How our Biology Shaped World History | Lewis Dartnell | Talks at Google

How our Biology Shaped World History | Lewis Dartnell | Talks at Google Talks at Google 2.32M subscribers Subscribe 155 Share Download Clip Save 6,688 views Jun 18, 2023 #humanbiology #talksatgoogle Author and research scientist Lewis Dartnell joins us to discuss his book “Being Human: How our Biology Shaped World History,” an exploration of ​​how our biology has shaped our relationships, our societies, our economies and our wars, and how it continues to challenge and define our progress. Get the book here: https://goo.gle/3UjWiSG . For more information on Lewis, please visit http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb/ . Professor Lewis Dartnell is a research scientist, presenter and author based in London, UK. He graduated from Oxford University with a First Class degree in Biological Sciences, and completed his PhD at University College London in 2007. His research is in the field of astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He is also very active working as a scientific consultant for the media, having appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. He is the recipient of several awards for his science writing and outreach work and regularly freelances for newspapers and magazine articles. Moderated by Rob Leworthy. #talksatgoogle #humanbiology Transcript Follow along using the transcript. Show transcript Talks at Google 2.32M subscribers Videos About Twitter 8 Comments rongmaw lin Add a comment... @kateelderson 1 year ago Prof. Dartnell's book on ancient human life and how it was moulded by tectonic plates and ice ages, is packed with information. Every sentence is full of interest. For such a young person he writes easily and well, but how on earth he has time to write and teach is beyond me. He also sounds like a decent bloke! 4 Reply @vitadushageheimnis8557 1 year ago Good talk on how biology and geograohy and opium shaped our lives 😊 Reply @janklaas6885 1 year ago (edited) 📍43:16 2📍46:09 3📍30:59 1 Reply @skunktheshrink 1 year ago Undiscerning. Disappointing. (Sounds like a compilation; that doesn't add anything new to the conversation.) 1 Reply 2 replies @davidzapen8974 1 year ago #30KforBackPay #ZapenForPrez 🪙 1 Reply Transcript 0:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] 0:07 [APPLAUSE] LEWIS DARTNELL: Good afternoon, everyone. 0:13 Thank you all so very much for coming along. What I thought would be useful at the beginning is 0:19 to have a few ego slides-- talk a bit about myself, what my background is, and therefore what sort of angle, what 0:24 sort of perspective, I'm coming at with this new book, with "Being Human." And I'm a professor at the University of Westminster 0:32 just down the road. Cycled over. And the topic of my research, what my science, 0:37 is all about is in a relatively recent field of science called astrobiology. 0:43 It's all about looking into the possibility of there being life beyond the Earth. So I've come from a biology background. 0:49 And astrobiology is all about extending that understanding and knowledge of how life on Earth got started, what kind of conditions it can survive under, 0:57 and extending that to other places in our solar system and beyond in the galaxy. So I spend a lot of my time thinking 1:04 about our next-door neighbor planet, Mars, and whether Mars ever had the appropriate environment 1:09 for hardy microbial or bacteria-like lifeforms to get started. 1:15 And if they're there, if there are Martian bugs, what be the best way of trying to find them? 1:20 What sort of biosignatures or signs of life would we want to go look for? What sort of experimental instrument 1:26 do we want to strap to the front of our Mars Rover to try to find if there are Martian bugs there? 1:32 And alongside that research and working in the lab with my PhD students, I do a lot of this sort of stuff-- 1:38 telling people about the science that gets me all excited and I'm really passionate about, and writing books. 1:46 It's my first major book, which I did give a Google Talk on a few years ago. It was called "The Knowledge-- 1:52 How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch." And this was a thought experiment. 1:58 Let's say, just the sake of argument, there's been some kind of global catastrophe, a doomsday 2:04 event, an apocalypse. And the vast majority of the human race has died and civilization as we know it has collapsed. 2:11 But for whatever reason, this lovely room in the Google headquarters has served as some kind 2:16 of hardened bunker. And we have survived the end of the world when everything else has been destroyed. 2:23 We're a post-apocalyptic survival community. And we're going outside an hour's time, blinking 2:28 in the bright afternoon sunshine. See the smoking ruins of London, the rest 2:33 of the civilization around us, and asking ourselves, well, what next? What would you most need to know how to make, how to do, 2:43 to support yourselves when everything we take for granted on modern lives has just disappeared? 2:49 And could you go about rebooting civilization itself in the way you reboot a computer after it's crashed? 2:55 Could you accelerate that process of recovery? Could you leapfrog and find shortcuts through this network of science and technology 3:02 that built the modern world that we all live in? So effectively, what I'm doing with this book is could you do this for real? 3:07 Could you do Minecraft for real? Could you start in a blank, empty landscape and know what would be useful natural resources to go 3:14 and seek, to dig up, how to get metal out of rocks, how to use things in different combinations with each other 3:21 to make useful tools and technologies, and pull yourself back up by your own bootstraps? 3:28 So effectively, what I'm doing with "The Knowledge" is looking at the history of human ingenuity 3:34 and resourcefulness and inventiveness and seeing how the world that we take for granted was created through those. 3:41 And what I've done with my most recent book, with the previous book, "Origins," 3:46 is now pull up on that perspective even further and look at not how human ingenuity built 3:52 the world, the modern world, but how features of the planet itself we live on have had a huge defining 3:59 influence on the course of human history, so aspects of plate tectonics, and continental drift, 4:04 or the circulation of the atmosphere high above our heads, or where different natural resources can be found and metals, and how that's 4:11 had an influence on all the different societies and cultures and civilizations through history. 