Monthly Archives: April 2020

Forget the simple out-of-Africa idea of how humans evolved. A huge array of fossils and genome studies has completely rewritten the story of how we came into being.

By Graham Lawton

The Natural History Museum/Alamy

JEBEL IRHOUD, Morocco, 1961. In a barium mine in the foothills of the Atlas mountains, a miner makes a ghoulish discovery: a near-complete human skull embedded in the sediment. Archaeologists called in to investigate find that the skull is old, but not that old. It is filed away and largely forgotten.

Hinxton, UK, 2019. Robert Foley, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Cambridge, is giving the opening address at a three-day conference on human evolution. What Im pretty sure of is that, by the end of the first day, something like 20 per cent of what I say will be wrong, he says to the hall. By the end of the second day, something like 50 per cent will be wrong, and at the end of the conference, Im hoping that something I said at the beginning still holds true.

Until recently, the story of our origins was thought to be settled: Homo sapiens evolved in eastern Africa about 150,000 years ago, became capable of modern behaviour some 60,000 years ago and then swept out of Africa to colonise the world, completely replacing any archaic humans they encountered. But new fossils, tools and analyses of ancient and modern genomes are tearing apart that neat tale. The Jebel Irhoud skull has turned out to be a key to a new, slowly emerging paradigm. With the dust yet fully to settle, the question now is how many, if any, of our old assumptions still hold. Should we be thinking of a completely

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Human evolution: The astounding new story of the origin of our species - New Scientist

Editors note: We have received some queries as to whether this post is true or a gag. While liberally mixing in truth (see the hyperlinks), it is indeed an April Fools Day joke!

The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) was founded in 1976 by a prominent American atheist and abortion advocate. As the foundations website explains: The history of Western civilization shows us that most social and moral progress has been brought about by persons free from religion.

The website also features a quote from Charles Darwins unabridged autobiography: I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true this is a damnable doctrine. Appropriately, FFRF has in the past honored prominent Darwinists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Lawrence Krauss (among others) with its prestigious Emperor Has No Clothes award.

Although FFRF devotes most of its energy to stamping out public displays of Christianity, it has also opposed the teaching of intelligent design (ID). According to ID, it is possible to infer from evidence in nature that some features of the world, including some features of living things, result from intelligence rather than unguided natural processes. Since ID contradicts Darwins core (and atheism-friendly) belief that evolution was unguided, FFRF has long regarded ID as a form of religious creationism. As such, FFRF argues that ID cannot legally be taught in publicly funded institutions.

The crowning achievement in FFRFs crusade against ID was its 2013 takedown of Professor Eric Hedin (pronounced he-DEEN) at Ball State University (BSU) in Indiana. Evolutionary biologist and FFRF Honorary Board member Jerry Coyne led the charge. Up until 2013, BSU physics professor Eric Hedin had taught an interdisciplinary honors elective that emphasized the relationships of the sciences to human concerns and society. It explored differing viewpoints on a number of issues, including intelligent design, and the assigned readings included critics as well as defenders of ID. Hedin had prepared the class in accordance with university regulations through the usual processes.

FFRF wrote a letter to BSU complaining that Hedin was engaged in religious proselytizing. BSU ended up cancelling Hedins course.

The following September, University of Washington evolutionary biologist David Barash published a piece in the New York Times titled God, Darwin, and My College Biology Class. Barash wrote:

Every year around this time, with the college year starting, I give my students The Talk. It isnt, as you might expect, about sex, but about evolution and religion, and how they get along. More to the point, how they dont.

He continued:

The more we know of evolution, the more unavoidable is the conclusion that living things, including human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process, with no indication of a benevolent, controlling creator.

According to one student, Barash then had his class of 200 undergraduates sing his version of a Hank Williams classic:

Ive wandered so aimless, life filled with doubt.I didnt know what truth was about.Then Darwin came like a stranger in the night.Praise evolution, I saw the light!

I saw the light, I saw the light.No more darkness, no more night.No higher power, but Im oh so bright.Praise evolution, I saw the light!

