum, and put it under the microscope to see what it might reveal. But dust profiling has long been an imprecise science. Foster and her colleagues wanted to see if using DNA typing of bacteria and fungi in dust as well as biochemical analysis could help investigators determine the precise provenance of tiny particles of dust.

For their study, the scientists set out to determine whether the DNA profiles of dust samples from a single geographical location would remain stable over time. To test this, they set out small tiles, 1 square meter in size, at each of three collection sites in South Australia with different kinds of soils. They then swabbed the tiles for DNA after 1, 4, 8, and 12 weeks and found that the DNA profiles held over the 12-week period. Foster says she was surprised to also find signature minerals—especially talc from one site that had a talc mine not too far away.

When you go somewhere, dust is what you take with you.

Foster and her colleagues were able to predict provenance for 67 percent of the dust samples using bacteria profiles and 56 percent using fungi profiles. These distinct DNA signatures pertained to sites more than 20 kilometers away from one another, but Foster says it’s possible that such DNA profiling could distinguish between sites just 5 meters apart. Fungal and bacteria communities can change with the seasons, so these temporal changes would need to be taken into account.

The field of environmental DNA profiling has expanded rapidly in recent years. Scientists can now test the waters or the air and determine if a specific species (say, an invasive pest) has recently been there. Or they can sample to see what kind of species diversity an ecosystem contains. But forensic dust profiling flips this approach on its head: To tell where a person has been, look at the particles they carry with them.

“Dust just opens a whole new door,” says Foster, “because it gets everywhere.” Forensic scientists are still trying to get that dust to talk.

Lead image: J Walters / Shutterstock

Katharine Gammon

Posted on December 11, 2023

Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California, who writes about environment, science, and parenting. You can find her on Twitter @kategammon.

Environment

A Dubious Cure for Ocean Plastics

Popular removal methods might do more harm than good.

By Katharine Gammon    November 16, 2023

You might think that running a giant mechanical rake along the coastline to collect plastic debris would be a really good idea. But it turns out there are a lot of downsides. The process kills dune plants, which accelerates erosion, for example. In fact, beaches that consistently win awards for cleanliness—including some iconic beaches in Malibu, California—are often hurting for biodiversity.

Mechanical rakes, giant sieves, nets, and conveyors are increasingly used by companies and nonprofits around the world to scoop up plastic from beaches, oceans, and rivers. But the results might not add up for the environment. A new analysis, published in the journal One Earth, suggests large scale mechanical plastic cleanups largely do more harm than good.

Collected ocean plastic is more likely destined for a landfill than for a recycling plant.

It’s not just beach ecosystems that suffer damage. River and marine ecosystems are harmed, too. In harbors, for example, plastic-trapping tech like Seabins—a cross between a pool skimmer and a trash can—collect debris by pumping water into a large device. But they also trap large amounts of seaweed and ocean life: One analysis showed that for every four pieces of plastic, Seabins captured one marine organism, which typically died within two days.

Melanie Bergmann, a marine ecologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and co-author of the paper, says she was inspired to look into the issue because of the increasingly forceful public campaigns run by some of the companies behind plastic removal technologies. The crisis of plastic choking oceans and rivers can seem insurmountable—at humanity’s current rate of use, plastic production is projected to triple by 2060—which is why ambitious machines and targets are becoming more popular, she says.

WHAT A DRAG: Nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup slowly drags nets through bodies of water over periods of weeks to complete its plastic removal projects. But the nets trap living creatures, too. Photo by TAUFIK ART / Shutterstock.

One nonprofit, The Ocean Cleanup, for example, claims that it can remove 90 percent of floating plastic from the oceans by 2040. But to grab plastic from the ocean, the nonprofit tows a net through the water at slow speeds for up to two weeks. This method leads to significant bycatch: A single device running for one year could kill 675 tons of zooplankton as well as larger animals like sea turtles and sharks, according to research from Aalborg University in Denmark.

Some plastic removal companies and nonprofits are motivated by plastic credit schemes that are increasingly pushed by plastics manufacturers. Like carbon credits, they are ripe for greenwashing, Bergmann says. She expects the plastics industry will fund even more of these collection schemes in the future, so that business-as-usual plastics production can continue. But as of yet, no international science-based criteria exist for measuring the efficiency of plastic clean-up systems or the harms they cause to the environment.

Sometimes the simplest tech can be the best: beach cleanups by hand are effective at removing plastic along shorelines and riverbanks while also raising awareness of the problem, Bergmann says. Another example that seems to work pretty well, she says, is the Ocean Voyage Institute, which works with sailors to fit GPS trackers to abandoned fishing gear encountered on their sails. The Institute’s sailboats then go out to selectively retrieve the items. In 2020, they collected 150 tons of gear through this approach.

Some plastic removal companies and nonprofits are motivated by plastic credit schemes.

In the end, removing plastics just moves the debris from one place to another. Collected plastic has to go somewhere, and after months in the ocean, it is more likely destined for a landfill than for a recycling plant. Plastics “attract persistent organic pollutants from water and undergo weathering,” according to Bermann and her coauthors, which makes them less suitable for reuse.

The researchers say efforts would be better spent minimizing the amount of plastics produced and pressuring plastic producers to design more sustainable materials. “In order to effectively reduce plastic pollution, we need to focus on preventive measures that are higher up in the waste hierarchy such as a reduction in production,” says Bergmann. “This is also a much more affordable solution for many countries around the world.”

There is no quick fix. She says, “We need to change our ways.”

Lead image: SaltedLife / Shutterstock

Katharine Gammon

Posted on November 16, 2023

Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California, who writes about environment, science, and parenting. You can find her on Twitter @kategammon.

Environment

A Cyclone, a Flood, and a Very Big Park

How scientists harnessed disaster to chart a path for climate resilience.

By Katharine Gammon    November 15, 2023

When Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique in 2019, it slammed into Gorongosa National Park with 105-miles-per-hour winds and flooding that put at risk 200,000 people in its path. Immediately, the park leapt into action: Its rangers transformed into a rapid response team that rescued people in canoes and helicopters, and the park’s coffee factory became a food packing facility for emergency supplies, providing sustenance to more than 30,000 families weekly.

Cyclone Idai—one of the deadliest on record in Africa to date—and the subsequent rising waters also had an immediate impact on wildlife in the 1 million-acre park, giving researchers all over the world the opportunity to study the cyclone’s effect on different species. The setup was fortuitous: In addition to being a safari destination, the park is essentially a massive science laboratory, with abundant cameras and animals wearing radio collars. Using the park’s camera grid and hourly pings from animal collars, researchers could watch in near-real time, from their labs thousands of miles away, as collared animals raced to avoid rising waters. In the cyclone’s aftermath, they could observe ways in which the park’s ecosystems responded to the cataclysm.

Gorongosa sits at the southernmost edge of the Great Rift Valley, and the devastation wrought by Cyclone Idai motivated the park’s scientists to turn to research that will help them understand future climate trends for Southern Africa—and the best ways to create resilience against future catastrophes. As the world seeks climate solutions, Gorongosa could become a model in how to analyze and adapt to a changing world.

To understand the impact of events such as more frequent and more powerful storms, park scientists, in collaboration with Princeton University, are creating the Gorongosa Carbon, Climate, and Biodiversity Lab, a collaborative network and a research effort to study the intersections of creatures, their environment, and a changing climate. In addition to research on the impact of stronger storms, the lab also will study how animals impact carbon sequestration, where the carbon is stored in the park, and how it cycles around.

Researchers could watch in near-real time as animals raced to avoid rising waters.

The new research was “born of just pure collaborative efforts from separate dispersed studies in the park,” says Hallie Walker Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. It sprang from conversations among researchers chatting at the park’s cafeteria. The data come from key Mozambican scientists, park employees, and researchers from South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, all working on their own projects but willing to contribute and work together to enable a comprehensive reconstruction of events. It underscores the “special, close-knit, and collaborative research community at Gorongosa,” says the Princeton ecologist Rob Pringle.

That same spirit of collaboration can also be said of the lab: It is not yet an official entity—but, rather, a spontaneous collaborative response by the park’s scientists and other researchers. “Because these really extreme cycles are really unpredictable,” says Walker Brown, “you don’t know when they’re going to happen or where—but because of the nature of Gorongosa, we were able to provide so many data sources toward this effort.”

Size matters

Most recently, Walker Brown co-authored a paper that addresses one aspect of the lab’s research: Size matters. Biologists had long wondered: How does an animal’s body size affect the ability to withstand the effects of storms? The only hints came from research in the 1990s, when a series of hurricanes struck small islands in the Bahamas. There, researchers from the University of California, Davis observed that larger species (lizards) were more resistant to cyclone effects, whereas better dispersers (spiders) recovered faster. But there had never been a comprehensive, comparative research of mammals living on the savanna—until now.

HERD AND SEEN: Look close at this LIDAR photo and you’ll see a a herd of waterbuck grazing in a floodplain in Gorongosa National Park. Scientists at the park use this remote sensing method, which measures the time it takes light to bounce off an object and return to the emitter, to measure the impact of animals on the ecology of the land. Courtesy of Andrew Davies.

The paper’s findings, published today in the journal Nature, demonstrate that big mammals are better able to withstand the scarcity of food after an event like Cyclone Idai. They’re also more mobile because their longer legs make it easier for them to escape their home ranges after flooding caused by the cyclone. Smaller species were more likely to die during the flood and in the weeks after because they simply drowned in rising waters.

Conservationists are often worried about the decline of megafauna—the big animals in an ecosystem—because they are at risk from perennial pressures such as poaching and habitat loss in the Anthropocene. But Walker Brown says that it’s critically important to realize that smaller species are more at risk from acute effects of events like storms and floods.

She adds that researchers were also surprised to find what people and organizations that work in disaster relief for human populations have long known: that the cyclone’s most severe impact on the species came from the lack of food in the weeks and months that followed, and that animals near the bottom of the food chain were the ones most severely affected. Recognizing this effect of the cyclone is critical for understanding the needs of species in aftermaths of future natural catastrophes. “It’s not just that wind and that initial flooding that’s going to be the main issue,” Walker Brown says. “For many populations, it is a longer-term impact of an altered forage landscape.”

Carbon sequestration

In addition to probing the impacts of dramatic storms, the new lab will take a closer, collaborative look at the role—and movement—of carbon in Gorongosa. As the climate changes, it’s critical to understand how carbon cycles through an environment, since the release of carbon adds to the already-ballooning amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There are many open questions in understanding how carbon flows through a savanna ecosystem, says Pringle, who studies rules that govern ecosystems. Fire plays a role, as do herbivores, who eat plants that could otherwise store carbon.

One of Pringle’s new projects at Gorongosa is to estimate the carbon stored above and below ground in the park. Last summer, he worked with Harvard University ecologist Andrew Davies to fly a 10-foot-wide drone armed with LiDAR—a remote sensing method that measures the time it takes light to bounce off an object and return to the emitter—in an effort to capture high-resolution imagery of the southeastern section of the park. Once the data are processed, the team will be able to precisely estimate the amount of carbon stored in the park’s trees and plants—and how the area has changed since the cyclone.

Previous studies have shown that savannas can quickly oscillate between reducing carbon emissions or contributing to them—as animal communities change. A 2009 study in the Serengeti looked at carbon in the ecosystem as wildebeest recovered from rinderpest, a contagious viral disease also called cattle plague. When rinderpest was eradicated in the 1960s, Serengeti’s wildebeest population climbed to 1.3 million and kept grass on the savanna shorter, constraining fires, which, in turn, increased tree cover. That caused the Serengeti ecosystem to switch from emitting carbon because of grass-fed fires to sequestering it. “That’s the kind of dynamism that savannas can show,” says Pringle, “because of the potential for extreme fluctuations in the amount of tree cover. Tropical savannas cover an eighth of the world’s land surface, so it’s a big chunk of territory—and not a trivial contribution to the overall terrestrial carbon budget.”

They will be able to estimate the amount of carbon stored in the park’s trees and plants.

Understanding this, Pringle says, can help the park to make better management decisions locally about how to balance the objectives of biodiversity conservation and carbon sequestration. It can also help scientists worldwide to understand how carbon moves around a tropical savanna, how carbon exchange shifts as wildlife community changes, and the role that large herbivores play.

Adam Pellegrini, a biologist at the University of Cambridge, is planning to conduct soil carbon and nutrients sampling in areas that are designated for testing the impacts of fire and herbivores on the ecosystem. He wants to measure the radiocarbon signature in soil organic matter to find out how old the carbon is there, to estimate how quickly the carbon is turning over in the soil.

The carbon data are useful for the park for its own carbon accounting and as a potential future source of income from carbon credits. “The amount of science that’s being done in Gorongosa right now really poises it to be a figurehead in establishing a good way to use carbon credits, to potentially finance the park as well as financial local communities,” says Pellegrini.

Carbon credits work like permission slips for emissions: When a company buys a carbon credit, usually from a government, they gain permission to generate one metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions—with the idea that they’ve offset their emissions by investing in a carbon-sequestering endeavor. They’re not a foolproof solution: Studies have found carbon credit programs vastly overestimate the climate-saving benefits of these programs. And in some parts of the world, Indigenous populations reject carbon credit as a capitalist climate scheme and instead have turned to ancestral practices often rooted in coexistence with and an understanding of ecosystems that safeguard environments by default.

Climate strategy

Cyclone Idai was also a turning point in terms of how Gorongosa approaches climate strategy, says Matthew Jordan, a consultant for the park who formerly was its director of sustainability. Climate strategy in Gorongosa, he says, is rooted in the experience of the more than 200,000 people who live in the 2,000-square-mile buffer zone that is maintained and governed by the park—especially the 60,000 families who were uprooted by the cyclone. “That experience was catalytic for the park to really think about its role in climate change,” he says.

FOREST FOR THE TREES: Using LiDAR, scientists at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique have been assembling an ambitious map, attempting to “see” and tabulate the above-ground carbon stores in trees and plants to track how the crucial element cycles through the park. Courtesy of Andrew Davies.

And its ability to respond to these disasters. “Our headquarters isn’t in some capital city, our headquarters is in the national park underwater, and that’s part of why climate became really front and center for us,” Jordan says.

Climate mitigation and adaptation are potential opportunities to deliver on Gorongosa’s mission, which, says Jordan, combines protecting biodiversity and raising the quality of life for the people who live around the park. Future climate change will likely bring stronger and more frequent storms, as well as unpredictability around growing seasons, even as the number of farming families around the park grows.

“Gorongosa spent the last 10 years bringing back 100,000 wild animals and restoring the biodiversity in the park,” says Jordan. “The next 10 years are going to be about agriculture, because the smallholder farmers [around the park] are growing in number.”

That expansion of farms has to come with conservation in mind as well. The park’s naturally maintained floodplain and spongy land mitigate against even stronger devastation from cataclysms, Jordan points out: “As tragic as it was to have people being flooded, if there was no Gorongosa park and if the land had been overrun by cattle, the tragedy would have been tenfold worse.”

Pringle says a physical laboratory space for the Carbon, Climate, and Biodiversity Lab is not imminently planned.

Pringle says a physical laboratory space for the Carbon, Climate, and Biodiversity Lab is not imminently planned.  “At this point such a facility is an aspiration,” he says. “The vision is that if we are able to succeed in generating good science, then that will be the proof-of-concept needed to make it possible.”

Lead photo by Svetlana Arapova / Shutterstock

The  Nautilus Gorongosa Series is published in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group.

Katharine Gammon

Posted on November 15, 2023

Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California, who writes about environment, science, and parenting. You can find her on Twitter @kategammon.

Evolution

- A Peculiar Fish and an Evolutionary Mystery

- Thank Eve for Human Evolution

- My 3 Greatest Revelations

- Psychology Lost a Great Mind

Evolution

A Peculiar Fish and an Evolutionary Mystery

What we can learn from the macabre diets of a curious species of cichlids.

By Jeffrey McKinnon    December 4, 2023

Our story begins in 1954, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in what was then Belgian Congo, with a little paper about fish diets titled “A Curious Ecological ‘Niche’ among the Fishes of Lake Tanganyika.”

The authors, biologists Georges Marlier and Narcisse Leleup, describe a little-studied species of cichlid fish. According to their findings, adults subsist mainly on the scales of other fish, which they tear off their living prey with fearsome teeth. Marlier and Leleup note that the individuals they held in an aquarium would not eat “earthworms, fish powder, or insects” or anything else they presented other than the scales of live fish.

A few decades later,  the eminent Harvard fish biologist Karel Liem and his coauthor Donald Stewart investigated the mechanics of how these fish evolved to feed on scales, with a special focus on their jaws and teeth. They described a new species with notably extreme laterality (a particularly strong twisting of the head toward the left side or the right) and proposed that asymmetry in the shape of these fish’s skulls was associated with their macabre diets, likely providing an advantage in feeding. They also noted that there were similar numbers of right- and left-twisted individuals.

WINNER, WINNER: The laterality of Perissodus microlepis in Lake Tanganyika. A lefty morph of the former and righty morph of the latter species are shown from both sides. Image courtesy of Hori, M., et al. Dynamics of laterality in Lake Tanganyike scale-eaters driven by cross-predation. Symmetry (2019).

The laboratory work provided important insights, but it was a long-term field study, appearing in 1993 in Science by Michio Hori, then a biologist at Wakayama Medical College in Japan,  that began to explain the persistence of both left and right mouth laterality in Tanganyika’s scale eaters. For most of a decade, I presented the work described in this paper every time I taught a course in evolution to undergraduate biology students. It is quite literally a textbook study.

Hori found that his study animal, Perissodus microlepis, typically attacks by striking the prey fish on the side of the body, approaching from the rear to be less visible. When he towed a prey fish behind a boat and captured wild scale eaters after they struck it, individuals attacking from the right always had a mouth with a left twist, whereas individuals attacking from the left always had a mouth that twisted right. He was also able to identify scales, from Perissodus stomachs, as having come from the left or right side of the prey based on their pore patterns. Much as with strike observations, fish with right-twisted mouths had eaten scales from the left side of their prey and left-twisted scale eaters had eaten scales from the right.

But why should the scale eater population show such exceptional variation, with the mouths of some individuals twisting visibly to the right and others to the left?

Hori’s answer—frequency dependence—and the evidence he collected to support it, are the reason the paper attracted enduring attention. Frequency dependence occurs when rare traits or strategies are more successful than common ones. It’s a principle nicely illustrated through sport.

They would not eat anything other than the scales of live fish.

When there are direct contests between individuals, a combatant-competitor can gain an advantage by having a strategy that is unfamiliar to opponents. For example, left-handed fencers, who are generally less common, will be familiar with the attacks and defenses of right-handed opponents, as right-handers are frequently encountered. But right-handers will have less experience of lefties—giving the rare left-handers an advantage. Consequently, lefties are at a higher frequency among competitive fencers than in the general population. The same goes for cricket, baseball, table tennis, and martial arts. In these highly interactive sports (and others), having the less common laterality—being a leftie—is advantageous. Success is frequency dependent, negatively so to be precise: As one’s frequency goes up, success goes down and as frequency goes down, success increases.

Hori hypothesized that scale eaters are a bit like fencers. If scale eaters always struck from one side, say, the right, their prey would only have to guard against predictable attacks from a single direction and could probably do so effectively. Any rare scale eater biting from the left should do particularly well in this situation, against unprepared prey. Of course, as lefties become more common, the prey should shift their attention accordingly. Thus the situation should lead to frequency dependence and the persistent presence of both left-and right-attacking scale eaters in the population, at something close to 50-50.

Hori was able to test for frequency dependence by taking advantage of natural ups and downs in the relative abundance of fish with right- or left-twisted mouths. About every 2.5 years, the population shifted from mainly lefty fish to mainly fish with right-twisted mouths. By looking at scars on the sides of prey fish, Hori was able to estimate the relative success of the morph that was less common. He found that, as expected, whichever twist type was less abundant left more scars and achieved more successful bites, with success rates flipping when the rare morph’s frequency increased and it became the abundant variety.

Understanding frequency dependence is essential to grasping how the most rapid diversifications in any vertebrate have occurred. These have often evolved through coevolutionary processes, much like the evolutionary tango of the scale eaters and their prey.

This article is adapted from Jeffrey McKinnon’s Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History.

Lead image courtesy of Hori, M., et al. Dynamics of laterality in Lake Tanganyike scale-eaters driven by cross-predation. Symmetry (2019).

Jeffrey McKinnon

Posted on December 4, 2023

Jeffrey McKinnon is a professor of biology at East Carolina University. His research has taken him to every continent but Antarctica and has appeared in journals including Nature and the American Naturalist. He is the author of Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History.

Evolution

Thank Eve for Human Evolution

It’s females who vaulted biological hurdles and forged our evolutionary success.

By Lucy Cooke    November 29, 2023

In October, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England, Cat Bohannon was sporting a pink latex top and a mischievous twinkle in her eye. She and I shared a stage to talk about our recent books; in my case, Bitch: On the Female of the Species; in hers, Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. We hit it off immediately.

Eve, Bohannon’s first book, is a sweeping revision of human history that places the female body center stage, instead of just a feminine footnote to the macho main event. Bohannon, a Ph.D. from Columbia University (where she studied the evolution of narrative), with a sideline in poetry and performance, tells this epic tale through a series of “Eves”—presumed ancestors who vaulted various biological hurdles, with pivotal consequences for our evolutionary path.

Talking to Cat Bohannon is like being struck by a tornado of ideas.

Eve begins in the Jurassic period with a small rodent Morganucodon, nicknamed Morgie by the Smithsonian, which laid eggs and lacked nipples but nevertheless became the first mammalian breast feeder. We discover that milk is alarmingly like pus, but with added prebiotics for developing gut health. Next comes Protungulatum donnae, “our womb’s great-grand-rat,” who managed to survive the apocalypse that wiped out the dinosaurs by inventing the placental pregnancy.

By the time we get to our hominin ancestors, with their ever-expanding brains, this internal incubation system is starting to creak—mammalian mothers are at war with their fetuses over limited resources, and hominin heads too big to pass through the pelvis. It is this fundamental biological limitation that shaped our trajectory far more than man the hunter, farmer, or toolmaker ever did. In Bohannon’s myth-busting tale, reproductive choice and the need for midwifery drove the evolution of a matriarchal society, like the one we see in our great ape relative the bonobo.

Eve’s structure reminded me of Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, but the content, with its female focus, could not be more different. Bohannon shares Dawkins’ gift for compelling science communication but has her own intimate style. The book took her 10 years to write. During this time, she finished her dissertation and became a mother. Twice. Alongside all the Eves, we meet various incarnations of Bohannon herself, from life-drawing model to almost sex worker (during college she interviewed for a job as an escort but decided against putting her “vagina up for rent”). Her personal stories bring grit, humor, and humility to those of her imagined Eves.

Not long after the festival, Bohannon and I spoke over Zoom about the incredible Eve. Talking to her is like being struck by a tornado of ideas.

AUTHOR, AUTHOR: Cat Bohannon and Lucy Cooke after sharing the stage at the Cheltenham Literature Festival in England to talk about sex, evolution, and the female body. Photo courtesy of Lucy Cooke.

Tell us how midwives set our ancestors on the evolutionary path to success.

Because this is for Nautilus, and it’s a science credit, I’ll start with a high-minded idea and dig in. Paleoanthropologists don’t give a damn about rocks. That’s not what they’re actually studying. What they really want to know about is the triangulation of an object that is a tool, its user, and its environment. From that you can infer ideas about a creature, its cognitive capabilities, its likelihood of socially shared knowledge, its relationship with foodstuffs. There’s a lot you can learn from rocks.

Tool use is fundamentally about doing something to overcome a basic limitation of your body plan in your environment. How does utilizing a tool get you there? What behaviors are you doing to overcome that limitation? Our biggest problem wasn’t food. I mean, it’s always food. We’re always hungry. Our most important problem was we were crap at making babies.

By looking at fossils, we’ve determined that many in the hominin line share this problem—our pregnancies got longer and more difficult and more prone to crippling and sometimes deadly complications for the mother and child than they are for almost any other primate. In evolutionary biology, that’s a hard problem. You can limp around on one foot, you can have a weird neck, you can be many things in the animal world. But if you suck at making babies, then you are not destined for great success. You’re certainly not destined for massive migration plans that end up in every environment in the world.

Enter the midwife.

Right. If need is the mother of innovation, look at the mothers. The way they innovated is with behavior. Our workarounds are always behavioral. And midwifery is a behavior. But it’s a behavior that requires major shifts in a social organization. You need to have strong female bonds where you can trust someone between your legs when you’re giving birth.

Jane Goodall and many other wonderful primatologists have seen that there’s a lot of female infanticide. When you’re giving birth as a chimpanzee, you’re going off secretly, then carefully reintroducing that newborn to the group, and only to your friends first. If you’re not friends with the alpha female, you’re avoiding the hell out of her because she’s not just going to kill that kid, she’s going to eat it in front of you, while you scream.

But it’s not just about midwifery. Any good OB-GYN will tell you how your pregnancy, birth, and postpartum recovery are deeply dependent on your prenatal care. They’re also deeply dependent on the whole history of your reproductive life and general health before you ever get pregnant. So, given your local environment, and what’s going on around you, it may be healthier to have less children, or have them in a cluster, which is also a behavioral innovation. I’m not the first to say that Lucy [the name for an australopithecine skeleton from over 3 million years ago] had a midwife. She shared our obstetric dilemma.

The traditional model for hominin society has been based on chimpanzees—a patriarchal society where females disperse from their natal group, and don’t have strong bonds with one another. But your midwife argument supports those that see our other great ape relative—the matriarchal bonobo, with her sisterhood of unrelated females—as a more convincing model. You even found evidence of bonobo females supporting one another giving birth, which I found incredible.

The thing that I found most interesting about it wasn’t simply the laboring female was so obviously trusting of the others. It was that they shared the placenta. We’ve wondered about how midwifery might take hold as a regular practice in a species—you need those strong female bonds. Usually, the argument is a mother is helping a daughter, or a sister—you must have that genetic bond. But now there is an immediate reward. I have never eaten a placenta—and have no desire—but that’s a nutritive reward for being around. And the bonobos are passing it and sharing it. And sharing food in primates is a big social bonding thing. So, in other words, you get a meaty bloody treat for helping, and also not harming the child.

I’m not going to say the editor had testicles, but maybe?

Speaking of blood, menstruation is a bit of an anomaly. Humans are part of an eclectic, and unrelated assembly of bleeding female mammals that includes a handful of primates, four bats, the elephant shrew, and a spiny mouse. Why?

We like to focus on the blood and tissue and mucus coming out of the hatch. But that isn’t the most biologically interesting thing. It is probably just an accident of it being less expensive to just shed the stuff rather than reabsorb it. A lot of species just reabsorb it.

What’s interesting about the way that we have a menstrual cycle is that we build up our endometrial lining without any signal from a fertilized egg. Most beasties only start doing that when they get that hormonal signal that a fertilized egg is incoming. Then you get rare creatures like us who have a very invasive placenta that penetrates all the way down into the mother’s bloodstream. This is a partial allograft that’s docking in—the basal plate of the placenta being of the mother’s body, and then the top plate being made of fetal material from the embryo. The placenta is the only organ that’s made of two different organisms.

So, it’s like trench warfare, right? Because there’s maternal fetal competition for resources. That means the mother’s body has long evolved to survive and resist invasion. And of course, the embryo has evolved many mechanisms to get as many resources as it can—our babies are among the greediest out there. So, we have periods because our bodies have evolved to survive our blood-sucking demon fetuses.

That’s just a fantastic way of looking at it. But that hasn’t been the way that many people have thought about periods. Wasn’t there a whole bunch of ideas, largely devised by men, about menstruation? What’s one that made you chuckle?

The thesis that women synchronize their periods in order not to have sex with men, and therefore the men can go out and hunt and get us food, and I don’t know, snacks. And this is the dawn of human collaborative civilization. On the face of it, this is a very bad idea. But it was published in a very reputable place. I don’t know what the editor was thinking. I’m not going to say the editor had testicles, but maybe?

Man the hunter has traditionally driven the story of our evolution. He’s the great hero and many advances are tied to him. One of those is bipedalism. But you see that differently, too.

When you think about what it is to become upright, from a more tree-based life form, you’re thinking about expanding range. And that is usually about food sources. It probably was not hunting big game. We don’t have evidence for that until way later, way later. We’re talking about finding a tasty tuber at the edge of your range.

It’s useful to think about who has the greatest need for nutritive resources. Is that going to be the male with the slightly bigger body plan? Or is it going to be a female, who is the primary caretaker in nearly every primate species? Who is also lactating, which is metabolically costly, and is going to require a lot of food to feed the kid. The dawn of bipedalism to me sounded a lot more like single moms with a hungry kid who needs to expand her range.

She has advantages in metabolic endurance to be able to walk that far. And there is evidence that female bodies in humans are better geared for endurance. Endurance runners have more so-called slow-twitch muscle, and speed runners have more fast-twitch. Well, the sex-differentiated balance is clear, even in so-called untrained bodies. Female-typical muscle cells are also better at tapping into different energy substrates when one runs out, versus male muscles. So it’s all the way down to the microscopic that we have this endurance advantage.

Another gynecological innovation that you write about is the evolution of reproductive choice in mammals, albeit unconscious choice.

It’s always tricky, right? Because what we call choice is so tied to our understanding of human consciousness. So, what does it mean to choose? Well, it seems clear that female reproductive choice—as it’s talked about in biology—is very much a thing. I found it fascinating how many other species of mammals have abortions. And what I’m talking about here is social abortions. Humans can have surgical abortions, or you can have miscarriages. But that’s not a medical term: That is a spontaneous abortion.

There are many species that have a spontaneous abortion in response to a directly observed social change. A mouse is going to do it when she smells the scent of an unfamiliar male while she’s pregnant. And she is extremely likely to end that pregnancy and return to her fertility cycle.

That’s what grandma’s for—she remembers where the good hunting is.

You see it in lions, horses, and geladas. It’s normal. The mechanisms that drive it are probably a bit different, depending on the species. And the gelada was amazing because now we’re in a primate—we’re closer to us. They live in that harem-based reproductive group, and the females will abort when a new male does a coup and takes out the old alpha—80 percent of the time. That’s a hell of a freakin’ signal. And what’s interesting to me is that, it’s usually modelled as fear of infanticide. Because why invest in the baby if it’s just going to be killed by the new guy, right? So that’s a threat response.

