Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome to stuff to Blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
Speaker 1: Not too long ago we were talking about ticks, about
Speaker 1: how it turns out you can get a tick on
Speaker 1: your eyeball sucking the juice from within straight through the conjunctiva.
Speaker 1: It turns out you can get all kinds of acquired
Speaker 1: diseases from ticks, like the acquired meat allergy syndrome, or
Speaker 1: the of course lime disease. We all know about all
Speaker 1: these other diseases. Of course, the woods are full of
Speaker 1: not just small animals that can hurt you, but in fact,
Speaker 1: if you want to go up to the Northwest or
Speaker 1: somewhere like that, there might be bears that could be
Speaker 1: a threat to you. And yet people want to go
Speaker 1: to the woods. Well they're lovely, dark and deep, that's
Speaker 1: the thing. I mean. I like to go to the woods,
Speaker 1: and yet there's nothing in the wood that materially benefits me.
Speaker 1: There's no food there, there's no like mating opportunity there.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of an odd thing to say, but
Speaker 1: you know, there's no in a biological sense of the word.
Speaker 1: Nothing there for me really except an experience, and yet
Speaker 1: I seek that experience. I love going hiking in the woods. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I find the same situation with with my family. We
Speaker 1: go out in these these little hikes, you know, in
Speaker 1: the Atlanta area, and yeah, we're not we're not foraging
Speaker 1: for berries or mushrooms or are hunting small prey. We're
Speaker 1: just going out there and kind of breathing air, getting
Speaker 1: a little exercise. And um, yeah, I mean you can
Speaker 1: you could break it down into those tangibles and say, well,
Speaker 1: I'm getting some fresh air, I'm getting some exercise, I'm
Speaker 1: you know, I'm occupying myself for the morning, I'm getting
Speaker 1: away from my phone or something like this. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but in terms of these like evolved needs, these basic
Speaker 1: biological needs, they're not they're not necessarily being fulfilled. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the woods, for some reason seem to give you pleasure.
Speaker 1: It the thing you're seeking out, even though there's not
Speaker 1: a really direct that. There might be indirect explanations, but
Speaker 1: there's not a really direct explanation for why your body
Speaker 1: would be sending you there. Here's another question, why do
Speaker 1: we like pets? Oh yeah, I mean this is a question.
Speaker 1: My wife and I ask a lot about our cat
Speaker 1: because she's kind of a nightmare. But we so we
Speaker 1: always have these discussions where like parasites. Yeah, there, she's
Speaker 1: living in our house, eating our food. Uh, and what
Speaker 1: does she give back? Like, she's not she's not keeping
Speaker 1: mice out of our our grain or anything. She's just
Speaker 1: laying around and frequently attacking my feet and sometimes barfing
Speaker 1: on the floor. But then but we still love her
Speaker 1: for some reason, She's still enriches our lives somehow. Our dog, Charlie,
Speaker 1: is an absolute parasite. He sometimes can be so annoying,
Speaker 1: but we love this dog. This dog. He brings me
Speaker 1: so much pleasure. I'm so happy to have this dog,
Speaker 1: even when he's barking at me to take him on
Speaker 1: a walk while I'm trying to work on something, or
Speaker 1: or just eating a bunch of food that we have
Speaker 1: to pay for. I mean, from a strict material point
Speaker 1: of view, there's not really a reason to want to
Speaker 1: have this thing in my house except that I love him. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know, and I bet a lot of people
Speaker 1: out there right now are thinking, well, I'm not a
Speaker 1: dog person, I'm not a cat person. I don't like
Speaker 1: to go into the woods. I would I would invite
Speaker 1: you to expand these definitions because I feel like there
Speaker 1: are certainly individuals out there who really don't want to
Speaker 1: go into the you know, the North Georgia wilderness, but
Speaker 1: they might be very attractive to, say, you know, the
Speaker 1: desert environments of Arizona, or to other national parks, or
Speaker 1: to the beach or you know, or to tropical islands
Speaker 1: like some. So if your local outdoor environment doesn't call you,
Speaker 1: if specific outdoor environments don't don't call to you, then
Speaker 1: there have to be there are probably other natural world
Speaker 1: environments that that do ring your bell. I got one
Speaker 1: more for you, Robert. Why do people plant flowers in
Speaker 1: their backyard? Yeah? I mean what maybe you could say, okay,
Speaker 1: planning flowers in the front yard could be some kind
Speaker 1: of social thing where you're trying to demonstrate your I
Speaker 1: don't know, wealth and leisure time or something like that.
Speaker 1: People plant flowers in their backyard people nobody can see
Speaker 1: them except you, and so again it's there there appears
Speaker 1: to they're getting some kind of pleasure from having these
Speaker 1: plants that are growing, that they're taking care of, and
Speaker 1: the plants don't provide food. They don't provide any material
Speaker 1: benefit except that you look at them and it makes
Speaker 1: you feel good. Unless you're growing edible flowers. Well you know,
Speaker 1: but wait, is that a thing? I thought? Edible flowers?
Speaker 1: You can buy them at Healthful. You can seriously get
Speaker 1: a whole container of edible flowers for like, you know,
Speaker 1: eighteen pocks or something. Wait, people eat squash blossoms stuff. True,
Speaker 1: they squash blossom, but yeah, a lot of people that
Speaker 1: do grow flowers you're just growing them to look at
Speaker 1: them or to appreciate, say the butterflies that are attracted
Speaker 1: and buy them the or the various pollinating insects. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we have all these weird relationships with light forms
Speaker 1: and natural landscapes, with pet animals, with vegetation. And if
Speaker 1: not a dog or a cat, you think of fish, think, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, snakes, reptiles, Yeah, the reptiles, whatever your fancy is,
Speaker 1: even a even a weird pet like a scorpion or
Speaker 1: a tarantula. And uh and you know, I'm not calling
Speaker 1: you a weirdo if you have those, but you're probably
Speaker 1: into the weirdness of it. If you do own a
Speaker 1: pet scorpion, a tarantula. What about if you own pet ticks, well,
Speaker 1: then you're probably what a A A a partially mythological
Speaker 1: Eastern warlord. Right as you call back to our ticks episode,
Speaker 1: that would be great to have a pit of ticks
Speaker 1: in your house for when, you know, just to threaten
Speaker 1: the children when they're being too unruly, or you just
Speaker 1: have them as pets. And people are like, whoa, you
Speaker 1: have a pit full of ticks. That's horrible, And you're like, no,
Speaker 1: I don't. I don't feed anybody to the ticks. I
Speaker 1: just keep them around. I'll have to watch these little
Speaker 1: guys crawl around. So we're presented with a question here.
Speaker 1: And the humans seek out all kinds of activities and
Speaker 1: get pleasure from all kinds of activities that don't appear
Speaker 1: to have any erect material benefit, yet we we just
Speaker 1: like them. And so one reason for this could be
Speaker 1: that it's some kind of cultural thing that we, you know,
Speaker 1: we grow up being taught to like walking in the
Speaker 1: woods or to like looking at flowers, and that's possible answer.
Speaker 1: But also many of these things seem very universal, like
Speaker 1: across different cultures, people have some kind of companion animal
Speaker 1: relationship or they enjoy certain natural landscapes, they enjoy being
Speaker 1: surrounded by certain types of plants, and so another way
Speaker 1: of looking at this, apart from just cultural learning, could
Speaker 1: be that there's some kind of biological instinct that connects
Speaker 1: us to other forms of life, even forms of life
Speaker 1: that aren't directly benefiting us by say, providing food or
Speaker 1: providing shelter or something like that. And this brings us
Speaker 1: to the topic of today's episode, which is a hypothesis
Speaker 1: that's been around in biology and evolutionary psychology for a
Speaker 1: few decades now, known as the biophilia hypothesis. And this
Speaker 1: is mainly attributed to the work that there have been
Speaker 1: multiple people working in this field now, but it's mainly
Speaker 1: attributed to the work of the American biologist Edward O.
Speaker 1: Wilson also known as EO. Wilson. Now, Robert, you recently
Speaker 1: went to like the E. O. Wilson Center. Is this
Speaker 1: a place, uh from his hometown? Um, it's it's definitely
Speaker 1: down from his stomping grounds, because Edward O. Wilson is
Speaker 1: it was out Alabama, born in the nineteen nine and
Speaker 1: he grew up in various Florida and Alabama towns. So
Speaker 1: this is very much in his his stomping grounds. The
Speaker 1: Edward Wilson Center is in Freeport, Florida, and um, I
Speaker 1: and my family visited it earlier this month. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it's named in honor of Wilson, and it echoes his
Speaker 1: ideas and values. And he's he's been there, he's done,
Speaker 1: he's he's visited the center, so he's he's he's very
Speaker 1: much a part of it's it's ethos. I guess, I
Speaker 1: guess you would say, so, what's this place like? It's wonderful.
