Instant Genius - How geology can influence elections - Lewis Dartnell

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell is here to talk about how the Earth's ancient geography has influenced the development of human civilisations, and how it still affects our behaviour today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. If you look at an election map of the southeast region of America, the US, it's a sea of Republican red, rural areas voting for the Republicans and for Trump. But in that sea of red, there's this very distinct, curving, crescent shape of blue, of people voting Democrats. And again, just by looking at the map that I show in the book, it kind of sparks something in your mind.

you start wondering, why is that? Why is it the people in this quite narrow curve are voting Democrat rather than Republican everyone else around them is? And the answer turns out to lie beneath your feet, that it's the geology that's underlying that region that is important. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC 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 Science Focus. or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Focus magazine. When we think about history, we usually focus on the human impact, our influential leaders, the great civilizations we've built

and how we've harnished the world's resources to power our lives. But what about the influence of our planet? How has Earth helped to create us? In his new book, astrobiologist Louis Dartnell talks us through just that. how the Earth's ancient geography has influenced the development of human societies in ways we might not have noticed, and how it still affects our behaviour today. He's talking to BBC Focus editorial assistant Helen Glennie about a few fascinating case studies, like how geological forces drove our evolution in the East African Rift,

and whether the UK's ancient geography influences our political beliefs. Here's Lewis explaining what his new book is all about. Lewis, your new book is called Origins, How the Earth, made us. Can you give me a brief overview of what that book's about? So Origins is all about the many ways that different features of the planet we live on, features of planet Earth have directed the course of human evolution and influenced us throughout our history through the kind of growth and development of civilizations for thousands of years as well. So it looks at different fundamental features like place,

tectonics or the atmospheric circulation patterns in the air and what effects they've had and how they've directed the course of our history and therefore why is the world the way we find it today? Why is our everyday life this way rather than some other way if history played out differently? Okay, it sounds fascinating. So how do you go about making those connections between the features of the Earth and human history and human behaviour. Where do you get that information from? So I'm a scientist. My research field is in astrobiology,

which is all about looking into the possibility of life on other planets. So is the bacterial life on Mars and how might we find it? So I spend a lot of my day-to-day working life thinking about the Earth in comparison to other planets and what might be special about our Earth and how it works. And so I thought it was a natural extension. I was thinking along these lines for quite a while about how has Earth been habitable for life in the most fundamental sense, but then how might features of our planets have been critical through much more recent history, through the human story, if you like.

And so I wanted for this new book to kind of draw those lines to bridge that gap between science and history and see how they kind of inform each other. So throughout origins, I try to explain a bit of the science and a bit of the history that that's affected and weave those two kind of back and forth through the chapters of the book, it's almost like two strands of a story or two strands of the narrative. Now, one of the first examples that you talk about is the emergence of early humans from the East African Rift. Now, I think we've all heard this story, but I'd never really thought about exactly why humans developed there in the first place. So I thought that's an interesting place to start.

Can you tell me a bit about that particular example? Yeah, so I actually grew up in East Africa myself. I was at school in Nairobi, and on our kind of weekends, we would drive off into Nairobi Safari Park and kind of go see all the wild animals and the savannah environment that's there. So my own childhood, in a way, kind of echoes humanity's childhood. I grew up where us as a species had our birthplace, had our cradle. And as you say, I think it's quite common knowledge that all of humanity around the world today comes from Africa. We are all African migrants about 60,000, 65,000 years ago migrated out of Africa around the world.

But I think there's a deeper question underlying that is, well, why did we evolve in East Africa? What was special or quirky about that particular part of the planet over the last five million years that created a species that was so versatile and adaptable and intelligent like humans like us Homo sapiens are, but also the other hominine species that we kind of grew up with in East African Rift? And when I started digging down into why that might be, it's one of those questions that just gets more and more interesting that kind of further. you dig down into it. And it was this kind of weird interplay, this combination of effects from the geography, from the Rift Valley itself that we were evolving in, and how that was interacting with climate cycles on the planet. And the main feature here is that the Rift Valley has got these kind of liner mountains. The walls of the valley are very high. So they collect a lot of rainwater, whereas the floor of the Rift Valley is very hot and dry.

And so any lakes that you get along that riff alley are very, very sensitive to that balance between precipitation and evaporation, between the rainfall and it then evaporating off again. And so every time there's a little bit of a wobble in Earth's tilt, what we call the procession cycle and kind of Earth's place in the cosmos, that slightly shifts just how much terrain falls in the tropics and East Africa, these amplifier lakes, as they're known, respond very, very rapidly and significantly. So these lakes, these sources of water for our ancestors would have been very rapidly flicking in and out of existence. And it's thought that those lakes are that critical missing link between the really profound changes to our planet,

like plate tectonics and climate cycles and the very short time scale effects that influence a species on the course of its lifespan. So it's this weird combination of what the geography of East Africa was, that plate tectonic environment with these climate cycles to do with Earth's orbit and its tilt relative to the sun that created us as a species. We're kind of children of plate tectonics in that sense.