4:17 And with the latest book, the one that I'm here to talk to you about this afternoon, "Being Human," I'm now continuing 4:24 that same kind of investigative process, trying to break apart what we're familiar with in our world, 4:33 hold up a mirror to it, make commonplace, everyday things seem strange. 4:38 So I'll talk about human family in the course of this talk and show you why, actually, the family feels really familiar, 4:44 it feels really commonplace, but actually it's quite a strange thing when you think about it, and look at what the consequences 4:51 of that human family unit have been through history. What were the biological origins of it? 4:56 So I'm sort of dissecting us as a species, if you like, in this book. What is innate or intrinsic about humanity as an animal, 5:05 of our different aspects of our genetics or our anatomy or our psychology and cognitive biases, 5:12 and see how those have had an effect through history. So we'll start with Family, one of the first chapters 5:20 of the book. And what's been happening over our evolutionary lineage 5:26 from when we separated-- we diverged from the most recent common ancestor, chimpanzees, around 7 million years ago, through hominin type ancestors 5:35 like Australopithecus about 3 million years ago, and then up to our anatomically modern humans 5:42 around 300,000, maybe 200,000, years ago, there have been two major trends in our evolution. 5:50 We developed to be able to walk upright and we became more and more intelligent, 5:57 giving us the capabilities for tool use, problem solving, language, cooperation. 6:02 So we developed to be both bipedal and big brained at the same time. 6:08 And those two evolutionary adaptations are effectively at loggerheads with each other. 6:14 They're sort of mutually exclusive in that sense. Because if you look down here, this is the hole 6:21 that we have and other mammals have in their pelvis that allows the baby to pass through the birth 6:28 canal during birth. And the design constraint need for adapting 6:34 a pelvis to be able to walk upright constricts the hole, whereas you need to expand the hole 6:39 to fit bigger and bigger-brained, bigger and bigger-skulled babies through. So there's that fundamental disconnect with our evolution. 6:49 And the solution that evolution hit upon was to extend the developmental process of humans 6:55 long after they've passed through that hoop of birth. We have many, many years, after being a child 7:02 and then being an infant, when we're effectively entirely dependent on our parents 7:08 to support ourselves-- to carry us around, to feed us, to protect us. Compared to something like an antelope, 7:14 which, within just a matter of minutes, can spring up and walk alongside its mother. And so that places an enormous drain on the resources, 7:22 on the care that the mother alone is able to provide. So in our human evolution, we developed 7:30 by biparental investment-- not just the mother helping raise the child, but the father became 7:36 absolutely crucial in that process as well. But through that process of biparental investment, 7:46 you need to effectively have a mutual exclusivity contract. 7:52 You need to have a biological contract so that the mother, during pregnancy and in the early years of child rearing, 7:59 can be certain that the father, the man, is going to stick around and help with the assistance. 8:04 On the other hand, the father needs to be assured that the woman is committed to the relationship as well and he, in fact, is the father of that child and not 8:12 someone else. And the solution that ever evolution hit upon for that biological contract is pair bonding. 8:21 There is a hormonal bond that links mother and father that is mediated through the hormone 8:28 oxytocin. And other pair-bonded species such as birds also use oxytocin for that same biological bonding 8:36 between mother and father. Now, oxytocin plays several roles in mammalian behavior. 8:44 It triggers the contraction of the uterus muscles for the process of childbirth, it triggers milk secretion for lactation, 8:52 and also forms that strong bond between the mother and her baby. And in humans, we simply extended 8:59 that oxytocin bond to cover the mother and the father as well. 9:04 And there's another brain chemical that's also involved in that process, which is dopamine, 9:10 the sort of pleasure compound of the brain, which is also stimulated by psychoactive drugs like caffeine, nicotine, 9:18 opiates. So you could say quite fairly that love is an addictive drug. 9:24 It has a very, very similar neurochemistry behind it. And we experience that oxytocin pair bond as romantic love. 9:33 That's a human adaptation for binding mother and father together. 9:39 And marriage is no more than a cultural construct built upon that biological foundation of pair bonding. 9:47 And the pair bond between mother and father and between both parents and the child is the basis of the human family. 9:54 That sort of human family unit is an oddity within mammals. It's one of our adaptations supporting our big brains 10:04 and our intelligence. Now, with the emergence of civilization, 10:09 with agriculture and the ability to accumulate resources, so accumulate the grain that you've harvested 10:16 or the livestock that you're keeping, we came to not just inherit physical traits from 10:22 our parents-- so the color of our eyes-- but also things like wealth, resources, territory, 10:30 and the influence and status that those afford you. So inheritable power gave rise to monarchies and ruling 10:39 dynasties. And the succession of that absolute power, of that sovereign power, from one individual 10:46 to the next within the same family gives us that deep link between kinship, 10:52 between relationships, and kingship, between sovereign power. 10:57 So although reproduction, pair bonding, family, all fundamental biological aspects of us as a species, 11:07 and on top of that, we have social constructs like marriage and inheritance of power built on top of them, 11:14 within those ruling dynasties in history, those biological functions took on a whole new level 11:22 of significance. Marriage became not just the union between two individuals for the purpose of child rearing, 11:29 it came to represent the tying together of two powerful families. 11:34 And strategic marriages became used as a political tool to secure peace between kingdoms or to cement alliances. 11:43 And the children born of that union intertwine the bloodline of both of those dynasties. 