Instant Genius - Gaia Vince: What part does culture play in our evolution?

Episode Date: November 7, 2019

Some scientists now believe we are living in a new epoch, the age of invention and human influence on the world, called the Anthropocene. In 2014, science journalist and broadcast Gaia Vince took readers on a journey through this new world in her award-winning book, Adventures in the Anthropocene. Documenting the startling impacts of human’s growth on Earth, Gaia opened eyes to the future that we have all but set in stone. Her new book, Transcendence (£20, Allen Lane), looks instead to our past, and how humans have evolved as much through our culture as through our genes. How did Homo sapiens out-live our hominin relatives, and what made us so different from the other primates? Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Richard Dawkins: Can we live in a world without religion? Does data discriminate against women? – Caroline Criado Perez Are Generation Z our only hope for the future? – John Higgs Is racism creeping into science? – Angela Saini What does a world with an ageing population look like? – Sarah Harper Is religion compatible with science? – John Lennox     Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. If you follow Darwinian evolution, you know that we came like all the other species, but then something happened, right? We took off and the others didn't in a completely different way. And I wanted to understand that. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine,

team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world, find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. Some scientists now believe that we are living in a new epoch, the age of invention and human influence on the world, called the Anthropocene. In 2014, science journalist and broadcaster Gaya Vince took readers on a journey through this new world in her award-winning book, Adventures in the Anthropocene. Documenting the startling impacts of humans' growth on Earth, Gaia opened eyes to the future that we have all but set in stone. Her new book,

Transcendence, looks instead to our past, and how humans have evolved as much through our culture as through our genes. How did Homo sapiens outlive our homin relatives? And what made us so different to the other primates? Here's editorial assistant Amy Barrett talking about Transcendence and the future of humankind with Gaya Vintz ahead of her book's publication. So Gaya, what is our transcendence? Well, I suppose it's the journey that we've made as a species. Unlike any other species, we've gone from just another smart ape to this creature that has taken over the entire planet.

We dominate the environment. We dominate all the other species. And we've changed our own. We've made ourselves, and that's been the transcendence, I suppose, for us, this idea that we make ourselves. And the books were subtitles How Humans Evolve Through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time. I wonder if we could maybe just talk about those. So how has fire shaped our evolution? That's really about the energy transition that we've undergone. So unlike all the other species, we have harnessed an external source of energy, which is, um, the energy.

which has allowed us to offload our physical capabilities, but also our cognitive abilities. So what I mean by that, I suppose, is that the energy packed we've made with the physical world and everything from the actual, the earth beneath us and the resources that we burn to the sun, to leverage us. So the pact that we've made has enabled us to outsource our physical energy requirements.

So it's basically, it's like a lever. So with the touch of a button, for example, you can launch a rocket into space. You're not using your muscle power to do that. You're not even joining in a team effort of, you know, three other people to do that. We've managed to offload our physical capabilities to move entire mountains. And when did we first do that? Well, we did that.

We started doing that with fire. When we managed to light a fire, create that, we then it enabled us to change the food that we received. So it became a much more efficient, much more. caloric form of food. So instead of having to spend our entire day just literally just eating to maintain our brains, we were able to get the same amount of calories from a much smaller by cooking because it makes it much chemically and physically breaks down the food to make it much more energy rich. and that enabled us to adapt our brains to make them bigger.

So we became cleverer because of that, but we also fire allowed us to change the materials around us to cook mud and turn it into pottery, to cook rocks and from them make steel eventually. So all those sorts of ways, fire, harnessing that external energy source has given us that great big physical change. change. But with that came a change in the way we act as a species. We became much more social,

much more cooperative. And because of that, we are able to harness a cognitive lever as well. So we offload a lot of the thinking power we need to do to our group. We use a sort of collective brain, which is really useful. So if I need to know something, I don't have to work it out myself, I can ask somebody, or I can be taught, which is even better, or I can look it up in a book, on the internet, whatever. I don't have to have all the answers, which is really lucky because I don't have any of them. So there's a lot of energy involved in working something out, in solving a problem cognitively. And for that reason, most species haven't really developed that very far, whereas we have, we've been able to not just work things out, but go further