In the gelada what’s interesting is there could be infanticide, but it actually seems to be more about social tracking, because that new guy can’t actually succeed in his coup if he doesn’t have the support of the majority of females, right? So, these social abortions are not simply mapping threatened stress in a social environment. Sometimes it is for self-advantage.

Indeed, the gelada females that get pregnant more reliably are those who do have the social abortions. So, there is a reproductive fitness thing there, too. But the idea that it might be tied to social bonding means it’s both threat and reward. It’s a complex space, and that for me, when I think back now to our very messy, complex, cautious, conscious thing of human primates, it removes this idea that abortion is somehow new and unnatural. It removes this idea that intervening on female fertility in a way that down-regulates our fertility, rather than always trying to be pregnant, would somehow not be true of other mammals and is something only we do. I think only we consciously choose the way we do it. But having an abortion response to a perceived change in a social environment, whether for threat or for reward, is something a lot of mammals do.

The female experience has traditionally been wedded to motherhood, as if no other role existed for us. But that’s not always the case. Orcas, for example, are one of the few species that, like humans, go through menopause. The popular theory is that it’s so they can help their daughters care for their offspring—the grandmother hypothesis—but you think that’s not quite accurate. Tell us about your thinking on menopause.

The grandmother hypothesis holds to the idea that not only does spending a portion of your later life not having babies reduce your competition with your daughters, but also, most importantly, you become advantageous to your daughters, because you’re helping take care of the kids. You know, built-in mammalian daycare. It’s a great situation, which as a mother of young children, I have a lot of sympathy for.

But orcas are not particularly taking care of the grandkids more. What they mostly seem to be known for is leading the pod to good hunting grounds, particularly when local food sources are running dry. In other words, in a time of nutritive stress, that’s what grandma’s for—she remembers where the good hunting is. She’s also instrumental in teaching younger members of the pod more difficult hunting strategies like lining up like line-backers and creating a bow wave to knock a seal off an ice flow.

So, in general, we expanded our lifespan. That’s clear from bones and tooth growth. We had a series of mutations that expanded human lifespan to considerably old age. And the story of menopause is the story of how all human bodies started having a benefit from having the elderly around. I assume it probably required some pretty collaborative societies to have the elderly around. Those societies were probably like unicorns for a very long time. But once you had societies that could support the elderly, one presumes they would benefit from the wisdom of older people.

But the tragic thing about menopause is that women outlive males on the average. And we love men, whether or not we have sex with them. We love trans women and people with these biologically male bodies. If we’re lucky enough to live to an old age, we’re going to have to say goodbye to them. I think the great impact of menopause is not the hot flashes, it’s saying goodbye to your loved ones.

That’s definitely the sad side of it. But your emphasis on the fact that menopause is more about a selection for longevity, rather than a selection for a shortening of fertility, is like, boom, yes, that just makes total sense. The idea that I have a role in society for my wisdom, and it was actively selected for, is really empowering. Eve contains a huge amount of wisdom. Well done, you, for plowing forward and writing it. What do you hope will be its legacy?

I hope it gives people more permission to talk about the lived reality of their own bodies. The body is automatically taboo, we are hesitant to speak about it. I hope this book gives readers new frames to talk about what womanhood might be, what parts of it come from where, and what parts don’t. I hope scientists and clinicians take up the call to better study the biology of sex differences, because all women are under-studied and under-cared for. We have the power to change that.

Lead image: Polina Raulina / Shutterstock

Lucy Cooke

Posted on November 29, 2023

Lucy Cooke is a New York Times best-selling author, award-winning documentary filmmaker and broadcaster, National Geographic explorer, and TED talker with a Master’s in zoology from Oxford University. Her latest book is Bitch: On the Female of the Species.

Evolution

My 3 Greatest Revelations

Joseph LeDoux on writing his new book, “The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human.”

By Joseph LeDoux    November 17, 2023

1 The Fundamental Division of the Nervous System Is Not What I and Many Others Thought

For me, book writing is a process of discovery. I find out how much I don’t know about a topic that I thought I knew well enough to write a book.

For example, in my latest book, The Four Realms of Existence: A New Theory of Being Human, I proposed that everything about being human is subsumed within four fundamental, parallel, entwined realms of existence that reflect our evolutionary past and account for our present ways of being. These are the biological, neurobiological, cognitive, and conscious realms. I knew quite a bit about each of these topics and felt they must fit together in some fundamental way, but I did not fully know what the key links were. But once I saw how the biological realm, which is necessary for life, is connected to the neurobiological realm, I had a framework for the whole book.

Like many neuroscientists, I assumed that the nervous system consists of two distinct functional units: the central nervous system—which is composed of the brain and spinal cord—and the peripheral nervous system—which is made up of the nerves that run from the central nervous system through the rest of the body. But while researching the book, I came across a paper from the 1970s by Alfred Sherwood Romer, a prominent paleontologist, who was interested in the evolution of the nervous system. It rocked my world.

MIND-ALTERING: While researching his new book, Joseph LeDoux stumbled upon a paper from the 1970s by Sherwood Romer that rocked his world—and his understanding of how the human nervous system is organized. Photo courtesy of Joseph LeDoux.

Romer pointed out that each animal, including the human, is an imperfect functional and structural union between “two somewhat distinct beings.” The first is a “somatic” animal—consisting of most of our flesh and bone. The second is a “visceral” animal—essentially, the digestive tract and its appendages. This visceral animal, he wrote, “to a considerable degree, conducts its own affairs,” and the somatic animal “exerts but incomplete control” over it. Romer, in effect, endorsed an organizational chart of the nervous system that flips the traditional one on its head. He made the somatic and visceral nervous systems the major partition, with the central and peripheral locations of their neural tissues being secondary.

Modern understanding of neural evolution supports Romer’s view. Before animals arrived with nervous systems, unicellular organisms had bodies with visceral (i.e. metabolism) and somatic (i.e. sensory and motor) functions. When complex multicellular animals evolved a nervous system, its job was to support visceral and somatic functions. But the first nervous systems were spread across the body with no centralized control component. As a result, the central-peripheral distinction was secondary to the visceral-somatic one.

Why did evolution single out mammals and birds for higher cognition?

Romer’s contribution was essentially lost in the sands of time. But discovering his perspective, which includes much more than I have explained here, opened my mind to a fundamental tenet of evolutionary theory—that new functions evolve from old. This not only helped me understand how the neurobiological realm evolved out of the biological realm, but also how the cognitive realm evolved from the neurobiological and the conscious realm from the cognitive. In other words, it became the basis for the nested hierarchy that defines the four realms of existence.

2 Warm Blood Explains the Cognitive Sophistication of Birds and Mammals

You have probably heard about the impressive cognitive capacities of birds, especially parrots and corvids, which belong to the crow family. Corvids are particularly interesting. They use internal representations of where and when they stored food and can make choices based on freshness—that is, they retrieve and consume older items before newer ones. It has been said that their cognitive capacities rival those of primates.

But why did evolution single out mammals and birds for higher cognition? The answer I found in my research was another eye opener. Only mammals and birds are warm-blooded. To maintain their higher body temperature, they have to burn more calories, which means they have to move around more and consume more food than cold-blooded creatures, such as reptiles. Advantages might therefore accrue to organisms that could use cognitive abilities, especially the ability to construct internal mental models of the world and use them to make plans about when (time of year and time of day) and where (locally and distally) to forage for what (perishable or durable food) in relation to predictions about energy expenditure and energy prospects in the near- and long-term.

But not all birds have these cognitive capacities. Therefore, while being warm-blooded may be necessary, it is not sufficient for model-based cognition. The fact that the reptiles from which birds evolved do not have the capacity for model-based cognition suggests that birds and mammals very likely evolved these similar capacities separately, undoubtedly as a solution to distinct selective pressures they faced. So-called parallel evolution is very common.

3 We Can’t Tell the Difference Between Conscious and Unconscious Thought Processes

My wife is an art critic, and she introduced me to the work of the literary theorist Roland Barthes, who wrote, “it is language which speaks, not the author.” By “language,” he meant the cultural narratives that author and reader share and that the author uses to communicate.

Both speech and writing are often based on unconscious cognitive processes. Think about it. In conversation you frequently do not plan what you are saying, you just say it, and when writing you often just write away. Underlying these activities are mental models that integrate present stimuli with memory to achieve a momentary goal. Consciously, you observe what you say or do as it is happening, and build that into a simultaneous conscious mental model. These ideas, which came to me while writing the book, became the foundation for a dual mental model framework. The main idea is that one cognitive mental model is non-conscious, or more accurately, pre-conscious. It, in turn, spawns a conscious mental model. Both mental models can control speech and action, but one does so non-consciously and the other consciously.

If I am correct, the effort to scientifically understand and experiment on consciousness may be even more complicated than we thought, because it would be very difficult to determine, at any given moment, whether a given act of speech or overt behavior is controlled by the pre-conscious or conscious mental model. But AI tools might help identify content features that distinguish between responses controlled by one mental model or the other.

Lead image: robin.ph / Shutterstock

Joseph LeDoux

Posted on November 17, 2023

Joseph LeDoux is a neuroscientist and the director of the Emotional Brain Institute at NYU. He is also a professor of psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical School. LeDoux’s previous books include The Emotional Brain, Synaptic Self, and The Deep History of Ourselves. He is the lead singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids.

Evolution

Psychology Lost a Great Mind

With his wife, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby transformed our understanding of human nature.

By Steven Pinker    November 14, 2023

On November 10, 2023, my dear friend John Tooby died—or as he would have put it, finally lost his struggle with entropy.

John was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who together with his wife, Leda Cosmides, founded the field of evolutionary psychology. But that academic accomplishment doesn’t do him justice; it’s the institutional embodiment of the way his mind worked. John had insight into human nature worthy of our greatest novelists and playwrights, grounded in an understanding of the natural world worthy of our greatest scientists. Evolution for him was a link in an explanatory chain that connected human thought and feeling to the laws of the natural world.

It was this depth of thinking that made John’s company so precious. His conversations would mix sly observations of people’s foibles with profound allusions to science, history, and culture. Conference audiences forgave him for his famously discursive presentations, in which he might use up his time with a digression on the Big Bang before he ever got to the data.

Belying the canard that evolutionary psychology is a bunch of post hoc just-so stories, John, together with Leda and their students, published many experimental findings that confirmed nonobvious predictions about a wide range of psychological phenomena. These included statistical thinking, the perception of race, the development of sibling feelings, and the emotion of anger.

But John’s greatest accomplishment was bringing to fruition Darwin’s prediction that “psychology will be placed on a new foundation.” That foundation is natural selection, since it alone can carve nooks of beneficial organization out of a universe that relentlessly slides into disorder. As he and Leda put it in a paper title, “The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology.” The primary challenge for a science of mind is to explain how such improbable feats as perception, reasoning, and goal-seeking could have arisen in a world in which overall entropy must increase. The answer ultimately lies in the only force in nature that can temporarily shape matter into functioning organs, including the human brain.

His influence on me is retroviral, chimeric: I can barely distinguish his thinking from my own.

In a set of foundational papers written when he was a postdoc around 1990, John, with Leda and his graduate advisor Irv DeVore, laid out principles for how to analyze human nature as a product of evolution. Evolution does not imply that humans are naked apes: There is a tension in evolutionary thinking between phylogeny, which left us similar to our primate ancestors, and adaptation, which fitted us to a distinctive niche. He called it the cognitive niche—not a concrete ecozone like the savannah, but an ability to use knowledge, sociality, and language in real time to outcompete species that can react only in evolutionary time. The logic of natural selection implies that humans are not “fitness-maximizers,” pumping out as many babies as possible, but “ancestral-fitness-cue-maximizers,” seeking satisfactions that correlated with fitness in the environments in which we spent our evolutionary history (sweets with energy, sex with reproduction, revenge with deterrence).

John and Leda also reconciled the universality of human nature with the uniqueness of the individual by distinguishing the levels on which selection works. In our functional design, we must be birds of a feather, because sexual recombination scrambles our blueprints every generation. But in our molecular makeup, each of us is unique, as if to change the combinations to our locks every generation so that the pathogens that constantly evolve to safecrack our tissues have to start all over with our siblings and children.

John was also famous among his friends for his bon mots. In an email lamenting the dogmas of his field, he wrote, “A litmus test of how attached someone is to something is what they will give up in order to keep it. To judge by recent controversies, anthropologists are willing to give up consistency, science, logic, scientific epistemology, and belief in an external world in order to keep their faith in the founding myths of cultural particularism and arbitrariness.” At a dinner one night, a first-year graduate student noted how he preferred his new intellectual freedom to the pressure for immediate results he had endured in industry: “I like coming home at the end of the day not having accomplished anything.” John replied, “Young man, you have a bright future in academia.”

John explored the dark side of human nature unsentimentally, but also our better angels with appropriate awe. Fittingly so, because I can think of no specimen of Homo sapiens who better exemplifies the best of what we’re capable of: astonishing erudition, speed-of-light wit, panoptic curiosity, staggering intellectual power, and saintly good nature. John was jolly, self-effacing, altruistic. He showed that at least one member of our species can confer immense benefits to others regardless of the costs to self. I experienced this during a blessed sabbatical in Santa Barbara when John took time away from his own deadlines to give transformative advice on a draft of How the Mind Works. His influence on me is retroviral, chimeric: so thoroughly embedded in my brain that I can barely distinguish his ways of thinking from my own. The good men do is interred with their bones, and I know that many other colleagues and students are beneficiaries of his largesse.

When entropy finally overtook John, it left a huge hole in the lives of those who knew him, and another in the ecosystem of ideas.

Lead photo courtesy of  UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology

Steven Pinker

Posted on November 14, 2023

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and the author of The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, The Stuff of Thought, and other books influenced by John Tooby.

General

- Print Edition 52

General

Print Edition 52

By Liz Greene    December 8, 2023

Issue 52 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our September and October 2023 online issues. It includes contributions from science writer Philip Ball, journalist Elena Kazamia, astrophysicist Paul M. Sutter, writer Shruti Ravindran, and more. This issue also features new illustrations by Mark Belan.

Geoscience

- How Earth Once Cooled Off

- A New Way to Trigger a Tsunami

Geoscience

How Earth Once Cooled Off

A geological discovery shows how carbon was captured to chill the planet.

By Marcia Bjornerud    December 27, 2023

Could understanding the forces that drove former ice ages on Earth help us figure out how to slow or even reverse global warming? It’s a question scientists have spent considerable time contemplating.

The geologic record shows that many dramatic historic fluctuations in Earth’s climate—including ice ages and periods of accelerated warming—were driven by imbalances in the carbon cycle. Humans are clearly responsible for the current imbalance—we emit 50 times more carbon dioxide annually than all the world’s active volcanoes combined, far outstripping the capacity of natural “sinks” (like the oceans and forests) to drain and sequester that excess CO_2 from the atmosphere.

But when we look at the distant past, explaining carbon cycle imbalances becomes more complex, since Earth’s carbon system is composed of many components—plants, animals, soils, oceans, rocks—interacting over timescales ranging from months to millions of years.

It’s tempting to think these carbon-gobbling minerals could help us avert climate disaster.

Now a new paper proposes a bold idea about what has turned Earth icy more than once in its long history. The authors, MIT’s Joshua Murray and Oliver Jagoutz, suggest that our planet’s ice ages may have been brought on by a previously unrecognized link between plate tectonics—the drifts and collisions of pieces of Earth’s crust—and Earth’s capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere over long timescales. The study builds on earlier observations that unusual rocks called ophiolites formed during several periods of pronounced cooling in the Paleozoic Era, 541 to 252 million years ago.

Ophiolites—derived from a Greek root meaning “serpent”—are anomalies. Seen from above, they resemble writhing piles of snakes. These exposed slabs of ancient oceanic crust and underlying upper mantle were formed at oceanic ridges but are found high in mountains like the Alps and Himalayas, having been thrust onto continents during tectonic plate collisions.

Ophiolites are composed of volcanic basalts and other igneous rocks called gabbro and peridotite. When exposed to the atmosphere, basalt and peridotite interact with carbon dioxide to form carbonate minerals like calcite that store carbon dioxide in solid form. In fact, some contemporary proposed carbon dioxide removal strategies are based on this process, with modest success to date.

Geoscientists have previously speculated that ice ages in the Paleozoic—including two linked to mass extinction events—could have been driven by ophiolites that were exposed when the supercontinent Pangea took shape between about 350 and 200 million years ago. Those ophiolites captured so much carbon, goes the thinking, that the planet was plunged into a freezing spell.

ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: A geologist takes samples from an alpine ophiolite outcrop. Photo by nicolabelotti96 / Shutterstock.

But the authors of earlier studies were not able to explain one important aspect of the rock record during these periods of cooling: namely, big changes in the ratio of two carbon isotopes. Over time, sedimentary rocks from marine environments record changes in the relative abundance of carbon isotopes in the ocean and atmosphere.

The two varieties of carbon in question, 13C and 12C, are stable and similar in every way—except that the lighter 12C is easier for photosynthesizing organisms, such as trees and phytoplankton to process. “Organic” carbon like that found in peat, coal, or petroleum thus has relatively more 12C and less 13C than the “raw” carbon dioxide spewed by volcanoes. During each of the half dozen Paleozoic ice ages, the ratio of 13C to 12C rose significantly, indicating that large volumes of photosynthetically fixed, light 12C disappeared from the ocean and atmosphere.

This is where ophiolites come in. When rainwater weathers them, they produce certain minerals known as smectites, often called “expansive” or “fat” clays. Their crystal structure has exceptionally high surface area, enabling them to soak up water—and ensnare large amounts of organic matter containing 12C-heavy carbon. (Clays produced by weathering of more ordinary igneous rock types, such as granite, have much lower net surface area.)

Using a computer model of the geochemistry of ophiolite weathering, together with global carbon cycle simulations, the authors show that smectite clays derived from ophiolites and buried within marine sediments could plausibly capture enough carbon to match the Paleozoic variations in 13C/12C—and tip the world into an ice age.

Today, the Earth is closer to tipping in the opposite direction, and it’s tempting to think that perhaps carbon-gobbling smectites could help us avert climate disaster. Of course, the study’s simulations run on timescales of millions of years. Unlike humans, ophiolites and other rocks have all the time in the world.

Lead image: Ilija Erceg / Shutterstock

Marcia Bjornerud

Posted on December 27, 2023

Marcia Bjornerud is a professor of geology at Lawrence University and the author of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and was a 2000-2001 Fulbright Scholar.

Geoscience

A New Way to Trigger a Tsunami

How historic records and new data uncovered the colossal underwater avalanche that unleashed a massive wave in 1650.

By Marcia Bjornerud    December 1, 2023

After centuries in repose, volcanoes may reawaken, clear their throats, let off steam, and, if provoked, explode. As in human fits of rage, a volcano’s violent outburst is often self-amplifying: Their response to a small disturbance can feed on itself, spiraling into a tantrum. As a result, a furious eruption can arise from a relatively modest trigger, making some outcomes—like a devastating tsunami—unpredictable.

Volcanic eruptions are always formidable, but they’re especially perilous underwater, where cause and effect may become entangled, each fueling the other. A recent study published in Nature Communications vividly illustrates this, taking advantage of new imaging data and simulations to reconstruct the murky events beneath the Aegean Sea that caused a destructive tsunami in 1650. The results could help make tsunami-warning systems more effective, the researchers say, because reliable early warnings depend on understanding the temperament of submerged volcanoes.

The volcano, Kolumbo, whose eruption is linked to the 1650 tsunami, is part of an infamous family of volcanic islands and seamounts known collectively as the Hellenic Arc. The most notorious of these is Thera, or Santorini, whose catastrophic eruption around 1600 B.C. devastated the Minoan civilization and is a perennial favorite on lists of possible sites for Plato’s lost city of Atlantis. Although the 17th-century eruption of Kolumbo was far smaller, it generated a tsunami 66 feet high on the island of Ios a dozen miles north.

The new study combines eye-witness accounts of the 1650 tsunami—including observations from Santorini that the seas had retreated before the wave struck—with detailed maps of the seafloor’s shape, imaging of the volcano’s insides from seismic wave data, photographs of the crater taken by a remotely operated submarine, and computer modeling of how tsunamis form. Scientists have previously attributed volcano-related tsunamis to underwater earthquakes triggered by the molten rock moving beneath the seafloor, or an explosive discharge of volcanic gasses, or the collapse of a volcano after it ejects its molten contents—or some nightmarish combination of these.

It was like a gargantuan, deadly, bottle of champagne being uncorked.

But the new data gathered from Kolumbo point to another compelling scenario that could create a wave with the height and power described in historical records: the collapse of one flank of the volcano in a massive submarine avalanche. The seafloor map shows a series of terraces on the northwest side of the volcano. That’s probably how it would end up if a huge volume of material slid down the volcano’s slope, stacking up on itself like a chain-reaction pile-up on a highway. According to seismic imaging of the volcano, which reveals its interior architecture, faults in loose volcanic sediment caused the terraces to form. Counterintuitively, however, the researchers suggest that this colossal submarine landslide was not only the result—but also a cause—of Kolumbo’s eruption.

Sometime in the years before the tsunami, they suggest, Kolumbo began to have small eruptions of gassy magma, spewing powdery ash. This loose material started to accumulate, unstably, on top of ash and broken rocks from previous eruptions on the volcano’s flanks. Then one day, a large mass on the northwest side broke away from the summit and slid down. This dramatic relocation of matter left a void for the overlying seawater to fill, setting in motion a giant wave that rippled toward nearby islands, where the sea briefly retreated before slamming into the coasts, striking Ios with the greatest energy.

Meanwhile, the sudden removal of so much weight from the surface of the volcano itself destabilized the magma chamber deep inside, like a gargantuan, deadly, bottle of champagne being uncorked. Carbon dioxide and other gasses that had been dissolved in the magma when the volcanic “lid” was on came bubbling violently out. This, in turn, abruptly lowered the magma’s density, propelling it to the surface in an explosion 10 times larger than the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens in Washington State, which unleashed the energy of 25,000 atomic bombs.

The authors emphasize that this scenario, in which a series of modest, gassy eruptions set in motion a chain of ruinous events, is a sobering lesson for those who strive to protect the public from natural disasters. Volcanoes, like volatile people, may sometimes give no clear sign about what they are about to do. The challenge for tsunami prediction is to recognize which volcanoes vent quietly, and which ones just can’t seem to control themselves.

Lead image: Shutterstock AI Generator / Shutterstock

Marcia Bjornerud

Posted on December 1, 2023

Marcia Bjornerud is a professor of geology at Lawrence University and the author of Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and was a 2000-2001 Fulbright Scholar.

Health

- The Bittersweet Science

Health

The Bittersweet Science

Boxing is reputed to fight Parkinson’s Disease. I put on the gloves to find out.

By Mark MacNamara    December 8, 2023

The notion of boxing as the “sweet science” is often thought to have been coined in 1956 by the great New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling. He used the term as the title of his definitive book on the sport, but he took it—with much appreciation—from a British sportswriter, Pierce Egan. In 1813, Egan wrote about the “sweet science of bruising” in his master work, Boxiana. The book is a collection of magazine pieces set in a bloody, bare-knuckled world opposite Jane Austen’s.

As for the “sweet science,” no one ever really defines it. A carefully thrown knockout punch to a sweet spot on the chin is one possible derivation. There’s also the play on a science with so little apparent sweetness. But that’s not it. The sweet science Liebling and Egan describe had more to do with British principles of “stoic virtues,” “generosity,” and “true courage”—altogether, life in a contradictory place. It’s a square ring, after all, where sometimes hope transcends the specter of an awful inevitability.

Or so I’ve come to think, on a journey I’ve begun in the past year, exploring how the sweet science can be used as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease—that increasingly common degenerative disorder of the nervous system, tied to a loss of the brain chemical dopamine, which is involved in movement, memory, motivation, and cognition.

Someone told her she moved like a wavy wind sock outside a used car lot. “Exactly how I feel,” she said.

In October 2022, a longtime tennis partner noticed something “strange” in my stride, along with a noisy shuffle. “Fatigue,” I replied with pique. The truth is I’m 75 and had known something might not be right for years, particularly the ominous hand tremors, as well as the night-of-the-living-dead gait and a facial expression to match. Add severe anxiety in public places and bizarre nightmares, some quite disturbing.

I found a specialist to resolve the matter. We talked on the phone. “I don’t think you have Parkinson’s, but why don’t you come in,” she said. I did and within minutes she changed her mind. She was struck by the tremors on both my left and right side, and by some other more subtle indications, like an occasional difficulty in swallowing. She recommended a physical therapist to conduct the Mini-BESTest: Balance Evaluation Systems Test. Among the challenges: you stand on one leg for 20 seconds then the other leg; walk quickly up and down a hallway, while looking up and down, then to the left and right; stand in a corner on a cushion with eyes closed, not touching the wall. Finally, the therapist holds on to your shoulders and tries to pull you down from behind.

I enjoy these kinds of tests and did well enough that the physical therapist thought I was on the bubble, at least in terms of balance. She suggested I return in six months and brought up the matter of meds. I explained that I ran regularly and would like to depend on natural dopamine for as long as I could. Exercise has long been known to boost dopamine. One of the cruelties of Parkinson’s is that there is no blood or other test to confirm it. But if certain meds like Carbidopa-Levodopa cause certain symptoms to subside, then you probably suffer from it. Probably. Or, perhaps you have a variation, which may be even more debilitating.

In the end, I surrendered to the meds, but in the six months before my diagnosis became clearer, I kept with the delusion that I was athletic enough to generate my own dopamine, and so I began running several miles a week. Then one day a friend asked if I’d heard about Rock Steady Boxing. I hadn’t. “Well,” they said. “You should try it. Might sound counterintuitive, but you don’t really hit anybody. It’s about redoing the wiring.”

Rock Steady Boxing was founded in 2006 by a 40-year-old prosecutor named Scott Newman and a two-time Golden Gloves boxer named Vincent Perez. At the time, Newman had been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s. Perez drew Newman into a world focused on optimizing reflexes, balance, dexterity, and coordination. The two men worked six days a week getting Newman back in shape, using prolonged exercises done as strenuously as possible.

As Newman’s health and spirits lifted, he imagined a business opportunity. It was to create a noncontact boxing program to help people in their struggle with both motor and non-motor symptoms. The scientific basis was to use intense exercise to stimulate the natural flow of dopamine. At the cellular level, dopamine also helps protect the nerve cells attacked by the disease.

Now, 17 years later, Rock Steady Boxing operates as a nonprofit organization headquartered in Indianapolis. Today there are nearly 900 affiliates across the country, and more than a dozen abroad.

In October 2022, I began going to a Rock Steady Boxing gym at the southern end of Silicon Valley, in Santa Clara, near Levi’s Stadium. It’s a modest, two-ring gym called Relentless Boxing, equipped with a farrago of bags, weights, ropes, tires, medicine balls, and gloves, and on the walls, poster tributes to local champions. The mood is both friendly and guarded. Most participants have mild to moderate tremors and mobility issues. There are at least a dozen regulars, four or five women, all mostly retirees over 50, a handful over 70. One man arrives with his wife to help him along. A few people work from chairs, rather than yoga mats.

COACH ROB: After beating childhood cancer, Rob Putnam went on to become a featherweight boxer. Now he’s the head coach of the Rock Steady Boxing program in Santa Clara, California, helping people fight Parkinson’s disease. Photo courtesy of Rob Putnam.

Class includes three major components: aerobics, strengthening, and balance training. Also, core muscle stretching. Postures come from yoga, judo, jujitsu, and other martial arts. Calisthenics include coordination drill-stations such as jumping jacks, jump ropes, the speed bags, situps, and pushups—always as many as you can, and when you can’t go on, the coaches, particularly the local franchise owner and head coach at Relentless Boxing, Rob Putnam, 36, urges you to keep going anyway. You work as hard as you can for short periods of time. Exhaustion is healing. The idea is you survive Parkinson’s by thinking in terms of three-minute rounds.

The daily routine varies but often it’s in the last 30 minutes that you put on the gloves and hit the heavy bags, as hard and fast as you can for three minutes, the length of a round in the ring. Boxing features four core punches: jab, cross, hook, and uppercut. Add basic defensive moves: bob and weave, advance and retreat. In one exercise, you quickly memorize a six-punch combination, which might include punches and moves. Then you box for 60 seconds. Rest for 10 seconds. Then another combination, rest, and another. You’re working mind and body, ever faster. As you become proficient, over months and years, Coach Rob urges you to visualize the heavy bag as an actual opponent, so you imagine facial features, body type, strengths, and weaknesses. The purpose is to sharpen focus, personalize, tune the signals, and learn to be meticulous.

The most satisfying part of a class is when the coach puts on his mitts, not unlike a catcher’s glove, and invites you to punch him. Or her. The coach literally catches your punch. This is the closest you get to real contact. The coach calls out punches by name or number (1 for jab, 2 for cross, etc.) and you hit the corresponding mitt. If you’re skillful, and resilient, you get into a rhythm. You hear it as the gloves make contact. You’re working in and out of range of your opponent, bobbing and weaving, and it all becomes an aesthetic, a kind of dancing.

From time to time someone falls in class, which includes exercises for falling and getting up again. Falling is the great menace with Parkinson’s. Phyllis fell a few weeks ago, with hardly any warning. She was standing by the gym entrance, chatting. No need for an ambulance but unnerving. “It’s not like fainting,” she said, “more as though gravity had pulled you down out of thin air.” She’s a retired teacher, ever optimistic, sweet as anything, and while at the beginning of class we stand in a circle practicing voice exercises, she moves around in place, endlessly swaying. Someone told her she moved like a wavy wind sock outside a used car lot. “Exactly how I feel,” she said with a smile.

