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McGinn suspects that the reason why philosophical conundrums such as the mind/body problem – how physical processes in our brain give rise to consciousness – prove to be intractable is that their true solutions are simply inaccessible to the human mind.

Is a question still a “mystery” if you have arrived at the correct answer, but you have no idea what it means or cannot wrap your head around it? Mysterians often conflate those two possibilities.

Most importantly, we can extend our own minds to those of our fellow human beings. What makes our species unique is that we are capable of culture, in particular cumulative cultural knowledge. A population of human brains is much smarter than any individual brain in isolation.

It is quite true that we can never rule out the possibility that there are such unknown unknowns, and that some of them will forever remain unknown, because for some (unknown) reason human intelligence is not up to the task. But the important thing to note about these unknown unknowns is that nothing can be said about them. To presume from the outset that some unknown unknowns will always remain unknown, as mysterians do, is not modesty – it’s arrogance.

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

Discovery is not the neat and linear process many students imagine, but usually involves, in Dr. Firestein’s phrasing, “feeling around in dark rooms, bumping into unidentifiable things, looking for barely perceptible phantoms.”

As he argued in his 2012 book “Ignorance: How It Drives Science,” many scientific facts simply aren’t solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations.

People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.

The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask.

Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”

giving due emphasis to unknowns, highlighting case studies that illustrate the fertile interplay between questions and answers, and exploring the psychology of ambiguity are essential.

The time has come to “view ignorance as ‘regular’ rather than deviant,” the sociologists Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey have boldly argued. Our students will be more curious — and more intelligently so — if, in addition to facts, they were equipped with theories of ignorance as well as theories of knowledge.

This article makes an excellent case for "ignorance studies" but, ironically, treats "agnotology" as a cutting edge concept when in fact it is an old notion with a long history and a better name: "nescience." Nescience can refer to the Socratic idea of learned ignorance, but the concept was also developed in the eighteenth century, chiefly by Scottish commonsense philosopher Thomas Reid

"nescience" has considerable advantages over "agnotology". Linguistically, nescience is the precise opposite of "science" (scio: "I know"; nescio: "I don't know"). So why not stick with the Latin root word--and avoid any of the unfortunate connotations "ignorance" has in contemporary parlance? Historically, the word reminds us of the concept's provenance in Socratic philosophy and the Scottish enlightenment. Finally, unearthing the history of "nescience" might yield an unexpected insight into American intellectual history, since many of our founders read Thomas Reid's philosophy in college.

All great art allows us this: a glimpse across the limits of our self.

They are moments of genuine expansion. They are at the heart of our humanity. Our future depends on them.

the particular in great literature has always flowed to the universal.

. “Every reader,” as Marcel Proust writes in “Time Regained,” “is actually the reader of himself.

Books can’t install unknown feelings or passions into us. What they can do is develop our emotional, psychological and intellectual life, and, by doing so, show us how and to what extent we are connected.

Considering yourself lucky is a good thing. Rather than having a negative worldview—“that’s just my luck”—thinking yourself to be lucky results in positive brain functioning and overall well-being.

To navigate this tricky terrain, Frank suggests asking someone about their luck rather than informing them of their luck.

As should we all. Luck is not a mystical ally.

Globally, the numbers can be even worse, and the stakes often higher. “Say a person comes into the hospital in Sierra Leone with a fever and flulike symptoms,” DeRisi says. “After a few days, or a week, they die. What caused that illness? Most of the time, we never find out. Because if the cause isn’t something that we can culture and test for” — like hepatitis, or strep throat — “it basically just stays a mystery.”

It would be better, DeRisi says, to watch for rare cases of mystery illnesses in people, which often exist well before a pathogen gains traction and is able to spread.

Based on a retrospective analysis of blood samples, scientists now know that H.I.V. emerged nearly a dozen times over a century, starting in the 1920s, before it went global.

Zika was a relatively harmless illness before a single mutation, in 2013, gave the virus the ability to enter and damage brain cells.