Speaker 1: So my family was vacationing at greaton Each which is
Speaker 1: close to Destin. But if you need a broader idea
Speaker 1: of where it is, we're talking roughly halfway along the
Speaker 1: coast between Pensacola and Panama City. And I know that
Speaker 1: at times, if one is visiting Florida, you're not a
Speaker 1: Floridian yourself. There's sometimes a hesitancy to uh to backtrack
Speaker 1: away from the beach too much. But there there are
Speaker 1: some I mean, far from from just this one location,
Speaker 1: there's some wonderful outdoor. Uh, you know, things to see
Speaker 1: in the States, So so don't be afraid to explore
Speaker 1: a bit. Uh. No, I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Some people really love the beach. I really love the swamp. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite places that have been to a
Speaker 1: few times now is uh Coula Springs State Park in Florida.
Speaker 1: This is where you have this wonderful deep natural spring.
Speaker 1: You have manateees coming in this rich um estuary environment
Speaker 1: with protected regions. Is this where you saw the leaping fish.
Speaker 1: When we jumping off the leaping fish, they were just
Speaker 1: leaping around like it was a Disney movie. It was fabulous.
Speaker 1: If you haven't caught that episode, that's from I guess
Speaker 1: a year so ago. Yeah, but yeah, I go back
Speaker 1: and check out our episode about jumping fish. That was
Speaker 1: a more interesting topic than I expected. Yeah, that one
Speaker 1: and and at times deadly. I'll make sure we linked
Speaker 1: to that one on the landing page for this episode
Speaker 1: is stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. But the
Speaker 1: Edward O. Wilson Center, Yeah, so it's a wonderful indoor
Speaker 1: outdoor educational center and it really does an excellent job
Speaker 1: of relating biology to two young people. Most of the time,
Speaker 1: during the course of the year it's it's only open
Speaker 1: to school groups and whatnot. But during the summer June
Speaker 1: and July. It's open to the public on Thursdays and Fridays.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about it, you can
Speaker 1: go that E. O. Wilson Center dot org. Uh. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's wonderful. There's a giant bird when you first walk
Speaker 1: in the door. They're giant animals to crawl on. There's
Speaker 1: a there's an observable bee colony honey Bees. You can
Speaker 1: check out and try and find the Queen. So if
Speaker 1: it's the Edward Wilson Center, I would expect there to
Speaker 1: be ants there right. There are ants. Yes, there's a
Speaker 1: huge display on ants, a giant ant that you can
Speaker 1: crawl on. Yeah. So it's it's it's really wonderful stuff.
Speaker 1: I recommend going like honey, I shrunk the kids scale. Yes. Well,
Speaker 1: so before we get into the biophilia hypothesis, we I
Speaker 1: guess we should talk about Edward Wilson himself because one
Speaker 1: of the so he's got this book from nineteen eight four,
Speaker 1: I believe is from the nineteen eighties called Biophelia, where
Speaker 1: he first articulates this idea. Now he would explore it
Speaker 1: more in a later book. Um, but this book Biophelia
Speaker 1: is a is a book I've read, and it's a
Speaker 1: really enjoyable scientific memoir. A lot of what he talks
Speaker 1: about is like his research on ants and his field
Speaker 1: work in places like Surinam and Papua New Guinea. And
Speaker 1: so he weaves together these themes from his life and
Speaker 1: from his work and science and his thoughts about what
Speaker 1: the role of science and society is. The the idea
Speaker 1: that ties this all together is this idea of biophelia
Speaker 1: are innate affiliation with or desire to focus on other
Speaker 1: living life forms and natural landscapes or lifelike processes. Now,
Speaker 1: there's some ambiguity in there, and we can address that
Speaker 1: ambiguity later and any problems that might cause for this
Speaker 1: as a hypothesis. But he definitely has a personal way
Speaker 1: of expressing his feelings about this idea, right. It very
Speaker 1: much connects back to stories throughout his life. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's important to note that Edward O. Wilson is he's
Speaker 1: the real deal here. He is. He's he is an
Speaker 1: acclaimed scientist, uh specifically and entomologist, and he is a
Speaker 1: and he is a very accomplished author. Like he he
Speaker 1: officially retired in but he's just continued to write books,
Speaker 1: uh like almost every year. I mean, his bibliography is
Speaker 1: incredible and his books are good. He's one of those
Speaker 1: science writers who is actually a very very good writer.
Speaker 1: He's expressive and poetic, but he also gets to the
Speaker 1: point I think he's one of the better scientists slash
Speaker 1: science writers in America. Yeah, and then, and he's also
Speaker 1: very relatable, especially when you see him, you know, in
Speaker 1: person or a video or a Ted talk. He's he's
Speaker 1: Alabama born, He's very folksy, and he describes himself as
Speaker 1: being essentially still a child at heart, and he has
Speaker 1: that kind of enthusiasm for nature. So I mentioned he
Speaker 1: was born in an earlier biographical detail that often comes
Speaker 1: up and he attributes to being what sort of steered
Speaker 1: him into studying ants is that he was seven years
Speaker 1: old and he blinded himself in one eye during a
Speaker 1: fishing accident. You know what. He pulled up a fish
Speaker 1: and the finn got him right, and a spiny finn
Speaker 1: got him in the eye and blinded him. And so
Speaker 1: he this led him to focus more, he says, on
Speaker 1: little things, things that he could actually get up, you know,
Speaker 1: get up close to with an eyeglass. So he turned
Speaker 1: to ants entomology, there's a game is key area of research.
Speaker 1: He attended the University of Alabama and earned his bachelor's
Speaker 1: and masters in biology, and he identified fire ants as
Speaker 1: an invasive species and reported on the first US colony
Speaker 1: of fire ants. That was while he was in college.
Speaker 1: In college, the early days for him. Um, and this
Speaker 1: is we were just talking about this before we went
Speaker 1: on the air. Here there's a video on YouTube and
Speaker 1: it was I believe it. It is aligned with the E. O.
Speaker 1: Wilson Center. But it starts off narrated by Harrison Ford
Speaker 1: and then and then Attenborough comes in and talks about
Speaker 1: how how how amazing Edward o' wilson is. So this
Speaker 1: this video is weird for multiple reasons, and one of
Speaker 1: them is that you hear Harrison Ford trying to sound
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about something which I don't know if I've ever
Speaker 1: heard before. The most chronically bored and unenthusiastic actor in
Speaker 1: the history of cinema. And we love him for it.
Speaker 1: But he's he's talking about the greatness of the work
Speaker 1: of Edward Wilson, and he still kind of has that
Speaker 1: that lake onic, sad, not very excited edge in his voice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: even though this is this is clearly like he's clearly
Speaker 1: passionate about it, like you did this for a reason.
Speaker 1: But later on in the video, you're following Edward o'wilson,
Speaker 1: like recent Edward O Wilson, Old Edward O. Wilson wandering
Speaker 1: around in the Florida wilderness, coming up to a fire
Speaker 1: ant colony. He reaches down with his bare hand, stirs
Speaker 1: them up, like scrapes the nest, and they all begin
Speaker 1: to swarm. And then he sticks his hand in the
Speaker 1: nest and lets them crawl in his hand and lets
Speaker 1: them begin to uh to attack his hand and uh
Speaker 1: and then he brushes them off. But it really demonstrates
Speaker 1: his man his devotion to connecting with the natural world
Speaker 1: and his fascination with the with these insects. Well, it's
Speaker 1: almost deranged because he's he's like smiling gleefully as they're
Speaker 1: all stinging and attacking the back of his hand. He's
Speaker 1: got these hundreds of ants on his skin and he's
Speaker 1: like each one of these bites is like a hot needle.
Speaker 1: But it it just shows you how, you know, how
Speaker 1: fascinated he is with them like that he would have
Speaker 1: this really kind of a holy moment, Like I kept
Speaker 1: thinking of St. Francis with the animals. Only instead of
Speaker 1: touching a you know, petting a lamb, he's petting fire ants.