than that and then build on those solutions that we found iteratively over a lifetime but also over generations because we pass that knowledge down. And being able to hold this information in our brains long enough to be able to copy and learn and remember and pass it on to somebody else requires the sorts of brains that need to be fed with cooked food. But it also then enables the sort of progression of ideas that allows us to offload that cognitive processing that we each need to do individually, we can offload that into the collective brain. So, so really, we, we're very clever. We're able to sort of surf the, the energy batteries of our collective brains and also our physical levers. That was a very long answer to what's the

fire part about. But it's really, it's really about, it's really about energy. And I think that that is the evolutionary advantage. You know, no animal can succeed beyond the amount of energy that they use. Energy is kind of a limiting factor for everything, for how many children you can produce and feed to everything. So we were able to harness more energy and that's why our population is seven and a half billion now. And when you say we, do you just mean homo sapiens or was it the other hominens?

Well, I would say that this is quite a key difference in my book compared to a lot of other books. I think that this whole process goes back deep into our history. I'd say Homo erectus had already mastered a lot of this nearly two million years ago. You know, we built on that. We developed further our cumulative cultural evolution. but I think they were already onto a lot of the things. It's likely that they were able to make fire. You know, they traveled, they left Africa.

They went to the fringes of Europe and Asia. You know, they went a long way. They went to places which were too cold for a tropical ape. I think they mastered a lot of the things. Maybe they had language, you know. I don't think that our long history has been something. which has its roots in some cognitive revolution that happened, say, 20,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago. This is a long, long process of cultural evolution, and there's been very little

biological change in humans over the last couple of hundred years, a couple of hundred thousand years, certainly in the last 40,000 years. I wouldn't have thought there's been a big change or more, you know. So this is a long process. And you mentioned language that you think sort of Homer Rectus might have had language. How did language impact how we live? So language enables us to transmit information in a really super efficient, low energy, reliable way. That's really useful. And the sort of information we could transmit is not just cultural, technological, technological,

information, but also social information, who to trust, who you can copy from. Language makes it possible for you to teach somebody really easily. You're not just copying them, but you're adjusting what you're doing, showing them a different way. You can describe things that are not immediately in front of you. In these ways, language really is at the basis of all of this. I mean, these all occurred concurrently. Our cumulative evolution could not have occurred without language. I think it's at its heart.

And language binds us as a community. And our evolution is based on our societies being big enough to hold sufficient numbers of sufficient amounts of cultural information, cultural knowledge. So if we've got a very small pool of people to learn from and, to teach and to pass information among, there's only going to be a small number of technologies we can learn, of iterations, the variation is going to be small. It's the same as with gene pools. Technologies don't improve unless there's an influx of new blood, new ideas.

And so, but to manage much larger groups, you need language. You need it to bond you together. and to relate to people. So humans are a species where the group includes non-kin, people who are not related to you, and we rely on those and we depend on them. But that means we need to be able to trust them, and it means that we all must align our interests together.

And that might be obvious in terms of food provision, but for many other things, it's not obvious. There's a lot of conflict between people. between ideas and so on. So one of the ways we do that is we provide a sort of shared story, which we can all buy into, which we can all, we can all play a part in this kind of bigger idea of where we are and who we are as a people.

And this idea of a story that binds people, you need language for that. You can start off with daubing, and drawings and so on, but to really draw people in, to align their mind so that everybody is thinking the same thing, you need language. And there are studies that show that when lots of people are listening

to the same sort of moving story, their brains are in sync. And other things. You know, there are plenty of rituals that do that, but they're normally based around a central, story. So whether it's dancing, wordless dancing to music, it's still based around this story that we see each other as a community enjoying something together and this positive feeling, even if it's not articulated. So language is really important for that. And it's

driven us. And once we got towards writing, you know, that's, that really is the, we're offloading our memories still further because once it becomes written down, it's able to be passed around in a different way and read by different people. We are reading things that are thousands of years old. So that memory has passed in an intact form for all that time, long after the synapses of the person that first thought it and created it and wrote it down have survived. So in that way, yeah, language becomes timeless. And in terms of a time frame, when do we see, you know,

evidence of discovery of fire compared to development of language? Can you put that in some sort of timeline for us? How long ago? Well, so the first fires that we can be sure were made by humans come around the time of Homo erectus. The thing is they don't preserve very well because of fires and also fires occur naturally. So it's hard to be sure that this was created specifically by people.

