Alexander Selkirk - II

As he grew to know his island, he felt more comfortable. But there were days when the island's quiet grew heavy. He had no living soul to talk to. Moody and dispirited, he wondered what God had in mind, imprisoning him on this remote island. These melancholy periods, however, came about less and less as the weeks passed and his contentment continued to grow. He found his temper moderating. His angry outbursts at trees and sky for the injustice of his lot ceased. By the end of his second year on Juan Fernández, Selkirk was living comfortably. 

His life on Juan Fernández had become a daily joy, his days aboard ship and his home in Largo increasingly remote. The hut was warm, food plentiful. He was never bored. Knowledge of the island had replaced fear and ignorance. He had a sense of complete freedom, of fulfillment, of safe harbor. There was the solitude to endure, of course, and the lack of a mate or two to enjoy a drink and a chat. But in this he had no choice. He came to a decision. If fate decreed, he would be content to spend the rest of his days on his island kingdom, master of his own life and destiny.

(My reactions after becoming locked-in also followed a similar trajectory. When Time has done enough work, you find ways to deal with the new reality and eventually you get used to it. As soon as an imagined experience becomes an actual experience that cannot be changed, the brain looks for ways to analyse and explain it in a way that allows us to appreciate it. This happens even for regular, everyday events rather than just for terrible events like becoming a quadriplegic. Most people don’t realize how quickly the human mind gets adapted to new situations.)

One day he saw two ships heading for Juan Fernández. He saw their flags through his spyglass: English! Eight seamen came ashore and were bewildered by the sight of disheveled man who could only grunt and mutter words that sounded like "marooned ... marooned." One of the officers recognized Selkirk — "the best man on the Cinque Ports," he stated. Learning that Selkirk had been sailing master of the Cinque Ports and a veteran seaman "of great skill and conduct" he was appointed second mate of the ship.

On the way back home he had unexpected news about the crew of the Cinque Ports - it had run onto an underwater shelf, broke apart, and sank. Almost all the crew drowned, but the captain and six seamen made shore in a boat and were captured by waiting Spanish soldiers. Selkirk was stunned. What if he had not gone ashore on Juan Fernández? He might have drowned or still be wasting away in a Spanish prison. By choosing the island, he had escaped a dreadful fate.

Selkirk finally reached London on October 14,1711 eight years after he left. There had been days on a faraway island when he had expected never to see England again. Life must have seemed very good. Sometime in 1712, the captain of the ship published a book. Sections told about the rescue of Selkirk. The book became the most popular travel book of the year and was reprinted in French, Dutch, and German. Selkirk, the man who had survived four years alone on an island, became a celebrity. He was introduced to rich friends and invited to dinner parties. 

But he could never get used to this luxurious lifestyle. An article said, "[He] frequently bewailed his return to the world which could not ... with all its enjoyments, restore him to the tranquility of his solitude" on his island. He is quoted as saying, "I am now worth 800 pounds but shall never be so happy as when I was not worth a farthing." In late 1716 or early 1717 he enlisted in the Royal Navy. 

Sometime in November or December 1721, when in Africa, Selkirk became ill. Medicine at the time knew little about treating tropical diseases. He died a few days later. At a spot called Selkirk's Lookout on Juan Fernández today stands a bronze tablet placed in 1863. It reads:

In memory of Alexander Selkirk, mariner, a native of Largo, in the county of Fife, Scotland, who lived on this island in complete solitude for four years and four months. He was landed from the Cinque Ports galley, 96 tons, A.D. 1704, was taken off in the Duke, privateer, 12th Feb., 1709. He died Lieutenant of H.M.S. Weymouth A.D. 1728, aged 47 years.

The last date was incorrect. The Weymouth's logbook in the Public Records Office in London gives 1721 as the year of his passing. He was 41. Still, the tablet, erected nearly a century and a half after Selkirk's death, recognized the Scottish mariner's magnificent adventure — a salute to a fellow seaman who had survived four years alone on a remote island.

And by the time he died, he had become the role model for one of the most famous characters in fiction - Robinson Crusoe. 

Alexander Selkirk - I

Selkirk was a veteran seaman. At fifteen years of age, he had run away from home, the seaside village of Largo, Scotland. He sailed on merchant ships between the West Indies and England and learned navigation, which enabled him to become a ship's officer. He joined an English ship called the Cinque Ports. As sailing master in 1703, he had piloted the Cinque Ports from England south through the Atlantic Ocean, around stormy Cape Horn. 

The Cinque Ports reached the remote Spanish island of Juan Fernández off the West coast of South America. The island lies 360 miles due west of Valparaiso, Chile. Because England and Spain were at war, the island was not a safe place for an English ship. He knew from charts that the island was about twelve miles long and four miles wide. He was twenty-seven years old and strongly built. He also possessed a quick temper.

The island was the only anchorage and watering place that could be chanced along the Spanish-held South American coast. While water casks were being refilled from freshwater streams on shore and trees cut for the woodbin, Selkirk inspected the ship. After its long passage from England to Juan Fernández, many repairs were needed.

The captain, though, would hear none of it. Repairs could take days. Spanish warships could appear any time. He was determined that as soon as water and wood came aboard, they would leave. Selkirk argued that the captain was being overly cautious but the latter refused to yield. Selkirk stubbornly refused to accept the decision. Now his well-known temper began to rise. The captain decided to call Selkirk's bluff. He left Selkirk alone on the island and left. 

As the night came on, it's unlikely that he was deeply distressed. He believed that the whole episode had been an unfortunate fit of temper on both their parts. His marooning on the island would be temporary — maybe a day, a week, and the Cinque Ports would come back. He was navigator, the one man able to sail the poorly charted ocean and find the way back to England. He would just have to make the best of it until the ship returned.

He considered building a fire but decided against it. Savages might see the flames. He had heard of flesh eaters on South Pacific islands. His sea chest held a few linen shirts and wool stockings, flint and steel for making fire, cooking pot, brass spyglass, hatchet, knife, and his books on navigation and geometry. As the days went by, his hopes of the ship returning diminished. He found crabs, mussels, and clams for food. He managed to build a fire and used water from a stream. 

After weeks on the beach, Selkirk shifted to a cave whose hollow entrance offered an advantage: a high lookout over the bay, a place to watch for a ship. He slept whole days away. Sleep was his only escape. Awake, he whistled Scottish folk tunes, a human sound in the island's stillness. Sometime in May or June of 1705, after eight or nine months on the beach and in the cave, Selkirk admitted a hard truth - the Cinque Ports would not be returning to the island. It was possible that he would stay here for years, perhaps for the rest of his days.

He discovered waterfalls and streams and marveled at the island birds—hawks, owls, petrels, puffins, blackbirds, and hummingbirds. In one valley he came upon a field of turnips and stands of fig trees. He found patches of oats, pumpkins, radishes, parsnips, and parsley growing wild. Selkirk gathered the crops gratefully, but how they came to grow there he didn't know. (In 1591 Spanish settlers from the South American mainland had planted crops and grazed goats during a brief but unsuccessful attempt to farm and build homes on the island.)

He stacked dry grass and branches, ready to set on fire. The smoke would signal a passing ship. But a signal fire also meant taking a fearful risk. The waters between Juan Fernández and the coast of South America were patrolled by Spanish and French warships. A smoke signal might bring one or the other.  "[The Spanish] would murder him," he feared, "or make a slave of him in the [silver] mines." Despite his daily watch, no ship arrived to rescue him. He was alone, both master of the island and its prisoner.

Selkirk's days followed a regular routine. After a reading in the Bible, he prepared a light breakfast — fruit, a cabbage leaf, a drink of fresh water. Next a bath in the nearby stream, scrubbing himself with pumice, a soft volcanic stone. He mashed charcoal from the fire pit into powder, placed a line on a finger, scrubbed his teeth, then rinsed his mouth in the stream. A walk on the beach might reward him with the capture of a sea turtle. Sometimes he fished for snapper, bonito, sea bass, and yellowtails. 

The impact hypothesis - III

The Alvarezes wrote up the results from their tests and sent them, along with their proposed explanation, to Science. Their paper, “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” was published in June 1980. An asteroid six miles wide collided with the earth sixty-five million years ago. (The date was later revised to 66 mya.) Exploding on contact, it released energy of more than a million of the most powerful H-bombs ever tested. Debris, including iridium from the pulverized asteroid, spread around the globe. 

Sunlight disappeared and temperatures plunged and a mass extinction ensued. The Alvarezes proposed that the main cause of the K-T mass extinction was not the impact itself or even the immediate aftermath. The truly catastrophic effect of the asteroid was the dust which spread around the globe and shut out the sunlight and blocked photosynthesis in plants. In the intervening decades, this account has been subjected to numerous refinements. 

It generated lots of excitement, much of it beyond the bounds of paleontology. In the context of “hard-core uniformitarianism,” the impact hypothesis was worse than wrong — it couldn’t have happened. A few years later, an informal survey was conducted among paleontologists. A majority thought some sort of cosmic collision might have taken place. But only one in twenty thought it had anything to do with the extinction of the dinosaurs. Among professional paleontologists, the Alvarezes’ idea and in many cases the Alvarezes themselves were reviled.