Inspired by Barash, FFRF added the following logo to their stationery, Praise Darwin: Evolve Beyond Belief. Two members of FFRFs Executive Board of Directors had misgivings about adopting the logo. It looks too much like religion to me, one of them said privately. But the logo remained.

Two years later, Darwinian philosopher Michael Ruse published Darwinism as Religion, which pointed out that Darwinian evolution has always functioned as much as a secular form of religion as anything purely scientific. Two more Executive Board members became uneasy at FFRFs position on evolution. But the four dissenters were in the minority, and FFRFs position remained unchanged.

Then, early in 2020, FFRF received word that a high school student had secretly taped a biology teacher making disparaging comments about the theory of evolution. Outraged, an attorney for FFRF wrote to the school district that no controversy exists in the scientific community regarding the fact of evolution, and the teaching of alternative theories or a controversy is not only inappropriate and dishonest, it is unconstitutional. The tiny rural school district lacked the resources to challenge the FFRF, which has a legal staff of ten attorneys and two legal assistants. So the superintendent merely replied that the teacher in question would comply with the New York State Education Law and the U.S. Constitution.

On February 28, 2020, the FFRF issued a press release announcing: N.Y. public school reins in proselytizing teacher, per FFRF advice. According to the press release, the teachers anti-scientific rant was both unconstitutional and pedagogically deplorable.

The incident was subsequently reviewed by an FFRF Executive Board member (not one of the four original dissenters) who had training in both biological science and constitutional law. She knew that controversy over evolution does exist in the scientific community. Furthermore, she noted that FFRFs letter to the school district cited several court decisions but left out the most relevant one: Edwards v. Aguillard (1987). In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that teaching creation science in public schools is unconstitutional, but questioning the scientific validity of evolution is not unconstitutional and may in fact be encouraged. FFRFs criticism of the teacher had been dead wrong. The board member agreed with the four dissenters who had already concluded that Darwinism was functioning as a religion.

At an emergency meeting a week ago, a majority of the members on FFRFs Executive Board of Directors voted that Darwinian evolution is, in fact, a religion. The board resolved that FFRF would henceforth oppose public funding for it and work to prohibit its teaching in public schools and universities.

Yesterday, FFRF issued a brief press release confirming the boards decision:

After long and careful deliberation The Freedom from Religion Foundation has recognized that Darwinism, like Christianity, is a religion. So the foundation now opposes the teaching or even the mention of Darwinian evolution in publicly funded institutions. Let freedom ring!

In other news: Today is April Fools Day.

Photo: A (genuine) sign in Harrisburg, PA, from the Freedom from Religion Foundation, by Jason / CC BY-SA.

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Breaking: Freedom From Religion Foundation Opposes Teaching Evolution in Public Schools - Discovery Institute

Its ID Evolution Month at FindBiometrics, in which well be delivering in-depth features on biometric innovation in the identity space. This could cover a lot of ground the whole biometrics industry has seen tremendous innovation over the past couple of decades. But there are a few salient areas that call for a thorough investigation right now.

Were starting things off with one of the biggest and most recent innovations in the world of biometric technology, and indeed in the mobile sector and consumer tech more broadly: the emergence of selfie authentication.

As with the popularization of the smartphone in general, much of the credit for the emergence of mobile biometrics must go to Apple. The company introduced fingerprint scanning to its industry-leading iPhone line in 2013, kicking off a rapid transformation across the smartphone industry as competitors sought to implement fingerprint scanning technology in their own devices.

As soon as 2016, Acuity Market Intelligence was estimating that there were 750 million smartphones on the market featuring biometric technology largely in the form of fingerprint sensors and by the end of the next year, fingerprint sensors were considered a more or less standard feature on mid-range and premium smartphones. For Acuitys part, the renowned market research firm predicted in its 2016 report that 100 percent of all smartphones shipped in 2018 would have biometric technology and then another big move from Apple prompted a mainstream modality shift that changed everything.

That move was, of course, Apples announcement of the iPhone X, a new smartphone that did away with the iPhones iconic Touch ID fingerprint scanning system in favor of facial recognition. Authentication software supporting facial recognition was already available for mobile operating systems, but Apples support of this modality as the central mechanism for phone unlocking (among other things) on the iPhone X market the first time that a broad swath of mainstream smartphone users would be introduced to selfie-based authentication.