11:50 And the child could then come to inherit both crowns-- come to rule both kingdoms. 11:56 So the human imperatives of pair bonding and reproduction became tools of statecraft at sort of a much higher level 12:06 within society. Now, we can think of many different notable royal 12:12 families from history-- of the Bourbons in France, the Tudors in England, in English history, the Ming dynasty, 12:18 the Tokugawas in Japan-- but by far the most influential ruling family, 12:25 the most influential dynasty in European history, were the Habsburgs. 12:31 And the Habsburgs started from relatively humble beginnings in the Duchy of Swabia, up here in what 12:38 is Northern Switzerland today. And they're able to maneuver themselves 12:43 to become the de facto inheritable crown of the Holy Roman Empire. 12:49 So they effectively absorbed bits of Germany and Central Europe. 12:55 And then, through a mastermind system of strategic political alliances, 13:02 marrying into other royal families across Europe, being masterminded by the Habsburg King Maximilian I-- 13:10 his own marriage was arranged to the heiress to the Duchy of Burgundy-- so they acquired bits of France 13:16 and the Low Countries up here. And he arranged for his son to marry the heiress 13:23 of both Castile and Aragon. And so their son then inherited the crowns of a unified Spain. 13:31 Maximilian also arranged for his grandson to marry Isabella of Portugal. And so within just 50 years, within just two generations 13:39 of this carefully plotted out system of dynastic marriages, 13:45 they were able to extend their dominion over, effectively, half of Europe. 13:51 And this was all almost completely bloodlessly, this through strategic marriage rather than invasion and war. 13:58 They had to protect their claims, sometimes, with armies. So the Habsburgs really were the grandmasters 14:05 of the Game of Thrones. And all of this period of history coincided, from the European perspective, 14:12 of the age of exploration and discovery and colonization and exploitation. 14:18 So the map we see in the bottom here is all of the territories around the world that the Habsburgs came to rule over, 14:24 although not necessarily all at the same point. So this includes the Spanish and Portuguese territories 14:31 and the Americas, around the African coastline, parts of India, the Spice Islands. 14:37 The Philippines were claimed by the explorer Magellan and named after Philip II. 14:44 That's where they got that got their names from. And you'll see on this map, even England, for a short period, 14:50 was within this Habsburg dominion when Philip II of Spain married Queen Mary I in 1554. 14:58 So this one family, single family, was able to spread its arms to encircle the entire world. 15:08 And in the early 16th century, the Habsburg King Charles V became the first ruler in human history 15:16 to reign over an empire upon which the sun never set. Long, long before the British Empire, 15:23 it was the Habsburg Empire that encircled the world. But this single dominion of the Habsburg Empire 15:30 was split after Charles V between his brother 15:36 and his son to create the Spanish Habsburg dynasty and the Central European branch of that family. 15:45 And it's within that Spanish Habsburg dynasty that this program of strategic royal marriages 15:54 had a particularly acute biological blowback. And the problem here is that with consanguinous marriages, 16:02 marriages between related families, related royal families, you not only reinforce political power, 16:09 but also this inbreeding over the generations creates a reduction in genetic variability, genetic diversity, 16:18 one generation going [? to ?] [? another. ?] It consolidates political power, but also defective genes. 16:25 And so the very means of their ascendency also held the seeds of the catastrophic collapse 16:32 of this hugely powerful ruling dynasty of the Spanish Habsburgs. 16:38 And out of the 11 marriages in the line of kings leading up to Charles II, nine of them were consanguinous, 16:45 were between closely related family members, between first cousins or between-- 16:51 even more unpalatable from our point of view in the modern world-- between uncle and niece. 17:00 And so the degree of inbreeding increased tenfold 17:05 over the two centuries leading up to Charles II. 17:10 Now, the most conspicuous aspect of that consanguinous 17:16 marriages, those inbreeding within the Spanish Habsburgs, was in their face. They developed a long humped nose with an overhanging tip, 17:27 a droopy, bulbous lower lip. So one of the Habsburg kings, Leopold I, 17:34 in the second half of the 17th century, was pretty unkindly nicknamed [? fotzenpeudel ?] 17:41 in Vienna, which you could translate as "twat face" or "vagina face." He was remarked upon by his sort of bulbous lower lip. 17:51 But even more notably in the Habsburg family was their sharply jutting out lower jaw, 17:58 to such an extent that the top and lower rows of teeth no longer even met each other. Chewing became very difficult. And this 18:04 is the so-called Habsburg jaw. So going from Maximilian I on the left, who 18:10 was the architect, the mastermind of that cleverly plotted system of dynastic marriages, 18:17 going to his great great great great grandson Charles II, 18:24 we see that increasingly pronounced Habsburg jaw which can be demonstrated to be due to that increasing 18:31 levels of inbreeding down the generations. But there are even more severe consequences for the Habsburgs 18:38 of that inbreeding. And the dynasty suffered increasingly from epilepsy and other mental health issues, 18:45 as well as strings of miscarriages and stillbirths. And so this royal family, one of the most 18:52 pampered and privileged families in the world, with access to the best nutrition the best health care at the time, 18:59 suffered an overall infant mortality rate of about 80%, 19:05 which is four times higher than a Spanish peasant family living at the same time. 19:13 And all of this came to a head with Charles II, who became known as El Hechizado, "the hexed" or "the cursed," 19:24 due to his many, many different severe afflictions which weren't due to just one particular mutation or one 19:30 genetic disorder, but an entire suite of genetic disorders all being concentrated in this last king of the Spanish 19:38 Habsburgs. And he was never fit to rule as king. 19:43 So first his mother and then his second wife ruled in his stead as regent, ruled on his behalf. 