Know This

by Mr. John Brockman

  It will be interesting to see how this plays out. But meanwhile I hope that more of the public is beginning to understand that getting cancer usually doesn’t mean you did something wrong or that something bad was done to you. Some cancer can be prevented and some can be successfully treated. But for multicellular creatures living in an entropic world, a threshold amount of cancer is probably inevitable.

  The Decline of Cancer

  A. C. Grayling

  Philosopher; master, New College of the Humanities, and supernumerary fellow, St. Anne’s College, Oxford, U.K.; author, The God Argument

  In a great year for science, it is hard to restrict applause to just one area, but a worthy one is cancer research, which has seen a number of advances. Genetic manipulation has rapidly reversed colorectal cancer in mice, a Dutch team has developed a highly accurate blood test for cancer, a general cure for cancer is promised by the discovery that attaching malaria proteins to cancerous cells destroys them, the Mayo Clinic has found a way of short-circuiting cancer-cell growth by using a certain junction protein (PLEKHA7), early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer looks more possible following the identification of a protein on particles released by cancer cells in the pancreas, low-toxicity nano-pills for treatment of breast cancer look to be on the way, and the FDA has approved Palbociclib for breast cancer treatment. There may have been other announcements in the oncology field this year, but the cumulative effect of these developments would appear to support the claim made by a leading oncologist that within a generation no one under the age of eighty will die of cancer.

  The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women

  David M. Buss

  Professor of psychology, University of Texas, Austin; co-author (with C. M. Meston), Why Women Have Sex

  Every year, more women than men become college-educated. The disparity is already prevalent in North America and Europe, and the trend is beginning to spread across the world. At the University of Texas at Austin, where I teach, the sex ratio is 54-percent women to 46-percent men. This imbalance may not seem large at first blush. But when you do the math, it translates into a hefty 17-percent more women than men in the local mating pool. Speculations about reasons range widely. They include the gradual removal of gender discrimination barriers and women’s higher levels of conscientiousness (relative to men’s), which translates into better grades and superior college-app qualifications. Whatever the causes, the disparity is creating a mating crisis among educated women.

  We must look deeply into our mating psychology to understand the far-reaching consequences of the sex-ratio imbalance. Women and men both have evolved multiple mating strategies. Some of each gender pursue casual hook-ups; some pursue committed partnerships. Some alternate at different times of their lives; some do both simultaneously. And although a few social scientists deny the data, research overwhelmingly shows that men harbor, on average, a greater desire for sexual-partner variety. Men experience more frequent sexual thoughts per day, have more sexual fantasies involving multiple partners, and more readily sign up for online dating sites for the sole goal of casual sex. Thus a surplus of women among educated groups caters precisely to this aspect of men’s sexual desires, because the rarer gender is always better positioned to get what it wants on the mating market. In places like large cities in China, with their surplus of men, women can better fulfill their desires while many men remain frustrated and mateless. Context matters. For every surplus of women in places like Manhattan, there exist pockets where men outnumber women, such as schools of engineering or the software companies of Silicon Valley. But when there are not enough men to go around, women predictably intensify their sexual competition. The rise of hook-up cultures on college campuses and online dating sites like Tinder, Adult Friend Finder, and Ashley Madison is no coincidence.

  Gender differences in sexual psychology are only part of the problem. Additional elements of the mating mind exacerbate it. A key cause stems from the qualities women seek in committed mateships. Most women are unwilling to settle for men who are less educated, less intelligent, and less professionally successful than they are. The flip side is that men are less exacting about precisely those criteria, choosing to prioritize, for better or worse, other factors, such as youth and appearance. So the initial sex-ratio imbalance among educated groups gets worse for high-achieving women. They end up being forced to compete for the limited pool of educated men not just with their more numerous educated rivals but also with less-educated women, whom men find desirable for other reasons.

  The relative shortage of educated men worsens when we add the factors of age and divorce to the mating matrix. As men age, they desire women increasingly younger than they are. Intelligent, educated women may go for a less accomplished partner for a casual fling, but for a committed partner they typically want mates their own age or a few years older and at least as educated and career-driven. Since education takes time, the sex-ratio imbalance is especially skewed among the highly educated—those who seek advanced degrees to become doctors, lawyers, or professors, or who climb the corporate ladder post-MBA. And because men are more likely than women to remarry following divorce and to marry women increasingly younger than they are—three years at first marriage, five at second, eight at third—the gender-biased mating ratio skews more sharply with increasing age.

