Animal, heal thyself
Many Minds
What happens to animals when they get sick? If they’re pets or livestock, we probably call the vet. And the vet may give them drugs or perform a procedure. But what about wild animals? Do they just languish in misery? Well, not so much. It turns out that animals—from bees to butterflies, porcupines to primates—medicate themselves. They seek out bitter plants, they treat wounds, they amputate limbs, they eat clay—the list goes on. This all raises an obvious question: How do they know to do this? How do they know what they know about healing and medicine? It also invites a related...
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The rise of machine culture
Many Minds
The machines are coming. Scratch that—they're already here: AIs that propose new combinations of ideas; chatbots that help us summarize texts or write code; algorithms that tell us who to friend or follow, what to watch or read. For a while the reach of intelligent machines may have seemed somewhat limited. But not anymore—or, at least, not for much longer. The presence of AI is growing, accelerating, and, for better or worse, human culture may never be the same. My guest today is . Iyad directs the at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Iyad is a...
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How should we think about IQ?
Many Minds
IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for “general cognitive ability”—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they’ve learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot...
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Rethinking the "wood wide web"
Many Minds
Forests have always been magical places. But in the last couple decades, they seem to have gotten a little more magical. We've learned that trees are connected to each other through a vast underground network—an internet of roots and fungi often called the "wood wide web". We've learned that, through this network, trees share resources with each other. And we've learned that so-called mother trees look out for their own offspring, preferentially sharing resources with them. There's no question that this is all utterly fascinating. But what if it's also partly a fantasy? My guest today is ....
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Electric ecology
Many Minds
There's a bit of a buzz out there, right now, but maybe you haven’t noticed. It's in the water, it's in the air. It's electricity—and it's all around us, all the time, including in some places you might not have expected to find it. We humans, after all, are not super tuned in to this layer of reality. But many other creatures are—and scientists are starting to take note. My guest today is . Sam is a sensory ecologist at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, and one of a handful of scientists uncovering some shocking things about the role of electricity in the natural world. Here, Sam...
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The nature of nurture
Many Minds
The idea of a "maternal instinct"—the notion that mothers are wired for nurturing and care—is a familiar one in our culture. And it has a flipside, a corollary—what you might call “paternal aloofness.” It's the idea that men just aren't meant to care for babies, that we have more, you know, manly things to do. But when you actually look at the biology of caretaking, the truth is more complicated and much more interesting. My guest today is . She is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis and the author of the new book, . In it, she examines...
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The space of (possibly) sentient beings
Many Minds
We may not know what it's like to be a bat, but we're pretty confident that it's like something—that bats (and other mammals) are sentient creatures. They feel pleasure and pain, cold and warmth, agitation and comfort. But when it comes to other creatures, the case is less clear. Is a crab sentient? What about a termite, or a tree? The honest answer is we just don't know—and yet, despite that uncertainty, practical questions arise. How should we treat these beings? What do we owe them? My guest today is . Jonathan is a Professor of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and the...
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From the archive: Cities, cells, and the neuroscience of navigation
Many Minds
Hi friends, we're still on a brief summer break. We'll have a new episode for you later in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ---- [originally aired September 21, 2022] If your podcast listening habits are anything like mine, you might be out for a walk right now. Maybe you’re wandering the neighborhood, just blocks from home, or maybe you’re further afield. In either case, I’m guessing you’re finding your way without too much trouble—you’re letting some intuitive sense steer you, track how far you’ve gone, tell you where to go next. This inner navigator...
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From the archive: What does ChatGPT really know?
Many Minds
Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! ---- [originally aired January 25, 2023] By now you’ve probably heard about the new chatbot called . There’s no question it’s something of a marvel. It distills complex information into clear prose; it offers instructions and suggestions; it reasons its way through problems. With the right prompting, it can even mimic famous writers. And it does all this with an air of cool competence, of intelligence. But, if you're like me,...