19:50 And the only thing that this dynasty, the only thing the kingdom need of him was that most fundamental 19:59 of human functions, which was to just reproduce, just produce an heir so at least we continue 20:06 into the next generation. But despite two marriages, he never fathered any children. 20:12 It seems quite clear that he was congenitally incapable of fathering a child. 20:18 So after generations of inbreeding and that mounting genetic burden, the entire dynasty effectively collapsed. 20:26 They strategically married themselves into extinction. And the crisis that precipitated in 1700 20:33 with the death of Charles II triggered the war of Spanish Succession. There was a scramble between the other European powers 20:40 to try to claim as much of their territory as it crumbled and fell apart with the collapse of the empire, and saw a sort of great shift 20:48 in the political landscape across Europe after that War of Spanish Succession. 20:55 And I wanted to move on to another story in the book. So I've basically cherrypicked what 21:01 I felt were the most interesting and fascinating and profound examples of these deep links 21:07 from fundamental aspects of us as a species, of our biology, and the historical consequences of them. 21:14 And one of my other favorite examples when I was researching and writing the book is this one about changing our minds, 21:21 how as an intelligent, self-aware, conscious species, we go out of our ways to try to alter our state of mind. 21:33 We exploit plants and then fungi to affect the very functioning 21:38 of our brain, to stimulate or intoxicate, to calm, 21:44 to invigorate, to alter our perception of the world. And indeed enjoying that process of getting out of our minds, 21:52 of changing how we perceive the world, is pretty much universal of human cultures 21:58 around the planet. And through widespread production as well as international trade, there are four substances 22:07 that came to be consumed widely around the world in order to change our minds, and in doing so, 22:14 came to change the course of world history, came to change the world as well. And these are alcohol, nicotine with tobacco, 22:23 caffeine through tea and coffee, and then morphine or other opiates harvested from opium. 22:31 And these are all psychoactive substances. Your cup of coffee in the morning is psychoactive. 22:37 It is modifying and altering how your brain functions, which is why you look for that sort of buzz with your first cup of coffee in the morning. 22:44 So all of these psychoactive substances affect our neurons in slightly different ways, 22:50 but they all trigger the same reward center in the center of our brain, which 22:58 is the mesolimbic pathway. And this core pathway right deep in our brains 23:05 runs from the top of the brainstem up to the base of the forebrain. 23:11 And it's a tract of nerve cells, a tract of neurons, which release that signaling compound, dopamine, 23:17 which I mentioned earlier. It's known as that the pleasure compound of the brain. And although that mesolimbic pathway, the neurons in it 23:25 constitute only a tiny percentage of all the nerve cells in the brain, something like 0.001%, 23:32 it is enormously important in motivating our behavior towards survival and reproduction-- so eating food, 23:42 quenching your thirst, having sex, those all trigger the mesolimbic pathway. 23:47 It's like a reward signal. It's lighting up a reward signal in the brain. And we perceive that as the sensation of pleasure. 23:56 So in order to tune our behavior for survival, our brain gets us to repeat actions 24:01 that triggered that pathway last time and avoid actions which suppressed it in the past. 24:07 So the pleasure center of the brain, the mesolimbic pathway, is also therefore deeply linked to the process 24:13 of how we learn-- how we learn what are useful things to be able to do. And therefore it is linked intrinsically to addiction 24:19 as well. So problems arose when humans discovered ways of lighting up that mesolimbic pathway by doing 24:29 things other than activities to help our survival and reproduction, other than things we would have been doing in our natural world, namely drugs, 24:37 namely psychoactive drugs. So alcohol caffeine, nicotine, opiates, they all effectively 24:45 short-circuit-- they all effectively hack that mesolimbic system by increasing the levels 24:50 of dopamine in that pathway. But as a flip side of that, they're also intrinsically addictive. 24:57 You're not just looking forward to your buzz of your first cup of coffee, you are dependent on that cup of coffee. 25:02 If you don't have it for a day or two, your mind is foggy and you probably get some kind of throbbing headache. That is an addiction to something relatively unserious. 25:14 But in the 18th century, the British demand for tea came to be supplied by the illicit trafficking 25:21 of another psychoactive drug. So the story about I'm about to tell 25:26 you is how a mind-altering, addictive substance was used as a weapon, as a political tool, by one empire 25:35 to subdue another. 25:41 So the demand for tea had been growing steadily through the 18th century with most of it coming from China. 25:48 But the problem was China just had no interest at all in anything the British Empire could 25:53 supply. So Britain was facing a colossal trade deficit. 25:59 And pretty much the only thing the Chinese valued was hard cash in the form of silver. 26:06 So we were hemorrhaging-- sort of late 1700s, Britain was hemorrhaging this precious metal across the East 26:13 until the East India Company realized that they could create a growing market for something that they 26:21 were able to source cheaply and easily in bulk. Because although the Chinese government would only 26:28 consider silver for official trade, the Chinese people were keen on something else, 26:34 which was opium. So opium is the latex, the fluid that sort of exudes out 26:41 of cuts you make in the immature seed pods of the poppy. And it contains morphine as well as 26:48 codeine which provides the pain relief from opium. But that opium, that morphine, also 26:56 triggers that mesolimbic pathway that we saw earlier. So it gives you a buzz of pleasure. 27:02 It was adopted to be used not only as a medicine but as a recreational drug. 27:07 And the East India Company started drug running opium into China where it was outlawed at the time. 27:16 So the East India Company couldn't just sail into port and unload it. They used middlemen of Indian merchants 27:23 to sail it into the estuary of the Pearl River, sell it for silver, and then smuggle it ashore to then 27:30 be distributed across China. So although it is illegal for nonmedicinal purposes in China 27:36 at the time, opium was legal and quite widespread in Britain this period in history. 