Nautilus Magazine: Existential Comfort Without God

 Research in psychology and the cognitive science of religion offers some answers, but they’re not without nuance. For example, there’s evidence that scientific beliefs can deliver some of the benefits of religion,2 but there’s also evidence that some scientific beliefs—such as human evolution—are widely seen as a threat to human values.3 There’s evidence that people use language differently when reporting religious beliefs versus other commitments about the world4 (e.g., people believe in God, but think there are atoms, with analogs in other languages5), but there’s also evidence that religious and scientific beliefs reflect common psychological mechanisms.6 [...]

But the most striking results emerged when participants were asked to generate existential explanations that offered comfort and peace of mind. These instructions made participants most likely to generate explicitly religious or spiritual explanations—the proportion of such explanations jumped from 34 percent in the baseline condition to over 56 percent in the comfort condition. Yet participants without explicit religious commitments readily constructed “natural” (as opposed to supernatural) explanations that offered comfort, as well. In fact, natural sources of existential comfort were offered almost as often (about 36 percent of the time) as their explicitly supernatural counterparts (about 42 percent of the time). [...]

Just because people could generate natural sources of existential comfort, it doesn’t follow that those sources were just as comforting as their religious and supernatural counterparts. We also asked our participants to rate how successfully their explanations fostered positive emotions and buffered against negative ones, and we found that the explanations with only natural sources of comfort were judged significantly less successful than those that included only supernatural sources of comfort. Living on in people’s memories wasn’t quite as good as eternal life—at least when it came to emotional comfort, which is admittedly only one aspect of a valuable and meaningful system of beliefs.

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Nautilus Magazine: Do We Have Free Will? Maybe It Doesn't Matter

This isn’t an idle theoretical or academic question—beliefs about free will, Genschow says, seem to affect many “societally relevant” behaviors, like cheating. They also lie at the foundation of our criminal justice system, helping to justify retributive forms of punishment (the idea that people deserve to be locked up, for example, for committing certain crimes) as opposed to rehabilitative ones (confining and reforming people until they can safely re-enter society). Some philosophers, like Saul Smilansky, have argued that if we were to give up on free will, the consequences would be catastrophic. [...]

This gist of the meta-analysis from Genschow and his colleagues suggests that free will’s proponents and detractors may be putting too much store in what people believe. The belief, or disbelief, doesn’t seem to affect individual behavior in any way we might care about. Manipulating people’s ideas about free will, at least in experimental conditions, has only a small and temporary effect. In other words, a persuasive anti-free will essay (the most effective method found) doesn’t change people’s core beliefs about free will—it only puts them in a temporary, slight anti-free will mindset. (Most people naturally believe in free will, so most of the manipulations studied try to reduce belief in it, though it can work both ways). There is no evidence that this induced change in free will beliefs has any effect on morality, such as antisocial behavior, cheating, conformity, or willingness to punish. There is also no definitive evidence against such effects. So for now, it appears that people’s beliefs in free will don’t really matter. [...]

The way these two thinkers have talked passed each other reminds us that it’s hard to change people’s beliefs about free will. So, it can feel like a relief to realize, at least according to Genschow’s meta-analysis, that even when you can change people’s beliefs, it seems to make no moral difference anyway.

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Nautilus Magazine: Digging Deeper Into Holocaust History

 The history of the uprising was written in part by those who escaped. “They tell us what happened in that final moment,” says Freund, who has led archaeological investigations into Jewish history in Israel and Europe. But the story of the Warsaw uprising, and the Holocaust, is not complete. Holocaust survivors and their stories are dwindling. Now geoscientists have stepped in to fill in the historical gaps. By employing geophysical mapping and soil sampling, among other techniques, they have located mass grave sites—there are an estimated 200 such sites in Lithuania alone—corroborated testimonies of daring escapes, and unearthed the remains of a once-thriving culture. [...]

“Science is the next frontier that will speak about these sites,” Freund says. Geophysical techniques provide a way to locate and preserve sites that have been built over, as is often the case in Holocaust sites across Europe, even locating them under the canopy of vegetation. While certain sites will be excavated, the process of discovering them does not have to be destructive, as with traditional archaeology. Using non-invasive techniques means archaeologists can hold history in situ. Such non-invasive methods are a matter of being sensitive, too. “These are mass graves of people who are victims,” Freund says. “They have been victimized once and we don’t want to disturb them again by disturbing their burials.” [...]