But evidence for the hypothesis continued to accumulate. First was tiny grains of rock known as “shocked quartz.” Under high magnification, shocked quartz exhibits what look like scratch marks caused by high pressure that deform the crystal structure. Shocked quartz was first noted at nuclear test sites and later found near impact craters. In 1984, grains of shocked quartz were discovered in a layer of clay from the K-T boundary in eastern Montana. 

It occurred to Walter Alvarez that if there had been a giant, impact-induced tsunami, it would have left behind a distinctive "fingerprint" in the sedimentary record. He scanned the records of thousands of sediment cores that had been drilled in the oceans, and found such a "fingerprint" in cores from the Gulf of Mexico (oops! Gulf of America). Finally, a hundred-mile-wide crater was discovered beneath the Yucatán Peninsula buried under half a mile of newer sediment. 

This crater had shown up in gravity surveys taken in the nineteen-fifties by Mexico’s state-run oil company. When Walter located the cores in 1991 and examined them, they were found to contain a layer of glass—rock that had melted, then rapidly cooled at the K-T boundary. To the Alvarez camp, this

was the conclusive proof that they required about there having been an asteroid impact.  It was enough to move many uncommitted scientists to support the impact hypothesis. By this time, Luis Alvarez had died of complications from esophageal cancer. The crater became more widely known, after the nearest town, as the Chicxulub crater.

When the Alvarezes had published their hypothesis, they knew of only three sites where the iridium layer was exposed. In the decades since, dozens more have been located. The confirmation of the impact hypothesis was a challenge to a uniformitarian viewpoint that basically every geologist and paleontologist had been trained in. 

On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out. The event’s most famous victims, the dinosaurs — or, to be more precise, the non-avian dinosaurs — suffered a hundred percent losses. Around two-thirds of the mammalian families living at the end of the Cretaceous disappear at the boundary. Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. 

Change one detail, and we can imagine a completely different world. If the asteroid had hit a moment earlier or later, it would have hit deep ocean instead of shallow seas, releasing far less toxic gas, and killing many fewer species. If the asteroid had been delayed by just one minute, it might have missed Earth entirely. An astrophysicist has proposed that tiny oscillations of the sun's orbit flung the asteroid from the distant Oort cloud toward our planet. But for one small vibration in an unfathomably distant reach of deep space, dinosaurs might have survived — and humans might never have existed. 

Natural Selection is often presented as a relentless improvement from worse to better. Richard Dawkins once said that “Nature is a miserly accountant, grudging the pennies, watching the clock, punishing the smallest extravagance." But evolution at times proceeds in an unpredictable fashion. This is obvious when you consider that the evolution of mammals only happened because of an asteroid strike. But we mostly hear about survival of the fittest not survival of the luckiest. 

The impact hypothesis - II

Enter Walter Alvarez. He came from a long line of distinguished scientists. His great-grandfather and grandfather were both noted physicians, and his father, Luis, was a physicist at the University of California-Berkeley. Walter attended graduate school at Princeton and took up geology. In the early 70s, he got a research post at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Alvarez decided to try to figure out, on the basis of plate tectonics, how the Italian peninsula had formed.

In this quest, he found himself working in a hill town of Gubbio, about a hundred miles north of Rome, with an Italian geologist who was an expert on foraminifera or “forams” for short. They are the tiny marine creatures that create little calcite shells which drift down to the ocean floor once the animal inside has died. They can only be seen with microscopes. The geologist drew Alvarez's attention to a curious sequence. 

In one centimeter of clay separating two limestone layers, there were no fossils at all. In the older layer that lay below the clay, the forams were much larger than in the younger layer above the clay. The same of distribution of forams above and below the clay layer was present everywhere he looked. What had caused such a change in the forams? How fast did it happen? These were the questions that puzzled Walter. The pursuit of these questions led him to one of the biggest discoveries about one of the most important days in the history of life.

First a brief description of Deep Time. The history of life is divided into three chapters called "eras". The first is called the Paleozoic (“ancient life”), the second the Mesozoic (“middle life”), and the third the Cenozoic (“new life”). Each era comprises several “periods”; the Mesozoic, for example, spans the Triassic, the Jurassic, and the Cretaceous. The next period is the Tertiary (now renamed the Paleogene).

               Geological Time Scale 

The boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary layers, where the clay layer is found is called the K-T boundary. K is used as the abbreviation for Cretaceous because C was already taken by an earlier geological period known as the Carboniferous; today, the border is formally known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene, or K-Pg, boundary. It is a line that definitively marks the end-Cretaceous mass extinction everywhere in the world where the right aged rocks are preserved. It happened 66 mya (million years ago). 

                                                             KT (or KPg) boundary 

 Alvarez had been used to believing in uniformitarianism. He had learned that the disappearance of any group of organisms had to be a gradual process, with one species slowly dying out, then another, then a third, and so on. But the sequence in the Gubbio limestone gave him a different picture. The many species of forams in the lower layer seemed to disappear suddenly and all more or less at the same time. He also realized another thing. These forams appeared to vanish right around the point the last of the dinosaurs were known to have disappeared.

In 1977, Alvarez got a job at Berkeley, where his father, Luis, was working. He brought with him to California his samples from Gubbio. While Walter had been studying plate tectonics, Luis was busy winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. He’d also developed the first linear proton accelerator, invented a new kind of bubble chamber, designed several innovative radar systems, and codiscovered tritium.  In 2007 the American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century."

Luis Alvarez was interested in all sorts of riddles. An example was whether there were treasure-filled chambers inside Egypt’s second-largest pyramid. He would often come up with innovative ideas to approach the problem. When Walter told his father about the puzzling fossil distribution in Gubbio, Luis was fascinated. He came up with the wild idea of clocking the clay using the element iridium which is extremely rare on the surface of the earth. But Luis knew that it was much more common in meteorites. 

On earth, the tiny amounts of iridium come from bits of meteorites that are constantly raining down on the planet. Luis reasoned that the longer it had taken the clay layer to accumulate, the more cosmic dust would have fallen; thus the more iridium it would contain. By this technique he would be able to find out what length of time the clay layer represented. Walter gave him some limestone from above the clay layer, some from below it, and some of the clay itself. 

When the results came from the lab, it was puzzling. The amount of iridium that was present in the layers above and below the clay layer was what was normally present on earth. But the amount of iridium in the clay layer in the middle was 30 times higher. No one knew what to make of this. Was it a weird anomaly, or something more significant? Something very unusual, and very bad, had happened at the K-T boundary. The forams, the clay, the iridium, the dinosaurs, were all signs — but of what?

Two other sites having sediments dated to 66 mya when the Dinosaurs disappeared were found - one in  Denmark and another in New Zealand. They had the same pattern as the ones at Gubbio - a thin clay layer between earlier and later layers. They too showed an iridium “spike” in the clay layer. The Alvarezes knew they were onto something and started thinking up theories that would fit the available data. Finally, after almost a year’s worth of dead ends, they arrived at the impact hypothesis. 

The impact hypothesis - I

More than 99 percent all species that have ever lived on Earth have become extinct. For many people, when they think about extinction, they think about dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were huge terrestrial animals that lived during the period about 240 to 66 million years ago (called the Mesozoic Era). They had rich varieties in body size, shape and way of life. They ruled the Earth for more than 100 million years, till somehow they suddenly vanished on the Earth more than 65 million years ago. 

The mystery of the extinction of the Dinosaurs has been the focus of research and debate for long. Many different theories have been put forth as explanations. Some of the well-known ones include invoking climate change to which the dinosaurs could not adapt; continental drift causing climate change; flipping of earth’s magnetic poles leading to the dramatic changes of natural environment; acid rain leaching away important micronutrients; rodents eating dinosaur eggs as food; etc. 

The most commonly accepted explanation is that a meteor struck the earth 66 million years ago leading to a nuclear winter that led to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs (birds are accepted as having evolved from a branch of the dinosaurs). The rock slammed into the Yucatán Peninsula moving at something like forty-five thousand miles per hour. The asteroid blasted into the air more than fifty times its own mass in pulverized rock.

The resulting huge cloud of very hot vapor and debris raced over the North American continent incinerating anything in its path. Owing to the composition of the Yucatán Peninsula, the dust thrown up was rich in sulfur and particularly effective at blocking sunlight. After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multi-season “impact winter.” Forests were decimated. Marine ecosystems collapsed. And the non-avian dinosaurs died out. 

The interesting question is: how did scientists find out about a meteor-strike that happened all that long ago? Before that story, one needs to know about a clash between two schools of thought in evolutionary biology: uniformitarianism and catastrophism. 

In the opinion of uniformitarians like Darwin, the emergence and disappearance of species are the outcomes of natural evolution. When there is change in natural environment, the species is no longer able to adapt to the new environment and if there are no other proper places for migration, the population of the species will diminish till it becomes extinct. They believe that the emergence and disappearance of species is the effect of slow natural selection. The uniformitarian view denied sudden or sweeping change of any kind.