27:44 It tended to be dissolved into alcohol to give laudanum, which you've probably heard of. 27:49 And that was freely available as a painkiller. It was even used in cough medicines for babies. 27:55 And lots of literary figures in this period of history were effectively high-functioning opium addicts, 28:00 laudanum addicts, so Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 28:06 But they all took their opium fix, their opium hit, by drinking it, by drinking the laudanum. 28:13 So that delivered to the relatively slow release of opiates into the bloodstream. 28:18 Whereas the Chinese, on the other hand, had taken to smoking opium. 28:23 It was a habit they probably picked up from the Dutch on the island of Taiwan where they're trading at the time. 28:30 And smoking opium gives you a much more rapid, a much more intense hit, and therefore so much more potent and a lot more 28:38 addictive. And East India Company realized they could exploit that addictive property. 28:44 Once you've gained a clientele, they will just keep coming back for more and more. It's a perfect trade item in that sense. 28:51 And so in this sense, the British addiction for tea was being traded for the Chinese addiction 28:57 to opium, which was a great deal more destructive to Chinese society than our drinking a cup of tea 29:03 in the morning. And the East India Company could effectively grow as much of that new currency as they needed. 29:09 They had huge plantations for it in India. And so this pipeline-- 29:15 pumping opium, forcing it into China-- expanded and expanded until, in 1806, just 29:21 after the Battle of Trafalgar, that trade deficit had been forcibly reversed. 29:27 And for the first time in history, silver now began flowing from China into Britain. 29:34 And the East India Company kept on pushing those opium imports into China. 29:40 So the opium imports trebled between 1810 and 1828, and then almost doubled again by 1832. 29:48 The British were wielding this addictive substance as a tool of imperial subjugation. 29:54 It was being used very deliberately as a tool or a weapon in that sense. 30:00 So the Chinese emperor, in 1839, effectively declared a war on drugs. He declared a war on the import of opium 30:06 and appointed a high-flying bureaucrat called Lin Zexu 30:11 to stamp out that opium trade. And he turned up at the main European trading 30:17 port in the province of Canton, demanded that the factories stop distributing the opium 30:25 and destroy it. And they laughed in his face and said no. No, we're not going to be doing this. 30:31 There's an enormous amount of money. So Lin Zexu nailed close all the doors to the factories, 30:36 to the warehouses, where the Europeans were at, cut off their food supply, and it became this sort of hugely heightened, hugely tense 30:45 situation. And it was the chief superintendent for trade for Britain, a guy called Charles [? Eliot, ?] 30:52 who was able to defuse this flash point, this situation, by persuading the traders, persuading the merchants, 30:59 to turn over their entire cache of opium by promising that the British government would reimburse them 31:05 for their costs, for their losses. And so this deal seemed to satisfy everyone. 31:11 The Chinese seize this huge drug cache. It was able to destroy that illegal contraband. 31:17 The traders got paid full price anyway, so they didn't really care. And the flashpoint [? immediately ?] 31:22 diffused and the port remained open to international trade. So everyone was happy apart from the British Prime Minister, 31:30 who's effectively just been landed with this huge bill to buy that enormously valuable enormous cache of opium which 31:37 had been seized and then destroyed. And the prime minister felt backed into a political corner. 31:43 And from his point of view, the only choice he could see open to himself was to force China to reimburse Britain for those destroyed goods. 31:52 And this basically set in motion what became a common feature of European imperialism, which 31:59 was gunboat diplomacy. The British sent over a task force of troops and ships 32:07 and started what became known as the First Opium War. They blockaded the mouth of the Pearl River. 32:14 They capture a number of ports along the coast. Chinese armies on land were torn apart 32:20 by the British rifles in their lack of military training and tactics. 32:28 And so the Chinese were forced to sue for peace. And in the humiliating Treaty of Nanking, 32:36 they had to not only pay for the opium that been destroyed in the first place, pay the British back the cost of coming over there with their army 32:43 to sort it all out, they had to cede Hong Kong, the Fragrant Harbor, to the British as a colony, 32:49 and open another five treaty ports along the coast, including Shanghai. 32:55 The British weren't satisfied with even that, and thought, right, we're going to have another go at this. And the Second Opium War then forced China 33:04 into fully legalizing opium. It was just an open trade of opium into China after that. 33:11 So by the time the Japanese invaded China in 1937, an estimated 10% of the entire Chinese population, some 40 33:21 million people, were addicted to opium from this forced trade by the British. 33:27 And it wasn't until 1949 and the Communist regime of China when Chairman Mao when it eventually got stamped out. 33:34 So China endured this opioid crisis for around 150 years, forced upon it by corporate greed, 33:43 by imperial coercion. And effectively it's a very, very similar situation 33:48 to what we're facing today again with opioids, more severely in the US than, perhaps, in Europe. 33:56 But again, that opioid crisis driven by companies such as Purdue Pharmaceuticals 34:04 for corporate greed, for trying to make more profits out of the drug they already produced by increasing the number of conditions 34:10 it was prescribed for, for increasing the availability of opioid-based painkillers. 34:15 So there's a story again here from something fundamental about our biology, how we seek ways of getting out 34:21 of our mind with different drugs, things like tea or coffee or opiates, and how that ended up 34:26 having a profound impact on the course of history. 