Occasionally, there are news stories about a man who eats steel or a girl who likes to eat plastic. Such a condition where the person develops an appetite for a non-food substance is called pica. Pica is more common than one would think. The most common cases are those of dirt, clay and chalk, with the disorder being much more prevalent in children or pregnant women. Although pica is officially a mental disorder (possibly related to OCD), it is possible that it is a neurological mechanism to cure a certain mineral deficiency. For example, patients with coeliac diseases or hookworm infections tend to be iron-deficient and the substances they eat tend to contain iron. It is unclear how the brain knows what “food” to eat to cure a disease, but there are many cases where people subconsciously consume foods that would improve their health. According to a study, between 8% and 65% of people have had a sudden urge for a very strange appetite. However, as substances commonly involved in pica (such as dirt and ice) are solids, they can damage the oesophagus and the digestive tract. Also, they may contain toxic chemicals which can cause poisonings, making pica a potentially dangerous condition.
Normally, babies are dressed in blue for boys and pink for girls to differentiate their sex. Even in adult societies, the colour pink is associated with women. As some women have a particular fondness for the colour, the stereotype deepens. Why is femininity related to the colour pink?
The easiest explanation is that it is simply a social construct. In other words, as society says “pink is a girl’s colour”, the stereotype is set. Although this may seem like a simple answer, it shows the power of the majority’s opinion and stereotypes. As evidence to this theory, one can consider the following excerpt. It is taken from an American magazine from 1918:
“The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl”.
As you can see, in the past the opposite was the social norm where pink was a boy’s colour. This shows that pink and women have no direct links. This norm was flipped around the 1940’s and pink is still the symbol for femininity.
There is also some scientific data attempting to explain the phenomenon. One study proposed that as prehistoric humans had gender roles where the men hunted and the women gathered, women evolved to seek out red berries, which are ripe and delicious. Thus, they still have a soft spot for pink things. Also, as one can see from cheek blush and red lipstick being common make-ups, women like to accentuate a flush on the face. Pink cheeks and red lips signify that they are healthy and ready for reproduction, causing men to find the colour attractive. Pink clothes further enhance this effect to make the woman look more attractive. A similar technique is used by monkeys (especially baboons) where the female’s backside turns pink or red to alert the males that she is ready to mate.
The sound of fingernails scratching a chalkboard is one of the most difficult sounds to listen to. This “screech” sound gives the sensation of your soul being ripped to shreds and invokes great discomfort. Why is this?
Professor Randolph Blake of Vanderbilt Center, USA, observed that this sound is very similar to the scream chimpanzees and macaque monkeys make when they see a predator. According to other researches on this phenomenon, many species of monkeys also hate this sound greatly. Blake used these facts to hypothesise that as our primitive ancestors used this sound to alert an enemy approaching, it has been programmed into our primitive brain to trigger a negative response. Also, physically this sound amplifies in our ears at a certain frequency to cause intense pain. The pain and our basic instincts combine to generate such an unpleasant feeling.
Rock-paper-scissors is a fun game that is played by people of all ages and nationalities. But there is also a species of lizards that plays this game, albeit in a rather strange way.
Male common side-blotched lizards, also known as Uta stansburiana, have a mating strategy based on the game, where the chances of “winning” is equal and one type has an advantage over another type while being disadvantaged against another type. The males come in three types, differing in the colour of their necks: orange, blue and yellow.
Orange-throated males are the strongest but do not like to form a bond with the female (i.e. do not want a relationship). They can easily win over a fight against the blue-throated males to win the female, but yellow-throated males can sneak in and win over the female instead. Orange beats blue but loses against yellow.
Blue-throated males are middle-sized but do form strong bonds with females. They lose in a fight against orange-throated males, but can easily defend against yellow-throated males as they are always with their female. Blue beats yellow but loses against orange.
Yellow-throated males are smallest but can mimic females, letting them approach females near orange-throated males. They mate with the females while the orange-throated male is distracted, but this strategy does not work with blue-throated males as they have stronger bonds with the females. Yellow beats orange but loses against blue.
Interestingly, although the proportion of the three types average out to be similar over the long run (much like the probability of a person playing a certain hand), in the short term the preferred strategy tends to fluctuate. For example, orange-throated males may strive with their masculine strength for four or five years, but then the trend will slowly switch to yellow-throated males and their mimicking, female-stealing strategy. After another four or five years, blue-throated males will make a comeback as they win over females with their strong bonding.