Phyllis has been with Rock Steady Boxing for more than three years. She finds it enormously helpful, particularly the cognitive aspect. Rock Steady Boxing is her one refuge. “The reason I joined was less for the exercise than to learn something new,” she told me. She’s lost 50 pounds, become calmer, less frustrated, more confident, and slightly more coordinated. She especially appreciates the way coaches can read her movement and suggest ways to retrain her body. She’s come to depend on the immediate effect these directions often seem to have. And yet as much progress as she’s made, she still has moments when her legs freeze. She told me she was in a nightmare running through a field and jumping a hurdle. “Actually, I was throwing myself out of bed. It’s happened before. I’ve had several black eyes. The worst was when I hit my face on the nightstand and broke my nose.”

Before and after class, people exchange tips. “This neurologist returns calls, not that one.” “So-and-so is going to have Deep Brain Stimulation.” “Have you heard about the work of Peter Tass at Stanford who has developed a vibrating hand glove that may have a profound effect on Parkinson’s?” “If you have Parkinson’s, how do you explain to your children they may inherit it?” “You’ve got to read Ray Dorsey’s new book, Ending Parkinson’s Disease, a Prescription for Action. He traces the disease back to the London smoke fogs in the 1870s. He says Parkinson’s is preventable if you can limit your exposure to the deadly chemicals around us, like the children who worked as chimney sweeps in the 1700s defeated scrotal cancer.”

If you can rebuild self-acceptance, then you don’t care what somebody in the restaurant thinks of your tremors.

In these conversations at the gym, there are always the questions underneath: Does Rock Steady Boxing really work? And for how long and under what conditions? The consensus among people I spoke with—neurologists, physical therapists, trainers, and participants—is that it does work. For me, it has. After a year, I’ve acquired strength and agility, although the arm tremors and awkward gait are about the same. Friends say I seem more energized and focused. The Rock Steady Boxing 1 to 5 scale, where 1 is high, meaning 1 is your goal, had me at one 1.5 when I started and after 8 months, I moved up to 1. A subtle improvement but encouraging, if only for a moment.

Terry Ellis is an associate professor at Boston University who investigates the effects of exercise on the progression of Parkinson’s. She’s a coauthor of a 2019 Frontiers in Neurology article on the effects of Rock Steady Boxing on Parkinson’s, which offered a rather depressing conclusion: “Despite growth in the popularity of boxing for Parkinson’s and some positive findings, there is limited evidence of efficacy.”

Recently, Ellis took a much more positive position. Rock Steady Boxing, she told me, was “a great idea, a great program,” but it’s not about boxing per se. It’s about how jabs, crosses, hooks, and undercuts get your heart rate up, just as aerobic, strength, and balance training do. She added, “There’s been many rigorous studies that show aerobic exercise impacts the brain of people with Parkinson’s and reduces the severity of motor symptom problems. Those studies also show aerobic exercise stabilizes the progression of Parkinson’s.” Still, the question remains how to keep adjusting the program over many years, especially for people who may face other illnesses.

Kimball Magoni, 69, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 10 years ago. He lives in Massachusetts and has been going to the same Rock Steady Boxing class for nearly five years. He’s also a licensed clinical psychologist and these days accepts only Parkinson’s patients. Magoni has become increasingly interested in the power of camaraderie to deal with the whole Parkinson’s kit of grief, anger, loneliness, helplessness, self-pity, and shame. Many people, following their diagnosis, Magoni said, feel lost from their community.

“It’s like coming home when you were a kid,” Magoni told me. “If you had a happy house, a sanctuary you’re a part of, that takes care of a whole lot of crap. You walk in, you’re valued. That’s what’s so unique about Rock Steady Boxing. With the right group, people will connect, they will support each other, they will feel much less anxious about their Parkinson’s. Why? Because they’ve got a place where they’re back to being valued for who they are, not what symptoms they have, or don’t have. They find their way through places like Rock Steady Boxing back into the tribe. And if you can rebuild self-acceptance, which is so critical, then you don’t care what somebody at the next table in the restaurant thinks of your tremors.”

Magoni noted that one benefit of Rock Steady Boxing is the feeling of control derived from boxing itself. Even if you’re unable to stand, and box while sitting in a chair, you feel relief by being physically aggressive, active rather than passive.

Fortunately, every other day there’s the curative promise of the gym and the song of the speed bag.

Not long ago, I paid my regular visit to the physical therapist. Once more she gave me the Balance Evaluation Systems Test. The score had barely changed. In fact, the result was slightly better than six months earlier. The therapist was delighted. Yet there was something amiss. One exercise involved walking briskly a few yards to a cone and back, while counting down from say 100 in threes. I mangled it. Twice. Which was strange because a few months earlier I had no problem. The therapist shrugged. “No matter, this happens sometimes under duress. What else is going on in your life?”

A few days after the promising test score, I have one of my periodic nightmares. I’m hiding in a small room in the district attorney’s office. I once served as the public information officer in the San Francisco DA’s Office. In the dream, my archenemy is standing just outside the door. I’m terrified he’ll discover me. I decide to rush him, make a last stand, howling as I go. And then as I crash through the door I see the face, but it’s not my archenemy, whoever that might be, it’s someone I don’t recognize at all. I wake up and find myself hitting my wife with the back of my hand. She yells at me to stop and then firmly, without a word, she holds down my arm until I go back to sleep.

The next morning, I wake up with my daily unease, that whole kaboodle of dream bits and now new guilt, plus the ominous specter of insignificant tasks, the idea that I am slowly disappearing, and the worry over empathy’s end—for others and myself. Fortunately, every other day there’s the curative promise of the gym and the song of the speed bag. Today is on but I’m caught between the desire for solitude and the solace of others. I pick others.

When I arrive, Michael, a retired building contractor, greets me with his mantra about this being the one exclusive club nobody wants to join. We smile. We shake our heads. I look to see who else is there. Phyllis is swaying rhythmically to gym pop. Steve, on the speed bag, throttles it like a pro. And then there’s Cyndie, a lithe, red-headed spirit and a former executive assistant to a county health officer. She’s been coming to Rock Steady for six years, she just turned 60. She joined Rock Steady Boxing on the recommendation of her neurologist at Stanford. Friends told her she was nuts. Her parents, churchgoers from the Midwest, were both supportive and very curious. They came to visit. She showed them there was no danger because there was no contact and anyway, she was the last person in the world with any interest in punching or being punched. They came round and over the years many of her symptoms have not progressed. “Frankly, I don’t know if it works,” she told me. “I think it does. All I know for sure is that I came initially out of curiosity, and now I stay for the comradery.”

As people gather ’round, Coach Rob takes quick stock of how people are doing: who’s on a peak, who’s in a valley. He doesn’t see plateaus with Parkinson’s, he sees arcs: the man who arrived in a wheelchair and two years later discarded his cane and stood up to punch the bags; the man who was making good progress but then stopped coming, reclaimed old bad habits and declined. One truth about Rock Steady Boxing is you have to stay with it, and of course nothing is certain.

Rob was once a featherweight boxer by trade, 5’6”, 147 pounds, reminiscent of Daniel Mendoza, a 5’ 7”, 160-pound Jewish fighter from London’s Whitehall district who in the 1780s became one of the great boxers of his day. He was distinguished by lightning glove speed, a mesmerizing ability to bob and weave, and, above all, to anticipate his opponent. He pioneered Muhammed Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy and in 1789 started a boxing school devoted to technique. He also wrote a book, The Art of Boxing, in which he described the sweet science in terms of maximizing reflexes, balance, dexterity, and coordination—all aspects of the Rock Steady Boxing training.

Coach Rob had three bouts of cancer as a child, including a bone marrow transplant at age 9. At one point, all the other children in his ward had died. Doctors said his survival was due partly to the muscle mass he acquired learning karate at age 3 and partly to the martial-arts-style physical therapy he received in the hospital. He said he learned to “visualize my white cells literally beating up my cancer cells.” Which led to his notion of imagining a face and arms on the big body bag. He told me he came away from childhood with an iron optimism based on the conviction that “I wasn’t allowed to lose. That was my mother’s doing. Each time the cancer came back she taught me to think of it as an opportunity: ‘OK, well, I guess I get another fight.’ Does that make any sense?”

Of course it does. And yet I’m not so rock solid in my own conviction. The metaphor that describes my orientation is not the ring but the high wire, where I feel as though I’m plodding along mile after mile, trusting that my good balance will save me, if I’m lucky, disciplined, and follow all the best advice. I’ve come to believe that Rock Steady Boxing works best that way—if you make it into a mission control center that brings together the newest exercise and medical strategies, and the power of the group.

I’m actually more loner than comrade. But I won’t forget the fellow boxer who came up to me to ask if I could re-strap his glove, which had come undone. He looked exhausted and proud, stoic, and very thankful for my small help, thankful in a way that captured exactly the definition of the sweet science, which I now think of as an antidote to inevitability, an untightening of the fist.

Lead image: wabeno / Shutterstock

Mark MacNamara

Posted on December 8, 2023

Mark MacNamara, a writer and journalist based in Asheville, North Carolina, has written for such publications as Nautilus, Salon, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Vanity Fair.

History

- History’s Five Best Body Part Stories

- Tesla’s Pigeon

History

History’s Five Best Body Part Stories

Charles I’s neck bone, Queen Victoria’s armpit, and other fabulously gruesome medical tales.

By Kristen French    December 8, 2023

A few years ago, medical historian and surgeon-in-training Suzie Edge was in the operating room preparing to amputate a patient’s leg. She began telling her colleagues just how such an amputation might have gone during the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, when there were no anesthetics or antiseptics, and doctors relied on surgical saws to do their work. With a combination of admiration and mild rebuke, the head of surgery told her, “Suzie, you really need to go and tell these stories somewhere else.”

So she did. Edge began posting short videos recounting gory stories of the body parts of historical figures on TikTok. She soon developed a large and adoring following. Many of them offered up their own bloody anecdotes in comments. “They just kept on suggesting things and saying, ‘Have you looked at this?’ ‘Have you looked at that?’” says Edge. “Suddenly, I had this huge pile of body parts.” It was enough material for a book, so she wrote one: Vital Organs: The History of the World’s Most Famous Body Parts. It was published earlier this year.

“It’s something that we’re not supposed to like, we’re not supposed to be interested,” she says of the broad appeal of guts and gore. But she found that thinking about actual bodies in all of their vital carnality really brought the historical characters she had been studying to life. Below, five of Edge’s favorite body part stories, in her own words.

He was the only person to stab the Queen and get away with it.

1. Charles I’s Neck Bone

The first story that really stuck with me was about Charles I. His head was chopped off in 1649, and he was stuck in a temporary vault with Henry VIII and a couple of others. But the Georgians [as the folks in England from 1714 to 1837 were known] loved to open tombs and coffins and have a poke, so when his body was found, the doctor had a look and said, “Oh yes, this, this definitely looks like somebody who’s had his head chopped off.” There was a slice through the cervical vertebrae. Now the doctor stole a little piece of sliced neck bone and took it home, and he turned it into a salt cellar. He pushed it around at dinner parties. This went on for years until Queen Victoria got wind of it, and she said, “That’s really odd, and, uh, can we put it back please?” So the coffin was opened up and it was put back. I just found that remarkable. It sent me digging for more of these body part tales.

2. Alexis St. Martin’s Stomach

I think one of my absolute favorites is a chap in Canada who, in the 1820s, was shot at close range in the chest. The wound didn’t really heal very well, so he was left with an open hole in his stomach. You could see into it. A doctor took control of him and did hundreds of experiments, putting things into this guy’s stomach. At one point he stuck his tongue in to see how it would taste. And it just went on from there. His story brought up a lot of wider ethical questions: What should we do with body parts and human remains and medical consent?

3. Queen Victoria’s Armpit

Women’s issues were not written about as much in medical literature during the 1800s, but I did go looking for good stories about women. In 1871, when Queen Victoria was in her castle in Scotland, she noticed an annoying swelling in her armpit. It was an abscess, a collection of pus under the skin. It was the size of an orange, which made it hard for her to move her arm, so they called surgeon Joseph Lister to come from Edinburgh. Lister, a surgeon who furthered antiseptics hugely, had developed this funny contraption he called the donkey engine. It could spray an area being operated on with carbolic acid [also known as phenol or benzenol], which would kill any bacteria it touched. So he sprayed this yellow mist all around Queen Victoria’s room and, mistakenly, into her face. She survived the surgery, and after that Lister would tell people he was the only person to stab the Queen and get away with it. Others tried to assassinate Queen Victoria—but nobody else got as close to her with a knife.

“Oh yes, this definitely looks like somebody who’s had his head chopped off.”

4. Louis XIV’s Fistula

The King developed a sore bum, and he prodded and poked it and wouldn’t leave it alone until he made it worse. And he, too, developed an abscess—a perianal abscess. And then it just got so bad that he eventually developed a fistula, a new hole in his rear end. Eventually a surgeon was called, because the physician couldn’t do much for him. But the surgeon said, “I’ll need to practice.” So he went out into the streets of Paris to find his test subjects, and he practiced on people in prisons. He came back and he operated on the King. It took three hours. But he cleaned out this wound, and the King survived. The best part is that the people within the King’s court, people with no fistulas, they began asking for this operation. Some of them probably didn’t end up as well as the King.

5. Napoleon’s Penis

Another wild story is about Napoleon. He was dead and they did an autopsy. At the time, the doctor who did the autopsy thought, “I know, I’ve got a good idea. I’m going to cut off this man’s penis.” And he did. And he handed it to a priest who smuggled it off Saint Helena island. It was passed between booksellers—booksellers are strange people—and put on display. Eventually it was bought by a urologist, and it now lives in a basement in New Jersey. The urologist did have a look: He X-rayed it and all he could say for sure was that it was a penis. He’s like, “Well, we can’t say it’s Napoleon’s.” But the woman who now owns it—because the urologist passed it on to his daughter when he died—she just keeps it hidden away and doesn’t want anybody photographing it or dealing with it. And yet, we’re still talking about it, aren’t we?

Lead image: paseven / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 8, 2023

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus.

History

Tesla’s Pigeon

An inventor, a bird, and a plan to connect all the minds in the world.

By Amanda Gefter    December 6, 2023

On a February morning in 1935, a disoriented homing pigeon flew into the open window of an unoccupied room at the Hotel New Yorker. It had a band around its leg, but where it came from, or was meant to be headed, no one could say. While management debated what to do, a maid rushed to the 33rd floor and knocked at the door of the hotel’s most infamous denizen: Nikola Tesla.

The 78-year-old inventor quickly volunteered to take in the homeless pigeon.

“Dr. Tesla … dropped work on a new electrical project, lest his charge require some little attention,” reported The New York Times. “The man who recently announced the discovery of an electrical death-beam, powerful enough to destroy 10,000 airplanes at a swoop, carefully spread towels on his window ledge and set down a little cup of seed.”

Nikola Tesla—the Serbian-American scientist famous for designing the alternating current motor and the Tesla coil—had, for years, regularly been spotted skulking through the nighttime streets of midtown Manhattan, feeding the birds at all hours. In the dark, he’d sound a low whistle, and from the gloom, hordes of pigeons would flock to the old man, perching on his outstretched arms. He was known to keep baskets in his room as nests, along with caches of homemade seed mix, and to leave his windows perpetually open so the birds could come and go. Once, he was arrested for trying to lasso an injured homing pigeon in the plaza of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and, from his holding cell in the 34th Street precinct, had to convince the officers that he was—or had been—one of the most famous inventors in the world.

Tesla said that he and his bird could speak to one another mind to mind.

It had been years since he’d produced a successful invention. He was gaunt and broke—living off of debt and good graces—having been kicked out of a string of hotels, a trail of pigeon droppings and unpaid rent in his wake. He had no family or close friends, except for the birds.

And one in particular.

He told his biographer, John O’Neill, the story himself. “I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them, for years,” Tesla said. “But there was one pigeon, a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I would know that pigeon anywhere. No matter where I was that pigeon would find me; when I wanted her I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. She understood me and I understood her. I loved that pigeon.”

“Yes,” he continued, “I loved that pigeon.”

Tesla said that he and his bird could speak to one another mind to mind, and that sometimes, as they silently conversed, beams of light would shoot from her eyes.

It would be easy to dismiss the pigeon chapter of Tesla’s life as a bizarre or pathetic turn of events: the once-great engineer who wowed the world with dazzling displays of electricity, whose inventions shaped the way currents ran through our cities and electrified our homes, descending into loneliness or madness, believing himself to be in a romantic relationship with a telepathic bird.

But in doing so, we’d miss something critical. For it wasn’t really a turn of events at all. In a way, they were all of a piece—the blazing currents, the ingenious inventions, the notion of conversing mind to mind—in a moment in time when the universe suddenly had been turned on its head, when the discovery of invisible waves from the electromagnetic spectrum opened up strange new spaces, and the line between the possible and the impossible cut the shape of a wing.

Tesla’s love of pigeons was an obsession with a capital O. Likely followed by a capital C and a capital D. He seems to have suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, and his case was severe. As a child, he described, “I contracted many strange likes, dislikes and habits.” Dislikes included: anything too round (“the sight of a pearl would almost give me a fit”; “I would get a fever by looking at a peach”) and touching another person’s hair (“except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver”). Likes included: doing things in threes (hence his hotel room on the 33rd floor). As for habits, there was counting: the steps in his walks, the cubical contents of his soup. “If I missed I felt impelled to do it all over again,” he recalled, “even if it took hours.”

He was, from an early age, tormented by intrusive thoughts, a textbook symptom of OCD, though his were extreme: ideas and images that gripped his mind with such unrelenting force they bordered on hallucination. They were often accompanied by flashes of light, the air around him “filled with tongues of living flame.” At times, Tesla’s perceptions seemed to be amplified. “I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table in the room would cause a dull thud in my ear,” he wrote in his autobiography.

IN THE AIR: Nikola Tesla (sometime around 1898) holds a lightbulb several feet away from a generator, and it nevertheless continues to shine. The late 19th century was a time when light, power, messages, and voices could suddenly be summoned from the ether—there seemed no reason to think this fantastical progression should stop short of brainwaves and thoughts. Credit: Scewing / Wikimedia Commons .

These experiences shaped the way Tesla thought about thought itself. Because he had little control over them, he felt them to be coming from the outside, as if he were picking up unwanted signals from the world around him. Soon he grew convinced that all thought came from the outside—that our brains pluck images, ideas, and inventions from the environment. “The brain is not an accumulator as commonly held in philosophy,” he decided, “and contains no records whatever of a phonographic or photographic kind. … The brain has merely the quality to respond.” If only he could figure out how the brain decides which signals to tune into and which to keep out or why some were magnified to such terrifying proportions, he thought, we might finally understand the workings of the mind, and he might finally feel connected to other people and at home in the world.

As a young man Tesla’s mind was widely celebrated as among the brightest of his time. At 26 years old in 1882, Tesla conceived of the alternating-current motor. When it was perfected and built six years later, Tesla’s motor completely redefined how one could use electric currents to induce motion.

Existing motors required mechanical parts to keep their rotors turning in one direction. Those parts were subject to friction—they sparked and wore down; they were a drag on efficiency. In an epiphany, Tesla realized that he could replace those physical parts with electrical currents. Most engineers at the time worked with direct current, which flows in one direction, but Tesla saw the potential of alternating currents, which reverse directions, flowing back and forth. The key, he realized, was to use multiple alternating currents that were out of step with one another. That way, their voltages could cancel out at just the right moments to produce a combined magnetic field that would steadily rotate, causing the rotor to spin. The relationship between currents could do the work of a machine.

“It was a fundamentally brilliant insight,” says W. Bernard Carlson, a historian of technology at the University of Virginia. “To this day, all alternating current motors, whether in the hard drive of your computer or your refrigerator or an elevator, follow the same basic principle. Before Tesla, you only had electric lighting. After Tesla, you could have electric light and power.”

Tesla, though, had something much bigger in mind. It began with the Tesla coil, which he designed in 1891. He had set out to create an induction coil (a device in which the electrical current in one coil of wire induces a current in a second coil of wire) when he realized what would happen if this time the currents were in sync. By adjusting the lengths of the coils so that their electrical vibrations aligned, Tesla discharged a rip-roaring spark.

This was the phenomenon of resonance—the same principle that explains how tuning forks ring and sympathetic pendulums swing, why there’s music in the harmony of the spheres. Tesla turned it into an engineering principle. And he saw that it stood to solve a problem that was vexing science.

Before Tesla, you only had electric lighting. After Tesla, you could have electric light and power.

In 1865, James Clerk Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism, showing that visible light was an electromagnetic vibration—and that there could be others. Only with the discovery of radio waves by Heinrich Hertz, in 1888, did it dawn on scientists that there existed an entire electromagnetic spectrum that was, in principle, infinitely vast. At the lowest end of the known range, radio wavelengths could span the planet, while a wavelength of visible light might be 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair, and gamma rays, in the upper register, vibrated on the scale of atomic nuclei. Wilhelm Röntgen’s 1895 discovery of X-rays only furthered scientists’ feeling that the universe had cracked open and that a brave new world was spilling out. The British newspaper The Standard reported that “the universe was full of different sorts of vibrations, of which [scientists] had not the remotest knowledge or slightest suspicion”—waves that could cut through a London fog, and rays that could pass through buildings and bone.

In a few short years, the world had grown infinitely richer, full of mysterious new possibilities. The question was how to access and utilize those vibrations. What was needed, said physicist William Crookes, who did pioneering work on electron beams, were “more receivers which will respond to wavelengths between certain defined limits and be silent to all others.” This, he said, is “the most difficult of the problems to be solved.”

Tesla saw the solution in resonance. When the alternating currents in his coils vibrated in sync, they not only produced sizzling sparks, they also emitted radio waves—attach an antenna and you’ve got yourself a radio transmitter. By tuning the coils, Tesla could choose the frequency of the emitted waves. In turn, those tuned coils, exposed to radiation coming in through the antenna, would only respond to waves of the resonant frequency. The Tesla coil could serve as a tuned receiver.

“Tesla was one of the first to really understand this idea of tuning,” Carlson says. “His big insight was that radio waves could be resonant phenomena.” Tesla’s coil was a potential solution not only to Crooke’s problem but also, Tesla hoped, to his own—to the problem of how his brain tuned in to the world.

The study of electricity and the nervous system had always gone hand in hand. The first measurements of moving current were made in the 18th century by Luigi Galvani, who connected a frog’s nerve to a long metal wire and held it up to a stormy sky, channeling electricity from the air; when lightning flashed, the frog’s muscles contracted. Alessandro Volta modeled the first battery on the nerves of the electric eel; Samuel Morse used that battery to power his electric telegraph lines, then turned right back around and compared his telegraph to living nerves. An 1837 article in The Scotsman expounded on the possibilities of cities linked by “electric nerves”: “Men a thousand miles from each other would be enabled to confer as if they were in the same apartment, or to read each other’s thoughts as if they were in the sky.”

Just as the first electrically coded messages were being sent along telegraph wires in the 1840s, the first precise measurements of electrical activity in neurons were being made. So when Hertz discovered radio waves traveling wirelessly through the air, a new neural concept suddenly became possible; perhaps there were also “brain waves.”

If accelerating charges in a wire could induce wireless vibrations in the ether, scientists thought, surely sparks in neurons could, too. “Brain waves are fashionable in London at this moment,” read an 1897 edition of the Boston Evening Transcript, reporting on remarks by Crookes. “His brain wave theory is only an extension of the law governing the vibrations of sound and light.” The idea was that somewhere in the vast and unexplored electromagnetic spectrum one could find thought.

“The discovery of wireless radio made people rethink the basic ideas of consciousness,” says Anthony Enns, a researcher at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who studies the history of technology and its relation to pseudoscience. “Crookes was fascinated by the idea of the brain as a kind of radio transmitter and receiver,” while Oliver Lodge, one of the pioneers of radio, “saw consciousness as a kind of energy field that was not located in the brain but surrounded the brain.” If thoughts generated brain waves, why couldn’t other minds pick them up? “The air is as full of brain waves as it is of sunbeams and starlight,” penned one newspaper reporter of the time.

GREAT MINDS: Mark Twain was a frequent visitor to Tesla’s lab. Here he is seen, around 1895, illuminating a lightbulb from current that is being run through his body; Tesla looks on from the dim behind him. Tesla’s ideas were infectious: “We must have the thought itself shot into our minds from a distance,” Twain told Harper’s Monthly.  Credit: The Century Illustrated monthly magazine.

The distance between humans seemed to be shrinking, and the possibility of thought transference seemed an increasingly natural outcome of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. The writer Mark Twain who was known to hang out in Tesla’s lab, told Harper’s Monthly:

The telegraph and the telephone are going to become too slow and wordy for our needs. We must have the thought itself shot into our minds from a distance. … Doubtless the something which conveys our thoughts through the air from brain to brain is a finer and subtler form of electricity, and all we need to do is find out how to capture it and how to force it to do its work, as we have had to do in the case of electric currents. Before the day of telegraphs, neither one of these marvels would have seemed any easier to achieve than the other.

The great inventors were hard at work, trying to be the first to build this mental telegraph. Alexander Graham Bell, for one, constructed helmets made of coiled wires, which two people could wear, one transferring their thoughts to the other. The result? “The thought in one brain has produced a sensation in the other, through the two helmets, but what the relation was between the thought and the sensation could not be determined,” Bell reported to McClure’s Magazine at the time.

Tesla proposed a technology that went beyond transmitting mere thoughts. He called it “television”—not to be confused with what we now know as television—by which one could “see at a distance” what another person was seeing in their mind. He figured that since vision involves excitations running from the retina up to the brain, perhaps imagination involved signals traveling from the brain back down to the retina. With a device capable of reading those signals off the retina, Tesla explained, “we may finally succeed in not only reading thoughts accurately but reproducing faithfully every mental image.” We could even “project the images conceived on a screen and render them visible to an audience,” he said. He assured the world that he was working on it.

Tesla didn’t subscribe to spiritualism; he didn’t believe in the psychic or the supernatural, though plenty of high-minded scientists of his time did, including the likes of Lodge and Crooke. Tesla described his own view of the universe as “grossly materialistic.” And yet he could wish for his pigeon and she would come; he could understand her through the lights from her eyes.

If such things seem contradictory, it’s because that moment has come and gone, a time when the line between the material and the mental was hard to make out, when matter and mind both had their places upon the same electromagnetic spectrum, a spectrum with infrared and radio at one end, visible light somewhere in the middle, along with fear and love, hope and X-rays, and gamma rays in the far reaches, along with imagination and ideas.

Tesla was going to “convert the entire Earth into a huge brain.”

It was a period in the history of science when previously unimaginable ideas were coming not just into focus, but fruition. At the dawn of the 1840s, there was no telegraph, no phonograph, no radio, no phone. By 1901, disembodied voices could be summoned from the ether; messages could be sent across the ocean, surfing electromagnetic waves. It was enough to leave the public dizzy and scientists speculating. “When there’s a new scientific discovery that throws in the air our old scientific concepts, then a lot of extraordinary theories can be entertained,” says Enns of this period of electromagnetic magical thinking. The line between science and pseudoscience becomes difficult to draw.

The current, Enns says, can also flow both ways: “Unorthodox ideas can end up directing what we do in our legitimate scientific practices.” In 1924, the German psychiatrist Hans Berger set out to prove the existence of telepathy by measuring brain waves emanating from the skull. “His idea was that if you could record these electrical impulses, it would show that the brain was a communication device,” Enns says. So Berger invented the electroencephalogram (EEG), a foundational technology of modern-day neuroimaging. We no longer think of our brains as wireless telegraphs or thoughts as things that can be transmitted by brain waves; now we think of brains as computers and thoughts as things that can be uploaded to the cloud. “These ideas have not really gone away,” Enns says.

For Tesla, nerves in the brain had to work by the principle of resonance, which meant thoughts were things we could all tune into, given the right device. If he could create a technology that would allow everyone around the globe to resonate with one another, it “would be of inestimable consequence on all human relations.” Especially his own.

So that was his plan. He was, as he put it, going to “convert the entire Earth into a huge brain.”

At the turn of the century, and the height of his fame, Tesla announced his plans to create a “World System” that would unite in literal harmony the entire globe, allowing people everywhere to send energy and information to be received by anyone, anywhere else.

Other scientists were also experimenting with wireless radio communications, sending electromagnetic waves between grounded transmitters and receivers. The assumption was that the signals were traveling through the air, while the ground currents merely completed the circuit. But Tesla was convinced they had it all backward—there was no way, he said, that the signal would make it through the air for long distances. Light waves travel in straight lines, but the Earth is curved—the information would be making a beeline for outer space. No one at the time knew that radio waves would run up against charged particles in the ionosphere and reflect back.

So Tesla figured that the messages had to be going through the ground. The Earth, he thought, must be a resonant cavity that could host standing waves of electrical vibrations—waves that could be plucked like guitar strings. If he could pump in energy at the Earth’s resonant frequency, he could set the electrical activity of the entire planet aquiver, and use it to transmit messages or power between any two points on the globe.

THE GREAT CONNECTOR: Tesla dreamed of an Earth-spanning system that would use electromagnetic resonance to connect all humans on the planet. The first node was to be a giant Tesla coil-like tower constructed at Wardenclyffe, pictured here around 1902. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

In 1901, on the northern shore of Long Island, at a site called Wardenclyffe, Tesla erected a 187-foot mushroom-capped tower while the locals looked on bemused. From the base of the tower, a circular staircase wound down to a well 120 feet below the surface, from which there extended an array of iron pipes and four stone-lined tunnels, 100 feet apiece, where the electricity would be pumped into the ground.

To the press he promised that a system of such towers—giant Tesla coils, in effect—would connect all existing telegraph exchanges. It would allow government agencies to send secret messages, which no spy could intercept. It would integrate all the phone lines, create a global news media, link up the world’s stock tickers, distribute sermons around the globe. It would synchronize clocks; transmit images, text, and music; it would provide a global navigation system to steer the ships, and energy to power them. It would send messages—person to person—in a flash, to “an inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch.” It would broadcast the thoughts from one’s retinas to whoever else wanted to see them. And, more than anything, it would make Tesla a little less lonely.