Great. So can you tell me a bit about the specific conditions that arose in order for humans to kind of develop into what we are today? Yes, we talked just now a bit about plate tectonics and how that created us as a species, how that drove our evolution to be an intelligent tool using social ape that we are today. But actually, plate tectonics had a really important role to play a little bit later in our history, which is when we were starting to found these first civilizations, We're settling down to these cities and growing crops, growing, growing plants in the fields around these cities. And when you look at a map of where a lot of ancient civilizations started and you plot on that same map the boundaries of these tectonic plates,

and there's a picture that I created for the book Origins that shows exactly this. There's a really surprising correlation between those early civilizations, all huddling along these tectonic. boundaries. So we know that plate boundaries are, in some sense, dangerous places to be. That's where a lot of volcanoes and earthquakes are concentrated. But clearly, they're also providing some sort of benefit, some sort of advantage to the earliest cities and civilizations. And if you look at Mesopotamia, which is this land between the rivers, between the Tigris and Euphrates in the Middle East, That entire region of Mesopotamia is essentially running along the tectonic trough that's been created alongside the Zagros mountain range. So when the Arabian plate was pivoting away from Africa and slammed into Eurasia, when there was that plate tectonic collision going on that crumpled up this great big mountain range, a lot of the ground kind of sagged down under the weight of that mountain range to create this region of Mesopotamian.

which has now collected these great rivers and a lot of sediment to get very fertile soil. So in that particular instance, there's a very clear reason why some of the earliest cities in our history of civilization were attracted without really realizing what was going on and the kind of science behind that they were attracted to that particular tectonic region as being a really conducive place to settle down and go through the beginnings of agriculture. Uh-huh. Okay. So it created conditions where the rivers and the fertile lands were, I guess, more beneficial, well, beneficial enough to be worth living there with the risks of earthquakes or volcanoes, those sorts of things that we associate with plate boundaries. Exactly, in that sense that the advantages outweighed the risks. And then there's plenty of other examples around the world that the book explores as to why early cities were founded right by plate boundaries, but also a lot of trade routes. ancient trade routes went to long plate boundaries as well. So there's that kind of human

element being attracted to these particular features of our planet of the world. Now, you talk about geography also influencing modern human behaviour, like voting behaviour in the USA following the bed of an ancient sea, which seems really crazy. Can you explain that example? Yeah, so throughout the chapters of origins, I try to cover the whole of human histories and from our very creation as a species and how plate tectonics was crucial in that process through thousands of years of the history of our cities and civilizations and empires rising and falling again and what were the causes behind that. But I wanted to look at as much at the modern world as well. This isn't just ancient history. There are some really deep signals of features of planet Earth underlying something

as kind of modern and current as the most recent elections. And one of the examples was the elections that voted in Trump in the United States. And if you look at an election map of the southeast region of America, of the U.S., it's a sea of Republican red. Most people in that area of the country voting Trump, rural areas voting for the Republicans and for Trump. But in that sea of red, there's this very distinct, curving, crescent shape of blue, of people voting Democrats.

And again, just by looking at the map that I show in the book, it kind of sparks something in your mind. You start wondering, well, why is that? Why is it the people in this quite narrow curve are voting Democrat rather than Republican, everyone else around them is? And the answer turns out to lie beneath your feet. That's the geology that's underlying that region that is important. And in particular, if you look at geological map, that present of Democrat voting counties, is a stratum of rock, which dates back to the Cretaceous period of Earth's history, so about

60 to 70 million years ago. And during that period, there's the much higher sea levels, and this really fertile, thick sea mud was deposited, which got compacted down as now being re-exposed in that part of the United States. And this is where the geology starts blending into the history, because in US history, in the kind of 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, when the farmers were trying to grow cash crops in that part of America, cotton grew very, very well in those rich, dark, fertile soils coming from that ancient Cretaceous seabed. And at that period in history, growing cotton and harvesting it meant you need kind of nimble fingers. You can't harvest cotton the way you would harvest wheat or rice. It's very, very labor intensive. And that period in history,

that meant slaves. So a lot of people were essentially kidnapped. They were taken against their world in Africa, taken across the Atlantic and ships, dumped onto these cotton fields of Southeast America to work with the cotton fields in that Cretaceous region of the planet. And hundreds of years later, the descendants of those slaves still live in that region. They, they, The socioeconomic background that means they're more likely to be voting for Democrat rather than for Republican. So it's quite a slightly complicated explanation, but there's this lovely sequence of steps where you go from something you would think would be quite ephemeral or kind of nebulous

like what political party people are likely to vote for. And that goes straight down to the soil around them and the geology beneath their feet and the different ages of 100 years of history and how it's created that environment we live in I love that as an example of how the geology dictates the history, which dictates the politics we have today. And actually, if you look at the UK, there's another really nice example of politics revealing the kind of geological map beneath our feet. If you look at the constituencies in the last election that voted for Labour, that maps almost perfectly against the parts of the country where there are carboniferous deposits. So strata rock that are about 315 million years old. And again, on that part of origins in the book, I explain, why is it that labor constituencies

might be more like to be found around rocks that 315 million years old? And can you explain that to us? Can you explain it to us here? What's the link? Yes, the very secret behind it that the carboniferous era in our planet was when a great deal of the coal was laid down. I explained the book about what was weird about the Earth, 350 million years ago that so much coal was created then rather than any other chapter of our planet's history.