People take interest in ants for many reasons. Some people are fascinated by how ants have achieved what they deem a perfect totalitarian system. In fact, if you observe it from the outside, an ant nest appears to be completely harmonious as everyone works the same, everyone focuses on the good of the whole and everyone is prepared to sacrifice themselves. But humanity has failed in every attempt at totalitarianism up until now. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, Carthaginians, Persians, Chinese, French, British, Russians, Germans, Japanese and Americans all experienced an age of glory and appeared as if the world would be assimilated into them, but fortunately a tiny grain of sand would always fall and destroy their unified systems.
This is why there are people who try to imitate insects who live in hive societies (consider how Napoleon’s insignia was of a honeybee). If what unifies an ant nest’s thoughts into one is pheromones, then modern society’s worldwide media does the same function today. People always suggest something that they believe is good and expect others to follow it. They believe that this way, we will achieve a perfect human society one day. But this is not the way of the universe.
Nature, unlike what Darwin suggested, does not evolve so that the fittest survive and rule (and what standard could possible differentiate “fit” and “undesirable”?). Nature’s powers lie in variation. In nature, there are good, evil, insane, devastated, lively, ill, deformed, demented, happy, depressed, intelligent, foolish, selfish, generous people and big, small, black, yellow, red, white things etc. They must all exist. If there is one danger in nature, it is when one group is destroyed by another group.
If there is a field of corns and only the corns that have the “best” traits (i.e. require the least water, stand cold weather and produce juicy corn) are used to pollinate, then the entire crop can be wiped out by a single disease. Contrastingly, a wild crop with individual corns having unique traits with varied weaknesses and differences can survive diseases as the corns find a way to beat it among the many different traits.
Nature hates standardisation and loves diversity. It is through diversity that nature exerts its original abilities.
(from The Encyclopaedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge by Bernard Werber)
One of the most basic instincts of a human being is to doubt. We do not easily extend our trust to strangers. This is a natural response that is very beneficial for your survival from an evolutionary perspective (consider the overfriendly dodos that were wiped out by humans). As civilisation has progressed and the size of societies grew, people devised legal systems to lower their vigilance against each other. This was because instead of wasting time being suspicious of others, we devised specialist roles who would do that for us, allowing us to live in peace with each other. These specialists who stay alert and guard us enforce the law and stabilise our society. However, what would happen if the people that protect us from evil become evil? Is it not a scary thought to think that there is no one that watches the watchmen?
Emperor Qin Shi Huang who united China to form the Qin dynasty divided up his people, setting up a mutual guard system to enforce his rule. Informing became a civil obligation. To not report illegal activities was illegal in itself. The system of informing was as follows: five families form a group with each group being watched by an official warden who reports on them. This official warden is carefully observed by an unofficial surveillant. Five groups come together to form a tribe. If it is found that at any level something was not reported, the blame was turned on every member of the group. Thus, a circle of surveillance is formed.
This method was extremely effective and Emperor Qin’s rule of terror was unstoppable. Crime rates plummeted while productivity rose. The problem was that the people’s quality of life was pathetic. Emperor Qin’s system of watching was later adopted by Nazi Germany. The people under the rule of the Nazis had to live in fear of being reported by their neighbours. This method is also seen being used by Big Brother in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Is this truly the best system to keep peace? Laws are put in place for the happiness and safety of the people, yet over-surveillance is an ironic concept that exists for those who hold power rather than the people.
How much should we trust another person? And who will watch the watchmen?
How many friends can a person have? Believe it or not, science has solved this question. An anthropologist called Robin Dunbar studied various societies, tribes and primate groups to determine how many members a group can have to maintain stability. He discovered that the ideal size for a group of humans was about 150.
What happens if there are more than 150 people in a group? This is easily explained by the following thought experiment. Imagine that you have a friend called Mr. White. Add a personality to him – flesh him out as a person. Next, you make another friend called Mr. Red. Then Mr. Blue, Mr. Green, Mr. Maroon… At a certain point, you will no longer remember the name or personality of your “friend” and not even care about that person. This is the limit set by our brains – known as Dunbar’s number, or more colloquially the Monkeysphere.
Any person outside of this Monkeysphere is not of your concern. Once you saturate your brain with 150 relationships, the brain ceases to care about other people. Interestingly, the Monkeysphere is directly related to the size of the neocortex (the part of the brain responsible for higher order thinking). For example, most monkeys can only operate in troupes of 50 or so.
The Monkeysphere can be defined as the group of people that you conceptualise as “people”. Because of this limitation, we are physiologically incapable of caring about everyone in the world. For example, we are highly unlikely to be concerned about the welfare of the janitor at work compared to a loved one. As politically incorrect it may be, the brain sees the janitor as “the object that cleans the building” rather than a human being. You may “care” about the janitor in the sense that you greet him in the corridor, but there is a limit to this. This effect actually explains quite well why society is dysfunctional in general.