Geoscientists have another ambitious project planned for this summer—searching for a lost cache of information about Nazi crimes and Jewish heroes in Warsaw. Between 1940 and 1943, an organized underground operation, comprising dozens of contributors, collected thousands of documents: photographs, drawings, writings, journals and tabulations, signed and dated. They put them into 2-feet-high metal milk cans and metal boxes, and buried them in the Warsaw Ghetto. Called the Ringelblum archives after historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the caches were buried in three different locations. In 1946, a survivor found the first of the milk cans. According to Freund, the archives were used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. The second part was discovered in 1950. The archives were used in the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. No one has found the third cache.

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Nautilus Magazine: What Did the Past Smell Like?

That’s a question with which the minds behind “Odeuropa” will have to grapple. Launching this January, it is a $3.3 million, three-year, multinational project on the collection and recreation of smells in 16th- to early 20th-century Europe that will marry historical and literary analysis with machine learning and chemistry. The project is pioneering and also, in a year of COVID-19 induced anosmia with sensory-deprived lockdowns, timely.2 We became aware of our need for environmental stimulation—and the undervalued power of smell. [...]

Descriptions of odor also are culturally mediated. A 2016 study showed that even French and Franco-Canadians today may not agree in their experience and evaluation of the same odor3: For the French, for example, wintergreen was rated much less pleasantly than for French-Canadians. “In France, wintergreen is used more in medicinal products than in Canada, where it is found more in candy,” a press release for the study stated. “Anise was rated similarly in two cultures but was described more often as ‘licorice’ in Quebec and as ‘anise’ in France.” Intricate cross-cultural differences make for intriguing anecdotes. But they are hard to document. [...]

Odeuropa opens up a new sensory experience of history. The researchers will create a catalog of past scents by digging through 250,000 images and thousands of texts (in seven languages), ranging from medical descriptions of smells in textbooks to labels of fragrances in novels or magazines. Machine learning will help to cross-analyze the plethora of descriptions, contexts, and occurrence of odor names (such as tobacco, lavender, and probably horse manure). This catalog serves as the conceptual basis for perfumers and chemists to create fragrant molecules fitting 120 of these descriptors. [...]

Part of the Odeuropa team is a research project called Smell of Heritage, carried out by Cecilia Bembibre, a doctoral student in heritage science at University College London. Heritage scientists look to come up with new ways to study materials and collections that make up cultural heritage, as well as how the environment interacts with it. Bembibre, for example, analyzes and archives culturally essential aromas. “In the heritage context,” the Smell of Heritage website states, “experiencing what the world smelled like in the past enriches our knowledge of it, and, because of the unique relation between odors and memories, allows us to engage with our history in a more emotional way.” [...]

The historical conservation of smell visualizes (for lack of a better term) our need to directly experience and engage with the changes in our history’s materiality. In a world accelerating the digitization of knowledge and the virtual documentation of other people’s lives, we should not forget about our desire to sensually experience. It’s vital, for me at least. Things like virtual reality, which can persuasively simulate visual, auditory, and even tactile sensations, won’t feel convincing enough without also incorporating smell, the next and perhaps ultimate frontier, given how difficult it is to substitute. A fan of the outdoors like me wants to get a whiff of the horse poop.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why We Judge People Based on Their Relatives

We know that humans are inference machines. With very little information, people can guess at rates above chance whether someone is a psychopath. With a 10-second video clip, people can correctly guess whether someone is gay 81 percent of the time. To many, “stereotype” is a word practically synonymous with “false,” but stereotype accuracy is one of the best replicated findings in psychology. You can accurately infer a lot about someone simply by knowing their ethnicity, sex, or country of origin. Of course, when we know people better, we tend to rely relatively more on our own experience. [...]

For most characteristics, it looks like genetics are much more important than parenting. One large study found that, for adopted children, their rate of criminality was 12 percent if their biological parents were criminals but their adopted parents were not criminals—but just 6 percent if their adoptive parents were criminals and their biological parents were not. When both sets of parents, biological and adoptive, were criminals, the rate of criminality shot up to 40 percent. There is a similar pattern when it comes to drug and alcohol abuse. If we know that Pete is a criminal with a substance-abuse problem, his father Jack is much more likely to have these problems as well. [...]