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From the archive: Medieval monks on memory, meditation, and mind-wandering
Many Minds
Hi friends, we're on a brief summer break at the moment. We'll have a new episode for you in August. In the meanwhile, enjoy this pick from our archives! _____ [originally aired May 17, 2023] You know the feeling. You're trying to read or write or think through a project, maybe even just respond to an email, when your attention starts to drift. You may not even notice it until you've already picked up your phone or jumped tabs, until your mind has already wandered way off-piste. This problem of distraction has become a bit of a modern-day obsession. We now fret about how to stay focused, how...
info_outlineIt's an enduring puzzle. For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors were nomadic, ranging over large territories, hunting and gathering for sustenance. Then, beginning roughly 12,000 years ago, we pivoted. Within a short timeframe—in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas—humans suddenly decided to settle down. We started to store our food. We domesticated plants. We set off, in other words, down a path that would reshape our cultures, our technologies, our social structures, even our minds. Yet no one has yet been able to account for this shift. No one has been able to fully explain why agriculture happened when it happened and where it happened. Unless, that is, someone just did.
My guest today is Dr. Andrea Matranga. Andrea is an economist at the University of Torino, in Italy, with a focus on economic history. In a new paper, he puts forward an ambitious, unifying theory of the rise of agriculture in our species. He argues that the key trigger was a spike in seasonality—with certain parts of the world, particularly parts of the northern hemisphere, suddenly experiencing warmer summers and colder winters. This led risk-averse humans in these places to start to store food and, eventually, to experiment with farming.
In this conversation, Andrea and I talk about how he developed his theory, in steps, over the course of almost 20 years. We consider the weaknesses of earlier explanations of agriculture, including explanations that focused on climate. We discuss how he wrangled vast historical datasets to test his theory. And we talk about some of the downstream effects that agriculture seems to have had. Along the way we touch on: salmon, wheat, taro, and milk; agriculture as a franchise model; Milankovitch Cycles; risk-aversion and consumption-smoothing; interloping in the debates of other disciplines; the possibility of a fig-based civilization; and how we inevitably project our own concerns onto the past.
Alright friends, I hope you enjoy this one. As I said at the top, the origins of agriculture is just one of those irresistible, perennial puzzles—one that cuts across the human sciences. And, I have to say, I find Andrea's solution to this puzzle quite compelling. I'll be curious to hear if you agree. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Andrea Matranga. Enjoy!
A transcript of this episode is available here.
Notes and links
8:00 – Various versions of the fable ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ are compiled here.
13:00 – One of the last remaining ziggurat complexes is Chogha Zanbil.
16:00 – The classic paper by anthropologist Alain Testart on food storage among hunter-gatherers.
19:30 – An influential study emphasizing that agriculture occurred after the Ice Age due to warming conditions. Other studies have posited that other features of climate may have led to the rise in agriculture (e.g., here).
21:00 – An (illustrated) explanation of Milankovitch Cycles.
27:00 – For Marshall Sahlins’ discussion of ‘The Original Affluent Society,’ see here.
32:00 – Jared Diamond’s popular article, ‘The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.’
33:00 – A paper criticizing the particularistic focus of many archaeological treatments of the origins of agriculture.
36:30 – Dr. Matranga used a variety of data sources to test his theory, including a dataset compiling dates of agricultural adoption.
42:00 – A report detailing evidence of agriculture in Kuk Swamp in New Guinea.
43:00 – The book Cuisine and Empire, by Rachel Laudan.
44:00 – A paper by Luigi Pascali and collaborators on the rise of states and the “appropriability” of cereals.
1:01:00 – A paper about the Natufian culture, which is considered to occupy an intermediate step on the road to agriculture.
Recommendations
What We Did to Father (republished as The Evolution Man), by Roy Lewis
The Living Fields, by Jack Harlan
Kalahari Hunter-Gatherers, by Richard Lee and Irven Devore
Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation to UCLA. It is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.
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