Speaker 1: If lambs could sting. Yes, so Edward O. Wilson. Uh So,
Speaker 1: he moved onto Harvard in nine and he joined the
Speaker 1: faculty there and again he retired in uh. But but
Speaker 1: he remains on as an honorary curator in entomology, and
Speaker 1: he's during the course of his career again, he's written
Speaker 1: numerous books. He's received more awards than we can list
Speaker 1: in this podcast, including the Pulitzer Prize, which he I
Speaker 1: believe received at least twice. Uh. He's received the Ted
Speaker 1: Prize and the U S National Medal of Science again
Speaker 1: just to name a few. Now, a lot of Wilson's
Speaker 1: efforts outside of his scientific research over the years have
Speaker 1: been focused on the idea of conservation and preservation of nature. Yes,
Speaker 1: that we have this rich biodiversity. Everything is connected, and
Speaker 1: we have to preserve it because if you start, you
Speaker 1: start pulling things out, you start allowing things to go
Speaker 1: dark in this epic grid of by a biodiverse um life,
Speaker 1: then you're gonna have cascading collapses, and you're going to
Speaker 1: you're going to risk tremendous damage to our ecosystem. He
Speaker 1: sort of reminds me of the influence of somebody who
Speaker 1: I enjoyed talking about last year in our summer reading episode,
Speaker 1: which is the early ecologist Alexander von Humboldt, sort of
Speaker 1: responsible for the idea of ecology, both focusing on the
Speaker 1: inner connections between things in nature. How an organism doesn't
Speaker 1: No organism is an island, It doesn't stand on its own,
Speaker 1: and they all have connected inner dependencies. And we we
Speaker 1: we threaten natural life forms at our own peril. And
Speaker 1: I think he frames this in two ways. He says,
Speaker 1: you know, destroying natural habitats and destroying organisms that may
Speaker 1: in fact be some kind of keystone species in a
Speaker 1: natural ecology that threatens us materially, like these can have
Speaker 1: negative effects on our health, that can lead to the
Speaker 1: spread of new diseases, It can make resources harder to get,
Speaker 1: It can cause all kinds of problems for us materially.
Speaker 1: But he also emphasizes a lot just just the feeling
Speaker 1: of pleasure we get from nature and how important it
Speaker 1: is to our sense of well being and happiness to
Speaker 1: have intact natural ecologies around us, and this is sort
Speaker 1: of how he gets to the biophilia hypothesis. Alright, we're
Speaker 1: gonna take a quick break, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will dive into the biophilia hypothesis and discuss what
Speaker 1: it's saying. Uh and also some eventually we also get
Speaker 1: to some criticism about it. Thank alright, we're back. So
Speaker 1: Wilson proposed this term biophilia meaning the love of life
Speaker 1: in uh, the short publication back in biophilia the human
Speaker 1: bond with other species, and he defined this as humanities
Speaker 1: that innate tendency to focus on living things as opposed
Speaker 1: to the inanimate and in effect, he argued for in
Speaker 1: innate love of nature. Now there you already see some
Speaker 1: tension in the definitions, right, because in one statement there
Speaker 1: it's talking about focusing on other life forms and lifelike processes,
Speaker 1: and in the other statement it's saying that we naturally
Speaker 1: love nature. Now, focusing on things and loving them are different.
Speaker 1: And this is going to be. One of the problems
Speaker 1: people have raised with the biophilia hypothesis is um that
Speaker 1: it may not be exactly pinned down on exactly what
Speaker 1: the hypothesis is saying, but for now, we we should
Speaker 1: just try to explain the way it's usually expressed by
Speaker 1: people who are in favor of the biofilia hypothesis, and
Speaker 1: they tend to go with the focus idea, right, that
Speaker 1: it's that we focus on other living things and lifelike processes,
Speaker 1: where for some reason we're way more interested in trees
Speaker 1: than we are in rocks. Now, I should also add
Speaker 1: that the term biofilia itself was used earlier in the
Speaker 1: nineties sixties by the German social psychologist Eric from to
Speaker 1: denote a psychological orientation tour nature. But uh, it was
Speaker 1: really a Wilson who then took it and tweaked the
Speaker 1: meaning and really led to its primary usage today. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe we should read a passage from Wilson to see
Speaker 1: what what he has to say about the concept. He says,
Speaker 1: the object of my reflection can be summarized by a
Speaker 1: single word biophilia, which I will be so bold as
Speaker 1: to define as the innate tendency to focus on life
Speaker 1: and lifelike processes. From infancy, we concentrate happily on ourselves
Speaker 1: and other organisms. We learned to distinguish life from the
Speaker 1: inanimate and move toward it like moths to a porch. Light, novelty,
Speaker 1: and diversity are particularly esteemed. The mere mention of the
Speaker 1: word extraterrestrial evokes reveries about still unexplored life, displacing the
Speaker 1: old and once potent exotic that drew earlier generations to
Speaker 1: remote islands and jungled interiors. That much is immediately clear,
Speaker 1: but a great deal more needs to be added. I
Speaker 1: will make the case that to explore and affiliate with
Speaker 1: life is a deep and complicated process in mental development,
Speaker 1: to an extent, still undervalued and philosophy and religion, our
Speaker 1: our existence depends on this propensity. Our spirit is woven
Speaker 1: from it. Hope rises on its currents. Yeah, I like that,
Speaker 1: and so I like that he's he's situating biophilia as
Speaker 1: a sort as a hypothesis to explain something about our nature.
Speaker 1: But it also, I think for him takes on a
Speaker 1: sort of propulsive meaning about like how we should act.
Speaker 1: That if we act in accordance with with these natural
Speaker 1: urges to affiliate with nature, we can sort of shed
Speaker 1: this man conquers nature mentality that was present in a
Speaker 1: lot of human history. And you might wonder, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so if throughout a lot of human history, we've had
Speaker 1: this mentality of you know, we've got to tame the
Speaker 1: beast of nature, We've got to make it bend to
Speaker 1: our will and defeat our predatory adversaries. Wild Is that?
Speaker 1: Is that tendency throughout human history a challenge to the
Speaker 1: biophilia hypothesis. I don't know what do you think, Robert, Well,
Speaker 1: we'll discuss this a little bit more as as we go.
Speaker 1: But I do find it interesting that even in environmental circles,
Speaker 1: even in um, in environmental movements, you see them, you
Speaker 1: see individuals evoke this idea of mastery over nature. You know,
Speaker 1: it becomes this idea of saving the planet, positioning man,
Speaker 1: is this as as not completely uh, you know, dishonestly,
Speaker 1: but positioning us as individuals with power over nature, and
Speaker 1: therefore we should use our power over nature to rain
Speaker 1: things in and gain control over the situation. I like
Speaker 1: the way you put it there with about the idea
Speaker 1: of saving the planet, Like why do what does it
Speaker 1: mean when you talk about saving the whales versus not
Speaker 1: hurting the whales? I mean essentially you're you're saying the
Speaker 1: same thing, but they're starting with different assumptions. When if
Speaker 1: you're say save the whales, it almost says like, you know,
Speaker 1: we have two fates on a scale that we control,
Speaker 1: and we can press one side down or press the
Speaker 1: other side down, save them or kill them. But really
Speaker 1: the idea is that on their own they'd be fine.
Speaker 1: We are doing things to them to kill them, you know,
Speaker 1: it's not like they were naturally going extinct when we
Speaker 1: found them. Yeah, so you could have you can have
Speaker 1: one person that's saying save the whales, and the other
Speaker 1: person could say let's live in harmony with the whales.
Speaker 1: Ultimately they may be arguing for the same thing, but
Speaker 1: that but each argument cast humanity and its role with
Speaker 1: nature in a slightly different light. Yeah, and so I
Speaker 1: think the the stop harming the environment as opposed to
Speaker 1: save the environment might be better because it better emphasizes
Speaker 1: the fact that we we live alongside all the other
Speaker 1: organisms in the environment and we need them. They're not
Speaker 1: like pets that we're deciding what to do with. Of course,
Speaker 1: then again, messaging is aimed at at the listener, and
Speaker 1: there are going to be certain groups, certain individuals that
Speaker 1: are going to react more strongly to son two different
Speaker 1: arguments and say hey, you have the power to say
Speaker 1: some whales. Don't want to say some whales. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: made me feel really good. But if you say, hey, man,
Speaker 1: stop killing the whales, stop hurting the whale, stop wrecking
Speaker 1: our environment. You know that puts sometimes a negative spin
Speaker 1: on it that is not going to be as embraced
Speaker 1: by an individual or group. Yeah. I guess it's the
Speaker 1: superhero mentality. You want to be the superhero and save
Speaker 1: the bus full of children. It's not all that exciting
Speaker 1: to say that you wouldn't harm a bus full of children. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have one more quote from Wilson I want to
Speaker 1: read before we move forward. He just because this is
Speaker 1: just another example of his his beautiful ability to to
Speaker 1: sum up so many of these environmental ideas. He says,
Speaker 1: the living environment is what really sustains us. The living
Speaker 1: environment creates the soil, creates most of the atmosphere. It
Speaker 1: is not just something out there. The biosphere is a membrane,
Speaker 1: a very thin membrane of living organism. Now it's important
Speaker 1: to point out that as a scientific hypothesis, if biophelia
Speaker 1: has anything to say, it should have something to say,
Speaker 1: meaning that it shouldn't just be you know, people love nature, right,
Speaker 1: because we that's sort of obvious. People do generally tend
Speaker 1: to love nature in one way or another. Even if
Speaker 1: you're not really an outdoors person, you probably have some
Speaker 1: kind of preference for natural shapes, for plant environments, for
Speaker 1: things like that over dead, dry, uninhabited landscapes. I mean,
Speaker 1: think about picture the surface of the Moon or Mars
Speaker 1: or something like that. Does that look like a place
Speaker 1: you want to live? No, But at the same time
Speaker 1: it is. It is an environment, right. I Mean we
Speaker 1: were just talking about Arabia Mountain yesterday, which is a
Speaker 1: local hiking area in the Atlanta area, and we were saying, oh,
Speaker 1: it's great, It's like walking on another planet. It's like
Speaker 1: being on the moon. Yeah, it's cool for a couple hours.
