Top Quotes: “This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works” — John Brockman

Introduction

“In a world of scissors and schooldesks shaped for righties, being a lefty is not just annoying, it seems to be bad for you. According to a number of studies, lefties are at higher risk for disorders like schizophrenia, mental retardation, immune deficiency, epilepsy, learning disability, spinal deformity, hypertension, ADHD, alcoholism, and stuttering.

Which brings me to Charlotte Faurie and Michel Raymond, a pair of French scientists who study the evolution of handedness. Left-handedness is partly heritable and is associated with significant health risks. So why, they wondered, hadn’t natural selection trimmed it away? Were the costs of left-handedness canceled by hidden fitness benefits?

They noted that lefties have advantages in sports like baseball and fencing, where the competition is interactive, but not in sports like gymnastics or swimming, with no direct interaction. In the elite ranks of cricket, boxing, wrestling, tennis, baseball, and more, lefties are massively overrepresented. The reason is obvious: Since 90 percent of the world is right handed, righties usually compete against one another. When they confront lefties, who do everything backwards, their brains reel, and the result can be as lopsided as my mauling by Nick. In contrast, lefties are used to facing righties; when two lefties face off, any confusion cancels out.”

“Athletic contests are important across cultures. Around the world, sport is mainly a male preserve, and winners from captains of football teams to traditional African wrestlers to Native American runners and lacrosse players gain more than mere laurels: They elevate their cultural status; they win the admiration of men and the desire of women (research confirms the stereotype: Athletic men have more sexual success). This raises a broader possibility that our species has been shaped more than we know by the survival of the sportiest.”

“It may be true and may be false — I don’t know, but probably somebody who reads Edge will be able to say, authoritatively, with suitable references. I am eager to find out. I was told some years ago that the reason that some species of sea turtles migrate all the way across the South Atlantic to lay their eggs on the east coast of South America after mating on the west coast of Africa is that when the behavior started, Gondwana was just beginning to break apart (that would be between 130 and 110 million years ago), and these turtles were just swimming across the narrow strait to lay their eggs. Each year the swim was a little longer — maybe an inch or so — but who could notice that? Eventually they were crossing the ocean to lay their eggs, having no idea, of course, why they would do such an extravagant thing.”

“Around 4.567 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust collapsed in on itself. At the center of the cloud, our sun began to burn, while the outlying dust grains began to stick together as they orbited the new star. Within a million years, those clumps of dust had become proto-planets. Within about 50 million years, our own planet had already reached about half its current size. As more protoplanets crashed into Earth, it continued to grow. All told, it may have taken another 50 million years to reach its full size, a time during which a Mars-sized planet crashed into it, leaving behind a token of its visit – our moon.”

“Some have argued that the self-confidence of adult males is influenced by how young they were when they reached puberty (because of the boost in status caused by being bigger, even if temporarily, than their peers). It has been claimed that smarter adults are more likely to be firstborns (because later children find themselves in environments that are, on average, less intellectually sophisticated). Creative adults are more likely to be later-borns (because they were forced to find their own distinctive niches). Romantic attachments in adults are influenced by their relationships as children with their parents. A man’s pain-sensitivity is influenced by whether or not he was circumcised as a baby.

With the exception of the stereo-vision example, I don’t know if any of these explanations are true. But they are elegant and non-obvious, and some of them verge on beautiful.”

“Take the Moroccan Amazighs, or Berbers, people with highly similar genetic profiles who now reside in three different environments: Some roam the deserts as nomads, some farm the mountain slopes, some live in the towns and cities along the Moroccan coast. And depending on where they live, up to one-third of their genes are differentially expressed, reports researcher Youssef Idaghdour.” For example, among the urbanites, some genes in the respiratory system are switched on – perhaps, Idaghdour suggests, to counteract their new vulnerability to asthma and bronchitis in these smoggy surroundings. Idaghdour and his colleagues propose that epigenetic mechanisms have altered the expression of many genes in these three Berber populations, producing their population differences.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists have long been preoccupied with our childhood experiences – specifically, how these sculpt our adult attitudes and behav-iors. Yet they have focused on how the brain integrates and remembers these occurrences. Epigenetic studies provide a different explanation. For example, mother rats that spend more time licking and grooming their young during the first week after birth produce infants who later. become better-adjusted adults. And researcher Moshe Szy proposes that this behavioral adjustment occurs because epigenetic mechanisms are triggered during this critical period, producing a more active version of a gene that encodes a specific protein. Then this protein, via complex pathways, sets up a feedback loop in the hippocampus of the brain – enabling these rats to cope more efficiently with stress.

