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- An Archaeological Reckoning

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

An Archaeological Reckoning

Jennifer Raff is on a mission to rewrite the history of human origins in the Americas.

By Elena Kazamia    December 4, 2024

I was not allowed to see the bones of the dead when I visited Jennifer Raff. They were fragments of teeth and skulls held in a small metal cabinet in the basement of Fraser Hall, the University of Kansas’ hub for anthropology research. The bones can be thousands of years old and belong to some of the earliest-known settlers of the Americas.

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Raff, who practices martial arts, has a strong athletic build and a bright, unguarded demeanor. As we walked through the anthropology department above the basement, I noticed skulls of hominids in glass cases along the walls. So why were the bones in the basement so vigilantly out of bounds?

Raff told me that Native Americans typically regard the remains as sacred, belonging to their ancestors. Members of some tribes had granted Raff permission to study the genetic composition and origins of the bones. But she must do so discretely, keeping the remains hidden from visitors.

Raff, an associate professor of anthropology at the university, specializes in paleogenomics, extracting genetic material from ancient remains. The DNA preserved inside the remains has the power to vindicate or undermine carefully laid out archaeological theories about migration patterns, how and when people first arrived, and to shed light on how these early settlers lived their lives.

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I can’t atone for the abuses of the past, but I can try to make the field better.

For years, Raff has studied how humans first set foot in the Americas. Her 2022 book, Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas, was praised by Dartmouth College paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva for drawing together archaeology and Indigenous oral traditions “in a masterly retelling of the story of how and when people reached the Americas.”

Raff admitted that she was not always sensitive to the provenance of the ancient remains she studies. When she was working on her Ph.D., she analyzed DNA from a first-century burial site in Illinois without the consent of local tribes. She used rib bones belonging to deceased women and children to extract DNA and study relatedness. It was perfectly legal to use the skeletons, which were kept at Indiana University, but she now regrets doing so.

“In retrospect, I should have gone to tribes who claim descent from these populations, talked to them about the work, and gotten permission,” Raff said. “But at the time I thought, ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ so I just did it. That’s an attitude that I really push back against now with colleagues and other people in the field, thinking you can just do this work without permission or engagement with descendant communities. I really regard my earlier work as very unethical. I won’t go back and publish any of it.”

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Raff’s change of heart toward ancestral remains and artifacts represents a personal awakening for her. It also represents a generational shift in the practice of anthropology and archaeology. Raff’s mentor, Dennis O’Rourke, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, said that in previous generations archaeologists rarely if ever consulted with Indigenous peoples. “There were no seeking permissions to do the work,” he said. “Most researchers relied on museums to provide permissions, and museums sometimes engaged in consultations and sometimes not.”

As Raff and I arrived at her office, she said, “One of my missions as a scholar in this discipline is to try to improve it. I can’t atone for the abuses of the past, but I can try to make the field better in my way.”

Raff sat at her desk in her university office, pulling her dark hair into a ponytail behind her head. A framed photograph of Muhammad Ali boxing underwater in a swimming pool hung on a wall. A Rothko print in deep blues and reds hung on an opposite wall. Sitting on a bookshelf were prizes Raff has won for Origin, one of them from the American Anthropological Association for the best science book in the field of biological anthropology. They were joined by mostly popular science and adventure books from authors she admires: In the Empire of Ice by Gretel Ehrlich and Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics by British geneticist Adam Rutherford, a friend and mentor.

With the sun setting over the Kansas horizon, Raff told me it was a summer in the Arctic that shaped how she saw her own discipline. It was 2009 and she was a postgraduate, a geneticist invited to participate in the excavation of Nuvuk, an archaeological site located in Alaska’s northernmost point. Ocean storms continuously erode the coast there, pushing the frontier of the land southward. The area is home to the Iñupiat, who have lived there for more than 1,000 years.

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The dig that Raff joined was excavating the ancient cemetery at Nuvuk, which was rapidly eroding into the water, taking away with it the cultural and physical remains of the paleo-Inuit who were most undoubtedly related to the present-day inhabitants of Utqiaġvik.

IN HER ELEMENT: Jennifer Raff on site, helping a colleague with an excavation in Kansas, where she lives and works. Credit: Colin McRoberts.

The Arctic landscapes left an indelible impression—the starkness of the open plains, the punishing swarms of insects, the winteriness even on the warmest days. “It’s a remarkable environment,” Raff said. The people whose genes Raff studies had survived this and harsher environments for at least a millennium. “I could really appreciate the innovations that kept them alive,” she said.

The scientists had sought permission to sequence the DNA preserved inside the remains unearthed at the cemetery through consultations with the Iñupiat of Utqiaġvik. The community had agreed, provided certain provisions—minimal physical damage to the excavated bodies, followed by prompt reburial.

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“It was liberating,” Raff said. “To work within an explicitly stated framework, composed by the descendants of the peoples I was hoping to learn from, made it easy to do our scientific research on their terms.”

Since the 1800s, anthropology museums have stocked their collections with Native American artifacts and remains sacred to tribes. “Native peoples were essentially powerless to stop it,” said Chip Colwell, editor-in-chief of Sapiens, an anthropology magazine, and formerly a senior curator at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. “When I was coming up in the field in the ’90s, it was extraordinarily rare for Native peoples’ concerns, insights, practices, and religions to be considered as a part of archaeology.”

Human history belongs to all humankind, the rationale went, elevating archaeology and anthropology to the prerogative of enlightening all humanity. From that vantage point, the needs and views of a relatively small group, such as the Native Americans, seemed trifling, especially if they insisted on the reburial of discovered bones and artifacts. Reburial, rather than preservation of archaeological finds in museums, was seen as anti-science, prohibiting future investigations which might shed new light on history.

In 1971, road workers discovered a burial ground in Glenwood, Iowa. They uncovered the remains of 26 European-American “pioneers” and a Native American woman and her child. While the pioneers were reburied in a local cemetery, the Native American remains were packed off to the Office of the State Archaeologist in Iowa City, to be distributed to museums or universities. “Dead Native Americans were archaeological resources for the state and white people weren’t,” Colwell explained. “We had allowed Native peoples to become the subject of science in a way we hadn’t for other people.”

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The Glenwood incident sparked a movement to defend Native American rights, challenging archaeological standard practice. In 1990, on the heels of the Civil Rights movement, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted into law. It gave Indigenous people the right to rebury their dead, provided they could make a tenable connection between ancient remains and tribal affiliation. Under NAGPRA, affiliation can be established via land ownership, so that remains discovered on federal or tribal land are recognized as belonging to the tribes themselves. At the time, Colwell said, passage of NAGPRA caused an uproar. “Some scholars equated reburial to book burning or destroying libraries of knowledge.”

Gradually, the culture among archaeologists began to shift, thanks largely to Indigenous activism. “That began to really push archaeologists to confront the ways in which their discipline was perpetrating harm,” Colwell said. He estimates that 90 percent of anthropologists and archaeologists today are on board with the law.

Raff said meeting tribal members and learning about their cultures from them is a boon to science. Scientists can’t approach research questions, such as when humans first arrived in the Americas “with just one discipline’s data and methods alone. You have to let multiple truths or multiple possibilities coexist at the same time.”

Raff’s comfort with ambiguity deeply informs her work. Her central thesis in Origin runs contrary to the anthropology that has long been taught in classrooms, a tidy story of how the first people arrived on the American continent in a single wave of migration from Asia some 15,000 years ago.

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Raff patiently unwinds this expectation, explaining how multiple disciplines and ways of knowing have, over the past two decades, converged on a richer, but muddier narrative of when humans first set foot in the Americas. The tidy Clovis-first theory held that people who settled the continent about 15,000 years ago were supported by a novel technology—a special kind of sharp spearhead (a Clovis head) that allowed them to hunt and subsist on megafauna. It was assumed that the “last glacial maximum,” an ice age that lasted for 4,000 years (between 23,000 to 19,000 years ago), covered the land in deep, year-round ice sheets that prohibited settlers before then.

But studies of DNA from the oldest human remains unearthed in the Americas, as well as sequenced genomes of present-day Indigenous people, show that Native Americans are descendent from a single population, dating to somewhere between 25,000 to 20,000 years ago. This suggests there was a refugium—a hospitable nook where these ancestors survived—far from other human tribes roaming the plains of Asia over the same period.

Raff’s thesis about the first Americans runs contrary to the tidy story taught in classrooms.

There have been no confirmed human settlements that date to this time, although Raff believes the best place to look is underwater, not far from where she conducted her research in Nuvuk. Scientists know that during the last Ice Age, Asia was connected to North America by a land bridge across the Bering Strait, which may have had a climate mild enough to allow populations to flourish.

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The genetic signatures also show a distinct spread of different tribes—a branching sometime between about 22,000 and 18,000 years ago. One branch, the Ancient Beringians, has no known living descendants. The other, known as the Ancestral Native Americans, gave rise to populations south of the Laurentide ice sheet, which cloaked the north of the continent, along a line roughly connecting present-day Seattle with New York City.

The Ancestral Native Americans spread quickly across the whole continent, with many populations splitting extremely rapidly from one another. In Origin, Raff explains how this has long baffled archaeologists because it is not consistent with a slow overland advancement of hunter-gatherer populations.

A hypothesis proposed by Canadian archaeologist Knut Fladmark in 1979 has gained significant traction in recent years due to the pairing of ancient DNA work and Indigenous knowledge. Fladmark argued that people could have migrated along a coastal route rather than an ice-free corridor inland. Further research by scholars, notably Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon, has led to the theory that humans could have lived along the coast eating kelp, fish, shellfish, and marine mammals, traveling to new sites by boat, via a “kelp highway,” which ran north to south along the west coast of North America, a route that could account for the rapid spread of communities.

This idea lacks concrete archaeological evidence—no physical artifacts related to navigation have been found—but is supported by oral traditions of the Tlingit and Haida tribes of Alaska, “who maintain that their ancestors were a seafaring people who have lived in this region since the dawn of history,” Raff writes in Origin. The oral traditions of the Tlingit are rich in narratives of ancestors traveling along the Pacific Northwest Coast and down the Stikine River, over and below glaciers, foraging for seals and other marine mammals.