But there are certainly some in caves in what is now Israel. So in the Middle East, there are fires that we can pretty much date there. In terms of language, well, again, you know, how do you date that? We don't know about Homo erectus. I think they had language. Who knows? Neanderthals, from their anatomy and from what little we know of their genes, it's certainly possible for them to have had language.

I think they definitely had language of some kind. I don't think language is something, again, which suddenly arrived in humans 40,000 years ago. I think that's an absolute nonsense, and we had it a long time before then. and we would have needed it for the groups that we had the size of them and the ambition that they had to make tools, complicated tools, and they made compound tools.

So tools that involved different parts being stuck together. So maybe a stone from one area that was then traded with a piece of wood and stuck on and glued and bound with another material, which all came from different places. And so in order to make a compound tool like that, they had to be able to plan ahead to think about the different resources, to trade them, to bind them, to make them,

to pass on that knowledge. I think they needed language for that, for sure. And what about writing? Writing, well, so writing is relatively recent. There are different beginnings to writing, different message sticks we used by aboriginals. We don't know how far back. they go. There are different forms of calculating and, you know, doing accounts and things like that.

But actually a written language and an alphabet and things like that, they are relatively recent. But before we had writing, we had other skills, really amazing memory skills, for example. And they came into their own, even now in a lot of communities that are illiterate, people have much much better memories and memory training methods that they learn so that they can recite large portions of cultural history just like homer's works are all recited for example learnt and recited we lose that once we become literate because we become skilled at something else so there's like a payoff of what we can't have i mean we can still train ourselves to have that sort of memory, but we don't take the time to do that, and we don't, because there's no need.

When you write your first book, you were said to have been inspired because of the number of news stories you had when you were working as a journalist. Is there anything in particular that really inspired you to write transcendence? I think it's the shock, the shock and all, of how did this incredible thing happen, the Anthropocene. You know, we are now dominating the planet. We're changing everything about, you know, from the temperature of the atmosphere to the acidity of the oceans to the species to creating cities

where entirely artificial landscapes, farmlands everywhere. We're changing the genetic evolutionary trajectory of countless animals. through domestication, including ourselves, all of this. And I just thought, how an earth did that happen? How are we doing this and not another species? What's so special about us? How did this happen?

Because there were plenty of big history books around, but I don't feel they really explain this. Like the mechanism and the understanding of how an earth did this one species become this incredible life force? Because we're not like any of the other animals. You know, yes, we. are rooted in biological evolution. I don't think that we were sort of created like Adam and Eve or anything.

So we, you know, if you follow Darwinian evolution, you know that we came like all the other species, but then something happened, right? We took off and the others didn't in a completely different way. And I wanted to understand that. So that was very much my inspiration. I felt there's a complete untold story here that I wanted to explore. And can you now answer that?

Like, what does make us special? Well, that we are cultural beings. That is the root of our transcendence. So, you know, we're biologically determined. You know, there's biological determinism there, but there's also cultural determinism. And our culture is as much part of our biology as, as the rest of our biology, as ourselves. So, you know, if you look at what is natural, What are we designed to do? What is our evolutionary purpose? You see a lot of people saying, oh, you know, it's not natural that I don't know, that we eat, I don't know, it's not natural that we're eating sushi rather than the paleo diet or something like that. But the point is that the paleo diet is just as natural as bubble. bubble gum flavored candy floss. Being a human means that that is natural.

We are culturally driven. We are cultural beings. So it's just as natural for us to, for two women to have sex with each other as a man and a woman. Or it's just as natural for somebody from one country to have sex with somebody from another country. I don't know why I'm talking about sex all the time. But the point is it's just as natural for us to live in,

in the open in a straw hut as it is to live in a skyscraper or live in a pod underneath the ocean. Our natural is driven by our culture. It's part of our natural is we are technological cyborgs. We decide what we want to do. We make ourselves and there is no unnatural because that's what humans are. What's natural for us might not be natural for a dog. Dogs themselves mostly are unnatural because we made them. That's a very good point.

