Innholdsfortegnelse for EG14 i New Scientist - The Essential Guides

HUMAN society has come a long way in the mere 6000-odd years since the first cities were founded and “civilisation” took root. Our ability to live and cooperate in large groups beyond kinship boundaries has no obvious parallel in the animal world. As this 14th New Scientist Essential Guide makes plain, only strict societal rules and a near-universal moral code have made it possible – as well as power structures such as religion to make us toe the line. Even so, our innate way of dividing the world into “them” and “us” means prejudicial thinking and group-on-group aggression still scar human society today. This guide aims to take a long view of certain aspects of why human society works as it does. With such a complex subject it is necessarily…

HOW many people do you know? It is likely to be at the very most only around 150. That is the number of social interactions that Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has shown that one individual can keep track of. Evidence for that includes studies of villages and army units through history, and the average tally of Facebook friends. To build large-scale societies, we had to overcome this fundamental limit on cooperation. How? → Page 28 has more on the structure of modern friendship networks Humanity’s universal answer was the invention of hierarchy. Several villages allied themselves under a chief; several chiefdoms banded together under a higher chief. To grow, these alliances added more villages, and if necessary more layers of hierarchy. Hierarchies meant leaders could coordinate large…

AS A SPECIES, we possess remarkably little genetic variation, yet we tend to overlook this homogeneity and focus instead on the differences between groups and individuals. At its darkest, this tendency generates xenophobia and racism, but it also has a more benign manifestation – a fascination with the exotic. Nowhere is our love affair with otherness more romanticised than in our attitudes towards the cultures of East and West. Artists and travellers have long marvelled that on opposite sides of the globe, the world’s most ancient civilisations have developed distinct forms of language, writing, art, literature, music, cuisine and fashion. As advances in communications, transport and the internet shrink the modern world, some of these distinctions are breaking down. But one difference is getting more attention than ever: the notion…

“AND they lived happily ever after.” The lifelong commitment of two people to one another may be the fairy-tale ending, and has certainly developed into an ideal of Western society. Yet throughout our early history, polygyny, or one male with several females, was routine. One idea for how monogamy came to dominate is that as we evolved larger brains, keeping babies alive required more effort and food. The children of men who were spread across too many families were less likely to survive. Indeed, a recent analysis found that, from hunter-gatherers to industrial societies, the greater the father’s investment, the more monogamous the society. In turn, monogamy helped social stability: if a few men monopolise all the women, that leaves a lot of disgruntled bystanders. And, more recently, religion also…

Cooperation between different groups in society often means putting our own narrow advantage to one side. That has led to the development of a near-universal rulebook that governs which behaviours are to be encouraged, and to be proscribed. Traits such as courage and modesty are “good”, for example; lying and cheating are “bad”. As societies became more complex, this moral code has required independent structures to keep people on the straight and narrow and maintain social cohesion – chief among them, perhaps, moralising religion. But our religious sensibilities tapped into far older evolved wiring.…

WHAT is a human? This is possibly the oldest question in the Western intellectual tradition. Today, there are three influential and competing definitions. The first is the Christian theological view that humans are made in the image of God. The second is a more philosophical position that defines humans as possessing certain capacities, such as self-consciousness and rationality. Finally, there is the biological view, where humans are defined – and differentiated from animals – by their DNA. This is more than an academic debate. Scholars have long argued that these definitions matter in the real world because they influence how people treat one another. Proponents of each definition claim that if the public accepts the “wrong” one, we will end up mistreating other humans. Christian theologians have long claimed, for…

You believe that religion supplies lots of useful and supportive structures that atheists have rejected along with the supernatural. Can you expand on that? I think the origins of religion are essentially to do with the challenges of living in a community and the challenges of bad stuff happening to us, of which the ultimate is death. Religions are rooted in these needs. They are an attempt to control ourselves, heal ourselves and console ourselves. Some of these manoeuvres are accessible to non-believers and some are not. Belief in the afterlife is simply not there for a non-believer. However, the communal rituals might be utterly accessible to non-believers, and rely in no part on anything supernatural. There are some that can be incorporated into secular life without too much difficulty.…

CHIMPANZEES are not a proxy for our ancestors – they have been evolving since our two family trees split between 7 and 10 million years ago. Nevertheless, their social structures can tell us something about the conditions that male dominance thrives in. Male chimps spend their lives in the group they were born into, whereas females leave at adolescence. As a result, males in a group are more closely related to each other than the females. And because relatives tend to help one another, they have an advantage. The same is true in human societies: in places where women move to live with their husband’s family, men tend to have more power and privilege. Patrilocal residence, as it is called, is associated with patriarchy. For most of our history, we…

CONFLICT seems to be an integral part of human social organisation. “We’re one species, yet we bind ourselves into exclusive, conflicting groups,” says anthropologist Scott Atran, cofounder of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflicts. Numerous experiments have revealed how the flimsiest badges of cultural identity can create hostility towards outsiders – even the colour of randomly assigned shirts can do it. Paradoxically, these antagonistic tendencies may be intimately linked with another, much more noble side of human nature: our unparalleled capacity for large-scale cooperation and altruistic self-sacrifice. Few activities draw on these traits like fighting on behalf of our group, with the high risk of injury or death that entails. Such a combination would have paid off in a world of warring tribes, where groups with…