These behavioral modifications remain stable through adulthood. However, Szyf notes that when specific chemicals were injected into the adult rats’ brains to alter these epigenetic processes and suppress this gene expression, these well-adjusted rats became anxious and frightened. And when different chemicals were injected to trigger epigenetic processes that instead enhance the expression of this gene, fearful adult rats (rats that had received little maternal care in infancy) became more relaxed.

Genes hold the instructions; epigenetic factors direct how those instructions are carried out. And as we age, scientists report, these epigenetic processes continue to modify and build who we are. Fifty-year-old twins, for example, show three times more epigenetic modifications than do three-year-old twins; and twins reared apart show more epigenetic alterations than those who grow up together. Epigenetic investigations are proving that genes are not destiny; but neither is the environment – even in people.”

“Using other methods, researchers have confirmed that increasing the perceived economic value of time increases its perceived scarcity.

If feelings of time-scarcity stem in part from the sense that time is highly valuable, then one of the best things we can do to reduce this sense of pressure may be to give our time away. Indeed, new research suggests that giving time away to help others can actually alleviate feelings of time pressure.”

“This causal effect may also help to explain why people walk faster in wealthy cities like Tokyo and Toronto than they do in cities like Nairobi and Jakarta.”

“Because moving around in space is a common physical experience, concepts such as “up” or “down” are immediately meaningful relative to one’s own body. The concrete experience of verticality serves as a perfect scaffold for comprehending abstract concepts, such as morality: Virtue is up, whereas depravity is down. Good people are “high-minded” and “upstanding” citizens, whereas bad people are “underhanded” and the “low life” of society. Recent research by Brian Meier, Martin Sellbom, and Dustin Wygant illustrated that research participants are faster to categorize moral words when presented in an up location and immoral words when presented in a down location. Thus people intuitively relate the moral domain to verticality; however, Meier and colleagues also found that people who do not recognize moral norms – namely, psychopaths – fail to show this effect.

People not only think of all things good and moral as up, but they also think of God as up and the Devil as down. Further, those in power are conceptualized as being high up relative to those over whom they hover and exert control, as shown by Thomas Schubert. All the empirical evidence suggests that there is indeed a conceptual dimension that leads up, both literally and metaphorically. This vertical dimension that pulls the mind up to considering what higher power there might be is deeply rooted in the basic physical experience of verticality.

Verticality not only influences people’s representation of what is good, moral, and divine, but movement through space along the vertical dimension can even change their moral actions. Lawrence Sanna, Edward Chang, Paul Miceli, and Kristen Lundberg recently demonstrated that manipulating people’s location along the vertical dimension can turn them into more “high-minded” and “upstanding” citizens. They found that people in a shopping mall who had just moved up an escalator were more likely to contribute to a charity donation box than people who had moved down on the escalator. Similarly, research participants who had watched a film depicting a view from high above – namely, flying over clouds seen from an airplane window – subsequently showed more cooperative behavior than participants who had watched a more ordinary, and less “elevating,” view from a car window. Thus being physically elevated induced people to act on “higher” moral values.”

“Automotive engineers routinely apply simple energy-balance equations when, for example, designing a hybrid electric car to recapture kinetic energy from its braking system. None of the energy is truly created or destroyed, just recaptured – in this case, from a combustion engine, which got it from breaking apart ancient chemical bonds, which got it from photosynthetic reactions, which got it from the sun. Any remaining energy not recaptured from the brakes is not really lost, of course, but instead transferred to the atmosphere as low-grade heat.”