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In 2007, a genetic reconstruction of the genome of Shuká Káa, a man whose skeleton was found in an Alaskan cave and was dated to 10,000 years ago, added credibility to the kelp highway theory. It showed that Shuká Káa’s people were the ancestors of the Tlingit. At the same time, chemical analysis of his teeth showed that Shuká Káa had indeed grown up on a diet of seafood. Other archaeological artifacts found alongside his body in the cave suggested that he had engaged in long-distance trade for high quality stone, further support the coastal highway theory. The genetic sequencing work was done in consultation with the Tlingit tribe, and after the work was completed, Shuká Káa was buried in 2008.

Raff reminds her readers that not all Native American origin stories align neatly with the results of genetics. And that genetic results are not set in stone, as new techniques overturn initial interpretations. In the closing pages of Origin, Raff calls it hubris to think a definitive history of the peopling of the Americas is possible.

Raff ventured into writing for the public in 2015 when she created a blog called Violent Metaphors. The name, suggested by a publicist friend, reflected her feisty feelings at the time. “I wanted to go after pseudoscience and the anti-vaccine stuff that really made me mad,” she said. One post about misinformation about measles’ vaccinations begins, “Dear parents, you are being lied to.” “I learned the things that went viral were the ones that I was writing passionately about,” Raff said. “When I had a real connection, emotional connection to a topic, I wrote the best.”

Raff’s blogging landed her in the culture wars, where she became a target for those who saw her as an embodiment of political correctness over objective science. In particular, Raff has been in the crosshairs of Elizabeth Weiss. Weiss is a professor emeritus of anthropology at San Jose State University and the coauthor with James W. Springer of Repatriation and Erasing the Past. Weiss and Springer criticize NAGPRA and the reburial of human remains in ancestral burial grounds. They argue “secular and scientific scholarship concerning human and biological differences” is being suppressed and censored by deference to Native American religious myths.

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I don’t want to be this white savior liberal girl running around.

In a 2022 review of Origin in the online magazine Quillette, Weiss aimed that criticism at Raff. “To defer to Indigenous creationist ideas is no different, in principle, from deferring to religious Christian attitudes,” Weiss wrote. As “an anthropologist, I find the anti-scientific trend that the book represents to be deeply unsettling.”

In response, Raff said, “Being respectful of the beliefs and priorities of Indigenous peoples is not in opposition to science, and I’ve never been asked by any tribe to change the results of our research to fit an agenda. Weiss is stereotyping Native Americans as anti-science, which is ludicrous; they are as varied in their perspectives and belief systems as all people are.”

Raff was born Jennifer Anne Kedzie in Carbondale, Illinois, the first daughter of three. Her youngest sister died in infancy of spinal muscular atrophy, a rare genetic disorder for which there was no cure in the early 1980s. Raff was 4. After the loss of her daughter, Raff’s mother was moved to return to higher education and neuroscience, and the family lived in university towns in Missouri and Indiana. Raff’s parents divorced amid the moves and financial struggles, but Raff stayed close with both her parents. Raff’s father worked as a quality assurance engineer in industry, and she credits him for pushing her to look for answers and research. “Every time I would ask him a question, he would be like, ‘Look it up.’”

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On the campus of Indiana University where she lived as a student, Raff grew close to Elizabeth and Rudolf Raff, both biology professors. Rudolf Raff was a pioneer of evolutionary developmental biology and director of the Indiana Molecular Biology Institute. Their son, Aaron, was Jennifer’s boyfriend, and Aaron and Jennifer married while she was in college but divorced during her last year of graduate school. “It was horrible, a really hard time,” Raff said. “But I got through it. I focused on martial arts and fighting. I thought, ‘This could be a life for me.’” And then I thought, ‘No, you know what? I love science more.’” She kept Raff as her surname.

Raff has never lived outside the inland heart of the country—Illinois, Indiana, Utah, Texas, and now Kansas. Raff’s home is decorated with objects embedded with personal meaning—sepia photographs of her family, traditional weapons used in martial arts, and a handful of paintings. “Low Tide,” a peaceful landscape work by the Native American artist Linda Infante Lyons, hangs above the dining room table. It is also on the cover of Origin. A violent depiction of abolitionist John Brown leading a bloody uprising against enslavers in 1865 hangs in the living room.

In the time I spent with Raff, there was only one instance I saw her look incredibly uncomfortable. It came during a dinner at her home with her husband, Colin McRoberts, a lawyer and negotiations consultant; their son, Oliver; her mother, Kathy; and a friend of Raff’s, Peter Koenig. As we discussed the success of Origin and Raff’s advocacy for the inclusions of Native Americans’ own stories in archaeology, Koenig remarked, “It took a white girl for Americans to hear the story.” Raff buried her head in her hands and hoodie.

“I don’t want to be this white savior liberal girl running around,” Raff told me later. “I think I have a platform. I don’t know if it’s because I’m white, because I’m a professor, because I’ve been writing for the public for a long time. I don’t know. It might be all these things.”

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In the spring of 2024, Raff received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete her second book, The Ancients: The Untold Story of How We Became Human. “It will continue my focus on challenging pernicious concepts of biological race and colonialist practices—particularly those still prevalent in paleoanthropology and paleogenomics,” Raff said. It will continue her quest to “complicate” the picture of human origins, so the public can begin to see the complex narratives of belonging. Where an origin is not a single point on a distant horizon, but a forest of interwoven roots.

Lead image: Zichrini / Shutterstock

Elena Kazamia

Posted on December 4, 2024

Elena Kazamia is a science writer from Greece. She has a master’s degree in conservation from University College London and a Ph.D. in plant sciences from the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

Arts

- That Healing Sound

ARTS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

That Healing Sound

When music is medicine.

By Kevin Berger    November 29, 2024

As a music lover my entire life, who could have been doing productive things to be a good citizen rather than playing albums and going to concerts, I can safely say I have never been inclined to think of music as having any practical value.

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But reading the new book by Daniel Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine, made me think otherwise. Levitin, a neuroscientist who first got the public thinking about the biological machinery behind music in his 2006 book, This Is Your Brain on Music, puts the spotlight on burgeoning methods of music therapy restoring pleasure to so many people who have lost it.

Recently, over video, I told Levitin at his home in Hollywood that his book opened my eyes to the seemingly magical effects of music therapy. That led us into an engaging conversation on the secret chords that music strikes in our brains and bodies. Levitin began writing the book around the time he got some news from friend Bobby McFerrin, the many-splendored vocalist best known for his a cappella hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

THE NEUROSCIENTIST’S SONG: Daniel Levitin, professor emeritus at McGill University, is a musician himself: “Songwriting has also helped me to better understand my emotions about the loss of those close to me, and the breakup of relationships.” Photo courtesy of Daniel Levitin.

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You write that Bobby McFerrin “changed forever the way you think about music and medicine.” How so?

To begin with, I consider Bobby to be among a small number of people who are oracles. They’re human 2.0 Whatever force he’s in touch with, he just seems more evolved than the rest of us. That’s not to sound mystical or anything, but when Bobby says or does something, I pay close attention.

One day Bobby was feeling fatigued before a show in Vermont. He didn’t feel like he had the flu. He didn’t know what it was. But he was going to cancel the show. And then, because he’s Bobby and thinks more about other people than he does himself, he started imagining all these people who bought tickets. They’d probably been planning for this evening for some time. Some of them had to hire babysitters. And he didn’t want to upset that.

It was like the angel and devil on each shoulder telling him, “Stay in the hotel room, you’re sick.” “No, do the show.” Anyway, he went and did it, and once he started singing, everything changed. He no longer felt fatigued, he no longer felt unfocused, and he went through the whole show. Shortly after that, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

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What did his decision to perform tell you?

I knew from my own work in the laboratory that dopamine does different things in different parts of the brain, but one thing it does is signal pleasure. It’s also part of the motivation network. It motivates you to do things that are pleasurable or healthful, and it helps you to coordinate movement when you’re in the throes of Parkinson’s and can’t otherwise control your movements. In Bobby’s case, it kicked his motor system into doing the amazing thing he does, and the ultimate pleasure he derives from it.

Let’s talk about a few other afflictions. How does listening to music relieve depression?

The “how” is a difficult question. We know it does. But we’re still trying to sort out the distinct mechanisms behind it. The social part, though, is a big factor. Usually, when you’re depressed, you don’t feel like being with other people. Something has happened in your life that has caused you to feel cut off from others. There’s an organic component of depression and there’s genetic predispositions toward it, but there’s usually some sort of environmental trigger that leaves you feeling misunderstood.

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So, if you listen to happy music, that’s just another bunch of people who misunderstand how you feel. You’ve got no use for them. But, put on the right sad music, and you feel understood and validated. Your emotions are validated. It’s not somebody coming in and saying, “Hey, get up off the couch, straighten up and fly right. You have a lot to live for.” That’s not somebody who gets you.

Is music curing that gash on your elbow? Not directly, but it’s enabling your body to cure it.

But when you hear a musician or band that’s feeling what you’re feeling, you find that uplifting and validating, and you realize, “This person’s been through what I’ve been through and they came out the other side, and they turned it into a beautiful work of art.” On the chemical side, when you’re feeling in tune with the music, the hormone prolactin is released. It’s released in lactate when mothers are nursing their infants, in both the mother and the infant. It soothes and tranquilizes us.

How about anxiety?

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That’s a little bit different. Anxiety typically means your heart’s racing too fast. You’re worried you might have a feeling of impending doom. We’ve found populations of neurons fire in synchrony with the music, and with certain kinds of music, subject to individual taste, that can reliably lower your respiration rate and reduce cortisol levels, which are the real chemical that’s causing that anxious fight-or-flight reaction.

On a deeper note, how can listening to music help people with Alzheimer’s disease?

Typically, what we see in Alzheimer’s cases, where people have profound memory loss, is they don’t recognize where they are or how they got there. They may not recognize their loved ones. They may not even recognize themselves in the mirror. And when that happens, they do one of two things. They either fold in on themselves because the external world makes no sense, or they become violent because the external world makes no sense.