Tesla’s OCD had shaped his thinking about thinking, sparked his interest in resonance, and molded the form of his inventions—but it also left him disconnected and alone. He didn’t like to shake hands and often wore white gloves when out in public. He ate by himself at a special table that no one else at the hotel was allowed to use. As his biographer O’Neill noted:

A fresh table cloth was required for every meal. He also required that a stack of two dozen napkins be placed on the left side of the table. As each item of silverware and each dish was brought to him—and he required that they be sterilized by heat before leaving the kitchen—he would pick each one up, interposing a napkin between his hand and the utensil, and use another napkin to clean it. He could then drop both napkins on the floor. Even for a simple meal, he usually ran through the full stock of napkins.

If a fly landed on the table, they had to remove everything and start over. If a woman nearby wore pearls, it put him off his food.

But if the tower worked, he’d be able to connect to other people, to all people; he wouldn’t even have to wear his white gloves. As a child, Tesla played a game with his father where they’d try to guess the other’s thoughts. With the tower, no one would have to guess. It wasn’t so much that they could read each other’s individual minds. It was that they’d all be thinking together, multiple currents moving in and out of step, the invisible cogs and gears of a single brain. “These ties we cannot see, but we can feel them,” he wrote. In the world of the tower, we would cease to be isolated individuals—for a resonance is always a relationship.

It was a failure from which Tesla never recovered.

By 1902, the tower was completed, but the rest of the site wasn’t, and he was running out of funds. A year later, it became clear that no money was coming, and Tesla had nothing to show for the project, no evidence that the thing would work, and no way to attract new investors. Frustrated, he cranked up the coil, discharged a storm. “The air was filled with blinding streaks of electricity,” the New York Sun reported, “which seemed to shoot off into the darkness on some mysterious errand.”

Today, scientists largely agree that Tesla’s tower, even if completed, would never have worked. “He thought that he could transmit power through the Earth with no losses because the Earth would function like an inelastic medium,” Carlson explains, “but it doesn’t.” It was a beautiful idea. The real world simply didn’t match up with his grand vision.

It was a failure from which Tesla never recovered.

In the years that followed, he became more of a recluse. Once in a while, he’d make some wild pronouncement or another to the press—death rays and flying machines, a plan to send power to the moon—more inventions he’d dreamed up but for which he had nothing to show. The public grew impatient. Science moved on without him. “He was a broken man,” Carlson says.

In December of 1916, Tesla was to receive the prestigious Edison Medal from the American Institute of Electrical Engineers “for meritorious achievements in his early original work in polyphase and high-frequency electric currents”—emphasis on the “early.” The ceremony was held just steps from Bryant Park. But when Tesla was meant to take the stage, he was nowhere to be found. The engineers looked everywhere—the hallways, the restrooms—before rushing outside. In the plaza of the public library just adjacent, as O’Neill described it, “in the center of a large thin circle of observers stood the imposing figure of Tesla, wearing a crown of two pigeons on his head, his shoulders and arms festooned with a dozen more, their white or pale-blue bodies making strong contrast with his black suit and black hair, even in the dusk. On either of his outstretched hands was another bird, while seemingly hundreds more made a living carpet on the ground in front of him.”

Eventually, Tesla went back inside and accepted his medal. The tower at Wardenclyffe was dynamited and sold for scraps.

Before there were towers—before there was radio, before there were telegraphs—there were pigeons. Homing pigeons, prized for their exceptional navigation, had been used to transmit messages since the days of Julius Caesar. A well-trained bird could fly 600 miles without stopping, averaging 60 miles an hour at a pace. In wartime, they served in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the National Guard; even the U.S. Forest Service and CIA employed pigeons. When Paris was under siege by the Prussians, homing pigeons carried critical notes in and out of the city; using microphotography, the French could fit thousands of messages in the legband of a single bird. In the United States, pigeons flew news stories and stock prices. Papers like the New York Sun and the Boston Daily Mail relied heavily on pigeon post; the Baltimore Sun flew 500 birds between New York City and Washington, D.C.

But when Guglielmo Marconi, using a system of Tesla’s resonant circuits, transmitted the first wireless radio signal across the Atlantic in 1901, the pigeons were suddenly in trouble. “Marconi Beats Pigeons,” read the headline of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle: 200 homing pigeons employed by the Brooklyn Navy Yard to communicate with warships were about to be out of work. “It is thought that the Marconi system can be maintained as cheaply as the pigeon system,” the article reported.

MIND POWER: If Tesla could summon and channel electricity through the air, could not the recently discovered electric brain waves also be transmitted? He conceived of a system, illustrated here for a newspaper around 1933, that would capture pictures from the mind’s eye and project them for others—a technology he dubbed “television.” Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

So the unemployed ended up astray in the streets. And Tesla, whose inventions had put them out of a job, took them in.

“Sometimes I feel that by not marrying I made too great a sacrifice to my work,” 70-year-old Tesla told a reporter, “so I have decided to lavish all the affection of a man no longer young on the feathery tribe. I am satisfied if anything I do will live for posterity. But to care for those homeless, hungry, or sick birds is the delight of my life.”

And the white pigeon in particular seemed to stir something in him.

“If she needed me,” Tesla said, “nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.”

“One night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk,” Tesla told O’Neill. “I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her. As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes—powerful beams of light. Yes, it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory. When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. … I knew my life’s work was finished.”

On Jan. 7, 1943, at 10:45 pm, Nikola Tesla was found dead in his room by a hotel maid. “For forty years,” read the obituary that ran in The New York Times, “he lived and worked in a world of fantasy crackling with electric sparks, packed with strange towers to receive and emit energy and dreamy contrivances to give utopian man complete control of nature. It was a lonely life.” A spokesman for the hotel said that “Dr. Tesla died as he had spent the last years of his life—alone.”

Only he wasn’t alone—not likely. He always kept the window open.

Today, wireless technology performing nearly every dream Tesla had is in our back pockets, connecting us through that unseen spectrum, in devices, indeed, not that much bigger than a watch. But the homing pigeon remains an enigma.

How does it navigate? Does it use its powerful sense of smell? Its acute vision? Can it hear in infrasound? The U.S. Navy, in the 1950s, funded research to see if it homed by ESP. Scientists mostly agree that the birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic fields—but how? Researchers thought they found magneto-sensors in their beaks, only they turned out to be white blood cells. Now they think they’re in the brain stem, or maybe the inner ear.

A few years ago, some biologists in Spain decided to test whether exposing them to powerful magnetic fields would throw off their compass. They put the pigeons in an MRI—a magnetic resonance imaging machine—with a strength of three Teslas.

Upon release, the birds struggled to find their way. The controls, on the other hand, headed home—mysteriously tuned into some invisible vibrations.

Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with images by Daniel Prudek / Shutterstock and Wikimedia Commons

Amanda Gefter

Posted on December 6, 2023

Amanda Gefter is a science writer and the author of Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn.

Math

- We Were Wrong About Online Algorithms

Math

We Were Wrong About Online Algorithms

Three computer scientists disprove a long-standing idea about imperfect information.

By Madison Goldberg    December 7, 2023

In life, we sometimes have to make decisions without all the information we want; that’s true in computer science, too. This is the realm of online algorithms—which, despite their name, don’t necessarily involve the internet. Instead, these are problem-solving strategies that respond to data as it arrives, without any knowledge of what might come next. That ability to cope with uncertainty makes these algorithms useful for real-world conundrums, like managing memory on a laptop or choosing which ads to display to people who browse the web.

Researchers study generalized versions of these problems to investigate new methods for tackling them. Among the most famous is the “k-server problem,” which describes the thorny task of dispatching a fleet of agents to fulfill requests coming in one by one. They could be repair technicians or firefighters or even roving ice cream salespeople.

“It’s really simple to define this problem,” said Marcin Bieńkowski, an algorithms researcher at the University of Wrocław in Poland. But it “turns out to be bizarrely difficult.” Since researchers began attacking the k-server problem in the late 1980s, they have wondered exactly how well online algorithms can handle the task.

The choices reminded him of the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken.”

Over the decades, researchers began to believe there’s a certain level of algorithmic performance you can always achieve for the k-server problem. So no matter what version of the problem you’re dealing with, there’ll be an algorithm that reaches this goal. But in a paper first published online last November, three computer scientists showed that this isn’t always achievable. In some cases, every algorithm falls short.

“I am happy to say that it was a big surprise to me,” said Anupam Gupta, who studies algorithms at Carnegie Mellon University and was not involved in the paper. The work offers “deeper insight into the central problem in this area.”

Computer scientists first outlined this problem in 1988. To get a sense of it, let’s imagine a company that employs plumbers. As calls come in, the company needs to decide which plumber goes to which location. The company’s goal—and the goal of an algorithm for the k-server problem—is to minimize the total distance traveled by all the plumbers.

The tricky part is that the company doesn’t know in advance where the calls will come from. If it did, then it could rely on an “offline algorithm” that knows the future. In particular, it could use an ideal dispatching strategy that finds a solution with the least total travel for any string of calls. No online algorithm can ever beat it, or even reliably match it.

But researchers want to get as close as possible. They measure an online algorithm’s performance by comparing the travel distance in each strategy, calculating what’s known as the competitive ratio. Algorithm designers try to craft online strategies that approach the offline ideal, whittling this ratio down toward 1.

MAP MAKERS: To make sure no algorithm could achieve a competitive ratio of log k, the authors built a family of complex spaces, collections of points that could require an agent to visit; each successive space is made of copies of the last one.

Let’s imagine our plumbing company has just two plumbers, and it only serves a single, long street. The calls come one at a time. A reasonable first approach, known as the greedy algorithm, would be to dispatch whichever plumber is closest to the location of every incoming call. But here’s a scenario where this algorithm struggles: Imagine one plumber starts at the west end of the street and the other at the east end, and all the calls come from two neighboring houses on the west end. In that case, one plumber never moves while the other racks up the miles at those two houses. In retrospect, the best strategy would have been to move both plumbers to the problem-prone area—but, alas, you couldn’t have known where that was going to be.

Even so, Bieńkowski said, it’s possible to do better than the greedy algorithm. The “double coverage” algorithm moves both plumbers at the same rate toward any call that falls between them, until one of them reaches it. This method achieves a lower competitive ratio than the greedy algorithm.

While this abstract problem isn’t relevant for real plumbing companies, “the k-server problem itself is really the defining question” in online computing, said Yuval Rabani, a computer scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who co-authored the recent paper. In part, that’s because tools and techniques developed during work on the k-server problem often find applications elsewhere in the study of online algorithms, and even outside it.

“This is part of the magic of working on algorithms,” he said.

PROBLEM SOLVER: Yuval Rabani helped disprove a decades-old conjecture about the performance you can expect from certain algorithms. Credit: Aviv Zohar.

When they study these problems, scientists like to envision them as games against an adversary. The adversary chooses a devilish sequence of requests to make the online algorithm perform as badly as possible compared to its offline counterpart. To rob the adversary of some of its power, researchers use algorithms that include random decisions.

This strategy is quite effective, and researchers have suspected since the early 1990s that you can always find a randomized algorithm that reaches a specific performance goal: a competitive ratio proportional to log k, where k  is the number of agents. This is called the randomized k-server conjecture, and researchers have shown that it’s true for some spaces, or specific collections of points (the equivalent of houses that could call for plumbers). But it hasn’t been proved for all cases.

Like most researchers, Rabani and his co-authors—Sébastien Bubeck of Microsoft Research and Christian Coester of the University of Oxford—figured the conjecture was true. “I had no reason to doubt it,” Coester said.

This is part of the magic of working on algorithms.

But that started to change as they worked on another online problem. It had connections to the k-server problem, and the known lower limit on the competitive ratio was unexpectedly high. It made them think perhaps a goal as low as log k  for the k-server problem was overly optimistic.

Rabani said it was Coester who first suggested that the randomized k-server conjecture might be false. “As soon as he said it, it all made sense.”

To disprove the conjecture, the authors played the adversary, creating a perfect storm that would prevent any online algorithm from reaching a competitive ratio of log k. Their strategy had two parts: They constructed a family of complex, fractal-like spaces and designed a distribution of request sequences that would be difficult for any possible algorithm. On the algorithm’s very first move, the structure of the space meant it had to choose between two identical paths, one of which would eventually require extra travel based on the requests. Then the authors used a method called recursion to build spaces that multiplied these decision points, forcing the algorithm into a morass of bad options and driving up the cost.

The choices reminded Rabani of the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken,” in which a traveler contemplates two potential paths through a yellow wood. “We just apply the poem recursively,” he joked. “And then things go really bad.”

The authors showed that, in the spaces they had constructed, a randomized algorithm can never achieve a competitive ratio better than (log k)2, pushing a universal goal of log k  forever out of reach. They had refuted the conjecture.

This work, which won a Best Paper Award at the 2023 Symposium on Theory of Computing, marks a “solidly theoretical” milestone, Gupta said. This kind of result helps indicate what kind of performance we can hope for from our algorithms. In practice, however, algorithm designers often aren’t planning around worst-case scenarios, with an omnipotent adversary and complete ignorance of the future. When algorithms are unleashed on real-world problems, they often exceed theoretical expectations.

The paper, which also proved cutoffs for randomized algorithms used for other problems, could also have implications for future work in the field. The result clearly “highlights the power” of the technique the authors used, Gupta said.

Perhaps those future findings will defy researchers’ expectations as this one did, Rabani said. “This is one of the cases where it feels really good to be wrong.”

This article was originally published on the  Quanta Abstractions blog.

Lead image: Nan Cao for Quanta Magazine

Madison Goldberg

Posted on December 7, 2023

Madison is a science journalist and a graduate student in New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Her work has also appeared in Sky & Telescope magazine and the NPR project StateImpact Pennsylvania. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard University.

Neuroscience

- Why We Sense Somebody Who Isn’t There

Neuroscience

Why We Sense Somebody Who Isn’t There

When expectations aren’t met, our brains spook us.

By Phil Jaekl    December 19, 2023

For 10 months, Ernest Shackleton and his crew, bound for the South Pole, were stranded in Antarctic ice. The massive pressure of the ice was slowly crushing their ship, HMS Endurance. When the ship began to break apart, the men abandoned it and camped on the ice. A few weeks later, the Endurance sank. The freezing days dragged on, but the men saw hope when their icy campground began to splinter, revealing a watery lane for their small boats.

In May 1916, the explorers set off for land, battling violent winds, currents, and ice floes. They rowed until their bodies were ragged. Soon they began seeing things: “resemblances to human faces and living forms in the fantastic contour and massively uncouth shapes of berg and floe,” Shackleton wrote in his account of their survival, South. During a 36-hour trek over mountains and glaciers, with two crew members, Shackleton wrote, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” Inspired by Shackleton’s account, T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Wasteland,” “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”

Who indeed? Now, cognitive scientists have taken up the quest to explain the mysterious third. The felt presence of an unseen person, they have found, results from breaks in the neural connections that normally link expectations and actual experiences. During extreme conditions, or when the connection is broken and actions don’t meet unconscious expectations—a sign of land, a rescue team—our brains feed our minds a phantom substitute.

She reported an invisible man clasped her in his arms.

Ben Alderson-Day, an associate professor of psychology at Durham University, in the United Kingdom, and author of Presence, winner of a British Psychological Society’s Book Award for 2023, says it doesn’t always take Shackleton-like extremes to generate a felt presence. “People often describe a very distinct feeling that someone is there with them when they’re drawn into some sort of social situation where they need to act or change their position to make themselves safe,” Alderson-Day says.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have long believed this felt presence may link the sense of ghosts, spirits, phantoms, wraiths, specters, and apparitions, across all cultures. An early theory pioneered in the 1980s by psychologist Justin Barrett, attributed supernatural agency to a “hyperactive agency detection device,” a neural mechanism that biases us to presume the presence of purposeful agents. Its existence stems from our evolutionary success of erring on the side of caution when it comes to detecting predators. Around the same time, the late psychologist Michael Persinger began his notorious “God Helmet” experiments. He created weak electromagnetic fields in a motorcycle helmet, which participants wore while undergoing sensory deprivation. Persinger claimed he could induce a presence, often in the form of God, in 80 percent of participants. (Nearly all replication attempts failed to confirm the effect.)

Most recently, neuroscientist Olaf Blanke, a Swiss-German neurologist working in Lausanne, is using more rigorous methods than Persinger. While evaluating a 22-year-old woman for epileptic surgery, his team serendipitously discovered that it’s possible to induce neural activity that consistently elicits a felt presence. The procedure involved stimulating specific parts of her brain with electrodes, a fairly common technique that can produce a variety of hallucinatory sensations and perceptions. But this time, after a small electrical zap, she reported the clear yet unseen presence of someone behind her. During subsequent stimulations, she reported a man clasped her in his arms.

HE SAW THINGS: Ernest Shackleton, photographed during his HMS Endurance expedition, exemplifies how dire conditions can set the brain reeling. On a trek across ice seeking rescue, he wrote, he and his crew began seeing faces in the “massively uncouth shapes of berg and floe.” Credit: FMSky / Wikimedia Commons.

The stimulated region, called the temporoparietal junction, is where the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain meet. It is heavily involved in processing corporeal information relative to oneself and to other bodies. Damage or malfunctioning here can induce strange, out-of-body experiences where one views a remote, disembodied perspective of their own self. Aberrant functioning can also distort what are normally clear distinctions between oneself and others, where you end and something, or someone, begins.

To explore bodily illusions, Blanke and his team created an experimental device that seemed inspired by a Philip K. Dick novel. Participants wear a haptic sensing device that tracks their finger motion while they make poking movements into empty space in front of them. These movements are then replicated by a robot behind them, which they can’t see, that pokes them in the back. When a delay between the participants’ movements and the felt pokes is introduced—disrupting the causal relation between action and sensation—the participants attribute the pokes to an unseen but felt agent. Fosco Bernasconi, a senior scientist working with Blanke, explains that an impairment to self-body signals “causes the brain to misinterpret its own body signals and attribute them to somebody else.”

A neurological model of motor control, formally known as the forward model, says that whenever we execute movements to carry out an action, we create predictions in the form of neural body signals—called “efferent copies”—that allow us to anticipate the sensory consequences of our actions. When this causal relation gets disrupted by say, a delay, and the sensations deviate from our expectation, our brain can resolve the mismatch by attributing them to the actions of someone else. It makes sense, Alderson-Day says, “that if you disrupt sensorimotor signaling, you have an illusory body turn up.”

Blanke’s model provides a plausible mechanistic account to explain the feeling of a presence, but one explicitly tied to the activation of the motor system. In contrast to the experience of meeting God while seated and motionless, as Persinger claimed his experiments showed, Alderson-Day explains that Blanke’s work “is more focused on the clinical and neurological correlates of very distinct presence experiences—separate from the spiritual and ecstatic.”

Under stress, our brains feed our minds a phantom substitute.

What originally inspired Alderson-Day to investigate felt presence was a patient who constantly heard a voice. The patient didn’t have to perform any action to hear the voice, he just expected to hear it at any given moment, as if it was always “there.” Such motionless presence experiences fit well with another theoretical candidate for explaining their neural basis, called predictive processing, which holds that when one has high unconscious predictions or expectations of events, they can generate a bias that overrides perception.

Predictive processing is a revolutionary theory because it overturns the notion of perceptual experience as constructed primarily from incoming sensory signals. It implies, rather, that experience arises from a continually updated mental model of the world. Our brain is constantly generating predictions of sensory inputs around us. If we encounter something new, our brain may initially provide a faulty prediction, but in time, with more information, it tweaks the model to fit the reality.

The theory goes a long way to explain the massive amount of brain connections involved in making sense of the world. (Incoming sensory signals alone only comprise 1 to 2 percent of the brain’s energy consumption.) And how easily our perceptual experiences can go astray. Alderson-Day says that even mild disruptions between expectation and experience can result in the perception of a presence. “Predictive processing basically says that we all have the propensity to experience presences and other hallucinations, because we all rely on expectation to some degree in our perception of the world.”

In freezing Antarctica, it wasn’t only the extreme circumstances that gave rise to the “third who always walks beside you,” it was a precise set of unconscious processes born out of the misery that Shackleton and his men found themselves in, and the dire need to find their rescuers. These processes are universal in all of us, and so the next time you sense somebody who isn’t there, you might reflect on why that should be.

Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with images by alla_line and Illustration Forest / Shutterstock

Phil Jaekl

Posted on December 19, 2023

Phil Jaekl is a freelance science writer and author with an academic background in cognitive neuroscience. His latest book is Out Cold: A Chilling Descent into the Macabre, Controversial, Lifesaving History of Hypothermia. He lives in the Norwegian Arctic in Tromsø.

Paleontology

- A Day in the Life of a Fossil Preparator

- Digging for Our Origins in the Bone Beds of an African Park

Paleontology

A Day in the Life of a Fossil Preparator

Recreating the past requires as much art and craft as science.

By Caitlin Donahue Wylie    December 21, 2023

On a Thursday at 9:30 a.m., Jay,* a longtime staff preparator at the Southern Museum,** had a list of things to do. He wanted to search a bag of matrix—the name for the rock surrounding fossilized bone—for microscopic fossil mammal teeth and start gluing them in place on their tiny jaw; deliver light bulbs to the museum’s glass-walled preparation lab; replace a microscope light bulb in the specimen research space; check the lab’s air filtration system; buy a more powerful microscope lens (to facilitate his work on the mammal jaw); make a storage jacket for a fossil horse skull; mold a fossil squirrel skull to produce a replica—“and I have to finish my coffee.”

This diversity of tasks, workplaces, and even ranges of vision—from searching for teeth under a microscope to inspecting the lab’s huge air filtration apparatus—indicate the many kinds of knowledge, skills, and priorities involved in producing and maintaining specimens. Indeed, one of the key processes of preparing knowledge is preparing evidence. We know from studies of scientific practice that the work of distinguishing evidence from “noise” or “background” is complex, situated, and not obvious. Preparing evidence involves deciding what materials or observations are relevant, what form they should take, and how to achieve that form. What many people don’t realize is that these decisions often fall to skilled individual practitioners—many of whom are not scientists—such as Jay, who make in-the-moment judgments based on their expert observations and then apply skillful actions to pursue their expectations of the evidence.

Jay turned barely-visible chunks of preserved bone into a researchable specimen of a long-dead mammal.

Reconstructing fragmented fossils, like Jay’s mammal jaw, is technically difficult, epistemically loaded, and strikingly quotidian. Fossils almost always arrive in the lab in pieces, but without all their pieces. So which fragments preparators reattach—and where they reattach them—is rarely clear and requires judgment calls. Even defining what a fragment is relies on expertise.

Jay began work on the mammal jaw by searching a small box of sand-grain-size matrix under a microscope, hoping to find more slivers of teeth to match the jaw that he and colleagues had discovered during a collection trip a few months earlier. As I watched, Jay triumphantly lifted a barely visible “frag” (fragment) of fossilized tooth enamel out of the matrix with tweezers. He inspected it and guessed that the frag might “bridge the gap” between two other pieces he’d found, thereby making it possible to assemble all three pieces into one reconstructed tooth.

Removing matrix from fossils is a process of defining them in their current state, while repairing and reconstructing fossils involves, as the prefix “re-” implies, returning a specimen to its appearance in life. That achievement is, of course, impossible, but making a tooth look complete instead of shattered is considered a step closer to seeing that tooth as it looked when it was part of an animal. Soon after finding the frag, Jay decided to stop searching because the loose matrix contained only “tooth dust”—pieces of enamel that he judged too small to reconstruct or be scientifically useful.

LIVING FOSSIL: A preparator removes matrix from a fish skeleton covered in tiny fossilized scales. Courtesy of Caitlin Donahue Wylie.

Jay planned ahead, thinking through his decisions about how to best reunite the two pieces of the jawbone and, later, the teeth. First, he purposefully left finger-size hunks of matrix attached to the half-centimeter-long jaw pieces, as “handholds” to help him manipulate the tiny fossils while gluing them together. He would prepare away the handholds after he finished the repair. Next, he evaluated the options for adhesives. He decided on cyanoacrylate for its faster and stronger bond than other glues, which are important benefits when working with microfossils. The downside is that “you only get one shot,” he said, because cyanoacrylate bonds instantly and it would be nearly impossible to undo the join on such small bones. Positioning the pieces by their handholds and holding his breath, Jay delicately placed cyanoacrylate on the nearly invisible gap between them, adhering the two pieces.

With the jaw pieces reunited, Jay “built” each microscopic tooth, placing its frags in a base of soft clay to hold them while he aligned their broken edges. He put a drop of cyanoacrylate on a single paintbrush hair and allowed capillary action to suck the glue into the crack between two frags, where it bonded them together. He repeated these actions for each frag in each tooth.

Finally, based on his knowledge of anatomy and assessment of which broken edges corresponded, Jay lined up the rebuilt teeth in a small box in the order he thought they belonged on the jaw. He spent a long time getting ready to glue the teeth to the jaw, even though—or perhaps because—the task would only take an instant. But then he paused, and decided that he needed a few quiet days to best set up this final, stressful, “one-shot” reconstruction. He put the task “on standby” and eventually completed it a few weeks later.

Jay’s in-the-moment assessments and reactions to the situation resemble the reflection-in-action that craft workers and other experts practice. These judgment calls, based on expertise, experience, goals, and values, shaped how Jay conducted the common tasks of defining and reconstructing fossils, and thus how that mammal jaw and its teeth look. We should remember that teeth are scientists’ primary diagnostic feature for mammals. By saving the tooth frags (and not the tooth dust) and by reconstructing the gross morphology of the teeth and jaw, Jay turned barely-visible chunks of preserved bone into a researchable specimen of a long-dead mammal that lived alongside dinosaurs.

A KEEN EYE: A preparator points a pin vise tip at a small, triangle-shaped fossil reptile’s jaw subtly protruding from a lump of rock. Only someone with “the eye” can spot this specimen. Courtesy of Caitlin Donahue Wylie.

Later that day, Jay repaired another fossil, but not one fresh from the field. It was a holotype specimen of a small proto-horse species that had been first prepared in the 1950s. (A holotype or “type” specimen is the individual that scientists designate as the permanent defining example of its species.) A visiting scientist had found the narrow, palm-length skull lying in pieces in its storage box, so he brought it to Jay. Glue from many previous repairs coated the pieces’ broken edges, hiding their shape.

“I don’t see any obvious joins,” Jay told me. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.” Preparators’ power over a specimen’s appearance includes their ability to not apply techniques, such as by not identifying or attaching broken pieces. When I suggested that one frag belonged to the skull’s eye socket, Jay disagreed, saying wryly, “Put it there if you want it to be a new  type,” meaning a new—and invented—species. Then he suggested gluing an unattached canine tooth on the end of the skull’s nose like a horn. These jokes highlight preparators’ power to decide how a specimen looks, such as by their judgments of if and how broken bones fit together.

After many failed attempts to match the loose pieces with the skull’s broken edges, Jay decided to consult the specimen’s published description and photographs from the 1950s. I have seen preparators check scientific papers only a few times; this unusual step reflects how stumped Jay felt about how to reassemble this skull. Based on the paper’s text and images, Jay identified and adhered several pieces. He also found traces of glue on a canine tooth fragment and a matching glue-lined edge on the skull, indicating a former join. So he adhered the tooth there, even though it was absent in the published photos. There is a kind of circularity in this story in that a preparator prepared this specimen, then a researcher described it in a publication, and then a later preparator (Jay) repaired the specimen to match the publication.

Fossils almost always arrive in the lab in pieces, but without all their pieces.

Suspecting that the skull’s damage had resulted from rolling around inside its box, Jay decided to build a custom storage container for it. Eventually he landed on a “clamshell jacket” (something he learned how to make at a conference workshop led by another preparator), in which two cradles fully encase a specimen.

But when Jay set the skull in its finished half jacket, he realized that adding a top half would make the specimen too tall to fit in its storage drawer. He wanted to keep the skull in that drawer because its skeleton was in there too and he didn’t want them to become disassociated. It was also important to him (like all museum staff) to minimize the space each specimen takes in the museum’s overcrowded collection. So Jay declared the half jacket to be a finished cradle. The skull “is already more protected now than it was,” he said with a shrug. Jay’s lengthy experience as a preparator as well as consultation with a coworker informed his evaluation of which design would best achieve his goals for this fragile and important specimen. The constraints and many possible forms of storage support alone point to the many embedded values and contingencies for a specimen. The cradle, after all, becomes part of the fossil’s history and future.

No one had told Jay what to repair about the skull or to change the specimen’s storage. He followed best practices he’d learned from experience, not from published instructions. He decided to reattach as many frags to the fossil as possible, including ones not pictured in its published description. He chose to invest time in making a cradle in hopes of preventing damage and reducing future preparators’ time spent repairing this specimen. In that sense, Jay, too, becomes part of the fossil’s history and future.

*Jay is a pseudonym. I chose to assign pseudonyms to all the people and institutions in this study.

**This is also a pseudonym. The two museums, which in my book I call the Northern Museum and Southern Museum, are valuable for their significant vertebrate fossil collections, respected preparators and scientists, wonderful fossil exhibits, and glass-walled labs where visitors can watch preparators at work.

This article was originally published in MIT Press Reader.

Lead image: 501room / Shutterstock

Caitlin Donahue Wylie

Posted on December 21, 2023

Caitlin Donahue Wylie is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at the University of Virginia. She is the author of “Preparing Dinosaurs,” from which this article is adapted. An open access edition of the book is freely available for download here.

Paleontology

Digging for Our Origins in the Bone Beds of an African Park

In their search for the last common ancestor of chimps and humans, scientists at Gorongosa National Park are expanding the picture of early primate life.

By Charles Digges    November 22, 2023

For the paleoanthropologists looking to fill out the pages of humanity’s family album, a cache of ancient teeth unearthed over the past few years at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique could be like sepia-toned photos from the old neighborhood.

Yet the original owners of the teeth are far from human. In fact, the most startling specimens among them, discovered at an elevation of approximately 1,000 feet, come from the jaws of the genus Galeocerdo—tiger shark—an animal that doesn’t even live on land. Another set is from an ancient version of a hyrax, a distant, furry relative of elephants. Others are from the gargantuan Deinotherium—Greek for “terrible beast”—yet another relative of elephants, whose ancient tusks protruded from their lower jaws like great inverted question marks. A pair of incisors from an ape comes the closest to something in our evolutionary neighborhood, but they’re older than the light flickering from the Andromeda Galaxy and predate the emergence of our genus, Homo, by at least an epoch or so.