Sure enough, a number of Apples rivals quickly followed suit with the introduction of their own selfie-based authentication systems. Samsung, for example, had been looking to make a name for itself with iris recognition on its flagship smartphone devices, but sought to place more of an emphasis on facial recognition in the wake of Apples launch of Face ID; and a number of smaller smartphone companies quickly embraced Face Unlock systems in the ensuing year and change. For its part, Apple proceeded to embrace Face ID and ditch Touch ID on all of its subsequent iPhone devices.

The result of all this competitive activity among smartphone makers was the mainstreaming of selfie authentication. With increasing numbers of consumers using a face scan to unlock their smartphone and even to access their computers and laptops, thanks to authentication platforms like Microsofts Windows Hello there has been a growing familiarity with the overall concept of selfie authentication. That, in turn, has financial services providers, government authorities, and a range of other organizations embracing selfie authentication software for payment authorization, online account access, and more. And with the emergence of selfie-based solutions that are also capable of verifying official identity documents matching a users face to their drivers license photo, for example organizations are even starting to remotely onboard new clients, with no need for in-person identity verification.

This is the kind of innovation that we will be further exploring for ID Evolution Month in the weeks to come. Stay tuned to FindBiometrics for more in-depth analysis of how biometric innovation has helped to push the evolution of digital and mobile identity, and what the cutting edge of these trends looks like today.

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ID Evolution Month is made possible by our sponsor: Onfido

April 2, 2020 by Alex Perala

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ID Evolution Month: The Rise of the Selfie - findBIOMETRICS

Posted on Apr 2, 2020 in Evolution, Science

The Broken Hill skull, discovered in 1921 by miners in Zambia, is one of the best-preserved fossils of the early human species Homo heidelbergensis, who roamed Southern Africa. The fossil is estimated to be about 300,000 years old, according to Australias Griffith University scientists, who led an international team to date the skull of an early human found in Africa, potentially upending human evolution knowledge with their discovery.

The research also suggests that human evolution in Africa around 300,000 years ago was a much more complex process, with the co-existence of different human lineages. Previously, the Broken Hill skull was viewed as part of a gradual and widespread evolutionary sequence in Africa from archaic humans to modern humans, said Chris Stringer, curator at the Natural History Museum in London. But now it looks like the primitive species Homo naledi survived in southern Africa, H. heidelbergensis was in Central Africa, and early forms of our species existed in regions like Morocco and Ethiopia.

We can now identify at least three distinct and contemporary [Homo] lineages in Africa about 300,000 years ago, but we dont yet know whether our ancestry was largely or entirely contained within theH. sapiens part of that variation, says paleoanthropologist and study coauthor Stringer.

Underscoring the complexity of human evolution, in 2017, geologists demonstrated that another hominid species, Homo naledi, existed in southern Africa between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago. This was potentially the same time that modern humans first emerged in Africa, which created is a puzzle to scientists, who long held that there was only one species in Africa at this late time period Homo sapiens. How did this species exist alongside others with brains three times its size?

The discovery of Homo naledi by Professor Lee Berger of Wits University and his team at the Rising Star caves in the Cradle of Human Kind in 2013 was one of the largest hominin discoveries ever made and hailed as one of the most significant hominid discoveries of the 21st Century.

Naledis brain seems like one you might predict for Homo habilis, two million years ago. But habilis didnt have such a tiny brainnaledi did, said anthropologist John Hawks. Big brains were costly to human ancestors, and some species may have paid the costs with richer diets, hunting and gathering, and longer childhoods. But that scenario doesnt seem to work well for Homo naledi, which had hands well-suited for toolmaking, long legs, humanlike feet, and teeth suggesting a high-quality diet.

Homo Naledi, Newly Discovered Species Maybe Weve Had the Story of Human Evolution Wrong the Whole Time

Professor Rainer Grn from the Environmental Futures Research Institute led the team which analysed the Broken Hill (Kabwe 1) skull and other fossil human remains found in the vicinity including a tibia and femur midshaft fragment. The material is curated at the Natural History Museum in London. The remains have been difficult to date due to their haphazard recovery and the site being completely destroyed by quarrying.