In the latter case, they end up getting medicated, which is no good for anybody. A principle of mammalian memory is our earliest memories are the most well-preserved. If you play music for somebody with advanced memory loss, it allows them to connect with music from their youth, a part of themselves they had lost. They feel themselves again. They may still not know where they are, but at least they’re in touch with some part of themselves, and that can dramatically relieve anxiety, and in many cases, of those who reached a kind of catatonic state, it can pull them out of it for days at a time.

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Do you have to love music for it to work in healing?

No, you don’t have to love it, but you have to like it. In music therapy, people often say the music piped into public places is not what they want to hear. Your doctor can’t say, “Take two Adeles and call me in the morning.” It can’t work that way. You have to like the music. You have to choose it yourself.

Tell us about the default mode network in the brain.

It’s a network of regions in the brain we describe as the daydreaming mode. If you’re a carpenter and you’re hammering, you’re really paying attention. That’s the central executive mode. Its opposite is this daydreaming mode. It’s when you’re driving on the freeway, and you miss your exit because you know your brain was somewhere else. And it’s a mode of the brain that helps you to solve problems. Often, when you can’t solve a problem by thinking about it, you put it away. That’s the part of the brain that’s working on it. It’s related to the subconscious, although not identical, and it appears to be a healing mode because it restores a kind of homeostasis to the brain and to glucose metabolism. The brain runs on glucose, like a Tesla runs on electricity, or a Buick runs on gas. Glucose is the fuel of the brain, and it gets depleted after thinking too long or too hard, and that default mode allows it to replenish.

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And does music give us entry into the default mode network?

Yes, that’s right. Though probably not James Brown or electronic dance music.

What’s the significance of the default mode in music and healing?

Well, here we’ve got to do some hand-waving. During sleep, for example, there’s a lot of cellular housekeeping going on, getting rid of dead cells, purifying the bloodstream, organizing the thoughts of the day and consolidating them into memories. And that’s also what happens in a waking state during the daydreaming mode. There’s something healing and restorative about it. We’re not exactly sure how. But music can take us there.

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Listening to or playing music allows patients to feel better. Music takes their minds off their mental or physical pains. But can music actually cure them?

I would say it can, in the same sense penicillin can. Penicillin doesn’t cure the disease. Penicillin kills the bacteria that was causing the disease. Surgery doesn’t cure cancer. It gets rid of the cancer. Music boosts the immune system, in particular immunoglobulin IgA, a substance that travels to the site of mucosal infections by reducing cortisol. When you’re stressed, cortisol shuts down the immune system, because cortisol usually spikes in response to an explicit proximal threat, like a lion running toward you. Over thousands of years of evolution, the cortisol system figured out that if you’re going to have to fight a lion, you’ve got to preserve all your resources to fight or to flee.

Your doctor can’t say, “Take two Adeles and call me in the morning.” It can’t work that way.

So, what does preserving your resources mean at a physiological and metabolic level? It means shutting down your digestive system. That can wait till later. Shutting down your libido, because you don’t have time for that now. Shutting down your immune system. That’s why people with chronic stress have compromised immune systems. And if you can reduce psychological and physical stress, you’re enabling your body’s immune system to do what it’s meant to do. Music can promote IgA levels. They can promote cytokine production, the production of natural killer cells, T cells, plus, they can increase serotonin, which boosts your mood, which in turn, can create this cascade of neurochemical activity. So, is it curing that gash on your elbow? Not directly, but it’s enabling your body to cure it.

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You tell the stories in I Heard There Was a Secret Chord of Joni Mitchell, who suffered a brain aneurysm, damaging a large portion of her brain’s right hemisphere; jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, who suffered two strokes leaving the left side of his body partly paralyzed; and jazz guitarist Pat Martino, who had a large tumor surgically removed from his brain. In each case, these great musicians were aided in their convalescence by listening to music, often their own, and in Jarrett’s case, playing the piano with his one functional hand. Although recovery from brain trauma is not an exact science, you write, music was a catalyst in their recoveries. Which makes sense because music was literally their lives. It’s so incredible they found it inside them again. But what’s an example of remarkable recovery in people who are not musicians?

Well, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I think of soldiers in music therapy classes that focus on songwriting. The soldiers suffer severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder not amenable to talk therapy or drug therapy. They take all the pain and trauma and horrific visual and sensory imagery and put it out there in the world in a song; it’s no longer inside them. One of the ways talk therapy works is it allows you to not keep the trauma locked inside yourself. You’re presenting it to someone who ideally is a sympathetic, empathetic individual—the therapist—and getting it outside of you helps to make it objective, less fearful to you. Putting it in a song seems to be an even more powerful way to get the monster outside of you.

Music can be more engaging than talk therapy—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.

Do you have a personal experience of music as medicine?

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Right now, I’m thinking of my father, who I saw yesterday. He’s 92 and has short-term memory loss. He just got out of the hospital after a week with coronavirus, severe oxygen depletion, and fluid in the lungs. At home, he looked utterly transformed from the man he was in the hospital. He was listening to music from his teenage years. He was listening to Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman and Benny Goodman. I got to his house at 4 o’clock and he’d been listening for four hours straight and was just so happy. He has a blood pulse oximeter on him all the time. And when he listens to music, he breathes more deeply. The music is making him do it automatically because it’s physiologically stimulating.

How about medicine for you yourself?

When I can’t focus, I put music on. Sometimes I meditate to it. Sometimes I just put it on and close my eyes for 10 minutes. And when I’m feeling blue, or don’t know how I’m feeling, I can usually find the thing that helps me go, “Yeah, that’s how I feel.”

If you could only play one album to lift your spirits, what would it be?

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That’s an impossible question. Today it would be Alex de Grassi’s Slow Circle. Or it could be Bill Evans’ Sunday at the Village Vanguard. It might be Steely Dan’s Countdown to Ecstasy, something I can listen to all the way through over and over again and never get tired of.

My takeaway from reading I Heard There Was a Secret Chord is that music has a holistic effect on our brains and bodies. And the secret of the physiological changes induced by music, which we’ve been talking about, is pleasure. Think that’s fair?

I think that’s exactly right. But pleasure is not one thing. Neurobiology shows pleasure is a cascade of physiological responses that absolutely help in recovery. If we were to create a taxonomy of pleasure, there would be anticipatory pleasure, which is, “I see that cupcake and I suddenly feel good because I know I’m going to eat it.” Which is different than taking the first bite, the pleasure of consumption. Well, music is anticipation and consumption pleasure inextricably bound.

Ultimately, what’s special about music therapy?

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Music is special because it’s engaging. For some people, it’s more engaging than talk therapy—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually. It’s something that you can control the dose of. You can always turn it off or turn it louder or softer. And you can always choose the type of music you want to hear.

Lead image: CURAphotography / Shutterstock

Kevin Berger

Posted on November 29, 2024

Kevin Berger is the editor at large of Nautilus.

Astronomy

- Voyagers Ready to Go Dark

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Voyagers Ready to Go Dark

Earth’s most distant space probes prepare for their inevitable long night.

By Tom Metcalfe    December 3, 2024

When the two Voyager probes launched into space in 1977, they were headed to uncharted territory. It was the first time humanity had sent robot spacecraft to study up close the four giant outer planets of our solar system: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Stunning images and scientific data captured by the probes over the next few decades altered our understanding of the cosmos.

Through the Voyagers, we learned of Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, the tilted magnetic field of Uranus, a rotating storm on Neptune called the Great Dark Spot, and Saturn’s dynamic rings. We also discovered 23 new moons of the outer planets and found that these moons were not the dead, frozen worlds scientists had suspected. Saturn’s moons appeared to be composed mostly of water ice, while active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io spewed lava dozens of miles high. Eventually, the two spacecraft would explore not just the four giant planets, but 48 of their moons, as well as the rings, atmospheres, and magnetic fields those planets possess.

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Once the Voyagers’ tour of the four planets was complete in 1990, the world’s attention faded; but the probes continued to provide remarkable insights into the dynamics of the solar system, including ultraviolet sources among the stars and the boundary between the sun’s influence and interstellar space. Even today, both probes continue sending back data about the interstellar medium, the space between the stars, says Linda Spilker, NASA’s project scientist for the Voyager missions—including precise measurements of the density and temperature of the thin ionized gases it contains and the incidence of high-energy cosmic rays.

Some experts give the Voyagers only about five years before we lose contact.

More than 45 years after they first launched, the Voyagers are now NASA’s longest-lived mission and the most distant human-made objects from the Earth—but they will one day soon go offline and drift silently into the final frontier, perhaps for eternity. NASA has been progressively shutting down the instruments and cameras on the spacecraft for decades, to extend their working lives to the limit by using as little electricity as possible. One of Voyager 1’s last photographs, for example, was the famous “Pale Blue Dot” taken in 1990, shortly before its cameras were powered off forever. And since the late 1990s, engineers have commanded both Voyagers to shut down instruments related to plasma science, the strength of electromagnetic fields, and the analysis of starlight.

Some experts give the Voyagers only about five years before we lose contact. “There’s been a big push to try to keep the mission going until the 50th anniversary of their launches,” in 2027, says Johns Hopkins space scientist Ralph McNutt, who witnessed the Voyager 1 launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral in 1977 and has been involved with the Voyager missions throughout his career. “We’ll see.”

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According to NASA, Voyager 1 is now more than 15 billion miles from Earth, about three times the average orbit of Pluto, where radio signals take about 23 hours to reach it; while its twin Voyager 2 is almost 13 billion miles away. The probes are still in fragile radio contact with Earth, and their instruments show both have passed the “heliopause”—the theoretical outer edge of the solar system, where the wind of charged particles from the sun finally comes to an end. They are now drifting through interstellar space.

LISTENING TO THE COSMOS: This archival photo from 1976 shows a NASA engineer working on one of Voyager’s dish-shaped antenna, which are used to send scientific data back to Earth from the spacecraft. The “high-gain” antennae transmit signals over vast distances and point toward Earth no matter where they are in space. Photo by NASA / JPL-Caltech.