Speaker 1: It's it's not a place that I would want to live,
Speaker 1: I think, because well, even though there are some plants
Speaker 1: on it, the thing about Arabia Mountain is it's placed
Speaker 1: near Atlanta where it's this this outcropping of mostly bald
Speaker 1: stone that has no soil, It has no plants. There
Speaker 1: are a few little groves on it that have trees
Speaker 1: and bushes growing up out of them, but mostly it's
Speaker 1: just bare rock, and while I'm there, it's cool, but
Speaker 1: it's cool for exactly the reason that it's not a
Speaker 1: place i'd want to stay. Does that makes sense? But
Speaker 1: how do you feel about the desert? I like the desert,
Speaker 1: but the desert is full of life. I don't know
Speaker 1: how i'd feel about, well, the desert I've been to.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, I've been to the Chihuahua Desert and
Speaker 1: it's full of life. It's fascinating. And the life in
Speaker 1: the desert when you come to like a place where
Speaker 1: there's a river flowing through a desert and there's green
Speaker 1: radiating out away from it, the life you see becomes
Speaker 1: all the more precious because of how scarce the greenery
Speaker 1: and things are in other places around Now. A place
Speaker 1: that's just pure sand dunes with no life forms at all,
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's cool to look out for a
Speaker 1: few minutes, but I don't know if i'd want to
Speaker 1: stay there. Okay, uh yeah, I guess it's gonna vary
Speaker 1: from from person to person, but I would love to
Speaker 1: hear from anyone out there is listening who's like, yes,
Speaker 1: build me a cabin in a out on the sand
Speaker 1: dunes and then be happy. Uh, you might have might
Speaker 1: be able to put a make a stronger argument for it.
Speaker 1: Now to your point about this being a hypothesis too
Speaker 1: and about it being scientific scientifically grounded, is that on
Speaker 1: one hand, yes, biophilia involves an ethos and uh and
Speaker 1: a lot of just commentary on what it is to
Speaker 1: be human and the human experience. But then there is
Speaker 1: also the the idea that there's at least in part
Speaker 1: a genetically and involved, that this is something that is
Speaker 1: going to go deeper than just uh, you know how
Speaker 1: we're nurtured, but it's going to get down to our
Speaker 1: core biological nature. Yeah, this would make it biologically testable.
Speaker 1: It's say, it's that our tendency to affiliate with nature,
Speaker 1: or tendency to focus on life and life like processes
Speaker 1: is somehow determined by our genes, or at least it's
Speaker 1: primed by our genes, you know, gene primed learning is
Speaker 1: the thing that they often emphasize. So that should in
Speaker 1: theory be testable in some way if you're clear enough
Speaker 1: about what it is you're looking for. So maybe we
Speaker 1: should talk about some of the commonly cited evidence by
Speaker 1: biophilia theorists. What do, they say, are good reasons to
Speaker 1: think that we have this innate, in inherited tendency to
Speaker 1: affiliate with other life forms? All right, well, here's some
Speaker 1: of the here's some of the anecdotal evidence. All right. Um, so,
Speaker 1: first of all, universal appreciation for nature across human cultures.
Speaker 1: Now we've already touched on this a little bit, but
Speaker 1: it's just the idea that would no matter where you go,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nature and natural elements wrapped up
Speaker 1: in that culture. And uh, one example that I really
Speaker 1: like is people in very different cultures all over the
Speaker 1: world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a
Speaker 1: landscape that just happens to be similar to the Pleistocene savannas. Uh,
Speaker 1: that we evolved to thrive in the ideal savannah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is related to a concept to known and
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology is the environment of evolutionary adapted nous or
Speaker 1: the e A, which is basically the idea that animals
Speaker 1: tend to be adapted not to live anywhere on Earth,
Speaker 1: but for a particular landscape or type of environment that
Speaker 1: shaped their genes. And if that's the case, you've sort
Speaker 1: of like put your chips down on being the kind
Speaker 1: of organism that thrives in this kind of place, and
Speaker 1: as such, you should have some kind of mechanisms in
Speaker 1: your brain that tell you seek out that kind of
Speaker 1: place where you play best. Yes, now this I love this.
Speaker 1: Uh this this theory in this idea about art though,
Speaker 1: because if you spend any time in museums, you run
Speaker 1: across the landscapes and sometimes I'm not I'm not too
Speaker 1: much of a landscape guy. I tend to walk by
Speaker 1: a lot of them. Less there's something really cool going on,
Speaker 1: such as uh, we were just in the last episode
Speaker 1: talking about or one of previous episodes talking about landscape
Speaker 1: with the fall of chorus by Uh was it Bosha
Speaker 1: Brugle I can't and uh yeah, So you have one
Speaker 1: detail of a following mythological figure, but then also just
Speaker 1: a natural landscape with human activity and nature going on.
Speaker 1: So when you do, when you look at a lot
Speaker 1: of these these works of landscape art, you find open
Speaker 1: spaces of low grasses interspersed with the copses of trees.
Speaker 1: The trees tend to fork near the ground, which is
Speaker 1: to say, if they're tree, their trees you could scramble
Speaker 1: up into if you needed to get away from something. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's water close by or in the distance, so you
Speaker 1: don't feel like you're going to necessarily dry up or
Speaker 1: you know, you or you'd be able to take a
Speaker 1: swim if you got overheated, or there's there indications of
Speaker 1: animal life maybe birds in the distance, as well as
Speaker 1: diverse greenery. And finally, get this, a path or a road,
Speaker 1: perhaps a river bank or a shoreline that extends into
Speaker 1: the distance, almost inviting you to follow it m hm.
Speaker 1: And this type of landscape is generally regarded as beautiful,
Speaker 1: even by people in countries that don't have it. You know,
Speaker 1: like your your culture might not have a lot of
Speaker 1: landscape art, but you're gonna there's a very good chance
Speaker 1: you're going to encounter another culture's landscape art and you're
Speaker 1: gonna get it. You know, you can be completely you
Speaker 1: could have never seen any you know, say Chinese or
Speaker 1: Japanese landscape art, and then you would view it and
Speaker 1: you'd be like, yeah, I totally get it, and you're
Speaker 1: just drawn into it. You you want to crawl into
Speaker 1: the painting and run around with the trees. Okay. So
Speaker 1: this is commonly cited anecdotal evidence about the kinds of
Speaker 1: art and imagery people prefer. Now, I would say, as
Speaker 1: a counter example, as long as we're sticking with anecdotal
Speaker 1: for now, and when we're not claiming to have some
Speaker 1: kind of strong empirical case, I'd say, just personally, when
Speaker 1: I think about landscape images, I like the most. I
Speaker 1: like mountain images. Yeah, well, you know, one of these
Speaker 1: things is that to what is often going on in
Speaker 1: a mountain image. I mean, you're gonna have some somebody
Speaker 1: or something standing at a peak looking out just having
Speaker 1: you know, mastery over the landscape, being able to survey
Speaker 1: everything around you and see predators approaching you from a distance.
Speaker 1: You could very much argue that that's an evolutionary adaptation
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, because exactly having having the higher ground
Speaker 1: gives you the ability to see what's coming in in
Speaker 1: multiple directions. But of course that isn't exactly biophelia, because
Speaker 1: that that's talking about landscapes, but it's not really talking
Speaker 1: about organisms or lifelike processes. Though. One thing I will
Speaker 1: point out is that in some of the biophilia literature
Speaker 1: there does seem to be sometimes a kind of blurry
Speaker 1: nous or fuzziness about whether we're talking still just about
Speaker 1: natural organisms or whether this is turning into a preference
Speaker 1: for natural types of landscapes as opposed to I don't
Speaker 1: know what cities or something like that. Yeah. Now, and
Speaker 1: another example that comes up is the fact that some
Speaker 1: of the earliest human art works are the the various
Speaker 1: cave paintings that show you know, realistic animals, realistic um
Speaker 1: human beings and uh and uh, and also just decorative
Speaker 1: motifs that are clearly inspired by natural world organisms. Totally. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you see these these ancient reverent images, and they tend
Speaker 1: to be what they tend to be animals, Yeah, especially
Speaker 1: prey animals that you might be hunting. Yeah, exactly. And
Speaker 1: you know, these date back thirty two thousand years in
Speaker 1: the case of some of the French cave paintings that
Speaker 1: we've seen, and if you if you consider shell necklaces
Speaker 1: and whatnot, which might be stretching the argument a little bit,
Speaker 1: but that can take you back a good hundred thousand years. Now.
