From the Vault: Biophilia

it's a very I think, uplifting idea. Granted, we you know, we talked about some of the pros and cons of the hypothesis in this episode, but I think it's a cool thing to take with us here in our first Vault episode of the new year. Yeah, I think we talked about some potential limitations of it as an idea, but at the same time, it's hard to resist EO. Wilson's infectious love of all things living and squirming and breathing. Absolutely all right, So let's go ahead and dive right in.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert. Not too long ago we were talking about ticks, about how it turns out you can get a tick on your eyeball sucking the juice from within straight through the conjunctiva. It turns out you can get all kinds of acquired diseases from ticks, like the acquired meat allergy syndrome, or the of course lime disease. We all know about all

these other diseases. Of course, the woods are full of not just small animals that can hurt you, but in fact, if you want to go up to the Northwest or somewhere like that, there might be bears that could be a threat to you. And yet people want to go to the woods. Well they're lovely, dark and deep, that's the thing. I mean. I like to go to the woods. And yet there's nothing in the woods that materially benefits me. There's no food there, there's no like mating opportunity there.

And it's kind of an odd thing to say, but you know, there's no in a biological sense of the word, nothing there for me really except an experience. And yet I seek that experience. I love going hiking in the woods. Yeah, I find the same situation with with my family. We go out in these these little hikes, you know, in the Atlanta area, And yeah, we're not We're not foraging for berries or mushrooms or or hunting small prey. We're just going out there and kind of breathing air, getting

a little exercise. And um, yeah, I mean you can. You could break it down into those tangibles and say, well, I'm getting some fresh air, I'm getting some exercise, I'm you know, I'm occupying myself for the morning, I'm getting away from my phone or something like this. But be happen in terms of these like evolved needs, these basic biological needs, they're not they're not necessarily being fulfilled. Yeah, the woods, for some reason, seem to give you pleasure.

It's a thing you're seeking out, even though there's not a real direct that. There might be indirect explanations, but there's not a really direct explanation for why your body would be sending you there. Here's another question, why do we like pets? Oh yeah, I mean this is a question. My wife and I asked a lot about our cat because she's kind of a nightmare. But we so we always have the discussions where like parasites. Yeah, there, she's living in our house, eating our food. Uh, and what

does she give back? Like, she's not she's not keeping mice out of our our grain or anything. She's just laying around and frequently attacking my feet and sometimes barfing on the floor. But then but we still love her for some reason. She's still enriches our lives somehow. Our dog, Charlie is an absolute parasite. He sometimes can be so annoying, but we love this dog. This dog. He brings me

so much pleasure. I'm so happy to have this dog, even when he's barking at me to take him on a walk while I'm trying to work on something, or or just eating a bunch of food that we have to pay for. I mean, from a strict material point of view, there's not really a reason to want to have this thing in my house except that I love him. Yeah. And you know, and I bet a lot of people out there right now are thinking, well, I'm not a dog person, I'm not a cat person. I don't like

to go into the woods. I would I would invite you to expand these definitions because I feel like there are certainly individuals out there who really don't want to go into the you know, the north Georgia wilderness. But they might be very attracted to, say, you know, the desert environments of Arizona, or to other national parks, or to the beach or you know, or to tropical islands

like some. So if your local outdoor environment doesn't call you, if specific outdoor environments don't don't call to you, then there have to be there are probably other natural world environments that that do ring your bell. I got one more for you, Robert. Why do people plant flowers in

their backyard? Yeah? I mean what maybe maybe you could say, Okay, planning flowers in the front yard could be some kind kind of social thing where you're trying to demonstrate your I don't know, wealth and leisure time or something like that. People plant flowers in their backyard people nobody can see them except you. And so again is that there There appears to they're getting some kind of pleasure from having these plants that are growing, that they're taking care of.

