What was the greatest invention of human civilization? Arguably it was agriculture, which allowed for civilization itself. Prior to agriculture humans were some combination of hunters, gatherers, scavengers, and fishers. We lived off the land, which was a full-time job. Many communities had to be nomadic, to follow prey and follow the seasons. There were some permanently occupied sites, if they were in proximity to an adequate food source. Food was the ultimate limiting factor on human populations and ingenuity.

Agriculture was therefore a transformative invention, allowing people to stay in one place and develop infrastructure. It also freed up some members of the group to do things other than focus on acquiring food. It made civilization possible. How far back does agriculture go?

The consensus is that agriculture began in earnest about 12,000 years ago, in the fertile crescent that is now Iran, Iraq, Turkey and surrounding regions. Evidence for this includes the remnants of domesticated plants, and also evidence of farming and food processing. In addition there is evidence of domesticated animals, which would have been a source of labor and also an additional food source. There were also some downsides to this shift in lifestyle – relying on a narrow range of plants reduced food diversity and therefore overall nutritional quality. Living with domesticated animals, and in larger populations, also saw the rise of communicable diseases. The latter still plagues humanity. However, successful societies all figured out eventually how to farm a combination of plants that would provide adequate nutrition. You may have noticed that most cultures’ staple foods include some combination of a grain plus a legume – corn and beans, rice and lentils, for example.

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In an optimally rational person, what should govern their perception of risk? Of course, people are generally not “optimally rational”. It’s therefore an interesting thought experiment – what would be optimal, and how does that differ from how people actually assess risk? Risk is partly a matter of probability, and therefore largely comes down to simple math – what percentage of people who engage in X suffer negative consequence Y? To accurately assess risk, you therefore need information. But that is not how people generally operate.

In a recent study assessment of the risk of autonomous vehicles was evaluated in 323 US adults. This is a small study, and all the usual caveats apply in terms of how questions were asked. But if we take the results at face value, they are interesting but not surprising. First, information itself did not have a significant impact on risk perception. What did have a significant impact was trust, or more specifically, trust had a significant impact on the knowledge and risk perception relationship.

What I think this means is that knowledge alone does not influence risk perception, unless it was also coupled with trust. This actually makes sense, and is rational. You have to trust the information you are getting in order to confidently use it to modify your perception of risk. However – trust is a squirrely thing. People tend not to trust things that are new and unfamiliar. I would consider this semi-rational. It is reasonable to be cautious about something that is unfamiliar, but this can quickly turn into a negative bias that is not rational. This, of course, goes beyond autonomous vehicles to many new technologies, like GMOs and AI.

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In the awesome show, Black Mirror, one episode features a young woman who lost her husband. In her grief she turns to a company that promises to give her at least a partial experience of her husband. They sift through every picture, video, comment, and other online trace of the person and construct from that a virtual avatar. At first the avatar just texts with the wife, which then progresses to phone calls, and then finally to a full robotic avatar indistinguishable from the lost husband. Except – it is not really indistinguishable. It’s a compliant AI that isn’t quite human.

So-called grief tech is possible now and is getting more popular. This is another instance of technology creating a new ethical situation that we have to confront, and it is too early to really tell what the impact will be. There are companies, mostly in Asia, that will create the virtual avatar of a dead loved-one for you (one company charges $50,000 for the service). They don’t just scrub the internet, they will make hours of high definition video and interviews to create the raw material to train the AI. The result is a high fidelity visual avatar speaking in the voice of the deceased with a chat-bot mimicking their style with access to lots of information about their life.

The important question is not, how good is it. It’s already very good, and clearly it will get incrementally better. It will also likely get much cheaper. Eventually it will be an app on your phone. The question is – is all this a net positive and healthy experience or is it mostly creepy and unhealthy? I suspect the answer will likely be yes – both. It will depend on the individual and the situation, and even for the individual there are likely to be positive and negative aspects. Either way – we are about to find out.

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Generally speaking the mainstream media does a terrible job of reporting anything in the realm of pseudoscience or the paranormal. The Washington Post’s recent article on children who apparently remember their past lives is no exception. Journalists generally don’t have the background or skill set necessary to deal with these often complex topics. They also don’t seem to care, looking at such stories as “fluff” pieces and see nothing but their click-bait potential. Almost universally missing from such pieces in effective skepticism. At best you may get some token skepticism, buried deep in the article, and usually immediately nullified by another anecdote or unchallenged claim. Such pieces, if they do rely on experts, focus on believers.

I have written before about reincarnation. The Post article focuses on the same researcher, Stevenson, who always gets cited, because of his large body of research. The post article, in the end, is just regurgitating the same old arguments and evidence that has already been picked over by skeptics.