It’s surprising that there is almost no research about how much we judge people based on their relatives, given the abundance of evidence showing that we make quick inferences about other people on the basis of little information. Some sociologists have looked into a related bias, called the “courtesy stigma.” If you associate with someone who is stigmatized in society, like someone with substance-abuse problems, schizophrenia, or a cognitive disability, that stigma can fall on you. “Family stigma” is one form of courtesy stigma.

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Nautilus Magazine: We Never Know Exactly Where We’re Going in Outer Space

In the early 1960s, during the space race, neither American nor Soviet scientists really knew where planets like Mars or Venus were—especially at the accuracy and precision essential for spacecraft navigation. That may sound faintly ludicrous. They of course knew roughly where a target like Venus would be when a spacecraft got there. But “roughly” in this context might be an offset of 10,000 or 100,000 kilometers. Planetary positions, their ephemerides, rely on the calibration of their orbits to extremely high precision over time. But the only way to do that properly is to make direct measurements, just as the mariners of old would need to sail right by an island or shoreline in order to nail down its latitude and longitude. [...]

It remains to be seen whether tiny spacecraft can carry the requisite computational toolkit or sensory and steering capacity to do this. The bright stars themselves might be the best markers to exploit, together with our own sun forming a navigational beacon. Tiny pulses from miniature laser diodes could provide thrust to maneuver with, and perhaps the key is to send hundreds, even thousands, of nanocraft, each with modest AI and an ability to learn from each other and to reach their goals in space and time through massive redundancy and the sacrifice of many. But when you’re trying to catch a flying bullet—whether star or planet—with another flying bullet, things can go wrong. [...]

In sending machines to other worlds, even to other stars, we have no choice but to fully admit our inaccuracies and imprecisions, to be entirely, brutally honest about our limited grasp of what’s out there. Even the laws of nature are deductions based on wholly imperfect measurements, whether of planetary orbits and gravity, or of the properties of logic and symbolic manipulation in algebra—the latter being “measured” through human minds and the machines those minds produce. The amazing thing is how well these laws let us model and predict aspects of the physical world, a capacity that has reassured and helped us for thousands of years. We have managed to turn the problem around, and can now predict the kinds of chaos that should occur across nature, from unsettled weather conditions and unstable stock markets to, of course, planets.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Joys of Being a Stoic

So it goes for Stoicism: The stiff-upper-lip stereotype finds its root in the fact that Stoics practice endurance. It arose in ancient Greece and Rome, established around 300 B.C. by Zeno of Citium in Athens. People spanning the social gamut practiced it, from slaves such as the early second-century Epictetus to emperors like Marcus Aurelius. They took to heart the idea that if there is nothing you can do about a particular situation, why beat yourself up about it? Work toward as serene a degree of acceptance as you can muster instead. This doesn’t mean suppressing emotions. Rather, it means shifting your emotional spectrum—away from unhealthy emotions like anger and toward the mindful embracing of healthy ones like joy—by working on consciously altering the way you think about yourself and the world. [...]

Well, thank Zeus I’ve never been attracted by a “naive endorsement of stoic ideology.” That’s because I practice upper-case Stoicism, not lower-case stoicism. I’m into the philosophy, in other words, not the macho attitude. Not only are the two unrelated, but in fact research from practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy shows that the philosophy promotes eudaimonic well-being as well as engagement in life. The goal of Stoicism, after all, is to make us into the best human beings we can be, and it does so through the constant applications of two cardinal principles: the dichotomy of control and the four virtues.[...]

In essence, the idea is to internalize our goals: Instead of focusing, as it comes natural, on outcomes, let’s pay attention to our intentions and efforts. The Stoics think that the only truly good thing for us is our own character, and that therefore the only truly bad things are whatever may undermine our character. Everything else (including health, wealth, reputation, etc.) has value, but does not define who we are. [...]

It turns out that practicing Stoics experience a statistically significant increase in measures of their well-being, with fewer episodes of negative emotions (like anger) and more episodes of positive emotions (like joy). Moreover, such reduction of anger does not take place by way of suppression (which is impossible), but because Stoic practitioners reframe what happens to them in terms that simply do not trigger angry reactions in them. “We stop having ethically misguided and intense or conflicted emotions (sometimes called ‘passions’) and we move toward having ‘good emotions,’” as the handbook for the 2020 edition of Stoic Week states. “The passions are misguided because the passionate person supposes that happiness depends on acquiring or retaining ‘preferred indifferents,’ such as wealth or fame (rather than on exercising the virtues).” This folly leads to anger, fear, or overwhelming lust, emotions often marked “by intensity of feeling, instability and inner conflict.”