COMPUTERS are indifferent to their surroundings: a laptop works the same in a fluorescent-lit office or a leafy park. The same isn’t true of the human brain. In fact, its performance is exquisitely sensitive to the context in which it operates. This came into sharp focus for many people during the covid-19 pandemic when they were abruptly forced to work and learn in different environments. For Sapna Cheryan that realisation came earlier. In 2001, as a new graduate interviewing for internships in tech firms, she felt unwelcome, even alienated, by workspaces that looked like a stereotypical computer enthusiast’s basement hang-out. Now at the University of Washington in Seattle, she studies “cues of belonging”, the signals embedded in an environment that communicate to occupants that they are welcome there – or…

The bedrock of human civilisation is cooperation. Although it is a trait that exists elsewhere in the animal world, the complexity of our cooperative interactions seems unsurpassed, and underlies our moral sense and our rules-based codes of working. Where our unique ability to cooperate came from, and how that allowed the first civilisations to emerge, is very much up for debate, however – as is the origin of the differences we see between human cultures today. Understanding the nature of human society means going back to the beginning.…

Human society requires rules. A huge complexity of relationships underlies how we live together, and the only way we can manage them is by establishing – and enforcing – norms that everyone understands and, to greater or lesser extents, adheres to. Those norms govern everything from how we structure sexual and familial relationships to the formulation of friendship networks. Whether we are aware of them or not, they shape the way we interact with people from the moment we meet them. Taken together, these norms add up to a culture – and the culture we live in has surprising effects on how we think and act.…

COGNITIVE scientists sometimes talk about us being born with a “god-shaped hole” in our heads. As a result, when children encounter religious claims, they instinctively find them plausible and attractive, and the hole is rapidly filled by the details of whatever religious culture they happen to be born into. When told that there is an invisible entity that watches over them, intervenes in their lives and passes moral judgement on them, most unthinkingly accept it. Ditto the idea that the same entity is directing events and that everything that happens, happens for a reason. This isn’t brainwashing. The “cognitive by-product theory” argues that religious belief is a side effect of cognitive skills that evolved for other reasons. It pays, for example, to assume that all events are caused by agents.…

Questions of who is in charge became ever more central as human society became more complex. Hierarchical societies need leaders, and leaders must acquire power – sometimes through consent, but often through coercion. At the same time, our evolved sense of “us” and “them” set the stage for conflict where the need for cooperation extended beyond our kinship groups. The product of these innate biases is prejudicial thinking about those we deem to differ from us or share different goals, resulting in evils, from racism to extremism, that mark human society today.…

POSSESSIONS define us as a species; a life without them would be barely recognisable as human. Without clothes, a roof over our head, some means of cooking and a supply of clean water, we struggle to survive at all. Imagine, once you have them, wanting to live without a bed, a bath, towels, light bulbs or soap – let alone indulgences and luxuries, and all those objects with sentimental value. Our closest living relatives make do with none of this. Chimps employ crude tools and build sleeping nests, but abandon them after one use. Most other animals also get by without possessions. Our first possessions were probably our tools. The earliest stone tools, made some 3.3 million years ago, were designed to do a job, and must have been held…

What does being an expert mean? That’s actually a surprisingly tough one to answer. Broadly, it means that you are demonstrably extremely good at what you do, having spent a long time learning your craft; that you can pass your knowledge on to other people; and that you are recognised by other people as being extremely good at what you do. But there are complications. For a start, people often underestimate their own level of expertise and others might recognise you as an expert in ways you don’t yourself. Often there’s a social judgement involved, too: we think of brain surgeons or fighter pilots or concert pianists as having greater expertise than mechanics or plasterers or plumbers. We often overlook the experts all around us who don’t occupy very high…

ACCORDING to the World Bank, about 10 per cent of the planet’s population, or 760 million people, earn $1.90 or less per day. The hardship is such that the life expectancy of the world’s poorest people is nearly 15 years lower than that of the richest. Such absolute poverty is bad for those in it. But it is also a potential source of future conflict, especially as climate change is expected to hit the livelihoods of the poorest, often living in already marginal environments, the hardest. It’s in everyone’s interest to change things. While globalisation has eased the lot of many, the widespread policy of trade liberalisation and easing taxes on business and wealth with the expectation that money will “trickle down” from richer societies to poorer ones as they…

DESCRIBING the rise of robotics and AI as a “fourth industrial revolution” follows on from recognising three similar step changes over the past three centuries: those powered by coal and steam, by oil and electricity and by digital computing. Many cheer the promise of self-driving vehicles, virtual assistants and other labour-saving innovations. However, people are also worried about the potential long-term jobs fallout of the trend towards automation. One analysis by consulting firm McKinsey & Company in 2017 suggested that automation could displace up to 800 million jobs worldwide by 2030. Back in 2013, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at the University of Oxford rather piquantly used a machine-learning algorithm to assess how easily different jobs could be automated. The study concluded that machines will be able to do 47…