But the probes are running critically short of electricity from what are called their “nuclear batteries”—actually radioisotope thermoelectric generators that make electricity from the radioactive decay of plutonium.  The fading power of the probes and the difficulties of making contact over more than 10 billion miles means that, one day soon, one or other of the Voyagers won’t answer NASA’s daily attempts to communicate via the Deep Space Network of radio dishes. Both probes use heaters to keep key instruments warm and keep the hydrazine in the fuel lines liquid: When the fuel freezes up, the probes won’t be able to use their thrusters to keep their main radio antennae pointed at the Earth, and their communications will come to an end.

Newer space probes are now exploring the outer reaches of the solar system, including the New Horizons mission to Pluto. McNutt is overseeing an instrument on that probe, which is now heading for the “termination shock” where the solar wind first impacts the interstellar medium, about 5.5 billion miles from the Earth—almost twice the distance from Earth to Pluto. He’s also one of the principal scientists behind the Interstellar Probe proposal, which could launch as soon as 2036. Its technology will be 50 years more advanced than the Voyagers, and it could reach the same distance in half the time.

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For McNutt, it’s a “pleasant surprise” that the Voyagers are still working after all these years: “I joke with people: If you go back and look at the original papers, the Voyagers were designed to work for four and a half years,” he says. “We’ve outlived the warranty by a factor of 10.”

Even when the Voyagers can no longer communicate with Earth, it will not be the end of their mission. Both probes bear the famous 12-inch “golden record” of the sounds of Earth, greetings in more than 50 languages, music by Mozart and Chuck Berry, and a star map showing how to get here. The designers of the probe hoped that one day these records might be played by alien spacefarers far from Earth.

And their hopes may someday come true: Voyager 1 will get relatively near a star in the constellation Camelopardalis in about 40,000 years, while Voyager 2 will near a star in the constellation Andromeda at about the same time. It’s possible that the Voyagers may one day be overtaken by newer probes from Earth, but for now they are humanity’s ambassadors to the stars; when their communications to the Earth cease, that will become their final mission.

Lead image: Dotted Yeti / Shutterstock

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Tom Metcalfe

Posted on December 3, 2024

Tom Metcalfe is a science journalist based in London, where he writes mainly about space, energy, archaeology, Earth, and the oceans. He has written for Scientific American, National Geographic, Live Science, NBC News, BBC News, and others.

Environment

- The Vanishing Coast of Louisiana

- The New Climate Math on Hurricanes

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Vanishing Coast of Louisiana

Timelapse photographs documenting life on the bayou.

By Kael Alford    December 2, 2024

Along the bayous of Louisiana, south of New Orleans, five Native American settlements are clinging to disappearing earth. Their homes outline the narrow strips of land deposited by the Mississippi Delta like the fingers of a skeletal hand disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico.

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Southeast Louisiana is losing this land at an alarming rate—approximately a football field of land every 100 minutes—mostly due to human impacts of oil and gas extraction, subsidence, sea level rise, and increasingly damaging hurricanes brought by climate change. The people who make their homes here are continually seeking and finding creative solutions. A role they’ve taken on for centuries.

Many can trace their roots in the area to the 18th and 19th centuries, when a small number of Choctaw, Chitimacha, and other Native Americans—including some of my maternal ancestors—survived the vagaries of colonial settlement, wars, and waves of Indian removal policies in the remote coastal marshes of southeast Louisiana.

Over generations, they formed unique communities descended from a handful of shared Native American ancestors who intermingled with French and other European settlers. Here they farmed, raised animals, trapped, fished, and grew into large families for generations—until massive coastal erosion began eating away at the land.

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I have been photographing two of these communities, Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-aux-Chenes, since 2005. In 2024, I returned to the project after a 12-year hiatus. In many cases, I ended up photographing the same location with more than a decade between each image.

Most of the residents of Isle de Jean Charles—which was featured in the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild—have recently relocated together to a new community called New Isle, 33 miles farther inland. As a result, the community is far less inhabited now than it was when I last visited—I see plants and animals filling in the spaces that humans have vacated.

In this selection of photographs, I attempt to crystalize changes happening at both a geological and a human time scale so that they are more observable. The cycles of storm damage and recovery, erosion and displacement, are becoming more visible by the year. Developing relationships with people and landscape, I have come to see the fluid and powerful dynamics of loss and adaptability, the fragility and the strength of humans and a rapidly shifting ecosystem.

Photos by Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

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Left: January 2009

Sign at the entrance to Isle de Jean Charles.

Right: August 2024

Sign in front of a house on Island Road, Isle de Jean Charles.

Photos by Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Left: August 2010

Susie Danos in her garden on Isle de Jean Charles where she grew melons, cucumbers, beans, and okra. After years of storm flooding, some residents fear that the soil is contaminated by residue from offshore oil drilling. Frequent salt water intrusion kills plants and trees like the dead oak tree visible in the background.

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Right: September 2024

The site of Susie Danos’ gardens in 2024, marked by alligator tracks in the mud left by Hurricane Florence in 2018. Susie has left the island to live with her daughter’s family farther inland.

Photos by Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Left: September 2008

The single road that connects Point-aux-Chenes to Isle de Jean Charles. The road often floods and is in need of frequent repair due to coastal erosion.

Right: September 2024

The single road that connects Point-aux-Chenes to Isle de Jean Charles after Hurricane Francine, looking east. The road has been reinforced with riprap. Drainage pipes have been installed to allow water to recede after flooding.

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Photos by Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

Left: November 2009

Edison Dardar, Sr. on his porch in Isle de Jean Charles pictured after flooding receded from the island. Dardar cast for shrimp with a net nearly every day, just a few hundred meters from his house. He was vocal about not wanting to live anywhere other than his home on Isle de Jean Charles.

Right: September 2024

The house of Edison Dardar, Sr. on Isle de Jean Charles pictured after Hurricane Francine hit this year. Dardar died in December 2023 at age 74. He never left his island home.

Photos by Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

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Left: January 2010

A dead oak tree, known as a “skeleton tree” en route to Isle de Jean Charles and Pointe-aux-Chenes. Dead oak trees are a common sight along the eroding coastline of Louisiana. As salt water encroaches, trees and other fresh water flora are dying.

Right: August 2024

The same tree.

Lead photo by Kael Alford / Panos Pictures

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Kael Alford

Posted on December 2, 2024

Kael Alford is a photographer, writer, and educator whose work engages with political violence, environmental justice, and the tenuous personal relationship to others. She has published two photography books: Bottom of da Boot: Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast (2012) and Unembedded: Four Independent Journalists on the War in Iraq (2005).

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The New Climate Math on Hurricanes

For the first time, we can calculate how much climate change impacts a single storm’s severity.

By Syris Valentine    November 27, 2024

When Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s shoulder earlier this fall, it brought the largest storm surge ever recorded in the area. The storm had formed just four days earlier as a tropical depression, but when it made landfall, it was already a Category 4 hurricane, lashing the Tampa Bay area with savage winds and rain, flooding and laying waste to whole communities. Two weeks later, Hurricane Milton deepened the tragedy when it hit the Florida peninsula, unleashing catastrophic flooding and 100-mile-per-hour gusts, killing multiple people, and breaking meteorological records.

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Climate scientists have been warning for years that climate change is supercharging storms, broadly speaking. But connecting specific rates of warming to the ferocity of specific storms was out of reach. Now a team of scientists has developed a model that, for the first time, allows them to calculate how warming ocean temperatures have contributed directly to wind speeds in individual hurricanes. Using this model, they were able to determine, for instance, that climate change bumped Hurricane Rafael up two whole categories (from 1 to 3) earlier this month, and pushed another two hurricanes this year into category 5, the highest category, in which wind speeds exceed 157 mph.

“It’s really the evolution of our science on sea surface temperature attribution that has allowed this work to take place,” Daniel Gilford, an atmospheric scientist with the independent nonprofit research outfit Climate Central and the lead author of the study said in a press briefing. Gilford and his colleagues found that due to higher sea surface temperatures, maximum wind speeds were 19 mph higher on average in 84 percent of the hurricanes in the north Atlantic that occurred between 2019 and 2023, and, according to an additional analysis, most all hurricanes thus far in 2024 as well—enough to elevate them an entire category on the Saffir-Simpson scale. Moreover, global warming caused wind speeds in three of the hurricanes to course roughly 34 mph faster than they would have otherwise.

When storms double their wind speed, they can cause 256 times as much damage.

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To make these calculations, Gilford and his team first determined how much cooler the surface of the sea would be without human-induced climate change. “Climate models and observations are both showing us that, in a world without climate change, temperatures would be somewhere between 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit cooler,” Gilford said. Because the intensity of a hurricane is determined foremost by the temperature of the seas over which it passes, Gilford and team used the pre-warming sea surface temperatures to determine the maximum wind speeds that any particular hurricane theoretically would have reached without climate change. From there, they used statistical relationships gleaned from past hurricane seasons to estimate what the wind speeds might have been without warming. They could then compare these numbers against the speeds that were actually recorded to determine how much climate change likely ramped up the intensity.

Friederike Otto, a climatologist with World Weather Attribution, a nonprofit research group based in the United Kingdom, who wasn’t involved in Gilford’s study but who does work with Climate Central, says the methodology the scientists used looks solid. She has done similar work using historical data to determine how climate change has also increased the amount of rainfall that hurricanes cause. “We now have a lot of observations and many years of data where we see these changes.”

Gilford knows firsthand how hurricanes affect people’s lives. A tree fell on his family’s home in central Florida during Hurricane Jeanne in 2004, which he said catalyzed his current career. Today, he lives in Orlando, and hurricanes continue to impact his life year after year. “I care a lot about this problem,” Gilford said in a press briefing about his study, “and we should care about this problem because hurricanes are changing.”

Jumps in category strength carry tremendous hazards. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the potential damages caused by a storm increase exponentially—by a power of eight—with increases in wind speed. So, for example, when storms double their wind speed, they can cause 256 times as much damage.

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The new study does more than just reveal how climate change has worsened major hurricanes to date. It provides a method that scientists can use in the future to say, in near-real time, how global warming is affecting a specific, singular cyclone. This should help communities not only prepare for the supercharged storms that are becoming more standard fare, but also to better understand the critical connections between those storms and the forces of climate change.

