A time-worn joke about humans is that we’re nothing more than water’s way of getting from one place to another. What if living things in general began as just another of nature’s ways of moving energy from one place to another? (Or more precisely, of minimizing energy differences by increasing energy flows from one part of their environment to another.) This article fromPhysOrg.com describes the work of a father-son team of Finnish scientists whose investigations into why life began blur the line between animate and inanimate matter.

Their recent paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology describes living processes as being simply one of the mechanisms by which entropy increases. Seen from a thermodynamic point of view, all the cool complexity that characterizes the natural world and that fascinates us is perhaps simply a byproduct, but, as with so many human behavioral and emotional phenomena, it’s quite a fascinating by-product. [Annila, Arto and Annila, Erkki, Why Did Life Emerge?, International Journal of Astrobiology 7 (3 & 4):293–300 (2008), available from arxiv.org]

While you’re pondering that, consider also some fascinating new bits of information about the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. First, we have news from Hubble about the discovery of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a roughly Jupiter-sized planet orbiting another star (a planet where methane and water vapor have already been identified in the atmosphere). Although this particular planet is too hot to support life, this finding is an encouraging indicator of our growing ability to detect specific life-related molecules in the atmospheres of distant planets.

And, in a striking observational feat, a group of astronomers has been able to measure the size of an extrasolar planet using an extremely sensitive new detector. The news is summarized in this ScienceDaily article; the paper is available from arXiv.org. The camera, which can detect minute changes in the brightness of a star, imaged the transit of the planet across the star’s surface (like what we saw with the sun and Venus in 2004). From the resulting (tiny) drop in the star’s brightness as the planet progressed across its surface, the astronomers were able to determine the planet’s size, finding that it is smaller than previously estimated and in fact is one of the denser extrasolar planets found so far. Again, this new capability bodes well for the future.

One possible way to unify a big-history narrative is to use the theme of growing complexity in the universe. Stuart Kauffman studies complexity and self-organization; in particular, he believes that self-organization might play an important role in evolution, along with natural selection. He has recently written a book, Reinventing the Sacred, about his approach to moving away from a purely reductionist science and toward a science infused with meaning and even a sense of the sacred (a totally naturalistic sense, not a belief in a supernatural being). Kauffman talked about the book in an interview with Salon and has written an essay for Edge.org that’s excerpted from the book.

In the Salon interview, Kauffman says that having a shared sense of the sacred in nature might give the emerging global culture something to converge on (to counteract what he describes as a natural retreat into fundamentalism on the part of some people). This reminded me a bit of what David Christian said about a big-history narrative serving as a secular creation story. However, while what Christian said really resonated for me, Kauffman takes the idea much further, into places I’m not entirely comfortable with. For one thing, Christian noted that he wanted to draw a line between religion and what he was talking about with regard to big history, whereas Kauffman seems to be blurring that sort of line. (And I really don’t know what to think about his idea, mentioned in passing in the Salon interview, that there might be some connection between quantum physics and consciousness.) Still, he makes some good points and some provocative points, and I think the book will definitely be worth reading. (Anyone already read it and have any comments on it?)

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, one of the characters speaks of how “There must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry,” referring to a rhythm of alternating contraction and expansion of the attention, from a focus on details to a broader view of the whole horizon of knowledge. Last week David Christian spoke at IU on the idea of big history, an expansion in our view of history for which the time might well be ripe. It was an inspiring talk for a number of reasons. I like the big picture of how we got to be here and how things got to be this way, for one thing; also, the educational possibilities for a big-history approach are in my opinion very exciting.

Christian described the reasons behind the narrowing of history’s scope in the late nineteenth century. With science’s rise in prestige, other disciplines wanted to be equally rigorous and precise. In history, this meant focusing on areas where you could say something well-supported by documentary evidence; periods of time for which there was no written record (e.g., the revealingly named “pre-history”) had to drop out of the picture to one degree or another.