The beauty of this approach” — running blood samples from people hospitalized all over the world through his system, known as IDseq — “is that it works even for things that we’ve never seen before, or things that we might think we’ve seen but which are actually something new.”

In this scenario, an undiscovered or completely new virus won’t trigger a match but will instead be flagged. (Even in those cases, the mystery pathogen will usually belong to a known virus family: coronaviruses, for instance, or filoviruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.)

And because different types of bacteria require specific conditions in order to grow, you also need some idea of what you’re looking for in order to find it.

The same is true of genomic sequencing, which relies on “primers” designed to match different combinations of nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA).

Even looking at a slide under a microscope requires staining, which makes organisms easier to see — but the stains used to identify bacteria and parasites, for instance, aren’t the same.

The practice that DeRisi helped pioneer to skirt this problem is known as metagenomic sequencing

Unlike ordinary genomic sequencing, which tries to spell out the purified DNA of a single, known organism, metagenomic sequencing can be applied to a messy sample of just about anything — blood, mud, seawater, snot — which will often contain dozens or hundreds of different organisms, all unknown, and each with its own DNA. In order to read all the fragmented genetic material, metagenomic sequencing uses sophisticated software to stitch the pieces together by matching overlapping segments.

The assembled genomes are then compared against a vast database of all known genomic sequences — maintained by the government-run National Center for Biotechnology Information — making it possible for researchers to identify everything in the mix

Traditionally, the way that scientists have identified organisms in a sample is to culture them: Isolate a particular bacterium (or virus or parasite or fungus); grow it in a petri dish; and then examine the result under a microscope, or use genomic sequencing, to understand just what it is. But because less than 2 percent of bacteria — and even fewer viruses — can be grown in a lab, the process often reveals only a tiny fraction of what’s actually there. It’s a bit like planting 100 different kinds of seeds that you found in an old jar. One or two of those will germinate and produce a plant, but there’s no way to know what the rest might have grown into.

Such studies have revealed just how vast the microbial world is, and how little we know about it

“The selling point for researchers is: ‘Look, this technology lets you investigate what’s happening in your clinic, whether it’s kids with meningitis or something else,’” DeRisi said. “We’re not telling you what to do with it. But it’s also true that if we have enough people using this, spread out all around the world, then it does become a global network for detecting emerging pandemics

One study found more than 1,000 different kinds of viruses in a tiny amount of human stool; another found a million in a couple of pounds of marine sediment. And most were organisms that nobody had seen before.

After the Biohub opened in 2016, one of DeRisi’s goals was to turn metagenomics from a rarefied technology used by a handful of elite universities into something that researchers around the world could benefit from

metagenomics requires enormous amounts of computing power, putting it out of reach of all but the most well-funded research labs. The tool DeRisi created, IDseq, made it possible for researchers anywhere in the world to process samples through the use of a small, off-the-shelf sequencer, much like the one DeRisi had shown me in his lab, and then upload the results to the cloud for analysis.

he’s the first to make the process so accessible, even in countries where lab supplies and training are scarce. DeRisi and his team tested the chemicals used to prepare DNA for sequencing and determined that using as little as half the recommended amount often worked fine. They also 3-D print some of the labs’ tools and replacement parts, and offer ongoing training and tech support

The metagenomic analysis itself — normally the most expensive part of the process — is provided free.

But DeRisi’s main innovation has been in streamlining and simplifying the extraordinarily complex computational side of metagenomics

IDseq is also fast, capable of doing analyses in hours that would take other systems weeks.

“What IDseq really did was to marry wet-lab work — accumulating samples, processing them, running them through a sequencer — with the bioinformatic analysis,”

“Without that, what happens in a lot of places is that the researcher will be like, ‘OK, I collected the samples!’ But because they can’t analyze them, the samples end up in the freezer. The information just gets stuck there.”