And the plants don't provide food, they don't provide any material benefit except that you look at them and it makes you feel good unless you're growing edible flowers. Well, you know, but wait, is that a thing? I thought edible flowers. You can buy them at heallefits. You can seriously get a whole container of edible flowers for like, you know, eighteen bucks or something. Wait, people eat squash blossom stuff, true squash blossom. But yeah, a lot of

people that do grow flowers. You're just growing to look at them or to appreciate, say the butterflies that are attracted and by them, the or the various pollinating insects. Yeah. So we have all these weird relationships with life forms and natural landscapes, with pet animals, with vegetation. And if not a dog or a cat, you think of fish, think, oh, yeah, you know snakes, reptiles, You have the reptiles, whatever your fancy is, even a even a weird pet like a

scorpion or a tarantula. And uh and you know, I'm not calling you a weirdo if you have those, but you're probably into the weirdness of it. If you do own a pet scorpion, a tarantula. What about if you own pet ticks, well, then you're probably what a a

A a partially mythological Eastern warlord. Right. As a call back to our Ticks episode, that would be great to have a pit of ticks in your house for when, you know, just to threaten the children when they're being too unruly, or you just have them as pets, and people are like, whoa, you have a pit full of ticks. That's horrible, And you're like, no, I don't. I don't feed anybody to the ticks. I just keep them around.

I love to watch these little guys crawl around. So we're presented with a question here, and the human seek out all kinds of activities and get pleasure from all kinds of activities that don't appear to have any direct material benefit, yet we we just like them. And so one reason for this could be that it's some kind of cultural thing that we, you know, we grow up being taught to like walking in the woods or to

like looking at flowers, and that's possible answer. But also many of these things seem very universal, like across different cultures, people have some kind of companion animal relationship, or they enjoy certain natural landscapes, they enjoy being surrounded by certain types of plants, and so another way of looking at this, apart from just cultural learning, could be that there's some kind of biological instinct that connects us to other forms

of life, even forms of life that aren't directly benefiting us by say, providing food or providing shelter or something like that. And this brings us to the topic of today's episode, which is a hypothesis that's been around in biology and evolutionary psychology for a few decades now, known as the biophilia hypothesis, and this is mainly attributed to the work that there have been multiple people working in this field now, but it's mainly attributed to the work

of the American biologist Edward O. Wilson also known as EO. Wilson. Now, Robert, you recently went to like the E. O. Wilson Center. Is this a place uh from his hometown? Um, it's It's definitely down from his stomping grounds because Edward O. Wilson is it was Alabama, born in the nineteen nine and he grew up in various Florida and Alabama towns, so this is very much in his his stomping grounds.

The Edward Wilson Center is in Freeport, Florida, and um I and my family visited it earlier this month and it's named in honor of Wilson. And it echoes his ideas and values. And he's he's been there, he's done, he's he's visited the center, so he's he's he's very much a part of it's it's ethos. I guess you, I guess you would say, so, what's this place like?

It's wonderful. So my family was vacationing at Graton Beach, which is close to Deston, But if you need a broader idea of where it is, we're talking roughly halfway along the coast between Pensacola and Panama City. And I know that at times, if one is visiting Florida you're not a Floridian yourself, there's sometimes a hesitancy to uh to backtrack away from the beach too much. But there there are some I mean, far from from just this

one location. There's some wonderful outdoor uh you know, things to see in the States. So so don't be afraid to explore a bit. Uh No, I know exactly what you're talking about. Some people really love the beach. I really love the swamp. Yeah. One of my favorite places that have been to a few times now is uh Coola Springs State Park in Florida. This is where you have this wonderful deep natural spring. You have manateees coming in this rich um estuary environment with protected regions. Is

this where you saw the leaping fish? When we jump off leaping fish, they were just leaping around like it was a Disney movie. It was fabulous. If you haven't caught that episode, that's from I guess a year or so ago. Yeah, but yeah, I go back and check out our episode about jumping fish. That was a more interesting topic than I expected. Yeah, that one and and at times deadly. I'll make sure we linked to that one on the landing page for this episode is Stuff

to Blow your Mind dot com. But the Edward O. Wilson Center, Yeah, so it's a wonderful indoor outdoor educational center and it really does an excellent job of relating biology to two young people. Most of the time, during the course of the year it's it's only open to school groups and whatnot. But during the summer June and July it's open to the public on Thursdays and Fridays. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to E. O. Wilson Center dot org. Uh. But yeah,

it's wonderful. There's a giant bird when you first walk in the door. They are giant animals to crawl on. There's a there's an observable bee colony honey bees you can check out and try and find the queen. So if it's Edward Wilson Center, I would expect there to be ants there right. There are ants. Yes, there's a huge display on ants, a giant ant that you can crawl on. Yeah. So it's it's it's really wonderful stuff.