Christian likened the state of knowledge after this to an archipelago with only isolated islands above water, and the connecting land submerged. He’s hopeful that some of the islands are being reconnected; I think science is growing more cross-disciplinary these days, and some efforts are being made to link, e.g., neuroscience and literary studies, but by and large the gap between C.P. Snow’s two cultures, the sciences and the humanities, is still there.

Big history may offer a way to bridge that gap, and it’s possible now in a way it wasn’t before because history can be done rigorously across different time scales well outside that of written human history. Thanks to what Christian terms the chronometric revolution, we have reliable dates for events across much vaster stretches of time; big history as he proposes wouldn’t have been possible 100 or maybe even 50 years ago. (He mentioned how he’s been teaching a course in big history for a number of years and has watched astronomers narrow down the date for the Big Bang, the starting point for the timeline. That reminded me that when I first started studying astronomy in the 1980s, our estimates of the age of the universe were much less precise. It’s been a phenomenal few decades to be following astronomy.)

One possible unifying thread in the study of all history, from the Big Bang to yesterday, is the rise of complexity. Christian mentioned the work of Eric Chaisson, an astronomer who also studies and writes about complexity (he has a controversial but intriguing theory that complexity can be quantified using a parameter called the free energy rate density). For awhile I’ve had the topic of complexity on my radar as something I need to learn more about, but so far I haven’t read much. We can think of complexity in terms of five characteristics:

• Multiple diverse, varied components
• Linking mechanisms that connect the components in precise patterns
• New energy flows
• New emergent properties (new rules, new types of entities)
• Death

Seeing death on that list might be something of a surprise, but it makes sense; complex structures eventually break down. It’s another angle from which to look at death, a variant of sorts on Carl Sagan’s description of evolution as relying on time and death. For more about the role of complexity in the history of the universe, see Christian’s Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History.

The most interesting implications lie in the three possible agendas for applying big history that Christian described: in research, in teaching, and in global/political understanding. It seems to me that the last two are closely linked. Educationally, big history offers a coherent, unified narrative that helps students at all levels understand their place in the world, both in space and time. He argued that most if not all human communities have some kind of creation story, and suggested that perhaps big history could offer that kind of narrative for a secular age, satisfying what might be a deeply ingrained human need to understand the context for our individual lives.

Even more exciting is the potential to teach a story of human history, rather than the history of particular countries or regions. A big-history narrative makes clear the unity of humankind; Christian speculated about whether big history might be able to raise the kinds of emotions that national histories do, helping people to see the planet as a unified whole rather than a collection of tribes. He jokingly said that having a hostile alien appear would be a boon, because it would give us a common external enemy to rally against and define ourselves in opposition to. But, more seriously, he suggested that perhaps global climate change might offer the same kind of challenge. I think he’s probably right about that, and I hope we rise to the challenge. I can’t think of anything more thrilling than seeing humanity growing into a narrative of itself that includes a description of its setting that’s as full as possible in time and space, and that casts the story in terms of our whole species, set in a web of interdependencies with other species and with the rest of the planet. And if we share a reasonably accurate view of the story so far, maybe we can do a better job of figuring out where the story should go.

Two recent news stories give us an evocative look back at human societies in Turkey thousands of years ago. This article from Smithsonian.com describes the ongoing excavation of a site in Turkey called Gobekli Tepe. The site, which features a series of stone circles made of megaliths erected around 11,000 years ago (roughly 6,000 years before Stonehenge!), may be one of the first places on earth that humans thought of and treated as holy. Intriguing features of the site include the fact that there’s no evidence so far that anyone lived there, and it looks like the mound upon which it rests was built by human effort. Some of the pillars are carved with images of living things that you’d generally want to avoid: scorpions, lions, vultures.

There’s some speculation that we may need to rethink our ideas of the way civilization developed, based on findings about this place. Rather than a group of people learning to farm and slowly acquiring the wealth that served as the basis of cultural treasures such as temples, maybe people first began huge projects like this one, and the pressure to feed and otherwise support those working on them accelerated the development of farming and all the things that came with it.