But that coal is now underground and it's what fueled the Industrial Revolution. And it's what we continue to use as a major energy source in electricity, power stations, even today. And so what's going on here is that the labor constituencies are overlying these carboniferous deposits because that's where the coal can be dug up today. And the Labour Party has had its roots in the unions and particular coal mining unions. So that's why even still today, we saw that link between a political party and a geological rock formation between the 350 million-year-old rock deposits underlying the United Kingdom.

Yeah, it's really fascinating. Now, did you make any connections while you were writing the book that particularly surprised you? Yes, so one of the sections, well, the chapter I enjoyed most when I was researching the book that kind of really jumped out at me as being surprising and given that kind of wonderful aha moment when you see that link from the planet to our history was when I was talking about the age of expiration

and the age of sale when Europeans and the Portuguese and Spanish first, but then also the French and the Dutch and the English, the British, were all leaving the kind of European peninsula. It was kind of like a backwater of the world in that period of history. And they started exploring out across the Atlantic and trying to find sea routes to India to get involved in the spice trade and then finding routes across the Pacific. And what these explorers were doing was putting together the kind of jigsaw puzzle of where are the wind bands across the earth, whereas the main patterns of winds like the trade. winds or the Westlies, and how does that drive these currents in the ocean? So like the Gulf stream, for example, though. Those two things are very deeply linked to each other. So if you want

to sail from London all the way around the southern tip of Africa, to India, say, to pick up some tea or some spice to bring back to the UK, you have to understand that fundamental circulation pattern in the atmosphere that drives the winds. And so again, I love that link from something as fundamental is how the atmosphere circulates high above our heads, and how that drives these wind patterns, and therefore how that dictated that process of exploration and trade and then these vast empires of the ocean that were built by the European powers. And why places like Cape Town became so important in history or why California was so crucial to the Spanish and therefore why it's so built up today with a place like San Francisco

and Los Angeles, you know, kind of places you would go. on holiday today have got these deep roots back through history, and a lot of that comes back down to fundamental features of our planet and where things can be found. So all that kind of stuff jumped out in me when I was researching that particular chapter of origins of why the world is the shape it is we find it today, and what is it explains that origin. And so considering that these things influence where we choose to live and how we choose to vote, do you think it's important for us to be aware of these forces and how they influence our behavior? Yeah, I absolutely think so. And so for my own point of view, I wrote a book about this because

I thought it was interesting. I thought it was fascinating. And I wanted to tell other people about these stories that I'd found and things that explain our own everyday lives in the world we find. But if you start thinking about it a bit more seriously, how the earth has created us and driven our history, we're kind of turning that on its head nowadays with our modern industrialized civilization and all of the pollution we're giving off with our cars and our airplanes and our factories and power stations, that humanity has now become the kind of dominant force for changing our planet. And so a lot of scientists have called this current era, the Anthropocene, the kind of new age of humanity. And as people are well aware of already,

We've got a lot of problems on our doorstep to do with climate change and global warming and ocean acidification. And these things, which are problematic, we need to be able to find solutions to these so we can continue, you know, living the way that we've become accustomed to. And so I think just by appreciating that deep link behind how the Earth has made us and how we're now affecting the Earth in return, you just appreciate everything around you, just a little bit more and kind of understand how it works behind the scenes. and therefore why we need to take extra care over our planet. And have any of the things that you uncovered while you were researching the book changed your behaviours in any way? Yeah, I certainly think I've looked at the world around me in a slightly different way. So my last book, The Knowledge, was all about how you could reboot civilization after an apocalypse.

It was a thought experiment of how you could avoid another dark ages and recover society in civilization as quickly as possible after some kind of hypothetical doomsday event. Although it was a book that was about science and history didn't actually have anything to do with the end of the world. But what I want to do with this new book with origins was look, not just how the world was created by human ingenuity and human inventions and discoveries, but how the earth itself has been, you know, a lead character has played like a significant role in our story. So I think between those two books, between the knowledge and origins, I think I've given myself this kind of bigger overview

of how things work around you and what's the story behind them. And it's just, as I was saying before, just having that kind of in the back of your head to think about and how you look at the world around you. That was Lewis Darnel talking about how the Earth has changed us. His new book, Origins, is available now. In the latest issue of BBC Focus magazine, we look into China's Changi-4 lunar mission and ask whether this is the start of a new space race. We are also examining a bizarre condition called Afantasia,

in which suffers can't imagine things with their mind's eye. You can also read about whether accents are dying out and a man who's on a mission to image every fish in the sea using a CT scanner. As always, there's much, much more inside. And remember, if you like what you hear, then please, rates, review and share with anybody you think might enjoy our podcast. You can also subscribe and leave us a review at your favourite podcast apps. Also, if there's anybody you'd like us to speak to or a topic you want us to cover,

then let us know on Twitter at ScienceFocus. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're 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. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through, digital sources or poor signal.

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