34:32 The last quick story I wanted to tell you, just to wrap up in the last five minutes, is now looking at aspects of our psychology and cognitive 34:41 biases, so kind of glitches in our mental software, bugs in the operating system of our brains, if you like. 34:50 And I wanted to run a quickfire quiz. I wanted to introduce a bit of audience participation 34:56 at the end of the talk to help invigorate it because we haven't had coffee for 45 minutes. So I want you to read the questions I'm 35:03 going to put up on the slide. Don't bother shouting out an answer. Sort of answer in your own mind. But try to go with your gut. 35:09 Try to go with what your immediate reaction is to the question. Don't try to sort of outthink it. Don't try to think, ah, he's trying to catch us out, 35:15 so I'll go for the opposite one that I think. Be honest to yourself. We're trying to demonstrate these cognitive biases. 35:22 They affect all of us. I'm not trying to make you seem silly or foolish. Go with your gut reaction on what 35:28 you think the answer is to each of these three questions. And the first one is, do you think you're more likely to win the EuroMillions lottery jackpot 35:35 or be killed by a vending machine? Are you likely to win the lottery or be killed by a vending machine? 35:42 Decide what you think. The second question-- are there more words in the English language that start with the letter K 35:49 or that have K as the third letter in the word? And again, try not to try outthink it. 35:55 Try not to labor too much. Go with what your gut reaction is telling you. And then, thirdly, are you more likely to die in a car 36:02 accident or a plane crash? This probably is a-- I've save this one to last because it's probably 36:07 a bit more obvious where we're going with that. These are the right answers. More people are killed by vending machines 36:12 than win the lottery. This may come as a surprise to you. I haven't heard of a single person being jumped 36:18 by a vending machine down a dark alley, but I hear about people winning the lottery all the time. But this is an example of one of these cognitive biases called 36:26 the availability bias-- the availability heuristic. I more easily bring to my mind examples of lottery winners 36:32 than people being killed or injured by vending machines. By the way, this tends to be people either trying to get a free packet of crisps 36:38 or they've put in their money and it hasn't dispensed, or it's annoyingly got caught on one of the swirly spiral 36:44 things. So people rock it to try to release the product, and end up it toppling on them. 36:49 The second example is one of Daniel Kahneman's examples you might have come across in his book "Thinking Fast 36:54 and Slow." There are far more words that have k as the third letter 36:59 than begin with the letter K. They're just much harder for us to think about. It's easier to go with K-- 37:05 kangaroo, kick, whatever-- and come up with more examples quickly. So that availability bias again indicates to you 37:13 that there are more of them. And you're more likely to die in a car accident than a plane crash. Plane crashes are splashed across the news. 37:19 Lots of people will die at the same time. But you're far more likely to die, on average, in a car crash. 37:24 So these are examples of the availability bias or heuristic, which is just one example of an entire slew 37:32 of these cognitive glitches. Another one of them is the confirmation bias, 37:39 which historically, I argue in the book, Columbus suffered from. He went to his deathbed believing adamantly 37:47 that he had in fact reached the Orient, he'd reached China, and not some strange new place, despite the fact that all of the evidence or the indications 37:55 he came across in four separate voyages towards the west all told him that he wasn't where he thought he was. 38:02 He couldn't find any of the spices that he was looking for he took interpreters with him, and they didn't have a clue what language 38:08 was being spoken by the peoples they encountered. No one knew of this great civilization of China. 38:13 No one ever heard of the Khan that Marco Polo had talked about. So he simply grasped at straws. 38:21 He clung on to any indication that he was right, and simply discounted or ignored all the 38:27 greater amounts of counterindicative evidence, which is this confirmation bias. 38:34 We cling to our preexisting belief and simply ignore anything else that would 38:39 force us to reassess that. 200 years later, it was exactly that same confirmation bias 38:46 that was behind the dodgy dossier building the argument for weapons of mass destruction that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. 38:54 And just two years later, there was a report sent back to the president by the committee set up 38:59 to investigate what had gone so catastrophically wrong. There were no weapons of mass destruction there. They weren't even trying. 39:05 And a very telling quote from that report is that "when confronted with evidence that indicated Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, 39:13 analysts tended to discount such information rather than weighing the evidence independently. Analysts accepted information that fit the prevailing theory 39:20 and rejected information that contradicted it." That's basically a textbook definition 39:26 of what we mean by this glitch in our psychology. And it's this confirmation bias as well as 39:32 other cognitive biases that are going to affect the future that we can create for ourselves as 39:38 well, particularly with big challenges, 39:43 big problems that lie further in our future than the sort of decisions we make on an everyday basis in our lives such as climate change. 39:51 We all know the kind of sacrifices we need to be making to our lives in terms of eating less meat, not flying off in an airplane 39:58 to holiday for a bit of sun, not driving around in a gas-guzzling car, but maybe cycle 40:04 or walk or take public transport. The problem is those are all sacrifices to our lifestyle in the short term for benefits or advantages 40:12 that sort of lie over the horizon. They're slightly more indeterminate. So these cognitive biases affected us through history, 40:19 and they're going to determine, to a certain extent, how we can create the future for ourselves. 40:26 Those are the three examples that I wanted to talk to you about. There's a slide of clickbait here. 40:32 There are other stories that I found fascinating when I was researching and writing this book, "Being Human," 40:38 such as how a mutation in Queen Victoria's DNA contributed to the Russian Revolution 100 years later, 40:45 how tropical diseases on the other side of the world helped bring about the union between England and Scotland, 40:52 how our inability to make a particular chemical, a particular compound called ascorbate, absolutely dominated the [? age ?] [? of ?] [? sale ?] 