I recommend going like honey, I shrunk the kids scale. Yes. Well, so before we get into the biophelia hypothesis, we I guess we should talk about Edward Wilson himself because one of the so he's got this book from nineteen four I believe, is from the nineteen eighties called Biophelia, where he first articulates this idea. Now he would explore it more in a later book. Um, but this book, Biophilia is a is a book I've read, and it's a

really enjoyable scientific memoir. A lot of what he talks about is like his research on ants and his field work in places like Suriname and Papua New Guinea, And so he weaves together these themes from his life and from his work in science and his thoughts about what the role of science and society is. The the idea that ties this all together is this idea of biophilia are innate affiliation with or desire to focus on other

living life forms in natural landscapes or lifelike processes. Now, there's some ambiguity in there, and we can address that ambi uity later and any problems that might cause for this as a hypothesis. But he definitely has a personal way of expressing his feelings about this idea, right. It very much connects back to stories throughout his life. Yeah, so it's important to note that Edward O. Wilson is

he's the real deal here. He is. He's he is an acclaimed scientist, uh specifically an entomologist, and he is a and he is a very accomplished author. Like he he officially retired in but he's just continued to write books, uh like almost every year. I mean, his bibliography is incredible and his books are good. He's one of those science writers who is actually a very very good writer. He's expressive and poetic, but he also gets to the point I think he's one of the better scientists slash

science writers in America. Yeah and then. And he's also very relatable, especially when you see him, you know, in person or a video or a Ted talk. He's he's Alabamable, worn, he's very folksy, and he describes himself as being essentially still a child at heart, and he has that kind

of enthusiasm for nature. So I mentioned he was born in an earlier biographical detail that often comes up and he attributes to being what sort of steered him into studying ants is that he was seven years old and he blinded himself in one eye during a fishing accident, you know what. He pulled up a fish and the finn got him right, and spiny finn got him in

the eye and blinded him. And so he this led him to focus more, he says, on little things, things that he could actually get up, you know, get up close to with an eyeglass. So he turned to ants entomology. This game his key area of research. He attended the University of Alabama and earned his bachelor's and masters in biology, and he identified fire ants as an invasive species and reported on the first US colony of fire ants. That was while he was in college. That was when he

was in college, the early days for him. Um and and this is we were just talking about this before we went on the air. Here there's a video on you to uh and it was I believe it. It is aligned with the E. O. Wilson Center. But it starts off narrated by Harrison Ford and uh and in Attenborough comes in and talks about how how how amazing

Edward o'wilson is. So this this video is weird for multiple reasons, and one of them is that you hear Harrison Ford trying to sound enthusiastic about something, which I don't know if I've ever heard before. Yeah, you know, the most chronically bored and unenthusiastic actor in the history of cinema, and we love him for it. But he's he's talking about the greatness of the work of Edward Wilson, and he still kind of has that that lake onic, sad,

not very excited edge in his voice. Yeah, even though this is this is clearly like he's clearly passionate about it, Like you did this for a reason. But later on in the video, you're following Edward o Wilson, like recent Edward O. Wilson, Old Edward O. Wilson wandering around in the Florida wilderness, coming up to uh a fire ant colony. He reaches down with his bare hand, stirs them up like scrapes the nest and they all begin to swarm.

And then he sticks his hand in the nest and lets them crawl in his hand and lets them begin to uh to attack his hand and uh and then he brushes them off. But it really demonstrates his man his devotion to connecting with the natural world and his fascination with the With these insects, well, it's almost deranged because he's he's like smiling gleefully as they're all stinging and attacking the back of his hand. He's got these hundreds of ants on his skin and he's like each

one of these bites is like a hot needle. But it it just shows you how, you know, how fascinated he is with them like that he would have this really kind of a holy moment, Like I kept thinking of St. Francis with the animals, only instead of touching a you know, petting a lamb, he's petting fire ants. If lambs could sting. Yes, so um Edward O. Wilson h So, he moved onto Harvard in nine and he joined the faculty there and again he retired in UH.