Lead image: BEST-BACKGROUNDS / Shutterstock

Syris Valentine

Posted on November 27, 2024

Syris Valentine is an essayist and freelance journalist with a focus on climate and social justice. Outside of his newsletter “Just Progress,” his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Grist, and elsewhere.

Math

- When Work Is Play

MATH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When Work Is Play

Patchen Barss on his 3 greatest revelations while writing The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius.

By Patchen Barss    November 25, 2024

1 Work and Play Can Be Indistinguishable

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Long before I began work on The Impossible Man in 2018, I thought of Roger Penrose as a man at the center of two entirely separate mythologies: one as a mathematical physicist who decoded the inner workings of black holes and who forced the physics community to reckon with the limitations of relativity and quantum mechanics; the other as the creator of the impossible Penrose Triangle and the obsession-inducing, never-repeating patterns of Penrose Tiles. While his serious scientific work and his recreational mathematics both embodied a hyper-developed sense of simple, elegant, visual beauty, the two endeavors seemed completely incongruous. How could someone so immersed in esoteric, often fractious scientific arguments also exhibit such joyous, almost child-like wonder at the strange and dazzling ways shapes can fit together?

Penrose had learned from his father—a renowned geneticist who made his own jigsaw puzzles and carved wooden toys that mimicked the process of self-replication—that work and play go hand in hand. It’s often impossible to determine which one he was engaged in at any given time. The subject matter that delighted and fascinated Penrose—complex numbers, conformal geometry, unexpected simplicity, and the instinct that beautiful theories were more likely to be correct—crisscrossed through his peer-reviewed papers and his puzzles, games, and mathematical oddities.

PATTERN SEEKER: Author Patchen Barss has a longstanding fascination with patterns and nature. In addition to his new book, The Impossible Man, he has also written a children’s book about patterns in nature. Photo courtesy of Patchen Barss.

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In the early 1960s, Penrose was already deep into the relativity research that would revolutionize the field (and ultimately win him a Nobel Prize). He was also playing with puzzles and “impossible objects” like the Penrose Triangle, partly inspired by the work of M.C. Escher.  Escher and Penrose met in 1962 at the artist’s home and studio in the Netherlands. Penrose gave Escher a wooden tiling puzzle he designed and crafted. Escher invited Penrose to choose a print for himself from a stack on his workbench. Penrose chose Fishes and Scales, an image in which small fish seem to grow endlessly into larger fish as a viewer’s eyes chase them around and around the page.

Fishes and Scales used “conformal geometry,” a branch of mathematics Penrose knew well, and loved to play with. Years later, when his research led him to challenge some of the key elements in the story of how our universe began, conformal geometry formed the basis of his alternative hypothesis: a theory of “conformal cyclic cosmology” that centers around an endlessly expanding universe. Recreational mathematics and theoretical physics draw on the same concepts, and in the right hands, creative inspiration can turn them into a new mental toy for an idle moment, or a new tool for understanding how our universe came to be.

I work with words, rather than shapes or equations. I instinctively treat wordplay as a guilty pleasure—something I indulge in too often when I should be writing. I’ve learned through writing this book, though, to embrace the time I spend doing crosswords, playing Scrabble, solving puzzles with my sons, or working on The New York Times’ Spelling Bee as a valid part of my creative process.

2 Reality Can Be Unexpectedly Simple

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When Roger Penrose was 9 years old, he became fascinated with the fact that 2 plus 2 equals 2 times 2. He spent an inordinate amount of time thinking and searching for another pair of numbers whose sums also equal their product. Finally, he found one: 3 plus 1.5 equals 3 times 1.5. He shared the results of his labor with his older brother Oliver, who was considered the great mathematical talent of the Penrose family. With a deft algebraic flourish, Oliver quickly produced the statement, “Any two numbers whose reciprocals sum to unity have the property that their sum is equal to their product.” Where Roger had taken days to find a second pair, Oliver almost instantaneously figured out how to find infinitely more.

Recreational mathematics and theoretical physics draw on the same concepts.

He wouldn’t name it for another 30 years, but this was Roger Penrose’s first experience of “unexpected simplicity”—the idea that problems that appear deeply challenging and mysterious can be hiding incredibly elegant, simple solutions. His Penrose Singularity Theorem—the work that won him the 2020 Nobel Prize, was an iconic example. While other physicists searched for highly exotic and specific circumstances under which the universe could produce a region of infinite density, Penrose sought—and found—a simple, commonplace set of conditions.

In 2018 I wrote a children’s book  about patterns in nature, with a theme related to unexpected simplicity. In it, I exhorted readers to notice visual similarities between seemingly distinct phenomena (like branching rivers, tree roots, highways, and bronchi), and to consider whether some simple factor might connect them all (like that all these branching patterns have to do with flow). Despite that intuitive connection, intellectually absorbing the concept of unexpected simplicity is new for me.

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In my work as a science journalist, I surprisingly often experience a new assignment as a completely unprecedented challenge, one I’ll have to start from scratch to figure out how to approach. This story about Roger and Oliver and sums and products has stayed with me—I think of it now whenever I enter some daunting new subject area. When I feel trapped in a labor-intensive struggle to find the right science story to tell, I take a step back and see if there isn’t some unexpected simplicity I’m missing that can get me where I need to be.

3 There’s Always One More Question

During the six years I spent working on this book, Penrose went from his late 80s to early 90s—an age long past when many other great scientists have let go of their ideas, leaving them for new generations to pursue. Penrose continued writing, lecturing, and debating, driven to ensure his ideas would outlive him. Whether physicists retire early or late, though, the stark reality is that their work will never be finished. As Penrose worked to imbue his theories with a life of their own, he was continually identifying new questions, pursuing new ideas, and poking at new insights.

This trait is not unique to Roger Penrose. I’ve spent my working life doing something I once heard an anthropologist describe as “deep hanging out.” I’ve been immersed in a culture where people devote their careers to questions that might not be answered in their lifetimes—or possibly ever. When one thinks about what it takes to be a great scientist, it’s natural to think about qualities like cleverness, skepticism, and rigor. At least as striking though, is a willingness to commit your life to an endeavor whose major results you might never live to see. All through my research and interviews for The Impossible Man, I felt this sense of incompleteness seep into my bones.

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I am not a scientist, but I do have a thousand questions about why the universe is like it is, not to mention a million other non-scientific things I want to know, see, and experience. There is not enough time in one life to get to it all. I take a lesson from scientists like Roger Penrose who must find satisfaction from their partial role in a narrative that extends far into the past and the future. While I have trouble accepting the finitude of human life, I now remember to hope that whatever I accomplish in my limited time will enhance the experiences of friends, family, and colleagues who come after me.

Lead image: fran_kie / Shutterstock

Patchen Barss

Posted on November 25, 2024

Patchen Barss has written, edited, and produced stories about science, research, and culture for more than 20 years. His writing has appeared in Nautilus, Scientific American, the Globe and Mail, National Post, and the Toronto Star. He has been a producer at CBC Television and the Discovery Channel, and has a longstanding fascination with patterns and nature.

Psychology

- Consciousness Has a Psychology Problem

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Consciousness Has a Psychology Problem

The biases that shape our understanding of the mind.

By Iris Berent    November 27, 2024

Seeing the striking magenta of bougainvillea. Tasting a rich morning latte. Feeling the sharp pain of a needle prick going into your arm. These subjective experiences are the stuff of the mind. What is “doing the experiencing,” the 3-pound chunk of meat in our head, is a tangible object that works on electrochemical signals—physics, essentially. How do the two—our mental experiences and physical brains—interact?

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The puzzle of consciousness seems to be giving science a run for its money. The problem, to be clear, isn’t merely to pinpoint “where it all happens” in the brain (although this, too, is far from trivial). The real mystery is how to bridge the gap between the mental, first-person stuff of consciousness and the physical lump of matter inside the cranium.

Some think the gap is unbreachable. The philosopher David Chalmers, for instance, has argued that consciousness is something special and distinct from the physical world. If so, it may never be possible to explain consciousness in terms of physical brain processes. No matter how deeply scientists understand the brain, for Chalmers, this would never explain how our neurons produce consciousness. Why should a hunk of flesh, teeming with chemical signals and electrical charges, experience a point of view? There seems to be no conceivable reason why meaty matter would have this light of subjectivity “on the inside.” Consciousness, then, is a “hard problem”—as Chalmers has labeled it—indeed.

Can a person lack conscious experience, even if their body looks just like mine?

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The possibility that consciousness itself isn’t anything physical raises burning questions about whether, for example, an AI can fall in love with its programmer. And since consciousness is a natural phenomenon, much like gravity or genes, these questions carry huge implications. Science explains the natural world by physical principles only. So if it turns out that one natural phenomenon transcends the laws of physics, then it is not only the science of consciousness that is in trouble—our entire understanding of the natural world would require serious revision.

But before we run off too fast and far, let us pause, take a breath, and reconsider. The mind is hard to explain in physical terms—this much is obvious. Why it is hard, however, is far from evident. In fact, this question is open to two competing explanations. The first explanation puts the blame on what consciousness is—that it is not physical, as Chalmers claims. Alternatively, this impression (that consciousness isn’t physical) could arise from within, as a result of human bias—a psychological delusion.

Psychological biases are relevant because philosophers and scientists heavily rely on their intuitions as they try to explain what consciousness is. Is it special—can it reveal more about the world than what I can infer from my reason alone? Does my conscious experience seem physical? Can a person lack conscious experience, even if their body looks and works just like mine?

In these mini-thought experiments, intuitions are data. Since consciousness generates intuitions, intuitions can speak to what consciousness is, at least in principle. The problem is that the “psychology of psychology” is a tricky business.

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Human cognition, as we know, is laced with biases—we can readily recognize these distortions in visual illusions, auditory hallucinations, and logical fallacies. So, if our perception of the external world is distorted, why assume our internal perception is truthful? In fact, people are demonstrably plagued by multiple biases that cloud their reasoning about how their own psyche works.