Because we do not see people outside the Monkeysphere as “people”, they mean less to us. Stalin once said that “one death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Similarly, the death of a family member is devastating but 10,000 people dying in a foreign country from war does not have the same emotional effect. Furthermore, if a stranger was to die in front of your eyes, you would still not be nearly as devastated as the death of someone you are close to.
Also, as we do not feel connected to these “outsiders”, we are much more prone to act rude or aggressively. For example, one may insult other drivers with the most colourful words on the road, but would (hopefully) never say those words to a friend.
This expands to a greater scale in the context of survival. We are wired to put the need of the members of our Monkeysphere ahead of those outside of it. Thus, we would not steal from our friends but openly evade taxes as we see the government and others as a cold, faceless body. It does not occur to us that through our actions, we are harming other human beings. The same applies to our view of corporations; despite being made up of real people, we only see them as heartless machines actively conspiring against us.
What if the scale was then expanded to countries? If we do not see a person on the other side of the road as a human being, it is extremely unlikely we would register a foreigner as one. This explains why racism and stereotyping is so common in human societies. Although liberal-minded people would like to believe that we should treat every human being like we treat our mothers, our brain is incapable of it. In fact, it is much more likely we would see those people as acting against our interests by “stealing jobs” and so forth. Thus, racism is a hard-wired behaviour to protect the best interest of our Monkeysphere.
We have established that it is impossible to worry about the seven billion strangers in this world. This brings us to an important point: it is just as impossible to make “them” interested in “you”. It is a cold, hard fact that if you are outside of their Monkeysphere, people will not care about you. Ergo, they treat you badly, put you down, steal from you and downright ignore you. In fact, cognitive dissonance means you are even less likely to care for people outside the Monkeysphere as your brain actively rejects people from getting closer to your Monkeysphere, exceeding the preset limit of 150 people. This is why propaganda always focusses on dehumanising the enemy and why people seeking votes and attention pull at sympathy strings – to try get as close to your Monkeysphere as possible.
Many people will lament how we are not monkeys and the Monkeysphere does not apply to us. We have laws, ethics and “humanity”. However, we cannot escape our primitive psychological behaviours and this is reflected in societies filled with crime, unhappiness and a general disinterest in people not related to yourself. This is why city-dwellers tend to be less friendly than villagers, as there are too many people to fit in one, happy Monkeysphere. In fact, monkeys may have more functional societies than us because they hardly ever exceed their own Monkeyspheres (which may also explain why they rarely have wars). The same can be said of tribes and villages of the past.
Ironically, the development of society has been based around working around the limitations of the Monkeysphere – a theoretically ideal society. By living in larger groups, humans can achieve greater feats such as industries and large-scale economies. Although we suffer the consequences of racism and crime, we have become very effective in survival.
Economics is based on the Monkeysphere too. As we only care about our Monkeysphere, there is no reason for us to be concerned about the needs of others. So when a system such as communism forces us to share our bananas, we become infuriated that we have to give up our bananas to people we do not know. But in capitalism, every individual can pick bananas for just ourselves and those we care about. The system thrives as each Monkeysphere acts dynamically and everyone is happy. This is the concept of the invisible hand that is the foundation of modern economics.
But still, the concept of countries means that we have to share the burden of millions of people we do not care about in the form of taxes and civil duties. This makes us unhappy. So what can we do?
Firstly, realise that you are to others what others are to you. If you find a certain person on television as annoying and irrational, chances are that someone else sees you in that light. You are limited to your Monkeysphere of 150 people and people outside of it are in their own Monkeyspheres.
Secondly, understand that no one is special. There are no heroes or perfect beings. Everyone is a human being and prone to making mistakes and acting “human”. Therefore, we cannot idolise people and be disappointed by their actions. This also means that you cannot judge another person and consider their words and actions as insignificant, as they are just as human as you.
Lastly, never simplify things. The world is not simple. It cannot be generalised as one happy village with everyone living happily in harmony. It is a composite of a massive number of different Monkeyspheres, all concerned with their own well-being and not caring about anything else.
Remember the words that Charles Darwin spoke to his assistant, Jeje Santiago: “Jeje, we are the monkeys”. As much as we would like to think that we are higher-order beings, we are simple creatures of habit and behaviour limited by our Monkeysphere.
There are many physiological events that puzzle scientists. Menopause is one of these as it is very uncommon in other mammals. Why do human females stop having periods after aging? From an evolutionary point of view, an organism that has lost reproductive function cannot aid evolution and thus it is a mystery how a trait like menopause survived natural selection. The leading theory in how such a phenomenon happened is the grandmother hypothesis.
