Rutger Bregman on the crisis of moral ambition; Why primates have same-sex relationships; Living longer is easier than you think; Bizarre method to fight climate change

26:26Let's talk now about some new evidence for why same-sex sexual behavior occurs in primates. Now, in humans, we call this homosexual behaviour. In other animals, we call it same-sex sexual behaviour. Really common across the animal kingdom. And it's posed a problem for evolutionary biologists, because how can you explain something that doesn't apparently benefit your genes? Researchers have now analysed data on apes and monkeys to try and work out why this homosexual behaviour is more common in some species than others. And the discovery is quite interesting, surprising maybe. Michael LePage has reported on this.

27:00Michael, what have they found? Hi, yes. This is a study that looked at existing data on the prevalence of same-sex behaviour in nearly 60 species of apes and monkeys. Now, overall, same-sex behaviour was really common, so more than one instance was reported for every two hours of observation. But there was also a lot of variation. So, for instance, in common marmosets, there was hardly any same-sex behaviour seen, but among Japanese macaques, there were nearly six instances for every two hours of observations. So this team looked for associations with environmental and social factors that might explain why the prevalence of this behavior varies so much from these different among these different species.

27:45And so among other things, I found that it was much more likely in dry environments where food was scarce, or where there's more predation pressure, and also in more complex societies. So basically they found that same-sex behaviour is more common in stressful environments. Right, so the implication is that that same-sex behaviour helps those primates out and helps them survive. Yeah, that's certainly what this suggests. I mean, the study absolutely does not prove this, but it's definitely suggestive. So if, say, same-sex behaviour was something that these animals are doing for pleasure only, if it was a kind of luxury that they can indulge in when they've got time and energy to spare you would expect it to become less common in stressful environments not more common and of course it's already been shown that at least in some species same-sex behavior between individuals seems to help them form bonds and alliances and also to defuse tensions and avoid violence famously in bonobos right yeah absolutely yeah very famous in bonobos.

28:50So what this suggests is that it may be that same-sex behaviour helps make groups more cohesive and improves cooperation among the members of the group. And of course, that's going to boost survival when the going gets tough. So this behaviour may actually be adaptive, contrary to what we all assume. But of course, to nail the case, there's still a lot more work to be done. Researchers really need to show that this same-sex behaviour leads to a higher number of offspring if you want to show that this is an evolutionary adaptation. So then you would get to the position where you would say the explanation for gay sex is that it improves the success of straight sex.

29:29Yeah, I mean, it may sound unlikely, but bear in mind that with animals, what we're usually seeing is not exclusive same-sex behaviour, but what in people we'll call bisexuality. So for instance, one idea is that when males are young and they form strong bonds with other males through same-sex behavior that these alliances may in the long run help them get more access to females it's like a british boarding school yes thankfully i can't comment on that

30:03but but anyway uh everyone has heard this phrase survival of the fittest but it's often thought about in these really crude simplistic terms like who's got the biggest muscle who's going to win in a fight. But there's a lot more to surviving in the wild. There's a lot more to survival than fighting. So it can be about which animals are the smartest, which are the best at looking after their kids, which are the most cooperative. And so this work is suggested it may also turn out that the fittest individuals in evolutionary terms are those that engage in some same-sex behaviour, which is an idea with a certain delicious irony.

30:38But it's going to take some more work to settle the issue. I have to say at this point that as you probably know Michael it wasn't Darwin who said came up with that phrase survival of the fittest it was Herbert Spencer and he persuaded Darwin to put it into the origin of species and but I absolutely agree that you know natural selection is not all about competing as you say cooperation is a massive part of it. The other thing I found odd about this study was that it lumped all same-sex behaviour into the same category. So it didn't matter whether it's male, male, or female, female. So I guess that that's part of the we still have a lot to learn about it, right?

31:18Yeah, we're just getting started in understanding these behaviours. So bear in mind that the vast majority of animal species haven't been closely studied in any sort of sense. And even in those animals that have been studied, same sex behaviours can go and recognise because, you know, when you see animals engaging in what looks like mating we may not know if they're male female or male male or female female the sexes may not be clear and then of course even when people have seen what are clearly same-sex behaviors they may not report them i mean this certainly used to be the case researchers used to turn a blind eye to the stuff um it is changing now but there's probably still a lot that goes unreported so i think the bottom line is what we can now say for certain is that same-sex behaviour is a very natural thing.