Using radiometric dating methods, Grns analyses now puts the skull at a relatively young date, estimating it is between 274,000 and 324,000 years old. Publishing their findings and methodology in Nature, Grn said the new best age estimate of the fossil impacts our understanding of the tempo and mode of modern human origins.

Grn said his teams research adds to new and emerging studies which question the mode of modern human evolution in Africa and whether Homo heidelbergensis is a direct ancestor of our species.

The Daily Galaxy, Andy Johnson, via Griffith University

Image credit: Natural History Museum in London

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The Broken Hill Skull Does This 300,000-Year-Old Fossil Upend Human Evolution? - The Daily Galaxy --Great Discoveries Channel

Helmed by charismatic vocalist and guitarist Ryanne van Dorst, Dool combine pop hooks with heady lyrics and complex songwriting that draws from the underbelly of metal, psych, doom, occult rock, and more. Formed in Rotterdam in 2015 by members of Dutch rock outfits Elle Bandita, the Devils Blood, and Gold, the band (whose name translates to Wandering) have yet to tour the States, but they made waves in the heavy-music world with their 2017 debut, Here Now, There Then. On their brand-new second album, Summerland (Prophecy Productions), Dool lean into the arena-friendly side of their sound without compromising their aesthetic. The albums name nods to a pagan concept of the afterlifean idyllic place the soul can visit between incarnations or settle in after reaching a final ascensionand songs such as the title track and album closer Dust & Shadow are enhanced by otherworldly, majestic atmospheres. But Dool arent concerned solely with what happens after we leave this plane, but also with the road traveled and personal evolution along the way. To that end, theyre more earthbound on tracks such as Ode to the Future, anchored by a rich strummed guitar rhythm reminiscent of Patti Smith classic Dancing Barefoot. Van Dorsts vivid lyrics often address themes of self-questioning and strife, and when theyre interwoven into rock epics such as The Wells Run Dry (which features a spoken-word passage from Blzer front man Okoi Jones), no challenge seems insurmountable. Its easy to imagine radio-ready album single Wolf Moon and rock rager Be Your Sins (with a fiery Hammond organ solo by Swedish metal keyboardist Per Wiberg) as gateway drugs for mainstream rock and metal listeners who are primed to discover more esoteric sounds. Dool deliver on that front as well: God Particle features a Middle Eastern-inspired intro, a dynamic flow, and an intensity enriched by the albums backing vocalist, former Devils Blood and current Molasses front woman Farida Lemouchi. v

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Dutch dark rock band Dool explore the evolution of the soul on Summerland - Chicago Reader

Changes are coming at the Red Lake Mine Complex with a new boss in charge.

Australias Evolution Mining calls the northwestern Ontario operation an undercapitalized asset and intends to spend a significant amount of money on exploration to find more high-grade gold.

The Sydney-based gold miner finalized its acquisition of the complex with Newmont on March 31.

Evolution announced in late November it was acquiring the Red Lake Gold Complexin a US$475 million.

The deal is structured to enable Newmont to receive $375 million cash and a $100-million contingent payment where Evolution will pay Newmont $20 million for each one million ounces of new gold resources, staggered over a 15-year period.

The Red Lake operation has a 13-year mine life and, according to Evolution, there is outstanding exploration potential to grow the resource base in a geological environment that they are quite familiar with.

Their strategy is recapitalize the asset to reduce operational costs and spent money on development and exploration over the next three years.

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Part of the transformation program has already started with changes on the personnel side.

The mine general manager has been replaced and the search is on for a successor. The site leadership team has been reduced from 12 to 7 people.

Evolution expects to announce more changes shortly with regards to the broader workforce.

Beginning in February, Evolution began a complete overhaul of the approach toward exploration.

To build on Red Lakes history of high-grade discoveries, Evolution is consolidating all their inherited geological data for their 460-square-kilometre property.

The goal is amalgamate the 130 individual block models into a more simplified model using Evolutions methodology. The geology and exploration teams are being combined under one manager.

This will set things up for 2021 when plans will be in place to rapidly scale up drilling.