This mixed snapshot of past life found in a vein of sandstone and clay in the East African Rift System comes from the Miocene Epoch—a window of time stretching from about 23 million to 5 million years ago—that saw enormous development of vertebrates, particularly apes and other mammals.

The original owners of the teeth are far from human.

Yet like most things in paleontology, this trove is only a tiny fragment of a puzzle offered up piecemeal by the earth, at first glance disjointed and haphazard—the commas and consonants, perhaps, of a single stanza from a much, much longer verse.

To Susana Carvalho and her team at Gorongosa’s Paleo-Primate Project, these osteogenic antiquities mark the beginnings of a sweeping narrative involving the life, death, and the shifting landscapes of our cagey hominin ancestors, the creatures with which they shared the planet, and the environment in which they emerged.

“Even by looking at these other species that are not hominids, that are not apes, we’re also looking at the species that our ancestors evolved with and interacted with,” says René Bobe, the head paleontologist on the Gorongosa project.

Both Carvalho and Bobe joined me via Zoom—Carvalho from her office at Oxford University, and Bobe from the basement of the London Museum of Natural History, where he sat in front of a tall bank of metal drawers containing a few million years’ worth of fossils.

WORLDS BENEATH THEIR FEET: René Bobe and Susana Carvalho consult during a dig at Gorongosa National Park, where they lead the park’s Paleo-Primate Project. The project has unearthed fossils that paint a vibrant mural of life surrounding our earliest ancestors.

The project Carvalho has overseen at Gorongosa since 2015 incorporates the hardcore digging, sifting, and dusting of paleontology with training and mentoring for a cadre of Mozambiquan students who are pursuing graduate level studies in the field. Ravaged by a 16-year civil war that ended in 1992, Gorongosa has since undergone a profound revitalization that has seen its large animal populations rebound from near-decimation. Thirty years on from that conflict, the park is bursting with life and is home to as many as 6,300 different species of plants and animals. Carvalho’s team has uncovered a rich and strikingly comprehensive testament to what came before the current flora and fauna—and in the process is seeking to add another chapter to the story of humanity.

Within that chapter lies not so much an orderly family tree as a wildly branching bush with roots growing in a swirl from numerous directions. One key character among the thicket, Bobe tells me, is the elusive last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans. But Bobe says that any study of our roots must push deeper into time than that—to a last common ancestor of humans and all other African apes, chimpanzees and gorillas included.

“There are various ideas about what these ancestors looked like, how they behaved, what they ate, and how they lived, but nobody knows for sure because these ancestors have yet to be found,” he says. “These ancestors mark the starting point of our lineage becoming different from other African primates. Our research aims not just to find these fossil species of apes but also to document the ecosystems that existed in Africa during a very important time in the evolution of humans and other mammals.”

In 2018, after a long period of surveys, Carvalho and Bobe began an excavation at the so-called Mazamba Formation, which lies on central Mozambique’s Cheringoma Plateau, a stretch of upland Miocene sandstone wedged between the Zambezi and Pungwe Rivers. Many were skeptical that such a damp, flood-prone area packed with vegetation would yield any useful fossil finds. But it did.

What local Armageddon befell the organisms on this rock?

As a common reliquary for ancient bones, sandstone, as the name suggests, forms when grains of sand are compacted together by the elements over the course of millennia.

When an organism that dies in such an environment is gradually interred, its soft tissue are dissolved and replaced by quartz, feldspar, and other minerals. Preserved in the resulting rock are the firmer remnants—bones, shells, teeth, wood tissues. And there they lie, subsumed by newer and newer strata of rock, each marking a new page on the calendar of geologic time.

The excavation site includes several open-air digs as well as studies of deep limestone caves whose layered sediments offer a sweeping record of specimens dating from a more recent time when our genus Homo had already emerged. Carvalho’s findings from the caves include a smattering of small silica tools chipped to a fine edge to cut open fruit or husk bark—evidence that some species of Homo dwelled here. All told, Carvalho says she and her colleagues exhumed some 2,500 discrete fossils across all the Gorongosa digs.

“This combination of animals is not found elsewhere in the East African Rift system,” says Bobe. “So, we’re looking at the evolution of an ecosystem that is new to science, and it’s very, very interesting.”

EARLY BITES: Jaw fossils from an ancient tiger shark and hyrax, a distant relative of elephants, uncovered in Gorongosa, reveal that part of the landlocked park was once coastal, which suggests our primate forbears may have moved inland from the coast.

In London, Bobe rummages a jawbone out of one of his drawers at the museum and holds it up to his computer camera to show me—a hyrax specimen slightly larger than a human hand that was unearthed in Kenya in the 1950s by the legendary British-Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. It is similar, Bobe says, to the hyrax remains Carvalho and her team uncovered in Gorongosa.

Carvalho and Bobe’s hyrax specimen was found among what Carvalho described as a “bone bed”—a layer of fossils so plentiful that the species found within it must have died at the same time as the result of some catastrophic occurrence. Think Pompeii or the extinction of the dinosaurs.

What local Armageddon befell the organisms on this stratum of the Mazamba Formation remains unknown—Carvalho speculates that it could have been a recurring flood or other major storm—but it was the bone bed that proved Carvalho and Bobe were onto something.

On the basis of their finds at the Mazamba Formation, Carvalho and Bobe led a study for a paper published earlier this year asserting that the part of Gorongosa where their excavation is taking place was once coastal. The site now sits on dry land more than 50 miles due west of the Mozambique Strait—the waterline redrawn by ancient climatic shifts.

“This is the story of a coastal site, not an inland one, which has been the predominant focus of African paleoanthropology,” says Carvalho. “These are species that lived along the way between sea and land, and everything we are finding in Gorongosa is completely different from what you would find up north on the Rift or in the caves in South Africa—this area was an estuary.”

In this coastal forest, we’re going to find what we’ve been looking for.

The discovery of this liminal space between land and sea is an important one that has until now evaded paleontologists working in Africa, Carvalho tells me. An understanding of where ocean and land once met is critical to discerning the footprints of our primate forbears.

“It’s in this coastal forest that you are going to find what people have long been looking for but that no one has found yet,” Carvalho tells me. “Our hominin ancestors would have moved inland from here.”

Carvalho posits that during the twilight years of the Miocene, these ancestors might have followed riverbeds toward the interior of the continent, the humid rainforest vegetation along the way shepherding them toward new environments—and new adaptations.

The spectacular discoveries of Australopithecus skeletons in the 20th Century—which put East Africa on the map as humanity’s Garden of Eden—would seem to support this hypothesis, says Carvalho. Lucy, perhaps the most famous such specimen, was found in the savannas of Northeastern Ethiopia, part of the northerly reaches of the Rift, and well inland from the Red Sea.

At a mere 3.2 million years old, Lucy is much younger than the apes’ teeth that have turned up in Carvalho’s Miocene excavation. But, importantly, Lucy was a generalist omnivore, able to subsist on a variety of nutrients flourishing in her ancient environment. The hominins that would have been common during the Miocene had a more specialized diet and subsisted on soft fruits and other vegetation common along the water’s edge—a diet Bobe and Carvalho can analyze by examining patterns of wear on the ape’s teeth that they disinterred.

To both Carvalho and Bobe, there is a clear lineage among these earlier versions of ourselves. About 9 million years ago, the Earth became more arid, and the rainforests favored by Miocene primates began to shrink. It is around this time, says Bobe, that the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees was thought to live.

The chimpanzee ancestors—and their preference for ambulating with four limbs—remained within the moist forests that they still prefer today. Where in this historic relocation we emerged as a species remains, of course, the big unknown. At some point, we stepped into a more arid landscape as bipedal primates—but whether this happened when we reached the savanna or before is an intriguing question. There’s striking evidence suggesting that the apes from which our species of Homo eventually evolved were bipedal even before we left the trees.

So, what of these Last Common Ancestors, as the scientific literature calls them in capitalized terms, these theorized transitional species between us and the chimps we left in the forest?

In Carvalho and Bobe’s telling, they may well sit among the finds at the Mazamba Formation—all the more present for their absence. It’s a little like entering a house whose occupants have just left—here is a half-eaten apple, there an empty cup of coffee with a fresh brown ring at the bottom, the jackets on the rack by the door still astir.

Amid this hoard of fossils and bones from the Mazamba Formation, where will Carvalho and her colleagues find imprints of our shared precursors? “The stone tools might be able to tell us,” she says. “Because the hominins that used them could have left DNA samples in the sediments, and DNA preserves well in certain conditions like the limestone caves.”

It will be some time before Carvalho can have those sediments sequenced. But when she does, whose photo might she find?

Learn more about the team investigating human evolution in Gorongosa National Park below.

Photos and video courtesy of Gorongosa National Park

The  Nautilus Gorongosa Series is published in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group.

Charles Digges

Posted on November 22, 2023

Charles Digges is an environmental journalist and researcher who edits Bellona.org, the website of the Norwegian environmental group Bellona.

Psychology

- Will Psychedelics Replace Antidepressants?

- Your Brain Wants a Linear Story

- We Can Be Heroes

- What Gets Enemies to Negotiate

- Social Media Is Not Heroin

- Yes, There Is a Science to Shopping

- You Can Have Too Much Transcendence

- The Virtues of Not Knowing

Psychology

Will Psychedelics Replace Antidepressants?

Psychedelic treatment is helping patients make difficult emotional breakthroughs.

By Steve Paulson    December 20, 2023

If you’ve been following the news about psychedelics, you know we may be on the cusp of a revolution in psychiatry. For the first time in decades, promising new treatments for depression and PTSD seemed to be just around the corner. But while psychedelic-assisted therapy may sound incredibly promising, so did Prozac 30 years ago. So where does that leave psychiatrists and their patients?

Psychiatrist Charles Raison is on the front lines of that question. He’s one of the leading researchers in the current psychedelic revival. I recently sat down with Raison in his office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to talk about his research and what it means for treating people with depression.

How do you decide which is better, a psychedelic or an SSRI? Is it even possible to reconcile the two?

It’s very, very hard because they’re so different, right? The standard antidepressants, we know what they do. Brain imaging studies show they very rapidly turn down the danger center in the brain. So you wander around for a few weeks, feel better about things, you smile a little bit more, and then people smile back at you. The downside of that, though, is that if they chill things out too much, you go flat, you go numb. People wander around saying, “I’m not feeling as horrible, but I’m not feeling as much of anything.” I had a guy say a couple of years ago that his sister went on antidepressants and he felt like he half lost her. There’d been a depth of feeling that was erased with it.

Now, psychedelics are really the opposite. They ramp everything up. They make emotions more salient. So either you face your problems, feel your feelings fully, accept the difficulties of life, be grateful you’re alive, or you take a pill, feel better. It’s the difference between face it and change or chill out and just roll with it.

There’s a huge question about why psychedelics are so effective. Is it essentially the biological reaction in the brain or do you need the experience itself? I mean, a lot rides on how you answer that question.

That is the billion-dollar question. That is what animates my work, right? So everything that we are doing, it’s all focused on that question.

It’s the difference between face it and change or chill out and just roll with it.

I’ve talked with people in the venture capital startup business, and it seems like the magic bullet there would be to tweak the psilocybin molecule, make it fast-acting. You just have a two or three hour experience, but you get all the benefits. You can go into the clinic and feel better, but you don’t have to go through all the hard stuff.

Absolutely, and I admire this guy Dave Olson so much. He started a company called Delix Therapeutics, to tweak psychedelics even a little harder, so that it’s not that the experience lasts an hour or two, it’s that you’ve removed the psychedelic experience entirely. So, you can take the pill at home on Saturday morning and then feel better for six months. And when you start feeling bad again, in six months, you get another pill. That’s the VC venture capital pharmaceutical dream: Charge $20,000 a pill, no fuss. It doesn’t violate this very impersonal machine-like system we have in place for dealing with mental health in the United States. So, people are absolutely after this. But I’m really rooting for consciousness. I personally am greatly hoping that when we remove the conscious experience, that psychedelics will not have the signal.

I still don’t understand, why can a single psychedelic experience have such long-lasting effects six months later, a year later, a lifetime later? Is that rewiring the brain? Or you’ve just had this experience and somehow the experience has caused you to see the world in a new way?

From a purely scientific view, consciousness arises from brain function. Your feelings arise from brain function, your behavior arises from brain function. So if you are different six months from now, there’s got to be some physical substrate for that difference. What that substrate is, of course, is the holy grail. Everybody wants to know.

Now, there’s another huge question, and that’s whether you need a mystical experience to have the full therapeutic effect—the sense of oneness with the universe around you, ego transcendence, feeling that this other reality is more real than your waking reality. Or can you just have a ho-hum experience and get the full benefits?

It’s certainly the best, most replicated thing in science that if you have the mystical experience during the psychedelic experience, you’re likely to benefit down the road weeks and weeks later—less depression, less anxiety. But it’s not the only thing. I think there’s another domain that is often attached to the mystical experience but is also clearly separable. That’s been called emotional breakthrough, which is closely related to something that you might call psychological insight. These are experiences that have more to do with the life story of the person. A number of studies have shown that if a person faces difficult personal challenges during a psychedelic experience, ones they usually try to push aside, that also pretty strongly predicts antidepressant response. Let’s say I’m overwhelmed with horror that I’m dying of cancer, but I realize that I need to accept it. So this is psychedelics as a year of psychotherapy in a day.

So that suggests, almost by definition, that it has to be a difficult experience, right? You can’t just have a blissful experience and have the emotional breakthrough.

No, it comes at the end of suffering. So one of the dangers of psychedelics is that they can encourage something that’s been called spiritual bypass, which basically means that instead of dealing with primitive behaviors that are causing trouble in your life, you just go into the spiritual realm. You transcend them. You see this when psychedelics go bad, what they often seem to produce are very narcissistic people. These are people wandering around talking about spirituality. Then you watch how they’re living their lives and there’s no evidence they have met any sort of God. So that’s why I trust the spirituality of descent, down into the roots of suffering.

Excerpted from Luminous, a series from To the Best of Our Knowledge, hosted by executive producer Steve Paulson. Luminous explores the philosophical and cultural implications of psychedelics through conversations with scientists, historians and healers. You can learn more about the series and find where you can listen at ttbook.org/luminous.

Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with images by dexterous simpson, svetlichniy_igor, and Cannabis_Pic / Shutterstock

Steve Paulson

Posted on December 20, 2023

Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally-syndicated show To the Best of Our Knowledge. He’s the author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science. You can find his podcast about psychedelics, Luminous, here.

Psychology

Your Brain Wants a Linear Story

Artists may jumble time for dramatic effect. But your unconscious is always putting the narrative in order.

By Ajdina Halilovic    December 19, 2023

Tom smiles uncertainly at Summer. They touch hands, a testament to their shared past. “This is a story of boy meets girl,” the narrator tells us, but it’s “not a love story.” It’s the opening scene in (500) Days of Summer, a 2009 romantic comedy starring Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. After a brief intro, time cards flip rapidly on the screen, stopping at day 290. We find Tom in his kitchen, smashing plates. Summer has just broken up with him. Soon the numbers scroll again, and we return to the beginning, when they meet in an office elevator. Tom swoons. Then we are transported to the future once again, to the day when Tom realizes he is “officially” in love.

It’s a familiar narrative conceit. Storytellers of all kinds narrate events in nonlinear sequences, either for effect, to enhance the drama, or because they forgot some key detail and want to fill in the gaps. Even so, the jump cuts are disorienting. Because we live our lives chronologically, making sense of big leaps in a narrative sequence entails heftier mental work: Research shows our reaction times and reading pace slow and we have a harder time accessing memories related to events when they are presented to us out of order. So how do our brains actually process these narrative hops in chronology? That’s the question a team of Dartmouth researchers set out to answer in a small study recently published in Cerebral Cortex.

The Dartmouth team analyzed the fMRI scans of 20 healthy study participants, 19 to 53 years of age, taken as they watched (500) Days of Summer. What they found is evidence that our brains use temporal cues—like the time cards in the movie, or words related to the passing of time in a written or spoken story—to reorganize events into chronological order in real time. “I think the fact that we found evidence for this unscrambling on the fly during a complex narrative stimulus shows just how sensitive our brains are to temporal information,” says neuroscientist Emily Finn, a co-author of the study.

The brain is recognizing and sorting scenes that belong together in time.

To isolate the effects of time jumps, and compare them with changes in setting, the researchers tracked how certain areas of the brains of participants responded to changes in location and chronology. They chose to track activity in the 12 seconds following each narrative jump in certain areas of the brain that had already been associated with processing temporal and spatial context and integrating narrative information across long timescales.

Finn and her colleagues identified several specific brain areas that seemed especially sensitive to narrative hops in time, over and above changes in location. But even more interesting is that some of these brain areas maintained similar activity patterns for all chronologically related scenes, a finding that was consistent across participants. They took this as evidence that the brain is recognizing and sorting scenes that belong together in time.

An instant mastery over the chronology of events may serve a greater purpose, Finn and her colleagues reason: Encoding events in the correct order in our memories could be very helpful for understanding the causal relationships between one thing and another. The more you understand about cause and effect, the better you may be at predicting what is yet to come and making sense of the world and your environment, says Finn.

Of course, not all nonlinear narratives come with neat temporal cues. Sometimes, all you get is a passing “when I was a kid.” Other times, narrative fragments appear to spill into one another. In these cases, we may use other elements embedded in stories to sort out the chronology of cause and effect.

For example, Finn wondered if the familiar arc of the love story in (500) Days of Summer helped study participants put the disordered pieces where they belong. Many of the stories we tell each other and ourselves follow standard arcs, even if we have to leave out certain details to make the puzzle pieces fit.

The next time you are immersed in a movie or a book, know that your brain could be doing some behind-the-curtain work, constructing a whole from disjointed narrative parts, building a coherent world.

Lead image: JMGDigital / Shutterstock

Ajdina Halilovic

Posted on December 19, 2023

Ajdina Halilovic is an independent science writer and neuroscientist trained at Cambridge University.

Psychology

We Can Be Heroes

The transformative power of seeing your life as a hero’s journey. A reporter’s eyewitness account.

By Adam Piore    December 13, 2023    Illustrations by John Hendrix

In 1939, at the age of 27, Sid Kline set sail for Europe, landing in Prague as the Nazis were on the march. The night before their arrival, he stood on a balcony with Czech aristocrats and helped them polish off their best champagne, then smashed the crystal glasses in the courtyard below so nothing would be left for the Nazis.

In the days that followed, Sid, the short-statured son of a Jewish shoe salesman from Camden, New Jersey, visited Berlin, rubbing shoulders with currency smugglers, mercenaries, and his fellow American correspondents. He traveled by train through treacherous border crossings, and smuggled a subversive manuscript penned by a Count into free territory. He returned home to Manhattan to settle down, married my grandmother, and soon after, my mother arrived.

By the time I came along, Sid had lost most of his hair, developed a healthy paunch and a hearty smoker’s laugh, and taken a job as a rewrite man for the New York Daily News, where he wore a rumpled shirt and a green eyeshade, chain-smoked cigars, and spun reports coming in from the far reaches of the world’s greatest city into narrative gold.

Anyone can have a hero’s journey if you think about your life in a new way.

Sid used to tell me he couldn’t imagine a more satisfying life than the one journalism had provided him—the stories he heard, the people he met, the adventures it afforded him. It was a life story that allowed Sid to live out his final years believing himself to be a blessed and grateful man.

I thought of Sid earlier this year when I read the psychology paper, “Seeing Your Life Story as a Hero’s Journey Increases Meaning in Life.” The title struck something inside me I knew to be true. It began with Sid, whose hero’s journey increased meaning in my life—certainly more than the one offered by my other grandfather, a scientist who died far richer and with more renown but lacked Sid’s talent for storytelling. But it’s something I’ve also seen in countless others over the course of a long career traveling far and wide and speaking with people from all walks of life.

Sid’s stories led me to become a journalist. They’re the reason, when I reached my mid 20s, I quit a safe, secure job covering the New Jersey congressional delegation for a regional newspaper in Washington D.C., ignoring the warnings of my older colleagues who suggested my career would never recover. I felt stifled by the background politicking, calculations, and grandiosity of those in official Washington, a bubble where even the most extreme problems and high-stakes stories were somehow made to seem bloodless, bureaucratic, and disembodied from real human drama.

So, at 27, I moved to Cambodia, a raw, traumatized nation still emerging from 30 years of civil war, where everyday life seemed to be a matter of life and death. I wanted to meet and write about people who didn’t have the option of a safe, predictable life. I wanted to be surprised. I couldn’t ignore the ghost of Sid Kline—I wanted to have adventures.

And I have. I’ve pursued stories about people who, through the whims of fate, their own choices, or a combination of both, have found themselves in extreme situations that most of us can hardly imagine. Often the stories that are the most dramatic take a psychological toll on those involved. And often they’ve led me back to a series of questions that have long preoccupied me. How do people find meaning in the face of unimaginable tragedy, trauma, or disappointment? Why do some self-destruct, lose touch with reality, or give up, while others survive, recover, and find ways to draw strength from the challenges they were forced to endure?

Again and again, I found the answers zeroed in on the stories people told about themselves. During my interviews with genocide survivors in Cambodia, Vietnam veterans tormented by visions of their friends being obliterated in battle, victims of terrible accidents, survivors of workplace shootings, gang members in California’s most notorious prison, I saw up close how important the hero-journey narrative, or something close it, was to them, transforming and even helping to save their lives.

Seeing Your Life Story as a Hero’s Journey” is written by Kurt Gray, a social psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Benjamin Rogers, an assistant professor in the Management and Organization Department at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, along with eight colleagues in psychology. The authors were originally inspired by a screenwriting book, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them. Into the Woods author John Yorke writes that what makes a good movie is not necessarily the elements of the plot itself. What matters most is the growth and evolution of the characters at the center of that plot.

Gray chanced upon the book while going through a period in his own life when he felt purposeless and depressed. Nothing he could imagine doing seemed sufficiently epic. Perhaps, he thought, what was true about stories in movies and books that moved us was also true for our life stories. Maybe the problem was not that his life lacked meaning. Maybe the story Gray was telling himself about his life just needed a rewrite. “As human beings, we all grapple with meaning,” Gray told me. “Maybe my life could be more meaningful or less meaningful depending on how I think about it. We have this mind built for storytelling. We understand the world in terms of stories. And if that’s true, what stories are the best?”

In the paper, Gray, Rogers, and their colleagues unveil a “re-storying” intervention designed to help people transform the way they view their life stories—an intervention the paper suggests that can increase both meaning and resiliency in the face of life’s challenges. The authors designed their intervention by drawing from the “hero’s journey,” a classic story arc first identified in the 1940s by Joseph Campbell, the late scholar of comparative religion.

Each one of us is wired to behave like an autobiographical author—to make sense of the world through our stories.

Campbell, influenced by the ideas of the spiritual psychoanalyst and Freud disciple Carl Jung, argued that universal elements could be found in the most enduring myths and fairytales of disparate, unconnected cultures across the globe since the beginning of recorded history. This suggested to him that human beings are wired to make sense of the world around them by placing them in the context of this innately satisfying narrative structure, which Campbell detailed in his seminal 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Stories as diverse as the Odyssey, Ramayana, King Arthur, and even the Bible, Campbell argued, each contained a series of recognizable stages that began with a “call to adventure,” and led to a transformative quest. Along the way, the protagonist received help from mentors, encountered allies and enemies, and overcame a series of trials before achieving success and returning home transformed. Famously, George Lucas has said he based Star Wars on The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Gray, Rogers, and their coauthors boiled down Campbell’s 17 stages of the hero’s journey to seven: protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, legacy. They created a psychological test for people to measure the presence of those elements in their lives. Those who saw their lives as an epic journey scored higher on tests designed to measure meaning in one’s life and the psychological elements associated with it—satisfaction, a sense of well-being, and the extent to which they were “flourishing.”

“The hero’s arc connects the events of your life together, not just into different episodes, but one coherent narrative—and meaning is ultimately about connection, connecting up to bigger things, connecting together,” Gray explained to me. “Not only does it connect it together to something bigger, but it connects it together into something that resonates with us and is as timeless as we see in the movies.”

Gray told me he managed to put his crisis of meaning behind him. Though he recognizes that having kids is not saving the world, and “sitting by the playground is not as exciting as running from the black riders from Lord of the Rings,” he said he is determined to take new challenges in his professional life and make new allies in his personal one. “The point is,” he said, “anyone can have a hero’s journey if you think about your life in a new way.”

One of Gray’s heroes, and a coauthor of the Hero’s Journey paper, is Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. In the field known as “narrative psychology,” McAdams is a Jedi Master—a pioneering theorist who drew together intellectual strands from multiple fields to help invent a new one in the 1980s.

A trim, bespectacled psychologist with a square jaw, and thick, gray hair that he wears swept back over a broad forehead, McAdams told me his ideas about narrative psychology grew out of his experiences as an assistant professor at Loyola University, introducing undergraduates to the work of Erik Erikson, the 20th-century psychoanalyst best known for his theories of psychosocial development.

Erikson suggested human personality development proceeded in a series of predictable stages, each one characterized by a key challenge; young adults like his students, Erikson maintained, and McAdams taught, were primarily concerned with the crucial task of forming a coherent identity. (Erikson is credited with creating the phrase “identity crisis,” and a failure to complete this phase of development results in “role confusion.”) Among McAdams’ influences was French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who argued humans came to understand their own identities by using language to draw together disparate events and establish causal and meaningful connections between them.

That conclusion has powerful implications, McAdams said. Psychologists have long argued that identity provides the compass that, as we grow older, we use to guide our journey through the world and understand our place in it. Our identity determines which groups we seek out when we feel threatened or anxious, it determines which ideas we will defend, fight for—even die for. It also molds our expectations, and directly influences our choices and actions.

WARRIOR: When he was in prison, Manuel Ruiz was determined to change his narrative, to become a hero of his own story. He began to think of himself as a “spartan,” a “warrior,” a man of substance and dignity.  Photo by Kate Nicholson.

For McAdams, an intellectual breakthrough came when he began to realize that stories weren’t just a means to help form identity—story and identity were the same thing.

“If you could see an identity, it would be a story,” McAdams said. “People have stories in their heads about how they came to be and where their lives are going. A story does all those things that Erikson said that identity should do. It puts your life together, past, present, imagined, future, beginning, middle, end. It links things together over time. It integrates different parts of yourself.”

Each one of us, McAdams said, is wired to behave like an “autobiographical author”—to make sense of the world by creating stories about our lives. These stories “sit in our heads and they give our life a sense of purpose and meaning.”

Some view their lives as tragedies. Others, comedies, or love stories. Some stories are as labyrinthine as a Dostoevsky novel, others as simple as Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The way that people organize the events of their lives can reveal their level of resilience and influence the way they deal with adversity.

It’s a theory that is now supported by a weighty body of research. McAdams has spent decades sitting with strangers, collecting their stories, then teasing out patterns and correlating those patterns with standard measures of personality, well-being, and other variables.

McAdams today is best known for his work studying the stories of adults between the ages of 40 and 65, a period of life where the tumult and uncertainty of youth has dissipated, and healthy individuals—at least the way Erikson saw it—are often focused outward, raising children, enmeshed in careers, and being active in society. The healthiest adults, Erikson suggested, had mastered what he called “generativity,” they had developed a propensity to engage in acts that contribute to the greater well-being, and often promote the well-being of younger generations.

Indeed, McAdams found that, in middle-aged adults, just as Erikson theorized, there was a strong association between a deep sense of meaning, connection, and psychological well-being and generativity.  The stories those generative people told, McAdams discovered, often shared common elements—elements prominent in the hero’s journey—about overcoming suffering, triumphing over adversity, or being delivered from pain and persecution and turning challenges and setbacks into something positive.

“Highly generative adults love to tell you about their lives, almost as if they take pride in bad things happening,” McAdams said. “They love to tell you about how they turned the bad stuff into good stuff.”

McAdams also found common themes in the stories of those on the opposite end of the spectrum at middle age—those who instead of mastering the challenge of generativity had fallen into despair. Many of them believed that their most important life experiences were guided by fate, luck, and other circumstances beyond their control. McAdams coined the term “contamination” to describe a story element often seen in stories associated with the most miserable.

“Contamination means you have really great scenes that go suddenly bad and you can’t undo them,” he said. “If you have a bunch of them, or if you tend to see life that way, it’s trouble. Even if you have a positive event, you’re expecting the other shoe to drop. You’re expecting contamination. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I asked McAdams whether his findings, based for the most part on white populations in colleges and universities, applied to non-white, non-educated, non-American populations. He acknowledged that early in his career, he shared my concerns, and wondered whether his samples had skewed his findings.

But, he said, “we have never found any kind of relationship between education, income, and the ability to tell narrative stories about your life. Granted, we are not studying people who are homeless on the street, but we have looked at a broad range, from working class to upper class. The dimensions we look for—redemption, agency, communion, coherence—are not related to demographic variables. They’re not related to race either. We’ve done a lot of work with African Americans and contrasted them to Euro-Americans, and you don’t see big differences. Storytelling is basic. People respect stories and tell stories in all cultures.”

When I arrived as a new reporter in Cambodia, the country was still grappling with the legacy of three decades of civil war. Within a few days, I found myself interviewing—and working alongside—survivors of genocide. Most of the people I met had lost members of their family under the Pol Pot regime, a cataclysmic four-year period between 1975 and 1979 during which one in four Cambodians died of murder, starvation, or disease. Others had served as child soldiers, ended up in refugee camps, and suffered other traumas as the nation endured, not just a genocide, but a decade of a Vietnamese occupation, and a protracted civil war that kept Cambodia in poverty and crisis.

I saw things that left me shaken. I met an elderly woman begging on the street, who burst into tears when I asked her if she supported a United Nations tribunal to try former members of the Pol Pot regime, even though some were warning it could shatter the fragile peace. As tears streamed down her deeply lined cheeks, she described how Khmer Rouge soldiers had murdered her children in front of her by throwing them down the stairs. “They killed my children and that is why I am like this,” she said. Decades later, she still yearned for vengeance. The chance for justice was worth any cost.

