Author: Akshat Rathi

Akshat Rathi is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News. He has previously worked at Quartz, The Economist and The Conversation. His writing has appeared in Nature, The Guardian and The Hindu. He has a PhD in chemistry from Oxford University and a BTech in chemical engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai.

Change is good—we know it, but we hate it

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On my last trip home, for the first time since I left the country six years ago, I spent a whole month in India. It gave me the opportunity to think about some things more deeply than I have been able to on previous trips. One realisation was that most people don’t change very much at all. Their habits, thoughts, views, opinions, arguments, dressing style, preferences…. remain surprisingly unchanged.

For certain aspects of a person that is a good thing. But overall such an attitude has more negative consequences. I think it stops people from living happier lives that they are perfectly capable of living.

I don’t know why this is the case. Of course change is hard, but surely people would have figured out that it is also disproportionately rewarding and totally worth the occasional failures. If humanity hasn’t figured out that yet, then it is the failure of the collective that desperately needs fixing. And I am not the first one to recognise that.

One solution to the problem of enabling change is to use technology. Take the Coach.me app (previously, Lift). It lets you set goals and then helps you to reach them. It does that through social engineering and simple digital nudges.

The social engineering aspect involves the offer of live coaches or encouragement by strangers. Your goals are public and, if you’re friends use the app then they can look at how you’re doing and perhaps give you that much needed push. The digital nudges are reminders and simple tutorials to help you in your goal to, say, meditate daily.

Coach.me is not the only app. But what any of those apps do is provide a solution to the people who are already convinced that changing is important. That is a tiny slice of smartphone-using humanity.

What if we want to spread the message “change is good” and convince a much larger part of humanity? Education? Celebrities? Social media? How do you convince yourself to change? What do you do to make it happen?

Image: arthurjohnpicton CC-NC.

Why read the news

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It is easy to make fun of journalism as a profession or even claim that “news is bad for you.” But journalists continue working even when the news gets too depressing to cover. They are driven by a purpose, which an editor explained to me in my early days of journalism is to inform and entertain.

To some, however, informing and entertaining are goals that do not provide enough motivation. The right information delivered to the right audience at the right time can be powerful. News can have impact, and to the remaining few journalists it is this “impact” that makes the struggle worthy of the effort.

Such impact, however, is hard to measure. Unless you are working on a story such as the Edward Snowden leaks, it is difficult to find out what kind of impact your story about about jellyfish swimming can have on the real world.

Fortunately, every so often there is a reminder why good journalism is important even if “impact” is not always visible. Consider what Harvard University economist Sendhil Mullainathan wrote in the New York Times on racial bias:

“Even if, in our slow thinking, we work to avoid discrimination, it can easily creep into our fast thinking. Our snap judgments rely on all the associations we have—from fictional television shows to news reports. They use stereotypes, both the accurate and the inaccurate, both those we would want to use and ones we find repulsive.”

We are shaped by the thoughts that surround us. Good journalism plays a vital role in providing those thoughts. So don’t feel too bad about spending some of your time every day reading bite-sized news pieces, even if Mark Zuckerberg would like you to read a book instead. Just make sure that you are selective about the journalism you are reading.

Image credit: pslee999 CC-BY

Why some rodents have multiple biological fathers and one mother

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Anthropologists have found that polyandry—the union of one woman and more than one man—is a rarity in humans. Across thousands of studied societies, just a few dozen polyandrous cultures exist, widely scattered around the world. For the most part, the guess is that cultural factors are at work. Among rodents, however, the practice is both widespread and well understood: it cuts down on infanticide. Males who have not sired with a given female will kill her newborns to prevent the spread of his rival’s genes, and to free her from the burden of raising another’s young in favour of his own.

In a classic sexual arms-race case, the practice of polyandry won out. Males cannot distinguish their own young from a rival’s, so a female that gives birth to young from more than one male will have protected them all from any individual father’s aggression, lest he threaten his own offspring.

Natural selection, then, should have weeded out monogamy in rodents. But in the house mouse, Mus musculus, that has not happened; females can choose one or many mates. In a study published in Behavioral Ecology Yannick Auclair, of the University of Zurich, and colleagues, may have figured out why.

Mr Auclair set up and then meticulously followed the progress of a mouse colony over three years. He kept count of the litters laid, and whether they were raised in solitary nests (those that consisted of only one female and her family) or communal nests (in which females shared maternal duties, irrespective of who sired their offspring). For those pups that survived into adolescence, he took tissue samples to determine paternity by genetic analysis.

The final tally noted 146 survivors and 254 deaths among the pups. Scratch marks on the bodies suggested that almost all deaths were due to infanticide. What was more interesting, however, were the survival rates between different kinds of litters. Polyandrous litters survived well in both solitary and communal nests, but monandrous ones survived significantly more in communal nests than in solitary ones. The reason, the team concludes, is “socially mediated polyandry”. A nest full of pups from many mothers and fathers was as safe as a nest with one mother and many fathers’ pups. Females derived the protective benefits of polyandry without actually having to expend the effort to carry it out.

The authors suggest that socially mediated polyandry might apply to many more species that engage in communal care of the young, including a small percentage of mammals such as rodents. That makes it a rich seam for investigation by evolutionary biologists. The explanation for a smattering of polyandry in humans, however, remains a matter of guesswork for anthropologists.

First published on economist.com. Image by noadi. CC-BY-NC-ND.