From time to time, I’d like to highlight some of the most thought provoking articles on science that I’ve read recently. To me the most interesting ones tend to be ones that have some sort of philosophical implication, either on human nature or the nature of the universe in general. In this entry, I cover two recent articles on human nature, one on the latest attempt at a comprehensive theory of everything and finally one on an extremely speculative theory of what happens to the universe when humans simply observe it.

Slate magazine has a regular column on human nature and the latest entries by William Salestan covers the highly sensitive issue of whether or not general intelligence depends on race. The articles are full of references to many different studies and concludes that race definitely does make a measurable difference to average intelligence. As Salestan notes, there are plenty of counterbalancing factors that are non-genetic, including the familial environment in which children are raised and the cultures of certain races which may not encourage academic pursuits, but none of the other factors manage to wipe out the genetic influences entirely.

Of course, the articles explicitly state that the results don’t mean that any particular person’s race is a good predictor of his or her general intelligence because they’re based on averages of large populations. Another reason is that scientists agree that the variations in intelligence that have a genetic basis are greater among individuals of a given race than between pools of individuals from different races. Salestan also notes that with greater rates of intermarriage between races, the genetic differences between various racial groups should diminish over time. He suggests that human technology could eventually help to diminish the gap through genetic engineering.

It is only to be expected that Salestan’s articles have generated controversy and a good deal of debate. Many of the criticisms address the humanitarian aspect of worrying that such findings smack of eugenics. Such fears, while understandable, do not justify shying away from the truth, however unpalatable it is. A more cogent argument is that the articles use the term “race” in a lazy and irresponsible manner, without carefully defining what is meant in this context. In everyday terms, the use of the word “race” depends on a variety of easily identifiable physical traits including skin colour and hair type. However such physical traits account for only a very small part of our genes. It would be fairer to say that the various studies cited are more about the differences in intelligence between people of different genetic ancestries, but it may not always be possible to visually differentiate people who nevertheless have radically different ancestries.

The second article on human nature was published in an October issue of The Economist and covers the genetic basis of the traits of patience and fairness. Two different studies, one conducted by Marc Hauser of Harvard University and the other by Keith Jensen of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, compare how chimpanzees and humans differ in being patient and having a sense of fairness respectively. In the first study, the scientists found that chimpanzees could delay gratification for longer than humans, being four times more likely to wait for a greater reward later instead of opting for a smaller reward immediately. According to the article, since other animals like birds can delay gratification in this way for only a few seconds, both species are considered highly patient and this suggests that the trait of patience predates the evolutionary split between chimpanzees and humans some 4 million years ago.

In the second study, the scientists contrived a game for both the chimpanzee and human participants. In this game, two players divide a reward. One of the players is designated the proposer and can propose how the reward is to be split in any way he wants, from 50-50 to 100-0 in his favour. The other player, designated the responder then decides to accept the proposal or reject it. If the responder accepts, then the reward is split according to the proposer’s allocation. If the responder rejects the proposal, then neither party gets anything. The researchers discovered that chimpanzees were willing to accept most of the proposals, even if the split is highly unfair, but humans tend to punish unfair splits even if he gets nothing as a result.

Such studies are interesting in of themselves of course, but they also serve to further undermine the formerly prevalent theory that human minds are infinitely malleable “blank slates” at birth. They suggest that traits like patience and fairness, far from being learned from observation or inculcated by culture, are specific tools that we have gained from the process of evolution. Indeed, a third study by Bjorn Wallace of the Stockholm School of Economics finds through studies of identical and fraternal twins that the trait of fairness has a strong genetic component.

Meanwhile, theoretical physicists have been arguing over the latest attempt to formulate a Theory of Everything (TOE). For the past few weeks, various participants have been discussing at Backreaction, a blog shared by husband-and-wife physicists Sabine Hossenfelder and Stefan Scherer, the theory, described in a paper called An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything, by Garrett Lisi. The paper itself is of course anything but simple and I can’t pretend to understand anything past the introduction, though I understand that it attempts to unify the Standard Model of physics and the Theory of General Relativity in a way that uses relatively simple mathematics. It has since managed to receive a significant amount of attention from the media.

Unfortunately the scientific consensus at this time is that the theory is incorrect and numerous critics have stated that the theory doesn’t actually do anything to add to our understanding of the universe. Nevertheles, it’s an interesting look into the world of theoretical physicists and I personally am always excited at the possibility of a real TOE being just around the corner.

Finally a provocatively-titled article in the Telegraph appears to suggest at first glance a scenario right out of Greg Egan’s science fiction novel Quarantine. In the novel the Earth is quarantined by unknown cosmological powers when it is discovered that merely by observing the universe and thereby causing unstable quantum waveforms to collapse, mankind was destroying large parts of the universe. The writer of the article seems to imply at first that indirect observations of “dark matter” in 1998 has actively shortened the lifespan of the universe in a similar way because by treating the entire universe as an unstable quantum system, our observation of such dark matter has eliminated some of the previously probabilities of the universe’s end state, leaving us with a state in which the universe has a shorter lifespan.

However as the researchers involved, namely Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and James Dent of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, later stress, no causality is actually meant here and the observation merely confirms an end state of the universe that had already been determined by the time of the observation. A clear case of an overzealous editor willing to sensationalize a story to make it more exciting then, but still interesting food for thought.