The four stories we tell ourselves about death
by
Stephen Cave
I have a question: Who here remembers when they first realized they were going to die?
I do. I was a young boy, and my grandfather had just died, and I remember a few days later lying in bed at night trying to make sense of what had happened. What did it mean that he was dead? Where had he gone? It was like a hole in reality had opened up and swallowed him. But then the really shocking question occurred to me: If he could die, could it happen to me too? Could that hole in reality open up and swallow me? Would it open up beneath my bed and swallow me as I slept? Well, at some point, all children become aware of death. It can happen in different ways, of course, and usually comes in stages. Our idea of death develops as we grow older. And if you reach back into the dark corners of your memory, you might remember something like what I felt when my grandfather died and when I realized it could happen to me too, that sense that behind all of this the void is waiting.
And this development in childhood reflects the development of our species. Just as there was a point in your development as a child when your sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for you to realize you were mortal, so at some point in the evolution of our species, some early human's sense of self and of time became sophisticated enough for them to become the first human to realize, "I'm going to die." This is, if you like, our curse. It's the price we pay for being so damn clever. We have to live in the knowledge that the worst thing that can possibly happen one day surely will, the end of all our projects, our hopes, our dreams, of our individual world. We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse.
And that's frightening. It's terrifying. And so we look for a way out. And in my case, as I was about five years old, this meant asking my mum. Now when I first started asking what happens when we die, the grown-ups around me at the time answered with a typical English mix of awkwardness and half-hearted Christianity, and the phrase I heard most often was that granddad was now "up there looking down on us," and if I should die too, which wouldn't happen of course, then I too would go up there, which made death sound a lot like an existential elevator. Now this didn't sound very plausible. I used to watch a children's news program at the time, and this was the era of space exploration. There were always rockets going up into the sky, up into space, going up there. But none of the astronauts when they came back ever mentioned having met my granddad or any other dead people. But I was scared, and the idea of taking the existential elevator to see my granddad sounded a lot better than being swallowed by the void while I slept. And so I believed it anyway, even though it didn't make much sense.
And this thought process that I went through as a child, and have been through many times since, including as a grown-up, is a product of what psychologists call a bias. Now a bias is a way in which we systematically get things wrong, ways in which we miscalculate, misjudge, distort reality, or see what we want to see, and the bias I'm talking about works like this: Confront someone with the fact that they are going to die and they will believe just about any story that tells them it isn't true and they can, instead, live forever, even if it means taking the existential elevator. Now we can see this as the biggest bias of all. It has been demonstrated in over 400 empirical studies. Now these studies are ingenious, but they're simple. They work like this. You take two groups of people who are similar in all relevant respects, and you remind one group that they're going to die but not the other, then you compare their behavior. So you're observing how it biases behavior when people become aware of their mortality. And every time, you get the same result: People who are made aware of their mortality are more willing to believe stories that
tell them they can escape death and live forever. So here's an example: One recent study took two groups of agnostics, that is people who are undecided in their religious beliefs. Now, one group was asked to think about being dead. The other group was asked to think about being lonely. They were then asked again about their religious beliefs. Those who had been asked to think about being dead were afterwards twice as likely to express faith in God and Jesus. Twice as likely. Even though the before they were all equally agnostic. But put the fear of death in them, and they run to Jesus.
Now, this shows that reminding people of death biases them to believe, regardless of the evidence, and it works not just for religion, but for any kind of belief system that promises immortality in some form, whether it's becoming famous or having children or even nationalism, which promises you can live on as part of a greater whole. This is a bias that has shaped the course of human history.
Now, the theory behind this bias in the over 400 studies is called terror management theory, and the idea is simple. It's just this. We develop our worldviews, that is, the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it, in order to help us manage the terror of death. And these immortality stories have thousands of different manifestations, but I believe that behind the apparent diversity there are actually just four basic forms that these immortality stories can take. And we can see them repeating themselves throughout history, just with slight variations to reflect the vocabulary of the day. Now I'm going to briefly introduce these four basic forms of immortality story, and I want to try to give you some sense of the way in which they're retold by each culture or generation using the vocabulary of their day.
Now, the first story is the simplest. We want to avoid death, and the dream of doing that in this body in this world forever is the first and simplest kind of immortality story, and it might at first sound implausible, but actually, almost every culture in human history has had
some myth or legend of an elixir of life or a fountain of youth or something that promises to keep us going forever. Ancient Egypt had such myths, ancient Babylon, ancient India. Throughout European history, we find them in the work of the alchemists, and of course we still believe this today, only we tell this story using the vocabulary of science. So 100 years ago, hormones had just been discovered, and people hoped that hormone treatments were going to cure aging and disease, and now instead we set our hopes on stem cells, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. But the idea that science can cure death is just one more chapter in the story of the magical elixir, a story that is as old as civilization. But betting everything on the idea of finding the elixir and staying alive forever is a risky strategy. When we look back through history at all those who have sought an elixir in the past, the one thing they now have in common is that they're all dead.
So we need a backup plan, and exactly this kind of plan B is what the second kind of immortality story offers, and that's resurrection. And it stays with the idea that I am this body, I am this physical organism. It accepts that I'm going to have to die but says, despite that, I can rise up and I can live again. In other words, I can do what Jesus did. Jesus died, he was three days in the [tomb], and then he rose up and lived again. And the idea that we can all be resurrected to live again is orthodox believe, not just for Christians but also Jews and Muslims. But our desire to believe this story is so deeply embedded that we are reinventing it again for the scientific age, for example, with the idea of cryonics. That's the idea that when you die, you can have yourself frozen, and then, at some point when technology has advanced enough, you can be thawed out and repaired and revived and so resurrected. And so some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again, and other people believe an omnipotent scientist will do it.
But for others, the whole idea of resurrection, of climbing out of the grave, it's just too much like a bad zombie movie. They find the body too messy, too unreliable to guarantee eternal life, and so they set their
hopes on the third, more spiritual immortality story, the idea that we can leave our body behind and live on as a soul. Now, the majority of people on Earth believe they have a soul, and the idea is central to many religions. But even though, in its current form, in its traditional form, the idea of the soul is still hugely popular, nonetheless we are again reinventing it for the digital age, for example with the idea that you can leave your body behind by uploading your mind, your essence, the real you, onto a computer, and so live on as an avatar in the ether.