Is there anything that we haven't touched that we haven't had an influence on? Well, arguably no. Human influence can be seen everywhere because the ocean has been changed by us, the atmosphere has been changed by us. There is no place. You know, there are places which are more of a wilderness and more untouched, but arguably everything,

You know, everything that breathes air is now breathing a greater constituent of carbon dioxide than it was before the last 200 years. So I would say no, there is nothing that's untouched by humans. And yet we are part of nature. And why us as opposed to Neanderthals or, you know, Homo erectus, why Homoetopians? Well, that's a really interesting question. I think there's a lot of evidence to show. that cumulative cultural evolution, which is what drives our success,

is most successful, accelerates, becomes more diverse and more complex, the larger and more connected our societies are, just like with genetic evolution. You know, so a bigger population with more diversity will be healthier. So it is for our culture. larger more connected populations

drive that success and we had the edge we had the edge over that our populations were bigger and our connectedness was bigger and you know but then I guess it begs the question why so so maybe we were slightly more sociable

we were better at socialising better at articulating better at having more children and looking after them All these things just gave us that slight edge. You know, there's lots of theories about it, but I think that's really at the heart. And we have to remember that we're not as successful as, say, Homo erectus. They were around for over a million years.

We've been around for perhaps 300,000 years, a third of what they've been around. And we've already, you know, we've already changed the environment to the extent that we're, you know, risking this enormous population shrinking. I don't think we're going to go extinct, but, you know, who knows? We certainly, we haven't got the edge on them, so. Wow. Yeah, you don't think about it like that, too, at all. No, so, I mean, you know, and success itself is an interesting, an interesting value, really.

So when we talk about success in a biological sense, we normally mean population. So how big is the population, you know, so obviously bacteria are doing brilliantly. rats doing brilliantly. So in terms of human, of primate population, well, we're doing really well. Of big animals, we're doing really well. But then if you break that down and, you know, there is this sort of prevailing idea that our Western industrial civilization, our very technologically driven civilization is very successful. Well, yeah, you know, if you look at numbers population-wise, yes, we're doing really, really well. We're living longer, we're living healthier, all these sorts of things.

But there are so many other ways to look at success. You know, are we actually all kind of spending our lives in a sort of rabbit run of working, working, working, working until, you know, or are we living more relaxed lives where we spend more time and we integrate more into our environment? You know, what is success, you know? So I think it's a very loaded, loaded words. And I don't know. Biologically, we're doing brilliantly as humans. But in a lot of other ways, you know, we're polluting our own back garden and our water supply and everything.

So, you know, it could be said that we're not that successful in a lot of other ways. Could you call a human species of success or not really? Yeah. We're very, very dependent. on each other and I mean all humans are dependent on each other but in an industrialised society we're incredibly dependent on huge systems as well as on each other that's a success in one way but on another way it could be seen as a big failing we're not very autonomous we're not very resilient and we're not very we're not very independent of these big systems you know

whereas other societies perhaps have, you know, they're more able to survive in their environment than we are without these systems. And you've touched a little bit on the technology we have today. How has that aided our cultural evolution? Technology is part of what it means to be human. When I was talking about what it is to be natural and what natural is for humans, natural is using technology. there are no humans that don't employ some form of technology

and that again goes back, you know, pre-Homo sapiens. You know, there's tool use, chimps use tools. A lot of animals use tools. But our tools are, they improve over time. And so tool use is, again, it's an energy ratchet. So, you know, I can't open it in. with my teeth. It would take me a very, very long time with a tool and my same muscle power,

I can flip open, I can cut metal, you know. So that's what's happening there. It's the energy is being much more efficiently used. And so all through our history, we've just become more and more efficient at using energy. And what we can't do in human power, I mean, you know, there was a time when huge numbers of slaves were providing our energy. Now it's more likely to be, you know, huge numbers of machines. So, yeah, it's an energy efficiency thing.