Meningitis itself isn’t a disease, just a description meaning that the tissues around the brain and spinal cord have become inflamed. In the United States, bacterial infections can cause meningitis, as can enteroviruses, mumps and herpes simplex. But a high proportion of cases have, as doctors say, no known etiology: No one knows why the patient’s brain and spinal tissues are swelling.

When Saha and her team ran the mystery meningitis samples through IDseq, though, the result was surprising. Rather than revealing a bacterial cause, as expected, a third of the samples showed signs of the chikungunya virus — specifically, a neuroinvasive strain that was thought to be extremely rare. “At first we thought, It cannot be true!” Saha recalls. “But the moment Joe and I realized it was chikungunya, I went back and looked at the other 200 samples that we had collected around the same time. And we found the virus in some of those samples as well.”

Until recently, chikungunya was a comparatively rare disease, present mostly in parts of Central and East Africa. “Then it just exploded through the Caribbean and Africa and across Southeast Asia into India and Bangladesh,” DeRisi told me. In 2011, there were zero cases of chikungunya reported in Latin America. By 2014, there were a million.

Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne virus, but when DeRisi and Saha looked at the results from IDseq, they also saw something else: a primate tetraparvovirus. Primate tetraparvoviruses are almost unknown in humans, and have been found only in certain regions. Even now, DeRisi is careful to note, it’s not clear what effect the virus has on people. “Maybe it’s dangerous, maybe it isn’t,” DeRisi says. “But I’ll tell you what: It’s now on my radar.

it reveals a landscape of potentially dangerous viruses that we would otherwise never find out about. “What we’ve been missing is that there’s an entire universe of pathogens out there that are causing disease in humans,” Imam notes, “ones that we often don’t even know exist.”

“The plan was, Let’s let researchers around the world propose studies, and we’ll choose 10 of them to start,” DeRisi recalls. “We thought we’d get, like, a couple dozen proposals, and instead we got 350.”

Metagenomic sequencing is especially good at what scientists call “environmental sampling”: identifying, say, every type of bacteria present in the gut microbiome, or in a teaspoon of seawater.

“When you draw blood from someone who has a fever in Ghana, you really don’t know very much about what would normally be in their blood without fever — let alone about other kinds of contaminants in the environment. So how do you interpret the relevance of all the things you’re seeing?”

Such criticisms have led some to say that metagenomics simply isn’t suited to the infrastructure of developing countries. Along with the problem of contamination, many labs struggle to get the chemical reagents needed for sequencing, either because of the cost or because of shipping and customs holdups

we’re less likely to be caught off-guard. “With Ebola, there’s always an issue: Where’s the virus hiding before it breaks out?” DeRisi explains. “But also, once we start sampling people who are hospitalized more widely — meaning not just people in Northern California or Boston, but in Uganda, and Sierra Leone, and Indonesia — the chance of disastrous surprises will go down. We’ll start seeing what’s hidden.”

One message they all had: You are stronger than you think you are, and everyone is able to adapt in ways they didn’t think possible.

there are a few techniques to help you along — 100-mile race not required.

Pace Yourself

Training to become an elite endurance athlete means learning to embrace discomfort. Instead of hiding from pain, athletes must learn to work with it. A lot of that comes down to pacing

Similarly, as you muscle through an ongoing pandemic, you must look for ways to make peace with unknowns and new, uncomfortable realities. “When we think about the coronavirus, we are in it for the long run; so how do you pace yourself?”

She recommends thinking about your routines, practicing positive self-talk and focusing on processes instead of outcomes

You don’t know when the pandemic will end, but you can take control of your daily habits

“always have a little in reserve.”

Deplete your resources early and you’ll be in trouble. Focusing on day-to-day activities will pay off in the long run.

If you burn out all your mental energy in one day or week, you may find it more difficult to adapt when things don’t return to normal as quickly as you would hope.

There’s a pacing in living day to day, just as there’s pacing in climbing.

“Don’t play all your cards at once and keep a little something in reserve.”