But of course there are skeptics who say if we look at the evidence of science, particularly neuroscience, it suggests that your mind, your essence, the real you, is very much dependent on a particular part of your body, that is, your brain. And such skeptics can find comfort in the fourth kind of immortality story, and that is legacy, the idea that you can live on through the echo you leave in the world, like the great Greek warrior Achilles, who sacrificed his life fighting at Troy so that he might win immortal fame. And the pursuit of fame is as widespread and popular now as it ever was, and in our digital age, it's even easier to achieve. You don't need to be a great warrior like Achilles or a great king or hero. All you need is an Internet connection and a funny cat. (Laughter) But some people prefer to leave a more tangible, biological legacy -- children, for example. Or they like, they hope, to live on as part of some greater whole, a nation or a family or a tribe, their gene pool. But again, there are skeptics who doubt whether legacy really is immortality. Woody Allen, for example, who said, "I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I want to live on in my apartment." So those are the four basic kinds of immortality stories, and I've tried to give just some sense of how they're retold by each generation with just slight variations to fit the fashions of the day. And the fact that they recur in this way, in such a similar form but in such different belief systems, suggests, I think, that we should be skeptical of the truth of any particular version of these stories. The fact that some people believe an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again and others believe an
omnipotent scientist will do it suggests that neither are really believing this on the strength of the evidence. Rather, we believe these stories because we are biased to believe them, and we are biased to believe them because we are so afraid of death.
So the question is, are we doomed to lead the one life we have in a way that is shaped by fear and denial, or can we overcome this bias? Well the Greek philosopher Epicurus thought we could. He argued that the fear of death is natural, but it is not rational. "Death," he said, "is nothing to us, because when we are here, death is not, and when death is here, we are gone." Now this is often quoted, but it's difficult to really grasp, to really internalize, because exactly this idea of being gone is so difficult to imagine. So 2,000 years later, another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it like this: "Death is not an event in life: We do not live to experience death. And so," he added, "in this sense, life has no end."
So it was natural for me as a child to fear being swallowed by the void, but it wasn't rational, because being swallowed by the void is not something that any of us will ever live to experience.
Now, overcoming this bias is not easy because the fear of death is so deeply embedded in us, yet when we see that the fear itself is not rational, and when we bring out into the open the ways in which it can unconsciously bias us, then we can at least start to try to minimize the influence it has on our lives.
Now, I find it helps to see life as being like a book: Just as a book is bounded by its covers, by beginning and end, so our lives are bounded by birth and death, and even though a book is limited by beginning and end, it can encompass distant landscapes, exotic figures, fantastic adventures. And even though a book is limited by beginning and end, the characters within it know no horizons. They only know the moments that make up their story, even when the book is closed. And so the characters of a book are not afraid of reaching the last page. Long
John Silver is not afraid of you finishing your copy of "Treasure Island." And so it should be with us. Imagine the book of your life, its covers, its beginning and end, and your birth and your death. You can only know the moments in between, the moments that make up your life. It makes no sense for you to fear what is outside of those covers, whether before your birth or after your death. And you needn't worry how long the book is, or whether it's a comic strip or an epic. The only thing that matters is that you make it a good story.
What is so special about the human brain by
Suzana Herculano-Houzel
What is so special about the human brain? Why is it that we study other animals instead of them studying us? What does a human brain have or do that no other brain does? When I became interested in these questions about 10 years ago, scientists thought they knew what different brains were made of. Though it was based on very little evidence, many scientists thought that all mammalian brains, including the human brain, were made in the same way, with a number of neurons that was always proportional to the size of the brain. This means that two brains of the same size, like these two, with a respectable 400 grams, should have similar numbers of neurons. Now, if neurons are the functional information processing units of the brain, then the owners of these two brains should have similar cognitive abilities. And yet, one is a chimp, and the other is a cow. Now maybe cows have a really rich internal mental life and are so smart that they choose not to let us realize it, but we eat them. I think most people will agree that chimps are capable of much more complex, elaborate and flexible behaviors than cows are. So this is a first indication that the "all brains are made the same way" scenario is not quite right.
But let's play along. If all brains were made the same way and you were to compare animals with brains of different sizes, larger brains should always have more neurons than smaller brains, and the larger the brain,
the more cognitively able its owner should be. So the largest brain around should also be the most cognitively able. And here comes the bad news: Our brain, not the largest one around. It seems quite vexing. Our brain weighs between 1.2 and 1.5 kilos, but elephant brains weigh between four and five kilos, and whale brains can weigh up to nine kilos, which is why scientists used to resort to saying that our brain must be special to explain our cognitive abilities. It must be really extraordinary, an exception to the rule. Theirs may be bigger, but ours is better, and it could be better, for example, in that it seems larger than it should be, with a much larger cerebral cortex than we should have for the size of our bodies. So that would give us extra cortex to do more interesting things than just operating the body. That's because the size of the brain usually follows the size of the body. So the main reason for saying that our brain is larger than it should be actually comes from comparing ourselves to great apes. Gorillas can be two to three times larger than we are, so their brains should also be larger than ours, but instead it's the other way around. Our brain is three times larger than a gorilla brain. The human brain also seems special in the amount of energy that it uses. Although it weighs only two percent of the body, it alone uses 25 percent of all the energy that your body requires to run per day. That's 500 calories out of a total of 2,000 calories, just to keep your brain working. So the human brain is larger than it should be, it uses much more energy than it should, so it's special. And this is where the story started to bother me. In biology, we look for rules that apply to all animals and to life in general, so why should the rules of evolution apply to everybody else but not to us? Maybe the problem was with the basic assumption that all brains are made in the same way. Maybe two brains of a similar size can actually be made of very different numbers of neurons. Maybe a very large brain does not necessarily have more neurons than a more modest-sized brain. Maybe the human brain actually has the most neurons of any brain, regardless of its size, especially in the cerebral cortex. So this to me became the important question to answer: how many neurons does the human brain have, and how does that compare to other animals?
Now, you may have heard or read somewhere that we have 100 billion neurons, so 10 years ago, I asked my colleagues if they knew where this number came from. But nobody did. I've been digging through the literature for the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. It seems that nobody had actually ever counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter.