On the other hand, catastrophists believe that sudden, short-lived, and violent events lead to the extinction of many organisms. The leading scientific proponent of catastrophism in the early nineteenth century was the French anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier. He believed that the history of life on earth indicated that there had been several of these revolutions, like earthquakes and floods, which he viewed as recurring natural events, amid long intervals of stability. 

The more that was learned about the fossil record, the more difficult it was to explain the sudden disappearance and appearance of large numbers of species, which, according to Uniformitarians, should take millions of years. The Uniformitarians said that maybe the losses shown in the fossil record did constitute a “mass extinction.” But mass extinctions were not to be confused with “catastrophes.” They maintained that the fossil record was incomplete and the missing spans of time would eventually be found. 

In the war of words between the two groups, Uniformitarians held the upper hand for many decades. The feeling between the two groups was so bitter that Uniformitarians described catastrophism as 'evolution by jerks'. In retaliation, Catastrophists described Uniformitarianism as 'evolution by creeps'. Who said academics don’t have a sense of humour?

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - IV

What happened to Vavilov? It took many years for that story to emerge. After he was taken from Ukraine, he was subjected to brutal interrogation. Then he was put on a trial and found guilty of spying for the British, which was not true, and he was sentenced to death. So by the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Vavilov was no longer on the scene, he was in prison, awaiting execution. 

It's only because of the dedicated work of a Russian academic called Mark Popovsky in the 1960s that we even know that story. He managed to get access to the NKVD papers against all the odds, managed to write a book and smuggle it out of the Soviet Union. Popovsky became the first outsider to learn the story of how and why the security services arrested Vavilov, who informed on him, what sentence he received, and how and where he died. 

He recorded in detail how Vavilov had to face innumerable interrogations until the botanist agreed to collude in the fictional version of events that had been prepared for his confession. Then Popovsky began giving lectures, one of which he delivered at the seed bank itself.  The informers whom he mentioned by name jumped up and left the hall to the hissing and jeers of their colleagues. Then he published an article in which he described the three years leading up to Vavilov's arrest, and Trofim Lysenko’s role in these events. 

This mild provocation made the state issue a two-year ban on the publication of Popovsky’s writing. By 1967, attitudes toward Vavilov and his rival Lysenko had sufficiently shifted that the Institute was named the N. I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources. While publicly engaged in the restoration of Vavilov’s reputation, the Soviet Union sought to suppress details about his demise. It did not want the world to know that the state had murdered a famous scientist. 

A KGB agent visited Popovsky and issued a stern warning to the writer not to communicate in conversation, lecture, or publication, the information he had obtained about Vavilov. On June 3, 1977, the KGB searched Popovsky’s apartment for his notes but they did not find them. He had already photographed his notes and distributed them among friends and colleagues both within and outside Russia revealing Vavilov's story. 

In the years that followed, Vavilov's colleague Nikolai Ivanov worked tirelessly to revive and honor his friend and teacher’s work. He worked closely with Vavilov’s widow, Yelena, to locate and collect Vavilov’s unpublished manuscripts. With this material Ivanov published three major books detailing Vavilov's account of his specimen-gathering expeditions around the world. Ivanov edited two editions of Vavilov’s biography, and two articles that recentered his research in the arena of Soviet science. 

Vavilov laid the foundations of modern plant breeding. His vision for preserving plant biodiversity was ahead of its time. These are the same principles that are being used to give us the wheat, that gives us the bread that we eat every week today. He was also motivated by the idea of trying to build up a library of seeds and plants in the event that habitat was lost. This kind of work involving the preservation of threatened types of plants was extremely important and is what so many botanical scientists and banks are involved in today. 

Varieties of wheat collected by Vavilov from Spain, Japan, Italy, and Argentina and saved by the staff of his institution were crossbred to create the winter variety Bezostaya 1,  used across the world for its high yield. Samples of a rare and disease-resistant variety of wheat collected by Vavilov in the mountain valleys of Dagestan were used by British and Australian plant breeders to develop a new, high-yielding variety. 

By 1967 a hundred million acres of Russian agricultural land had been planted with seeds derived from the Institute’s collection. By 1979 that area had almost doubled to a third of all Russia’s arable land. Today the seed bank in St. Petersburg holds more than 320,000 separate samples, a collection that has proven invaluable in ensuring food security in Russia, with more than 4,500 new and unique types of plants bred from original samples collected by Vavilov and his teams. Ninety percent of the seeds and planted crops held in the St. Petersburg collection are found in no other scientific collections in the world. 

Around the world, people continue to benefit from the sacrifice of the scientists who gave their lives during the siege of Leningrad. This story is well known to plant scientists, people who work at seed banks but outside of that small community, it's not well known at all.

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - III

Vavilov’s disappearance from the Plant Institute led to confusion. That month the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition awarded Vavilov a gold medal for services to Soviet agriculture. His colleagues couldn’t understand why the authorities would simultaneously arrest him. They wrote letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the government, and the NKVD, vouching for his character and declaring that he was no spy. But a warning came that anyone who put his or her signature to the letter would be arrested for supporting a suspected “enemy of the people."

They hoped that Vavilov’s younger brother, Sergei, director of the Optical Institute, would be able to intervene but nothing came of it. Vavilov was dismissed from his position as director of the Plant Institute. Police arrived to search his office, then his apartment. A bogus story was circulated that had he visited Ukraine with a plan to cross the border and flee to the West, taking his scientific knowledge and findings with him. Trofim Lysenko's supporters were promoted to senior positions in the Institute and Vavilov's supporters were dismissed. 

All the while, Operation Barbarossa, the German plan for the invasion of Russia, had been in full swing. Nobody had any inkling that, within three months, Leningrad — formerly known as St. Petersburg —  would become the setting for the longest siege in recorded history. Hitler told his military chief of staff that Leningrad was not merely to be attacked, but was to be leveled, to become “uninhabitable.” By razing the city, the German army would eliminate a center of Bolshevism and nationalism. Also, according to Hitler, the German army would be spared “the necessity of having to feed the population through the Winter." The siege of Leningrad lasted for almost nine hundred days. 

The tactic to besiege a city is to soften up the people living there and to stop food and supplies entering the city. Starvation and hunger began in earnest as soon as the siege ring closed. It's estimated that upwards of one million people died, four times the number that died in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. In 1942, every third person living in the city perished. Most died from starvation. 

Vavilov had instilled in his followers a keen sense of responsibility; many of the specimens in the seed bank, he taught them, were as irreplaceable as precious artworks. They could not easily be re-collected or, in some cases, replaced at all, as the landscapes from which they had been harvested had already been destroyed by human activity. His staff understood that preserving the collection was now their primary goal. 

Although  the siege of Leningrad is very well documented, it was not known for a while because there was a state-wide cover-up to minimize the amount of casualties and the suffering that had happened in the city. But by the 1960s and 1970s the details started coming to light from people who had kept diaries. These showed what it was like throughout September, October, November of the first few months of the siege. The cupboards started to empty, as the people started to face the terrible decision of maybe butchering their pets or doing whatever it is that they needed to do in order to get some calories into their bodies to prepare for the winter. 

These diaries were by ordinary people but the botanists who worked at the Plant Institute did not keep the same kind of records. Much of the information about them comes from the things that they wrote in the years afterwards, which were much more plain, perhaps because they were government employees. But what comes through is that, throughout this ordeal, these scientists overcame hunger and injury and risked their lives to protect the world's first seed bank. They were literally starving during the siege and yet they refused to eat the very seeds they were safeguarding throughout it. 

It was a brutal winter in 1941 and more calories were needed in trying to stay alive in such cold temperatures. But the botanists made a collective decision that they're not going to touch any of the seeds. There were more than a quarter of a million seeds and plants inside the Institute in little tins. Many of them were edible. There were nuts and things that they just could have taken off the shelf and eaten on the spot which would have prolonged their lives. Instead, they gathered up the seeds and put them in two of the rooms, stacked them up, and then bolted the door shut so that no one could get in and touch them.

Some of them died while at their desks while continuing their work. One scientist was found slumped at his desk and when one of his colleagues tried to rouse him by shaking his shoulder, a packet of almonds spilled out of his hands. He had died while sorting through these almonds and cataloging them while resisting the urge to eat them and stay alive. What is it that drove the scientists to such extreme levels of self-sacrifice that resulted in the loss of life of 19 of the botanists who worked there?

They knew that some of these seeds were irreplaceable, priceless. The habitats where some of these seeds had been collected had been lost and there was no way to get them back. So eating them would have been a betrayal of that work and of their colleagues. There was a sense that this was their life's work. After the war, a journalist asked why they chose not to eat the seeds or give them to the starving people. One of the botanists said (as quoted in The Forbidden Garden):

Imagine this scenario: Here you are, a writer, who has authored a book. You’ve put your all into it — your whole life. And suddenly, let’s say, there is a severe frost, and you find yourself in a room without firewood to keep warm, only your manuscript.… Now can you begin to understand the psychology of the situation? You are freezing to death: Will you destroy this, the only copy of your book? Would you die to preserve this work? Yes, or no? Will you give in to temptation? 