Intuitive dualism is one such psychological bias. It suggests to us that the mind is ethereal, distinct from the body. My research suggests that intuitive dualism arises in humans naturally and spontaneously—it emerges from the two innate systems: One guides our understanding of the physical properties of objects; another helps us “read” the minds of others. So it is not the product of rationally analyzing what exists. It is a psychological delusion that arises from within the human mind itself.

However, intuitive dualism has been shown to give rise to various prejudices, ranging from the denial of human nature to our misguided fascination with neuroscience and the tendency to stigmatize people with psychiatric disorders. Our consciousness intuitions could arise from the same source as these biases.

So, if consciousness appears somehow distinct from physical reality, then this conclusion could well arise not from what consciousness really is, but rather from what our psyche is telling us, courtesy of intuitive dualism.

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How can we tell, then, whether or not our intuitions (that consciousness is not physical) reflect what consciousness really is? It looks like we are at a stalemate. And that’s a problem for the “hard problem.”

Recent research helps us move forward. To see how, suppose you inspect yourself in the mirror: Your face has an unhealthy greenish hue. Before rushing to the ER, you step outside and reexamine your image in natural light. The greenish appearance changes, you are all clear; the strange color was likely an artifact of the lighting. Shifting intuitions are diagnostic—they can help us identify our own biases.

The same logic can help us sift consciousness fact from fiction. If our intuitions about consciousness faithfully reflect what consciousness is, and if the nature of consciousness is invariant—meaning it doesn’t change from being physical to non-physical—then our intuitions about the nature of consciousness should also not change. In other words, they should not vary by context. But if consciousness intuitions shift, such that, in some situations, consciousness seems ethereal, and in others, it seems physical, then it’s likely something about our psyche that explains these intuitions, not consciousness itself.

When such shifts are detected, it’s a telltale sign of a psychological delusion, just like the shifts of your greenish complexion above. And if we could further explain how these shifts arise from within—by spelling out their psychological causes, then our confidence in this psychological explanation would increase further. Such shifts in consciousness intuitions, then, suggest that our intuitions can’t be trusted to reveal reliable information about the nature of our minds. This is precisely what psychological experiments probing our intuitions about consciousness show.

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Why should a hunk of flesh experience a point of view?

Sometimes this involves asking people to consider the idea of a philosophical zombie. Philosophical zombies are hypothetical creatures that lack consciousness yet everything else physical about them—including their biology and brain chemistry—matches humans perfectly. The idea is that if someone believes consciousness is distinct from physical matter, then that person should think philosophical zombies could, in theory, exist. And if philosophical zombies are conceivable, then perhaps the possession of an intact human body does not guarantee consciousness. Consciousness, so the argument goes, is thus distinct from the physical.

When philosophers are surveyed, most respond that, indeed, zombies are conceivable. But what about most people—do they, too, share these intuitions?

In a 2021 paper published in the journal Cognition, researchers Eugen Fischer and Justin Sytsma had participants think about whether the idea of a “philosophical zombie” made sense. To find out, they asked people to rate whether philosophical zombies would be capable of having conscious experiences, feelings, and emotions. Responses hovered around the “neutral” midpoint of the seven-point rating scale (4, “neither agree nor disagree”). Few participants, to be sure, outright denied that zombies are conscious, and fewer yet denied that zombies are conscious while affirming that they have a functional, humanlike body (as the instructions to the experiment suggested). This last result could either indicate that most people cannot fully conceive of philosophical zombies or that participants are simply reluctant to respond “no” (e.g., No, zombies aren’t conscious!).

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Indeed, in a 2022 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, my colleagues and I showed that when participants are forced to give a binary response (instead of a seven-point rating scale that allows them to “sit on the fence”), participants state that a perfect replica of a person’s body will not maintain their mental states—thoughts and beliefs. Insofar as consciousness is a mental state, this would imply that zombies do not seem possible.

Either way, participants in Fischer and Sytsma’s study certainly did not ascribe much conscious experience to zombies, even though the problem framing clearly established that these creatures have a human body. Consciousness, for them, seems to be at least partly distinct from the physical.

So far, then, it looks like most people intuit that consciousness is ethereal; at least, that is what they say about philosophical zombies. It is therefore tempting to conclude that what’s true for zombies could hold for the many other scenarios that philosophers have used to probe our consciousness intuitions. After all, if we assume that these scenarios shed light on what consciousness is—and for what we know, consciousness does not change—then what’s true in one case ought to be true in all.

The physicality case, it would seem, is closed; our intuitions tell us that consciousness isn’t physical. So strong is this tacit conviction that, to my knowledge, no one has bothered to check whether this is really the case. But it turns out that when most people are asked to consider a second famous case—the problem of Mary in the black and white room—people tend to view consciousness as squarely physical.

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Mary, the thought experiment goes, is a neuroscientist who is an expert on color vision. Mary herself, however, has never seen color, as she lives in a black and white room. Now, suppose that Mary steps out of that room and sees a red rose for the first time. How significant is that conscious experience? Will it register or “show up” in Mary’s brain?

A series of experiments from my lab at Northeastern University presented participants with several versions of Mary’s case (a total of 180 people across four different experiments). Their task was to rate not only the significance of that new conscious experience (specifically, “How transformative is Mary’s experience seeing the color red? How much has her grasp of ‘red’ changed by seeing the red rose?”) but also its embodiment—whether it is likely to “show up” in Mary’s brain.

The philosophical literature leads us to expect that Mary’s new conscious experience is significant—it has utterly transformed her grasp of color, and participants agreed. In fact, their ratings in response to the “transformative” question (above) were significantly above the midpoint of the seven-point rating scale, so clearly, participants did view this experience as quite significant. But when asked whether Mary’s conscious experience will “show up” in a brain scan (i.e., in Mary’s physical body), they said it will!

Participants further believed that Mary’s first conscious experience of red is more likely to manifest in the brain scan than all of her “abstract” knowledge about color vision. In fact, the more likely participants were to state the “red” experience would “show up” in the brain, the more transformative it seemed. Thus, not only did participants consider Mary’s conscious experience as squarely embodied, but embodiment was also linked to the significance of this experience.

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Consciousness does not change—what’s true in one case ought to be true in all.

In another experiment (from the same study), participants were asked to assume that Mary’s first encounter with the red rose happens in one of two conditions (presented to Mary as part of a carefully controlled experiment). One condition has Mary looking at the red rose in full view for several seconds; when asked to report her experience, Mary confirms seeing it. In a second condition, the red rose is presented for just a fraction of a second. When asked about what she saw, Mary reports seeing nothing. Despite this, participants are told, seeing the red rose for just a fraction of a second is likely to have registered in Mary’s brain since research has shown that after such subliminal presentations, the word “rose” comes to mind more readily.

The two conditions (the subliminal and conscious), then, are identical except that one engenders consciousness and the other doesn’t. By comparing them, we can directly examine intuitions about consciousness (as opposed to “seeing color”). If responses to the two conditions differ, then, this difference will shed light on how consciousness is perceived—whether it is transformative and whether it is embodied in Mary’s brain.

Results showed that participants considered Mary’s conscious experience (in the first condition) as more transformative than her subliminal experience (in the second condition); this is only expected from the philosophical analysis. But, contrary to what might be expected given the “hard problem,” participants also considered the conscious experience to be more likely to “show up” in Mary’s brain compared to the subliminal experience. And once again, “transformative” ratings were positively linked with the brain registering the experience, such that the stronger the intuitions that Mary’s conscious experience registered in her brain, the more transformative it seemed.

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These outcomes are striking for two reasons. First, the results show that, when people consider Mary’s case, consciousness seems to them squarely physical. This flies in the face of the common wisdom that consciousness seems not physical. Second, when compared with the zombie’s case, it appears that these psychological intuitions shift.

In the zombie’s case, consciousness seems ethereal; in Mary’s case, it seems physical. And if different thought experiments can produce such a radical shift in intuitions about the nature of consciousness, then our intuitions about subjective experience cannot possibly be trusted to reflect what consciousness really is like.  This means our intuitions about consciousness likely emerge from within—from psychological biases.

Our intuitions about consciousness are shaped by two competing psychological biases: intuitive dualism and essentialism.

A large body of literature suggests that people—adults and young children, across various societies and cultures—consider the mind distinct from the body. For intuitive dualists, philosophical zombies don’t seem so strange. Since dualists see the mind as ethereal, distinct from the body, they can readily imagine a creature that shares only our body, but not the inner light of conscious experience. From the outside, the creature seems just like any real person; but on the inside, there’s nobody home. They’re as conscious as a rock.

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Had our intuitions about consciousness stemmed only from intuitive dualism, then consciousness should have always seemed ethereal, just as the case of zombies suggests. But psychological biases, such as intuitive dualism, do not operate in a vacuum; they often interact with conflicting biases. And when these interactions occur, a bias that was previously silent can suddenly become dominant. Critically, the “push and pull” dynamics between them can also be shaped by context. When context shifts—when people consider different thought experiments about consciousness—the role of dualism may be weakened. Consequently, intuitions about the link between consciousness and the brain shift, too.

Mary’s case invokes just that shift in intuitions. What’s different about Mary’s case (relative to zombies) is that it invites us to evaluate a change to Mary herself (her new experience with color), and as a result, we now focus on her body, more than her mind. This attenuates the effect of intuitive dualism and brings a second competing constraint into the forefront—intuitive essentialism.

Essentialism is the intuitive belief that living things are what they are because they possess some innate, immutable essence that lies within their bodies. Research has shown that when people evaluate a change to a protagonist, they assess whether the change pertains to the protagonist’s essence. And since that essence seems to lie within the body, it is the body that determines the significance of that change.

For example, young children believe that a change to a dog’s insides (like removing its blood and bones) amounts to changing the kind of thing that it is, whereas external changes (like removing its fur) will not, presumably because it is within the “insides” that the animal’s hidden essence lies.

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Like the dog example, Mary’s case also features a change. So for an intuitive essentialist, Mary’s newly gained consciousness of the redness of the color red ought to be significant or transformative only if this change pertains to her bodily essence. It follows that, to engender a significant change, a new conscious experience must affect Mary’s body. Seeing color fits the bill, because “seeing” intuitively feels like an embodied affair that involves the eyes. Accordingly, participants viewed Mary’s conscious experience as “transformative.”