So I came up with my own way to count cells in the brain, and it essentially consists of dissolving that brain into soup. It works like this: You take a brain, or parts of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent, which destroys the cell membranes but keeps the cell nuclei intact, so you end up with a suspension of free nuclei that looks like this, like a clear soup. This soup contains all the nuclei that once were a mouse brain. Now, the beauty of a soup is that because it is soup, you can agitate it and make those nuclei be distributed homogeneously in the liquid, so that now by looking under the microscope at just four or five samples of this homogeneous solution, you can count nuclei, and therefore tell how many cells that brain had. It's simple, it's straightforward, and it's really fast. So we've used that method to count neurons in dozens of different species so far, and it turns out that all brains are not made the same way. Take rodents and primates, for instance: In larger rodent brains, the average size of the neuron increases, so the brain inflates very rapidly and gains size much faster than it gains neurons. But primate brains gain neurons without the average neuron becoming any larger, which is a very economical way to add neurons to your brain. The result is that a primate brain will always have more neurons than a rodent brain of the same size, and the larger the brain, the larger this difference will be. Well, what about our brain then? We found that we have, on average, 86 billion neurons, 16 billion of which are in the cerebral cortex, and if you consider that the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness and logical and abstract reasoning, and that 16 billion is the most neurons that any cortex has, I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. But just as important is what the 86 billion neurons mean. Because we found that the relationship between the size of the brain and its number of neurons could be described mathematically, we could calculate what a human brain would look like if it was made like a rodent brain. So, a rodent brain with 86 billion neurons would weigh 36
kilos. That's not possible. A brain that huge would be crushed by its own weight, and this impossible brain would go in the body of 89 tons. I don't think it looks like us.
So this brings us to a very important conclusion already, which is that we are not rodents. The human brain is not a large rat brain. Compared to a rat, we might seem special, yes, but that's not a fair comparison to make, given that we know that we are not rodents. We are primates, so the correct comparison is to other primates. And there, if you do the math, you find that a generic primate with 86 billion neurons would have a brain of about 1.2 kilos, which seems just right, in a body of some 66 kilos, which in my case is exactly right, which brings us to a very unsurprising but still incredibly important conclusion: I am a primate. And all of you are primates.
And so was Darwin. I love to think that Darwin would have really appreciated this. His brain, like ours, was made in the image of other primate brains.
So the human brain may be remarkable, yes, but it is not special in its number of neurons. It is just a large primate brain. I think that's a very humbling and sobering thought that should remind us of our place in nature.
Why does it cost so much energy, then? Well, other people have figured out how much energy the human brain and that of other species costs, and now that we knew how many neurons each brain was made of, we could do the math. And it turns out that both human and other brains cost about the same, an average of six calories per billion neurons per day. So the total energetic cost of a brain is a simple, linear function of its number of neurons, and it turns out that the human brain costs just as much energy as you would expect. So the reason why the human brain costs so much energy is simply because it has a huge number of neurons, and because we are primates with many more neurons for a given body size than any other animal, the relative cost of our brain is large, but just because we're primates, not because we're special.
Last question, then: how did we come by this remarkable number of neurons, and in particular, if great apes are larger than we are, why don't they have a larger brain than we do, with more neurons? When we realized how much expensive it is to have a lot of neurons in the brain, I figured, maybe there's a simple reason. They just can't afford the energy for both a large body and a large number of neurons. So we did the math. We calculated on the one hand how much energy a primate gets per day from eating raw foods, and on the other hand, how much energy a body of a certain size costs and how much energy a brain of a certain number of neurons costs, and we looked for the combinations of body size and number of brain neurons that a primate could afford if it ate a certain number of hours per day.
And what we found is that because neurons are so expensive, there is a tradeoff between body size and number of neurons. So a primate that eats eight hours per day can afford at most 53 billion neurons, but then its body cannot be any bigger than 25 kilos. To weigh any more than that, it has to give up neurons. So it's either a large body or a large number of neurons. When you eat like a primate, you can't afford both. One way out of this metabolic limitation would be to spend even more hours per day eating, but that gets dangerous, and past a certain point, it's just not possible. Gorillas and orangutans, for instance, afford about 30 billion neurons by spending eight and a half hours per day eating, and that seems to be about as much as they can do. Nine hours of feeding per day seems to be the practical limit for a primate.
What about us? With our 86 billion neurons and 60 to 70 kilos of body mass, we should have to spend over nine hours per day every single day feeding, which is just not feasible. If we ate like a primate, we should not be here.
How did we get here, then? Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods. And remarkably, that matches exactly what our ancestors are believed to have invented one and a half million years ago, when they invented cooking. To cook is to use fire to pre-digest foods
outside of your body. Cooked foods are softer, so they're easier to chew and to turn completely into mush in your mouth, so that allows them to be completely digested and absorbed in your gut, which makes them yield much more energy in much less time. So cooking frees time for us to do much more interesting things with our day and with our neurons than just thinking about food, looking for food, and gobbling down food all day long.
So because of cooking, what once was a major liability, this large, dangerously expensive brain with a lot of neurons, could now become a major asset, now that we could both afford the energy for a lot of neurons and the time to do interesting things with them. So I think this explains why the human brain grew to become so large so fast in evolution, all of the while remaining just a primate brain. With this large brain now affordable by cooking, we went rapidly from raw foods to culture, agriculture, civilization, grocery stores, electricity, refrigerators, all of those things that nowadays allow us to get all the energy we need for the whole day in a single sitting at your favorite fast food joint. So what once was a solution now became the problem, and ironically, we look for the solution in raw food.
So what is the human advantage? What is it that we have that no other animal has? My answer is that we have the largest number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, and I think that's the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities. And what is it that we do that no other animal does, and which I believe was fundamental to allow us to reach that large, largest number of neurons in the cortex? In two words, we cook. No other animal cooks its food. Only humans do. And I think that's how we got to become human.