What are you asking me, you and all the others? You’re surprised? You’re perplexed? Yes, it was difficult to walk at that time. It was unbearably difficult to get up every morning, move your hands and feet.… But to refrain from eating the collection? That wasn’t difficult. No, not at all. Because it was impossible to eat your life’s work, the life’s work of your friends and colleagues. Do I really need to prove such an elementary, simple thing to you?

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - II

One of Vavilov's former pupils, a peasant horticulturalist named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, followed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory that organisms could acquire traits in their lifetimes from their environments. These qualities would then be passed down to the next generation. There was no need for genetic engineering or seed banks, which, Lysenko argued, represented a waste of time and resources: one simply had to train plants to meet one’s goals, a theory he named vernalization.

Lysenko's outlier theory resonated with the country's leader, Joseph Stalin. He liked the idea that plants, like workers, could be transformed by an act of political will. Stalin also liked that, unlike Vavilov, Lysenko came from peasant stock, and that his theories did not rely on academic laboratory work. Lysenko promised Stalin that he could meet the demand for improved crop varieties within three years, seven fewer than Vavilov estimated his work required to produce results.

Stalin's policies had induced famine and he needed quick solutions. So when, at a 1935 conference, Lysenko delivered a speech in which he vilified the scientific elite and promised quick-fix solutions to the problems of Soviet food production and distribution, his message was welcomed. Vavilov followed Lysenko's work closely but suspected that he had manipulated the results of his experiments to support his ideas. But since he was supported by Stalin, Lysenko sailed past Vavilov, who was his former teacher, through the ranks of the Soviet hierarchy.

Vavilov had begun to experience powerful opposition in the late twenties itself because of Stalin's attacks on the intellectual elite. Lysenko’s arrival on the scene increased the attacks. The seed bank was increasingly viewed as a wasteful drain on the state without tangible benefit. Vavilov’s expeditions began to be viewed as little more than expensive luxury tourist trips that cost millions. 

It was Vavilov, however, whose reputation prevailed internationally. His expeditions were covered by Western journalists, and, on his travels, he befriended dignitaries and world leaders. In Stalinist Russia, to be acclaimed by so many international writers and intellectuals could soon become a problem. Vavilov suspected that his close ties to Western science had brought him under the surveillance of the Soviet security services.

Science in Stalinist Russia seemed deeply politicized. He faced criticism for hiring staff to work at the seed bank regardless of their social background and Party affiliation. In October 1937, Pravda published an editorial that claimed “[Vavilov’s] expeditions have absorbed huge amounts of people’s money. We must declare that practical value of the collection did not justify the expenses.” Stalin began to imprison intellectuals on charges of being "enemies of the state,” banishing them to labor camps to be “reeducated” in accordance with Communist principles.

Vavilov wondered for how long he could lead the Plant Institute in such an oppressive climate. He continued his work with great determination, maintaining that discipline, not politics, should inform research and scientific collaboration. At a March 1939 staff meeting he said: “We shall go to the pyre. We shall burn. But we shall not retreat from our convictions.” 

Nevertheless, the past twelve months had been trying. International fame and status had pushed Vavilov unwillingly into the shadow world of Stalin-era politics. Stress had started affecting his health. The doorman noticed how he became short of breath whenever he climbed the building’s staircase. He had become increasingly prone to fits of rage, which burned out quickly, leaving him feeling awkward and embarrassed because it was not like him. The jealousy of his peers had affected his health and led him on several occasions to attempt to resign from his position as director of the seed bank.

On August 6 1940, he was out collecting samples on a mountainside near Ukraine with some colleagues.  A black car pulled up with three shady looking characters who tell him that he was needed on urgent business in Moscow. He got into the car and left with them. But it' was a ruse because these were members of the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, and they arrest him. He was never seen again in public. 

Some months later, to everybody's surprise, Hitler broke off the nonaggression pact that he had signed with Stalin and invaded Russia. Before this,  for the first part of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied. Stalin had received a lot of warnings from his various spies that Hitler will break the pact but for whatever reason, he had chosen not to believe them. 

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - I

The Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, a botanical institute dedicated to the study of  plant life, was founded in the city of Petrograd in 1894. (The city is successively named Petrograd, Leningrad and St. Petersburg.) In March, 1921, a thirty-three-year-old man named Nikolai Vavilov, a bright young star in Russian science, was appointed as director of the penniless institute.  His dream was to turn the institute into the world’s first seed bank, a facility to store and preserve seeds for future use in agriculture, research, and conservation. 

Vavilov's inquisitiveness about the natural world drew him to biology. In 1906 he joined the Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture in Moscow. He developed a longing to see his theoretical work produce material benefits. He learned that Russian farmers reaped the poorest harvests anywhere in Europe. He knew that around half the harvest depended on the quantity of fertilizer used to feed the crop, and a quarter on the method of cultivation. The final quarter, however, depended on the quality of the seed grain. If he could improve the varieties of grain — higher yielding, better adapted, and more resistant — it might be possible for Russian farmers to improve their yields.

IN 1913 Vavilov went to England and met top geneticists there. Bateson, who had coined the term genetics just eight years earlier, had a profound influence on Vavilov's thinking. He was particularly impressed by the idea that potentially valuable wild varieties of wheat, rye, barley, and other crops had been overlooked by farmers in bygone centuries. Bateson believed these previously plants might carry invaluable genetic qualities that could be bred into today's crops.

When Vavilov arrived at Petrograd (then called Leningrad), he found out that the small collection of seeds at the Plant Institute had all but been destroyed. Looters had got into the building and eaten some of the seeds. He acquired a three-story nineteenth-century tsarist palace grand enough to house the world’s first seed bank. He collected a staff of keen, dedicated individuals committed to his vision. He took no interest in a person’s background, whether they came from peasant stock or a more well-heeled background. 

At that time, Russia was gripped by nationwide famine. WWI had led to a civil conflict that had crippled the country’s food production. Inflation, profiteering, the collapse of food supplies, and the breakdown of authority had led to a political coup that had brought to power the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Drought and crop failures worsened these human-made problems and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were now starving to death.

Everywhere conflict, natural disaster, and the destruction of habitat threatened to make certain types of plants extinct. Once destroyed, these specimens and their unique characteristics would be irretrievably lost; no amount of genetic tinkering could bring them back. The extinction of unexamined plant varieties could mean the loss of world-changing medicines, or varieties that could enable communities and nations to protect themselves against famine.

Vavilov mounted a series of expeditions to collect and catalog ancient, domesticated varieties of wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and other crops. He also sought their wild relatives, which, he reasoned, might prove useful in his experiments to breed unique varieties. He went to Iran, US, Mongolia, the Mediterranean, Italy, the Middle East, western China, Japan and many other countries in search of seeds and sent samples back to the Plant Institute to be sorted, cataloged, and stored. 

Vavilov's aim was to cross-breed different varieties of possibly overlooked crops to make supercrops, as we would term them today. So he would breed types of wheat, for example, that are disease-resistant or have a very high yield or able to withstand different climates. In twenty years, the Institute had become renowned throughout the world. The idea of a seed bank was novel, and the long-term value of a repository of genetic plant material had yet to be fully understood at the time. 

He got many prestigious awards. In Britain he was an elected member of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an honorary member of the Linnean Society of London and the Royal Horticultural Society, and of the Royal Society of Biology. In the United States he became a member of the American Geographical Society, and an honorary member of the Botanical Society of America. He was awarded honorable associations and honorary doctorates in Germany, India, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. 

By 1934, Vavilov had established more than four hundred research institutes and numerous stations around the Soviet Union. His journal, the Bulletin of Applied Botany, Genetics and Plant Breeding, had become a leading international publication in its field. Under his direction, the Soviet Union had become the world leader in plant breeding showing how countries might protect their populations from famine and starvation. 

But storm clouds were gathering. 

Hiroo Onoda - II

By the time Onoda returned to Japan, he became something of a legend in Japan. People wanted to see a  man who was still living in 1944! Or at least only a few days out of it. A man who for the past thirty years must have been carrying around in his head the forgotten wartime propaganda of those times. Japanese publishers were keen for the rights to Onoda’s story. He astonished most of them byturning down some of the more handsome offers and choosing a publisher whom he admired because of its youth magazines, which he had enjoyed in prewar times. 

Onoda kept neither diary nor journal, but his memory seems to have been remarkable. Within three months of his return, he had dictated two thousand pages of recollections ranging from the most important events to the tiniest details of jungle life. In July, 1974, articles began running in serial form in a weekly. His memoir, entitled No Surrender: My Thirty - Year War was published in Japanese and English translation. He himself made sketches for all of the diagrams and drawings in this book, as well as for many others appearing in a Japanese children’s edition.

He writes in his memoir that in a normal military school in Japan, recruits were taught not to think but to lead troops into battle, resolved to die if necessary. The sole aim was to attack enemy troops and slaughter as many as possible before being slaughtered. Soldiers were supposed to give their lives for the cause, not grovel in enemy prison camps. However, he was recruited for secret operations and the training he got was different: the aim was to stay alive and continue to fight as guerrillas as long as possible, even if this entailed conduct normally considered disgraceful. He says: 

I came to the conclusion then that I would probably go off to the Philippines and carry on my guerrilla warfare in the mountains until I died there all alone, lamented by no one. Although I knew that my struggle would bring me neither fame nor honor, I did not care.