But but he remains on as an honorary curator in entomology and he's during the course of his career again, he's written numerous books. He's received more awards than we can list in this podcast, including the Pulitzer Prize, which he I believe received at least twice. UH. He's received the Ted Prize and the U S National Medal of Science again just to name a few. Now, a lot of Wilson's efforts outside of his scientific research over the years have been focused on the idea of conservation and

preservation of nature. Yes, that we have this rich biodiversity. Everything is connected, and we have to preserve it because if you start you start pulling things out, you start allowing things to go dark in this epic grid of by a biodiverse um life, then you're gonna have cascading collapses and you're going to You're going to to risk

tremendous damage to our ecosystem. He sort of reminds me of the influence of somebody who I enjoyed talking about last year in our summer reading episode, which is the early ecologist Alexander von Humboldt sort of responsible for the idea of ecology, both focusing on the inner connections between things in nature. How an organism doesn't No organism is an island, It doesn't stand on its own, and they all have connected inter dependencies. And we we we threaten

natural life forms at our own peril. And I think he frames this in two ways. He says, you know, destroying natural habitats and destroying organisms that may in fact be some kind of keystone species in a natural ecology that threatens us materially, like these can have negative effects on our health. It can lead to the spread of new diseases, It can make resources harder to get, it

can cause all kinds of problems for us materially. But he also emphasizes a lot just just the feeling of pleasure we get from nature and how important it is to our sense of well being and happiness to have intact natural ecologies around us. And this is sort of how he gets to the biophilia hypothesis. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back we will dive into the biophilia hypothesis and discuss what it's saying. Uh, and also eventually we also get to

some criticism about it. All right, we're back. So Wilson proposed this term biophilia meaning the love of life in the short publication back in biophilia the human bond with other species, and he defined this as humanities innate tendency to focus on living things as opposed to the inanimate, and in effect, he argued for in innate love of nature.

Now there you already see some tension in the definitions, right, because in one statement there it's talking about focusing on other life forms and lifelike processes, and in the other statement it's saying that we naturally love nature. Now, focusing on things and loving them are different. And this is going to be one of the problems people have raised with the biofilia hypothesis is um that it may not be exactly pinned down on exactly what the hypothesis is saying.

But for now we we should just try to explain the way it's usually expressed by people who are in favor of the biofilia hypothesis, and they tend to go with the focus idea, right, that it's that we focus on other living things and lifelike processes, where for some reason we're way more interested in trees than we are in rocks. Now. I should also add that the term biofiliate itself was used earlier in the nineties sixties by the German social psychologist Eric from to denote a psychological

orientation towards nature. But uh, it was really Lee Wilson who then took it and tweet the meaning and really led to its primary usage today. Well, maybe we should read a passage from Wilson to see what what he has to say about the concept. He says, the object of my reflection can be summarized by a single word, biophilia, which I will be so bold as to define as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. From infancy, we concentrate happily on ourselves and other organisms.

We learned to distinguish life from the inanimate and move toward it like moths to a porch. Light. Novelty and diversity are particularly esteemed. The mere mention of the word extraterrestrial evokes reveries about still unexplored life, displacing the old and once potent exotic that drew earlier generations to remote islands and jungled interiors. That much is immediately clear, but

a great deal more needs to be added. I will make the case that to explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development, to an extent still undervalued and philosophy and religion. Our our existence depends on this propensity. Our spirit is woven from it. Hope rises on its currents. Yeah, I like that, and so I like that he's he's situating biophilia as a sort as a hypothesis to explain something about our nature.

But it also, I think for him takes on a sort of propulsive meaning about like how we should act. That if we act in accordance with with these natural urges to affiliate with nature, we can sort of shed this man conquers nature mentality that was present in a lot of human history. And you might wonder, like, Okay, so if throughout a lot of human history we've had this mentality of you know, we've got to tame the beast of nature, We've got to make it bend to

our will and defeat our predatory adversaries wild? Is that is that tendency throughout human history a challenge to the bio philly a hypothesis. I don't know, what do you think, Robert, Well, we'll discuss this a little bit more as we go. But I do find it interesting that even in environmental circles, even in um, in environmental movements, you see them, you

see individuals evoke this idea of mastery over nature. You know, it becomes this idea of saving the planet, positioning man, is this as as not completely you know, dishonestly, but positioning us as individuals with power over nature, and therefore we should use our power over nature to rain things

in and gain control over the situation. I like the way you put it there with about the idea of saving the planet, Like why do what does it mean when you talk about saving the whales versus not hurting the whales? I mean essentially you're you're saying the same thing,