Create Mini-Goals

Sports psychologists frequently recommend creating mini milestones en route to a big goal. There are many steps on the path from base camp to a mountain’s summit. Likewise, there are smaller, more achievable milestones to reach and celebrate as you venture ahead into the unknown.

“Setting goals that are controllable makes it easier to adapt,” Dr. Meijen said. “If you set goals that are controlled by other people, goals that aren’t realistic or are tough or boring, those are much harder to adapt to.”

“I’m really good at breaking things down into small increments and setting micro-goals,” he said. How micro?

“I break things down to 10 seconds at a time,” Mr. Woltering continued. “You just have to be present in what you are doing and you have to know that it may not be the most fun — or super painful — now, but that could change in 10 seconds down the road.”

And it may not change quickly. Mr. Woltering said he has spent six-hour stretches counting to 10 over and over again. “You just keep moving and keep counting,” he said. “And you have to have faith that it will change at some point.”

Create Structure

“Part of expedition life is having a routine that you’re comfortable with. When I’m on expedition, I always start the day with a basin of warm water and soap. I wash my hands, face, neck and ears and get the sand out of my eyes,” he said. “It’s something that’s repeated that gets you a sense of comfort and normalcy.”

During the pandemic, he has found comfort and normalcy by getting outdoors, and climbing whenever possible to “run the engine.”

Dee Caffari, a British sailor and the first woman to sail solo, nonstop, around the world in both directions, said structure is imperative to fight back loneliness and monotony.

“In your day you need structure,” Ms. Caffari said. “You need to get up in the morning knowing you’re going to make something happen.”

Focus on Something New

When all else fails, look to something new: a new hobby, a new goal, a new experience

During a particularly hard patch of a competition, some athletes say they focus on a different sense, one that perhaps is not at the forefront of their mind when the pain sets in. A runner could note the smells around her and a climber could note the way his hair is blowing in the wind.

When athletes are injured, sports psychologists and coaches frequently encourage them to find a new activity to engage their mind and body. The key is to adapt, adapt and then adapt again.

“We all want mental toughness, it’s an important part of dealing with difficult things,”

“The current definition of mental toughness is the ability to pivot and to be nimble and flexible.”

“The next moment is always completely uncertain, and it’s always been that way,” Dr. Gervais said. But adapting, adjusting expectations and discovering new goals or hobbies can allow you to continue to build the muscle that is mental toughness.

Bottom line? “Optimism is an antidote to anxiety,”

The targets of xenophobia—derived from the Greek word for stranger—are no longer the Japanese. Instead, they are Muslim immigrants. Or Mexicans. Or the Chinese. Or whichever group we have come to fear.

The teacher, Jane Elliott, divided her class into two groups—those with blue eyes and those with brown or green eyes. The brown-eyed group received privileges and treats, while the blue-eyed students were denied rewards and told they were inferior. Within hours, the once-harmonious classroom became two camps, full of mutual fear and resentment. Yet, what is especially shocking is that the students were only in the third grade.

The drive to completely and quickly divide the world into "us" and "them" is so powerful that it must surely come from some deep-seated need.

Once the division is made, the inferences and projections begin to occur. For one, we tend to think more highly of people in the in-group than those in the out-group, a belief based only on group identity. Also, a person tends to feel that others in the in-group are similar to one's self in ways that—although stereotypical—may have little to do with the original criteria used to split the groups.

The differences in reaction time are small but telling. Again and again, researchers found that subjects readily tie in-group images with pleasant words and out-group images with unpleasant words. One study compares such groups as whites and blacks, Jews and Christians, and young people and old people. And researchers found that if you identify yourself in one group, it's easier to pair images of that group with pleasant words—and easier to pair the opposite group with unpleasant imagery. This reveals the underlying biases and enables us to study how quickly they can form.

