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CAUSES AND CONDS

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Simple exercises, including reliving happy moments, can make you happier in just four minutes, research finds.

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Either we’re thinking about the laws of nature all wrong, or your own consciousness isn’t intrinsic to what’s going on inside your head. In fact, your consciousness is about as extrinsic as anything could be: it constitutively involves the entire cosmos. In particular, the early Universe isn’t just part of the story of how you got here; it’s part of who you are.

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GREGER

• Waiting for absolute scientific certainty may result in avoidable disease and even death. For example, had no-smoking efforts taken off when the association between smoking and lung cancer was first reported, instead of waiting for the link to be “absolutely clear,” lives could have been saved.
• The National Academy of Sciences released a landmark report on diet, nutrition, and cancer in 1982, which included interim guidance.
• Concerns were raised about processed meats, which were confirmed three decades later. Processed meat has been officially declared “carcinogenic to humans.”
• The 1982 report’s findings “generated a striking level of disbelief from the cancer community and outright hostility from people whose livelihood depended on foods in question and the food industry whose products were being questioned.”
• Invoking the precautionary principle, the latest science tells us to eat more fruits and vegetables, consume soy products to reduce breast cancer risk and increase chances of survival, and encourages “limiting or avoiding dairy products to reduce the risk of prostate cancer; limiting or avoiding alcohol to reduce the risk of cancers of the mouth, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, colon, rectum, and breast; avoiding red and processed meat to reduce the risk of cancers of the colon and rectum; [and] avoiding grilled, fried, and broiled meats to reduce the risk of cancers of the colon, rectum, breast, prostate, kidney, and pancreas.” In this context, the researchers are talking about all meat, including poultry and fish.
• We don’t have to wait, nor should we wait, for scientific consensus. We can and should “act on the best available evidence” we have right now.
• The beauty of safe, simple, and side effect–free solutions provided by the lifestyle medicine approach is that they can only help.
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• SUZUKI Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.” 
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• “A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it…In this way our life should be understood. Then there is no problem.”
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• I N PARTS oftheworld where autumnisunderway, squashes arenowonthe menu, and shops are stocking up onpumpkins forHalloween. Ihaven’t always beena fanof squashes, butthemore Ihave learned abouttheir evolutionary history,themore Ihave been charmed byhowsuchunlikely andunpromising fruits came to spreadworldwide. There is abeguilingdiversityof squashes andpumpkins, andtheir rangeof shapes, sizes andcolours gives themmuchaesthetic appeal. Buttheyallbelongtoonegenus – Cucurbita – and fall broadly into only sixmainspecies or subspecies. The ancestors of these originated in Northand CentralAmerica, andmanyofthe cultivars (thedomesticatedplant equivalent of dog breeds)we eattoday belong to one species, Cucurbita pepo. One ofthe surprising things about squashes is that sucha diverse array offruits canbe produced by suchclosely related plants – the pumpkinand courgette (zucchini),for example, are the same subspeciesofC.pepo. The squashes’ ability to exhibit sucha variety offorms, and their complexhistories, makes ithard to determine their wild ancestors.Butwe candraw some generalised inferences on whattheywere like fromthe 12 wild cucurbits thatlive in North andCentralAmerica today. The greatest diversity ofwild squashesnowresides inMexico, butitis thoughtthat Cucurbita probably originated inCentral or SouthAmerica.Thesewildspecies tend tohave round fruits,up to 8 centimetres indiameter,that areunpleasantly bitter-tasting, withahard and inedible rind. The purpose of a fruitis to disperse seeds, and the seeds inside squashes and pumpkins arehighlynutritious,whichposes a question: beforehumans came along,what could possiblyhave eatenthem? Several lines of evidence point tomegafauna – the large animals, over 1000kilograms inweight, that once shaped our ecosystems butlargelywent extinct atthe end ofthe Pleistocene Epoch, around 11,000years ago.Cucurbita seeds have beenfound inthe ancient dung ofmastodons – anelephantlikemammal – and itis easy to imagine suchanimalshavingno trouble cracking openthe tough skins of ancient squashes. What aboutthewild squashes’ bitter taste? Ithasbeensuggested thatlarge animals are less bothered by bitter tastes, as they are less likely to eat enoughof thesemolecules to experience their toxic effects. Smaller mammals, onthe otherhand, tendtobemore sensitive tobitter tastes andhavemore genes to detectthem. So itis possible thatCucurbita evolved its bitter flavours to ensure itwas specifically eatenand dispersed by particularly large animals, whichare also thoughttohave created thehabitats inwhich wildsquashes couldhave thrived. Many oftoday’swild squashes growlikeweeds, requiring recently disturbed ground to gaina foothold.Beforehuman farmerswere around to create this environment,the trampling oflarge beastsmighthave done the job instead. Butthenthe bigmammalswent extinct – probably due to climate change andhumanactivities – and Cucurbita seeds found themselves somewhattrappedwithintheir hard,unpalatable fruits. Today, wild cucurbit species are found in fewer places thanthey oncewere. Yetin2020, anestimated 28milliontonnes of pumpkins, squashes and gourdswere producedworldwide. Domesticationgave the cucurbits a second act, enabling themto spread across theworld and take advantage ofhumans for dispersing and planting their seeds.Wemay originallyhave used squashes only for their nutritious seeds, and perhaps foundotheruses for themtoo– one suggestionis that small gourdsmayhave beenused as floats for fishingnets. Oncewe started selectively propagating cucurbits,they losttheir bitter toxins and gained larger fruits. This act of domesticationis one ofthe oldestintheworld. Archaeological evidence suggests C. pepowas domesticated in Mexico 10,000years ago, around the same time that anumber of plants that are oftendescribed as the first crops – suchaswheat and barley–werebeingdomesticated inAsia’s FertileCrescent. Then C. pepowas independently domesticated a second time,in eastern NorthAmerica around 5000years ago. This lineage gave rise to today’s scallop and acorn squashes, among others,while theMexicanlineage is the one thatincludes pumpkins and courgettes. There are stillmany gaps in this tale ofthe pumpkin, butI hope this provides food for thoughtif youfind yourself carving a pumpkinlater this month, andinspiresyoutocook the fleshyouscoop out, rather thanthrowing itinthe bin.
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  a HYPERGAZE
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• AGENCY
• A bottom-up theory of agency could help us interpret what we see in life, from cells to societies – as well as in some of our ‘smart’ machines and technologies. We’re starting to wonder whether artificial intelligence systems might themselves develop agency. But how would we know, if we can’t say what agency entails? Only if we can ‘derive complex behaviours from simple first principles’, says the physicist Susanne Still of the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, can we claim to understand what it takes to be an agent. So far, she admits that the problem remains unsolved. Here, though, is a sketch of what a solution might look like.
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• DO NOT REACT DNR
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• A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of action, but is a phantom evoked by our genetic and evolutionary history.
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• james webb “Ihave coined thephrase ‘Just Wonderful Space Telescope’ as analternative name for JWST”
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• “Renewables arenow by far the cheapest energy source almost everywhere
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• his reveals a crucial dimension of agency: the ability to make choices in response to new and unforeseen circumstances. When a hare is being pursued by a wolf, there’s no meaningful way to predict how it will dart and switch this way and that, nor whether its gambits will suffice to elude the predator, who responds accordingly. Both hare and wolf are exercising their agency.
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