but they're starting with different assumptions. Uh. When if you were to say save the whales, it almost says like, you know, we have of two fates on a scale that we control, and we can press one side down or press the other side down, save them or kill them. But really the idea is that on their own they'd be fine. We are doing things to them to kill them. You know, it's not like they were naturally going extinct

when we found them. Yeah, so you could have you can have one person that's saying save the whales, and the other person could say, let's live in harmony with the whales. Ultimately they may be arguing for the same thing, but that but each argument cast humanity and its role with nature in a slightly different light. Yeah, and so I think the the stop harming the environment as opposed to save the environment might be better because it better emphasizes the fact that we we live alongside all the

other organisms in the environment and we need them. They're not like pets that we're deciding what to do with. Of course, then again, messaging is aimed at at the listener, and there are going to be certain group, certain individuals that are going to react more strongly to two different arguments and say, hey, you have the power to say some whales. Don't you want to say some whales? Yeah, that made me feel really good. But if you say, hey, man,

stop killing the whales. Stop hurting the whale, stop wrecking our environment. You know that puts sometimes a negative spin on it that is not going to be as embraced by an individual or group. Yeah. I guess it's the superhero mentality. You want to be the superhero and save the bus full of children. It's not all that exciting to say that you wouldn't harm a bus full of children. Yeah. I have one more quote from Wilson I want to

read before we move forward. He just because this is just another example of his his beautiful ability to to sum up so many of these environmental ideas. He says, the living environment is what really sustains us. The living environment creates the soil, creates most of the atmosphere. It is not just something out there. The biosphere is a membrane,

a very thin membrane of living organism. Now it's important to point out that as a scientific HYPOTHESI this if Biophelia has anything to say, it should have something to say, meaning that it shouldn't just be you know, people love nature, right, because we that's sort of obvious. People do generally tend to love nature in one way or another, even if you're not really an outdoors person, You probably have some kind of preference for natural shapes, for plant environments, for

things like that over dead, dry, uninhabited landscapes. I mean, think about picture the surface of the Moon or Mars or something like that. Does that look like a place you want to live? No, But at the same time it is. It is an environment, right. I Mean, we were just talking about Arabia Mountain yesterday, which is a local hiking area in the Atlanta area, and we were saying, Oh, it's great, it's like walking on another planet. It's like being on the moon. Yeah, it's cool for a couple hours.

It's it's not a place that I would want to live, I think, because well, even though there are some plants on it, the thing about Arabia Mountain is it's placed near atlant know where it's this this outcropping of mostly bald stone that has no soil. It has no plants. There are a few little groves on it that have trees and bushes growing up out of them, but mostly it's just bare rock. And while I'm there, it's cool, but it's cool for exactly the reason that it's not

a place I'd want to stay. Does that make sense? But how do you feel about the desert. I like the desert, but the desert is full of life. I don't know how i'd feel about, well, the desert I've been to. I mean, like, I've been to the Chihuahua

Desert and it's full of life. It's fascinating. And the life in the desert when you come to like a place where there's a river flowing through a desert and there's green radiating out away from it, the life you see becomes all the more precious because of how scarce the greenery and things are in other places around. Now a place that's just pure sand dunes with no life forms at all, I don't know. That's cool to look out for a few minutes, but I don't know if

i'd want to stay there. Okay, uh yeah, I guess it's gonna vary from from person to person, but I would love to hear from anyone out there is Listening's like, yes, build me a cabin in a out on the sand dunes and would be happy. Uh. You might have might be able to put a make a stronger argument for it. Now to your point about this being a hypothesis too,

and about it being scientific scientifically grounded. Is that on one hand, yes, biophilia involves an ethos and uh and a lot of just commentary on what it is to be human and the human experience. But then there is also the the idea that there's at least in part a genetically and involved, that this is something that is going to go deeper than just uh, you know how we're nurtured, but it's going to get down to our core biological nature. Yeah, this would make it biologically testable.