In 1959, 15 years after he went to Philippines, a search party left behind newspapers and magazines. Onoda and his surviving friend thought that the newspapers were doctored up by the American secret service to eliminate any news they did not want them to see. For them, the newspapers seemed to confirm that the war was still going on. Why? Because they told a lot about life in Japan. Their thinking was that if Japan had really lost the war, there should not be any life in Japan. Everybody should be dead.

When they arrived in the Philippines in 1944, the phrase ichioku gyokusai (“one hundred million souls dying for honor”) was on everybody’s lips in Japan. This phrase meant literally that the population of Japan would die to a man before surrendering. They took this at face value. They sincerely believed that if one Japanese were left alive, Japan could not have surrendered. The wartime newspapers all played this idea up in the strongest possible language. He writes: 

I was virtually brought up on this kind of talk. Reading the 1959 newspapers in this same frame of mind, the first thought I had was, “Japan is safe, after all. Safe and still fighting!” The newspapers offered any amount of proof. Wasn’t the whole country wildly celebrating the crown prince’s marriage? ... There was nothing here about one hundred million people dying. Japan was obviously thriving and prosperous. Who said we had lost the war? 

They had been stuck in 1945. Only after Onoda returned to Japan and looked out the window of his hotel at the streets of Tokyo did he realize that he had been living in an imaginary world. On his return he was cheered by a crowd of up to 8,000 people – a moment that was played out live on NHK, the country's national broadcaster. At that time, more progressive views of the war, which included atonement for crimes, were becoming more widely held. His re-emergence offered a useful propaganda tool for the country's powerful conservatives about old Japanese virtues of bravery, loyalty, pride and commitment that had been widespread during wartime.

He returned to a hero’s welcome in Japan, but found himself unable to adjust to modern life there. He received back pay from the Japanese government for his twenty-nine years on Lubang, but it amounted to very little. He moved to Brazil for a calm life of raising cattle on a ranch. In May of 1996, Hiroo Onoda returned to Lubang, and donated $10,000 to the school there. He then married a Japanese woman, and the two of them moved back to Japan from Brazil to run a nature camp for young people. On 16 January 2014, Onoda died of heart failure at the age of 91.

Onoda wasn't the only soldier who found it difficult to believe that the war had ended. Many Japanese groups continued fighting long after the country's surrender. Twenty-one soldiers were rounded up on the island of Anatahan in 1951. Teruo Nakamura, a Taiwanese-Japanese soldier, endured 29 years in the jungle after the end of World War Two, on Morotai, in present-day Indonesia. The key difference, says Seriu, is that many other Japanese holdouts "found ways to live in the formerly occupied country," and even started families in some cases. Onoda, on the other hand, "refused to live in collaboration with the inhabitants [of Lubang]."

Hiroo Onoda - I

On December 17, 1944, the Japanese army sent a twenty-three year old soldier named Hiroo Onoda to the Philippines to join the Sugi Brigade. He was stationed in the Philippines, and his orders were to carry out guerrilla warfare. At that time, the Asian leg of WWII was raging and his mission was to destroy Lubang island's (approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Manila) airstrip and the pier at its harbor ahead of the Allied invasion. 

Before leaving, his division commander told him that under no circumstances was he to give up his life voluntarily; however long the war lasts, so long as he has one soldier, he has to continue to lead him even if he has to live on coconuts. It turned out that Onoda was exceptionally good at following orders, and it would be 29 years before he finally laid down his arms and surrendered.

A couple of months after Onoda came to Lubang, the Allied forces defeated the Japanese. As they moved inland, Onoda and the three other guerrilla soldiers in his group retreated into the dense jungle. They survived by rationing their rice supply, eating coconuts and green bananas from the jungle, and occasionally killing one of the locals’ cows for meat which would sometimes bring them into conflict with the locals. It was upon killing one of these cows that one of the soldiers found a note left behind by a local resident, and it said, “The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains!”

The guerrilla soldiers decided that it was an Allied propaganda trick to coax them out of hiding. They got several such messages over the years - fliers were dropped from planes, newspapers were left, and they got letters from relatives with photos. Each attempt was viewed by the soldiers as a clever hoax constructed by the Allies. They braved jungle heat, incessant rain, rats, insects, and the occasional armed search party for years. Any villagers they sighted were seen as spies, and attacked by the four men, and over the years a number of people were wounded or killed by them. 

In a few years, one of the soldiers left and one was killed. The two remaining soldiers operated under the conviction that the Japanese army would eventually retake the island from the Allies, and that their guerrilla tactics would prove invaluable in that effort. On October of 1972, one of the remaining soldiers was killed by a Filipino police patrol. Onoda escaped back into the jungle, and was now alone in his delusional mission. 

He had been declared legally dead about thirteen years earlier but after this skirmish, it was concluded that he was still alive. More search parties were sent in to find him, however he successfully evaded them each time. But in February of 1974, after Onoda had been alone in the jungle for a year and a half, a Japanese college student named Norio Suzuki managed to track him down.

Onoda and Suzuki became good friends. Suzuki tried to convince him that the war had ended long ago, but Onoda explained that he would not surrender unless his commander ordered him to do so. Suzuki convinced Onoda to meet him again about two weeks later in a prearranged location. Suzuki returned to the island with Onoda’s one-time superior officer, Major Taniguchi. Onoda came in his uniform, wearing his sword and carrying his rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades. Major Taniguchi, who had long since retired from the military and become a bookseller, read aloud the orders:

Command from Headquarters, Fourteenth Area Army. Orders from the Special Squadron, Chief of Staff’s Headquarters, Bekabak, September 19, 1900 hours.

“1. In accordance with the Imperial Command, the Fourteenth Area Army has ceased all combat activity.

“2. In accordance with Military Headquarters Command No. A–2003, the Special Squadron in the Chief of Staff’s Headquarters is relieved of all military duties.

“3. Units and individuals under the command of the Special Squadron are to cease military activities and operations immediately and place themselves under the command of the nearest superior officer. When no officer can be found, they are to communicate with the American or Philippine forces and follow their directives.

“Special Squadron, Chief of Staff’s Headquarters, Fourteenth Area Army, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi.”

Onoda waited for some time feeling sure Major Taniguchi would come up to him and whisper, “That was so much talk. I will tell you your real orders later.” After all, Suzuki was present, and the major could not talk to him confidentially. He waited for some time but when the major remained silent, he realized the impossible: This was no trick - Japan had really lost the war! After a moment of quiet anger, Onoda pulled back the bolt on his rifle and unloaded the bullets, and then took off his pack and laid the rifle across it. When the reality of it sunk in, he wept openly.

By the time he formally surrendered to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1974, Onoda had spent twenty nine of his fifty two years hiding in the jungle, fighting a war that had long been over for the rest of the world. He and his guerrilla soldiers had killed some thirty people unnecessarily, and wounded about a hundred others. But they had done so under the belief that they were at war, and consequently President Marcos granted him a full pardon for the crimes he had committed while in hiding.

Kokura's luck

In Fluke: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Brian Klaas says that we give simplified, rational explanations for the world. We like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. We tend to ignore or minimize the importance of arbitrary, tiny changes that can have a huge impact on our lives. Some of these events we will never realize were consequential. Yet, when we try to explain the world, we ignore a truth: but for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be very different. 

He gives an example. On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson checked into Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. During their six-day stay, they soaked the beautiful sights in Kyoto - its historic temples, lovely gardens, the mudstone hill, the Japanese maples and ginkgo trees in full bloom... But that tourist visit turned out to be the most consequential sightseeing trip in human history.

Fast forward nineteen years. The Nazis surrendered on May 7, 1945. The focus now shifted to the Pacific where the Asian leg of the war showed no sign of ending. But in the hills of New Mexico, the scientists and soldiers saw a potential savior: the atomic bomb, a new weapon of unimaginable destruction. No successful test had yet been carried out to demonstrate the weapon’s full potential, but everyone involved knew they were getting close. 

On May 10, a group of 13 physicists and generals gathered at a top-secret location code-named Site Y three days after the Nazis had surrendered. This group would decide which cities should be chosen to introduce the bomb to the world. They thought that targeting Tokyo wasn’t a good idea, as heavy bombing had already devastated the new capital. After weighing up the alternatives, they decided that the first bomb would be dropped on Kyoto.

Why Kyoto? It was home to new wartime factories, including one that could churn out four hundred aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, leveling a former capital would deal a crushing blow to Japan’s morale. Kyoto was an intellectual hub with an educated population, home to the prestigious Kyoto University. Those who survived would, the committee supposed, recognize that this weapon represented a new era in human history and that the war had already been lost. 

The committee also agreed on three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. The target list was sent to President Truman. On July 16, 1945, a successful test explosion of the atom bomb was carried out in rural New Mexico. Military strategists consulted detailed maps of Kyoto and decided on ground zero for the explosion: the city’s railway yards. But, on August 6, 1945, the bomb code-named Little Boy fell from the sky not on Kyoto, but on Hiroshima killing 140,000 people, most of them civilians. 