Speaker 1: Beyond that, there are other anecdotal examples, like landscape architecture
Speaker 1: is full of of of examples of this. I ran
Speaker 1: across some some material by Bill Brown and Keith Bowers
Speaker 1: and Carol Franklin, all of them landscape architects, and uh,
Speaker 1: and they point out that you're just freakuently going to
Speaker 1: encounter actual nature inside of of a building. You're gonna
Speaker 1: counter fish, tanks and plants. You're gonna encounter, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: ornaments and patterns that read like nature. So it might
Speaker 1: be you say you're in Florida and then you go
Speaker 1: into a beach resort. But is there going to be
Speaker 1: some sort of pineapple design, you know, on the pillars
Speaker 1: or on the wallpaper. Uh, you have to take that
Speaker 1: into account. And uh and oh and then that opened
Speaker 1: Savannah that we crave, well, you could argue that we
Speaker 1: also create it to some extent in our golf courses.
Speaker 1: You're right, golf courses. In a way, it's it's a
Speaker 1: weird combination, like the ultimate mastery over nature. You and
Speaker 1: you enslave nature and just turn it into your own
Speaker 1: yard game then and bend it to your will. But
Speaker 1: still you're you're evoking certain natural motifs, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know why I'm so impressed by that. You
Speaker 1: I feel like you've golf courses. You just blew my
Speaker 1: Savannah hypothesis. Skepticism out of the water. And uh, I
Speaker 1: mean it does go to show that the idea you
Speaker 1: have biophilia, there's like overt biophilia and then biophilia in
Speaker 1: ways that you didn't even realize you were, you were,
Speaker 1: you know, employing it. Like. Another example of that is
Speaker 1: the symbolic use of nature and human language. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: all our metaphors are nature metaphors. Yeah, you know a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of them are very over you know,
Speaker 1: blind as a bat. Wise is it now pretty as
Speaker 1: a peacock, crazy as a rat, as an outhouse rat? Um, whoa,
Speaker 1: whoa what real expression like that? As crazy as an
Speaker 1: outhouse rat. And then there's crazy as a rat and
Speaker 1: a coffee Can I love a good crazy rat? Uh?
Speaker 1: Analogy there? But how about a bull in a China shop.
Speaker 1: A bull in a china shop is good too. Of course,
Speaker 1: china shops are not very uh, very much part of
Speaker 1: our revolutionary adapted landscape. But but but the bull is
Speaker 1: the bull, the bull and various other animals as a
Speaker 1: way to evoke personality, you know. And the thing is
Speaker 1: these are these are just some of the obvious ones,
Speaker 1: but it gets a lot more elegant, to the point
Speaker 1: that you're not always aware that you're invoking animal imagery
Speaker 1: in your language, but it's there. Oh and then I
Speaker 1: mean we could go on forever here about about spiritual
Speaker 1: reverence for nature across cultures totally. Yeah, think of all
Speaker 1: the sacred places in global myth, from Edenic gardens to
Speaker 1: sacred mountains to primordial oceans like we discussed in our
Speaker 1: recent episode about creating a universe. Yeah, I agree with that, though,
Speaker 1: yet again there were somewhat blurring the original definition. If
Speaker 1: the hypothesis is supposed to be about organisms, Wait a minute,
Speaker 1: are we talking about landscapes or just organisms? Well, let's
Speaker 1: talk about organisms. Let's look at all those gods and
Speaker 1: demigods that we have rolling about, uh how much. I mean,
Speaker 1: certainly there are examples of very anthropomorphic deities that are
Speaker 1: just pretty much just tall bearded people. But yet even
Speaker 1: in even say Abrahamic tradition, you have what you have
Speaker 1: winged angels that's invoking uh like you know, hybrid or
Speaker 1: or chimerical imagery. And then you have just straight up
Speaker 1: and yeah, you have the world serpents. You have celestial
Speaker 1: draft wagons in a Chinese mythology that are themselves composites
Speaker 1: of all these various animal motifs, and of course you
Speaker 1: look at the pantheon of the Hindu deities and you
Speaker 1: see all of these wonderful animal forms. Now, Wilson himself
Speaker 1: is very much into the idea of serpent imagery throughout
Speaker 1: human culture. As one example of that, he sites of biophelia.
Speaker 1: But this goes into Wilson's broader definition of biophilia because
Speaker 1: as some people employ the term, they think that it
Speaker 1: just means like love of other organisms or love of nature.
Speaker 1: Wilson goes with that focus on that our attention is
Speaker 1: naturally drawn to and stuck on other organisms, especially organisms
Speaker 1: that have some kind of evolutionary relevance for us. And
Speaker 1: one of the examples is the widespread biophobia of snakes.
Speaker 1: So for Wilson, biophobia is actually a subset of biophilia.
Speaker 1: We've got this relationship with other organisms, and so the
Speaker 1: serpent human mind relationship is something that that he really
Speaker 1: focuses on. He talks about how common snake dreams are
Speaker 1: across human cultures, how common snake imagery is in religions
Speaker 1: on all all parts of the planet, how common snake
Speaker 1: imagery is an art that they're just snakes everywhere. We
Speaker 1: apparently can't get them off the brain. And then he
Speaker 1: also compares this to the way that other primates seem
Speaker 1: to react to snakes with with greater alarm and magnitude
Speaker 1: of activity than they would too many other types of
Speaker 1: animals of comparable size. Oh yeah, I mean, and and
Speaker 1: it goes beyond beyond that into our various pet animals.
Speaker 1: If anyone's ever conducted the cucumber test with a cat,
Speaker 1: replace the cucumber on the the of the floor behind
Speaker 1: them when they're not looking. No, they'll turn around, and
Speaker 1: if they glimpse the cucumber, they'll jump. Whoa, um, I've
Speaker 1: had I have not had a lot of luck with
Speaker 1: this experiment with my own cat, granted how many times
Speaker 1: he tried. Only when I'm holding a cucumber in the
Speaker 1: kitchen and I looked down and see the cat facing
Speaker 1: the other way. So maybe you need longer cucumbers, yeah,
Speaker 1: or just more you know, I should, I should plan
Speaker 1: more in my cat experiments. But then, of course, anyone
Speaker 1: who's in who's ever in go involved themselves with horses
Speaker 1: knows you know, how a horse can behave if it
Speaker 1: sees a snake. I mean, and and I'm not even
Speaker 1: sure about dogs. I assume dogs have strong reactions to
Speaker 1: serpents as well. Yeah, I'd imagine just the other day
Speaker 1: my dog Charlie tried to eat a dead one. Oh well,
Speaker 1: we're out walking. It's there on the sidewalk, belly up,
Speaker 1: rotting a little bit and he he saw a snack.
Speaker 1: Do yank him away? You have to get in there. Now.
Speaker 1: Back to the idea of religion and UH in biophilia,
Speaker 1: you know, I also think that that heavily nature a
Speaker 1: line faiths illustrate this as well, such as like Shinto
Speaker 1: comes to mind, you know, the Japanese uh mentality that
Speaker 1: there is uh. You know, there's a there's a spiritual
Speaker 1: energy and all things. And granted some of that includes
Speaker 1: rocks but in statues, but it can, you know, certainly
Speaker 1: include natural forms as well and organisms. Uh. And there's
Speaker 1: actually an excellent article in the New York Times from
Speaker 1: this week. By the time you hear it, it it will
Speaker 1: be like a couple of weeks old, I guess. But
Speaker 1: it's about resurgent religious faith in China and the environmental
Speaker 1: activism that is coming with it. And it's hardly an
Speaker 1: underground thing. President Ji jin Ping has a champion to
Speaker 1: return to interest in Chinese culture and particularly Taoism and Confusism.