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Nautilus Magazine: Your Brain Makes You a Different Person Every Day

 Every moment of your life, your brain is rewiring. You’ve got 86 billion neurons and a fraction of a quadrillion connections between them. These vast seas of connections are constantly changing their strength, and they’re unconnecting and reconnecting elsewhere. It’s why you are a slightly different person than you were a week ago or a year ago. When you learned that my name is David, there’s a physical change in the structure of your brain. That’s what it means to remember something. [...]

There’s a study that’s been running for a few decades with nuns who’ve lived in a convent their whole lives and agreed to donate their brains upon their death. At autopsy, researchers discovered that some fraction of these nuns had Alzheimer’s disease, but nobody knew it when they were alive. The reason is because they were constantly challenging themselves. They had responsibilities and chores. They dealt with each other all the time, and one of the most challenging things for the brain is other people, in a good way. So till the day they died, they were cognitively active. Even though their brains were physically getting chewed up by the disease, they were constantly building new roadways in the brain. [...]

This question got me really interested in whether we could create new senses for humans. Could you feed in some kind of data stream where the brain is getting new data about something in the world that’s useful? This is called sensory substitution. In my lab, we started doing this with individuals who are deaf. We built a vest that’s covered in vibratory motors, kind of like the buzzer on your cell phone. The vest captures sound and turns the sound into patterns of vibration. The motors are ranged from low to high frequency, which is how your inner ear is also arranged, so we’re taking the inner ear and transferring it to the skin of the torso. It turns out that people who are deaf can understand what is happening in the auditory world by getting the information just through the patterns of vibration on their skin. You’re not using your skin for much of anything, but it’s this incredible computational material that you can pass a lot of data through.

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Nautilus Magazine: No, Animals Do Not Have Genders

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the psychologist John Money started using the term “gender role” to refer to something that associates with biological sex, but is not the same. From there, a theoretical distinction emerged where sex refers to facts about biological bodies. Gender, on the other hand, is cultural. It involves a set of behaviors and norms that shape how men and women act, prescribe how they ought to be, and specify what it means to be a man or a woman. These behaviors and norms emerge as a result of cultural evolution, and are transmitted to new generations through cultural learning. (Notice here that I implicitly refer to a two-gender system. I am not making a political point. This is just the most common type of system across cultures, traditionally.)

As gender theorists like Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling have pointed out, sex and gender cannot be fully pulled apart. Facts about our sexed bodies influence the cultural rules surrounding gender. (For instance, in many cultures it is a norm that men, who are typically males, do jobs that require a lot of upper body strength.) And facts about gender in turn shape our sexed bodies. (For instance, norms of what is attractive lead to different patterns of exercise, like weightlifting for men and running on the elliptical for women.) And these feedback on each other. (When men only weightlift, this creates further sex differences that reinforce our cultural norms.) But despite this intertwining, peacocks still do not have genders. And the reason is that peacocks do not have culture.

How do we know that gender is not simply a biological fact? What makes it cultural, rather than analogous to sex-differentiated behavior in animals? Here is some of the key evidence. Unlike in any other animal, gendered behavior in humans is wildly different across cultures. What is considered appropriate for women in one culture might be deemed completely inappropriate in another. Even the number of genders is culturally variable. While most cultures have settled on two genders, associated with biological sex differences, others settle on three or more.

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Nautilus Magazine: Your Romantic Ideals Don’t Predict Who Your Future Partner Will Be

Sparks and her team conducted two studies exploring whether our romantic ideals—the qualities we say we want most in a partner—predict who we’re actually interested in dating. In the first study, singles went on a blind date with a stranger and reported how things went. In the second, almost 600 people (both single and partnered) nominated five friends or acquaintances of their preferred gender and rated them on how romantically desirable they were. (Partnered participants were asked to rate their current partners instead of friends or acquaintances.) [...]

But that’s not quite what the researchers found. While singles’ own romantic ideals did predict who they said they’d be interested in dating, those ideals weren’t any better at predicting their romantic interest than the ideals a random other person in the study came up with. In other words, Nadya would be just as likely to be interested in Taylor if she thought he was loyal, funny, and a good cook (her own ideals) as if she thought he was smart, outgoing, and had a good body (Mira’s ideals). Only partnered participants were slightly more self-aware—their personal romantic priorities were better predictors of their romantic interest than those of random strangers—but even in this case, the difference was small at best. Across the board, romantic “priorities” seemed to be less related to romantic interest than you’d expect.