  Different women react in different ways to the mating crisis. Some use sexual tactics to ramp up their competition for men. They dress more provocatively, send more sexually explicit texts, consent to sex sooner, and hope that things turn into something more than a brief encounter. Some women opt out of the mating game, unwilling to compromise their careers in the service of mating. (Although some progress has been made, women still suffer disproportionately from compromises between career and family.) And some women hold out for an ever smaller pool of men who are single, educated, and emotionally stable; who are not sexual players; and who can engage their intellect, sense of humor, emotional complexities, and sexual passions for more than just a night.

  The good news for those who succeed is that marriages among the educated tend to be more stable, freer of conflict, less plagued by infidelity, and less likely to end in divorce. Educated couples enjoy a higher standard of living, as dual professional incomes catapult them to the more affluent tiers of the economy. They suffer less financial stress than their less educated counterparts. Assortative coupling on the education level does have an unintended downside—it’s a major contributor to economic inequality in the larger society, widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. But for accomplished women who successfully overcome the odds unfairly stacked against them, mating triumph typically takes precedence over loftier goals of reducing societal-level inequality when the two conflict.

  What are the potential solutions to the mating-pool shortage for educated women? Should they adjust their mate preferences? Expand the range of men they’re willing to consider as mates? Mating psychology may not be that malleable. The same mating desires responsible for the skewed gender imbalance to begin with continue to create unfortunate obstacles to human happiness. As successful women overcome barriers in the workplace, they encounter new dilemmas in the mating market.

  The Most Important X . . . Y . . . Z . . .

  Jared Diamond

  Professor of geography, UCLA; author, The World Until Yesterday

  In many fields, one hears questions in the format, “What is the most important X . . . Y . . . Z . . . , etc.?” For instance, what is the most important factor accounting for artistic creativity? Or competitive biological success? Or a happy marriage? Or military success? Or scientific creativity? Or successful child-rearing? Or a sustainable economy? Or world peace?

  In our complicated, multifactorial world, the correct answer to such a question is almost always, “The most important consideration is not to search for the most important consideration.” Instead, there are normally many considerations, none of which can be ignored.

  For instance, mar
ital therapists have identified nineteen independent factors essential to a happy marriage: compatibility about sex, money, religion, politics, in-laws, child-rearing, styles of arguing, and twelve other factors. If a couple agrees about eighteen of those factors but can’t resolve a disagreement just about sex (or just about money, or just religion, etc.), they are in deep trouble. Hence if you hear a newly married couple ask you in all seriousness, “What is the single most important requirement for a happy marriage?” you can bet that that marriage will end in divorce.

  The Mother of All Addictions

  Helen Fisher

  Biological anthropologist, Rutgers University; senior research fellow, the Kinsey Institute; author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love

  Falling in love activates the same basic brain system for wanting (the reward system—specifically the mesolimbic dopamine pathway), as do all drugs of abuse, including heroin, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine. Because this central neural network becomes active when addicted to any drug of abuse, I have long wondered whether feelings of romantic love can smother a drug craving or whether a drug craving can smother feelings of romantic love, or whether these two very different cravings might work together—sensitizing this brain network to make the drug addict more receptive to romantic love and/or make the lover more prone to other forms of addiction. In short: How does this central brain system accommodate two different cravings at once?

  All these questions are still largely unanswered. But in 2012 an article made inroads into this conundrum. Xiaomeng Xu and her colleagues put eighteen Chinese nicotine-deprived smokers who had also just fallen madly in love into a brain scanner, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).* As these men and women looked at a photo of a hand holding a cigarette and also at a photo of their newly beloved, the researchers collected data on their brain activity. Results? Among those who were moderately addicted to nicotine, the craving for the beloved reduced activity in brain regions associated with the craving for a cigarette.

  But there is some added value here. The article also suggests that engaging in any kind of novel activity (unrelated to romance) may also alleviate nicotine craving—by hijacking this same dopaminergic reward system. This single correlation could be of tremendous value to those trying to quit smoking.

  And I shall go out on a limb to propose a wider meaning to these data. Although there is only this very limited evidence for my hypothesis, this study suggests to me that there may be a hierarchy to the addictions. In this case, one’s addiction to a newly beloved may, in some cases, suppress one’s addiction to nicotine. Romantic love may be the mother of all addictions—indeed, a positive addiction enabling one to overcome other cravings to win life’s greatest prize: a mating partner.

  The Trust Metric

  John Gottman

  Psychologist; cofounder, The Gottman Institute; author, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

  What has amazed and excited me the most in recent scientific news is that the concept of trust can be measured validly and reliably and that it organizes a vast amount of information about what makes families and human societies function well, or fail.

  As a relationship researcher and couples/family therapist, I have known for decades that trust is the number-one issue that concerns couples today. Consistent with this is the finding that the major trait people search for in trying to find a mate is trustworthiness. Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking book Bowling Alone began documenting this field of scientific research, which is based on a very simple question. Sociologists have used a yes/no survey question: “In general, would you say that you trust people?” It turns out that regions of the U.S., and countries throughout the world, vary widely in the percentage of people who answer “Yes.”