Speaker 1: So and part of this is countering Western influences, but
Speaker 1: he's called for China to return to its roots as
Speaker 1: a quote, ecological civilization. Now, the article also points out
Speaker 1: that the movement as vote motivating Chinese Buddhists, Christians and
Speaker 1: Muslims as well. And you know, it's it's always I
Speaker 1: think worth reminding everyone that the China is is home
Speaker 1: to fifty five distinct ethnic groups, even if Han is
Speaker 1: the majority there, uh, and they are also numerous religious faiths. Now,
Speaker 1: I wonder how this initiative plays into the Chinese government's
Speaker 1: enabling of heavy polluting industry. I mean, of course they're
Speaker 1: not unique in governments to enable that. But no, no,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a a fair fair criticism, and I
Speaker 1: think that's certainly a conflict in uh in China uh
Speaker 1: presently um. And you know, there are other motivations as well,
Speaker 1: such as with you know, the u s sort of
Speaker 1: taking a a lesser role in the environmental leadership, that
Speaker 1: there's a place for someone like China to step up
Speaker 1: and assume power so there's power here as well. Uh,
Speaker 1: that's that's at stake. But as this article by Javiira
Speaker 1: Sea Hernandez points out, there's there's more of an emphasis
Speaker 1: in these resulting environmental movements on living in harmony with
Speaker 1: nature rather than what is perceived as a Western take
Speaker 1: on saving the Earth. To come back to the distinction
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier, so it's don't kill the whales,
Speaker 1: not save the whales, right, Yeah, And I think this
Speaker 1: is interesting in light of by affiliate, because I think
Speaker 1: it's very in keeping with the message of stewardship understanding biodiversity.
Speaker 1: But at the same time time, we see that that
Speaker 1: very savior message, uh, you know, invoked in materials promoting
Speaker 1: Edward Wilson and biophilia that like that Harrison Ford video
Speaker 1: we're talking about. He describes that quote as an epic
Speaker 1: battle to save our planet and it will involve swords
Speaker 1: and magic staves. And then you know there are some
Speaker 1: people will actually bring a technology into this argument as well.
Speaker 1: Wilson himself said that the more we understand organisms through science,
Speaker 1: the closer we become to them. Uh. And while technology
Speaker 1: can arguably distance ourselves from nature as well, it can
Speaker 1: bring us closer. Molecular biology and genetic engineering, for example,
Speaker 1: bring us closer to nature because is a greater understanding.
Speaker 1: And you can even argue that the search for extraterrestrial
Speaker 1: life too is a biophilic endeavor. Oh, I mean, the
Speaker 1: CT is almost perfect example of biophilia, if there is
Speaker 1: any merit to the idea, because like, there are millions
Speaker 1: of planet it's out there that we could be interested in,
Speaker 1: and what are we interested in? We're interested in the
Speaker 1: ones that have life on them. Now that could you
Speaker 1: could say that there there's just sort of like a
Speaker 1: cognitively recognized self preservation instinct right that we we say, okay,
Speaker 1: if there's another planet with life on it out there
Speaker 1: could be a threat to us, could help us so
Speaker 1: that we have motivations based in our cognitive capacities to
Speaker 1: understand that life has this this value out there. But
Speaker 1: that's not the only kind of life we're interested in.
Speaker 1: People have been looking for microbes in the soil of
Speaker 1: Mars for decades. Now, you know, we scoop up the
Speaker 1: soil of Mars and we want to see things alive
Speaker 1: in it. Why do we care so much about that?
Speaker 1: I mean, and that's not just scientists who care. I
Speaker 1: understand why scientists care, because it's part of their life's work.
Speaker 1: But the average person really does care. Usually whether there's
Speaker 1: life on Mars, that's an interesting question to them. Why. Well,
Speaker 1: because the answer ends up saying I mean, ends up
Speaker 1: saying something about ourselves and about life itself, you know.
Speaker 1: But but also I think just because life is interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the presence of life somewhere makes that place so much
Speaker 1: more fascinating than an otherwise dead rock covered in loose
Speaker 1: soil and stones. This makes me want to see more
Speaker 1: sort of darkly Edward Wilson type characters and some of
Speaker 1: our sci fi horror. You know, someone who's gonna really
Speaker 1: just reach out and touch the xenomorphs and love them.
Speaker 1: I guess we do see characters like that in the
Speaker 1: various alien films that Brad Dwarf comes to mind in
Speaker 1: the Alien Resurrection. I can't speak any anything positive by
Speaker 1: the Alien Resurrection. Let's move on al right, Well, let's
Speaker 1: move on to day. Let's take one more quick break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back we'll get into measurable bio
Speaker 1: biological evidence for biophilia as well as some evidence against it. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So so far, we've been talking not super
Speaker 1: rigorously about science. We've been talking about general anecdotal observations
Speaker 1: about people's behavior, about culture, about our own feelings. And
Speaker 1: that's fine, but that's not going to prove a scientific
Speaker 1: hypothesis and make it a workable theory, right. And and
Speaker 1: Edward Wilson has has been pretty clear throughout his career
Speaker 1: with this that like, there's not strong evidence for it,
Speaker 1: that there I think he more recently said, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: stronger evidence for it, but he's not He realizes that
Speaker 1: the evidence is not there yet. A lot of more
Speaker 1: research is required. But some of the measurable evidence that's
Speaker 1: out there. We've already touched on this a little bit,
Speaker 1: but measurable physiological responses and humans that are exposed to
Speaker 1: sometimes just images of snakes or spiders. Right, there has
Speaker 1: been actual empirical research on this, and and it's comparing
Speaker 1: our responses as humans to the responses especially of other primates,
Speaker 1: to say, like, is there some inherited, uh genetic component
Speaker 1: to our reactions to these animals that's not just culturally learned. Yes,
Speaker 1: that in a way, there's just like there's there's awareness,
Speaker 1: there's an important like cognitive awareness, you know. And to
Speaker 1: go back to the the idea of biophobia, this would
Speaker 1: be a biophobia that Wilson would include underneath his definition
Speaker 1: of biophilia. It would be a natural focus or attention
Speaker 1: that we give to certain types of organisms. Now, another
Speaker 1: big area and this is this is certainly an area
Speaker 1: where there's been a number of of studies over the years,
Speaker 1: and we could easily do a whole episode on it.
Speaker 1: But the importance of sunlight on mood and productivity. Mm hmm,
Speaker 1: Now how would that because obviously the sunlight is not
Speaker 1: like an organism, so right, but it's it's I believe
Speaker 1: the argument is that you're getting into the idea that
Speaker 1: like being being outdoors, being in nature, there are there
Speaker 1: are aspects of nature that yes aren't directly aligned with
Speaker 1: organisms but aren't, but is responsible for organisms that we're
Speaker 1: going to have this innate connection with. So this is
Speaker 1: expanding the definition. And I have seen this done and
Speaker 1: some people who talk about the subject expanding the definition
Speaker 1: to say that it's not just the desire to affiliate
Speaker 1: with organisms, but with natural environments, like when people talk
Speaker 1: about how it's people want to seek out water, being
Speaker 1: by the water, or something like that. And that's you know,
Speaker 1: not necessarily being by a pool, but being by a
Speaker 1: natural river or lake or something like that. Uh, that
Speaker 1: could be yeah, I guess that could be a peripheral
Speaker 1: or related type of idea. Now another area of measurable
Speaker 1: effect here ties in with the study by Roger Yuruk
Speaker 1: which found that patients recovering from surgery actually recovered much
Speaker 1: more effectively, uh if they were viewing trees and shrubs
Speaker 1: as opposed to those that would just had a view
Speaker 1: out their window of a brick wall. They also ended
Speaker 1: up taking half the painkillers and made half the nursing calls.
Speaker 1: So there was like a change in their behavior and
Speaker 1: not just in their reported affect but in what they
Speaker 1: actually did. If they could see some vegetation, Yeah, if
Speaker 1: they just if they could just see some trees and
Speaker 1: you know, and you know, presumably maybe some squirrelding birds
Speaker 1: in there as well. So this is part of a
Speaker 1: broader body of literature on the benefits of vegetative environments.
Speaker 1: There's been a lot of research like this, some of
Speaker 1: it also associated with the same guy, uh, Roger Ulric
Speaker 1: and across different studies. People have this positive aesthetic reaction
Speaker 1: to plant filled environments, and these environments are usually found
Speaker 1: to have some kind of stress reducing effect or somehow
Speaker 1: this otherwise restorative effect on mood and on behavior. And
Speaker 1: this goes beyond vegetation as well. For example, people tend
Speaker 1: to report reductions in stress or show fewer stress behaviors
Speaker 1: in the presence of an aquarium that has live fish
Speaker 1: in it. Or how about the often report. I mean,
Speaker 1: we don't need to tell you about all of the
Speaker 1: tons of studies that report the health benefits and mood
Speaker 1: benefits of exposure to pets, companion animals, you know, lowering
Speaker 1: your blood pressure and all, you know, all the stuff
Speaker 1: like that over the years. Yeah. I think it's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that you you you have these hospital
Speaker 1: animals that make the rounds and just meet in Greek people, uh,
Speaker 1: just the idea being that this will this will improve
Speaker 1: their their condition at least in you know, a small sense,
Speaker 1: but a measurable sense. One other thing I've read about
Speaker 1: this interesting is the idea of humans preference for certain
Speaker 1: geometric patterns. For example, uh, so, geometric patterns can be
Speaker 1: expressed in terms of what are called fractal patterns. That
Speaker 1: are repeating patterns that are often said to resemble designs
Speaker 1: found in biological organisms and in nature. So if you
Speaker 1: look down at surfaces of the earth from above, say
Speaker 1: winding rivers through a plain or how mountain, how you know,
Speaker 1: the drainage areas in mountains form these these spiky patterns
Speaker 1: looking down from above, Or if you look at the
Speaker 1: branches of trees, or of ferns, or of the spirals
Speaker 1: and flowering plants. I mean, it gets into the golden ratio, right,
Speaker 1: I mean the idea that if you if you do
Speaker 1: any image editing out there, you you know, you often
Speaker 1: bring in one of these overlays. Even sometimes like I
Speaker 1: use the rule of thirds one a lot, which is
Speaker 1: a very inorganic way of of breaking up your photo.