The results raise questions about whether we really have special insight into what we want. When it comes to romance, many people like to think they have a “type,” and they know what it is. Sparks’ research suggests this is an illusion. “Are we just describing positive qualities that everyone wants?” she says. “We might not fully understand our own preferences.”

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Nautilus Magazine: How the Pandemic Has Tested Behavioral Science

To their credit, the Nudge Unit has had some noteworthy successes, like developing interventions that have increased rates of tax payment and organ donation. But they’ve also been accused of overreaching; there is some evidence for behavioral fatigue, for example, but probably not enough for it to form the foundation of a country’s response to a deadly pandemic. As Anne-Lise Sibony, a researcher who studies the relationship between law and behavioral science, wrote in the European Journal of Risk Regulation, “[I]t is not clear why behavioral fatigue was singled out given that other, better-documented behavioral phenomena might—with equally unknown probability and distribution—be at work and either fuel or counteract it.” [...]

The flipside to this, of course, is when bad psychology comes from scientists. “If we’re overconfident in studies that don’t replicate,” psychologist Hans IJzerman told Nautilus in an email, “then we’re also establishing our own psychology.” Using evidence before it’s ready for primetime may not be better than nothing—it could be a waste of resources, or even actively harmful to those it’s intended to help. Concerns about behavioral fatigue, for example, were meant to protect the UK public, but they ended up indirectly facilitating the virus’ spread by delaying social distancing measures. [...]

Psychology and other fields are making progress in addressing their flaws, but it remains true that in the interplay between behavioral science and policy, puffs of smoke abound. For example, in the wake of worldwide protests against racist policing, there’s renewed interest in using science to change the behavior of police officers. For years, implicit bias training—classes and workshops designed to help participants recognize and counteract their own discriminatory thoughts and feelings—has been touted as the answer, not just for police departments but for white-collar office spaces and many other kinds of professional environments. The problem, though, is that it doesn’t seem to work, at least in its current form. A 2019 meta-analysis found that, while certain interventions can reduce measures of implicit bias, they don’t do much to change people’s behavior. “The reality is this multimillion, maybe billion, dollar industry has gotten way far ahead of the evidence,” said Patricia Devine, who runs a lab studying prejudice, on Marketplace Morning Report.

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Nautilus Magazine: Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction

There’s experimental evidence for this. Children, for example, sometimes actually believe that puppets are alive. Even animals sometimes react to pictures the same way they react to real things. The industrialized world is so full of human faces, like in ads, that we forget that it’s just ink, or pixels on a computer screen. Every time our ancestors saw something that looked like a human face, it probably was one. As a result, we didn’t evolve to distinguish reality from representation. The same perceptual machinery interprets both.

The rational parts of our minds, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, do indeed know that what we’re looking at, or reading, isn’t real. One way to understand this is by thinking about optical illusions. In the Muller-Lyer illusion, we can trace and know the two horizontal lines are the same length, but at the same time appear to be different lengths. Even after you understand how an illusion operates, it continues to fool part of your mind. This is the kind of double knowledge we have when we consume fiction.

These perceptual areas of our brains are very closely connected to our emotions. That’s why emotions don’t just motivate us to act in certain ways but force us to interpret the world differently. A 2011 paper, for example, explained how fear can affect vision, moods can make us more or less susceptible to visual illusions, and desire can change the apparent size of goal-relevant objects. The authors proposed that emotions offer information “about the costs and benefits of anticipated action,” knowledge that can be used swiftly, without thought, “circumventing the need for cogitating on the possible consequences of potential actions.”

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Nautilus Magazine: The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times

Think, for a moment, just how crazy this is. If you’re in Boston and someone tells you that they heard a sound coming from New York City, you’re probably going to give them a funny look. But Boston is a mere 200 miles from New York. What we’re talking about here is like being in Boston and clearly hearing a noise coming from Dublin, Ireland. Traveling at the speed of sound (766 miles or 1,233 kilometers per hour), it takes a noise about four hours to cover that distance. This is the most distant sound that has ever been heard in recorded history. 

So what could possibly create such an earth-shatteringly loud bang? A volcano on Krakatoa had just erupted with a force so great that it tore the island apart, emitting a plume of smoke that reached 17 miles into the atmosphere, according to a geologist who witnessed it. You could use this observation to calculate that stuff spewed out of the volcano at over 1,600 miles per hour—or nearly half a mile per second. That’s more than twice the speed of sound. [...]