If categorization and bias come so easily, are people doomed to xenophobia and racism? It's pretty clear that we are susceptible to prejudice and that there is an unconscious desire to divide the world into "us" and "them." Fortunately, however, research also shows that prejudices are fluid and that when we become conscious of our biases we can take active—and successful—steps to combat them

Unfortunately, such stereotypes are reinforced so often that they can become ingrained. It is difficult to escape conventional wisdom and treat all people as individuals, rather than members of a group. But that seems to be the best way to avoid the trap of dividing the world in two—and discriminating against one part of humanity.

It was hard to get there, because I had to learn over and over again that extreme conviction requires extraordinary evidence, and the evidence we have is usually far from extraordinary.

Just as we solved many of the mysteries that befuddled our ancestors, our descendants will solve many of the mysteries that befuddle us. Our ignorance is profound, forgivable and temporary. There are only two true errors: One is believing that we have no errors left to make, and the other is believing that those errors are permanent and irreversible.

It’s hard to maintain this attitude when you realize just how much we have left to figure out. And we often have to cultivate this attitude for ourselves, because our educators and experts often fail to give it to us.

Experts, for their part, are perfectly comfortable issuing blanket recommendations with scant evidence and then shaming people for not following them.

Our teachers and officials may think the public simply can’t handle uncertainty, and maybe that’s why they project so much confidence, even when the science is faulty. But the best way to cultivate informed citizens is to give them the evidence that we have, not the evidence we wish we had.

research elsewhere has found that people are less satisfied when choosing from a larger group: in one study, for example, subjects who selected a chocolate from an array of six options believed it tasted better than those who selected the same chocolate from an array of 30.

evidence shows that the perception that one has appealing alternatives to a current romantic partner is a strong predictor of low commitment to that partner.

But the pace of technology is upending these rules and assumptions. Relationships that begin online, Jacob finds, move quickly. He chalks this up to a few things. First, familiarity is established during the messaging process, which also often involves a phone call. By the time two people meet face-to-face, they already have a level of intimacy. Second, if the woman is on a dating site, there’s a good chance she’s eager to connect. But for Jacob, the most crucial difference between online dating and meeting people in the “real” world is the sense of urgency. Occasionally, he has an acquaintance in common with a woman he meets online, but by and large she comes from a different social pool. “It’s not like we’re just going to run into each other again,” he says. “So you can’t afford to be too casual. It’s either ‘Let’s explore this’ or ‘See you later.’ ”

he phenomenon extends beyond dating sites to the Internet more generally. “I’ve seen a dramatic increase in cases where something on the computer triggered the breakup,” he says. “People are more likely to leave relationships, because they’re emboldened by the knowledge that it’s no longer as hard as it was to meet new people. But whether it’s dating sites, social media, e‑mail—it’s all related to the fact that the Internet has made it possible for people to communicate and connect, anywhere in the world, in ways that have never before been seen.”

eople seeking commitment—particularly women—have developed strategies to detect deception and guard against it. A woman might withhold sex so she can assess a man’s intentions. Theoretically, her withholding sends a message: I’m not just going to sleep with any guy that comes along. Theoretically, his willingness to wait sends a message back: I’m interested in more than sex.

people who are in marriages that are either bad or average might be at increased risk of divorce, because of increased access to new partners. Third, it’s unknown whether that’s good or bad for society. On one hand, it’s good if fewer people feel like they’re stuck in relationships. On the other, evidence is pretty solid that having a stable romantic partner means all kinds of health and wellness benefits.” And that’s even before one takes into account the ancillary effects of such a decrease in commitment—on children, for example, or even society more broadly.

As online dating becomes increasingly pervasive, the old costs of a short-term mating strategy will give way to new ones. Jacob, for instance, notices he’s seeing his friends less often. Their wives get tired of befriending his latest girlfriend only to see her go when he moves on to someone else. Also, Jacob has noticed that, over time, he feels less excitement before each new date. “Is that about getting older,” he muses, “or about dating online?” How much of the enchantment associated with romantic love has to do with scarcity (this person is exclusively for me), and how will that enchantment hold up in a marketplace of abundance (this person could be exclusively for me, but so could the other two people I’m meeting this week)?