“Let’s assume for a moment that there is no human-caused climate change, or that the consequences are not dire, and we’ve made big investments to avert it. What’s the worst that happens? In order to deal with climate change:

1. We’ve made major investments in renewable energy. This is an urgent issue even in the absence of global warming, as the International Energy Agency has now revised the date of “peak oil” to 2020, only eight years from now.
2. We’ve invested in a potent new source of jobs.
3. We’ve improved our national security by reducing our dependence on oil from hostile or unstable regions.
4. We’ve mitigated the enormous off-the-books economic losses from pollution. (China recently estimated these losses as 10 percent of GDP.) We currently subsidize fossil fuels in dozens of ways, by allowing power companies, auto companies, and others to keep environmental costs off the books, by funding the infrastructure for autos at public expense while demanding that railroads build their own infrastructure, and so on.
5. We’ve renewed our industrial base, investing in new industries rather than propping up old ones. Climate skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg like to cite the cost of dealing with global warming. But these costs are similar to the “costs” incurred by record companies in the switch to digital-music distribution, or the “costs” to newspapers implicit in the rise of the Web. That is, they are costs to existing industries, but they ignore the opportunities for new industries that exploit the new technology. I have yet to see a convincing case made that the costs of dealing with climate change aren’t principally the costs of protecting old industries.”

“North American and Western European cuisine have a strong tendency to combine ingredients that share chemicals. If you are here, serve parmesan with papaya and strawberries with beer. Do not try this there, however: East Asian cuisine thrives by avoiding ingredients that share flavor chemicals. So if you hail from Asia, yin/yang is your guiding force: seeking harmony through pairing the polar opposites. Do you like soy sauce with honey? Try them together and you might.”

“The second system is a control system that can channel and harness all that seething energy. The prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide and control other parts of the brain. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision making. This control system depends much more on learning than does the motivational system. You get to make better decisions by making not-so-good decisions and then correcting them. You get to be a good planner by making plans, implementing them, and seeing the results again and again. Expertise comes with experience.

In the distant evolutionary past in fact, even in the recent historical past — these two systems were in sync. Most childhood education involved formal and informal apprenticeships. Children had lots of chances to practice exactly the skills they would need to accomplish their goals as adults and so to become expert planners and actors. To become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking, and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence — tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you’d need as an adult. But you’d do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood, where the impact of your inevitable failures would be blunted. When the motivational juice of puberty kicked in, you’d be ready to go after the real rewards with new intensity and exuberance, but you’d also have the skill and control to do it effectively and reasonably safely.

In contemporary life, though, the relationship between these two systems has changed. For reasons that are somewhat mysterious but most likely biological, puberty is kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. (The leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.) The motivational system kicks in with it. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks they’ll have to perform as grown-ups. Children have less and less chance even to practice such basic skills as cooking and caregiving. In fact, contemporary adolescents and preadolescents often don’t do much of anything except go to school. The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the development of the control system depends on just those experiences.”

“Consider accidental deaths from drug overdoses. In general, narcotics users tend to take the drug in a specific setting, such as their bathroom. The setting initially is a neutral stimulus, but after someone takes narcotics in it a few times, the bathroom comes to function as a CS: As soon as the user enters the bathroom with narcotics, the user’s body responds to the setting by preparing for the ingestion of the drug. Specific physiological reactions allow the body to cope with the drug, and those reactions become conditioned to the bathroom (in other words, the reactions become a CR). To get a sufficient high, the user must now take enough of the narcotic to overcome the body’s preparation. But if the user takes the drug in a different setting, perhaps in a friend’s bedroom during a party, the CR does not occur — that is, the usual physiological preparation for the narcotic does not take place. Thus, the usual amount of the drug functions as if it were a larger dose and may be more than the user can tolerate without the body’s preemptive readiness. Hence, although the process of classical conditioning was formulated to explain very different phenomena, it can be extended to explain why drug overdoses sometimes accidentally occur when usual doses are taken in new settings.”

“Data from traffic accidents suggest that the change in the legislation did reduce fatalities on the road by about 9 percent. (People substituted marijuana for alcohol and apparently drive better stoned than drunk) Saving drivers’ lives was not the intent of the law, but that was the effect.”

“Our ancestors’ lived experiences shaped their DNA, which in turn shapes ours. That means our lives don’t end with us but are passed down — the good and the bad, the trauma and the joy. In studies of mice in lab settings, not only did those that were exposed to extreme diets or stress display changes in their heart and metabolism, but so did their offspring and their offspring’s offspring and so forth. There is evidence that this applies to humans, too. Studies show that the children of trauma survivors, including those who endure ongoing systemic racism, have shown health issues similar to those of their parents as well as increased rates of many diseases.”