By 1883, weather stations in scores of cities across the world were using barometers to track changes in atmospheric pressure. Six hours and 47 minutes after the Krakatoa explosion, a spike of air pressure was detected in Calcutta. By 8 hours, the pulse reached Mauritius in the west and Melbourne and Sydney in the east. By 12 hours, St. Petersburg noticed the pulse, followed by Vienna, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Munich. By 18 hours the pulse had reached New York, Washington, D.C., and Toronto. Amazingly, for as many as five days after the explosion, weather stations in 50 cities around the globe observed this unprecedented spike in pressure recurring like clockwork, approximately every 34 hours. That is roughly how long it takes sound to travel around the entire planet.

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Nautilus Magazine: Why False Claims About COVID-19 Refuse to Die

There is a pandemic of misinformation about COVID-19 spreading on social media sites. Some of this misinformation takes well-understood forms: baseless rumors, intentional disinformation, and conspiracy theories. But much of it seems to have a different character. In recent months, claims with some scientific legitimacy have spread so far, so fast, that even if it later becomes clear they are false or unfounded, they cannot be laid to rest. Instead, they become information zombies, continuing to shamble on long after they should be dead.

It is not uncommon for media sources like Medium to retract articles or claims that turn out to be false or misleading. Neither are retractions limited to the popular press. In fact, they are common in the sciences, including the medical sciences. Every year, hundreds of papers are retracted, sometimes because of fraud, but more often due to genuine errors that invalidate study findings.2 (The blog Retraction Watch does an admirable job of tracking these.) [...]

Researchers have found, however, that the process of retraction or reversal does not always work the way it should. Retracted papers are often cited long after problems are identified,4 sometimes at a rate comparable to that before retraction. And in the vast majority of these cases, the authors citing retracted findings treat them as valid.5 (It seems that many of these authors pull information directly from colleagues’ papers, and trust that it is current without actually checking.) Likewise, medical researchers have bemoaned the fact that reversals in practice sometimes move at a glacial pace, with doctors continuing to use contraindicated therapies even though better practices are available. [...]

Other cases are more subtle. One major question with far-reaching implications for the future development of the pandemic is to what extent asymptomatic carriers are able to transmit the virus. The first article reporting on asymptomatic transmission was a letter published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine claiming that a traveler from China to Germany transmitted the disease to four Germans before her symptoms appeared.12 Within four days, Science reported that the article was flawed because the authors of the letter had not actually spoken with the Chinese traveler, and a follow-up phone call by public health authorities confirmed that she had had mild symptoms while visiting Germany after all.13 Even so, the article has subsequently been cited nearly 500 times according to Google Scholar, and has been tweeted nearly 10,000 times, according to Altmetric.

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Nautilus Magazine: Natural Selection in an Outbreak

Ebola doesn’t select people. We haven’t figured out what Ebola virus selects as its natural host, but it’s definitely not humans. Every once in a while, Ebola stumbles upon a human host, which ends up being a fatal mistake. When I say fatal, I mean for the virus. After all, Ebola is usually not highly efficient at sustaining infection or transmitting from human to human, and eventually that chain of transmission turns into a dead end. Every Ebola outbreak has ended, even the 2014-2015 West African epidemic. [...]

The circumstances that favor Ebola spillover to humans aren’t necessarily the same ones that drive full-scale epidemics, and it’s important to understand this distinction. Natural selection is the process by which the environment dictates what will thrive. Normally, a human population is not a hospitable environment for Ebola virus. But when we have dysfunctional healthcare systems, we convert a dead-end spillover event into a large outbreak—we select Ebola. It’s no coincidence that the largest Ebola outbreaks occurred in countries with weak governments recovering from brutal civil unrest, with poor education systems and inadequate healthcare infrastructures. Ebola virus finds succor in environments where hepatitis B is uncontrolled and cholera regularly sweeps through. It’s the environments where healthcare systems lag behind rapidly growing urban populations, where road networks carry natural resources out of remote areas but medical supplies cannot find their way in, and where everyone with a fever is told they have “malaria/typhoid” because there are no laboratory facilities to tell them otherwise. It’s these human environments that select Ebola. [...]