Reality-directed imagination, for its part, endeavours to re-create, in the intellectual realm, actions and events that have existed or have taken place, which we may have plenty or partial information about.

Reality-directed imagination is thus a means to retain a solid sense of reality rather than to submerge into the everlasting landscape of fantasy. We imagine what was and try to afford it life.  

Without reality-directed imagination, on the other hand, the study of history would be well-nigh impossible.

By resorting to reality-directed imagination we are able intellectually to disconnect ourselves from the present; to visualize, like a landscape gradually making its appearance as we move backwards in time, the setting in which an event occurred or the personal features of an individual we follow. We are able emotionally to connect ourselves to the prevailing conditions or to a person's thoughts.

In the study of history we make use of reality-directed imagination as we depict in our minds the characters of individuals or the nature of events. We even try to fill the gaps by resorting to our imagination ever vigilant not to lose sight of reality as it was. In other words, we attempt to imagine the unknown by resorting to the known.

Without imagination as a study-device, the learning of history becomes well-nigh impossible, for the information furnished to us is rendered unintelligible. We are unable to relate to it in any meaningful manner. We assess it in a mechanical way, devoid of image, sound and feel. Our attempt to understand it leads to a dead-end for we cannot leap forward from the stale fact before us and relate it to other facts beyond it.

Without imagination we cannot compare, distinguish and separate; we cannot know the difference between the particular and the general. In order to study history we need to avoid the mechanical, on the one hand, and the fantastic, on the other. In other words, we ought to eschew both lack of imagination and fantasy-directed imagination; the first does not allow us to proceed forward while the latter leads us to the realm of the unreal.

He complained to me that golf publications never rank his courses high enough, because the people who do the rating hold a grudge against him, but he also said that he never allows raters to play his courses, because they would just get in the way of the members.

He wanted the number, and the fact that I hadn’t published the number proved that I was just like all the other biased reporters, who, because we’re all part of the anti-Trump media conspiracy, never give him as much credit as he deserves for being awesome.

In Trump’s own mind, I suspect, he really did shoot 71 that day, if not (by now) 69. Trump’s world is a parallel universe in which truth takes many forms, none of them necessarily based on reality.

The response of Americans to terror is to be terrified — 9/11’s trauma has never been fully exorcised. Until we get over that, until we manage to stiffen our upper lips like the Brits, jihadist terrorists will exercise control over the American psyche like no one else. We can do better, can’t we? If we want the Constitution to survive both Islamism’s threat and the potential response of a beleaguered Trump, we’ll have to.

an upsetting instance of knowledge gaps in the last decade was the profound misunderstanding of complex financial products that contributed to the market collapse of 2007. Investment banks were unable to protect themselves from exposure to these products, because only a few people (either buyers or sellers) understood exactly what was being sold. Those individuals who did comprehend these product structures ultimately made huge bets against the market using credit-default swaps. The willingness of companies like AIG to sell large quantities of credit-default swaps reflected a gap in their knowledge about the riskiness of products they were insuring.

To discover the things you can't explain, take a lesson from teachers. When you instruct someone else, you have to fill the gaps in your own knowledge

Explain concepts to yourself as you learn them. Get in the habit of self-teaching. Your explanations will reveal your own knowledge gaps and identify words and concepts whose meanings aren't clear.

Engage others in collaborative learning. Help identify the knowledge gaps of the people around you. Ask them to explain difficult concepts, even if you think everyone understands them

When you do uncover these gaps, treat them as learning opportunities, not signs of weakness.

Today, the “common” interpretation of the recent past is thus composed of the manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them (Jewish, Polish, Serb, Armenian, German, Asian-American, Palestinian, Irish, homosexual…) marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood.