But I also saw things that left me inspired. One day, I traveled up to the Thai border to visit a recently liberated former Khmer Rouge stronghold deep in the Cambodian jungle. For 30 years, music had been banned and the villagers had been forced to dress only in gray and black. I arrived to find them clad in gaudy shades of pink, purple, and yellow—a joyous explosion of clashing colors, so jarringly mismatched it would have given Tim Gunn a heart attack. Later, sitting on a simple platform made of wooden slats, I listened as a woman told me about the day, just a few weeks earlier, when an enterprising countryman brought the first karaoke machine to town. Nobody had any money to pay for a song. But people came from miles around just to see it. And when that first maudlin Thai video flashed on the screen, depicting two young lovers by a riverbank crooning to one another in the melodic phrases of a contemporary pop song, the entire village burst into tears moved by the beauty of the simple cinematic and musical experience.

“They killed my children and that is why I am like this.”

It was in Cambodia that I first became fascinated by the phenomenon of psychological resilience. That led me to the classic book, Man’s Search for Meaning, by the Austrian psychiatrist and Nazi death camp survivor Viktor Frankl, a book that, long before the hero’s journey paper came out, presented a “re-storying intervention” that convinced me and a lot of others too, that when people change the way they view their story, it can change the way they live their lives. Both Gray and McAdams told me Frankl’s book had a profound influence on them.

At Auschwitz, Frankl observed his own physical and spiritual decline with grim professional detachment. He was called upon to counsel his fellow prisoners who had been pushed past the limits of their physical, psychological, and spiritual endurance. Frankl faced an impossible challenge. What is there to say, Frankl writes, to someone trapped in a real-life nightmare who insists, “I have nothing to expect from life anymore”?

Frankl’s approach was to convince those in despair they could still be a hero in their own story. The death camps show that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the sufferings it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified, and unselfish,” Frankl wrote. The impact of this shift in thinking, Frankl argued for the rest of his life, could transform lives. Like the life of Manuel Ruiz.

I met Ruiz in San Francisco in 2018, while researching a story on Inside Circle, a national organization that helps men inside and outside of prison rediscover their humanity, heal, and find purpose by offering group therapy seminars. During the gang hysteria that gripped Los Angeles in the early 1990s, Ruiz was convicted of shooting a rival gang member (who survived) and sentenced to life in prison. He arrived at California’s Folsom Prison as a confused 19-year-old kid with no education, full of self-loathing, hopeless, “lost,” violent, and defiant.

Within three months of arriving at Folsom, Ruiz was sitting in the day room watching TV, when older members of the Mexican-American prison gang with which he was associated approached and asked him if he’d be willing “to put in some work” for them in the prison yard. The Mexican Americans were at war with the Black inmates, and while the gang leadership had been serving time in solitary for fighting, five Mexican-American inmates in non-leadership roles had negotiated a truce with the Black inmates without their authorization. The older members wanted Ruiz to “send a signal.” They told him to carry out a nonfatal stabbing of one of the Mexican-American inmates who’d violated protocol. A couple days later, they sent him out into the prison yard with a knife made of sharpened metal taken from a clipboard, clenched between his butt cheeks. They also gave him an “ass-pack” consisting of a latex glove stuffed with tobacco, drugs, and messages to insert like a suppository in the expectation he would get sent to solitary confinement, “the hole.” Ruiz carried out his duty. He stabbed an older Mexican-American boxing trainer in the neck.

“I was sitting with the acceptance that I’m going to die in prison.”

Ruiz got 16 months in the hole for the stabbing and began a violent journey that would land him in Pelican Bay, the supermax prison whose inmates included Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. It was there that Ruiz discovered Frankl’s book, sent to him by his mother, and was introduced to older inmates who encouraged him to better himself.

Ruiz began waking up at 4 a.m. in his cell, doing yoga and tai chi, and working out. He refrained from cursing, forcing himself to do 50 burpees every time he slipped. He started doing crossword puzzles to improve his vocabulary. He avoided drinking and doing drugs (widely available in prison). He began to read, to study, to improve himself physically, mentally, and spiritually. He made a life for himself within the walls of his prison. (During the COVID-19 epidemic, during lockdown, he gave me advice on how to get through it without sinking into a deep depression.)

Ruiz told me he was determined to change his narrative, to become a hero of his own story. He began to think of himself as a “spartan,” a “warrior,” a man of substance and dignity. “I was sitting with the acceptance that I’m going to die in prison,” he said. “I’m not going to be able to see my parents. My whole reality was, ‘This is it, this is my life. What do I do?’ I knew Frankl went to the concentration camp, lost his wife. And his ability to change his perspective in the midst of that shit was a freaking huge deal. It was a big influence on me.”

By the time Ruiz left prison more than 21 years later, the unexpected beneficiary of recent prison reforms, he had transformed into an educated, leading advocate for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men. Today he is the chairman of the board of Inside Circle.

A NEW FRAME: Dennis Charney,  the dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, was shot at close range by a former employee in 2016. Early in his convalescence, he said, “You realize that you can’t undo what happened, but you can reframe it.” Photo by Claudia Paul.

Dennis Charney was also influenced by Man’s Search for Meaning, though when he read it, he had little reason to suspect the lessons contained in the book would ever apply to him.

Charney, who today is the dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, is an expert on resilience. He spent more than 30 years studying victims of sexual and physical abuse, those with congenital diseases, survivors of earthquakes, and prisoners-of-war from Vietnam who’d been kept in solitary confinement for years.

On Aug. 16, 2016, a former employee lay in wait for Charney outside his favorite delicatessen in his hometown of Chappaqua, New York. When Charney emerged with his morning bagel and cup of coffee, the employee, a disgraced scientist fired by Charney for scientific misconduct, opened fire at close range with a 20-gauge shotgun. The shotgun blast tore apart Charney’s right shoulder, punctured a lung, peppered his liver with buckshot pellets, and caused him to lose half his blood.

After six days in intensive care, Charney returned home, so spooked he slept with the light on. He endured waves of anxiety and fear, and fought off the instinct to hate his attacker, recognizing it as “negative energy that drags you down.” Early in his convalescence, he said, he recognized the opportunity to implement the lessons learned over his years of research. “You look at what happened to you, and you realize that you can’t undo what happened, but you can reframe it,” Charney said. “You can assimilate it into who you are as a person and move forward.”

Charney’s road to recovery, just like the transformation of Ruiz, seemed to follow the steps of the hero’s journey. Charney cast himself as a protagonist on a quest to assimilate the shooting into his own story. He told me he had lost a grandchild to a genetic disorder. “Those things become part of your life story,” Charney said. “The great things, the loves of your life, and the traumas, come together in your life story. How you handle them contributes to your personal growth. The term we use in my field is ‘post-traumatic growth’—you grow from the trauma and that makes you prepared to handle other challenges in your life.”

When Charney emerged from the deli, the disgraced scientist opened fire with a 20-gauge shotgun.

Following the shooting, Charney identified obstacles and challenged himself. A competitive kayaker and weightlifter, he resolved to recover sufficiently to enter a kayak race by the following spring and compete with med students in an annual “strongest person competition.” He relied on allies—family, friends, doctors, and students for physical and emotional support. He embraced a legacy, seeking out other victims, sharing his wisdom and offering support.

“My recovery was very public because I’m the dean, and I was in the ICU of my own hospital,” Charney said. “And what I did for myself was realize I could be a real role model for other people because so many people were watching my recovery.” Charney coauthored the 2012 book Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, with Steven Southwick, also an expert on human traumatization. Southwick died of prostate cancer while writing the third edition. Southwick’s battle against cancer, Charney said, “ended up becoming part of his life story, his narrative. He fought heroically for five years.”

We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote in 1979. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Didion’s loss of faith in “narrative’s intelligibility” is a pronounced theme today. “We’re told that story will set us free. But what if a narrative frame is also a cage?” asked The New Yorker in a 2023 essay, “The Tyranny of the Tale.” Kieran Setiya, a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, takes up the reasoning that imposing a narrative line on our lives reduces them in his 2022 book, Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find a Way. “When you define your life by way of a single enterprise, a narrative arc, its outcome will come to define you,” Setiya writes. “It’s a tendency we should fight.”

I was curious what Setiya might think of the hero’s journey paper. When I described it to him in an interview, he had quick rebuttals. “If you’re thinking of your life in narrative terms, you risk setting yourself up for a kind of life-defining failure,” he said. “You can narrow your perspective on life. You might think that making sense of your life in terms of a story can be meaningful and valuable and help you come to terms with difficult experiences. But that doesn’t have to take the form of a linear narrative of the kind the hero’s journey suggests. Lots of people have good lives without telling that kind of hero narrative.”

What’s more, Setiya said, “There’s the idea that if you can adopt the right attitude toward whatever circumstance you find yourself in, giving up on what’s out of your control, focusing on what’s in your control, and directing your agency at that, you’re guaranteed to achieve a flourishing or meaningful life. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think there’s any guarantee, unfortunately, that people’s lives are guaranteed to have the potential to be good and meaningful.” Telling people they can overcome terrible situations, he added, “is a kind of deception that is uncharitable and unempathetic to people. It’s a failure to acknowledge that there are circumstances under which people’s lives are terrible in ways that no change of attitude could possibly compensate for.”

It was hard for me to disagree with Setiya’s last point. It would be absurd to suggest the Cambodian woman who told me about the death of her children might somehow recover from the trauma by reinterpreting the events of her life.

It wasn’t hard for McAdams to disagree with Setiya. “Decades of research and clinical experience show that changing beliefs, stories, and self-understandings do indeed change lives,” McAdams said. “People can become happier by changing their thoughts about life. I mean, this is so fundamentally true that I don’t believe I have to argue it.” That said, he added, “happiness and meaning are not solely the product of beliefs. The real world counts. In fact, one of the great values of life narratives is that they change over time. People change their narrative self-understandings as life evolves. Narratives are not fixed traits. They are dynamic and elastic cognitive structures, showing remarkable flexibility in their integrative power.”

As a journalist, I’ve chosen a life that venerates narratives. They are a central part of the story I tell about myself. And when I think about the inspiring people I’ve met, the transformative power of the hero’s journey rings true. The most important factor setting apart those who recover from life’s trials from those who succumb is the ability to maintain a sense of agency, “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” Frankl wrote. Far from caging us, the stories we tell about ourselves can set us free.

Adam Piore

Posted on December 13, 2023

Adam Piore, a veteran journalist, is the author of two books and a longtime Nautilus contributor. He currently covers health and infectious disease for the Boston Globe.

Psychology

What Gets Enemies to Negotiate

The value of anger, guilt, and future thinking for finding common ground.

By Katharine Gammon    December 6, 2023

A short-lived truce between the Israeli government and Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas ended on Nov. 30 with a resumption of deadly violence and each side blaming the other for a breakdown in negotiations. This latest war in a brutal centuries-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians over land, statehood, persecution, and colonial power will likely require more than sterling mediation skills to resolve. But an emerging science suggests that indirectly influencing emotions such as hope, anger, and guilt may be a useful strategy for mediators looking to build peace.

We talked with Swiss neuroscientist, psychologist, and practicing mediator Olga Maria Klimecki-Lenz to discover what social science says about how to navigate trenchant international conflicts under deeply hostile conditions.

What makes a negotiator successful in international conflicts like these? What qualities do they need to have?

There’s one generic principle and it’s impartiality: to truly be looking for a solution which benefits all parties. But the research also shows that negotiators can work to influence the emotions of others and of themselves in positive ways. We know emotions are very important in conflicts, with emotions like hatred fueling conflict escalation, and other emotions such as hope, sometimes even anger, contributing to conflict de-escalation.

How can anger contribute to conflict de-escalation, and how might negotiators use this to their advantage?

In contrast to hatred, which is associated with the evaluation that the other person or group is inherently bad and will never change, anger is associated with the evaluation that an unfair action has happened and that one has enough resources or power to change the situation. Now, anger can lead to escalation and violence. But anger can also serve as a motivation for reconciliation, because the ultimate goal of the feeling of anger, when caused by an unfair action, is to overcome the injustice. And injustice can also be overcome by peaceful means. If negotiators want to motivate others or themselves to move from feeling hatred to feeling anger, they can try to shift the focus from the person’s or group’s characteristics, to the concrete actions that have been done by a person or group.

Feeling guilt for past actions is better for conflict de-escalation than feeling shame.

How can negotiators make their counterparts feel hopeful?

We understand more and more from our own research and from research that our colleagues do, especially in Israel and Palestine, that indirect emotional regulation strategies help. So strategies where we indirectly try to increase hope, or future thinking.

The peace talks at Camp David in 1978 between President Jimmy Carter, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin dragged on for 12 days with no solution. And then when they were about to break apart, Jimmy Carter asked Begin and Sadat: How do you imagine the future for your grandchildren? What future would you like them to live in? People who were present say that this was a turning point. They found a solution on the same day, and were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the same year.

This is something we wanted to test in the laboratory a couple of years ago. We asked a group of people to just think about the future for one minute—future events more than 30 days away. Another group was instructed to think about animals for one minute and to name animals. And then after that intervention, they played a computer game and we measured how much they helped other people who were also playing that game. The outcome was the strongest result of my research so far: Those people who thought about the future for just one minute helped much more than the people who thought about animals.

I think these indirect interventions—where we ask people to think about the future or where we give them generic texts that may bring about hope totally unrelated to the conflict, or where we provide them with ways to increase their own well-being and their own sense of benevolence—might transfer into the conflict situation.

How does culture influence what works in negotiations?

We know that emotions and emotional displays have huge cultural variations. Our colleagues in Israel have, for instance, found that feeling guilt for past actions is better for conflict de-escalation than feeling shame. However, it is not clear whether such findings are also applicable to some East Asian countries, such as Japan, where shame plays a vital role in keeping the community together.

How much of this is science and how much is art?

In social psychology, the main paradigm that was out there since the 1940s is the intergroup contact theory, which is the idea that bringing people together from different groups reduces prejudice and increases trust. But a 2018 meta analysis showed it’s not even clear whether this paradigm works because the studies involved did not account for peoples’ racial prejudices.

As psychologists we have done a rather poor job at conducting very rigorous experiments, and in conducting experiments outside of our home geographies. But we are beginning to do these studies now.

Lead image: LittlePerfectStock / Shutterstock

Katharine Gammon

Posted on December 6, 2023

Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California, who writes about environment, science, and parenting. You can find her on Twitter @kategammon.

Psychology

Social Media Is Not Heroin

You may think you scroll too much, but psychologists caution against calling it an addiction.

By Summer Rylander    November 29, 2023

Social media is exhausting. The sheer volume of information about humanity contained in just a few minutes of scrolling is almost too much to contemplate: Wrenching accounts of global violence mix with photos from your third cousin’s country wedding and surprising tales of human-animal friendship. Then there’s the FOMO of flipping through a buddy’s vacation pictures to Bhutan or Berlin while you’re on the couch in sweatpants. Even cute cat videos overwhelm after a while.

And yet, it’s hard to look away. Almost 60 percent of American adults think they spend too much time on their phones, and social media represents one of the biggest time sucks: On average adults spend more than 2 and a half hours on social media sites like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram every day, while teenagers clock nearly double that. All that scrolling, as we know, can leave people feeling sad and anxious, sleeping badly, doing poorly in school, getting little done at work, and neglecting friends and family.

So is attachment to social media an addiction? Many psychologists and public health figures think so, based on criteria used to diagnose other forms of addiction, such as internet gaming addiction. But no formal diagnosis exists, and studies of the effects of digital “detox”—disconnecting from the offending activity or substance for a defined period of time, a standard tool in addiction studies—have been mixed. Now a small but thoughtful new study in PLOS One calls into question whether addiction is the right term for heavy social media use, and suggests digital detox, at least over the short term, may not have much impact on mental health at all.

“I think ‘addiction’ is the wrong word to use,” says Durham University psychologist Michael Wadsley, co-author of the study. “Social media can certainly be problematic and people can use it in harmful ways, but I think we should be careful not to over-pathologize behavior as an addiction.”

For their experiment, Wadsley and his colleague Niklas Ihssen wanted to address gaps in previous digital detox studies: an over-reliance on self-report and few measures of the extent of problematic social media use among study participants. They recruited 55 students from Durham University, aged 18 to 25, with varying scores on the social media disorder scale. (None of the students had sought clinical help for their social media use.) The researchers then directed the participants to take one week off social networking sites, and measured withdrawal symptoms, craving, and mood over a 15-day period.

We should be careful not to over-pathologize.

They relied not just on self-assessments but also tracked the students’ craving through a number of behavioral and physiological tests. For example, they measured reactions to different visual cues: social media icons versus control stimuli such as iphone maps, weather, and settings app icons. They also measured how much the students distorted time, which is associated with stress and mood, as well as how much effort they were willing to make to gain exposure to social media sites.

Wadsley and Ihssen found no evidence of the kinds of withdrawal-like effects people typically experience when they suddenly discontinue use of an addictive substance or activity. The “detox” didn’t have positive effects on participants’ well-being, either. Overall, the social media pause didn’t yield much change in mood or motivation at all. They suspect that’s because reducing social media use may remove not just experiences that trigger negative emotions—such as FOMO—but also those that elicit positive emotions, like social approval.

If social media use were an addiction on par with gaming addiction or alcoholism, “after a week of absence you’d expect some substantial changes in mood, and especially in motivation,” says Wadsley. Excessive use of social media may be better defined as a habit, he says, one that can certainly become maladaptive. “I think what our study shows is that most people still maintain some degree of control over their social media use and can reduce their use quite substantially without having any severe impact on mood or cravings.”

The students did report spending a lot more time playing video games and shopping online during the social media detox period, though. So, overall, their screen time didn’t drop that much. Maybe it’s time to put that phone down after all?

Lead image: Paper Trident / Shutterstock

Summer Rylander

Posted on November 29, 2023

Summer Rylander (Twitter | Instagram) is an independent journalist based in Nuremberg, Germany. She covers foodways, responsible tourism, and the conservation of our biodiverse planet.

Psychology

Yes, There Is a Science to Shopping

Five tips to help you navigate the holiday craze with cunning and skill.

By Kevin Berger    November 24, 2023

The first thing you gotta do is go easy on the coffee before you hit the stores. Unless you want to make a bunch of impulsive purchases for things you don’t need but would love to have. Which, come to think of it, sounds like a good reason to have that second cup. In any event, it works. Mercedes has data to show it: free coffee, more car sales.

And listen, fewer choices make you happier, even when it comes to picking a mate. Too many choices spur regret for the one you didn’t make. That’s because feelings about losses are stronger than feelings about gains. Besides, your brain freezes in the face of a larger number of options. After all, there wasn’t a Costco on the savannah.

Also: go with your gut. The first sweater your eyes alight upon in the department store is the one you really want. Your unconscious is the ultimate personal shopper.

There wasn’t a Costco on the savannah.

But maybe do a little research first. It’s a fact of consumer life: Online reviews are a morass of opinions that nobody wants to wade through. But we do anyway. With the right frame of mind, you really can find value in them.

And plan ahead. “Nobody goes there anymore—it’s too crowded,” goes one of Yogi Berra’s best. But go to the supermarket we must, crowded or not. Still, you can use some nifty math—game theory—to determine when a store will be less crowded.

Finally, we don’t mean to get all earnest on you, but do give the environment a thought. Nearly 50 percent of stuff in the supermarket is made with palm oil, whose harvest isn’t doing forest ecosystems any good.

Lead image: Bro Crock / Shutterstock

Kevin Berger

Posted on November 24, 2023

Kevin Berger is the editor of Nautilus.

Psychology

You Can Have Too Much Transcendence

Just ask this religious scholar who took 73 high-dose LSD trips.

By Steve Paulson    November 22, 2023

A few years ago, retired professor of religious studies Chris Bache wrote a book called LSD and the Mind of the Universe. His book is the story of 73 high-dose LSD experiences he had over a period of 20 years, from 1979 to 1999, and how they changed his understanding of the very nature of reality. Bache believes psychedelics represent a “true revolution in Western thought,” and his life has been lived around that premise. But after his long psychedelic journey, Chris ends up in a really interesting place. He wonders, “Can you have too much transcendence?”

As a note to the reader, while I don’t usually like to attach warnings to my interviews about psychedelics, in this case, I will: Don’t do what Chris did. It’s too extreme.

Where were you in your life when you first started these high-dose psychedelic sessions?

I was a brand-new faculty member in the department of philosophy and religious studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio. I had just finished my graduate work at Brown University in philosophy of religion, and I was looking for where to go next. When I found the work of Stan Grof—a psychiatrist known for his research into non-ordinary states of consciousness—I thought, “that’s my life’s work.” I started experimenting with LSD when I was 30 years old and finished when I was 50, and then I spent the next 20 years digesting those experiences. I’m 74 now.

So these were high-dose experiences. We should give some sense of how high a dose.

I was taking 500 to 600 micrograms of LSD, which is right at the body’s maximum. You can take more, but you don’t get higher. I really implore people not to do what I did. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t do it that way. It causes a lot of wear and tear on the system, to go in and out of such extreme levels of consciousness, to so violently tear apart the structure of your mind.

It was a philosopher’s dream come true.

This is a much higher dose than what we would consider a high dose in psychedelic therapy, right, say for treating depression?

Yeah.

How long did these sessions tend to last?

All day. I’d usually start about eight o’clock in the morning, and I would be finished around six o’clock.

The way you write about this is that over these years, your psychedelic journey changed. It went through different phases.

Yes, in one phase, I started experiencing terrible, terrible legions of suffering, pain, violence. Every session, it got deeper and deeper. Sometimes, it became so intense and so extreme, I literally passed out from the extreme suffering. In the beginning, it was like I was experiencing something going on around me, but then, slowly, it began to get into my edges, and then eventually there was no me left separate from it. I became this terrible, terrible suffering.

On the positive side, when I would submit to this process, after several hours of suffering, I would go into an ecstatic portion of the trip. For the first year, this meant I experienced my entire life beginning to end, done. Of course, if you do that, you have some insights into what your life is about. After a year of this, I took a six-year hiatus. When I returned, while the ocean of suffering continued, when I would be spun into ecstasy, I was taken into this deep experience of cosmology. I was taken back to the beginning of creation. I experienced what creation feels like from a spiritual perspective. I was given a series of teachings, was taken into oneness. It was a philosopher’s dream come true.

Do you think you were tapping into some kind of larger consciousness?

I always experienced myself in dialogue with, or engaging, a massive intelligence that was clearly responsible for organizing the sessions, which I wouldn’t always understand while I was having it. But over a period of months and years, I could see there was a clear plan in this process. This intelligence never took a definitive form. It never took a deity form or a spirit guide form, and the deeper I went into the universe, the quality of this intelligence changed, and what I came to understand was that consciousness is an infinite ocean of potential.

Don’t do what Chris did.

Why did you stop after your 73 high-dose sessions of LSD, after 20 years?

I stopped for two reasons. One was pain. I was running so much energy in the sessions that I wasn’t calming down the way I used to. Eventually, the level of energy I experienced during these trips got to be more than I was able to dissipate afterwards with spiritual practice. The sessions were so intense that I was always uncomfortable in my body, and I knew it was time to let my system calm down.

The second reason was sadness. It was the sadness of coming out of deep immersion into the crystalline body of the divine. Once you dissolve into light, once you can know the joy, and the freedom, and the ecstasy of being light, when you come back out of that, there’s a sadness there. After going in and out of those experiences multiple times, it got just so hard to come back into time and space.

The way you write about this is you realized in the end you had too much transcendence.

Yeah, it led me to ask the question, “Is it possible to have too much God?” You know, that’s like an oxymoron. It is never possible to have too much God, but it is possible, I think, to have too much transcendence. It’s a delicate balancing act. I had so much transcendence that I lost my rooting on the earth, and I needed to stop entering non-ordinary states. I had to sit still on my cushion, in my life, and let those memories and the energies that I accessed, in those hours, soak into my physical being.

I can imagine you must have felt, when you were coming back from these extraordinary experiences, that ordinary, waking life was kind of pale, by comparison.

It does pale in comparison. It took me years to live with an awareness that everything, every being, every plant, is actually a manifestation of the divine, of this unified energy. Yeah, that’s worth working for.

Do you miss it? Do you miss those encounters with the divine, if that’s what they were?

In some ways, yes. In some ways, no, because I know it’s waiting for me as soon as I die. What reduces the longing, what truly gives me joy, is being able to talk about it and share it, because I’m wired as a teacher. The more I’m able to share these things, the more comfortable I am within my own being.

Excerpted from Luminous, a series from To the Best of Our Knowledge, hosted by executive producer Steve Paulson. Luminous, explores the philosophical and cultural implications of psychedelics through conversations with scientists, healers, and religious scholars. You can learn more about the series and find where you can listen at ttbook.org/luminous.

Lead image: Paul Craft / Shutterstock

Steve Paulson

Posted on November 22, 2023

Steve Paulson is the executive producer of Wisconsin Public Radio’s nationally-syndicated show To the Best of Our Knowledge. He’s the author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science. You can find his podcast about psychedelics, Luminous, here.

Psychology

The Virtues of Not Knowing

How relishing uncertainty can make us better thinkers and neighbors.

By Maggie Jackson    November 20, 2023

I am going to show you some pictures. Tell me whether each is more like a dog or a cat.” With these brief instructions, a pioneering University of California, Berkeley psychologist began giving people so-called tests of perception that were in fact extraordinary barometers of their capacity to relish the twists and turns of life.

Participants were shown a series of drawings of an animal that at first distinctly resembled a cat but then, bit by bit, with a tweak to an ear or a broadening of a muzzle, turned fully canine. The middle pictures were indeterminate, and for some, that proved unnerving. Again and again, these participants refused to surrender the safe harbor of their first answer until the sequence was nearly complete. They showed “a preference to escape into whatever seems definite,” wrote the researcher Else Frenkel-Brunswik.

The famous cat–dog experiments were part of a postwar search by some of the world’s leading scientists for the roots of authoritarianism and prejudice. What Frenkel-Brunswik discovered for her part was a key signature of the closed mind: intolerance of uncertainty.

Reaping the promise of not-knowing depends on a simple rubric: whether people are intent on eradicating uncertainty or are willing to stay open to it and so to a situation’s subtleties and complexities. This is a decision made in the moment yet one that also emerges from an individual’s personal comfort zone for uncertainty.

“Being uncertain means that I lack confidence.” “There is really no such thing as a problem that can’t be solved.” “I should be able to organize everything in advance.” These are statements drawn from the “Intolerance of Uncertainty” and “Tolerance for Ambiguity” tests, classic assessments that have been attracting new attention as tools for unlocking the upsides of not-knowing. (Ambiguity, the state of being inexact or open to multiple interpretations, is a source of uncertainty.) In essence, the tests measure the degree to which people view being unsure as a challenge or as a threat, a distinction that affects how well we learn, argue, explore, invent, and solve problems.

We can bolster our capacity for lingering in the gray spaces where cognitive treasures abound.

Those who shun the indefinite tend to see the world in shades of black and white, ignoring the gray. They are prone to jump to answers and are distressed by chaos and surprise. Their “cognitive map” is narrowed to “rigidly defined tracks,” wrote Frenkel-Brunswik. In contrast, people who operate on the other side of the scale are more likely to be curious, flexible thinkers who revel in complex problems and in new experiences from living abroad to trying a new delicacy. They may even be in better charge of their minds; evidence suggests that such thinkers have more gray matter (i.e., neural volume) in brain regions related to executive control.

In the study of the mind, a tolerance is a tendency, not a fate. We are all more or less prone to be introverted or outgoing, impulsive or reflective, and to welcome the opportunity of incertitude or not. A refusal to not-know isn’t a guaranteed mark of fascism or bigotry any more than someone who dislikes parties is automatically a full-on recluse. (And while political conservatives are a little more reluctant to embrace uncertainty, the well-publicized link between these two complex concepts is weak; many liberals detest surprises, and no small number of conservatives revel in change.)

We all have a personal appetite for not-knowing, but the real news is that this leaning is malleable. Situation and context matter; under time pressure, almost everyone’s eagerness to race to a conclusion deepens. At the same time, through practice and a bit of effort, we can bolster our capacity for lingering in the gray spaces where cognitive treasures abound. It is possible to move the dial.

Picture a laboratory experiment that brought together pairs of strangers with opposing political views for a brief online back-and-forth on a controversial topic such as abortion or gun control. The interactions that unfolded in the 2016 study were just the kind that so often go quickly awry. This is the moment when the cognitive mismatch that confronts us isn’t a mystery virus or a trade policy shift but another person with a wholly different view, an opponent we say. The potential for “conflict processing” awaits.

At the outset, half of the pairs were coached to take on a highly competitive, point-scoring mindset. The other duos were told to cooperatively learn as much as they could from one another. In fifteen minutes, this slight difference in stance shifted the participants’ approach to the world. The pairs of strangers who were gunning to outperform one another turned more absolutist, that is, lovers of sureness in learning and knowledge. They became more likely to believe that there was one unerring truth to the matter and that they held it, like a rock that they could seize and defend.

In contrast, those who had been primed to learn became more evaluative. They began to see knowing as inherently uncertain and as something best forged from multiple viewpoints. “I can absolutely see that point,” said one participant. They were no less confident in their views; contrary to what we might expect, having the courage to tolerate ambiguity is associated with assertiveness. But by being open to new, challenging information, they grew willing to examine and modify their position. They treated their understanding as akin to an evolving yet durable tapestry, its strength deriving from its very suppleness and mutability. From such a vantage point, more skillful and persuasive arguments are made.

No one seminar or script can transform us into virtuosos of not-knowing. “We don’t have a home-run magic bullet for this,” a leading scientist of uncertainty chided when I pressed him for an antidote to our fear of the unknown. We can’t “inject all this, bottle it, and put it into some easy intervention,” said Paul K. J. Han, a senior physician-scientist at the National Institutes of Health. One-shot fixes are the pipe dreams of an instant-answer age, he was reminding me.

Still, neither should we ignore the myriad chances that await us each day to open our minds to uncertainty—and to its remarkable potential.

This essay is excerpted with permission from Maggie Jackson’s new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, published this month by Prometheus Books.