It's say, it's that our tendency to affiliate with nature, or tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes is somehow determined by our gene, or at least it's primed by our genes. Gene primed learning is a thing that they often emphasize. So that should, in theory be testable in some way if you're clear enough about what it is you're looking for. So maybe we should talk about

some of the commonly cited evidence by biophilia theorists. What do they say are good reasons to think that we have this innate, in inherited tendency to affiliate with other life forms? All right, well, here's some of the here's some of the anecdotal evidence. All right, Um, so, first

of all, universal appreciation for nature across human cultures. Now we've already touched on this a little bit, but it's just the idea that would no matter where you go, there's going to be nature and natural elements wrapped up in that culture. And Uh, one example that I really like is people in very different cultures over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the Pleistocene savannas. Uh,

that we evolved to thrive in the ideal savannah. Yeah, and this is related to a concept to known and evolutionary psychology is the environment of evolutionary adapted nous or the e e A, which is basically the idea that animals tend to be adapted not to live anywhere on Earth, but for a particular landscape or type of environment that shaped their genes. And if that's the case, you've sort of like put your chips down on being the kind

of organism that thrives in this kind of place. And as such, you should have some kind of mechanisms in your brain that tell you seek out that kind of place where you play best. Yes, now this I love this. Uh this this theory in this idea about art though, because if you spend any time in museums, you run across the landscapes. And sometimes I'm not I'm not too

much of a landscape guy. I tend to walk by a lot of the unless there's something really cool going on, such as uh we were just in the last episode talking about or one of our previous episodes talking about landscape with the fall of Vicharus by h was it Bosha brugle I can't brugle b and uh, so you have one detail of a falling mythological figure, but then also just a natural landscape with human activity and nature

going on. So when you do, when you look at a lot of these these works of landscape art, you find open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees. The trees tend to fork near the ground, which is to say, if they're tree, their trees you could scramble up into if you needed to get away from something.

There's water close by or in the distance, so you don't feel like you're going to necessarily dry up or you know you or you'd be able to take a swim if you got overheated, or there's there are indications of animal life, maybe birds in the distance, as well as diverse green ory. And finally, get this, a path or a road, perhaps a river bank or a shoreline that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it.

And in this type of landscape is generally regard it is beautiful, even by people in countries that don't have it. You know, like your your culture might not have a lot of landscape art, but you're gonna there's a very good chance you're going to encounter another culture's landscape art and you're gonna get it. You know, you can be complete. You could have never seen any you know, say Chinese or Japanese landscape art, and then you would view it and you'd be like, yeah, I totally get it, and

you're you're just drawn into it. You you want to crawl into the painting and run around with the trees. Okay. So this is commonly cited anecdotal evidence about the kinds of art and imagery people prefer. Now, I would say, as a counter example, as long as we're sticking with anecdotal for now, and when we're not claiming to have some kind of strong empirical case. I'd say, just personally, when I think about landscape images, I like the most.

I like mountain images. Yeah, well, you know, one of these things is that to what is often going on in a mountain image. I mean, you're gonna have some somebody or something standing at a peak looking out just having you know, mastery over the landscape, being able to survey everything around you and see predators approaching you from a distance. You could very much argue that that's an

evolutionary adaptation as well. Yeah, because exactly having having the higher ground gives you the ability to see what's coming in in multiple directions. But of course that isn't exactly biophilia, because that that's talking about landscapes, w It's not really

talking about organisms or lifelike processes. Though. One thing I will point out is that in some of the biophilia literature there does seem to be sometimes a kind of blurry nous or fuzziness about whether we're talking still just about natural organisms, or whether this is turning into a preference for natural types of landscapes as opposed to I

don't know what cities or something like that. Yeah. Now, and another example that comes up is the fact that some of the earliest human art works are the the the various cave paintings that show you know, realistic animals, realistic human beings and uh and uh, and also just decorative motifs that are clearly inspired by natural world organisms. Totally. Yeah, you see these these ancient reverent images, and they tend to be what they tend to be animals, Yeah, especially

prey animals that you might be hunting. Yeah, exactly. And you know, these date back thirty two thousand years in the case of some of the French cave paintings that we've seen, and if you if you consider shell necklaces and whatnot, which might be stretching the argument a little bit, but that can take you back a good hundred thousand years. Now. Beyond that, there are other anecdotal examples, like landscape architecture

is full of of of examples of this. I ran across some of some material by Bill Brown and Keith Bowers and Carol Franklin, all of them landscape architects and uh, and they point out that you're just frekently going to encounter actual nature inside of of a building. You're going to counter fish tanks and plants you can encounter. Uh, you know, ornaments and patterns that read like nature. So it might be you say, you're in Florida and then

you go into a beach resort. But is there going to be some sort of pineapple design, you know on the pillars or on the wallpaper. Uh, you have to take that into account and uh and oh and then that opens savannah that we crave. Well, you could argue that we also create it to some extent in our golf courses. You're right, golf courses. In a way, it's it's a weird combination, like the ultimate mastery over nature.