The resulting mosaic does not bind us to a shared past, it separates us from it. Whatever the shortcomings of the national narratives once taught in school, however selective their focus and instrumental their message, they had at least the advantage of providing a nation with past references for present experience. Traditional history, as taught to generations of schoolchildren and college students, gave the present a meaning by reference to the past: today’s names, places, inscriptions, ideas, and allusions could be slotted into a memorized narrative of yesterday. In our time, however, this process has gone into reverse. The past now acquires meaning only by reference to our many and often contrasting present concerns.

the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed

Today, the opposite applies. Most people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our forebears.

What is significant about the present age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have abandoned not merely the practices of the past but their very memory. A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.

In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war. There is a reason for this. I

Until the last decades of the twentieth century most people in the world had limited access to information; but—thanks to national education, state-controlled radio and television, and a common print culture—within any one state or nation or community people were all likely to know many of the same things.

it was precisely that claim, that “it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good,” which until very recently distinguished democracies from dictatorships. We pride ourselves on having defeated the “evil empire” of the Soviets. Indeed so. But perhaps we should read again the memoirs of those who suffered at the hands of that empire—the memoirs of Eugen Loebl, Artur London, Jo Langer, Lena Constante, and countless others—and then compare the degrading abuses they suffered with the treatments approved and authorized by President Bush and the US Congress. Are they so very different?

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today

the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.

That same contrast may account for the distinctive quality of much American writing on the cold war and its outcome. In European accounts of the fall of communism, from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, the dominant sentiment is one of relief at the closing of a long, unhappy chapter. Here in the US, however, the story is typically recorded in a triumphalist key.5

For many American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth century is that war works. Hence the widespread enthusiasm for our war on Iraq in 2003 (despite strong opposition to it in most other countries). For Washington, war remains an option—on that occasion the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort.6

Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a misidentification of the enemy.

This abstracting of foes and threats from their context—this ease with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war with “Islamofascists,” “extremists” from a strange culture, who dwell in some distant “Islamistan,” who hate us for who we are and seek to destroy “our way of life”—is a sure sign that we have forgotten the lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.

How else are we to explain our present indulgence for the practice of torture? For indulge it we assuredly do.

“But what would I have achieved by proclaiming my opposition to torture?” he replied. “I have never met anyone who is in favor of torture.”8 Well, times have changed. In the US today there are many respectable, thinking people who favor torture—under the appropriate circumstances and when applied to those who merit it.

American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.

We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and “exceptional” circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and “terrorists,” between “us” and “them”—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur “never again.” So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war’s indefinite continuance.

They all had to be the same species.

was not surprising to find that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, a clear expectation of the biological species concept.

I wonder when the penny will drop: when we have five pieces of a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, every new bit that we add is likely to change the picture.

e identity of the fourth player remains unknown but it was an ancient lineage that had been separate for probably over a million years. H. erectus seems a likely candidate. Whatever the name we choose to give this mystery lineage, what these results show is that gene flow was possible not just among contemporaries but also between ancient and more modern lineages.

cientists succeeded in extracting the most ancient mitochondrial DNA so far, from the Sima de los Huesos site in Atapuerca, Spain.

We have built a picture of our evolution based on the morphology of fossils and it was wrong.

when we know how plastic - or easily changeable - skull shape is in humans. And our paradigms must also change.

e must abandon, once and for all, views of modern human superiority over archaic (ancient) humans. The terms "archaic" and "modern" lose all meaning as do concepts of modern human replacement of all other lineages.

he deep-rooted shackles that have sought to link human evolution with stone tool-making technological stages - the Stone Ages - even when we have known that these have overlapped with each other for half-a-million years in some instances.

e world of our biological and cultural evolution was far too fluid for us to constrain it into a few stages linked by transitions.

We have to flesh out the genetic information and this is where archaeology comes into the picture.

Rather than focus on differences between modern humans and Neanderthals, what the examples show is the range of possibilities open to humans (Neanderthals included) in different circumstances.

research using new technology on old archaeological sites, as at La Chapelle; and