And in your subtitle, you've got beauty, and I was really interested in that. How does beauty kind of play in human history? So we have a very subjective view of beauty. We assign value to things that are not of survival value. So, you know, if you're hungry and there's a piece of corn on the cob, that's obviously a very attractive thing. But if you see two pictures, one of them you might see and decide is more desirable than the other.

nothing's going to, it's not going to help you survive. I mean, so one of the great examples of this, I suppose, is gold or diamonds or something like that. This is of no survival value at all. You know, and yet we will kill each other over something like that. And what that does is it gives us, it's an enormous motivational force. So when we agree that something is beautiful, something is of value, whatever that is, we align as a society around it and it motivates us to behave in a certain way, to put a lot of energy into something which is not involved in necessarily producing food for us.

There's not an obvious reason for this. And we can see this in all sorts of everything from religious, religious values to the way we paint our faces to the designs of our houses and our cities. You know, we have made these artificial mountains and edifices. And beauty is this incredibly strong driving force, this sort of subjective force, because it doesn't have an external value, really. and it's such a strong motivator and has been throughout our history. And because of it, because we can agree a value on something,

it allows us to use tokens in some way to lower the exchange rate of dealing with people who are not related to us. So that's a bit complicated. What I'm trying to say is that supposing you decide that a certain shell is very attractive and everybody agrees that a certain shell is very attractive and you you collect them together you put them on necklaces and you have chains of these shell beads and they're very valuable you can't eat them you can't wear them you know to keep warm they have you can't burn them they've got no value other than they're beautiful then supposing you want

to you want to go hunting. You haven't got a spear. You have nothing, you have no food to give for the spear, but you need the spear. What you can do is you can give your beads in exchange for something which will give you food. And, you know, if it's a very small community, you can just say, can I have the spear? And when I get the meat, I'll give you the meat back. But if it's a large community where you're dealing with people you don't know and you don't know whether or not you can trust them, this shell necklace becomes something which lowers that, it lowers that risk for you. It lowers the cost of exchange. It lowers the energy involved in the risk. And so I think that has been enormously important to us because trade in resources has really helped

us succeed. And a lot of that trade has been made easier or has been entirely around things that we have decided are valuable. And that trade has actually driven the resource movements of things that actually are valuable, like food, like land, like materials that we actually need. So that's been really extraordinary. And if you look at the other animal species, they don't move resources around the world in the same way that we do. You know, we move from place to place. We migrate personally ourselves, but we do much more of moving resources around.

And that enables us to survive on an area. You know, I live in a place in South London and everything that I depend on does not come from that small square footage. You know, everything, my food, my clothes, my energy, everything comes from elsewhere. to me. Which is, again, one of those things that could be seen as a success, but also could be seen as, you know,

a failure in some ways. Exactly. Exactly. So that's, that has driven our very, very complex society and our success in that way, in terms of our population. The fact that we exchange resources and move them around, it's given us great resilience over our environment. We're not stuck in a small tropical forest niche where all our food is. We can move across the world and we can, you know, we can go to slightly risky.

areas because we have things that we can trade. So if we move to an area where we don't know whether we can hunt anything, we don't know what we can, we can trade with the people there who do know how to hunt it and, you know, that's their big, you know, these are their cows or whatever, we can exchange that for food. And it's been incredibly useful. I don't think we would have succeeded as we had without beauty. Well, yeah, I've never thought about it that way. But Once you say it, it seems so clear that it has impacted us so much, especially our cultural evolution. Yeah. Yeah.

And we, you know, still now, so much time and effort and energy and everything goes into beauty. It's everywhere. I wanted to talk about our relationship with the other hominids. Because it wasn't a them and us situation, was it? There was lots of kind of mingling, and we did have a relationship with them. We did. And for, you know, hundreds and... in some cases, thousands of years.

And we don't even, we're really starting to understand really what went on in our early ancestry, because there were definitely a lot of coexisting other species. And I actually call them different races, because at that stage, I think it wasn't, you know, what was a human, a homo sapien, was much, more varied than what it is now.

