Know This

by Mr. John Brockman

  Even die-hard proponents of market capitalism will cede that this public sector represents “market failure” where price and value become disconnected. Why should one elect to pay for an army when he will equally benefit from free-riding on the payments of others? Thus in a traditional market economy, payment must be secured by threat of force, in the form of compulsory taxes.

  As long as public goods make up a minority of a market economy, taxes on nonpublic goods can be used to pay for the exception where price and value gap. But in the modern era, things made of atoms (e.g., vinyl albums) are being replaced by things made of bits (e.g., MP3 files). While 3D printing is still immature, it vividly showcases how the plans for an object will allow us to disintermediate its manufacturer. Hence, the previous edge case of market failure should be expected to claim an increasingly dominant share of the pie.

  Assuming that a suite of such anthropic arguments can be made rigorous, what will this mean? In the first place, we should expect that because there is as yet no known alternative to market capitalism, central banks and government agencies publishing official statistics will be under increased pressure to keep up the illusion that market capitalism is recovering, by manipulating whatever dials can be turned by law or fiat, giving birth to an interim “gimmick economy.”

  If you look at your news feed, you’ll notice that the economic news already no longer makes much sense in traditional terms. We have strong growth without wage increases. Using Orwellian terms like “Quantitative Easing” or “Troubled Asset Relief,” central banks print money and transfer wealth to avoid the market’s verdict. Advertising and privacy transfer (rather than user fees) have become the business model of last resort for the Internet corporate giants. Highly trained doctors squeezed between expert systems and no-frills providers are morphing from secure professionals into service-sector workers.

  Capitalism and communism, which briefly resembled victor and vanquished, increasingly look more like Thelma and Louise—a tragic couple sent over the edge by forces beyond their control. What comes next is anyone’s guess, and the world hangs in the balance.

  The Origin of Europeans

  Gregory Cochran

  Physicist; adjunct professor of anthropology, University of Utah; co-author (with Henry Harpending), The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

  Europeans, as it turns out, are the fusion of three peoples—blue-eyed, dark-skinned Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, and Indo-Europeans from Southern Russia. The first farmers largely replaced the hunters (with some admixture) all over Europe, so that 6,000 years ago populations from Greece to Ireland were genetically similar to modern Sardinians—dark-haired, dark-eyed, light-skinned. They probably all spoke related languages, of which Basque is the only survivor.

  About 5,000 years ago, Indo-Europeans arrived out of the East, raising hell and cattle. At least some of them were probably blond or red-headed. In northern Europe they replaced those first farmers, root and branch. Germany had been dotted with small villages before their arrival—immediately afterward, no buildings. Mitochondrial variants carried by one in four of those first farmers are carried by 1 in 400 Europeans today, and the then-dominant Y chromosomes are now found at the few-percent level on islands and mountain valleys—refugia. It couldn’t have been pretty. In Southern Europe, the Indo-Europeans conquered and imposed their languages, but without exterminating the locals—even today Southern Europeans are mostly descended from those early farmers.

  In other words, the linguists were correct. For a while, the archeologists were, too: V. Gordon Childe laid out the right general picture (The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins) back in 1926. But then progress happened: Vast improvement in archeological techniques, such as C-14 dating, were accompanied by vast decreases in common sense. Movements of whole peoples—invasions and Völkerwanderungs—became “problematic,” unfashionable: They bothered archeologists and therefore must not have happened. Sound familiar?

  The picture is clear now, due to investigations of ancient DNA. We can see whether populations are related or not, whether they fused, or whether one replaced another and to what extent. We even know that one group of ancient Siberians contributed to both Indo-Europeans and Amerindians.

  We also know that modern social scientists are getting better and better at coming to false conclusions. You could blame the inherent difficulty of a historical science like archeology, where experiments are impossible. You might blame well-funded STEM disciplines for drawing away many of the sharper students. You could blame ideological uniformity—but you would be mistaken. Time travelers bringing back digitally authenticated full-color 3D movies of prehistory wouldn’t fix this problem.

  Their minds ain’t right.

  The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, but Worth It

  Hazel Rose Markus

  Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; co-editor, Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century

  The variously attributed Platinum Rule holds that we should do unto others as they would have us do unto them. The most important news is that there is growing evidence that every endeavor involving social connection—friendship and marriage, education, healthcare, organizational leadership, interracial relationships, and international aid, to name a few—is more effective to the extent that it adheres to this behavioral guide. The reason that the beneficial consequences of holding to the rule will remain important news is that the Platinum Rule is not simple and hewing to it is tough, especially in an individualist culture that fosters the wisdom of one’s own take on reality. Following the dictates of the Platinum Rule is so tough, in fact, that we routinely ignore it and then find it surprising and newsworthy when a new study discovers its truth all over again.