Studying the human brain changed the way I think about food. I now look at my kitchen, and I bow to it, and I thank my ancestors for coming up with the invention that probably made us humans. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets By
Saki Mafundikwa
I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States, and Africa called me back. And I founded my country's first graphic design and new media college. And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts. The idea, the dream, was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated, the creation of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage. We offer a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully completed their high school education. And typography's a very important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look inward for influence. Here's a poster designed by one of the students under the theme "Education is a right." Some logos designed by my students.
Africa has had a long tradition of writing, but this is not such a well-known fact, and I wrote the book "Afrikan Alphabets" to address that. The different types of writing in Africa, first was proto-writing, as illustrated by Nsibidi, which is the writing system of a secret society of the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria. So it's a special-interest writing system. The Akan of people of Ghana and [Cote d'Ivoire] developed Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago, and these are proverbs, historical sayings, objects, animals, plants, and my favorite Adinkra system is the first one at the top on the left. It's called Sankofa. It means, "Return and get it." Learn from the past. This pictograph by the Jokwe people of Angola tells the story of the creation of the world. At the top is God, at the bottom is man, mankind, and on the left is the sun, on the right is the moon. All the paths lead to and from God. These secret societies of the Yoruba, Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria, Congo and Angola respectively, developed this intricate writing system which is alive and well today in the New World in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti. In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Ituri society, the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree, and the women, who are also the praise singers, paint interweaving patterns that are the same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their
singing -- a sort of a musical score, if you may. In South Africa, Ndebele women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their homes in bright colors, and the Zulu women use the symbols in the beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces.
Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing, with the Ethiopic script that was developed in the fourth century A.D. and is used to write Amharic, which is spoken by over 24 million people. King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of 25. Shü-mom is a writing system. It's a syllabary. It's not exactly an alphabet. And here we see three stages of development that it went through in 30 years. The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s. It's a syllabary and reads from left to right. Next door, in Sierra Leone, the Mende also developed a syllabary, but theirs reads from right to left. Africa has had a long tradition of design, a well-defined design sensibility, but the problem in Africa has been that, especially today, designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration. The creative spirit in Africa, the creative tradition, is as potent as it has always been, if only designers could look within. This Ethiopic cross illustrates what Dr. Ron Eglash has established: that Africa has a lot to contribute to computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals. Africans of antiquity created civilization, and their monuments, which still stand today, are a true testimony of their greatness. Most probably, one of humanity's greatest achievements is the invention of the alphabet, and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt, and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact. That is, until 1998, when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western Egypt, and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C., centuries before Mesopotamia. Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place that they were discovered, these inscriptions -- research is still going on, a few of them have been deciphered, but there is consensus among scholars that this is really humanity's first alphabet. Over here, you see a
paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far, starting with the letter A, "ālep," at the top, and "bêt," in the middle, and so forth. It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans like Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop, whose seminal work on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery.
The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa, which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and build on a future for us and our children. It is also time that designers in Africa stop looking outside. They've been looking outward for a long time, yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp, right within them.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Fix your bad English
Hi. James, from EngVid. Today's video is on, well, "The Book of Bad English". There are mistakes that native speakers make that ESL people pick up -- and "ESL" is "English as a Second Language". People learning English, they pick up because native speakers don't even know they're making this mistake. So I want to teach you six common ones that come regularly or happen regularly in conversation. And I want you to learn them and make your English perfect. Let's go to the board.
Now, let's start with No. 1, one of my favorite ones: "amount" and "number". "Amount" is, sort of, like, "how much". A "number" is, you know, "thing". When we look at "amount", you can think of you can't count it, all right? A lot of times, when we say "amount" -- like, "I have a large amount of water in my house" -- you can't count water. But you can count a number, so: "The number of people who come to the city is in the thousands", so you can count them. Here's an example. Tell me if this is right or wrong. "The amount of students who are late is growing every day" or "the number of students who are late is growing every day." You should say "number" because you can count students. You can't count amount. That rhymes. Maybe that'll help, right? You can't count amount. You can't count amount. So when we want to talk about
a number of something or a body of something, "amount" is for things you cannot count, and "number" is for things you can count. English people make this mistake a lot.
Next: "among" and "between". When I used to teach "among" and "between", I would say, "'Among' is 'with'. So there're five chairs, and you're 'with' another. And 'between' is you're in the middle." That's it. Because I was so smart. And then I found out it's just this: two. More than two. That's it. Nothing special. When you talk about "between", except -- and this is a major exception -- when you're talking about differences. Differences you have to use "between". But generally speaking, "among" is more than two. "I was sitting among my friends at the bar." You can know there're probably four or five, not two. But "let's keep this between you and me"? A lot of times, Canadians say, "Let's keep this among us." And it's like, "Among who?" "The rest of those guys, you know. The Americans. They don't need to know this." Okay. So "between us" -- usually two, right? It could be two groups. "There was a fight between this country and that country." Right? Because it's two groups. But "among" is for more than two, cool? All right. So "among" -- more than two; "between" -- two.
What about "bring" and "take"? This is something that a lot of students make a mistake on. So you say, "Bring this to me" or "take this to him." It's very easy. "Bring" is "to the speaker", okay? And "take" is "away from the speaker". Now, if you're born in England, that's easy because they always talk about "I want takeaway." Takeaway. Because they take the food away from the restaurant, right? So one of my favorite sayings that we say in England -- not England -- that we say here is, like -- watch every space movie: "Take me to your leader." You'll never see a space movie, unless it's made by me -- and it would say, "Bring me to your leader." We don't do that. You say, "Take them to the leader" because you're taking them away from this spot where the speaker is to a new location or spot. So "take" and "bring" are easy because it's "bring -- come towards". Here's a mistake -- not Canadians -- English speakers make that you should be aware of. They'll say something like, "Don't forget to bring your bag with you" instead of, "Don't forget to take your bag." Do you know what the difference is? Well, you're leaving, right? So you need to take it away. Remember I said "away from"? Take the bag away from you. When you say, "Bring the bag with you", the speaker's speaking, you're still moving away from the speaker, right? So you've got
to use this. But Canadians and Americans and Brits say it a lot. They'll say, "Bring it with you." No. "Take" it with you. You know the difference now because you're smart. And you're studying from The Book of Bad English. Good for you. There's a worm in that book. Watch it.