According to this hypothesis, as humans are social animals menopause can still be an evolutionary advantage despite not being able to produce offspring. This is because older women can invest the massive amount of energy and time required to upkeep childbearing in other places. For example, they can help their family and society grow by working or taking care of children instead. Furthermore, as the probability of miscarriages and congenital defects rise with aging (generally after a woman hits the age of 30, the chances of a healthy pregnancy decreases), menopause has the function of protecting the gene pool of the species. These facts combined lead to the conclusion that after an individual has reached a certain age, taking care of their children or grandchildren instead of birthing more offspring is more effective in propagating their own genes. Also, there is no one that can propagate massive amounts of wisdom and information to the next generation like the elderly.
In modern society, menopause has more significance than at any point in the history of human beings. As our average life span has surpassed 80 and heading towards 90, almost half of a woman’s life is post-menopause. In some ways, the grandmother hypothesis contains within it a certain philosophy regarding life. As we age, we give birth to children and raise them until they become independent, at which point we escape our basic biological duty of reproducing to lead our “own” lives. Senescence is like a second spring after one’s “biological” life. It is the start to a new life – a more “human” life of your own where you can focus on seeking pure happiness.
We were all born from our parents. Our parents were all born from our grandparents. Everyone has a family tree and a root. If so, is it possible to find the beginning of mankind – our true “root”?
Our cells have an organelle (a part of the cell) called mitochondria. Mitochondria act as the cell’s engine and allow the cell to generate energy through respiration. An interesting fact about them is that they are not originally “ours”. About 1.5 billion years ago, there was an event where a prokaryote (cells without a nucleus, like a bacteria) invaded (or was eaten by) a eukaryote (cells with nuclei, like our cells). The prokaryote and the cell began a symbiosis and the prokaryote became a part of the cell.
Due to the external origin of mitochondria, they have a different genome to us. This is called mitochondrial DNA, shortened to mtDNA, which allows mitochondria to divide and synthesise proteins without the help of the host cell. It used to be a completely independent organism, but it has lost some of its functions to the cell.
mtDNA is inherited in a different way to normal DNA. Normally we receive half of our mother’s and half of our father’s genes, but we only inherit our mother’s mtDNA. This is because sperm keeps mitochondria in the tail which is lost during fertilisation, meaning our father’s mitochondria cannot be inherited. The only way to gain mitochondria is from those in the cytoplasm (the material that fills cells) of our mother’s egg. This is known as maternal inheritance.
Using this information, scientists compared a large sample of people’s mtDNA to turn back the clock. Knowing that a child and its mother share the same mtDNA and the mother and grandmother share the same mtDNA, we can analyse mtDNA to find the origin of mankind, or our first common female ancestor – also called Mitochondrial Eve.
Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived 200,000 years ago in Africa, thus she is also known as African Eve. Her mtDNA is an ancient heirloom passed along generation after generation to us, as evidence of evolution. Every living person on the face of the Earth is a descendant of her. So in some ways, it could be said that we truly are one big family.
The bombardier beetle, or Brachymus creptians, has a “machine gun”. When attacked, it makes an explosive sound and spouts smoke. This beetle combines chemicals from two separate glands to make the smoke. The first gland produces a solution of 25% hydrogen peroxide and 10% hydroquinone, while the second gland produces peroxidase, an enzyme that catalyses the reaction. When these solutions are combined and heated to 100°C, smoke and nitric acid vapour is produced and explosively released.
If you put your hand close to a bombardier beetle, it will rapidly release a scalding, noxious, red vapour. This nitric acid will cause blisters on afflicted skin. Bombardier beetles also know how to aim the tip of its abdomen to target an enemy. Via this method, it can hit a target a few centimetres away. Even if it misses, the explosive sound will scare away any predator. Normally, bombardier beetles store enough chemicals for three or four shots. However, some entomologists have found that some species can fire up to 24 times in rapid succession if provoked.
As these beetles are a bright orange and silver-blue colour, they are very noticeable. They act as if they do not care if they are seen, as they are equipped with an effective cannon. Generally, beetles with a colourful coat have a unique, ingenious defensive mechanism to ward off curious animals and insects. Despite this, rats that know that the beetle loves to use this “ingenious defensive mechanism” quickly grab the beetle and plant its abdomen in the ground. After attacking it continuously while in the ground to exhaust the beetle’s rounds, the rat bites off the head first.
(from the Encyclopaedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge by Bernard Werber)