Three days later, on August 9, another atom bomb code named Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, adding roughly 80,000 casualties to the horrifying death toll. But why was Kyoto spared? And why was Nagasaki — a city that hadn’t even been considered a top-tier bombing target — destroyed? Astonishingly, whether over 200,000 people lived or died depended on the nostalgia of a tourist couple and a cloud.

The intended blast in Kyoto site was only half a mile away from the Miyako Hotel, where Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson had stayed two decades earlier. By 1945, Mr. H. (Henry) L. Stimson had become America’s secretary of war, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. When the Target Committee picked Kyoto for destruction, Stimson put his foot down. He insisted that there was “one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.” Yet, despite his insistence, Kyoto kept reappearing on the targeting list. 

The Generals kept saying that Kyoto was a nerve center of the Japanese war machine and needed to be bombed. Stimson went straight to the top. He met with President Truman twice in late July 1945, each time outlining his vehement opposition to destroying Kyoto. Truman finally relented and Kyoto was taken out of consideration. The final targeting list contained four cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and a late addition, Nagasaki. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead of the original target of Kyoto. 

The second bomb was to be dropped on the city of Kokura on August 9. But as the B-29 bomber approached the city, an unexpected cloud cover made it dicult to see the ground below. The pilot circled, hoping the clouds would clear. When they didn’t, the crew decided to attack a secondary target rather than risking a botched drop. As they approached Nagasaki, that city was also obscured by cloud cover. With fuel running low, they made one last pass, the clouds parted at the last possible minute and the bomb was released. 

Nagasaki’s civilians were doubly unlucky: the city was a last-minute addition to the backup targeting list, and it was leveled because of a tiny window of poor weather over another city. If the bomber had taken off a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, countless residents of Kokura might have been incinerated instead. To this day, the Japanese refer to “Kokura’s luck” whenever someone unknowingly escapes from disaster.

Biological luck - IV

The problem is that, even with all this knowledge about how the brain is formed, it is still not possible to make a precise prediction about behaviour. Perhaps such a prediction is possible at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals. It is easy to predict what will happen to a person when a particular bone is broken. But in the case of behaviour, this level of precision is not possible. You can’t say for certain that a person who was abused repeatedly as a child will become an abusive adult.

When someone has extensive damage in the frontal cortex, you can say with certainty that their social behaviour will be inappropriate. But if you take someone who has had a very difficult childhood with abusive parents, malnutrition, etc. you can predict that the outcome won’t be good, but not much beyond that. Why is it that you can predict the effects of a fractured leg exactly but effects of various social factors on behaviour is difficult to predict?  Both cases are dependent on biological factors that are quite well understood. The difference is that they are qualitatively different biology.

When a bone shatters, the steps leading to inflammation and pain that will affect the person’s effort to walk immediately, is easy to know. That straight line of biology won’t be altered by variation in his genome, his prenatal hormone exposure, the culture he was raised in, or when he ate lunch. But all of those variables can influence social behaviours in our life i.e. the biology of the behaviours is always dependent on a number of factors that don’t affect something like a broken bone.

Let us suppose there is someone suffering from depression. Could you have predicted today’s behaviour by knowing about her biology? Suppose you know what version of the serotonin transporter gene she has. That probably gives you a predictive power of about 10 percent. Suppose you also know that she suffered from a traumatic event in childhood. Maybe your predictive power becomes 25 percent. Suppose you know in addition that she is living alone in poverty? Maybe now you have 40 percent predictive power. 

Suppose you also know the average level of stress hormones in her bloodstream today, if she’s living in an individualist or a collectivist culture, if she is menstruating (which typically exacerbates symptoms in seriously depressed women, making it more likely that they’ll be socially withdrawn). Maybe the predictability is now above 50 percent. If you add more factors, many of which have not yet been discovered, eventually your biological knowledge will give you the same predictive power as in the fractured-bone scenario. Science still knows about only a handful of those internal forces. 

Suppose you’re born to a poor, single mother. You are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there.  The stress hormones in your mother’s blood-stream will seep into your blood-stream through the placenta when you are in the womb thus affecting the development of your brain. The stress that your mother faces means that there  a good chance of her leaving you neglected, abused, and living in a crime-ridden neighbourhood. All this stress will further impact the development of the brain, specifically the frontal cortex. 

This early-life adversity thus makes it more likely that you’ll be spending the rest of your life in environments that present you with fewer opportunities than most. The type of brain you are saddled with make you less able to benefit from those rare opportunities — you may not understand them, may not recognize them as opportunities, may not have the tools to make use of them or to keep you from impulsively blowing the opportunity. Fewer of those benefits make for a more stressful adult life, which will change your brain into one that is unluckily bad at resilience, emotional control, reflection, cognition . . .

This continuous stream of interconnected factors ensures that luck does not average out over time. More luck later in life in most cases does not undo the effects of bad luck in early in life. Instead our world virtually guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified further. A report in the NYT says that a large-scale research study found that social mobility hadn’t changed much over time. To a large extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from that of your great-great-great-grandparents. 

When you look across centuries, at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many thought.  This is true whether you consider capitalism, democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution. The just world hypothesis is a lie. I can’t help agreeing with Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, "The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it ..."

All the nurses that I have had will have led difficult lives. Some will have a drunkard as a father or husband, some will be single mothers with their children in some hostel, some would have been ill-treated by a previous employer... It will be apparent that I have had far more lucky life. But, in spite of knowing all this, if somebody shouted at me now for what I think are trivial reasons, I often let my irritation get the better of me. A few minutes later, I will feel disappointed with myself and will tell myself that I should have exercised better self-control. 

I will think that if I had the person’s genes and life experience and an identical brain, I would have behaved in the same way as he or she did. In that situation, I could imagine a nurse going to an IIM and me being a nurse. It is a fallacy to think that our behaviour is independent of our personal histories. This present that I have now would not have been possible without the past that I had. Your personal history is not in the past but in the present "YOU". Our minds are the end products of all the biological moments that came before. But it is mighty hard to act according to this knowledge as I keep finding out. In a speech to Princeton graduates in 2012, Michael Lewis says:

In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

Biological luck - III

Apparently, the Russian oligarch Mikail Khodorkovsky said before his fall from grace, "If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him. Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it." Every one had the same starting conditions? This guy must have been hallucinating when he said that. "Man is born free ...", said Rousseau. "All men are created equal" is found in the United States Declaration of Independence. All people are neither born free nor created equal. They are constrained by the interaction between the genes they inherited and the environment they were born into. Babies are already different by the time they are born. 

Environment doesn't begin at birth, it begins at conception. The biggest source of these influences of the pre-natal environment is what’s in the maternal circulation, — levels of a huge array of different hormones, immune factors, inflammatory molecules, pathogens, nutrients, environmental toxins, illicit substances, all which regulate brain function in adulthood. If the mother is poor, nuroimaging studies on fetuses have shown that the fetal brain is more likely to be bathed in stress hormones from her circulation which delays aspects of brain maturation. 

This means that there is increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety in your adulthood. Lots of androgens in your fetal circulation (coming from Mom; females secrete androgens, though to a lesser extent than do males) makes you more likely as an adult of either sex to show spontaneous and reactive aggression, poor emotion regulation, low empathy, alcoholism, criminality. A shortage of nutrients for the fetus, caused by maternal starvation, means there’s increased risk of schizophrenia in adulthood, along with a variety of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. Your mother's socioeconomic status is already beginning to influence what kind of brain you're going to have as an adult. Biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.

That what kind of environment your womb was has all sorts of lifelong implications is shown by The Dutch Hunger Winter. This lasted from the start of November 1944 to the late spring of 1945. Europe was devastated by four years of brutal war. Western Netherlands was still under German control. A German blockade resulted in a big drop in the availability of food to the Dutch population. At one point the population was trying to survive on only about 30 per cent of the normal daily calorie intake. Over 20,000 people had died by the time food supplies were restored in May 1945.

The terrible shortages and suffering of this time also created a remarkable scientific study population. The Dutch survivors were a well-defined group of individuals all of whom suffered just one period of malnutrition, all of them at exactly the same time lasting about three months. Because of the excellent healthcare infrastructure and record-keeping in the Netherlands, epidemiologists have been able to follow the long-term effects of the famine. Their study had unexpected findings.

The effect of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during that terrible period showed interesting variations. If a mother was well-fed around the time of conception and malnourished only for the last few months of the pregnancy, her baby was likely to be born small. If, on the other hand, the mother suffered malnutrition for the first three months of the pregnancy only (because the baby was conceived towards the beginning of this period), but then was well-fed, she was likely to have a baby with a normal body weight. The foetus seemed to have ‘caught up’ in body weight.

Foetuses do most of their growing in the last few months of pregnancy so this doesn’t seem surprising. But epidemiologists were able to study these groups of babies for decades and what they found was really surprising. The babies who were born small stayed small all their lives, with lower obesity rates than the general population. For forty or more years, these people had access to as much food as they wanted, and yet their bodies never got over the early period of malnutrition. 