Okay. "Fewer" or "less". I'm going to make a statement, and think which one is correct. "'Fewer' than a million people have watched the videos on EngVid. 'Less' than a million people have watched the videos on EngVid." Which one would be correct? Yeah. If you said "less than", no. "Less" is similar to "amount". You say "fewer" for things you can count.
The birds and the bees are just the beginning By
Carin Bondar
Anyone in the room thought about sex today? (Laughter) Yeah, you did. Thank you for putting your hand up over there. Well, I'm here to
provide you with some biological validation for your sordid daydreams. I'm here to tell you a few things that you might not have known about wild sex.
Now, when humans think about sex, male and female forms are generally what come to mind, but for many millions of years, such
specific categories didn't even exist. Sex was a mere fusion of bodies or a trickle of DNA shared between two or more beings. It wasn't until about 500 million years ago that we start to see structures akin to a penis or a thing that gives DNA out, and a vagina, something that receives it. Now invariably, you're probably thinking about what belongs to our own species, these very familiar structures, but the diversity that we see in sexual structures in the animal kingdom that has evolved in response to the multitude of factors surrounding reproduction is pretty
mind-blowing.
Penile diversity is especially profuse. So this is a paper nautilus. It's a close relative of squid and octopus, and males have a hectocotylus. Just what is a hectocotylus? A detachable, swimming penis. It leaves the [body of the male], finds the female through pheromonal cues in the water, attaches itself to her body and deposits the sperm. For many decades, biologists actually felt that the hectocotylus was a separate
organism altogether. Now, the tapir is a mammal from South America. And the tapir has a prehensile penis. It actually has a level of dexterity in its penis much akin to what we have with our hands. And it uses this dexterity to bypass the vagina altogether and deposit sperm directly into the female's uterus, not to mention it's a pretty good size. The biggest penis in the animal kingdom, however, is not that of the tapir. The biggest penis-to-body-size ratio in the animal kingdom actually belongs to the meager beach barnacle, and this video is actually showing you what the human penis would look like if it were the same size as that of a barnacle. (Laughter) Mm-hm. (Laughter)
So with all of this diversity in structure, one might think, then, that penises are fitting neatly into vaginas all over the place for the purposes of successful reproduction. Simply insert part A into slot B, and we should all be good to go. But of course, that doesn't exactly happen, and that's because we can't just take form into account. We have to think about function as well, and when it comes to sex, function relates to the contributions made by the gametes, or the sperm and the eggs. And these contributions are far from equal. Eggs are very expensive to make, so it makes sense for females to be very choosy about who she shares them with. Sperm, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap, so it makes more sense for males to have a more-sex-is-better strategy when it comes to siring members of future generations.
So how do animals cope with these very incongruent needs between the sexes? I mean, if a female doesn't choose a particular male, or if she has the ability to store sperm and she simply has enough, then it makes more sense for her to spend her time doing other biologically relevant things: avoiding predators, taking care of offspring, gathering and ingesting food. This is, of course, bad news for any male who has yet to make a deposit in her sperm bank, and this sets the scene for some pretty drastic strategies for successful fertilization. This is bedbug sex, and it's aptly termed traumatic insemination. Males have a spiked, barbed penis that they literally stab into the female, and they don't stab it anywhere near her vagina. They stab it anywhere in her body, and the sperm simply migrates through her hemolymph to her ovaries. If a female gets too many stab wounds, or if a stab wound happens to become infected, she can actually die from it.
Now if you've ever been out for a nice, peaceful walk by the lake and happened to see some ducks having sex, you've undoubtedly been
alarmed, because it looks like gang rape. And quite frankly, that's exactly what it is. A group of males will grab a female, hold her down, and
ballistically ejaculate their spiral-shaped penis into her
corkscrew-shaped vagina over and over and over again. From flaccid to ejaculation in less than a second. Now the female actually gets the last laugh,
though, because she can actually manipulate her posture so as to allow the sperm of certain suitors better access to her ovaries.
Now, I like to share stories like this with my audiences because, yeah, we humans, we tend to think sex, sex is fun, sex is good, there's romance, and there's orgasm. But orgasm didn't actually evolve until about 65 million years ago with the advent of mammals. But some animals had it going on quite a bit before that. There are some more primitive ways of pleasing one's partner.
Earwig males have either really large penile appendages or really small ones. It's a very simple genetically inherited trait and the males are not otherwise any different. Those that have long penile appendages are not bigger or stronger or otherwise any different at all. So going back to our biological minds, then, we might think that females should choose to have sex with the guys that have the shorter appendages, because she can use her time for other things: avoiding predators, taking care of young, finding and ingesting food. But biologists have repeatedly observed that females choose to have sex with the males that have the long appendages. Why do they do this? Well, according to the biological literature, "During copulation, the genitalia of certain males may elicit more favorable female responses through superior mechanical or stimulatory interaction with the female reproductive tract." Mm-hm. These are Mexican guppies, and what you see on their upper maxilla is an outgrowth of epidermal filaments, and these filaments basically form a fish mustache, if you will. Now males have been observed to prod the female's genital opening prior to copulating with her, and in what I have lovingly termed the Magnum, P.I. hypothesis, females are
overwhelmingly more likely to be found with males that have these fish mustaches. A little guppy porn for you right there.
So we've seen very different strategies that males are using when it comes to winning a female partner. We've seen a coercion strategy in which sexual structures are used in a forceful way to basically make a female have sex. We've also seen a titillation strategy where males are actually pleasing their female partners into choosing them as a sex partner. Now unfortunately, in the animal kingdom, it's the coercion strategy that we see time and time again. It's very common in many phyla, from invertebrates to avian species, mammals, and, of course, even in primates.
Now interestingly, there are a few mammalian species in which females have evolved specialized genitalia that doesn't allow for sexual coercion to take place. Female elephants and female hyenas have a penile clitoris, or an enlarged clitoral tissue that hangs externally, much like a penis, and in fact it's very difficult to sex these animals by merely looking at their external morphology. So before a male can insert his penis into a female's vagina, she has to take this penile clitoris and basically inside-out it in her own body. I mean, imagine putting a penis into another penis. It's simply not going to happen unless the female is on board with the action. Now, even more interesting is the fact that elephant and hyena societies are entirely matriarchal: they're run by females, groups of females, sisters, aunts and offspring, and when young males attain sexual maturity, they're turfed out of the group. In hyena societies, adult males are actually the lowest on the social scale. They can take part in a kill only after everybody else, including the offspring. So it seems that when you take the penis power away from a male, you take away all the social power he has.