Moreover, seeing color is significant precisely because intuitively, this experience seems physically embodied. The results also showed that the more “embodied” Mary’s experience seemed, the more transformative it was. This link between “embodiment” and “transformativeness” is exactly what intuitive essentialism predicts.

Together, intuitive dualism and essentialism can both capture our conscious intuitions. The crucial point, however, isn’t just why and how consciousness intuitions shift. Rather, it is the fact a shift occurs that is critical. And since it does, you know you could be in trouble—your intuitions could well arise from your internal psychological biases. So, resist the temptation and do not blindly follow their delusional voice. Don’t trust your consciousness to tell you what consciousness really is.

Lead image: everything bagel / Shutterstock

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Iris Berent

Posted on November 27, 2024

Iris Berent is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and the author of The Blind Storyteller: How We Reason About Human Nature.

Technology

- Is Technology Worthy of Our Faith?

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is Technology Worthy of Our Faith?

Harvard and MIT humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein on his 3 greatest revelations while writing Tech Agnostic.

By Greg M. Epstein    December 5, 2024

1 Tech Has Become the Most Dominant Faith of Our Time

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Though I am an atheist, I have built my life and career around religion. First I spent five years pursuing ordination as a secular humanist rabbi, including 18 months living in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, studying ancient and modern Jewish sacred texts I believed—and continue to believe—are human creations, reflective not of divine inspiration but our own projections and needs. From there I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I’ve spent almost 20 years now as the humanist chaplain at Harvard University. Advising atheists, agnostics, and allies on ethical and existential concerns, my work has taken many forms, including writing about and building a diversely nonreligious congregation of my own. But as we approached the end of the past decade, I’d begun to wonder whether the congregation, as a form of organizing, was really how I wanted to spend my energy. Yes, congregations can help “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” as is roughly how I’d imagined them in my rabbinical seminary and at Harvard Divinity School. The problem is, that isn’t my language—it’s a quote from Facebook’s mission statement, as Mark Zuckerberg relaunched it in 2017.

KEEPING THE FAITH: Atheist Chaplain Greg M. Epstein says technology’s biggest ideas lately are bizarrely religious, but that we shouldn’t abandon technology. Rather he advocates for a tech reformation. Photo by Cody O’Laughlin.

When I was invited to join MIT as its humanist chaplain in 2018, alongside my work at Harvard, it first occurred to me: Silicon Valley, or “Big Tech,” had superseded religion as the largest force in the world, not only economically, but in terms of influencing our views and experiences of what it means to be human. As historian of technology Mar Hicks told me in 2023, “we’re in a period where tech has expanded to take over nearly every aspect of our lives, economically, socially, and politically.” I then asked Harvard economics professor Jason Furman, who served President Barack Obama as chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers to what extent he agreed with Hicks. One could attempt to quantify such a statement in any number of potentially valid ways, but ultimately, Furman said, it simply “seems true.” As someone who genuflects before his own stained-glass black mirror altar a couple hundred times a day, as many of us do, I would have to agree.

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My first revelation, then, was that if tech is a religion, as leading technology critics have pointed out for generations, it has become the most dominant faith of our time.

2 The Leading Ideas in Tech Today Are Bizarrely Religious

The leading “ideas” in tech today—which I think are better understood as the “theology” and religious “doctrines” of contemporary Silicon Valley—are very often both bizarre, and bizarrely religious. My book Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation is filled with examples of tech products, services, and marketing missives that are based in religious thinking, like: new AI religions and AI worship; artificial souls; AI Gods; AI Jesus; AI Buddha; Robo Priests, a kind of “rapture” or end-times known as “The Singularity”;  Epistles from AI utopia; fervent and even proudly “fanatical”  calls to colonize the stars immediately; and so much more. In my book I spell out why there are frighteningly close parallels between mainstream beliefs about AI and religious visions of Heaven, Hell, and the “Chosen People.” But all of that was written mainly over the course of 2021-23. Which is, of course, now ancient history.

Since tech religion is all about the now, let’s also look briefly at examples from this year. Like the viral Friend.com necklace, the glowing AI pendant that surveils everything you say and hear, feeding the input through Chat GPT to make recommendations as a “friend.” This company’s founder Avi Schiffmann says the app aims to provide a digital/AI alternative to “a relationship people used to have with God but is lacking in the modern world,” by providing a constant, all-knowing companion and guide.

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The leading “ideas” in tech today are very often both bizarre, and bizarrely religious.

Then there is Character.AI: It features dozens if not hundreds of chat-ready Gods and deities, explicitly labeled as such, starting conversations with comments like, “I am the God. I am the Creator of all things.” Character.AI is a massive, unregulated, unprecedented experiment: Its founder, Noam Shazeer, left Google to create the company a few years ago, after the tech giant refused to release a new chatbot he’d been working on. Google later paid Character.AI $2.7 billion to hire Shazeer back. And as Shazeer has told The New York Times, his “ultimate vision” is to build artificial general intelligence—which, as many have pointed out,  is a lot like building a god. Shazeer’s inventions are “a cool first use case for” such tech, he says. With more and more kids as the AI’s target audience, what could go wrong, right?

3 The Solution Isn’t … Tech Atheism

Though I work as a “professional atheist” in my day job as a Humanist Chaplain, in the “tech religion” I’m just an agnostic, because despite all the strangeness and often destructive absurdity in the ideas I hinted at above, I often can’t say for sure whether a given form of Silicon Valley tech might have a meaningfully positive impact on humanity. Surely some of these technologies are worthy of our faith, in the secular sense, it can just be very hard to know which ones.

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Still, it’s incredibly frustrating to watch such an influential set of companies and industries influence so many people (not to mention government institutions and policies) in the wrong direction because of the problematic beliefs of so many of their individual leaders—optimization as a commandment and inefficiency as a sin; profits (and their prophets) over people; AI “lives” tomorrow over more earthly concerns like the climate or social justice now. That’s why my third revelation was that a massive effort to reform the tech religion is already underway.

“I am the God. I am the Creator of all things.”

When I talk about a tech “Reformation,” I’m thinking of the kinds of movements led by modern religious reformers: people like Martin Luther King, Jr., and his transformative influence on American Christianity; or the organization Rabbis for Human Rights, in which rabbis from across the Jewish spectrum work to protect Palestinian rights; or my friend Lama Rod Owens, a self-described “Black Buddhist Southern Queen” who was originally ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and who is working to reinvent Buddhism as a more radically inclusive religious tradition. These aren’t people who’ve walked away from their religions, muttering loudly on the way out about how “deluded” those they’re leaving behind are. They’re examples of individuals who believe in the potential their religious communities have to do good, but who are honest and clear-eyed about the communities’ failings and injustices, and who devote themselves to improving them. Tech Agnostic tells many stories about people who are the equivalents to people like these, for the tech world—tech heretics, apostates, skeptics, mystics, Cassandras, and whistleblowers who range from seminal scholars to labor activists to everyday gig workers to social workers, psychotherapists, pastors, and beyond.

One of the youngest and most gifted of the reformers I spoke to, a recent Princeton University graduate in African American studies and computer science named Payton Croskey, gave me hope with her call for the creation of an “augmented undercommons”: “a parallel location where all who refuse to submit to technology’s watchful eye may freely reside while reconfiguring the world’s understanding of freedom and security.” It’s not that Croskey is attempting to build some physical tech utopia in a bitcoin city somewhere; rather, what impressed me was her ability to envision, as an undergraduate, a kind of mythological or even spiritual alternative to the mythological place known as “Silicon Valley” (which perhaps began as a reference to a geographical territory in California, but surely now is an idea, an imagined community, more than a space with discernable borders). When I was feeling most hopeless about the future of technology, to be reminded by a young student of the possibility of something more equitable and uplifting was as surprising as it was encouraging.

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And actually, the alternative digital world Croskey describes very much reminds me of BlueSky right now: a place where those of us who have been feeling marooned from healthy online conversations can connect, without algorithmic manipulation. Don’t get me wrong, no website or app is perfect. But an online space where thoughtful people can discuss ideas, current events, and the little details of life, bringing together different aspects of humanity without being actively manipulated by billionaires? That, for the moment, sounds like, if not a revolution, then at the very least, a revelation.

Lead image: Viktory Viktor / Shutterstock

Greg M. Epstein

Posted on December 5, 2024

Greg M. Epstein serves as humanist chaplain at Harvard & MIT, where he advises students, faculty, and staff members on ethical and existential concerns from a humanist perspective. He was TechCrunch‘s first “ethicist in residence” and has been called “a symbol of the transition in how Americans relate to organized religion.” He is the author of the New York Times-bestselling book Good Without God and has also written for MIT Technology Review, CNN.com, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Newsweek. His latest book is Tech Agnostic: How Technology Became the World’s Most Powerful Religion, and Why It Desperately Needs a Reformation.

Zoology

- When Songbird Couples Split

- An Artful Seduction

- A Stolen Egg

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When Songbird Couples Split

A warming climate may cause more bird couples to break up.

By Katarina Zimmer    December 6, 2024

On the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, little greenish-brown warblers mate for life—or at least a substantial part of it. Year after year, male and female bring the young chick insects to eat while vigorously defending the nest from skinks or predatory birds. These pairings are remarkably stable, lasting up to 15 years—a good chunk of their lifespans, which can reach 20 years—with just under 7 percent of warbler couples separating every year on average.

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But scientists are finding that changes in climate can upset these harmonious partnerships. In a recent study in the Journal of Applied Ecology, a team of scientists discovered that in years with little rainfall or extremely high rainfall, divorce rates soared, sometimes more than doubling to 16 percent.

Researchers suspect these higher rates of divorce may be driven by the stress brought by food scarcity in years with harsher climate—a conclusion that may bode ill for the little birds’ partnerships in a world with increasingly variable rainfall. But scientists are still working out whether higher warbler divorce rates are necessarily a bad thing in the long run, or if they might even help the birds adapt to adversity. In the worst case, “it could have long-term effects on the population size,” says evolutionary biologist Hannah Dugdale of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Since 1985, researchers have been carefully monitoring warblers on the Seychelles’ Cousin Island, catching them every year during the breeding season; each bird carries a metal ring with a unique identifier around its leg, along with a unique combination of colored rings so they can be identified with binoculars. The program is so thorough that if a bird isn’t sighted in a year, “we know that it has died,” Dugdale says. The bird couples are very territorial, so if one of them disappears from its territory and reappears in another, it’s clear that it has separated from its partner.