Lead image: Danomyte / Shutterstock

Maggie Jackson

Posted on November 20, 2023

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her prescient writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Her newest book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, was nominated for a National Book Award. Her previous book Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention sparked a global conversation on the steep costs of our tech-centric, attention-deficient modern lives. Learn more at her website.

Technology

- Stop Worrying About Deepfakes

- When AI Hallucinates

- Resurrecting an Extinct Animal as a Robot

- Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem

Technology

Stop Worrying About Deepfakes

Where many see the death of reality on the internet, this hacker-turned-Notre Dame professor sees communion.

By Anne Strainchamps    December 20, 2023

How are we to know what is real, on the internet? When a faked photo of an explosion near the Pentagon briefly spooked Wall Street this spring, it was the first major case of a viral AI-generated image moving the market. The hoax wilted under scrutiny, but to many, it seemed like a harbinger of far worse to come.

And yet, when Walter Scheirer, a computer scientist and media forensics expert at the University of Notre Dame, sent his students to scour the internet for examples of AI-doctored videos, what they brought back surprised him. It was, he says, “memes all the way down.”

So far, the majority of convincing deepfakes seem to be those engineered to generate a knowing chuckle rather than an economic collapse: fake Tom Cruise talking about hand-washing; Nicholas Cage in every movie ever; Joe Biden, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama playing Call of Duty together. The internet, Scheirer concluded, is indeed overflowing with fake content, but the vast majority of it seems aimed at the creation of connection—rather than destruction.

Scheirer and the internet grew up in tandem. An older millennial, he describes his first computer as “primitive”—a Texas Instruments box that hooked up to the family TV. In middle school, he began hanging out in Internet Relay Chat hacker channels, rubbing virtual shoulders with the cyberpunk renegades of the early computer underground. Even then, he says, hackers loved twisting science facts and fiction together, for the craft of it.

In his new book, A History of Fake Things on the Internet, published this month, Scheirer argues that today’s deepfakes are best understood in this spirit—and are, in many ways, the digital stepchildren of 18th-century satire, Victorian spirit photography, and other (very) pre-internet traditions of parody and imagination. In a recent conversation, Scheirer told me he has come to see the preponderance of fake things on the internet not as a radical and terrifying departure from civil norms, but as a wholly natural evolution of our human drive for mythmaking and storytelling.

HACKER AT HEART: Walter Scheirer’s early experiences in a high-profile hacker group opened his eyes to the universal drive for myth-making—whether on the page or the internet. “Haven’t creative art forms like the novel always challenged the truth in some way?” he says. “Why turn away from new innovations in storytelling simply because they provide an outlet for folks intent on making things up?” Photo by Glass Darkly Films.

Where do you draw the line between a harmless fake and a dangerously deceptive one?

One thing I came to appreciate more in writing this book is the value of parody and satire in human communication. This is a very old format for making a social critique, often used quite strategically. A really famous case which predates the internet is Jonathan Swift’s (1729) pamphlet, “A Modest Proposal.”

It’s about cannibalism, about eating babies and it’s really disturbing—but Swift isn’t actually talking about cannibalism; what he’s trying to do is make a social critique about the state of the poor in Ireland. If you’re reading critically and deeply, you make the connection right away and you probably find the transgressive, shocking nature of it funny in a dark way—and that’s of course what Swift intended.

But over the years, this pamphlet has been routinely misunderstood. Occasionally there are public readings of it, and even today people lose their minds—like, how in the world could we have people out there advocating for the consumption of babies?—which obviously misses the point. A lot of the internet is just like that. It’s awash in transgressive material that requires you to think a bit to get the message. The problem is, the feed-like nature of social media often causes us to stick to the surface-level message, so then you get these outcries.

What about deepfakes? Content that looks and sounds so real, it’s hard to detect, let alone refute. Is concern about those overblown too?

Yeah, it’s a question that’s been coming up recently. Deepfakes first appeared on the Internet in 2017, so it’s not a particularly new technology at this point. There was huge concern right away that you’d have videos appear in a political context that could change the course of an election or lead to political violence. But none of that has transpired.

We develop innovative new technologies and—surprise, surprise!—we use them to tell stories.

You write quite a bit about the computer underground in the 1990s and early 2000s. The way you tell it, even then people were blurring the line between fact and fiction online. Hackers were sharing technical information with each other, along with all kinds of creative rumors and jokes. You were a teenager then—how did you get drawn into this world?

I was always really interested in computers, but when I was in middle school, a friend of mine found some hacker textfiles—essentially creative writing zines produced by hackers—and was like, “Look, this is really interesting stuff!” and that’s when I realized there was this whole other world of computer use out there.

What was inside these files? Conspiratorial messages like, “Guess what the government’s really doing?”

All of that and more. Plenty of cheat codes for video games. But then it would dive deeper, like, Have you ever heard of the Unix operating system, that businesses and the government use? Well, here’s how to access it, here’s how to use it. And then you’d get the creative writing part. Along with classic conspiracy stories threaded in, lots of stuff about UFOs and paranormal activity that couldn’t possibly be true but was intriguing enough that you’d want to keep reading. I thought it was so cool to blend all these ideas together and I just needed more and more of it.

Did you yourself take part in any legendary hacking exploits? Anything you’d care to reveal?

I wish. I’ll give all the credit to the hackers who appear in my book. I was a bit younger.

Because there’s one story I wondered about. You write about a massive textfile that appeared online in 2012 and seems to document years of highly successful attacks against major corporate and government targets—deep penetration, the kind of stuff that could send someone to prison. You comment that to this day, no one knows who was behind it. Something about the way you phrased it made me wonder whether that was you.

No comment.

[Laughter] So, you clearly identify with the anarchistic, “the internet wants to be free” mentality. But today you teach at Notre Dame, and your bio says you “promote technology development informed by Catholic social teaching.” Somehow I’m having a hard time putting those two things together: anti-authoritarian hacker, Catholic social thinker. Can you explain?

What connects them is the idea of community. The hackers were a really interesting subculture—a bunch of people who were connecting for the first time and who built something that endures. They went on to create the computer security industry. And Catholic social teaching is all about: How do we flourish in a communal sense? How do you build some notion of the common good?

And here’s a big connection: If you turn back the clock and look at the ideas that informed the construction of the internet we have today, a lot of it comes from Marshall McLuhan, the famous media theorist from the 1960s. He’s very much associated with the counterculture, but one fact that a lot of people don’t know is that he was a devout Catholic.

The internet is awash in transgressive material that requires you to think a bit to get the message.

I did not know that.

He converted to Catholicism, and he believed that the Catholic faith was the ultimate media system. Because you’re always in communion, right? With the saints, with people who have passed, and of course with God. They all come together through prayer and meditation—these forms of spirituality—and it’s fascinating to see how that idea trickles down into his thinking about the media. He was obsessed with the idea of uniting the entire planet through information networks.

Didn’t he write that in the end, we will become information? That sounds like some kind of cyber-transubstantiation.

That’s exactly right. Technology is kind of mysterious when you think about it, right? I don’t think that’s entirely a crazy idea. A lot of people are talking about emerging technologies in this way, as they try to grapple with AI—you know, is there some spiritual dimension to it? I think there’s something to that. All these technologies are forms of human creation, and in Christianity we’re called to co-create with God; He gave us this ability to create.

So you see the internet as an extension of the collective imagination of humanity. Rather than as market-driven technology designed to rationalize work, you see it as a vehicle for something more important: mythmaking. You write about the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ idea that we live in two different realms at once: the real world, or the realm of truth, and the myth cycle. How does that concept apply to all of the strange things on the internet?

Lévi-Strauss’s insight was that the imagination is really useful for human survival but is discounted once you get to the 19th and 20th centuries. And yet, we’re still making up stories. Well, why? If you’re a perfectly rational person, you should want to optimize every aspect of your life. Why would you waste time telling stories and making things up? It’s not efficient. Especially here in the 21st century, it’s almost shocking to think daydreaming might be useful. Shouldn’t we just be working? But Lévi-Strauss argues that both ways of thinking are important, and they go hand in hand.

That’s interesting—because it can be tempting to wonder why we’re spending so much human energy constructing a simulated virtual world—trying to build a crappy copy of the creation online. But it seems to me that your point with Lévi-Strauss is that the internet is where our human drive to create myth lives. That maybe our sense of enchantment isn’t lost, but is sneaking back into this wild, inchoate frontier we created online. In which case, all those little memes are more significant than we think?

I firmly believe that. And it’s not terribly surprising when you look at culture through the centuries. We develop innovative new technologies and—surprise, surprise!—we use them to tell stories. I think that’s largely misunderstood.

I mean, what is the internet for? A lot of people would still say it’s the information superhighway; you go there to get facts and to get your work done—this corporate messaging that dates back to the dot-com era of the ’90s. But the internet was never really meant to be that; it was more McLuhan’s vision of a creative space where we can share the projections of our imaginations with others.

What connects hacking and Catholic social teaching is the idea of community.

This makes me think we’ve been talking with the wrong kind of people about the internet. Instead of tech gurus and cyber policy folks, we should be turning to psychoanalysts and anthropologists and theologians—to people who specialize in thinking about the stories we tell and our unconscious motivations for telling them. Sigmund Freud would be right at home online.

Yeah, just think about dreams. I mean, the internet, especially through these creative AI technologies, is like a dreamscape, right? It’s like, how much of human life is encoded in those A.I. hallucinations? I think there’s a lot of interesting work to be done there, but very few people are studying it.

Or something else I’ve been reading about—“resurrection deepfakes.” Chatbots or replicas of people who are no longer alive. There’s a genre begging for some deeper analysis.

Yeah, this is a big idea, that AI could actually bring people back. And it’s a longstanding idea, too—kind of like old “spirit photography,” which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Photographers were getting fancier in their special effects—yes, actually, it was possible to edit photos in a darkroom!—and discovered that if you exposed a film negative to light twice, you could actually get two different images. So you could have someone sit for a portrait and then expose the same film to an old photo of their long-lost loved one and in the double exposure, it would appear as this ghost-like apparition.

And now people are doing essentially the same thing with deepfakes, right? There’s this inclination to keep in touch with the dead—and I think McLuhan would probably be pretty happy with this.

You make me think that asking whether something on the internet is true or fake is in many ways beside the point. Not saying you condone unethical behavior. But one of your main points is that online fakes reveal more than they conceal, because they tell us something about ourselves. What are they saying?

What is the story, right? That’s the big thing a lot of social scientists are trying to find—a sweeping generalization to explain this whole phenomenon. But at the end of the day, it’s just telling stories. People just want to connect with other people. A lot of these media objects are for human connection. It’s like, I want to share something with you, I want you to understand something about me or my community.

Lead image: Master1305 / Shutterstock

Anne Strainchamps

Posted on December 20, 2023

Anne Strainchamps is a Peabody Award-winning public radio journalist. She is the host and founding producer of To the Best of Our Knowledge, the “intelligent, optimistic, curious” national public radio show and podcast from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.

Technology

When AI Hallucinates

Let’s not praise inaccuracy as creativity.

By Oliver Bown    November 21, 2023

This fall, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s once- (and possibly future-) CEO made a surprising statement about artificial intelligence. AI systems, including that company’s ChatGPT, are known to “hallucinate”: perceive patterns and generate outputs that are nonsensical. That wasn’t a flaw in AI systems, Altman said, it was part of their “magic.” The fact “that these AI systems can come up with new ideas and be creative, that’s a lot of the power.” That raised eyebrows: We humans are rather good at creativity without getting our facts all wrong. How could such an appeal to creativity make a decent counter to the many concerns about accuracy?

To begin, what do people mean when they say an AI system “hallucinates”? Take this example of what happens when GPT4 tries its hand at academic citations:

Me:

Can you complete the title of the paper by Keith L. Downing written in 2004, “Development and the …”

GPT4:

Yes, the complete title of Keith L. Downing’s paper written in 2004 is “Development and the Baldwin Effect: Evolution by Any Other Name?” This paper delves into the Baldwin Effect and its implications for understanding evolution and development.

The part of the title “Evolution by Any Other Name?” is made up. As it happens, that is the title of another academic paper on “alternative models of biological evolution,” and so is very relevant, but very definitely wrong.

When people say GPT is hallucinating, they are referring to this kind of mangling of facts. But the idea of hallucination implies that at other times the facts have been accurately portrayed. Unfortunately, this promotes a misunderstanding of how large language models (LLMs) work, and misunderstanding how a technology works can make the difference between it being safe and dangerous. It might be better to say that everything GPT does is a hallucination, since a state of non-hallucination, of checking the validity of something against some external perception, is absent from these models. There is no right or wrong answer in their world, no meaning relating to goals.

That’s because LLMs are not models of brains, but of language itself, its patterns, structures, and probabilities. At heart their job description is incredibly simple: Given some text, they tell us what text comes next. It’s worth keeping front and center, however, that there is not always one right response. If I say “the tail that wags the …” you might say the next word is “dog” with a high degree of certainty, but this is not the right and only answer. In any such context, there is much freedom, and the “rightness” of any answer depends not only on the conceptual context but also on what you’re trying to do—your goal.

There is no right or wrong answer in their world, no meaning relating to goals.

As we barrel into the AI age, the issue of the accuracy of LLMs has triggered mild concern in some quarters, alarm in others, and amusement elsewhere. In one sense Altman was rightly deflecting interest away from any claim that GPT can convey accurate information at all. In another sense, he was layering one misconception with another in the implication that hallucination is key to creative capability. But since he mentioned it, what of GPT’s creative prowess?

It is certainly clear that a large part of the uptake of GPT has been for creative tasks, so what makes something creatively productive, and does this need to be at the expense of facts? Huge amounts of effort have been put into understanding how humans do creative things, and, as an important corollary, dispelling myths about creativity. This vast literature is reasonably unanimous about one crucial property of human creative cognition: that it involves the performance of a sort of search.

As the creativity researcher Teresa Amabile most eloquently justifies, creative problems are by their definition those for which there is not a known solution, and by extension, necessitate “heuristic methods” for seeking those solutions where no “algorithmic” method will suffice. Aligning with the psychologist Dean Simonton, I believe this is well condensed into the idea of “blind search,” noting that “blind” does not mean “random.” Think of a radar scanning space; it moves systematically in a circle, traversing all possible points, but is nevertheless blind in its searching. In cognitive terms, blind search also necessitates evaluation, knowing what we’re looking for.

Several theoretical approaches to the psychology of creativity share the idea that human brains exhibit a capacity to perform a structured, distributed search, farming out a sort of idea generation, perhaps to subconscious modules, which are then evaluated more centrally.

But this is not only a process that happens inside brains: We do it collectively too. For example, the method of brainstorming was systematically developed to support divergent thinking, making overt recognized strategies for creative collaboration, and again identifying that heuristic methods of search are powerful for creative success. In a brainstorming session, each participant acts like one of those little, simple generative modules; two of the key brainstorming rules are to delay judgment, and to go for quantity over quality. Evaluation happens later in brainstorming, the point being that sometimes it closes our minds to fruitful possibilities.

That’s not to say there is no more to effective creativity than that: Both individual and social forms of creativity have many other important dimensions—mastery of a subject, the ability to learn from others, the ability to conceptually represent problems, and all the peripheral work that brings creative ideas to fruition.

But thinking about the sorts of structures that may support heuristic, distributed search helps us focus on effective architectures for creativity, above all recognizing that in simplest terms even the creativity of a single human being arises from the interaction between types of cognitive processes that generate and that evaluate.

I’ve argued that we might tease out two flavors of the creative process altogether, specifically to help us understand how machines can play creative roles. “Adaptive” creativity is the behavior we typically associate with human intelligence. It is the full, integrated package of generation and evaluation. Meanwhile, a less discernible “generative” creative process is all around us. It is sometimes haphazard, sometimes more structured, but generally goalless. Within human brains, it might take the form of subconscious streams whirring away. But it even exists where there is no overt evaluation to speak of, just generating stuff, as in the basic goalless mechanism of evolution by natural selection (being mindful that “biological fitness” is not a goal but an outcome of evolutionary processes).

While classic “hero” stories of creativity concern the neatly bounded adaptive variety—this is the central myth of creativity—the wild generative form is actually more prevalent: accidental scientific discoveries, musical styles that arise from the quirks of a successful performer, solutions in search of a problem.

This is a very loose sketch, but it helps us immensely if we come back to thinking of GPT as a creative tool. Is it a good generator, a good evaluator, and can it put everything together into an adaptively creative package? GPT can superficially do a great job at both generation and evaluation; spawn some new ideas in response to a request, or critique something we input. We actually know a lot about the former: Many generations of older and less sophisticated generative systems have been used that way for some time—incapable of evaluating their own output, but generatively very powerful as a stimulant for creative people, as ideas machines. Sometimes the ideas are extraordinarily good, other times they’re mediocre, but that’s still a productive situation if this idea generation is situated within an effective creative assemblage: one involving a discerning human on evaluation duty.

GPT is still a loose cannon for creative generation. Often the results are poor.

It’s also worth noting that as a “mere generator,” GPT is better than most because it can do a good job of integrating context and is a whiz at handling concepts: Remember that productive creative search is blind but systematic, not random. Integrating context, and reinterpreting that context, is a critical way in which we can more systematically structure a creative search. Indeed, GPT works best at systematically integrating different constraints. Witness GPT rendering the proof of infinite primes in Shakespearian verse (this is my reproduction of an example given in the exhaustive study paper “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence”).

Better still, GPT can evaluate things too, perhaps not in the simple terms of “this is good, that’s bad,” but via structured feedback that helps the user think through ideas. But, it is always the user who has to do the ultimate job of evaluation: You can tell GPT your goals, but it does not share those goals. It is actually just providing more generative material for reflection that the user needs to evaluate. In creative terms, GPT remains a generatively creative tool, a powerful one no doubt.

Yet, although GPT does not perform the full package of distributed creative search that humans are particularly good at, there are clear pointers to how close it might be to doing so. Watch GPT in its current “interpreter” version: Writing code, running that code on a server, and adapting its next step based on the results, and you can see how thin that gap might be wearing.

GPT does these things to a degree that far exceeds anything since, but it is still a loose cannon for creative generation. Often the results are poor. It shows little talent for grasping aesthetic goals, let alone interacting through dialogue with the user to best foster creative results.

We remain open to whether, or exactly how, advances in these areas require radically different architectures, since GPT has surprised many thus far with what a “stochastic parrot” language model can achieve, exhibiting an emergent capacity for logic and understanding. But in the search for the full “adaptively creative” package, the issue of aligning with the user’s creative goals will turn out, I believe, to be absurdly complex and possibly a little bit sinister.

A recent example makes a striking case in point. A major supermarket created an app that would suggest original recipes to customers, based on the ingredients they had in their shopping basket. We might agree this is a charming idea for offering creative inspiration to break the mundanity of a daily grocery shop. The problem was that the generated recipes included dangerous and potentially deadly concoctions. As The Guardian reported: “One recipe it dubbed ‘aromatic water mix’ would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as ‘the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses’ …. ‘Serve chilled and enjoy the refreshing fragrance,’ it says, but does not note that inhaling chlorine gas can cause lung damage or death.”

“Tripping” might be a better term than “hallucinating” for such errors of judgment. In fact, it’s less that these are factual errors, but fall into a wider problem of groundedness in real-world concerns, death being a rather important one to us carbon-based lifeforms.

So what about hallucination? With creativity, as with any other use of GPT, such as signing off on a generated summary of a topic, the user is the ultimate arbiter. They must clearly understand that the language model is wired to make plausible predictions, not report accurate information nor share the user’s goals.

But it is patently evident that human creativity and human attention to accuracy and truth are not mutually exclusive. Our brains can freewheel generative ideation without mistaking our imagination for fact. Thus while there is truth in the idea that creativity might benefit from temporary suspensions of disbelief, ultimately creative capability should not be a distraction from the expectations of accuracy. I don’t make any claim that later instances of GPT won’t “solve” hallucination in some way. Indeed, a version with integrated web search, being released imminently, may rapidly and effectively reduce instances of people being unknowingly served incorrect information. But for now it is critical that users understand the basis for GPT’s factual inaccuracy: It lives in a world of word probabilities, conceptually sophisticated as they may be, not of human concerns.

“Tripping” might be a better term than “hallucinating” for such errors of judgment.

Perhaps the most important point of all, though, is that GPT is not an abstract academic experiment. It is big business, already out in the wild and driving many actors’ commercial ambitions. There are two points where this reality manifests a slightly different take on GPT’s capability.

The first is that, for reasons largely of safety, we see GPT being increasingly shrouded in input and output filters and pre- and post-prompts that tidy up the user experience. It is already a complex assemblage. Although the LLM part is often described as a black box, it is the stuff around it that is literally (socially) black-boxed, that we don’t get to see or understand. Our potential co-creativity with such machines is mediated in multiple hidden ways.

Secondly, GPT is trained on millions of copyrighted texts; whether its use infringes on this copyright depends on the hotly debated issue of fair use under current copyright law in the United States and elsewhere. This works because GPT does not and cannot plagiarize significant chunks of creative material, and copyright laws cover specific instances of creative works, not general styles, which is what GPT is expert at reproducing. Generally, it cannot reproduce specific instances because it has no concrete record of the original sources.

As the makers of AI systems push the idea they are making creatively fertile tools, these multiple concerns and more are engaged in a complex dance: creative productivity; avoiding plagiarism; factual accuracy; safety; usability; explainability; energy efficiency; and profit.

Limitations aside, GPT can indeed be an incredibly powerful creative tool, best understood as a generatively creative system. But hallucination is a troubled term. It is critical that even creative uses develop with a clear-headed understanding of LLMs’ grasp on reality.

This article was originally published in MIT Press Reader.

Lead image: Andrey Suslov / Shutterstock

Oliver Bown

Posted on November 21, 2023

Oliver Bown is associate professor and co-director of the Interactive Media Lab at the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of the book Beyond the Creative Species.

Technology

Resurrecting an Extinct Animal as a Robot

A soft robot replica solves a mystery about the evolution of movement.

By Katherine Skipper    November 21, 2023

Fossils often seem to offer a rock-solid portrait of life forms long-gone, and a clear story about how evolution tracked from point A to point B. But sometimes scientists uncover remains that are so distinct from anything alive on Earth today that they struggle to characterize them.

Pleurocystitid represents one such enigma. This distant relative of the starfish—shaped like a tadpole, with a flat hard shell, two long arms, and a tail-like stem—lived on the seafloor millions of years before the dinosaurs roamed the planet.

Scientists believe the pleurocystitid was one of the first of its kind—a lineage called the echinoderms that includes the starfish and modern sea urchins—to evolve the ability to move. But because its shape and build were so different from those of modern echinoderms, or any other living creatures, exactly how it moved was a mystery.

You’re really creating things that people haven’t seen.

To solve the riddle, a team of engineers and paleontologists recently brought the extinct organism back to life: They built a robot replica of the creature based on fossil records, and called it Rhombot.

Using robotic springs and 3-D printed rubbery materials called elastomers, the team was able to design flexible muscles and show how this long-extinct animal pushed itself along the seafloor. “You’re really creating things that people haven’t seen,” says Philip LeDuc, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University who worked on the project.

Scientists have long used biologically inspired robots to better understand the behavior and biomechanics of living animals, including snakes, lizards, octopuses, and salamanders. But building robots to study extinct organisms, a field the researchers call “paleobionics,” is new.

To imitate the adaptability found in biological tissues, scientists are increasingly designing these robots with “soft” materials. Traditional robots, built from rigid parts connected by motorized joints, can move in highly coordinated ways, but they can’t mimic the more fluid and flexible motion of soft tissues and muscles.

IT’S ALIVE: The Rhombot is a 3-D robot replica of pleurocystitid, a distant relative of the starfish. The robot helped scientists solve a mystery about the evolution of movement. Photo courtesy of Department of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University.

In muscles, electrical signals from the brain cause chemical changes in the cells that make them contract. In some metal alloys, electric currents can induce temperature changes that cause the atoms to switch between different structures, which can lead the material to deform. These “shape memory alloys,” as they are known, can be used to design flexible artificial muscles.

The Carnegie Mellon team relied on 3-D scans of fossils to print a model pleurocystitid, including the body, arms, and the tail-like stem. Springs made of shape memory alloy and embedded in the stem worked like a pair of muscles. With electronics built into the rigid body and connected to the metal alloy wires, the bending of the stem from side to side could be controlled.

The researchers tested the robot in a water tank, with a surface that simulated the seafloor. The robot wriggled slowly headfirst along the bottom of the tank, using its long muscular stem as a kind of lever. They showed that pleurocystitid would have maximized speed with long, slow, sweeping movements of the stem, rather than with short strokes. The mystery was solved. “I knew whatever we found was going to be interesting,” says LeDuc. “I just had no idea what it was going to be.”

The team built several robots to test the effect of the stem length on speed. Increasing the stem length from three to four times the robot’s body length made it move five times faster. Based on the results, and the fact that newer fossils tend to have longer stems, the scientists concluded the pleurocystitid evolved a need for speed.

LeDuc thinks the success of the Rhombot will inspire paleontologists to revive other extinct creatures in metals and rubber—and unlock more secrets to the evolution of life on Earth.

Lead image: ivangonzzalez / Shutterstock

Katherine Skipper

Posted on November 21, 2023

Katherine Skipper is a freelance science writer and physics researcher at University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Her doctoral research focused on experimental active matter and the high-density behavior of Janus particles in three-dimensional systems.

Technology

Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem

We are one step closer to fully private internet searches.

By Madison Goldberg    November 17, 2023

We all know to be careful about the details we share online, but the information we seek can also be revealing. Search for driving directions, and our location becomes far easier to guess. Check for a password in a trove of compromised data, and we risk leaking it ourselves.

These situations fuel a key question in cryptography: How can you pull information from a public database without revealing anything about what you’ve accessed? It’s the equivalent of checking out a book from the library without the librarian knowing which one.

Concocting a strategy that solves this problem—known as private information retrieval—is “a very useful building block in a number of privacy-preserving applications,” said David Wu, a cryptographer at the University of Texas, Austin. Since the 1990s, researchers have chipped away at the question, improving strategies for privately accessing databases. One major goal, still impossible with large databases, is the equivalent of a private Google search, where you can sift through a heap of data anonymously without doing any heavy computational lifting.

It would be like having a librarian scour every shelf before returning with your book.

Now, three researchers have crafted a long-sought version of private information retrieval and extended it to build a more general privacy strategy. The work, which received a Best Paper Award in June at the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing, topples a major theoretical barrier on the way to a truly private search.

“[This is] something in cryptography that I guess we all wanted but didn’t quite believe that it exists,” said Vinod Vaikuntanathan, a cryptographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the paper. “It is a landmark result.”

The problem of private database access took shape in the 1990s. At first, researchers assumed that the only solution was to scan the entire database during every search, which would be like having a librarian scour every shelf before returning with your book. After all, if the search skipped any section, the librarian would know that your book is not in that part of the library.

That approach works well enough at smaller scales, but as the database grows, the time required to scan it grows at least proportionally. As you read from bigger databases—and the internet is a pretty big one—the process becomes prohibitively inefficient.

In the early 2000s, researchers started to suspect they could dodge the full-scan barrier by “preprocessing” the database. Roughly, this would mean encoding the whole database as a special structure, so the server could answer a query by reading just a small portion of that structure. Careful enough preprocessing could, in theory, mean that a single server hosting information only goes through the process once, by itself, allowing all future users to grab information privately without any more effort.

For Daniel Wichs, a cryptographer at Northeastern University and a co-author of the new paper, that seemed too good to be true. Around 2011, he started trying to prove that this kind of scheme was impossible. “I was convinced that there’s no way that this could be done,” he said.

But in 2017, two groups of researchers published results that changed his mind. They built the first programs that could do this kind of private information retrieval, but they weren’t able to show that the programs were secure. (Cryptographers demonstrate a system’s security by showing that breaking it is as difficult as solving some hard problem. The researchers weren’t able to compare it to a canonical hard problem.)

SEARCHING IN THE DARK: From left: Wei-Kai Lin, Ethan Mook, and Daniel Wichs devised a new method for privately searching large databases. Courtesy of Ian MacLellan and Khoury College of Computer Sciences/Northeastern University.

So even with his hope renewed, Wichs assumed that any version of these programs that was secure was still a long way off. Instead, he and his co-authors—Wei-Kai Lin, now at the University of Virginia, and Ethan Mook, also at Northeastern—worked on problems they thought would be easier, which involved cases where multiple servers host the database.

In the methods they studied, the information in the database can be transformed into a mathematical expression, which the servers can evaluate to extract the information. The authors figured it might be possible to make that evaluation process more efficient. They toyed with an idea from 2011, when other researchers had found a way to quickly evaluate such an expression by preprocessing it, creating special, compact tables of values that allow you to skip the normal evaluation steps.

That method didn’t produce any improvements, and the group came close to giving up—until they wondered whether this tool might actually work in the coveted single-server case. Choose a polynomial carefully enough, they saw, and a single server could preprocess it based on the 2011 result—yielding the secure, efficient lookup scheme Wichs had pondered for years. Suddenly, they’d solved the harder problem after all.

At first, the authors didn’t believe it. “Let’s figure out what’s wrong with this,” Wichs remembered thinking. “We kept trying to figure out where it breaks down.”

But the solution held: They had really discovered a secure way to preprocess a single-server database so anyone could pull information in secret. “It’s really beyond everything we had hoped for,” said Yuval Ishai, a cryptographer at the Technion in Israel who was not involved in this work. It’s a result “we were not even brave enough to ask for,” he said.

Cryptographers have a long history of results that were initially impractical.

After building their secret lookup scheme, the authors turned to the real-world goal of a private internet search, which is more complicated than pulling bits of information from a database, Wichs said. The private lookup scheme on its own does allow for a version of private Google-like searching, but it’s extremely labor-intensive: You run Google’s algorithm yourself and secretly pull data from the internet when necessary. Wichs said a true search, where you send a request and sit back while the server collects the results, is really a target for a broader approach known as homomorphic encryption, which disguises data so that someone else can manipulate it without ever knowing anything about it.