So what are my take-home messages from my talk today? Well, sex is just so much more than insert part A into slot B and hope that the
offspring run around everywhere. The sexual strategies and reproductive structures that we see in the animal kingdom basically dictate how
males and females will react to each other, which then dictates how populations and societies form and evolve.
So it may not be surprising to any of you that animals, including ourselves, spend a good amount of time thinking about sex, but what might surprise you is the extent to which so many other aspects of their lives and our lives are influenced by it.
So thank you, and happy daydreaming. (Applause)
Why I must come out By
Geena Rocero
The world makes you something that you're not, but you know inside what you are, and that question burns in your heart: How will you become that? I may be somewhat unique in this, but I am not alone, not alone at all. So when I became a fashion model, I felt that I'd finally achieved the dream that I'd always wanted since I was a young child. My outside self finally matched my inner truth, my inner self. For complicated reasons which I'll get to later, when I look at this picture, at that time I felt like, Geena, you've done it, you've made it, you have arrived. But this past October, I realized that I'm only just beginning. All of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our moment in history, even our own bodies. Some people have the courage to break free, not to accept the limitations imposed by the color of their skin or by the beliefs of those that surround them. Those people are always the threat to the status quo, to what is considered acceptable. In my case, for the last nine years, some of my neighbors, some of my friends, colleagues, even my agent, did not know about my history. I think, in mystery, this is called the reveal. Here is mine.
I was assigned boy at birth based on the appearance of my genitalia. I remember when I was five years old in the Philippines walking around our house, I would always wear this t-shirt on my head. And my mom asked me, "How come you always wear that t-shirt on your head?" I said, "Mom, this is my hair. I'm a girl." I knew then how to self-identify.
Gender has always been considered a fact, immutable, but we now know it's actually more fluid, complex and mysterious. Because of my success, I never had the courage to share my story, not because I thought what I am is wrong, but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free. Every day, I am so grateful because I am a woman. I have a mom and dad and family who accepted me for who I am. Many are not so fortunate.
There's a long tradition in Asian culture that celebrates the fluid mystery of gender. There is a Buddhist goddess of compassion. There is a Hindu goddess, hijra goddess. So when I was eight years old, I was at a fiesta in the Philippines celebrating these mysteries. I was in front of the stage, and I remember, out comes this beautiful woman right in front of me, and I remember that moment something hit me: That is the kind of woman I would like to be. So when I was 15 years old, still dressing as a boy, I met this woman named T.L. She is a transgender beauty pageant manager. That night she asked me, "How come you are not joining the beauty pageant?" She convinced me that if I joined that she would take care of the registration fee and the garments, and that night, I won best in swimsuit and best in long gown and placed second runner up among 40-plus candidates. That moment changed my life. All of a sudden, I was introduced to the world of beauty pageants. Not a lot of people could say that your first job is a pageant queen for transgender women, but I'll take it.
So from 15 to 17 years old, I joined the most prestigious pageant to the pageant where it's at the back of the truck, literally, or sometimes it would be a pavement next to a rice field, and when it rains -- it rains a lot in the Philippines -- the organizers would have to move it inside someone's house. I also experienced the goodness of strangers, especially when we would travel in remote provinces in the Philippines. But most importantly, I met some of my best friends in that community. In 2001, my mom, who had moved to San Francisco, called me and told me that my green card petition came through, that I could now move to the United States. I resisted it. I told my mom, "Mom, I'm having fun. I'm here with my friends, I love traveling, being a beauty pageant
queen." But then two weeks later she called me, she said, "Did you know that if you move to the United States you could change your name and gender marker?" That was all I needed to hear. My mom also told me to put two E's in the spelling of my name. She also came with me when I had my surgery in Thailand at 19 years old. It's interesting, in some of the most rural cities in Thailand, they perform some of the most prestigious, safe and sophisticated surgery. At that time in the United States, you needed to have surgery before you could change your name and gender marker. So in 2001, I moved to San Francisco, and I remember looking at my California driver's license with the name Geena and gender marker F. That was a powerful moment. For some people, their I.D. is their license to drive or even to get a drink, but for me, that was my license to live, to feel dignified. All of a sudden, my fears were minimized. I felt that I could conquer my dream and move to New York and be a model.
Many are not so fortunate. I think of this woman named Ayla Nettles. She's from New York, she's a young woman who was courageously living her truth, but hatred ended her life. For most of my community, this is the reality in which we live. Our suicide rate is nine times higher than that of the general population. Every November 20, we have a global vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance. I'm here at this stage because it's a long history of people who fought and stood up for injustice. This is Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Today, this very moment, is my real coming out. I could no longer live my truth for and by myself. I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror. I am here, exposed, so that one day there will never be a need for a November 20 vigil.
My deepest truth allowed me to accept who I am. Will you? Thank you very much.
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
Kathryn Schulz: Geena, one quick question for you. I'm wondering what you would say, especially to parents, but in a more broad way, to friends, to family, to anyone who finds themselves encountering a child or a
person who is struggling with and uncomfortable with a gender that's being assigned them, what might you say to the family members of that person to help them become good and caring and kind family members to them?
Geena Rocero: Sure. Well, first, really, I'm so blessed. The support system, with my mom especially, and my family, that in itself is just so powerful. I remember every time I would coach young trans women, I would mentor them, and sometimes when they would call me and tell me that their parents can't accept it, I would pick up that phone call and tell my mom, "Mom, can you call this woman?" And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so — But it's just, gender identity is in the core of our being, right? I mean, we're all assigned gender at birth, so what I'm trying to do is to have this conversation that sometimes that gender assignment doesn't match, and there should be a space that would allow people to self-identify, and that's a conversation that we should have with parents, with colleagues. The transgender movement, it's at the very beginning, to compare to how the gay movement started. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. There should be an understanding. There should be a space of curiosity and asking questions, and I hope all of you guys will be my allies.