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If divorce is causing warblers to break up with perfectly good mates, they may wind up single or with worse partners.

The reality is that males and females are sexually promiscuous and often cheat on one another, but once pairs begin to share a nest, the male will still stick with his female mate to care for her offspring—even when the chick is not his. The bird couples typically live together with helper birds—usually the female’s older offspring, both male and female, who help them in raising young. Female helper birds sometimes also breed and contribute an egg to the nest.

Scientists don’t know much about exactly how warbler divorces play out—when it happens, whether it’s the male or the female initiating the separation, or if it’s preceded by a period of strife or aggression. “Maybe one just leaves without saying anything. It could be a very sad affair,” says behavioral ecologist Augs Bentlage of the University of Groningen, a joint first author on the paper with his colleague Frigg Speelman, also at University of Groningen. After splitting up, some birds stay single while many find new partners.

The warblers’ average annual divorce rate of 6.6 percent per year is comparable to that of other birds that tend to live out their lives in a single region but lower than that of many migratory species that have much higher annual divorce rates. For great reed warblers, for instance, it’s 85 percent. That’s partly because partners lose each other over long seasonal journeys and end up finding new mates along the way.

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Seychelles warbler divorce rates were highest in years with unusually low rainfall, according to the team’s analysis of divorce data and local weather records. Bentlage suspects that dry weather reduces the vegetation that insects feed on and evaporates waters where the insects lay their eggs. Warbler couples would then struggle to find enough insects for their offspring, causing physiological stress. The birds may blame these difficulties on their choice of partner, the researchers hypothesize. “You might actually start to perceive your partner as being a low-quality partner,” Bentlage says. On top of this, male helper birds appear to be less likely to assist with chick-raising in years with low rainfall, while females didn’t change their behavior, according to some previous research by Dugdale and her colleagues.

The year of 1997, which saw exceptionally high rainfall in the Seychelles, also saw a spike in warbler divorce rates. Extreme rainfall can kill insects while strong winds can destroy bird nests. And if birds get wet, it’s harder for them to maintain optimum body temperatures. Parents would need to stay with chicks to help keep them warm, limiting their time for insect-gathering, causing stress. From low to high rainfall, “both extremes kind of have the same effect,” Bentlage says.

It’s still unclear what all this means for the warbler populations overall. Extreme years in the Seychelles are predicted to become more common as the global climate warms—a trend that is already making the birds less likely to attempt to breed and lay an egg as well as lowering fledgling survival rates, probably because there are fewer insects for them to eat.

Divorce could either help or hurt the birds during harsh years. Separation could counterintuitively be a good thing if the birds are indeed ditching partners who are bad at finding food, for instance. This might give them the chance to find ones who are better at it, giving future chicks a higher chance of survival. In line with this idea, some long-term research on black-browed albatross couples has found that when they divorce—which increases in years with warm sea surface temperatures—the females tend to find new partners with whom they’re more likely to produce chicks.

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But, if divorce is causing warblers to break up with perfectly good mates, they may wind up single or with worse partners instead. This could, in turn, lower the number of chicks they make and, theoretically, over many generations, even increase extinction probability, Dugdale says.

Either way, it’s clear that the heating of the Earth’s atmosphere has not only obvious and direct impacts on animal survival, but also more subtle and complex influences on their lives, the decisions they make, and the relationships they cultivate with one another.

Lead image: inimalGraphic / Shutterstock

Katarina Zimmer

Posted on December 6, 2024

Katarina Zimmer is a freelance science and environment journalist.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

An Artful Seduction

Bowerbirds arrange flowers, dung, and shotgun shells to create elaborate love shacks.

By Sarah Milligan    December 2, 2024    Photograph by Tim Laman

In the name of sexual selection, male bowerbirds create art.

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Bowerbirds, a family of 20 species found in New Guinea and Australia, are named for the elaborate structures they create—“bowers,” often made of sticks or grasses, their main evolutionary or practical purpose seems to be to attract a mate. Females visit multiple bowers before choosing. They meticulously inspect the structures and observe the males’ courtship displays—dancing, calling, and showing off what biologist and filmmaker Sir David Attenborough called their “seduction parlors”—then choose the bower and bird that seem the fittest.

The Vogelkop bowerbird pictured above is native to western New Guinea. With his drab brown feathers, he is no eye-catching bachelor on his own. But what he lacks in plumage he makes up for with his elaborate bower, adorned in red leaves, flower petals, berries, and a pile of dung.

Curated objects may include flowers, berries, feathers, and even shotgun shells.

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Bowers vary from bird to bird and species to species. Some are large, spanning up to 9 feet tall, while others are more modest. Different species of bowerbirds seem to prefer different bower components, fastidiously arranging their collections with curated objects that may include flowers, berries, leaves, fungus, feathers, stones, and even human items like bottlecaps, nails, and shotgun shells. Sometimes the birds steal coveted trinkets from other bowers.

Vogelkops have been observed arranging fresh deer dung at the mouth of their yurt-like chambers and later furiously picking away at the mushrooms sprouting from the aging dung—perhaps the mushrooms were not part of their original design vision. Other species dabble in painting, spreading masticated plant material mixed with saliva on the walls of their bowers. Still others have been observed arranging their lawn art in order of size, with the smallest items proceeding to the largest.

While bowerbirds have innate bower-building instincts, it can take years of learning and honing their craft before they begin constructing high-quality bowers like the one pictured above. Some researchers suspect that advances in the art of crafting an immaculate bower get passed along from one generation to the next, another sign that many species can learn from, teach each other, and engage in a suite of aesthetic undertakings. Bowerbirds will alter their designs to mimic the bowers around them, to better attract local females. For example, “Billy the Bowerbird”—a spotted bowerbird who lived among a population of satin bowerbirds for five years—constructed his bower using pine needles and blue flowers like his neighbors, where normally a spotted bowerbird would build with grass and sticks, favoring white, green, and red decorations.

The Vogelkop bowerbird in our photo likely honed his elaborate architecture using a combination of local bower culture and years of trial and error. When a female visits, the male will dance, sing, and strut in front of his bower—sometimes holding a trinket in his beak—to entice her further. Then, should she approve of his handiwork and performance, they will mate, and she’ll fly off alone to a higher, more secluded spot to build a nest for her eggs. The male will remain at the bower, tending and tinkering in the hopes that another female will be equally impressed with his fanciful bachelor pad, choose him as a mate, and pass along his aesthetically inclined genes.

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This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

Tim Laman is a field biologist and wildlife photojournalist specializing in the Asia-Pacific region, with bylines in National Geographic, and more than a dozen scientific articles on birds and rainforest ecology.

Sarah Milligan

Posted on December 2, 2024

Sarah Milligan is a Minnesota-based writer and photographer focusing on the intersection of community, conservation, and culture. Her work has appeared in Atlas Obscura, Rewilding Magazine, and others. She holds postgraduate degrees in conservation science from Imperial College London and environment and development from the London School of Economics.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Stolen Egg

A winning photograph shows a wasp that has parasitized an egg.

By Liz Lindqwister    November 26, 2024    Photo by Alison Pollack

A small, scaled creature appears ready to emerge through a broken wall in an iridescent dome. Though the dome might resemble a strange spaceship, it is actually the remains of a moth egg, and the creature inside is a wasp that parasitized the egg.

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Many wasp species are parasites, laying their offspring in or feeding on other insect and spider eggs. Scelionidae wasps, like the one pictured here, are “idiobiont” arthropods who, as developing larvae, feed on and grow from within their unfortunate host eggs—in this case, a sigmoid prominent moth (Clostera albosigma). Although these wasps are detrimental to the lives of their host organisms, many parasitic wasp species have formed beneficial relationships with other animals, including humans.

In the United Kingdom, where moths frequent musty closets and feast on wools and cottons, pest control teams have taken to releasing Trichogramma wasps on the unsuspecting fabric-eaters. Museums and heritage sites are particularly fond of this wasp-control method, since their ravenous parasitism is less toxic than fumigation or spraying insecticides.

Many parasitic wasp species have formed beneficial relationships with other animals.

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California-based photographer Alison Pollack captured this surprising moment in her photograph, a winner in the Nikon Photomicrography Competition’s top 20 images. Though this egg was fully intact when Pollack’s colleague, Brent Haglund, first collected it from atop a poplar leaf in New Hampshire, the egg “hatched” just a few days later. It was only when Pollack inspected this specimen under a microscope that she realized she was staring at a wasp’s eye and leg through the cracked egg’s opening.

Pollack’s photograph used “focus stacking,” an editing technique that helped her display the true depth and detail of this wasp-and-egg duo. This technique is particularly useful in microphotography, where even the most powerful cameras would struggle to capture the micrometer-sized patterns of a wasp’s compound eye. To compose her  shot, Pollack layered no fewer than 200 photos. By literally “stacking” a set of images that focus on different parts of a scene, photographers like Pollack can create a composite photo that keeps every detail of the subject in sharp focus, revealing some of nature’s most surprising moments.

Liz Lindqwister

Posted on November 26, 2024

Liz Lindqwister is a writer originally from Peoria, Illinois. Her reporting on tech, culture, and history has appeared in the San Francisco Standard, STANFORD Magazine, the Library of Congress, and Vox’s Today Explained. A historian by training, Lindqwister holds degrees in early American studies from Stanford University and Cambridge University.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2024 Dec 6

Anthropology

An Archaeological Reckoning

Arts

That Healing Sound

Astronomy

Voyagers Ready to Go Dark

Environment

The Vanishing Coast of Louisiana

The New Climate Math on Hurricanes

Math

When Work Is Play

Psychology

Consciousness Has a Psychology Problem

Technology

Is Technology Worthy of Our Faith?

Zoology

When Songbird Couples Split

An Artful Seduction

A Stolen Egg