Even more unexpectedly, the children whose mothers had been malnourished only early in pregnancy, had higher obesity rates than normal. They also had a greater incidence of other health problems as well, including certain tests of mental activity. Even though these individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something had happened to their development in the womb that affected them for decades after. And it wasn’t just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage when the foetus is really very small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life.

Even more extraordinarily, some of these effects seem to be present in the children of this group, i.e. in the grandchildren of the women who were malnourished during the first three months of their pregnancy. So something that happened in one pregnant population affected their children’s children. Audrey Hepburn spent her childhood in the Netherlands during the famine and despite her later wealth she had lifelong medical problems like anemia, respiratory illnesses, and œdema as a result. Subsequent academic research on the children who were affected in the second trimester of their mother's pregnancy found an increased incidence of schizophrenia in these children.

Biological luck - II

Why do different childhoods produce different adults? The reason is that the brain that you have as an adult was influenced during its construction by various childhood experiences. For example, lots of childhood stress damages construction of the frontal cortex, producing an adult less adept at helpful things like impulse control. Lots of exposure to testosterone early in life makes for the construction of a highly reactive amygdala, producing an adult more likely to respond aggressively to provocation. 

The names are not important. What is important to appreciate is that there are areas in the brain that are very important to us deciding what counts as the right thing to do and all brains are constructed differently depending on their life experiences. Every aspect of your childhood, factors over which you had no control, sculpted the adult brain you have. Childhood adversity increases the odds of an adult having depression, anxiety, and/or substance abuse and also impairs learning and memory. There is also a greater chance of their indulging in antisocial behaviour, including violence; and being in relationships that replicate the adversities of childhood. 

Some studies demonstrate that by age five, the lower a child’s socioeconomic status, on the average, the thinner the frontal cortex and the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regulation, impulse control. Thus, if you are born in a poor family, your odds of success are automatically lowered. Some of the reasons why poverty reduces your chances of success are human specific — if you’re poor, you’re more likely to grow up near environmental toxins with the neighbourhood having more liquor stores than playgrounds; you’re less likely to attend a good school or have parents who can spend qualify time with you. 

The Adverse Childhood Experiences, or “ACEs,” quiz asks a series of questions about common traumatic experiences that occur in early life. It is an indication of how lucky your childhood was. It will ask about things like abuse, neglect and household dysfunction. For each of these experienced, you get a point on the checklist, where the unluckiest have scores approaching a ten and the luckiest being around zero. It is found that for every step higher in one’s ACE score, there is roughly a 35 percent increase in the likelihood of adult antisocial behaviour, including violence; problems with impulse control; substance abuse; increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety disorders, poorer health and earlier death. 

The opposite happens if you a have a high RLCE (Ridiculously Lucky Childhood Experiences) score. As a child, did you feel loved and safe in your family?  Was your neighborhood crime-free, your family mentally healthy, your socioeconomic status reliable and good? Well then, you’d be a high-functioning adult. Children who have suffered from abuse or neglect in their early years grow up with a substantially higher risk of adult mental health problems than the general population. Often, the child grows up into an adult at high risk of depression, self-harm, drug abuse and suicide.

All these factors indicate adult potential and vulnerability, not inevitable destiny. There may be all sorts of problems in childhood. It has been found that childhood abuse increases the odds of being an abusive adult; witnessing violence raises the risk for PTSD; But despite such problems many individuals turn into reasonably functional adults with the childhood adversities seeming to have left no permanent scars. What explains such resilience?

What is important is the number of times a child suffers the whips and scorns of time and the number of factors that protects the child from trauma. If a child has been sexually abused OR has witnessed violence, the chances of it leading a normal adult life is better than if it had experienced both. If a child has experienced poverty, then the future prospects of the child are better if the family is stable and loving than broken and acrimonious. The more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy adulthood.

What happens when everything goes wrong — no mother or family, minimal peer interactions, malnutrition, etc? Take the example of the Romanian institution kids. In the 1980s the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu banned contraceptives and abortions and required women to bear at least five children. The result was that institutions soon filled with thousands of infants and kids abandoned by impoverished families. Many intended to reclaim the kids later when their financial situation improved. The kids thus lived in overwhelmed institutions, resulting in severe neglect and deprivation.

The story became widely known after Ceauşescu’s 1989 overthrow. The resulting  international attention led to some improvements in the institutions and many kids were adopted by Westerners. Since then, all categories of children - children adopted in the West, those eventually returned to their families, and those who remained institutionalized - have been studied.

As adults, all these kids had low IQ, poor cognitive skills, problems with forming attachments, often bordering on autistic, anxiety and depression galore. The longer the institutionalization, the worse the prognosis. When their brains were studied, they were found to have decreased size, gray matter, white matter, frontal cortical metabolism, connectivity between regions, sizes of individual brain regions. Only the amygdala - a small, almond-shaped structure in the brain, one of its key functions being to control fear and anxiety - is enlarged. 

An enlarged amygdala indicates an anxious and depressed child. Children with autism, ADHD or OCD tend to have an enlarged amygdala. So improved conditions later in life doesn’t reverse certain brain regions that developed during a traumatic childhood. Adverse consequences can be reversed to a greater extent than used to be thought. But the longer you wait to intervene, the harder it will be.

Biological luck - I

People are obsessed with finding out the secrets to success. Many take great pride in describing themselves as self-made. They will assert that it was their individual traits — talent, skill, mental toughness, work ethic, persistence, optimism, etc. that helped them reach where they are now. Parents keep telling their children that if they try hard enough, they can achieve their goals. Self-help books will keep telling you that you, alone, are the solution that you seek. They ignore the fact that their success was entirely due to the initial conditions that they found themselves in which benefited them greatly.  

It is difficult to see that society's wealthiest and most successful individuals are simply the lucky ones. I had thought luck was important but not to the extent that I now think it is. How important the luck you had in where and to whom you were born only recently became clear to me after reading and listening to Robert Sapolsky who teaches neuroscience at Stanford University. The genes you inherited, foetal environment, childhood experience, the culture you were born in, all contributed to shaping the construction of your brain. 

Choices, efforts, intentions, will power, all of which influence our behaviour, are themselves biological phenomena. You are lucky to have them. Basically, our present state is the result of our cumulative biological and environmental luck. A misguided notion that many have today is spelled out by the nihilist, Bazarov, in Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons: 

I assure you, studying separate individuals is not worth the trouble. All people are like one another, in soul as in body; each of us has brain, spleen, heart, and lungs made alike; and the so–called moral qualities are the same in all; the slight variations are of no importance. A single human specimen is sufficient to judge of all by. People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying each individual birch–tree.

Most people will agree that our natural attributes like height, which make you good at playing certain games, or fast twitch fibres, that enable you to run fast, are biological. Then they will say that what really matters is what do you do with those attributes - whether you work hard to take advantage of those gifts or whether you waste these blessings. But this ability to work hard doesn’t come out of thin air. It's that brain of yours (and more specifically, a part of the brain called the frontal cortex) that decides if you are going to show impulse control or whether you give in to the slightest temptation. 

The frontal cortex is the most recently evolved brain region. The human frontal cortex is bigger and more complex than in other apes. It has a wide portfolio of functions including working memory, gratification postponement, long-term planning, regulation of emotions, impulse control, among others. Sapolsky groups these functions under one heading: "the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do." It is the last brain region to fully mature, with people being in their mid-twenties by the time it is fully functional. 

The frontal cortex, and even more specifically, a part of it known as the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), is critical for making tough decisions in the face of temptation. This explains why teenagers do things that adults find daft - their PFC is not yet firing on all cylinders. And everyone doesn’t have the same PFC (and other parts of the brain). The enormous varieties of adolescent experiences will help produce enormously varied PFCs in adulthood. And this PFC is responsible for what you characterise as grit, character, backbone, tenacity, strong moral compass, etc.

Your adolescent experiences of trauma, stimulation, love, failure, rejection, happiness, despair, etc. all have played a very important role in constructing the PFC that you are using as an adult to decide whether to practice now or to skip it and watch a movie instead. It is difficult to appreciate that the same neurotransmitters, receptors, or transcription factors are involved when considering feats of willpower as is the case when regarding fast twitch fibers. Most people seem to have to have no idea how lucky one must be to be both talented and hard working. Your admirable self-discipline has much to do with how your cortex was constructed when you were a foetus and your childhood and adolescence.

You can’t will yourself to have more willpower. The factors that can affect willpower include blood glucose levels; the socioeconomic status of your family of birth; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress; whether you’re in pain; if you have had a stroke in your frontal cortex; if you suffered childhood abuse; how much of a cognitive load you’ve borne in the last few minutes; if you’re infected with a particular parasite; if you have the gene for Huntington’s disease; lead levels in your tap water when you were a kid; if you live in an individualist or a collectivist culture, among many others, most of which are beyond your control.