32:05It's not unnatural at all, it's absolutely a natural behaviour. Why it's so common among so many different animals is still very much up for debate. And of course, there can be more than one reason, you know, in different species, different types of groups of animals, there may be different factors at play. Yeah, and of course, that says really nothing about in humans, where it's even more complex and so many factors at play. Absolutely. now it's still near the start of the year and lots of people have set ambitions for the year health goals like running a marathon or something there's a new study out this week suggesting that we don't have to be so ambitious about health improvements in order or things we do for our health to to get real improvements and it could be that small tweaks are all we need um carissa Wong, you've been reporting on this.

32:56What's the story? Yeah, so we've heard this all before. Get better sleep, exercise more, eat a healthy diet, and great, you're going to live a long life, your health is going to be in good shape. But as we know, life is very hectic. We all get tired, we get stressed. So it can be quite hard to make big changes to our health. And that's what's really cool about this new study is it shows that adding mere minutes to your sleep, your exercise, and just a half cup of vegetables per day could actually make a real difference to your longevity. I mean, it sounds too good to be true. And is it really the first time that all these things have been, you know, figured out?

33:33Because it doesn't sound dramatically unplausible, the things you say. So, of course, we've always been in pursuit of living long lives and lots of studies have looked at these factors and how they improve health. But most prior studies have only took a very binary view at what changes make to your longevity. So they'll look, for example, at people who meet the World Health Organization exercise guidelines and people that don't. Or people that eat what they call a healthy diet versus people that eat an unhealthy diet as they define it. But no one's really looked at these really small tweaks to your lifestyle that might have an impact together on your longevity.

34:12I'd love to read that self-help book. You know, like basically the 80-20 self-help book of becoming healthier or happier or whatever. Like this is the bare minimum to do and you'll have great results. Does that book exist? Maybe one of you can write it. It surely does. I'll buy it. Well, this is the thing we're going to get onto, what it means for individuals versus the population level changes that this study shows. So perhaps you can tell us a bit more about what the study does. Yeah, I'll first tell you a bit more about what they actually did. So the researchers essentially analysed sleep, dietary and exercise data from about 60 ,000 people from the UK Biobank.

34:48And these people were aged between 40 and 69. And these people provided sleep data and exercise data by wearing a movement tracking device on their wrist. And a few years before that, they'd also completed dietary surveys where they record in the past year how frequently they ate various food groups like fresh fruit or processed meat, for example. And then after that sort of tracking of their exercise and sleep that happened, they basically were followed for eight years afterwards to see. Wow, so decent time. Yeah, to see who died and to track their health. And then they plugged all that data, all that information in and what did they find?

35:28Yeah, so the first thing the researchers did is they pinpointed the 5 % of people with the least healthy lifestyles. And essentially these people slept around five hours a day. They did moderate to vigorous exercise. So that's like brisk walking, running up a flight of stairs. They did that for about five minutes per day. And each day they scored about 35 on a dietary scale. So that was a scale that ranked how healthy their diets were from zero to 100, with 100 being like the perfect diet. Yeah. I mean, OK, that doesn't sound that slovenly to me in a way. I've had certainly days where I might have been in that category.

36:08are they interested in that group because they were at the worst, at the highest risk of early death or disease? Exactly. So these people are the most likely to go on to have a chronic condition, to die early. So that's why it's really important for the researchers. They wanted to see how can you improve their lifestyle to benefit their health. And so what they did is they plugged all this data into a statistical model, which they then used to estimate that compared to that least healthy group of participants, if you were to get about five minutes more of sleep a day, two minutes more of one moderate to vigorous exercise each day, and if you ate the equivalent of an extra half portion of vegetables daily, then you would live, they estimated, for a year longer on average.