Typical homomorphic encryption strategies would hit the same snag as private information retrieval, plodding through all the internet’s contents for every search. But using their private lookup method as scaffolding, the authors constructed a new scheme which runs computations that are more like the programs we use every day, pulling information covertly without sweeping the whole internet. That would provide an efficiency boost for internet searches and any programs that need quick access to data.

While homomorphic encryption is a useful extension of the private lookup scheme, Ishai said, he sees private information retrieval as the more fundamental problem. The authors’ solution is the “magical building block,” and their homomorphic encryption strategy is a natural follow-up.

For now, neither scheme is practically useful: Preprocessing currently helps at the extremes, when the database size balloons toward infinity. But actually deploying it means those savings can’t materialize, and the process would eat up too much time and storage space.

Luckily, Vaikuntanathan said, cryptographers have a long history of optimizing results that were initially impractical. If future work can streamline the approach, he believes private lookups from giant databases may be within reach. “We all thought we were kind of stuck there,” he said. “What Daniel’s result gives is hope.”

This article was originally published on the  Quanta Abstractions blog.

Lead image: Allison Li for Quanta Magazine

Madison Goldberg

Posted on November 17, 2023

Madison is a science journalist and a graduate student in New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Her work has also appeared in Sky & Telescope magazine and the NPR project StateImpact Pennsylvania. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard University.

Zoology

- Tracking the Lion Poachers

- I Know How the Caged Bird Jams

- How Capybaras Outwit Big Cats

- Queen of the Mob

- Giving Thanks for Whales

- Nature’s Invisibility Cloak

Zoology

Tracking the Lion Poachers

Forensic science comes to wildlife law enforcement.

By Summer Rylander    December 18, 2023

The regal African lion is a species in dramatic decline. Biologists estimate that populations of Panthera leo have fallen by almost three quarters over the past 50 years, leaving just 23,000 mature lions on the continent. While habitat loss and vanishing prey populations are the biggest hazards to the species, illegal poaching remains a major threat.

The animals are killed for their body parts—claws, teeth, and bones—which are illegally traded within Africa or exported to destinations in Asia, where they are turned into jewelry or used in traditional medicines. Retaliatory killings, often occurring after conflict with livestock, add further stock to this trade with body parts removed in the aftermath of almost half of conflict-driven deaths. But as the parts are circulated across borders, it becomes difficult for wildlife crime investigators to determine their geographic origins, complicating efforts to catch the poachers and stop these crimes.

New software called the Lion Localizer may be able to help. It’s a database of lion mitochondrial DNA representing 146 locations across Africa and India where lion DNA sequences have been collected and cataloged. Biologists can use the tool to anonymously query DNA sequences extracted from confiscated lion parts to see if they can identify a match.

“If you put in a sequence and a lion head icon pops up on the map,” you have an exact DNA match, says Alfred Roca, a genetics professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the principal investigator on the Lion Localizer project. You know where your dead lion roamed. More often, you will get a red pin on the map, which tells you the lion likely came from a particular region of an individual country, such as Masai Mara in Kenya. Or you may get a black pin, which tells you only the country where your lion may have lived.

Penalties for poaching and trafficking wildlife have stiffened in many African countries over recent years.

The scientists who developed the tool at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign chose to focus on mitochondrial DNA. For one, it’s more plentiful than nuclear DNA, which means large amounts of it are easily gathered from lion bones or other parts that have been seized by law enforcement. Secondly, mitochondrial DNA is transmitted by the maternal lineage—which is convenient since females tend to stay put, while males typically stray farther. That means mitochondrial DNA is more closely associated with a single geographical location.

“It’s easier to deal with mitochondrial DNA because you get a lot more copies and it’s not as widely dispersed as other genetic markers. It can give you a better idea of where the lion is from,” says Roca.  Knowing provenance is particularly critical in regions like West Africa, where lion population numbers are dangerously low.

Penalties for poaching and trafficking wildlife have stiffened in many African countries over recent years, but this presents a new set of challenges. Offenders used to plead guilty when the consequences were little more than a modest fine. Now, lengthy jail times and large fines mean poachers are more likely to go to court where the burden of proof lies with the prosecution.

“It’s mainly about forensic intelligence and understanding where things come from,” says Rob Ogden, director of TRACE Wildlife Forensics Network, a United Kingdom-based nonprofit that aims to apply forensic science to wildlife law enforcement and a partner in the Lion Localizer project. “In some cases, the penalties are higher if the part comes from a nationally poached animal,” says Ogden.

Lion Localizer isn’t a tracker. It can’t follow animals on the move. But it’s a valuable intelligence tool in the fight against wildlife crime—one that is open-source, anonymous, and free to use.

Lead image: The Len / Shutterstock

Summer Rylander

Posted on December 18, 2023

Summer Rylander (Twitter | Instagram) is an independent journalist based in Nuremberg, Germany. She covers foodways, responsible tourism, and the conservation of our biodiverse planet.

Zoology

I Know How the Caged Bird Jams

Surprising things happen when you give zoo animals control over the soundscape.

By Elena Kazamia    December 14, 2023

In a modest rectangular enclosure surrounded by sparse green shrubbery, just past the main gate of San Diego Zoo Safari Park, a middle-aged hyacinth macaw blasts Daft Punk on his bespoke boombox. His name is Sampson and he likes to dance.

Sampson can operate the boombox, aptly named JoyBranch, by biting or holding on to a kind of joystick made to look like a slice of log with a twig protruding from it. Motion sensors (called BobTrigger) keep the music going as long as he bobs and nods, dipping his head in rhythm. Within weeks of its installation, the boombox changed the dynamics of Sampson’s interactions with visitors. To draw them in, he could rock out. When he tired of entertaining, he could stop dancing to switch off the music. More often than not, when the show was over, his visitors moved on.

It’s really about rethinking the culture of zoos.

JoyBranch is one of a number of sound projects at San Diego Zoo and other zoos around the country that aim to give captive animals more agency over their environments. The boombox came into being after Sampson’s caretakers noticed how much the bird enjoyed grooving to the rhythms wafting from an iPhone during care sessions. (The BobTrigger was added when they realized he couldn’t press play on the JoyBranch and dance at the same time.)

The project was led by Rébecca Kleinberger, a digital technology, cognition, and sound researcher trained in MIT’s Media Lab who now runs her own research group at Northeastern University in Boston. When Kleinberger walks through a zoo, she doesn’t just look, she listens. Here is the cackle of families laughing and talking as they walk by, a gasp of excitement as an animal turns to face them, a child’s piercing cry for attention. Then the sound wave of human noise retreats as the crowd moves on, and she can suddenly detect the roar of a male lion in the distance. It is a deep, penetrating, regal growl that visitors delight in. But how does it make the gazelle standing just a few feet away from her behind the slim barrier feel? The animal is evolved to feel fear.

A JOYFUL SOUND: When a macaw named Sampson first encountered JoyBranch in his enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, he thought it was just a convenient place to groom his beak. Then he realized he could use it to play DJ. Credit: RebKlein / YouTube.

In her work with zoos, Kleinberger aims to use sound to reduce the stress of animals living there, to improve their quality of life and, most of all, to give them some control over their environments. Hearing is a dominant sense for many species, and animals in zoos are continuously bathed in sounds that may have little in common with what they might hear in the wild: construction noise, vehicles, human speech, and the sounds of unfamiliar animal neighbors. Sensitivities vary from species to species but some animals suffer from discomfort severe enough to provoke pacing, rocking, and self-harming behaviors, like plucking out their own feathers.

“It’s really about rethinking the culture of zoos,” says Kleinberger. Sometimes the kind of intervention she recommends is simple, like providing a soundproof space for an animal to access when needed. But sometimes it’s about adding sounds, rather than removing them. “There are ways of thinking more innovatively, more creatively, into what we can provide for animals” to enrich their lives in captivity, she says. In a review published last month, Kleinberger laid bare her vision for the “zoos of the future”—a manual for how to incorporate thoughtful soundscapes into their design.

It is a deep, penetrating, regal growl that visitors delight in.

Only about one-third of zoos have actually experimented with auditory enrichment—including natural and ecologically relevant sounds, human-made classical music, and radio broadcasts—to enhance the welfare of captive animals. Asian elephants, leopards, and several species of birds have been shown to benefit, according to the research. A much smaller number of projects in zoos have allowed captive animals to actually interact with sounds, including experiments with macaws, white-faced sakis, African elephants, and orangutans. Orangutans, for example, have been encouraged to create their own “music,” though some research suggests the apes may often prefer silence to sound.

When Sampson played his music, he did it for his own enjoyment, but also to entertain an audience. During a 2020 study of how Sampson used JoyBranch, together with colleagues, Kleinberger reported that when no music was playing visitors walked away from Sampson even as he was trying to engage with them. In his role as DJ and performer, however, using JoyBranch, he held court, and was the one to decide when to begin and end the show. The visitors were delighted—we come to zoos to connect and observe animals. The best time at the zoo is when we walk away feeling the animals are not sad to be there.

As we walk through a zoo, we often forget that we too are on display for the animals to observe. Being present with animals in these spaces presents rare opportunities for interaction. Kleinberger believes that technologies can help make these interactions more meaningful for us and the animals, enriching the zoo experience. “I don’t think it’s good to think about the animal in isolation, but much more in terms of how do we integrate the humans” she says. “I’m into creating experiences and creating live connections between spaces, between people, between animals.”

Elena Kazamia

Posted on December 14, 2023

Elena Kazamia is a science writer from Greece. She has a master’s degree in conservation from University College London and a Ph.D. in plant sciences from the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

Zoology

How Capybaras Outwit Big Cats

The world’s largest rodent is a jaguar’s favorite snack.

By Krista Langlois    December 12, 2023    Photo by Nick Garbutt

Nick Garbutt was leading a photography tour in the tropical wetlands and flooded savannas of Brazil’s Pantanal region when he spotted a dark shadow in the brush. It was a jaguar, and the cat was stalking a family of capybaras munching plants at the edge of the Paraguay River. Although jaguars are agile swimmers and have been known to prey on turtles, crocodiles, and even dolphins, one of their favorite foods is capybara—the world’s largest rodent, about the size of a full-grown gray wolf.

In places like the Pantanal where jaguar populations are particularly dense, capybaras tend to stick close to rivers and other bodies of water. Even though jaguars don’t mind getting wet, capybaras have a greater chance of swimming to safety than scurrying away on land. The semi-aquatic rodents have webbed feet to propel them through water, and—as German explorer Hans Staden described in 1557—“when anything alarms them, they flee into the water toward the bottom.” Capybaras can hold their breath for up to five minutes, and are so well adapted to their aqueous habitat that they’ve been filmed trotting along river bottoms.

Capybaras’ eyes, ears, and nose are all perched high on their heads, allowing them to stay mostly submerged.

As Garbutt watched from a boat, the jaguar crept closer to the capybaras. About 60 feet away, the predator paused. “Suddenly,” Garbutt recalls, “the jaguar rushed, but the capybaras were fractionally quicker, leaping immediately into the water and diving beneath the surface.”

The jaguar didn’t follow, and the capybaras eventually resurfaced in a neat line, the mother loudly barking her alarm. Capybaras’ eyes, ears, and nose are all perched high on their heads, allowing them to stay mostly submerged with just the crowns sticking out like periscopes. These capybaras stayed in the water, while the jaguar crouched on land, watching.

“It was an amazing little snippet of behavior to witness,” Garbutt says. It was also an example of the ways in which predator-prey relationships shape the ecosystems of the Pantanal and beyond. In places where jaguars have been extirpated, for example, capybaras venture farther from waterways to forage, and have been known to reach such high population densities that they’re sometimes considered a nuisance. The lack of jaguars is partially to blame—or thank—for the hundreds of capybaras that have “invaded” a gated community and torn up manicured lawns near Buenos Aires, Argentina. But out in the suburbs, when capybaras face off against resident pet dogs, there are few places where mamas and kids can dive to safety.

This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

Krista Langlois

Posted on December 12, 2023

Krista Langlois is a freelance journalist and essayist based in Durango, Colorado. In addition to her work as a contributing editor for bioGraphic, she writes about people and nature for publications including Adventure Journal, The Atlantic, Hakai, National Geographic News, Outside, and Smithsonian.

Zoology

Queen of the Mob

Meerkats are famous for their teamwork, but it’s enforced by a matriarch with an iron fist.

By Sarah Gilman    December 7, 2023    Photograph by Klein & Hubert

Animals must be resourceful to survive in Botswana’s harsh Kalahari Desert. For meerkats, that means looking out for one another. These social members of the mongoose family live in cooperative family units, called “mobs,” that can number up to 50 adults and pups. When meerkats forage for grubs, termites, scorpions, poisonous millipedes, and other invertebrates, they do so together. Periodically, one stands sentinel on a higher point to scan for threats, adopting a posture similar to that of the meerkat captured in this image by wildlife photographers Marie-Luce Hubert and Jean-Louis Klein.

When a sentinel spies something of concern, it musters its versatile voice to protect the mob. Meerkats are among the most vocal of all mammal species. Their range of some 30 types of calls includes one that specifically warns their brethren of the approach of a ground predator, like a jackal, while another indicates that a raptor like a tawny or martial eagle is flying overhead. Meerkats have yet another call that warns of snakes or rival meerkats, summoning the mob to gather and fight the foe, rather than flee to the nearest burrow. Meerkats can even signal the relative urgency of a threat—their voices more harmonic if the threat is low, and harsher and louder if high.

Meerkat cooperation arises from a “despotic” reproductive arrangement.

But they don’t chat only in times of distress. Meerkats also keep track of each other’s locations with a special call while roaming, for example. And each morning, members of a meerkat mob will gather together to face the sun and murmur “sunning calls,” which they carefully sequence to avoid interrupting one another, almost like a conversation.

That might sound warm and fuzzy, but meerkat cooperation arises from what researchers have dubbed a “despotic” reproductive arrangement. As with social insects like bees, a single meerkat “queen” dominates breeding behavior within the mob and forces subordinate meerkats, many of them her offspring, to help raise her pups rather than having their own. She enforces her reign with aggression driven by testosterone levels that surge past male meerkat levels when she is pregnant—viciously competing for food, attacking and sometimes evicting other females, and killing their pups, should they have any. Research led by Christine Drea through Duke University has even shown that this aggression can pass from the queen to her pups, who maintain their place in the hierarchy by acting, in the words of a Duke press release, like “spoiled little brats.”

Considering that a queen meerkat may have as many as three to four litters per year over 10 years, that’s a lot of entitlement for her subordinates to bear. Interestingly, though, the despotic system also seems to put a serious strain on the queen. Dominant meerkat females tend to have significantly more intestinal parasites than their subordinate mobsters. While that could simply be because they have more contact with other meerkats, what with all the tussling they do to maintain power, it could also be the result of a more insidious actor that can deplete anyone’s immune system: stress.

This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

Sarah Gilman

Posted on December 7, 2023

Sarah Gilman is a writer, illustrator, and editor who covers the environment, science, and place from rural Washington state. She’s also a contributing editor at Hakai Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon, Smithsonian, High Country News, National Geographic, and others.

Zoology

Giving Thanks for Whales

Some of our favorite stories about those marvelous marine mammals.

By Brandon Keim    November 23, 2023

During this holiday season I will give thanks for many things: my family, my friends, my health. And whales.

Now, that last part might raise a few eyebrows at the dinner table. Yet why should it? Each of those great ocean gardeners will capture about 33 tons of carbon over the course of their lives, and spread nutrients that give rise to countless more lives. One analysis calculated that the average whale’s ecological services are worth $2 million—a figure that might rub some people as coldly utilitarian, but is better understood as a nod to just how extraordinary whales are.

Truly they are keystone species—and not only in life, but in death as well. The washed-ashore carcasses of whales were once a common presence on Earth’s coastlines, a vital conduit of nutrients from ocean to land; their bodies are the reason that California condors, the largest birds in North America, are associated with the Pacific coast rather than the continental interior. And when whale bodies fall to the ocean floor, they form organic islands that sustain entire communities for decades.

Whales are not only ecological marvels, of course. They’re also extraordinarily intelligent animals, possessing complex brains, rich social lives, culture, and communication systems that may be akin to language. Much of what is important to our own lives is important to them as well: family, friends, and communion. For many people, that realization comes after listening to whales sing.

In light of their qualities and their importance: What next? A basic, essential task is to improve their conservation. Commercial whaling has ended but threats remain, foremost among them the terrible toll of ship collisions. Solving that problem is very much within our grasp.

We can do more than that, though. Some people push consideration for whales even further, arguing that they deserve to be formally represented in political and institutional decision-making. It’s a wild idea, but the sort of thing that a richer appreciation of whales leads to—and it all begins with being thankful for them.

Lead image: PolinaVyun / Shutterstock

Brandon Keim

Posted on November 23, 2023

Brandon Keim (Twitter / Mastodon / Substack) is an independent journalist and editor of the ocean section at Nautilus. He is now finishing Meet the Neighbors, a book about animal personhood and nature, which will be published by W.W. Norton in 2024.

Zoology

Nature’s Invisibility Cloak

Meet the sea creatures with real powers to go unseen.

By Edwin Barkdoll    November 16, 2023

The lure of invisibility has captivated humans for millennia: the Egyptian god Amun-Ra manifested as the transparent wind which could be felt but not seen; the Greek philosopher Plato’s magic ring granted invisibility to a shepherd who then usurped the throne by murdering a king and marrying his wife; J.R.R. Tolkien’s One Ring bestowed its wearer with the power to vanish and dominate others.

Even today, invisibility ranks high among desirable “superpowers.” And why not? It could confer the ability to hide from one’s enemies, prevail against competitors, or achieve tasks that would otherwise be impossible.

Of course, despite mythologizing and coveting it and seeking technological solutions beyond a magic ring or potion, humans have not mastered invisibility to become transparent. But transparency has not gone undiscovered by natural selection, having evolved independently in unrelated animals including octopuses, arthropods, and fishes. Despite the animals’ differences, they have followed similar transparency “recipes” to reap the benefits of being unseen, predators and prey alike, particularly in aquatic environments.

Now you see me, now you don’t

Animals are complex, material beings and even the tiniest among them can stub their figurative toes against other objects—so how can they go undetected and blend in with their environment?

Superficial camouflage employs mimicry, disguise, and concealing or disruptive coloration to avoid being seen. It is a common tactic that has evolved among many animals, from insects to octopuses to large mammals. In essence, camouflage tricks the viewer into misperceiving the hidden animal.

SHIMMERS IN THE SEA: Iridescent cilia on a transparent comb jelly.  Photo by Zoe Weil.

Not to cast aspersions on camouflage—it can be a highly effective survival strategy and, unlike transparency, can be used by large animals—but it only scratches the surface of deception.

Transparency veils an animal from view but is also a deeper ploy. The entire body—surface and inner tissues alike—must work together to become clear. Perfect transparency is not necessary; viewed from a distance underwater, even a translucent octopus becomes invisible, and that can make all the difference in survival.

An animal must accomplish two primary feats to become transparent: First and most straightforward, it must minimize the light it absorbs. Second, it needs to reduce the amount of light it scatters.

The cost of color

Pigments are ubiquitous in biology. Superficially, they color our eyes, skin, feathers, and hair. Internally, oxygen-transporting respiratory pigments like hemoglobin color your blood red. (Or, if you’re invertebrate, hemocyanin colors your hemolymph blue. There’s a whole palette of invertebrate respiratory pigments, ranging in color from violet to green to yellow.) In other words, they increase animals’ visibility.

Reducing pigmentation is a low-hanging fruit in the journey to becoming transparent. Pigments have a “manufacturing cost” to the animal, requiring biochemical machinery for synthesis. However, one can’t just willy-nilly jettison all pigments without consequence. A human deprived of hemoglobin cannot live. There are constraints on eliminating pigments, many of which can be satisfied if the organism is small and simple.

WATCH YOUR STEP: A beached cross jellyfish.  Photo by Zoe Weil.

Jellyfish are poster creatures for transparency: They are simple, thin-bodied animals whose bodies are 95 percent water, and what oxygen they need is absorbed directly from surrounding water, eliminating the need for light-absorbing respiratory pigments.

Half-inch-long eel larvae, sometimes called “glass eels,” also lack these pigments. The larvae aren’t as “water-full” as jellyfish, but their bodies are almost leaf-like, which allows oxygen to diffuse the short distance directly into their bodies without hemoglobin or gills. However, there is a practical limit to how far oxygen can diffuse through tissue, and as the larvae grow their metabolic needs outstrip this simple mechanism. They begin to produce hemoglobin, reducing their transparency.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

The heavy-lifting task of becoming transparent is reducing light scatter. Consider a handful of table salt: A single salt crystal is clear, yet the jumble becomes opaque in a pile. As light passes from the air into a crystal, and then as it exits from crystal to air, the light bends from its original path. Consisting of many haphazardly oriented crystals, the pile of salt diffusely scatters the light and appears white even with no pigment.

SIMPLY SECRETIVE: A transparent larval American eel. Photo by Uwe Kils.

“Transparent animals are either very simple,” says Sönke Johnsen, a visual ecologist at Duke University, “or they have to work to minimize these differences” in refraction. Eel larvae contain large quantities of transparent compounds called glycosaminoglycans that perform double duty as energy stores and structural support. Their organs are also tiny and inconspicuous, lacking the complexity that will develop with age.1 Animals including other eel larvae, juvenile fish, aquatic crustaceans, and squid adopt similar strategies.

Transparency lost?

Even the most transparent animals may possess gonads, eyes, and perhaps a gastrointestinal tract replete with their last meal. (The “cross” in the jellyfish above is part of the digestive tract.) All these organs interfere with concealment, but there’s a limit to how much can be eliminated.

THE OPACITY OF AGE: An adult American eel. Photo by Sam Stukel.

Some small octopuses further camouflage their guts and eyes by altering these organs’ shapes and orientations. Glass octopuses, Vitreledonella richardi, keep their tubular eyes and needle-shaped stomach oriented vertically in order to appear less noticeable to predators below.

Transparency is prevalent in many juvenile marine organisms, providing much-needed protection from predators. Eventually the development of more prominent, complex organs and a need for respiratory pigments brings an end to transparency—one more thing to lament about growing old.

The edges of invisibility

Having eliminated pigments and simplified its internal structure, the salp in the photograph below is transparent; you could probably read through it. Nevertheless it remains visible, particularly around its edges. Why?

SOMETHING’S FISHY: A jellyfish-like salp found on an Oregon beach. Photo by Stephen Grace.

Just as differences in the refractive indexes—the degree to which light bends when entering or exiting a medium—of structures within an animal are important, so is the difference between an animal and its surroundings. Put the salp back in the ocean, its natural environment, and it disappears. Salps, comb jellies, and jellyfish are all aquatic animals who mainly consist of water—a jellyfish body is 95 percent water compared to a human body’s meager 60 percent—and when placed in water, the salp’s outline effectively disappears. Its refractive index is nearly the same as its environs. When held in comparatively low refractive index air, though, the salp is visible.

But I’m as transparent as glass!

Can an animal be large and transparent?

There are physical constraints on size and transparency. No substance is perfectly clear; some of the light passing through it is always lost, even if this is imperceptible to a casual observer. (Consider the photo below: At left is the word “transparent” seen through a half-inch of glass, and at right through 32 inches of glass.) It’s for this reason that the deep ocean’s bottom cannot be seen from the surface, no matter how clear the water.

NOTHING IS PERFECT: The word “transparent” through a little glass—and a lot. Image by Edwin Barkdoll.

An animal is no different. A meter-thick jellyfish loses its transparency because of this simple property. Comb jellies several feet long do exist, but they are a half-inch thick at most. And though salps can form long chains, if you could convince them to line up and let you look through them like a pirate with a spyglass, the view would be cloudy.

Grasping at mysteries

Sönke Johnsen calls his  “favorite mating mystery” that of the glass octopus, who must copulate to reproduce yet are rare, nearly-transparent animals in a very large ocean.

NIGHT LIGHTS: A luminous glass octopus. Courtesy of the Schmidt Ocean Institute.

Johnsen asks, “How on earth [do] they find each other?” Nobody knows, but another translucent octopus species, Japatella diaphena, has found a solution to that dilemma: Females develop a luminescent organ as they approach sexual maturity, perhaps functioning as a reproductive signal to males. There is no evidence that the glass octopus uses a similar strategy, however, unlike the octopus itself, our knowledge about it is murky.

Anti-invisibility strategy

Vision is an extraordinary ability that, for some animals, extends into domains we can only imagine. Many invertebrates—including insects, crustaceans, and squid—can detect the polarization of light, something we can glimpse when wearing polarized sunglasses.

SURVIVAL STRATEGY: The bright areas in the photograph show how an aquatic dobsonfly larva’s muscles polarize light. Image by Edwin Barkdoll.

Additionally, many tissues, particularly muscles, become strikingly visible when viewed in polarized light. Furthermore, light is partially polarized underwater due to the reflection at the surface and scattering in the water.

These three factors—the prevalence of polarization vision, the polarization of light in water, and the reduction of invisibility in polarized light—prompt the question, “Can predators use polarization vision to detect otherwise transparent prey?”

Indeed some creatures may do this. Transparent phantom midges, for example, are eaten by fishes who can detect polarized light; squids, themselves partly transparent as juveniles, may use their polarization sensitivity to enhance the capture of smaller transparent prey.

SUPER-VISION SQUID: This squid embryo, 1 millimeter in diameter and still in its egg, was found on a Maine beach. The reddish-purple spots are its polarized-light sensitive eyes. Image by Edwin Barkdoll.

A great example of an arms race in nature, yes? Not so fast, cautions Johnsen. “Don’t let the pretty pictures in the lab fool you into thinking that’s what happens in the real world,” he says.

Experiments on the polarization of squid, for example, have yielded conflicting results; the jury is still out on polarization vision as an anti-invisibility strategy.2

Are terrestrial animals missing out?

The short answer is “mostly.” Some aquatic insect larvae, like those of dobsonflies and phantom midges, possess temporary transparency that is lost as they mature and leave the water. The significant refractive difference between air and animal tissue is virtually insurmountable, with few exceptions.

Among the exceptions are the wings of many flying insects, which are transparent by virtue of having little or no circulation, being only a few cells thick, and sometimes possessing anti-reflective structures.3 Whether this serves a you-can’t-see-me function combined with disruptive coloration for predator avoidance or some other purpose is unclear.

TERRESTRIAL TRANSPARENCY: A glasswing butterfly. Photo by Edwin Barkdoll.

Even humans partake in a limited but essential way: The transparency of our corneas, lenses, and the fluids that fill our eyes is critical for our vision. Not surprisingly, the characteristics that favor transparency in aquatic creatures also feature prominently in our eyes, the gelatinous parts of which are 98 percent water—a figure that even a jellyfish would covet. There are no light-disrupting structures between our corneas and retinas, and no jumble of refractive indexes among the eye’s tissues.

SELF REFLECTION: The cornea of my “self-eye” shows a telltale reflection due to the refractive difference between the cornea and air. Photo by David Tiller.

Beauty is everywhere

It’s an ironic twist of convergent evolution that we use the transparent tissues in our eyes to look for transparent animals. If you’re lucky, you may glimpse a tiny shimmering dobsonfly larva in a stream or an undulating comb jelly in the ocean. But if you see nothing, look again. Someone may be hiding in plain view.

Lead image by Edwin Barkdoll

References

1. Miller, M.J. Ecology of Anguilliform leptocephali: Remarkable transparent fish larvae of the ocean surface layer. Aqua-BioScience Monographs 2, 1-94 (2009).

2. For conflicting results in squid, see: Gavioli, I.L., de Ortiz, D.O., Bersano, J.G.F., & Vidal, E.A.G. Connecting polarized light and water turbidity with feeding rates in Octopus americanus paralarvae. Journal of World Aquaculture Society 53, 241-257 (2021). And: Shashar, N., Hanlon, R.T., & Petz, A.deM. Polarization vision helps detect transparent prey. Nature 393, 222-223 (1998).

3. Pomerantz, A.F., et al. Developmental, cellular, and biochemical basis of transparency in clearwing butterflies. Journal of Experimental Biology 224, jeb237917 (2021).

Edwin Barkdoll

Posted on November 16, 2023

Edwin Barkdoll is a Maine Master Naturalist and nature photographer who enjoys prowling wherever an untrodden trail beckons. He writes the Nature Unveiled Blog.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 28 Dec, 2023

Arts

We Were Born to Groove

We’re Biased Against AI-Made Art

Portrait of a Fractured Arctic

Fishing Gear on the Fashion Runway

What Should We Do With an Old Sea Shanty?

Our National Parks in the Quiet of the Pandemic

Astronomy

Earth May Not Be Toast

Could the Universe Be Finite?

Hello, Jupiter!

The Cosmic Web and the Fate of the Universe

Communication

The Most Beautiful Science of the Year

AI Can Help Democracy

How a New Database Can Help Protect the Ocean

Environment

Tame Your Climate Anxiety in 2024

How Dust Could Help Solve Crimes

A Dubious Cure for Ocean Plastics

A Cyclone, a Flood, and a Very Big Park

Evolution

A Peculiar Fish and an Evolutionary Mystery

Thank Eve for Human Evolution

My 3 Greatest Revelations

Psychology Lost a Great Mind

General

Print Edition 52

Geoscience

How Earth Once Cooled Off

A New Way to Trigger a Tsunami

Health

The Bittersweet Science

History

History’s Five Best Body Part Stories

Tesla’s Pigeon

Math

We Were Wrong About Online Algorithms

Neuroscience

Why We Sense Somebody Who Isn’t There

Paleontology

A Day in the Life of a Fossil Preparator

Digging for Our Origins in the Bone Beds of an African Park

Psychology

Will Psychedelics Replace Antidepressants?

Your Brain Wants a Linear Story

We Can Be Heroes

What Gets Enemies to Negotiate

Social Media Is Not Heroin

Yes, There Is a Science to Shopping

You Can Have Too Much Transcendence

The Virtues of Not Knowing

Technology

Stop Worrying About Deepfakes

When AI Hallucinates

Resurrecting an Extinct Animal as a Robot

Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem

Zoology

Tracking the Lion Poachers

I Know How the Caged Bird Jams

How Capybaras Outwit Big Cats

Queen of the Mob

Giving Thanks for Whales

Nature’s Invisibility Cloak