DOMINIC McAFEE

DOMINIC McAFEE

Marine Ecologist · University of Adelaide · Restoring Lost Oyster Reefs

There's this real emergence of young people doing incredible things enabled by bio-modern technology and a more globalized and connected world and access to amazing educational resources about what the environment does and means for humanity. We've lost something like 85% of oyster reefs globally. In Australia it's over 99%. We've smashed this ecosystem to smithereens. It covered something like 7,000 kilometers of coastline and the flat oyster reef, for example, the flat oysters, one type of oyster that we work with were completely removed from the Australian mainland, and about 5,000 kilometers of reef destroyed in a very short period of time. And because of the intensity with which the coastlines were modified following European settlement of Australia, they haven't been able to come back naturally.

ANIL SETH

ANIL SETH

Author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science · Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Program on Brain, Mind & Consciousness

This is a point in philosophy that the world as it is can never be directly apprehended by our minds. We are shielded from it by what's called a sensory veil. There are, for instance, no such thing as colors that are out there. As the artist Cezanne said, "The colors are where the brain and the universe meet." And color is, I think, a really good example because it is, in a sense, less than what's there because our eyes are only sensitive to three wavelengths of this huge electromagnetic spectrum, which goes all the way from x-rays and gamma rays to radio waves. And we live in a tiny, thin slice of that reality. But then out of those three wavelengths we experience our brains generate many more than three colors and almost an infinite palette of colors. So there's no sense in which our perception could ever reveal the world as it really is, that it reveals the world in a way that's very useful for us as organisms hell-bent on continuing to live and to survive. 

DAVID J. LINDEN

DAVID J. LINDEN

Author of Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality · The Accidental Mind · The Compass of Pleasure · Touch
Professor of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University

It's a fundamental human question, how do we become individuals? It's a basic thing about being alive and thinking. Nature versus nurture is a phrase that was popularized by Francis Galton in the late 19th century. and the idea behind it is that if you were to look at a particular trait, say, shyness or height, you could say, well, to what degree can we attribute height to nature? In this case, meaning the gene variants that you inherit from your parents versus nurture in this case, meaning how you were raised by your parents and by your community. And I have many problems with this expression. Part of it is that the nature part shouldn't just mean genetics. There's all kinds of biological things that are not genetic things. If your mother fought off a viral infection while you were developing in utero, then you have a much higher chance of developing schizophrenia or autism when you grow up. Now that's biological, but it's not hereditary. That's not something that you would then acquire and then pass on to your own children. It only happens in the one generation. The other problem is when we hear the word nurture, we really focus on the family, how your parents raised you or failed to raise you, how your community was involved. And those things are very important, but they're far from everything that impinges upon you in your life. I take experience as the thing to substitute for nurture because it is much more inclusive and it includes not just social experience from your family and your peers and your community, but also experience in the more general sense.