There’s a lot of speculation about what dampens and ultimately ends an Ebola outbreak. When a spillover turns into an epidemic turns into a trickle of cases, credit goes to the highly technical international response of laboratories and treatment units, skilled local surveillance and monitoring teams, and even the increasing numbers of survivors that cannot be re-infected. What is often missing from the discussion is how communities adapted to this new threat. How they altered their environment through the use of improvised protective equipment and self- or locally-imposed quarantine. We can all learn from this resilience and resourcefulness. It is this local adaption and memory that we will depend upon, if we as a global community fail to build up the failing healthcare systems that favor Ebola.

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Nautilus Magazine: The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming

Typically the preparation of the animal is where you have exposure. By the time it’s cooked and prepared, the virus would have been dead. It’s more common that transmission is through the animal shedding or people slaughtering the animal, when they’re exposed to bodily fluids, blood, and secretions. With the avian influenza from poultry, a lot of the exposure and infections go back to the preparation of chicken for cooking. In Egypt, for instance, when you look at who was infected, more common than not it was a woman, directly responsible for slaughtering and preparing the animal. [...]

Certainly. We’ve been able to identify bats as reservoirs for coronaviruses and documented specific bat populations as reservoirs for Ebola virus. We want to understand how each of these bats operate within an ecosystem. Do they have certain behaviors and practices that either keep them remote from or proximal to human populations? The bat population in which we isolated the Ebola virus in West Africa was a species of bat that also tends to co-roost within human housing, so it elevates the opportunity for spillover. [...]

Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. [...]

Oh, sure. It was predictable. It’s like if you had no traffic laws and were constantly finding pedestrians getting whacked by cars as they crossed the street. Is that surprising? No. All you need to do is to better manage how we set up crosswalks, how we establish traffic rules and regulations. We’re not doing that. We’re not establishing the kind of safe practices that will minimize the opportunity for spillover. If we better understood where these viruses are circulating and understood that ecology, we would have the potential to disrupt and minimize the risk of spillover.

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Nautilus Magazine: What Really Inflamed the Coronavirus Epidemic

An online tidal wave of reflection and grief that I’ve never seen before resulted. My own personal WeChat feed was flooded with comments and tributes to him, ranging from poems to cartoons of him eating his favorite meal of fried chicken. The rage was directed largely at Wuhan city officials. After Li had written to his friends, he had been called into a police station, where he was forced to sign an unusual document designed to coerce him into silence. Later, he spoke to Chinese private media company Caixin, shedding light on the unfolding epidemic which, having engulfed first Wuhan and its surroundings, is now front page news across the world. Li became, as a result, the face and name of a censorship phenomenon involving a number of other doctors. [...]

But did censoring Li and others make the outbreak of the virus much worse, leading to many more deaths, as many Chinese people believe? Not so much. The censorship, and its subsequent chilling effect, is not what is killing people: What is a far more proximate cause of these deaths is the incompetence of the Wuhan government and the central health authorities in the two weeks that followed the censorship. They failed to prepare any sort of health system response, and the Wuhan authorities were preoccupied by a major political conference. When the virus took hold and became an epidemic, the health system was swamped. People were unable to access health services, and in some cases, people were contracting the virus when already sick or weak, making them more likely to succumb. [...]

The Wuhan authorities knew that the epidemic was of grave concern, yet did not notify the public nor begin preparing. It seems most likely that they were completely occupied by the two political meetings, which took up all government and Party resources, and killed any air time for public health announcements—thus negligently wasting two vital weeks to prepare for any possible outbreak. For example, they lacked the capacity to test for the virus at the necessary scale, making only 200 test kits per day, and sending early tests off to Beijing for results. On January 20, Xi Jinping got involved and the vast Chinese bureaucracy kicked into gear, shutting down a whole province. Local governments were told to take any measures necessary. For the past three weeks, we have seen the overreaction: airports and travel grinding to a standstill, most of China working from home (around half of China’s citizens are unable to move), and various countries closing their borders to Chinese nationals.

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Nautilus Magazine: This Psychological Concept Could Be Shaping the Presidential Election

Pluralistic ignorance is a discrepancy between one’s privately held beliefs and public behavior. It occurs when people assume that the identical actions of themselves and others reflect different underlying states. The term has been in circulation for nearly 80 years, though more recent experiments have made it a focal point of social psychology. [...]