  The challenge of holding to the Platinum Rule begins with the realization that it is not the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Golden Rule is also a good behavioral guide and one that shows up across the religious traditions (e.g., in Judaism—what is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; in Confucianism—do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself). Yet built into the foundation of the Golden Rule is the assumption that what is good, desirable, just, respectful, and helpful for me will also be good, desirable, just, respectful, and helpful for you (or should be, and if it isn’t right now, trust me, it will be eventually).

  Even with good friends or partners, this is often not the case. For example, from your perspective, you may be certain you’re giving me support and fixing my problem. Yet what I would prefer and find supportive and have you do unto me is for you to listen to me and my analysis of the problem. In the many cases in which we strive to connect with people across social class, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, and geography, there is almost certainly some disconnect between how you think you should treat people and how they would like to be treated. Doing unto others as they would have you do unto them requires knowledge of others, their history and circumstances, what matters to them. It means appreciating and acknowledging the value of difference and accommodating one’s actions accordingly.

  At the base of the successful application of the Platinum Rule is the realization that one’s own way may not be the only or the best way. Yes, not all ways are good; some are uninformed, corrupt, and evil. Yet the findings from cultural science are increasingly robust: There is more than one good or right or moral way to raise a child, educate a student, cope with adversity, motivate a workforce, develop an economy, build a democracy, be healthy, and experience well-being.

  What is good for me and what I assume will be good for you too is likely grounded in what cultural psychologists call a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) perspective. For the 75 percent of the world’s population who cannot be so classified (a majority that includes many people in North America without a college degree or with non-Western heritage), who I am, what matters to me, what I hope to be
, and what I would most like done unto me may not match what seems so obviously and naturally good and appropriate from the WEIRD perspective.

  Besides knowledge of the other and appreciation of the difference, the Platinum Rule requires something harder—holding one’s own perspective at bay while thinking and feeling one’s way into the position of the other and then creating space for this perspective. Such effort requires a confluence of cognitive, affective, and motivational forces. Some researchers call this psychological work perspective-taking; some call it empathy, some compassion, still others social or emotional intelligence. Whatever the label, the results are worth the effort.

  When colleges ask students from working-class or underrepresented-minority backgrounds to write about what matters to them or to give voice to their worries about not fitting in in college, they are happier, healthier, and outperform students not given these opportunities. Managers who encourage employees to reflect on the purpose and meaning of their work have more effective teams than those who don’t. The odds of persuading another in an argument are greater if you acknowledge the opponent’s moral position before asserting your own. Research from across the social sciences supports the idea that just recognizing the views, values, needs, wants, hopes, or fears of others can produce better teaching, medicine, policing, team leadership, and conflict resolution. Taking others’ views into account may change the world.

  Perhaps even more newsworthy than the successes of understanding what matters to others are the many failures to apply the Platinum Rule. Government and private donors distributed billions following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, much of it spent doing what the donors believed they would do if they were in the place of those devastated by the disaster. One notable project was a campaign to underscore the good health consequences of handwashing to people without soap or running water. Many humanitarians now argue that relief efforts would be less costly and more effective if instead of giving people what donors think they need—water, food, first-aid kits, blankets, training—they delivered what the recipients themselves say they need. In most cases, this is money.

  Whether independent North Americans (who, according to some surveys, are becoming more self-focused by the year) can learn the value of the Platinum Rule is an open question. At this point, the science suggests that it would be moral, efficient, and wise.

  Adjusting to Feathered Dinosaurs

  John McWhorter

  Professor of linguistics, Columbia University; cultural commentator; author, The Language Hoax

  The discovery that dinosaurs of the Velociraptor type had ample feathers and looked more like ostriches than the slick beasts in the Jurassic Park movies was my favorite scientific finding of 2015.

  The specific discovery was the genus Zhenyuanlong, but it tells a larger story. Feathered dinosaurs have been coming out of the ground in China almost faster than anyone can name them, since the 1990s. However, it has taken us a while to recognize that the feathers on these dinosaurs mean that equivalent dinosaurs in other parts of the world had feathers as well. The conditions in China simply happen to have been uniquely suited to preserving the feathers’ impressions. That paleontologists now know that even Velociraptor had feathers is a kind of unofficial turning point. No longer can we think of feathered dinosaurs as a queer development of creatures in East Asia. We can be sure that classic dinosaurs of that body type, traditionally illustrated with scaly lizard-type skins—dino fans of my vintage will recall Coelophysis, Ornitholestes, etc.—had feathers. Other evidence of this kind came in 2015 too, including the discovery of strikingly extensive evidence of feathers on dinosaurs long known as the “ostrich-like” sort—Ornithomimus. Little did we know how close that resemblance was.

  “Who really cares whether Velociraptor had feathers?” one might ask. But one of the key joys of science is discovering the unexpected. One becomes a dino fan as a kid, from the baseball-card-collecting impulse, savoring one’s mental list or cupboard of names and types. However, since the seventies it has become clear, first, that birds are the dinosaurs that survived, but then, more dramatically, that a great many dinosaurs had feathers just like birds. This shouldn’t be surprising, but it is. Dinosaurs have gone from hobby to mental workout.