Was it a cemetery, maybe? Were all the scary things kept together there, where people perhaps visited but never lived? We don’t know, and may never know. It’s an enigmatic site; it was built before the written record begins, and perhaps the most memorable moment in the Smithsonian story is when the author reflects on the impossibility of reaching back into the minds of its creators and understanding their motivation. I’ve long been impressed by the vast amounts of energy that societies will pour into efforts to grapple with concepts like death and eternity (e.g., the work that went into providing for dead Egyptian rulers in a hypothetical afterlife). This is perhaps one of the more staggering examples.

The other story is much more recent; the 8th century BCE seems almost recent by comparison. This press release on EurekAlert describes an Iron Age stone memorial inscribed with both words and pictures that tell us a lot more about what was going on in the mind of its creator. The inscription reveals a fascinating intersection of Semitic and Indo-European beliefs at the time, including the suggestion that the stone memorial was seen as a resting place for the soul of the man it commemorated.

Recent research suggests that listening to music that makes you happy may be good cardiovascular hygiene, with a positive effect on not only mood but also the endothelium, the lining of the blood vessels. Following up on an earlier study that found that laughter was linked to blood vessel dilation (a cardiovascular plus), researchers examined the effects of listening to various types of music. They found that when participants listened to music that they said made them feel joyful, their brachial arteries increased in diameter, indicating better blood flow. Music that made the participants feel anxious had a milder effect in the opposite direction, slightly constricting the artery.

The effects of funny videos and audiotapes designed to encourage relaxation were also examined; the former was also linked to blood vessel dilation, although effect was not as big as in the case of the joyful music. The relaxation tapes had no statistically significant effect. I was curious about the tapes, because over the years I’ve listened to so many relaxation tapes when I was stressed out that by now, by association, they tend to give me the heebie-jeebies.

The study looked at ten people; many of them chose country music as their “joyful” music and heavy metal for the “anxious” music. There’s obviously a whole lot more to be explored in terms of genres and the effects of personal history and experience, but this is a very interesting link between the mind and body. (Coincidentally, I happened to be listening to the jubilant final movement of Brahms’s first symphony as I wrote this, which certainly raised my spirits and I hope did my heart good.) The research is described in this press release on EurekAlert and was presented today at the American Heart Association’s meeting as Positive Emotions and the Endothelium: Does Joyful Music Improve Vascular Health?

[Postscript, December 29, 2023: Sigh. I rather regret the time I spent considering pleasurable activities in terms of their beneficial effects on human health. The point of pleasurable activities is to enjoy them.]

I’ve always liked an epitaph supposedly used by Epicureans in ancient Greece: “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not mind.” It expresses a benign resignation toward the inevitability of death as part of the natural cycle. And although it’s written in the form of a statement by a dead person, the dead cannot really express themselves thus, even if that’s how they felt about it when they were alive.

This article from Scientific American Mind proposes that the human tendency to believe in an afterlife is based on a particular cognitive illusion. Even if you believe that death is truly the end of the road, it’s impossible to imagine ourselves not being here and so to experience even in imagination what death will be like. In other words, we have to be here to think about not being here, which can be a major source of confusion for a brain trying to understand its own death. Obviously it’s possible to hold what the article describes as extinctivist beliefs about death truly being the end, but even extinctivists can have a hard time conceptualizing what that means for themselves.

From this viewpoint, it’s probably not existential terror that first led humans to think that there was an afterlife, but an innate trick of consciousness. The article describes various studies that have examined people’s statements about the feelings, thoughts, and intentions of the dead. In particular, some scientists have looked at what children have to say on the subject, and have found that younger children are more likely than older children to assume some kind of psychological continuity in the dead. Even when they’re aware that death will eliminate the need for food or sleep, they talk as if the dead will still be able to feel or think.

The fact that this tendency is weaker in older children indicates that it’s not (or at least not entirely) imposed by culture. Interestingly, however, language and religious training can influence the degree to which older children ascribe mental states to the dead: clinical or scientific language and secular schooling both seem to counteract the mental habit of assuming ongoing mental activity after death.