40:59 for hundreds of years and indirectly led to the rise of the mafia. This is the story of vitamin C and scurvy. 41:06 And the surprising outcome is that our solution to vitamin C-- growing lots of lime trees on the island of Sicily-- 41:15 was one of the drivers of the rise of organized crime that became the mafia. It's one of these sort of unintended consequences 41:21 of history. Again, back through that chain of cause and effect to something fundamental about ourselves and our genetics. 41:28 So thank you ever so much, everyone, for-- well, firstly for coming along; secondly, for not leaving halfway through. 41:34 I hope you found it interesting. I did overtalk by a couple of minutes. [INAUDIBLE] has been giving me the eagle eyes 41:41 from the side there. But we do still have some time for questions. If anyone has got anything you want to ask about this book 41:46 about "Being Human," about how you can reboot civilization after apocalypse, about how we can search for life on other planets, I consider any of that fair game 41:53 if you want to ask about any of the topics I sort of alluded to through the course of this talk. But thanks again, [INAUDIBLE]. 42:00 Cheers. [APPLAUSE] 42:05 AUDIENCE: Hey, Lewis. Thank you for the talk. So based on your research, what would you 42:11 say are the reasons for humans wanting to go outside of their brains? Or even in this world, I think, currently, we 42:18 see different forms of humans wanting to go outside of their brains. Like maybe, in the past, it used to be opiate. I mean, it's still the case right now as well. 42:25 But any reasons from a biological perspective or from an anthropological perspective 42:31 due to which humans want to escape their minds all the time? LEWIS DARTNELL: Yeah, it's a great question. I'll repeat in case you didn't hear it. 42:36 It was basically, why might it be that humans enjoy getting out of their-- changing their minds, getting out of their brains, so much? 42:42 And I wonder if it's a great question but with almost a dissatisfying answer. Because it's fun. 42:48 Because we enjoy it. Because it does trigger that means the mesolimbic pathway. We do get that buzz of pleasure. 42:53 There are, of course, anthropological aspects as well. I didn't really mention the use of hallucinogens, 43:01 but they are another very important class of psychoactive compounds which have been used by many, many cultures around the world 43:07 to have out-of-body experiences, to induce visions, to commune with the spirits and gods, which is a perfectly 43:14 valid reason to take something like psilocybin mushrooms or peyote was another quite commonly used hallucinogen 43:23 in the Americas. So there are many different ways that we choose to change how our mind works, to basically get out 43:30 of the drudgery of everyday life and how that, let's say, little buzz of pleasure. 43:36 AUDIENCE: Are there like many examples of other species who also find search for such shortcuts or pleasure? 43:43 Or they don't have time for that? LEWIS DARTNELL: There's an interesting example but also a pretty unpleasant example that I talk about in the book where 43:51 you can trigger the mesolimbic pathway by eating, having sex, or by having a cup of tea, or licking on some opium poppies, 43:59 but you could also, if you want to experiment, slide an electrode through your skull, into your brain, and just tickle the mesolimbic pathway 44:06 with electrical impulses. You can electrically trigger the brain. We don't do that to people because you'd never 44:12 get ethical approval, but those sort of experiments were done a few decades ago on lab rats. 44:18 And the lab rats had control of that stimulation in the mesolimbic pathway with a button. 44:24 And they basically just pushed it and pushed it and pushed it and pushed it and pushed it. And they stopped drinking, and they stopped eating, 44:30 and they stopped moving away from the button. And they just pushed it and they pushed it and they pushed it until they basically keeled over from exhaustion and died. 44:35 Like it is so fundamental to motivating and driving our behavior with that system, that if you 44:41 find a way to short circuit and hack it, it's impossible to do anything else. And this is why addictions are called diseases. 44:49 Like the addict who feels compelled to smash a car window to grab a wallet they can see on the dashboard 44:55 or something is suffering from a disease, they're suffering from the addiction, they're not in control of their actions, 45:01 to avoid those withdrawal effects and sort of rebalance the system once they 45:06 have developed that addiction. So not just the electrode experiments, 45:12 but some of these other psychoactive compounds animals will preferentially choose given the choice 45:18 as well. So this is a very ancient pathway in our brains. 45:23 Other mammal species have a very similar mesolimbic pathway also mediated by dopamine, and if not dopamine, then very, 45:31 very similar other compounds, other molecules, are used across the animal kingdom. This is basically a universal way that animals invented. 45:39 Animals have evolved to tune their behavior to help their survival to learn what is a good thing to do 45:46 and what to avoid doing. AUDIENCE: You've written a book about how the Earth shaped us and a book about how 45:53 our biology shaped us. So which of those had a larger influencing factor on humanity, 46:01 if that's not too big of a question? LEWIS DARTNELL: No, it is a solid question. And I think the first thing to point out 46:06 is "Origins" talked about planetary influences on human history, this one is talking about aspects of our biology on human history. 46:14 And you always want to be careful of not committing sort of geographical determinism or biological determinism. 46:21 So I can argue, as I do in "Origins," for example, that a particular band of rocks in the American Southern states 46:29 correlates with voting behavior. I'm not saying, of course, that people are compelled to vote in a particular way 46:34 because the rocks beneath their feet. It's not deterministic. But you also don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater 46:41 and pretend that there are no influences of geography or where resources are found or aspects of our biology 46:49 that are important in history. Of course things like socioeconomic factors or trade 46:57 factors or political factors, of course, are important. What I'm trying to do with these two books is just widen that perspective a little bit 47:03 and say, well, let's look at the geographical factors as well. Let's look at the biological factors. And then with "Knowledge," I was looking at sort of factors 47:10 to do with our inventions and contingencies in invention and technology. 