Next years exploration drilling budget is estimated to be $20 million to $25 million (Australian dollars).

Up to eight underground drill rigs will be utilized with a stated objective of finding high-grade gold across their entire land holdings.

Currently, there are four rigs operating underground doing definition and grade control drilling. Results should be out in the March 2020 quarterly report.

Evolution also expects to accelerate mine development to more than 1,000 metres per month by next December, up from an average of 668 metres from last December.

The company said their executive team has spent considerable time in Red Lake to start planning their turnaround strategy.

Among the key takeaways from their tour was a high level of confidence that there was more gold to be discovered, a belief that there are places to cut costs, and very positive engagement with workers who know that change is necessary for the operations long-term future.

In a statement, Evolutions executive chair Jake Klein said in starting their search to acquire a Canadian operation in 2017, Red Lake was identified as having the most upside.

The driver for our interest was both the outstanding potential for the discovery of new, high grade mineralization and clear turnaround opportunity to restore it to being a safe, efficient, long life, low cost operation."

The company reports there have not been any positive tests of COVID-19 among its employees or contractors on site.

All fly-in/fly-out traffic has ceased but only 10 per cent of the Red Lake workforce has unable to work due to travel restrictions. That doesnt seem to have impacted production or mine development work, Evolution said.

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Evolution Mining puts its Red Lake turnaround strategy in motion - Northern Ontario Business

As molecular biologist Douglas Axe recalls, the Greek philosopher Gorgias (born about 483 BC) spent a lifetime pondering the nature of existence. At last he arrived at a firm conclusion: Nothing exists. In a presentation at the 2020 Dallas Conference on Science & Faith, Dr. Axe used Gorgias to illustrate his point that expertise does not necessarily drive you in the right direction. Sometimes it does the exact opposite. How could that be? Watch now and find out:

The controversy about Darwinian evolution is often framed as a matter of credentials. We must listen to the experts! Please precious experts, tell us what to think!

When Dr. Axe was planning his book, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, he considered doing as other scientists have done: distill a lot of technical literature down for a lay audience. But he ultimately decided that that was to play into the hands of those atheists and materialists he was arguing against. They would simply tell his lay readers that the readers were in no position to judge even an ultimate question like this the origins of life and must instead docilely confirm the majority or consensus view of people holding PhDs in the correct fields. As Axe says here, I firmly believe you dont need a PhD to decide whether we are cosmic accidents or not.

Axe tells some of his own personal story, which I did not know. As a high school student he dissected frogs in biology class and found that uninspiring. It wasnt until college at U.C. Berkley and grad school at Caltech that he came to appreciate the wonders of life at the molecular level. He realized, This is engineering, remarkable engineering, far beyond anything humans can do.

But he explains why, even without his background as a professional scientist, we all already know what we need to know to decide whether life reflects intelligent purpose. This is an affirming and liberating message.

Looking for more great content in contrast to all the negativity everywhere else in the media and online? We have been releasing videos from Discovery Institutes January event in Dallas. Come back next Wednesday for Stephen Meyer on The Return of the God Hypothesis.

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Evolution and the Experts A Liberating Message from Molecular Biologist Doug Axe - Discovery Institute

(Inside Science) Imagine putting your hand in a pile of poop. It stinks and squishes. What do you do next?

Most likely, you'll scrub that hand with plenty of soap and you don't need public health officials or a germ theory of disease to tell you that's the right thing to do. But when you touch the handrail on an escalator, it's much harder to remember that you could be picking up coronavirus germs.

Humans have instincts that have evolved over millions of years to steer them away from infectious diseases. In some ways, these psychological adaptations collectively dubbed "the behavioral immune system" are helping us fight the COVID-19 pandemic. In other ways, they're failing us. And some experts warn that if we're not careful, our pandemic-heightened instincts could turn us into more bigoted, less compassionate people.

For most of human history, infectious diseases probably killed more people than anything else, said Joshua Ackerman, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The need to defeat viruses, bacteria and other parasites has shaped well-known elements of the immune system such as antibodies and white blood cells.

But the traditional immune system can only respond once a parasite is inside our bodies. By that time, the invader may already have caused damage, and to destroy it, the body must fight a messy and expensive war.