The article also mentions the concept of person permanence, which means the recognition that just because someone is out of sight doesn’t mean he or she has stopped existing. We learn this when we’re very young and, as the author of the article suggests, perhaps we can’t easily unlearn it when we’re thinking about people we know who have died, as opposed to people we know who are alive but absent. This may be another factor contributing to the intuitive feeling that maybe the dead aren’t really gone.

And in some sense, they do live on, in our memories and imaginations, and in that sense, they’re always here. Not in the way you’d like them to be, but still, for people you were close to, parts of them live on in you. Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop explores this idea in detail. One of my favorite Ashleigh Brilliant cartoons has the caption “Officially, we begin at birth, and end at death, but it’s really much more complicated than that.” I don’t know exactly how Brilliant meant it, but even an extinctivist like me can find some truth in that.

I’ve run across several things lately about the psychology and even the physiology of people’s political beliefs. For instance, this press release from EurekAlert describes some work that studied 46 adults with strong political views and examined their political beliefs as well as their physiological responses to disturbing images and unexpected loud sounds. The team of US researchers found a notable difference between those who reacted more strongly to the images and those who did not. (The paper, Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits, was published in the September 19, 2008, issue of Science.) To quote from the abstract: “. . . individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War.”

The abstract goes on to describe the policies favored by the former as protective of the existing social order. I find the concept of protectiveness interesting in this context, because gun control and pacifism can also be considered protective, but of individual lives and well-being rather than of the social order. Another press release, this one from the National Science Foundation, goes into a little more detail, and describes the strong reactors as believing that the biggest threat to the well-being of those they care about is other people, while the other group sees more risk in technology or inanimate objects (like guns). This was a small study, and obviously there’s a lot more to political views than just your physiology (remember the old joke about how a conservative is just a liberal who’s been mugged?), but this is a very interesting starting point.

Another study, this one by two psychologists at Northwestern, looked at the political beliefs of 128 church-attending Christians. The researchers asked the church-goers what life would be like if there were no god. The politically conservative among them were more likely to envision a world of chaos, where social institutions break down due to uncontrolled human behavior. The politically liberal, on the other hand, thought the world would be empty, barren, and lacking in deep emotional experiences. The disparity suggests that the two groups are motivated by a different set of fears and hopes. This press release from EurekAlert has more information. The article, What if there were no God? Politically conservative and liberal Christians imagine their lives without faith, is in press in the Journal of Research in Personality.

“Every day is better than the one before it,” sang Al Stewart in a bouncy, optimistic song about Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic. Thinking that things will keep getting better can be a motivator, but life is more of an up-and-down affair than a series of constant improvements. According to a recent study, older people realize that and have fewer illusions about possible future happiness (and also more accurate recall of past mindsets).

Researchers surveyed nearly 4,000 adults in the US ranging in age from 24 to 74 in 1995–1996, and then again nine years later. They asked about current levels of satisfaction with life and projections for the future. The overall trend was that younger people (under 65) appeared to see life as a sort of a progression, with the present better than the past and the future projected to be even better yet. On the other hand, those over 65 saw the past and the present as being about equally satisfactory, and they did not anticipate as much satisfaction in the future. The younger people were not as accurate in projecting their future state of mind (they thought they’d be more satisfied than they were).

What’s particularly interesting is that across all the age groups, having realistic views of the past and future was linked to “the most adaptive functioning across a broad array of variables”. One of the things I enjoy about getting older is the perspective that you get from having a wider range of experiences to draw on as you face new situations (this is especially valuable for difficult new situations). I’m 47 now, so maybe I can look forward to greater self-awareness and a more realistic grasp of life’s possibilities and limitations by the time I hit 65. (Sounds like I just need to keep my expectations reasonable.) This press release from EurekAlert provides more details, and the paper itself, which will appear in the September 2008 issue of Psychological Science, is Realism and Illusion in Americans’ Temporal Views of Their Life Satisfaction: Age Differences in Reconstructing the Past and Anticipating the Future, by Margie E. Lachman, Christina Röcke, Christopher Rosnick, and Carol D. Ryff.