Speaker 1: But you can also bring in essentially a snail shell,
Speaker 1: so you can see this curve. Because so you end
Speaker 1: up with situations where people are like, they may not
Speaker 1: be actually thinking this, but essentially they're looking at an
Speaker 1: image and saying, oh, this this photograph of race cars
Speaker 1: is great, but I'd love it a little bit more.
Speaker 1: It evoked an image of a snail shell. You know. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: you probably don't think it consciously but people do. In
Speaker 1: some studies show preferences for fractal patterns, geometric fractal patterns
Speaker 1: at certain levels of of density branching, and these basically
Speaker 1: are said to correspond to the most common patterns seen
Speaker 1: in natural organisms. So if you're thinking about branching trees
Speaker 1: or mangrove roots or things like that, these are geometric
Speaker 1: patterns that are brains seem to prefer looking at. Now.
Speaker 1: Of course, one question about that is if we're responding
Speaker 1: to geometric patterns through some innate preference in our brain.
Speaker 1: It's not just culturally learned, but we we've got these
Speaker 1: inherited genetic preferences for things that spike at this angle
Speaker 1: this many times. One wonder is if that means you
Speaker 1: could trick your brain into satisfying any kind of biophilic
Speaker 1: impulse to whatever extent that is real, just by looking
Speaker 1: at dead geometric patterns or things like that that simulate
Speaker 1: whatever it is we notice in nature that we like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think here we get we get down to
Speaker 1: this situation where biophilia it's kind of like the echoes
Speaker 1: of biophilia throughout our our life and our culture and
Speaker 1: our creations. Even things that don't you know, aren't overtly
Speaker 1: a statue of an animal or the the the avocation
Speaker 1: of of an animal's form. Uh, there's still aspects of
Speaker 1: it there that are resonating through most of what we do. Now.
Speaker 1: I think it's time to talk about some criticisms of
Speaker 1: the idea, because as if you if you can't tell,
Speaker 1: I've got some reservations about biophilia. At the same time
Speaker 1: that I find it strongly intuitively persuasive, I also recognize
Speaker 1: that the idea it's got some problems. So I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about one study I read that was published
Speaker 1: INN and the General Environmental Values, which is a peer
Speaker 1: reviewed environmental ethics journal by the author's joy and to
Speaker 1: Block called Nature and I are to a critical examination
Speaker 1: of the biophilia hypothesis. And like I said, while I
Speaker 1: I intuitively respond to a lot of what Wilson and
Speaker 1: people like him have said, I think this article makes
Speaker 1: some good points. So they're arguing against the biophilia hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And they don't argue that we don't have natural inherited
Speaker 1: tendencies to focus on living things. But they're more talking
Speaker 1: about whether biophilia as a commonly understood idea is a
Speaker 1: coherent scientific construct. So this is the author's take. Biophilia
Speaker 1: is presented as a hypotheists and they say, okay, that's fine,
Speaker 1: because when you're at the hypothesis stage in science, you're
Speaker 1: not saying this is a proven theory or something like that.
Speaker 1: You're just saying, we're speculating about something that appears to
Speaker 1: be the case. Let's do some experiments and find out
Speaker 1: if it's true. That would be fine. But there's one
Speaker 1: key criterion for a hypothesis, and that's that it needs
Speaker 1: to be falsifiable. Now, this is buying into one particular
Speaker 1: theory about the demarcation problem separating science from pseudoscience. We've
Speaker 1: talked about that before, but this is a very commonly
Speaker 1: accepted solution of the demarcation problem. A hypothesis should be
Speaker 1: a statement that you can come up with some kind
Speaker 1: of way of showing whether it's true or false, that
Speaker 1: you could prove it false. Now, they turned to the
Speaker 1: biophelia definition that's often offered by EO. Wilson, which is
Speaker 1: quote the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes,
Speaker 1: and they break that into three key parts, which is
Speaker 1: a the innate tendency be to focus and see on
Speaker 1: life for lifelike processes. So they start by talking about
Speaker 1: life or lifelike processes, and this is a good point,
Speaker 1: they say, Okay, so how is life like defined? The
Speaker 1: hypothesis is often expanded to include things like, we've been
Speaker 1: talking about natural landscapes water features as the object of biophilia.
Speaker 1: So is a waterfall an object of biophilia? Obviously a
Speaker 1: waterfall is not alive, but biophilia theorists sometimes assert that
Speaker 1: moving water features and other things are lifelike enough that
Speaker 1: they can be grouped under the biophilia rubric. And on
Speaker 1: what basis do we conclude that? Like what gets ruled in?
Speaker 1: And do people looking at a waterfall really start thinking
Speaker 1: of it in the same way they would think of
Speaker 1: an organism. I'm not sure that there's strong evidence for that. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, if you take the waterfall and
Speaker 1: you just think about flowing water, I mean, flowing waters
Speaker 1: is a habitat for organisms. Uh, And then you know,
Speaker 1: in any place where there's some sort of a dynamic
Speaker 1: with flowing water, there's a potential for the the capture
Speaker 1: and consumption of set organisms. Yeah, I see that but
Speaker 1: that that almost begs a greater expansion of the statement
Speaker 1: of the hypothesis. Right, it seems like that would make
Speaker 1: it an innate tendency to focus on life or lifelike
Speaker 1: processes or environments that could sustain life or lifelike processes. Okay,
Speaker 1: But then you can also come back and say, what
Speaker 1: is a what is a branching uh, waterway, but a
Speaker 1: bit of branching vein through a body, Like there's the
Speaker 1: form of the flowing water. Evoke the flow of blood
Speaker 1: through an organism or the you know, the chambers inside
Speaker 1: a plant. I mean, that's a good point, but I
Speaker 1: guess I guess the question would be are people really
Speaker 1: seeing it that way? Like, is that is that entering
Speaker 1: their minds or are they just responding to water because
Speaker 1: sometimes you get thirsty, yeah, or it's just really loud,
Speaker 1: or they just like these moving features, or there's some
Speaker 1: other thing about it that's yeah. So I think that's
Speaker 1: a decent point to raise. The next thing they focus
Speaker 1: on is the idea of focusing. So in that definition,
Speaker 1: there's some wishy washing us about what the human who
Speaker 1: experiences biophilia does, Like sometimes biophilia is treated as the
Speaker 1: desire to quote affiliate with other organisms. And to me
Speaker 1: that means we would assume it to mean that you
Speaker 1: want to be near them, you want to look at them,
Speaker 1: you want to touch them, you want to interact with them.
Speaker 1: But other times there's this more neutral word focus used.
Speaker 1: And and because of our biophilia, the ideas we focus
Speaker 1: on living organisms, they sort of command our attention living
Speaker 1: organisms or lifelike processes. But they point out that there's
Speaker 1: there's not necessarily consistency here. Ulric seems to define biophilia
Speaker 1: as a positive affiliation with life forms. Wilson himself includes
Speaker 1: biophobia within the definition of biophilia, and one of his
Speaker 1: primary examples, as we talked about, is this nearly universal
Speaker 1: mental obsession with snakes and frightening snake imagery. Um, so
Speaker 1: they say that, you know, this part of the definition
Speaker 1: really does need to be more specific. We need to
Speaker 1: figure out what we're talking about here. Is it just
Speaker 1: what we like or is it what gets our attention
Speaker 1: or what is going on? Well, and this raises questions too,
Speaker 1: And I mean it makes me think about about deer hunters,
Speaker 1: you know, which you can relate to. Having grown up
Speaker 1: in the South in Tennessee. It was not a deer
Speaker 1: hunter myself, but nor I have known many. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: there's a it's sometimes tricky, I think for for people
Speaker 1: who aren't affiliated with that culture or haven't really given
Speaker 1: it much thought to understand. But there is a love
Speaker 1: for nature, and you're gonna love for deer, I think
Speaker 1: with with a lot of maybe even most, maybe all
Speaker 1: deer hunters. You know, there's a and there's this, at
Speaker 1: times kind of difficult to understand reverence for the deer.
