Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Humans are related to all other species here on Earth, but some are closer relatives than others. Primates, a group that includes apes, monkeys, lemurs, and others besides ourselves, are our closest relatives, and they exhibit a wide variety of behaviors that we can easily recognize. Frans de Waal is a leading primatologist and ethologist who has long studied cognition and collective behaviors in chimps, bonobos, and other species. His work has established the presence of politics, morality, and empathy in primates. His new book is Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

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Frans de Waal received his Ph.D. in biology from Utrecht University. He is currently Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among his awards are the Knight of the order of the Netherlands Lion, the Galileo Prize, ASP Distinguished Primatologist, and the PEN/EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, not to mention an Ig Nobel Prize.

• Web page
• Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution
• Facebook public page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia
• Amazon author page

Every time we make an important decision, it's hard not to wonder how things would have turned out had we chosen differently. The set of all those hypothetical lives is a kind of "multiverse" — not one predicted by quantum mechanics or cosmology, but a space of possibilities that is ripe for contemplation. In their new movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, Daniels (the collective moniker for writer/directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) use this idea to tell the story of Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who is the "worst" of all her avatars in the multiverse. We talk about philosophy, filmmaking, and how we should all strive to be kind amidst the chaos.

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Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are writers and directors collectively known as Daniels. They met and formed a collaboration while in film school at Emerson College. They have directed a number of music videos for artists such as DJ Snake and Tenacious D. Their first feature film was Swiss Army Man, starring Daniel Radcliffe.

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• IMDb: Kwan, Scheinert
• Twitter

Welcome to the April 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

Randomness and probability are central to modern physics. In statistical mechanics this is because we don't know everything about the distribution of atoms and molecules in a fluid, so we consider a probability distribution over what they might be; in quantum mechanics it's because the theory only lets us predict measurement outcomes probabilistically. Physicist Nicole Yunger Halpern explains how we've been lagging behind at bringing these two theories together, and how recent progress is changing the landscape of how we think about the microworld.

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Nicole Yunger Halpern received her Ph.D. in physics from Caltech. She is currently a NIST physicist and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Physics and IPST at the University of Maryland. Her Ph.D. thesis won the international Ilya Prigogine Prize for a thermodynamics dissertation. As a postdoc she received the International Quantum Technology Emerging Researcher Award. Her new book is Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday's Tomorrow.

• Lab web site
• University of Maryland QuICS web page
• Google Scholar
• Blog
• Amazon author page
• Twitter

The future grows out of the present, but it manages to consistently surprise us. How can we get better at anticipating and preparing for what the future can be like? Jane McGonigal started out as a game designer, working on the kinds of games that represent miniature worlds with their own rules. This paradigm provides a useful way of thinking about predicting the future: imagining changes in the current world, then gaming out the consequence, allowing real people to produce unexpected emergent outcomes. We talk about the lessons learned that anyone can use to better prepare their brain for the future to come.

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Jane McGonigal received her Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a writer and Director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. She teaches a course at Stanford on How to Think Like a Futurist. She has developed several games, including SuperBetter, a game she designed to improve health and resilience after suffering from a concussion. Her recent book is Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything–Even Things That Seem Impossible Today.

• Web site
• Institute for the Future page
• Urgent Optimists
• Amazon.com author page
• Wikipedia
• Twitter

Biological organisms are pretty good at healing themselves, but their abilities fall short in crucial ways. Planaria can be cut into pieces, and each piece will regrow into an entire organism; but for most advanced animals, loss of a limb becomes a permanent condition. But why should that necessarily be so, if an organism's genome knows what it's supposed to look like? Lea Goentoro's lab has recently produced surprising results that indicate that it's easier than you might think to coax animals into regenerating limbs.

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Lea Goentoro received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University. She is currently Professor of Biology at Caltech. Her research involves how biological systems function and develop across a variety of scales, including perception, organization, and self-repair.

• Lab web page
• Caltech web page
• Google Scholar publications
• "A conserved strategy for inducing appendage regeneration in moon jellyfish, Drosophila, and mice"

All societies grant more power to some citizens, and there is always a temptation to use that power for the benefit of themselves rather than for the greater good. Power corrupts, we are told — but to what extent is that true? Would any of us, upon receiving great power, be tempted by corruption? Or are corruptible people drawn to accrue power? Brian Klaas has investigated these questions by looking at historical examples and by interviewing hundreds of people who have been in this position. He concludes that power can corrupt, but it doesn't necessarily do so — we can construct safeguards to keep corruption to a minimum.

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Brian Klaas received his D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford. He is currently Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London and a columnist for The Washington Post. His new book is Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us. He is host of the Power Corrupts podcast.

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• UCL web page
• Washington Post columns
• Wikipedia
• Amazon author page
• Twitter
• New Zealand Police recruitment video

Welcome to the March 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of questions asked by Patreons, whittle them down to a more manageable size — based primarily on whether I have anything interesting to say about them, not whether the questions themselves are good — and sometimes group them together if they are about a similar topic. Enjoy!

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If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have trained us to think that they won't be that different at all; they'll even drink and play music at the same cafes that humans frequent. A bit of imagination, however, makes us wonder whether they won't be completely alien — we have zero data about what extraterrestrial biology could be like, so it makes sense to keep an open mind. Arik Kershenbaum argues for a judicious middle ground. He points to constraints from physics and chemistry, as well as the tendency of evolution to converge toward successful designs, as reasons to think that biologically complex aliens won't be utterly different from us after all.

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Arik Kershenbaum received his Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology from the University of Haifa. He is currently College Lecturer and Director of Studies at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves.

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• Cambridge web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Amazon author page
• Twitter

We're pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren't naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet such threats are real, both natural and human-induced. We need to collectively get better at anticipating and preparing for them, at the level of political action. Andrew Leigh is an academic and author who now serves in the Parliament of Australia. We discuss how to move the conversation about existential risks from the ivory tower to implementation in real policies.

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Andrew Leigh received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a member of the Australian House of Representatives representing Fenner. He was previously a professor of economics at Australian National University, and has served as Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities. His recent book is What's the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics.

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• Research web site
• Wikipedia
• Twitter