The lead anecdote is of a toddler who has an imaginary friend, Nina, and begins to weave increasingly details stories about Nina and her life. The detail that gets her parents most interested is when their daughter says, “Nina has numbers on her arm and it makes her sad.” This was interpreted as a memory from a Nazi concentration camp. There are basically two ways to interpret such behavior by children – either they are genuine memories of a past life (or some other source of actual memories), or they are fantasies. Here is a typical line of argument from the Post article:

She explained that at age 2 or 3, children engage in fantasy play, but they are not likely to fabricate a statement involving their primary relationships. In other words: Saying “You’re not my mom” or “I want my other parents” or “Where are my children?” — common among these cases — is not something you would typically expect a very young child to say, let alone repeat insistently. “It doesn’t sound like confusion,” Klein says. “It sounds like a real statement. And young children just don’t make this kind of thing up.”

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I recently received the following question to the SGU e-mail:

“I have had several conversations with friends/colleagues lately regarding indigenous beliefs/stories. They assert that not believing these based on oral histories alone is morally wrong and ignoring a different cultures method of knowledge sharing. I do not want to be insensitive, and I would never argue this point directly with an indigenous person (my friends asserting these points are all white). But it really rubs me the wrong way to be told to believe things without what I would consider more concrete evidence. I’m really not sure how to comport myself in these situations. I would love to hear any thoughts you have on this topic, as I don’t have many skeptical friends.”

I also frequently encounter this tension, between a philosophical dedication to scientific methods and respect of indigenous cultures. Similar tensions come up in other contexts, such as indigenous cultures that hunt endangered species. These tensions are sometimes framed as “decolonization” defined as “the process of freeing an institution, sphere of activity, etc. from the cultural or social effects of colonization.” Here is a more detailed description:

“Decolonization is about “cultural, psychological, and economic freedom” for Indigenous people with the goal of achieving Indigenous sovereignty — the right and ability of Indigenous people to practice self-determination over their land, cultures, and political and economic systems.”

I completely understand this concept and think the project is legitimate. To “decolonize” an indigenous culture you have to do more than just physically remove foreign settlers. Psychological and cultural colonization is harder to remove. And often cultural colonization was very deliberate, such as missionaries spreading the “correct” religion to “primitive” people.

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I don’t think I know anyone personally who doesn’t have strong opinions about music – which genres they like, and how the quality of music may have changed over time. My own sense is that music as a cultural phenomenon is incredibly complex, no one (in my social group) really understands it, and our opinions are overwhelmed by subjectivity. But I am fascinated by it, and often intrigued by scientific studies that try to quantify our collective cultural experience. And I know there are true experts in this topic, musicologists and even ethnomusicologists, but haven’t found good resources for science communication in this area (please leave any recommendations in the comments).

In any case, here are some random bits of music culture science that I find interesting. A recent study analyzing 12,000 English language songs over the last 40 years has found that songs have been getting simpler and more repetitive over time. They are using fewer words with greater repetition. Further, the structure of the lyrics are getting simpler, and they are more readable and easier to understand. Also, the use of emotional words has increased, and has become overall more negative and more personal. I have to note this is a single study and there are some concerns about the software used in the analysis, but while this is being investigated the authors state that it is unlikely any glitch will alter their basic findings.

But taken at face value, it’s interesting that these findings generally fit with my subjective experience. This doesn’t necessarily make me more confident in the findings, and I do worry that I am just viewing these results through my confirmation bias filter. Still, it not only fits what I have perceived in music but in culture in general, especially with social media. We should be wary of simplistic explanations, but I wonder if this is mainly due to a general competition for attention. Overtime there is a selective pressure for media that is more immediate, more emotional, and easier to consume. The authors also speculate that it may reflect our changing habits in terms of consuming media. There is a greater tendency to listen to music, for example, in the background, while doing other things (perhaps several other things).

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A recent study finds that 14.8% of Americans do not believe in global climate change. This number is roughly in line with what recent survey have found, such as this 2024 Yale study which put the figure at 16%. In 2009, by comparison, the figure was at 33% (although this was a peak – the 2008 result was 21%). The numbers are also encouraging when we ask about possible solutions, with 67% of Americans saying that we should prioritize development of green energy and should take steps to become carbon neutral by 2050. The good news is that we now have a solid majority of Americans who accept the consensus on climate change and broadly support measures to reduce our carbon footprint.

But there is another layer to this study I first mentioned – the methods used in deriving the numbers. It was not a survey. It used artificial intelligence to analyze posts on X (Twitter) and their networks. The fact that the results aligns fairly well to more tried and true methods, like surveys, is somewhat validating of the methods. Of course surveys can be variable as well, depending on exactly how questions are asked and how populations are targeted. But multiple well designed survey by experienced institutions, like Pew, can create an accurate picture of public attitudes.