  Here’s the amazing scientific news. In regions of the U.S., the percentage of people who trust others correlates highly with an array of positive social indices such as greater economic growth, greater longevity of citizens, their better physical health, lower crime rates, greater voting participation, greater community involvement, more philanthropy, and higher student achievement scores—to mention just a few variables that index the health of a community. As we move from the North to the South in the United States, the proportion of people who trust others drops continuously. A great archival index of trust turns out to be the discrepancy in income between the richest and poorest people in a region.

  High income discrepancy implies low trust. That discrepancy has been growing in the U.S. since the 1950s, as has the decline in community participation. Data show that in the 1950s CEOs earned about 25 times more than the average worker; that ratio has grown steadily, so that in 2010 it was about 350 times more. So we are in a crisis in this country, and it’s no surprise that the gap between the rich and the poor has become a major issue in the 2016 election. One fact in these results: How well the U.S. cares for its poorest citizens is a reliable index of the social and economic health of the entire country. Empathy for the poor is thus smart politics.

  These results also hold internationally, where the trust percentage is also related to less political corruption. Only 2 percent of the people in Brazil trust one another, whereas in Norway 65 percent trust others. Many other factors are important internationally, but we note that Brazil is currently in chaos, while Norway is thriving.

  These spectacular data are, unfortunately, correlational. Of course it’s hard to do real experiments at societal levels; however, these findings on trust have spawned growing academic fields of behavioral economics and neuro-economics, which fields are generating exciting new experiments. Combined with the mathematics of game theory, this work has led to the creation of a valid “trust metric” in interactions between two people. A new understanding of the processes of how two people build (or erode) trust in a love relationship has enabled a new therapy currently being tested.

  We are approaching an understanding of human cooperation in family relationships that generalizes to society as a whole. I’m hopeful that these breakthroughs may eventually lead us to form a science of human peace and harmony.

  Optogenetics

  Christian Keysers

  Neuroscientist; director, Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience; author, The Empathic Brain

  Over the past decade, with the discovery of optogenetics, neuroscience has thrown open a door that seemed closed forever. Before optogenetics, our ability to record the activity of cells in the brain was sophisticated, and we understood that our emotions, our thoughts, and our perceptions entail the activity of millions of cells. What we lacked was the ability to trigger a similar state in the brain on command. Neuroscience was a spectator of the mind, not an actor. With the advent of optogenetics, this is changing.

  Optogenetics is a new field of biotechnology that lets us transform brain activity into light and light into brain activity. It allows us to introduce fluorescent proteins into brain cells to make them glow when they’re active, thereby transforming neural activity into light. It also allows us to introduce photosensitive ion channels into neurons, so that shining light on the cells triggers activity or silences neurons at will—thereby transforming light into neural activity. By employing modern technologies that record light from neurons deeper and deeper in the brain and guide light onto individual neurons, we have crossed a frontier that only a decade ago seemed far away: For the first time, we can selectively re-create arbitrary states in the brain—and hence the mind.

  A small number of experiments have demonstrated the potential of this technique. For instance, mice were made to experience fear, and then optogenetics reactivated the pattern of neural activity triggered during the original experience and the mice froze in fear again. Neuroscience has become a protagonist. The science-fiction scenario of “total recall” (in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was implanted with memories he never had, in the film of the same name) now becomes practicable. In another set of experiments, the activity of cells in one animal’s brain wa
s recorded and imposed on corresponding cells in the brain of another animal—which was then able to take decisions based on what the other animal was feeling.

  I predict that the ability to measure and re-create brain activity at the level of specific neurons is about to transform us in ways no other invention has. The invention of fire, of the wheel, of antibiotics, of the Internet, changed our lives in profound ways, making them safer, more comfortable, more exciting. But they have not changed who we are. Recording and manipulating brain activity will change who we are. It will serve as an interface through which computers can become part of our brain and through which our brains can directly interface with each other.

  When we observe a baby grow into a child, we see how profoundly a person changes when connections in her brain allow her to tap into the resources of new brain regions. Soon, for some of us, this process will continue beyond the confines of our body, when optogenetic-like technologies allow our minds to encompass the world of computers. Who will we become? What will the world look like, sensed directly not only with our own senses but with all the sensors of the Internet of Things? What would global climate negotiations be like if we could directly connect with the brains of the people around us in the ultimate form of empathy? How will our societies deal with a transition phase in which neuro-enhancement will be affordable to some of us and not to others? In which some will have amazing powers of thought while others remain confined within their own brains?