36:53Just those tiny differences gives a year extra life on average. Yeah, exactly. And that's what's so kind of mind-blowing about this study. And what was really interesting is they found that combining all these tweaks, your sleep exercise and diet actually was much more effective than purely focusing on one lifestyle pillar alone so it would take sleeping an extra 25 minutes a day without changing your exercise without changing your diet to have the same benefit but if you just put a bit of effort into the three different aspects then you could achieve so improve lots by a small amount and also it feels really doable when it's you're not asking a lot yeah exactly i mean i can really relate to this i think a lot of us can it's a lot easier to just like sleep a little bit more and then do you know an extra block around you know and on a walk then engineer your day your work your family life so that you get an extra 25 minutes of sleep so i think that's what's really appealing and and might be a much more achievable goal for people we need a two minute workout video the two minute workout go ahead and you can film that this afternoon for us won't take long okay Okay, so we've looked at the effect on this lowest category.

38:06But what about, is it not just for really unhealthy, these really unhealthy category people? What about the rest of it? That's a good question. And I asked the researchers about that. And they said, yeah, they did the same sort of analysis with the people with the average lifestyle. And they did find very similar effects on extending lifespan. So that's good news. Okay, great. And let's go on about this population level thing. This is not so much about advice for the individual, is it? This is a population level effect they're looking at. Can you unpick that for us? Yeah, I can unpick that a little bit.

38:38So essentially what this study is looking at is a population level association between how much you sleep, eat, exercise and your life span, essentially. And so what we've got to remember then is every individual within that population, of course, we all have a different genetics. we're exposed to different environmental factors air pollution yeah we might all be on a slightly different trajectory of just fundamental aging and so essentially while these associations are really good news and say okay in general it doesn't take much effort to make a difference to your health you've got to be careful about putting these exact figures on each individual because we don't know like you might get a lot more benefit from the five minutes of exercise than I might just because we're all individuals yeah but it's not a bad message anyway is it to do those things that they're recommending and the broad message of smaller health goals build them into your day into your lives it's achievable it can make a big difference and there was another study as well let's just touch on that yeah so in another study it's a similar kind of study it's a population-wide study they looked at people from like Norway Sweden and the US and they essentially compared their mortality rates with how much physical activity they were doing again that moderate to vigorous intensity exercise.

40:00And they basically predicted that if the vast majority of people in those cohorts were to do an extra five minutes of that moderate to vigorous exercise per day, then you could maybe prevent 10 % of deaths in the following eight years compared to if you didn't do that. That's amazing. It's a really extraordinary, actually, a large amount. It's a bit like we're saying that the amount of vaccine improvement that the MRA vaccine did for COVID. And you can imagine the economic impacts that might trickle out, you know, immediately effect. So do we know how long people might need to do those before they might see the effect?

40:40Or is this not known yet? Yeah, that's a really good point. So of course, as I mentioned, a lot of this data is like getting people to wear a movement tracking device for a week, right? So we do know these sort of exercise and sleep are fairly stable traits across years but we really don't know for sure how representative that week of measurements is of someone's habits is it like representing a year of their life the whole decade the past decade yeah so um it's it's something that we would need to do further research to know exactly how long you need to make these changes to see those lifespan benefits but having said all that you know starting sooner is better like we don't need to necessarily know the exact time frame.

41:22I think the everyday person should just think, well, let's just do a little bit more to improve our lifestyle and that will have great benefits. We have a short break now for a message from Veve Healthcare. HIV is no longer a death sentence, but the epidemic is far from over. Today, more than 40 million people are living with HIV and nearly a quarter are not receiving life-saving treatment. Join New Scientist CoLab and Veve Healthcare for Unfinished Business, How Do We End HIV? It's a vital roundtable discussion streaming on the 28th of January. Global experts will discuss the future of care and the collective efforts required to end the epidemic.

42:01Sign up for the free discussion online. It's being run and funded by Veeve Healthcare at veeve at newscientist.com. That's V-I-I-V at newscientist.com. Now, over the last three years, average global temperatures have exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. Remember, the Paris Agreement selected 1.5. That was considered the threshold for preventing the very worst impacts of climate heating. Now, three years in a row above 1.5 doesn't mean we're officially above it, because that needs a 20-year average, but it's not looking good. Alec Loon, you've been reporting on this, and also the idea to remove loads of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

42:45So let's just mention Paris again, 2015. We thought the official breach of 1.5 would come in 2045. And now it's looking like 2030. So it's accelerating. Can we say heating is accelerating? Yeah, warming has been accelerating. The earth is warming at a faster rate than it was in previous decades. A big reason for that, scientists think, is that sulfur emissions have gone down. So basically sulfur particulate pollution has gone down, mainly from coal power generation as natural gas comes in, as renewables come in, and also from shipping because the shipping sector has cracked down on dirty fuels.