KS: Thank you. That was so lovely. GR: Thank you. (Applause)
A word game to communicate in any language By
Ajit Narayanan
I work with children with autism. Specifically, I make technologies to help them communicate.
Now, many of the problems that children with autism face, they have a common source, and that source is that they find it difficult to
understand abstraction, symbolism. And because of this, they have a lot of difficulty with language.
Let me tell you a little bit about why this is. You see that this is a picture of a bowl of soup. All of us can see it. All of us understand this. These are two other pictures of soup, but you can see that these are more abstract These are not quite as concrete. And when you get to language, you see that it becomes a word whose look, the way it looks and the way it sounds, has absolutely nothing to do with what it started with, or what it represents, which is the bowl of soup. So it's essentially a completely abstract, a completely arbitrary representation of something which is in the real world, and this is something that children with autism have an incredible amount of difficulty with. Now that's why most of the people that work with children with autism -- speech therapists, educators -- what they do is, they try to help children with autism communicate not with words, but with pictures. So if a child with autism wanted to say, "I want soup," that child would pick three different pictures, "I," "want," and "soup," and they would put these together, and then the therapist or the parent would understand that this is what the kid wants to say. And this has been incredibly effective; for the last 30, 40 years people have been doing this. In fact, a few years back, I developed an app for the iPad which does exactly this. It's called Avaz, and the way it works is that kids select different pictures. These pictures are sequenced together to form sentences, and these sentences are spoken out. So Avaz is essentially converting pictures, it's a translator, it converts pictures into speech. Now, this was very effective. There are thousands of children using this, you know, all over the world, and I started thinking about what it does and what it doesn't do. And I realized something interesting: Avaz helps children with autism learn words. What it doesn't help them do is to learn word patterns. Let me explain this in a little more detail. Take this sentence: "I want soup tonight." Now it's not just the words here that convey the meaning. It's also the way in which these words are arranged, the way these words are modified and arranged. And that's why a
sentence like "I want soup tonight" is different from a sentence like "Soup want I tonight," which is completely meaningless. So there is another hidden abstraction here which children with autism find a lot of difficulty coping with, and that's the fact that you can modify words and you can arrange them to have different meanings, to convey different ideas. Now, this is what we call grammar. And grammar is incredibly powerful, because grammar is this one component of language which
takes this finite vocabulary that all of us have and allows us to convey an infinite amount of information, an infinite amount of ideas. It's the way in which you can put things together in order to convey anything you want to.
And so after I developed Avaz, I worried for a very long time about how I could give grammar to children with autism. The solution came to me from a very interesting perspective. I happened to chance upon a child with autism conversing with her mom, and this is what happened. Completely out of the blue, very spontaneously, the child got up and said, "Eat." Now what was interesting was the way in which the mom was trying to tease out the meaning of what the child wanted to say by talking to her in questions. So she asked, "Eat what? Do you want to eat ice cream? You want to eat? Somebody else wants to eat? You want to eat cream now? You want to eat ice cream in the evening?" And then it struck me that what the mother had done was something incredible. She had been able to get that child to communicate an idea to her without grammar. And it struck me that maybe this is what I was looking for. Instead of arranging words in an order, in sequence, as a sentence, you arrange them in this map, where they're all linked together not by placing them one after the other but in questions, in question-answer pairs. And so if you do this, then what you're conveying is not a sentence in English, but what you're conveying is really a meaning, the meaning of a sentence in English. Now, meaning is really the underbelly, in some sense, of language. It's what comes after thought but before language. And the idea was that this particular representation might convey meaning in its raw form.
So I was very excited by this, you know, hopping around all over the place, trying to figure out if I can convert all possible sentences that I hear into this. And I found that this is not enough. Why is this not enough? This is not enough because if you wanted to convey something like negation, you want to say, "I don't want soup," then you can't do that by asking a question. You do that by changing the word "want." Again, if you wanted to say, "I wanted soup yesterday," you do that by converting the word "want" into "wanted." It's a past tense. So this is a flourish which I added to make the system complete. This is a map of words joined together as questions and answers, and with these filters
applied on top of them in order to modify them to represent certain nuances. Let me show you this with a different example.
Let's take this sentence: "I told the carpenter I could not pay him." It's a fairly complicated sentence. The way that this particular system works, you can start with any part of this sentence. I'm going to start with the word "tell." So this is the word "tell." Now this happened in the past, so I'm going to make that "told." Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to ask questions. So, who told? I told. I told whom? I told the carpenter. Now we start with a different part of the sentence. We start with the word "pay," and we add the ability filter to it to make it "can pay." Then we make it "can't pay," and we can make it "couldn't pay" by making it the past tense. So who couldn't pay? I couldn't pay. Couldn't pay whom? I couldn't pay the carpenter. And then you join these two together by asking this question: What did I tell the carpenter? I told the carpenter I could not pay him.
Now think about this. This is —(Applause)— this is a representation of this sentence without language. And there are two or three interesting things about this. First of all, I could have started anywhere. I didn't have to start with the word "tell." I could have started anywhere in the sentence, and I could have made this entire thing. The second thing is, if I wasn't an English speaker, if I was speaking in some other language, this map would actually hold true in any language. So long as the
questions are standardized, the map is actually independent of language. So I call this FreeSpeech, and I was playing with this for many, many months. I was trying out so many different combinations of this.
And then I noticed something very interesting about FreeSpeech. I was trying to convert language, convert sentences in English into sentences in FreeSpeech, and vice versa, and back and forth. And I realized that this particular configuration, this particular way of representing language, it allowed me to actually create very concise rules that go between FreeSpeech on one side and English on the other. So I could actually write this set of rules that translates from this particular
representation into English. And so I developed this thing. I developed this thing called the FreeSpeech Engine which takes any FreeSpeech sentence as the input and gives out perfectly grammatical English text.