47:15 AUDIENCE: Hi, Lewis. Is there anything about our biology which directed us to develop what 47:21 we would call the nuclear family compared to other familial structures? So thinking about another mammal, like elephants, 47:28 obviously, have quite successful matriarchal family structures that are very different from ours. 47:34 Just wondering if you have any thoughts on that. LEWIS DARTNELL: Yeah, the human family I described is not unique to humans. 47:40 It is something of an anomaly. We are slightly weird in doing it. There are other examples in the animal kingdom. There are other examples of pair bonding animals, 47:47 like a lot of birds, like I talked about. But pair bonding is quite rare within mammals. 47:53 And the nuclear family-- two parents, two or three kids-- is kind of an oddity of modern industrialized Western 48:02 civilization. And many cultures around the world lived in much larger family groups with sort of wider kin, 48:08 so grandparents living with their children and grandchildren, aunts and uncles playing very important roles in each other's lives. 48:15 So although I'm not trying to say that that sort of "two parents, two or three children" nuclear family is biologically determined, what I'm saying 48:24 is that bond between the parents and the bond from parents to the children is biologically-- is mediated by that oxytocin hormonal bond which 48:33 forms the core of these wider networks of kin and relatives and relationships. 48:40 AUDIENCE: What's one of the stories that you had to drop? The word count is always over. 48:46 What had to go? LEWIS DARTNELL: There were a couple of things which I thought was a great story 48:51 but I couldn't convince myself was true or was-- which is always frustrating when you've got a great story-- 48:57 or I couldn't find enough evidence in the literature to sort of back it up. And I think, as a science writer-- 49:02 or anyone-- you've got to be really careful about allowing something to slip through just because you like it. So a couple of examples, the two middle chapters in the book 49:11 deal with diseases, so endemic disease, and then also pandemic disease and plagues, and the effects 49:17 that they've had on history. And some examples in that which I sort of read about [INAUDIBLE] think, oh, that sounds neat. 49:22 That kind of makes sense. But is it true? And I had to make the call on some of those, and going, I can't put it in. 49:30 I'll just allude to it in talks when it's not being recorded. AUDIENCE: So my question is, in many of the stories you shared-- 49:35 which are really great-- there is the element of, I think, a pursuit of power or the addiction to power, such as in the Iraq War or the Opium 49:44 War. So do you think it's becoming or it's already part of our biology, or at least for a subset 49:49 individuals of humans? LEWIS DARTNELL: Yeah, again, it's interesting when you try to compare 49:55 humans to our most closely related primate relatives, so the bonobos or the chimpanzees, and trying 50:02 to work out, are humans intrinsically warlike, intrinsically aggressive, intrinsically dominant, or intrinsically more egalitarian? 50:10 It's a complex and muddied issue. What does seem to be the case, as I talk about in the first chapter of the book, 50:16 when I'm talking about the software of civilization, what had to happen in human evolution to enable us to live 50:23 in large peaceful societies and therefore develop civilization and live in cities in the first place, 50:28 it seems that there was a clear trend towards decreasing certain kinds of aggression and violence in our evolutionary lineage. 50:35 But it persists. People do still seek dominance. 50:40 They seek positions of power. They seek ways of amassing resources, and therefore wealth, and therefore influence. 50:47 And clearly, that became easier with civilization and cities. 50:53 Particularly when someone who starts off with some more resources can buy muscle, they can give some of their grain 50:59 to someone else to put on some armor and go fight in their army for them, it becomes a sort of positive feedback process. 51:05 Social hierarchies and dominance hierarchies 51:10 are sort of baked in that sense. AUDIENCE: A bit of follow-up on that, but is there anything in our biology 51:17 that gives you hope for the advancement of that egalitarian aspect? So we have this shortcut in the brain. 51:24 We can as well all click the button. We are all already advanced enough 51:30 to be able to just click the button. What is there that gives you hope that we will not end up 51:36 all just clicking the buttons? LEWIS DARTNELL: Yeah, again, I mean, I wouldn't want to claim that we are slaves to our biology. 51:42 We do have huge levels of intelligence, self-awareness, we can make our own decisions. 51:50 Some of the things with cognitive biases I talked about sway those decisions that we make. Sometimes we're not always making 51:56 the most rational decisions for certain definitions of rationality. But there is a huge research effort 52:02 at the moment within those cognitive biases of how to de-bias ourselves. What is the best way of setting up a committee structure 52:09 or framing a discussion so that you don't get swayed by whoever speaks first or who happens to be the most 52:16 eloquent or dominant speaker? How can you minimize the effects of those cognitive biases? 52:24 Although that ends up being quite hard, because even if you are aware of the existence of a bias, it can still sort of trap you in it. 52:30 You can still be sort of swayed by it subconsciously. So I'm not saying we're slaves to our biology. Advances are being made. 52:36 I give an example in one of the later chapters about the Good Friday Agreement, and how that was successful in securing 52:42 peace in Northern Ireland because they successfully got over some of those cognitive biases, 52:48 and specifically loss aversion. So there are some good examples of that being successfully achieved. 52:55 SPEAKER 1: With that, we will say thank you very much to Lewis Dartnell. LEWIS DARTNELL: Thank you, everyone. Cheers. [APPLAUSE] 53:01 53:07 [MUSIC PLAYING]