43:27So that's actually cleaned up the skies. Unmasked. Unmasked this heating. More of the sun's heat is reaching the Earth's surface. But when we look at why we're going to probably breach the 1.5 target already by 2030 rather than 2045, the real issue is that emissions, our human emissions have continued to accelerate, right? So last year was another record high of fossil fuel emissions. So basically, we're not only putting more and more CO2 in the atmosphere, we're putting it in at a higher and higher rate each year. And that may be slowing down. But the problem is that emissions continue to go up.

44:09And so that we're bringing ourselves closer to the 1.5 target faster and faster. And, you know, we've already seen last year so much extreme weather, record low polar ice on both poles. billions of dollars of damage, climate-related damage around the world. Have we underestimated even what we would have thought was going to happen at 1.5? Yes. There are some studies that suggest that we have underestimated the climate impacts and that these things, things like extreme precipitation, flash floods in some regions of the world are happening sooner than we anticipated at a lower level of warming than we anticipated they would.

44:49So we have underestimated that. And there was actually another report that came out yesterday that was making the case that governments and businesses around the world have underestimated the impacts of climate change, and they are not preparing for the worst case scenario in the way that financial institutions are expected to when we talk about risk management, right? So they were saying, and this includes both climate scientists and financial advisors and people from the financial services industry saying that we could have trillions of dollars of economic loss by 2050. They said up to$25 trillion of economic losses by 2050 on the trajectory that we're on now.

45:33And yet, global banks are not predicting a recession because they expect that GDP, that the economies of the world, the global economy is going to grow even faster than that$25 trillion hit. So, I mean, that's clearly, you know, kind of an optim... Some would say that's too optimistic that they should be preparing for a worst case scenario when we start crossing tipping points, when we start having these cascading effects that is going to really affect, you know, conflict, human migration, and the economy. And so, essentially, we're taking the mid-range scenario, you know, and we're not looking at the extreme scenario, the worst case scenario, you know, have a best guess about the worst case is proper risk management.

46:16And we're not doing that. It seems amazingly dangerous and risky, like a gamble that you might see in a, you know, a poker game on TV or something, not what you'd want from people managing the, you know, these huge amounts of money in the global economy. You'd expect a bit more adversity to risk than we're seeing. Yeah. And a risk manager at one of the major UK financial services firms, Bailey Gifford, said that the risk management that the financial industry is doing right now in regards to climate change is like being on the Titanic, pulling away from the birth and predicting a smooth sailing all the way to New York.

46:56That's the best case scenario, but they're not playing for the worst case scenario. Now, we always try to find solutions at New Scientist, and we often talk about the need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. But Alec, the story you've reported on this week, I'm struggling with because the idea is to cut down vast swathes of forest, sink the trees into the Arctic Ocean and lock up the carbon there. Can you take me through this? Because I am struggling with it. Yeah, it's a big idea from kind of a comment piece. This is not new research. This is a back of the envelope calculation that these dendrologists have done.

47:32These are guys who study tree rings. So they go around the world trying to find really, really old, well-preserved trees. And they notice that a lot of those are Arctic driftwood coming from the Arctic Ocean. Some of them are in Alpine lakes, for instance. They notice that in these high Alpine cold environments, driftwood can be preserved for 8 ,000 years at the bottom of an Alpine lake. So it's pretty astounding. And then they also know that they've been up to Siberia and northern Canada, places like this, Alaska. and they noticed that there's this huge boreal forest, the biggest biome on Earth.

48:06It holds a trillion tons of carbon at least when you take the soils and the trees into account. And there are these huge rivers flowing through it into the Arctic Ocean. There are six major rivers going through the boreal forest and emptying into the Arctic Ocean. So these guys said, well, hey, and also the boreal forest is burning more frequently and more intensely as the climate warms, releasing more and more of its carbon into the atmosphere. So these guys said, well, hey, let's put all these things together. What if we logged 30 ,000 square kilometers on each of these six rivers, dump the wood on the river when it's frozen in the winter.