Blood glucose levels affect willpower because of the glucose demands of the frontal cortex. A real- world example of this is a study of more than 1,100 judicial rulings. What best predicted whether a judge granted someone parole versus more jail time? It was found that the longer it had been since judges had eaten, the less likely they were to grant a prisoner parole. There was overall decline over the course of a tiring day with essentially a zero percent rate just before judges ate. This shows that there are situations when biology can affect our behaviour. 

What was causing this behaviour? As the hours since the last meal kept increasing, the PFC was finding it more difficult to focus on the details of each case, the judge became more likely to choose the easier default option which is to send the person back to jail. This is the easier option than giving careful thought to whether the criminal in front of you has some potential for change. This idea is supported by a study in which subjects had to make judgments of increasing complexity. As the task progressed, the PFC became more slow during deliberating and the subjects became more likely to opt for the easier decision. Of course judges will give various philosophical reasons for rationalizing their decisions rather than say that they were caused by hunger. 

Ignaz Semmelweis

Ignaz Semmelweis was born in Budapest in 1818. He received his doctor’s degree from Vienna in 1844 and was appointed assistant at the obstetric clinic in Vienna and devoted his life to the health of babies and mothers. His is a name you have probably never heard of. He has probably saved more lives than any other person in the medical profession. 

Rich women delivered at home. But poverty, illegitimacy, or obstetrical complications forced many woman to seek hospitalization. The mortality rates ranged as high as 25–30 percent. Various ideas were floated to explain the high death rates. Some thought that the infection was induced by overcrowding, poor ventilation, the onset of lactation, or miasma. Semmelweis too proceeded to investigate its cause although his chief objected because he thought that the deaths could not be prevented. 

Semmelweis started observing hospital routines. He noted that pregnant women were admitted to one of two obstetric wards. The only difference between the two wards was that one was staffed exclusively by midwives, while in the other ward, medical students and doctors were in charge of deliveries and conducted autopsies on dead women in the nearby room. He observed that mortality was much higher in the latter ward. 

The death of a friend and colleague of Semmelweis provided him a clue to solve this puzzle. The friend developed a condition resembling the fever in the obstetrics ward staffed by doctors following a scalpel laceration while supervising an autopsy. This made him suspect that the higher mortality rate in the ward was due to the contamination of the hands of medical students and doctors with something during autopsies. He began to suspect that doctors were bringing the infection to the patients. 

The idea that many diseases are caused by germs is only about 150 years old. In Sommelweis' time, doctors often went directly from dissecting corpses in the morgue to examining mothers in the maternity ward. He suggested as an experiment that the doctors wash their hands before touching the mothers not just with soap but with a chlorine solution. Chlorine, as we know today, is about the best disinfectant there is. Semmelweis didn't know anything about germs. He chose chlorine because he thought it would be the best way to get rid of any smell left behind by those little bits of corpse on the doctors' hands.

And when he imposed this, the rate of childbed fever fell dramatically. You'd think everyone would be thrilled. Semmelweis had solved the problem! But they weren't thrilled. For one thing, doctors were upset because Semmelweis' hypothesis made it look like they were the ones giving childbed fever to the women. How dare he make such a suggestion to his social superiors? He was a nobody who kept on asking his colleagues to wash their hands. And Semmelweis was not very tactful. He publicly berated people who disagreed with him and made some influential enemies. Eventually the doctors in his clinic refused to listen to him and gave up the chlorine hand-washing. He lost his job.

Semmelweis kept trying to convince doctors in other parts of Europe to wash with chlorine, but no one would listen to him. At the time, it was argued that diseases resulted from imbalances among four humors, and that each disease was unique because each person was unique. Doctors said that a healthy person had a perfect balance of the four humors of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Semmelweis's findings that disease resulted from unhygienic practices contrasted with the theory of humors. Historians have argued that Semmelweis's Jewish and Hungarian origins contributed to the dismissal.

Without a job, Semmelweis left Vienna and returned to Pest, Hungary. There, he continued to implement his hand washing procedures. In 1851, He became the head physician at the Szent Rókus Hospital in Pest. When he implemented his policies, the rate of childhood fever plummeted. In 1855, Semmelweis became head of obstetrics at the University of Pest. When he implemented the chlorine washing procedure, infection rates at the university hospital fell. Throughout the 1850s, Semmelweis wrote papers on childhood fever and, in 1861, he published his book on the subject. 

Semmelweis's mental health began to deteriorate after the publication of his book and he suffered from severe depression. By 1865, his abnormal public behavior started affecting his professional life and his wife and some of his colleagues committed him to an insane asylum in Vienna, Austria. After trying to leave the insane asylum in August 1865, he was beaten and put in a straitjacket. After two weeks in the asylum, Semmelweis died on 13 August 1865 in Vienna, Austria. His autopsy revealed that he had died from blood poisoning in a wound that could have been sustained during the beating.

Semmelweis’s doctrine was subsequently accepted by medical science. Semmelweis was a pioneer in scientific risk assessment and in identifying the source of transmission, including conducting an effective intervention. Subsequently, it might be said that he has saved millions of lives, including, quite possibly, yours and mine.  

Are good institutions enough? - V

Humans have always struggled with the question of how to design institutions that make self-interested individual action result in the welfare of society. This situation is sought to be achieved by market institutions. But there is a large sphere of behaviour that is not governed by legislation. 

Around 1919, a man named John Fletcher Moulton, an English mathematician, barrister, judge, and Member of Parliament, gave a speech which was transcribed verbatim by someone in the audience. It was published in The Atlantic in 1924 with the title "Law and Manners". There was no transcript of the speech and if someone in the audience had not written it down, it would have been lost. (It was published after his death. I came to know about this speech from this episode of the podcast econtalk) 

In the speech, he says that there are three great domains of human action. First comes the domain of positive law, where our actions are prescribed by laws which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of free choice, which includes all those actions in which we claim and enjoy complete freedom. But between these two domains there is a third large and important domain which doesn’t get much attention these days. 

Here there is no law which tells us what should be done, and yet we feel that we are not free to do whatever we feel like doing. The freedom of action that we have will vary from case to case and will depend on our discretion. It grades from a consciousness of a duty nearly as strong as positive law to a feeling that the matter is just a question of personal choice. This is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. "The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself."

That is a brilliant phrase - "obedience to the unenforceable". Moulton gets at the fact that if you take the idea of a "free debate" literally, the debate will be destroyed. The assumption regarding a "free debate" is that you don't actually say whatever you want because that destroys debate. A "free debate" is not totally free. You have to recognise that there are unenforceable obligations of self-governance.   

If you have a set of norms surrounding speech, where people are given freedom and there's very few formal restrictions and we rely on obedience to the unenforceable, then it is better to leave it alone. But once you fail to be obedient to that unenforceable obligation, creating that obligation is very difficult.  If everyone else is talking too long and you respect this norm, then you feel like a sucker. You start to say, : "I'm a fool. Doing what's right is foolish." And then you've lost that norm.

Moulton's analysis suggests that we have a set of impulses which, over time, we can either cultivate or we can desist from doing. So, if I have the right to do something and I always do it, then I am cultivating a habit of vice. But, if I say, 'No, I shouldn't do that: that would be wrong, even though I can do it' then I am cultivating habit of doing the right thing. So, if a situation comes along that happens to be in the third domain of Moulton's framework, I know what the right thing to do is even though it is unenforceable because I've made it a habit. 

If we all cultivate that habit, then the society that we live in is much better for everyone. If I'm the only one doing that, I'm a chump and it won't work. If everyone else does it but I don't do it, I start to corrode their commitment to those habits. So, it really is important that when I look around, I see everyone else doing it.

The modern trend is to expand the scope of what Moulton calls law to prescribe things through the power of the state. But things that are legal are not necessarily things that should be done. And similarly, many things that should not be done perhaps should not be illegal. They should just be part of what Lord Moulton was calling manners or "obedience to the unenforceable". Many things should not be enforced through the state but through our social interaction. Many people underestimate the importance of moral strictures that we obey because they are the right thing to do. This is what Moulton emphasised when he used the term "obedience to the unenforceable". 

Adam Smith thought that over time, human beings both individually and collectively, were capable of perfecting a kind of self-governance. Much of our behaviour would actually be governed by the reactions of others, represented by the impartial spectator, which we had internalised to a great extent. He says in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that my desire for your approval and your desire to avoid my disapproval, is the foundation of civilisation.  It pushes us in a direction of doing the right thing.

He's aware it doesn't work all the time and that sometimes laws are necessary, but there's an impulse toward being a decent human being even when you don't want to be, because you don't want to lose the respect of the people around you. But modern economists will say that these are all principal-agent problems and all we have to do is design a set of rules and impose those in order to solve them. 

Thus, the eagerness and willingness to "do the right thing" has been eroded. This puts pressure on the state to use the power of the state to enforce the things that were once unenforceable. This, in turn crowds out the natural impulse of norms and institutions to emerge that would enforce these without the state. This back and forth between our imperfection in creating a demand for government intervention and then that government intervention crippling our ability to solve these problems is a positive feedback loop that is difficult to arrest once it begins.

A lot of what's disturbing about the world right now is the erosion of those norms. We are left with  disobedience to the unenforceable and facing the choice of having to legislate improvements.