When possible, it's better to avoid catching a disease in the first place. So evolution has crafted a parallel immune system in our minds, and at its core is disgust. That "ew" feeling is part of what motivated our ancestors to avoid likely sources of infection such as feces, vomit and rotting food.

"We don't even need to visually detect these things. They're some of the most aversive smells that we can experience," said Joshua Tybur, an evolutionary psychologist at Vrije University Amsterdam.

While it's hard to know whether other species experience disgust the way we do, it seems clear that our behavioral immune system has origins older than humanity. Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees shunning other chimps that had polio. Bonobos, sheep, horses and kangaroos all avoid food that has feces on it. Caribbean spiny lobsters are normally highly social, but they avoid sharing dens with other lobsters that are sick.

In some ways, a person with no sense of disgust might face similar handicaps to someone who can't feel pain, said Tybur. There are conditions that make people unable to feel pain, and they often lead to serious health consequences as people accumulate injuries and infections.

"We often take for granted how kind of naturally and intuitively we move ourselves away from reliable pathogen risks even without thinking, 'Oh, there might be a pathogen in there,'" said Tybur.

Now, that ancient psychological system is confronting a modern threat: a pandemic that travels on airplanes and sweeps through cities that are home to millions. Governments are encouraging or mandating that people stay home, where there's less possibility of encountering the virus. When people do go out, they're supposed to avoid touching their faces, wash their hands frequently, and keep their distance from others. But people are struggling to comply.

Part of the problem may be that for most of human history, people lived in small hunter-gatherer bands of a few dozen people. Our ancestors would never have encountered things that thousands of people touched in the same day, said Tybur. We haven't yet evolved instincts that such things are dangerous, and without that disgust reflex, it's easy to forget.

The story is more complicated when it comes to direct contact with other people. Humans already have an instinct for social distancing, noted Tybur. For contrast, think of dogs.

"When they see another dog, they will often run over and go mouth-to-mouth contact, they'll go mouth-to-[rear] contact, with a complete stranger," said Tybur. "For humans that would be unthinkable."

Humans like to keep a buffer between themselves and others, and the size of that buffer depends on the relationship. Between sexual partners, it's essentially zero; with strangers, it is much larger. The more intimate a relationship, the more comfortable people are with things like hugging and drinking from the same glass.

According to frameworks developed by Tybur as well as Debra Lieberman and colleagues at the University of Miami in Florida, people's brains calibrate their levels of disgust based on the "social value" they place on another person. People subconsciously compute things like how much they want to have sex with someone, what kind of friendship and support that person can offer, and whether they are genetically related. At the same time, they evaluate how likely the person is to give them a disease.

For example, if you encounter a stranger who smells bad or has bloody sores on their face, you will probably feel some level of disgust, but that reaction will be tamped down if it's your own child. And you may be fine with sitting next to a stranger on the bus, but unless you found them extremely sexy, you'd likely recoil at the idea of sticking your tongue in their mouth.

Now, people are being told to increase the buffer between themselves and others past where they feel it should be, said Tybur. He speculates that greeting rituals such as hugs, handshakes and cheek kisses may have developed in part because they demonstrate how highly we value people.

"When we shake someone's hand or when we give someone a hug, we might be advertising to that person that they're important enough to us that we're willing to take that pathogen risk," he said.

If that's true, it's no wonder that social distancing is hard. Talk show hosts may mock alternative greeting practices like touching elbows or feet (behavior changes that, for many, have gone from seeming overly cautious to grossly inadequate in the past few weeks). But to Lieberman, it makes perfect sense why people would want to bump elbows. It's to signal how much they care.

"They're just grabbing for straws in order to kind of figure out 'how do I show people this value,'" she said.

So if our sense of disgust isn't doing what we need it to, can we deliberately manipulate it to help us through this crisis? Perhaps, said Lieberman at least when it comes to hand-washing and disinfecting surfaces. A 2009 study found that when posters and educational videos about hand sanitation included disgusting images such as a poop sandwich, people were more likely to actually wash their hands.