48:45In the spring, it melts, and the wood flows down the river into the Arctic Ocean, where it eventually, over the course of a year, should sink. And then in the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, very cold, not much oxygen, not a lot of microbes down there to decompose the wood, and it can be preserved. And they say, it's better to store this wood down in the depths of the Arctic Ocean than let it burn. So they're trying to get ahead of a wildfire taking it into the atmosphere. Can you also turn this into an industry? Or does it take very long for these forests to regrow? But, you know, cut them, dump them on the river, and then again.

49:20Well, that's the idea. And the thing is, it kind of already is an industry, not in that area of the world, But there are several firms that are doing different variations on, I mean, everything from biochar, where you basically turn wood into charcoal and then spread it on farm fields, for instance, to pyrolysis, where you're kind of making woody waste into a bio oil that you inject underground. to there was a firm that actually took 25 ,000 tons of wood chips and sank them in the ocean off of Iceland called Runyantide was that firm. The biggest marine carbon dioxide removal operation of all time.

49:56And then sold that as a carbon credit. And sold that and delivered that. Yeah, they had sold the credits already and they delivered these carbon credits to big tech, to Microsoft, Stripe, these, you know, right? But, of course, they got a lot of pushback. They got a lot of flack for that. And the company actually folded pretty soon after that. Because people said, well, you didn't even study the deep sea where you were dumping these wood chips. You have no idea what actually happens when you put that much wood into the bottom of the ocean there. And, you know, also wood chips were turning up on coastlines as well, so not all the wood chips sank down.

50:29So, you know, there's a lot of questions. And, I mean, with this study, there are a lot of things that could go wrong if you're doing this in the boreal forest. So when a ton of wood goes down a river like we've done in the past with major logging operations in the United States, for instance, around the turn of the 19th century, 20th century, that just scours out the biodiversity in the river. If there's too many logs at the same time, it's like a scouring brush, one academic said. And it just wipes out all this biodiversity in the river. But also you could have logs damming up tributaries, let's say, causing flooding.

51:05And then that flooding can increase microbial activity, methane emissions from that flooding, melting permafrost, thawing permafrost from that flooding. So you could have a lot of emissions that might actually cancel out the good that the tree is sinking. Plus you're losing this massive forest ecosystem and all the biodiversity it supports as well. And like you say, the ecosystem services of perhaps flood protection and stuff. And this is where it gets a little bit philosophical. So these guys who wrote the study say, well, these trees are going to burn anyway. At some point they will burn. So there's no risk of kind of doing more harm than good because even if we only sink 10 % of them into the Arctic Ocean, that's still a net benefit because they were going to burn anyway.

51:51You know, but I've also talked to academics who work on northern forests, and they say that those forests can, you know, those trees can last, can live for hundreds or even thousands of years. So they say the boreal forests in some places, if it's permafrost, forest on top of permafrost or like a peatland ecosystem, those places burn once every couple of thousand years, right? So in that sense, then you're starting to say, well, okay, that's actually maybe a good form of carbon storage if it's only going to burn once every thousand years, right? That's a timescale that helps us climate-wise. I do feel like each story we've discussed today, we've ended with, we need to do more research, which I always hate ending on it.

52:31But we do have to do more research on all of these things. I mean, this one, absolutely. And the thing is, it has happened in the past, which is an argument in favor of doing more research. There was a thing called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which was this hothouse Earth period 56 million years ago. And there was a paper out recently that proposed that one of the things that helped transition from this hothouse climate into a cooler climate was actually the hothouse climate, a lot of moisture in the warm atmosphere, a lot of rainfall. and that washed a lot of trees and other woody debris into the Arctic Ocean where it sank and sequestered carbon from the atmosphere and helped us cool the climate.

53:15So this has potentially happened in the past and, yeah, maybe we can do it again. That's all for this week. Thanks to our guests and thanks to you for listening and we'll be back next week. Bye for now. Bye. Bye-bye.

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