And by putting these two pieces together, the representation and the engine, I was able to create an app, a technology for children with autism, that not only gives them words but also gives them grammar. So I tried this out with kids with autism, and I found that there was an incredible amount of identification. They were able to create sentences in FreeSpeech which were much more complicated but much more effective than equivalent sentences in English, and I started thinking about why that might be the case. And I had an idea, and I want to talk to you about this idea next. In about 1997, about 15 years back, there were a group of scientists that were trying to understand how the brain processes language, and they found something very interesting. They found that when you learn a language as a child, as a two-year-old, you learn it with a certain part of your brain, and when you learn a language as an adult -- for example, if I wanted to learn Japanese right now — a completely different part of my brain is used. Now I don't know why that's the case, but my guess is that that's because when you learn a language as an adult, you almost invariably learn it through your native language, or through your first language. So what's interesting about FreeSpeech is that when you create a sentence or when you create language, a child with autism creates language with FreeSpeech, they're not using this support language, they're not using this bridge language. They're directly constructing the sentence.
And so this gave me this idea. Is it possible to use FreeSpeech not for children with autism but to teach language to people without
disabilities? And so I tried a number of experiments. The first thing I did was I built a jigsaw puzzle in which these questions and answers are coded in the form of shapes, in the form of colors, and you have people putting these together and trying to understand how this works. And I built an app out of it, a game out of it, in which children can play with words and with a reinforcement, a sound reinforcement of visual structures, they're able to learn language. And this, this has a lot of potential, a lot of promise, and the government of India recently licensed this technology from us, and they're going to try it out with millions of different children trying to teach them English. And the dream, the hope, the vision, really, is that when they learn English this way, they learn it with the same proficiency as their mother tongue.
All right, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about speech. This is speech. So speech is the primary mode of communication delivered between all of us. Now what's interesting about speech is that speech is one-dimensional. Why is it one-dimensional? It's one-dimensional because it's sound. It's also one-dimensional because our mouths are built that way. Our mouths are built to create one-dimensional sound. But if you think about the brain, the thoughts that we have in our heads are not one-dimensional. I mean, we have these rich, complicated,
multi-dimensional ideas. Now, it seems to me that language is really the brain's invention to convert this rich, multi-dimensional thought on one hand into speech on the other hand. Now what's interesting is that we do a lot of work in information nowadays, and almost all of that is done in the language domain. Take Google, for example. Google trawls all these countless billions of websites, all of which are in English, and when you want to use Google, you go into Google search, and you type in English, and it matches the English with the English. What if we could do this in FreeSpeech instead? I have a suspicion that if we did this, we'd find that algorithms like searching, like retrieval, all of these things, are much simpler and also more effective, because they don't process the data structure of speech. Instead they're processing the data structure of thought. The data structure of thought. That's a provocative idea.
But let's look at this in a little more detail. So this is the FreeSpeech ecosystem. We have the Free Speech representation on one side, and we have the FreeSpeech Engine, which generates English. Now if you think about it, FreeSpeech, I told you, is completely language-independent. It doesn't have any specific information in it which is about English. So everything that this system knows about English is actually encoded into the engine. That's a pretty interesting concept in itself. You've encoded an entire human language into a software program. But if you look at what's inside the engine, it's actually not very complicated. It's not very complicated code. And what's more interesting is the fact that the vast majority of the code in that engine is not really English-specific. And that gives this interesting idea. It might be very easy for us to actually create these engines in many, many different languages, in Hindi, in French, in German, in Swahili. And that gives another interesting idea.
For example, supposing I was a writer, say, for a newspaper or for a magazine. I could create content in one language, FreeSpeech, and the person who's consuming that content, the person who's reading that particular information could choose any engine, and they could read it in their own mother tongue, in their native language. I mean, this is an incredibly attractive idea, especially for India. We have so many
different languages. There's a song about India, and there's a description of the country as, it says, (in Sanskrit). That means "ever-smiling speaker of beautiful languages."
Language is beautiful. I think it's the most beautiful of human creations. I think it's the loveliest thing that our brains have invented. It
entertains, it educates, it enlightens, but what I like the most about language is that it empowers.
I want to leave you with this. This is a photograph of my collaborators, my earliest collaborators when I started working on language and
autism and various other things. The girl's name is Pavna, and that's her mother, Kalpana. And Pavna's an entrepreneur, but her story is much more remarkable than mine, because Pavna is about 23. She has
quadriplegic cerebral palsy, so ever since she was born, she could neither move nor talk. And everything that she's accomplished so far, finishing school, going to college, starting a company, collaborating with me to develop Avaz, all of these things she's done with nothing more than moving her eyes.
Daniel Webster said this: He said, "If all of my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of
communication, for with it, I would regain all the rest." And that's why, of all of these incredible applications of FreeSpeech, the one that's
closest to my heart still remains the ability for this to empower children with disabilities to be able to communicate, the power of
communication, to get back all the rest.
Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
Suicidal crickets, zombie roaches and other parasite tales By
Ed Yong
A herd of wildebeests, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds. Many animals gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in the natural world. But why do these groups form? The common answers include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or gathering to mate or breed, and all of these explanations, while often true, make a huge assumption about animal behavior, that the animals are in control of their own actions, that they are in charge of their bodies. And that is often not the case.
This is Artemia, a brine shrimp. You probably know it better as a sea monkey. It's small, and it typically lives alone, but it can gather in these large red swarms that span for meters, and these form because of a parasite. These shrimp are infected with a tapeworm. A tapeworm is effectively a long, living gut with genitals at one end and a hooked mouth at the other. As a freelance journalist, I sympathize. (Laughter) The tapeworm drains nutrients from Artemia's body, but it also does other things. It castrates them, it changes their color from transparent to bright red, it makes them live longer, and as biologist Nicolas Rode has found, it makes them swim in groups. Why? Because the tapeworm, like many other parasites, has a complicated life cycle involving many
different hosts. The shrimp are just one step on its journey. Its ultimate destination is this, the greater flamingo. Only in a flamingo can the tapeworm reproduce, so to get there, it manipulates its shrimp hosts into forming these conspicuous colored swarms that are easier for a flamingo to spot and to devour, and that is the secret of the Artemia swarm. They aren't sociable through their own volition, but because they are being controlled. It's not safety in numbers. It's actually the exact opposite. The tapeworm hijacks their brains and their bodies, turning them into vehicles for getting itself into a flamingo.
And here is another example of a parasitic manipulation. This is a
suicidal cricket. This cricket swallowed the larvae of a Gordian worm, or horsehair worm. The worm grew to adult size within it, but it needs to get into water in order to mate, and it does that by releasing proteins