  Second, the feathered Velociraptor coaxes us to tease apart the viscerally attractive from the empirically sound. The truth is that the sleek versions of bipedal dinosaurs look “cool”—streamlined, shiny, reptilian in a good way. Nothing has made this clearer than the Velociraptors brought to life in the Jurassic Park films. For these creatures to instead look more like ostriches, sloshing their feathers around and looking vaguely uncomfortable, doesn’t quite square with how we’re used to seeing dinosaurs. Yet that’s the way it was. The sleek Velociraptor or any number of other dinosaurs of that general build are now “old school,” just like Brontosauruses lolling around in swamps (they didn’t) and Tyrannosauruses dragging their tails on the ground.

  Finally, Velociraptor as ostrich neatly reinforces for us the fact that evolution works in small steps, each of which is functional and advantageous at the time, but for reasons that can seem quite disconnected from the purpose of the current manifestation of the trait. In life in general, this is a valuable lesson.

  In a language like Spanish that marks articles, adjectives, and nouns with an arbitrary gender, the gender-marking helps clarify how the words relate to one another. But such marking originates from a division of nouns into such classifications as “masculine” and “feminine” (or animal, long, flat, etc., depending on the language) whose literal meanings fade over time, leaving faceless markers.

  In the same way, an ostrich-sized dinosaur with feathers clearly wasn’t capable of soaring like an albatross, which is one of many pieces of evidence that feathers emerged as insulation and/or sexual display and only later evolved to allow flight.

  Not that dinosaurs existed to conform to the aesthetics, tastes, and nostalgic impulses of observers millions of years after their demise, but feathered dinosaurs are tough to adjust to. Yet the adjustment is worth it: It makes dinosaurs more genuinely educational in many ways.

  People Are Animals

  Laura Betzig

  Anthropologist; historian; author, Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History

  As an aphorism, that isn’t news at all. 2,300-plus years ago, Aristotle wrote in his Politics: “It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.” He thought we were even more political than bees.

  But that apothegm became science after Darwin traced Homo sapiens’ descent from apes, and generations of Darwin’s scientific descendants—especially the last generation—followed up with field studies of hundreds of other social, or “political,” animals. They showed that whenever animals get together, they play by the same rules. When groups form in vaguely delineated habitats, where the costs of emigrating are low, they tend to be quasi-social. Most animals help raise the young and most animals reproduce. But when groups form in sharply delineated habitats, where the costs of emigrating are high—say, in the tree hollows where thousands of honeybees raise larvae produced by their queen—they’re often eu-(or “truly”) social. Some animals are breeders. Other animals work.

  As long as they kept moving, most Homo sapiens probably raised their own children. For roughly 100,000 years, they ran around the sub-Sahara; then, around 100,000 years ago, they left Africa. After around 10,000 years ago, they settled down in the Fertile Crescent and their societies started to look like those of the bees.

  Their hagiographers had medieval missionaries soak up chastity like honey, and some of the abbots who worked under Charlemagne were referred to as apis. Saint Ambrose, who venerated virginity, was discovered in his Trier cradle with a swarm of bees in his mouth and ended up as a honey-tongued bishop; Saint Bernard, who founded a monastery in Burgundy and venerated the Virgin Mary, was remembered as Doctor Mellifluus (the Honey-Sweet Doctor). But most helpers
in the Middle Ages retained their genitals.

  Workers in the first civilizations did not. There were apiaries in ancient Israel, the land of milk and honey, where David made his son Solomon a king in front of an assembly of eunuchs. And there were apiaries in Egypt, where pharaohs put bees on their cartouches and may have collected civil servants who lacked generative powers. There were more beekeepers in Mantua, where Publius Vergilius Maro grew up. For the benefit of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, he remembered how honeybees fought and foraged for their monarch, made honey, and nursed their larvae. In the end, unmarried soldiers, unmarried slaves, and the unmanned attendants of the sacred bedchamber effectively ran that empire. And the emperor bred.

  The take-home message from all of which is simple. It’s good to be mobile. Societies, human or otherwise, are politically and reproductively more equal when emigration is an option. They’re less equal when that option is closed.

  The Longevity of News

  Diana Deutsch

  Professor of psychology, UC San Diego; author, The Psychology of Music

  A remarkable thing about any piece of news, scientific or otherwise, is that it’s hard to gauge its longevity. A prime example of “important” scientific news that turned out to be mistaken is the “discovery” of N-rays by the physicist Prosper-René Blondlot in 1903. This was hailed as a major breakthrough and led rapidly to the publication of dozens of papers claiming to confirm Blondlot’s findings. Yet N-rays were soon discredited and are now referred to primarily as an example of a phenomenon in perceptual psychology: We perceive what we expect to perceive.