There were all sorts of different, um, different experimental types of people around and, um, there were, there were some that were much more different, like truly different ways like, like, um, like Neanderthals, like Denisovans and various,

no lady, homo neelady we found ruins, um, evidence for it's, it's, it's, it must have been an incredible time. Mm. Must have been really, really interesting. And we hit a bottleneck around 74,000 years ago when Tober, the volcano in Indonesia,

erupted. And we were sort of shrank to a much smaller population. And it's because of things like that and because of the few people that left Africa to start with, that we're all so incredibly similar. biologically we really haven't even started to speciate we're really very very similar what we've done instead of that is culturally speciate we've we've become culturally very different but the difference between genetic speciation and cultural speciation is genetic speciation takes you know thousands of years it's a much much longer time frame whereas cultural speciation you can flick it

from one day to the next. And a person that is born into one culture can adopt another culture, you know, tomorrow. And it doesn't set you in stone. So it's a very different thing. But what that gives us is a massive cultural diversity across the world, which is fascinating. So many different ways of being a human, even though biologically we're all the same. And are we very different from the first Temosapians? Well, we are a little bit different. We've, you know, biologically, do you mean? Yeah, we are a little bit different, but not drastically, no.

So you can sort of tell the difference between us now and then then? I think if you took an early Homo sapiens, put him in a suit and put him on the tube, no one would give him two looks, no. Wow, okay. I mean, no. Some people think that you could do that when a Neanderthal and nobody would even notice. I mean, I don't think that. that we were dramatically different biologically from a lot of these characters.

I wondered if we could talk about the future as a human race. So you bring up this term of a superorganism, that's what we're becoming, or what we already are? What does that mean? Well, so the idea is that our cultural evolution is, accelerates, sorry, I just say. So the idea is that our culture accelerates in diversity and complexity with larger populations that are more interconnected.

And we have never been so hyper-connected as we are now, and we have never had such an enormous population. So I think this is a really interesting time. I think we are acting in a very different way. We are acting very much like superorganism, so it's not you personally, I hope, that's destroying the Amazon rainforest or making coral reefs extinct. But as a superorganism, that's exactly what we're doing.

We are acting in a very different way across the planet in terms of the changes we're making environmentally, but also how we're interacting. You know, I can talk to somebody and figure out slightly more whether or not I can trust them, who I've never ever met from in Bangalore in India, in a second on the internet. I can exchange, I can have a trading relationship with them,

whatever. I don't... The way we interact is very different. The way we move food around, the way we move our resources around, the way our economic and institutional systems are all interconnected, the way our ideas a lot of small sort of niche ideas have become very mainstream over an enormous population. And I'm not saying that every human on the planet is part of this superorganism at all,

because I think, you know, some people aren't. And that's an issue because, you know, I think very strongly that that, there isn't one way of living. There isn't one type of successful society. But there is a society that we've got at the moment that's massive and very, very, very good at harnessing energy. We've never been so good at harnessing energy. And it is in danger of swamping all the other cultures

and it's in danger of homogenising too much and of taking away the land, the environment that other cultures depend on. So I don't know how we're going to go. I mean, our cultural evolution is different from the other animals in that I call it our human evolutionary triad and it's the co-evolution of our biology, our environment and our culture. And the environment that made us is now dramatically transformed by us into something very different. and I don't know how that's going to resolve,

how we are going to resolve it, because we're the only ones that can. But that will change us and the way we operate on the planet. So I don't know. We're at very early stages of our super organ. I call him homoomnis or homony. Yeah, and I think of him as a sort of toddler blundering around trying to find his way.

But you said you don't think we're going to go extinct. I mean, I don't think we're going to go extinct in the near future, but I am worried that huge numbers of people might die or suffer because of our environmental onslaught. So, yeah, I don't think, you know, we could survive as a species with just a few thousand people, and I don't think that's a big risk, that our species will go extinct. But, you know, we're more than just whether or not our species go extinct. We're all individuals that also matter in this huge group project. That was Guy Vince discussing human history and future ahead of her new book's release, Transcendence, How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time, which is published by Alan Lane on the 7th of November.

Listen to our podcast episode with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to hear more about human history and how a natural selection of genes gave us an evolutionary advantage. In this month's issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, we find out about the innovations that look to save the oceans from the threats of climate change, biodiversity loss and acidification. We speak to disability activist Adam Pearson about the notions of eugenics hidden in prenatal genetic testing and ask if peaceful protests can achieve meaningful change. Of course, there is much, much more inside. And as always, let us know what you think about this episode in the comments and leave a review if you haven't already. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling sites and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store.

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