In the last few weeks, news reports and public service announcements have been full of pictures that make the COVID-19 virus look "pretty," noted Lieberman. Icky images might make more of an impression. But, she warned, officials should be cautious about using disgust to encourage social distancing, as that would involve painting other people as disgusting.

"That's potentially dangerous because disgust has a nefarious relationship with morality," she said.

Many studies have shown links between the behavioral immune system and phenomena such as xenophobia, discrimination and willingness to trust others. For example, one study by Lene Aare at Aarhus University in Denmark found that people who are more sensitive to disgust tend to have lower levels of "generalized social trust," a measure of how much you believe others will look out for your best interests and avoid deliberately harming you. People who have low social trust also tend to be less willing to do things, like recycling, that benefit society as a whole.

People who view disease-related images are less likely to support immigration, especially when the immigrants are from different races and cultures. Several studies have suggested that when people's behavioral immune systems are triggered by images or articles related to infectious disease, they become more biased against groups including the elderly, the obese, foreigners and the disabled.

Such effects are modest and not always consistent, and researchers interpret them in a variety of ways. Nevertheless, it's enough to convince some experts that manipulating disgust could be playing with fire.

Renata Schiavo, a senior lecturer at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York, doesn't support using disgust in any public health messaging, even to promote hand-washing. The research on disgust in public health campaigns has mostly focused on hand-washing after people use the bathroom or before eating, she noted. It's not clear what effect such methods would have in a pandemic, when people must wash their hands far more often and in other circumstances. And given that this crisis is already inspiring fear and bigotry, Schiavo views disgust as too dangerous a tool.

"This virus is not Chinese. It's not European. It's not American. But there have been a number of populations that are unfortunately experiencing an increase in discrimination," she said. "While I know the intentions of using disgust are good, I don't know if we know enough about how to [address] people's emotions and biases."

Even without deliberate interventions, the coronavirus crisis is probably ramping up our disease-avoidance instincts, said Anastasia Makhanova, a social psychologist at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Much of Makhanova's research involves measuring how people's attitudes and bodies change when they read articles about disease threats, but that approach is impossible while the pandemic rages.

"Right now everyone is thinking about pathogen threats. So I can't engage in the experimental manipulation of how freaked out people are about getting sick," she said.

On the one hand, activating everyone's disease-avoidance instincts could help prevent the spread of the virus. Indeed, according to preliminary findings from data Makhanova gathered in the second week of March, people with stronger behavioral immune systems may be more likely to abide by recommendations for hand-washing and social distancing.

But we should also be aware that our heightened instincts could have harmful side effects, according to Aare, Makhanova and other experts. For example, those instincts could contribute to discrimination against people of Asian descent.

The instincts and biases our species has evolved don't mean we are doomed to behave badly, said Makhanova. People can correct for their biases if they are aware of them.

"[People] think that just because something's biological, it means we can't change it. But that's not true," she said. "We have a prefrontal cortex. We have self-control."

This article originally appeared on Inside Science.

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Disgust Evolved To Protect Us From Disease. Is It Working? - Discover Magazine

In 1951, movie audiences were introduced to a future classic in The Day The Earth Stood Still. At the start of this black and white film, a flying saucer lands in Washington D.C. and reveals a stoic defender in the robot Gort. This extremely powerful AI capable of turning our military's weapons to dust is entirely under the control of an alien named Klaatu. Throughout most of the film, Gort simply stands guard over the spacecraft while the story unravels elsewhere. By this point in time, audiences had seen such technological advances as radar and the atomic bomb. The concept of controlling an intelligent robot was no longer unimaginable or ludicrous. If anything, it was kind of cool.

The Day the Earth Stood Stilldepicts artificial intelligenceas a guardian that can be controlled and used for good, although this isn't immediately apparent in the plot. It isn't until the end of the film that Gort is given his commands and scoops up his master before departing Earth. The movie demonstrates a wonderfully diverse view of AI in both how it could be used in the right hands and how it would be perceived by its enemies. It's also shown as a device that can be used to achieve goals our fleshy bodies aren't capable of reaching alone but one without character or emotion. It would be more than two decades until the world would be transported to a galaxy far, far away and introduced to the lively robotic antics of two cultural icons.

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The stunning evolution of AI in movies - Looper