Speaker 1: You know, you see like deer stickers on people's car
Speaker 1: and the trophies of their heads, um, you know, hung
Speaker 1: in their homes, almost with a like a religious zeal,
Speaker 1: almost like it's some some shent uh you know antler god, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it mimics the behavior of our ancient ancestors.
Speaker 1: Who would you who might, in some kind of religious
Speaker 1: way take pieces of an animal that they had killed
Speaker 1: primarily for material resources. You know, you'd want its meat,
Speaker 1: you'd want its hide for clothing or something like that.
Speaker 1: But what do you do with the antlers? They become
Speaker 1: some kind of religious artifact, your tools? Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: Well what about part A that innate part? Right? Then
Speaker 1: this is another important part. So this means that biophelic
Speaker 1: tendencies are are not learned through culture, but they're inherited biologically,
Speaker 1: and this would generally be accepted to mean that they
Speaker 1: had adaptive value in the past. Right, they served us
Speaker 1: some purpose and so we adapted to favor them. And
Speaker 1: there's not always agreement on what form these adaptive mechanisms take,
Speaker 1: what whether they stem from the same general mechanism, or
Speaker 1: what their relative importance is. So the authors reformulate the
Speaker 1: hypothesis to fit all the nuances as they've just brought in,
Speaker 1: and it becomes there is a set of genetic predispositions
Speaker 1: of different strength, involving different sorts of affective states toward
Speaker 1: different kinds of lifelike things. You can see the problem here, right,
Speaker 1: that this is becoming so broad as to accommodate almost anything,
Speaker 1: and it becomes really hard to falsify since there's just
Speaker 1: so much wiggle room in that in that definition of
Speaker 1: the proposition, and it creeps more towards just a pure
Speaker 1: ethos or philosophy as opposed to something you can scientifically
Speaker 1: test for. Right uh now, To be fair to the
Speaker 1: biophilia theorists, the authors point out that this could be
Speaker 1: a sort of unreasonably broad definition. Uh, that's an artifact
Speaker 1: of the fact that they're trying to synthesize the work
Speaker 1: of different researchers working within the biophelia framework, and that
Speaker 1: it's possible for one individual scientist maybe to have a tighter, sturdier,
Speaker 1: more testable version of the hypothesis. Though the authors don't
Speaker 1: really seem to favor any of the particular ones they've
Speaker 1: come across. But if so, I think what they're thinking
Speaker 1: needs to happen is that biophilia theorists should identify the leaner,
Speaker 1: more specific hypothesis and unify their experiments underneath it. They
Speaker 1: also they attack some of the specific evidence given for
Speaker 1: the common legs of the biophilia hypothesis, For example, the
Speaker 1: savannah preference hypothesis, the idea of us a loving companion
Speaker 1: animals and are quote vegetated settings. You know that we
Speaker 1: surround ourselves with potted plants and things like that, even
Speaker 1: though there's no apparent material reason or benefit for doing so.
Speaker 1: And whether or not these criticisms of the lines of
Speaker 1: supporting evidence are correct, I'm somewhat persuaded by their criticism
Speaker 1: of the biophilia framework definition. Uh, And at the same time,
Speaker 1: I still feel persuaded by something about the general idea
Speaker 1: um Like I, I do feel this urge to connect
Speaker 1: with nature in some sense, and in the same way
Speaker 1: I was talking about Mars. Obviously, I think life commands
Speaker 1: our attention in a way that non living matter really
Speaker 1: does not seem to, even if it's not of immediate
Speaker 1: relevance to our survival or something like that. But I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe this could be culturally learned. I'm open
Speaker 1: to that possibility. So I'm somewhere in the middle on biophilia.
Speaker 1: I find it intuitively persuasive, but I also recognize that
Speaker 1: there could be a lot of problems with how it's
Speaker 1: framed as a scientific proposition, and maybe it needs to
Speaker 1: be narrowed down and made more specific and more falsifiable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: on a rational um level, I'm I'm I'm, I think
Speaker 1: I'm right there with you. But then if I if
Speaker 1: I look at it more emotionally, you know, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, philosophically, I guess I tend to decide with biophilia,
Speaker 1: especially since I my son is so biophilic, you know,
Speaker 1: he's just he loves animals. So much like he's not
Speaker 1: interested in cars or trucks or superheroes, but it's just
Speaker 1: it's just animals. He wants to draw animal as he
Speaker 1: wants to his the toys he has are generally animal related.
Speaker 1: He needs to see animals. And and I do pick
Speaker 1: that apart. I think, well, how much of this is,
Speaker 1: you know, something that we have have nurtured in him?
Speaker 1: How much of this is just you know, has to
Speaker 1: do with his you know, with with nature itself and
Speaker 1: something out of our hands. Um, yeah, Like where does
Speaker 1: it come from? Is it? Is it biophilic and just
Speaker 1: a mirror like learnable sense or is it something deeper,
Speaker 1: something that that does have an origin in his genes?
Speaker 1: So here's the real question. The thing we need to
Speaker 1: test for is we need to completely remove some human
Speaker 1: test subjects from all culture and put them on another
Speaker 1: planet and never communicate them with them at all, except
Speaker 1: we put some hidden cameras in and we give them
Speaker 1: the opportunity to either live in a in a in
Speaker 1: a sterile environment that satisfies all their material needs and
Speaker 1: gives them uh, food and entertainment and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: or an environment that's full of house plants and cats.
Speaker 1: And dogs and uh and gardens and flowers and access
Speaker 1: to walks in the woods. If they would go for
Speaker 1: the ladder, it does raise the question why do they
Speaker 1: want that? What what is telling them to do that
Speaker 1: instead of just go to the place that meets all
Speaker 1: their material needs. You know, in discussing like sci fi scenarios, here,
Speaker 1: I can't help but look back on the fabulous Bruce
Speaker 1: den movie Silent Running. Oh yeah, where he's trying to
Speaker 1: save the plants. Yeah, and he's yeah, this is the
Speaker 1: situation in this movie. It's a great movie. See if
Speaker 1: if you if you haven't, But Bruce Dern basically plays
Speaker 1: like the the last biophilic human in our civilization. Like
Speaker 1: the forests of Earth are gone, and they're only maintained
Speaker 1: within these giant biospheres aboard a series of they're not spaces,
Speaker 1: they're space ships, but they're kind of just in orbit.
Speaker 1: And and then the the ruling comes up, the orders
Speaker 1: come up that they need to jettison and detonate all
Speaker 1: of the forests. Bruce Durn's character goes rogue and uh
Speaker 1: and you know, takes off towards Saturn with the last
Speaker 1: forests of Earth. It's the adult version of the lorax
Speaker 1: he speaks for the trees um. But yeah, it in
Speaker 1: that case, like he is the that's a vision of
Speaker 1: a humanity that has lost its biophilia, that has drifted
Speaker 1: so far from it that they no longer feel and
Speaker 1: any attachment, and they no longer recognize the value of
Speaker 1: the natural world. Concrete, plastic, and steel environments are good enough. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like cubes of food as opposed to the stuff that
Speaker 1: Bruce Durn's character is growing. I mean, that's part of
Speaker 1: my intuition. I just can't see us ever being cool
Speaker 1: with that. I just can't. But you know, maybe it's
Speaker 1: hard to it's hard to do an experiment to really
Speaker 1: test that. But maybe somebody will come up with a
Speaker 1: good way. So my my outlook on biophilia now is
Speaker 1: I recognize their problems with the a work, but but
Speaker 1: I think it could be salvaged. I think people could
Speaker 1: come up with a with a leaner, more falsifiable version
Speaker 1: of the hypothesis and test the dickens out of it. All. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: there you have it, biophilia. Hopefully we provided a nice
Speaker 1: introduction to this if you weren't familiar with it, uh
Speaker 1: and and and if you're familiar with it, we uh
Speaker 1: we helped remind you about some of the I think
Speaker 1: some of the important tenants of it. You know, certainly
Speaker 1: some of the potential problems with it, but also I
Speaker 1: think the overall positive message of biophilia as a you know,
Speaker 1: bio diversity focused view of humans humanity's interaction with nature. Now,
Speaker 1: take your dog out in the woods and get some ticks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: get out there, all right. Hey, If you want to uh,
Speaker 1: check out more episodes of stuff about your Mind, head
Speaker 1: on over to stuff to a Boil your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: That's the mother ship where you will find uh all
Speaker 1: of our podcasts attached in wonderful biospheres and you can
Speaker 1: you can listen to everything back to the very beginning.
Speaker 1: You can check out blog post videos as well as
Speaker 1: links out to our various social media accounts so as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Humbler,
Speaker 1: and who knows what else. And if you want to
Speaker 1: get in touch with us directly, you can email us
Speaker 1: at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does
Speaker 1: it how stuff works dot com