The advantage of analyzing social media is that it can more easily provide vast amounts of data. The authors report:

We used a Deep Learning text recognition model to classify 7.4 million geocoded tweets containing keywords related to climate change. Posted by 1.3 million unique users in the U.S., these tweets were collected between September 2017 and May 2019.

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In my second book (shameless plug alert) – The Skeptics’ Guide to the Future – my coauthors and I try to imagine both the utopian and dystopian versions of the future, brought about by technology, either individually or collectively. This topic has come up multiple times recently on this blog when discussing technology and trust in science and scientists, so I thought it deserved its own discussion.

The overarching point is that science and technology should not be thought of as pure objective good, but rather they are tools, and tools can be used for good or evil. I admit I am a science enthusiast and a technophile, also a bit of an optimist, so when I hear about a new discovery or technology my first thoughts go to all the ways that it might make life better, or at least cooler. I have to remember to consider all the ways in which the technology can also be abused or exploited, which is why we explicitly did this in our futurism book.

So far, on the balance I think science and technology has been an incredible plus to humanity. For most of human existence life was “short, nasty, and brutish.” Science has given us a greater perspective on ourselves and the universe, freeing us from ignorance and superstition. And technology has given us the power to extend our lives, improve our health, and control our environment. It enables us to peer deep into the universe, and see for the first time a microscopic world that was always there but we had no idea existed. It enables us to travel beyond the confines of our planet, and eventually (if we survive) will enable us to be a multi-world, and even multi-system, species.

I do think we have lost touch with how bad life was prior to modern technology. Our period movies, for example, are highly romanticized. A brutally accurate portrayal of life prior to the industrial revolution would show people with horrible dentition ravaged by diseases and living mostly in drudgery. Most people never saw the world beyond their small village.  We get a hint of this sometimes, but never the reality.

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How much does the public trust in science and scientists? Well, there’s some good news and some bad news. Let’s start with the bad news – a recent Pew survey finds that trust in scientist has been in decline for the last few years. From its recent peak in 2019, those who answered that science has a mostly positive effect on society decreased from 73% to 57%. Those who say it has a mostly negative effect increased from 3 to 8%. Those who trust in scientists a fair amount or a great deal decreased from 86 to 73%. Those who think that scientific investments are worthwhile remain strong at 78%.

The good news is that these numbers are relatively high compared to other institutions and professions. Science and scientists still remain among the most respected professions, behind the military, teachers, and medical doctors, and way above journalists, clergy, business executives, and lawyers. So overall a majority of Americans feel that science and scientists are trustworthy, valuable, and a worthwhile investment.

But we need to pay attention to early warning signs that this respect may be in jeopardy. If we get to the point that a majority of the public do not feel that investment in research is worthwhile, or that the findings of science can be trusted, that is a recipe for disaster. In the modern world, such a society is likely not sustainable, certainly not as a stable democracy and economic leader. It’s worthwhile, therefore, to dig deeper on what might be behind the recent dip in numbers.

It’s worth pointing out some caveats. Surveys are always tricky, and the results depend heavily on how questions are asked. For example, if you ask people if they trust “doctors” in the abstract the number is typically lower than if you ask them if they trust their doctor. People tend to separate their personal experience from what they think is going on generally in society, and are perhaps too willing to dismiss their own evidence as “exceptions”. If they were favoring data over personal anecdote, that would be fine. But they are often favoring rumor, fearmongering, and sensationalism. Surveys like this, therefore, often reflect the public mood, rather than deeply held beliefs.

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What is “natural” for humans? It’s often hard to say, and in my opinion this is a highly overused concept. Primarily this is because humans are adaptable – we adapt to our environment, our situation, and our culture. So it is “natural” for us not to have a natural state.

But this does not mean there are no insights to be gained by considering the evolutionary milieu in which our ancestors spent the vast majority of their existence. By rapidly changing our environment we may be pushing the limits of our adaptability. We also need to consider the difference between surviving and thriving. We may survive in the world we have created for ourselves, but pay some price. For those of us living in industrialized societies, it’s also difficult to appreciate how different our lives are from the vast majority of human history and societies. What is now “normal” for us is a recent anomaly.

We can apply this line of thinking to many aspects of our lives, but I want to consider childcare. A recent study looking at Mbendjele BaYaka Hunter-Gatherers in the Republic of Congo found a number of interesting thing regarding childcare. Young children received physical contact for the majority of their day. Overall they had near constant attention from a caretaker. About half of this attention came from someone other than the child’s mother or parents. Children benefitted form a network of caregivers of 10 or more people, and occasionally as many as 20 or more. Older children, teenagers, and adult relatives all contributed to childcare. These networks potentially have a number of implications.

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