Over a decade later, psychologists Nicole Shelton and Jennifer Richeson examined whether pluralistic ignorance stymied friendship among black and white college students. They designed an experiment that asked students to imagine approaching a group of people from a different race in a dining hall. Results showed both groups of students wanted to have more contact with each other, but erroneously thought the other group didn’t want to have contact with them. In subsequent studies, Shelton and Richeson documented the real consequences of this miscalculation among Princeton students. They found that people who endorsed divergent explanations for their own actions and the identical actions of racial outgroup members had less contact with people of different races in their daily lives. Pluralistic ignorance deterred Princeton students of different races from interacting with each other.4 [...]

Nate Silver, editor of FiveThirtyEight, reflected on these data in a blog post. “Being a woman was the biggest barrier to electability, based on Avalanche’s analysis of the results, and women were more likely to cite gender as a factor than men,” Silver wrote. “So there are a lot of women who might not vote for a woman because they’re worried that other voters won’t vote for her. But if everyone just voted for who they actually wanted to be president, the woman would win!”9

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Nautilus Magazine: The Future of Food Looks Small, Dense, and Very Bushy

The way we live is out of balance with the way we eat. About eleven percent of the Earth’s land area is used for agriculture; meanwhile, two-thirds of the human population is now jammed in cities, which cover a mere three percent. Continued urbanization and population growth will require more farmland, more transportation, and an even bigger ecological footprint—unless we can find more efficient ways to feed the world.

One intriguing solution is to give traditional agriculture a 90 degree twist into vertical farming, where crops are grown indoors in tightly stacked rows, sustained hydroponically so that they don’t need dirt. A lot of food production could then be relocated to urban regions, so that less wilderness would need to be converted to cropland, notes Choon-Tak Kwon, a postdoctoral fellow in plant biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The financial and ecological cost of transporting food should decrease substantially, too. “You can grow perishable crops near your home all the year around,” Kwon says, ideally leading to “fresher foods with stable prices.” [...]

Other researchers are finding ways to apply targeted genetic shrinking to completely unrelated crops, as well. In 2018, Erika Varkonyi-Gasic and her colleagues with the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research Limited in Auckland created a dwarf kiwi vine through gene editing. Instead of long, climbing vines that take a few years to mature, the engineered kiwis were just a meter long at maturity and produced fruit within a year. The global appetite for kiwi fruit may be modest, but the shrinking technique could soon be ubiquitous.

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Nautilus Magazine: Mapping Gay-Friendly Cities Through History

What separates Ptolemy’s survey from simple jingoism, however, is his attempt to ascribe the ethnic differences he perceived to a set of rational principles. On this account, the Tetrabiblos is one of the earliest examples of what’s sometimes called anthropological ethnology. And unlike the blood-based racial theories which became especially pernicious in America and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, Ptolemy’s ethnology is entirely geographical. This makes the Tetrabiblos rightfully the great-grandfather of what’s surely the most famous modern work of geographic anthropology, Jared Diamond’s best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel. But let’s not be coy here. What really makes Ptolemy’s whirlwind world tour so entertaining is all the sex—or, rather, how candidly Ptolemy discusses the sexual habits of the peoples he describes. [...]

Ptolemy’s assertion that acceptance of homosexuality decreases along a line running from London to Riyadh agrees pretty well with what I imagine is the current conventional wisdom on the matter. Could he be on to something? To add a quantitative veneer to this question, we can use that favorite tool of data analysts everywhere: a linear regression. [...]

It’s no secret, for instance, that northwestern Europe historically, and even quite recently, was not especially welcoming toward homosexuals. Indeed, when the great Victorian explorer Richard Burton developed his own theory of geographically-influenced sexuality, the Middle East was explicitly included, and England excluded, from his map of what he termed the “Sotadic Zone”—a region where homosexuality was supposedly natural, accepted, and common. Were Figure 2 to be redrawn with data from 150 years ago, it’s altogether likely that the best-fit regression line would have entirely the opposite slope. Yet a correlation that shifts from one moment to the next undermines any argument that there’s a fixed principle at work. Instead, perhaps the only constant uniting Ptolemy’s and Burton’s theories is that each imagined the sexual mores of faraway lands to be radically different from what he knew back home, and each projected his disgust or desire accordingly. That’s hardly the story you would get if the only information you had was the cold and context-free data of Figure 2. Trying to figure out which story, if any, is hiding in your data is challenging expressly because there are usually multiple stories which can be crafted, and deciding which one to emphasize rarely has anything to do with the data itself.

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