RELIGION has given us algebra and the Spanish Inquisition, Bach’s cantatas and pogroms. The debate over whether religion lifts humanity higher or brings out our basest instincts is ancient and, in some ways, reassuringly insoluble. There are so many examples on either side. The last word goes to the most erudite – until someone more erudite comes along. Alternatively, we can ask whether religion has helped societies grow and flourish. Is it, as many believe, a form of social glue that builds cooperation? As it happens, there is surprising agreement about the moral significance of cooperation. A study involving 60 societies, ranging from small groups to the very largest, found that people everywhere equate “good” with cooperative behaviours and “bad” with non-cooperative ones. Admittedly, societies differ in the kinds of…

OUR greetings are imbued with deep symbolism and meaning. Any greetings that involve bodily contact may offer us a way to pick up chemical cues. Although the existence of human pheromones is controversial, research suggests that we may be able to assess someone’s physical fitness and fertility from compounds in their saliva – a possible rationale for the strange phenomenon of romantic kissing. What’s more, there is evidence that body odour can communicate someone’s emotional state and even their sexual arousal. Our greetings can allow us to sample this aroma without overtly sniffing someone’s body. Our tactile greetings also allow us to assess someone’s character and to establish our trust in them. One study found that the strength and duration of a handshake offers a fairly accurate prediction of personality…

ON 31 OCTOBER 1517, the rebel monk Martin Luther nailed his “95 theses” decrying the practices of the Roman Catholic church to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in present-day Germany, and so kicked off what became the Protestant Reformation. Some historians directly link Luther’s theological revolution and the ensuing scientific one. Luther opened the intellectual floodgates, the story goes, pitting open, forward-thinking Protestantism against conservative, anti-science Catholic dogma. The Enlightenment took root in the northern European countries that embraced Lutheran ideas, while the south languished under the Catholic yoke. It’s an appealing story. However, the notion that Catholic dogma was inherently a brake on science is something of a myth, says historian of science and religion Sachiko Kusukawa at the University of Cambridge. She thinks the misconception…

Trade lies at the heart of modern human society. As cultures complexified and diversified, basics such as food, clothing and shelter became products to be sold, bought and exchanged. We outsourced aspects of our subsistence to others with particular expert skills, and became workers – and economic animals. But work, production and consumption has become about more than just survival. A desire to own possessions and to fill our lives with creature comforts has become deep-rooted in our psychology, and the basis of much economic activity. There’s one thing we need to know about our relationship with economics, however – we are not very good at it.…

Human society has changed immeasurably since recognisable civilisation began with the first cities some 6000 years ago. In many ways, in many parts of the world, we live longer, safer, healthier and happier lives than in any era of human history. And yet human society today faces huge challenges. The growth-based economic model that has delivered unprecedented prosperity and well-being for many over the past few decades is also the driver of environmental problems from climate change to chemical pollution. Meanwhile, growing inequalities suggest new sources of future conflict both within and between nations, and the rise of artificial intelligence challenges many aspects of the current organisation of society. Can things continue as they are?…

Urbanisation is accelerating as global population grows. Is that a good thing? Many people point to cities as villains. I prefer a more nuanced narrative that says cities offer an opportunity for innovation. This typically generates more wealth and, to some extent, more well-being, but also inequality, which has its own implications for well-being. More than 90 per cent of the world’s GDP arises from urban activities, but its distribution is very uneven. Cities have other drawbacks too, such as higher crime and air pollution. So the question shouldn’t be: is urbanisation good? It should be: since urbanisation is inevitable, can we urbanise in a more resource-efficient way? And how do we measure both resource efficiency and urban well-being? You have pioneered a field called sustainable urban systems science. Can…

You argue that AI is inherently political. What do you mean? Artificial intelligence is politics all the way down. From the way in which data are collected, to the automated classification of personal characteristics like gender, race, emotion or sexual identity, to the way in which those tools are built and who experiences the downsides. Time and time again we’ve seen that people who are already marginalised are the ones who experience the worst harms from large-scale artificial intelligence systems. We’ve seen communities of colour targeted by predictive policing systems, immigrants surveilled and tracked by deportation tools, and people with disabilities cut off from support services due to poorly designed healthcare algorithms. What are the most problematic uses of AI you can see coming down the track? One I find…

THE idea that Western power and influence is in gradual decline, perhaps as a prelude to collapse, has been around for a while. But in recent years it has gained a new urgency. Resource depletion, inequality and environmental issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss threaten the basis of Western prosperity and stability. Other nations and regions, justifiably demanding a fairer share of the cake, are on the up. Using science to predict the future isn’t easy, not least because both “collapse” and “Western civilisation” are difficult to define. Despite these difficulties, some scientists and historians are analysing the rise and fall of ancient civilisations to look for patterns that might give us a heads-up on what is coming. ← Chapter 1 deals with how civilisations first arose According…