You and you enslave nature and just turn it into your own yard game then and bend it to your will. But still you're you're evoking certain natural motifs, you know. Yeah, I don't know why I'm so impressed by that. I feel like you've golf courses. You just blew my Savannah hypothesis skepticism out of the water. And uh, I mean it does go to show that the idea of biophilia, there's like overt biophilia and then biophilia in ways that you didn't even realize you were. You were, you know,

employing it. Like. Another example of that is the symbolic use of nature and human language. Oh yeah, all our metaphors are nature metaphors. Yeah, you know a lot of a lot of them are very over you know, blind as a bat. Wise, is it now pretty as a peacock, crazy as a rat as an outhouse rat? Um? Whoa, whoa what? Oh yeah, thats a real expression, just like that, as crazy as an outhouse rat. And then there's crazy as a rat and a coffee can I love a

good crazy rat? Uh? Analogy there? But how about a bull in a China shop? A bull in a China shop is good too. Of course, China shops are not very uh, very much part of our revolutionary adapted landscape. But but but the bull is the bull, the bull and various other animals as a way to evoke personality,

you know. And the thing is, these are these are just some of the obvious ones, but it gets a lot more elegant, to the point that you're not always aware that you're invoking animal imagery in your language, but it's there. Oh and then I mean we could go on for forever here about about spiritual everance for nature across cultures totally. Ye, think of all the sacred places in global myth, from dentic gardens to sacred mountains to primordial oceans like we discussed in our recent episode about

creating a universe. Yeah, I agree with that, though yet again there were somewhat blurring the original definition. If the hypothesis is supposed to be about organisms, Wait a minute, are we talking about landscapes or just organism? Well, let's talk about organisms. Let's look at all those gods and demigods that we have rolling about, uh how much? I mean, certainly there are examples of very anthropomorphic deities that are

just pretty much just tall bearded people. But yet even in even say Abrahamic tradition, you have what you have winged angels that's invoking uh like you know, hybrid or or chimerical imagery. And then you have just straight up yeah, you have the world serpents. You have celestial dragons in Chinese mythology that are themselves com posits of all these various animal motifs. And of course you look at the pantheon of the Hindu deities and you see all of

these wonderful animal forms. Now, Wilson himself is very much into the idea of serpent imagery throughout human culture. As one example of that, he sites of biophilia. But this goes into Wilson's broader definition of biophilia because as some people employ the term, they think that it just means

like love of other organisms or love of nature. Wilson goes with that focus on that our attention is naturally drawn to and stuck on other organisms, especially organisms that have some kind of evolutionary relevance for us, and one of the examples is the widespread biophobia of snakes. So for Wilson, biophobia is actually a subset of biophilia. We've got this relationship with other organisms, and so the serpent human mind relationship is something that that he really focuses on.

He talks about how common snake dreams are across human cultures, how common snake imagery is in religions on all all parts of the planet, how common snake imagery is an art that they're just snakes everywhere, we apparently can't get them off the brain. And then he also compares this to the way that other primates seem to react to snakes with with greater alarm and magnitude of activity than they would too many other types of animals of comparable size.

Oh yeah, I mean, and and it goes beyond beyond that indo our various pet animals. If anyone's ever conducted the cucumber test with a cat, replace the cucumber on the the the floor behind them when they're not looking. No, they'll turn around, and if they glimpse the cucumber they'll jump. Whoa, um, I've had I have not had a lot of luck with this experiment with my own cat, granted how many times he tried. Only when I'm holding a cucumber in the kitchen and I looked down and see the cat

facing the other way. So maybe you need longer cucumbers, yeah, or just more you know, I should, I should plan more in my cat experiments. But then, of course, anyone who's in who's ever and involved themselves with horses knows. You know how a horse can behave if it sees a snake. I mean, and and I'm not even sure about dogs. I assume dogs have strong reactions to serpents as well. Yeah, I'd imagine just the other day, my dog Charlie tried to eat a dead one. Oh well,

we're out walking. It's there on the sidewalk, belly up, rotting a little bit and he he saw a snack. Do yank him away? You have to get in there now. Back to the idea of religion and UH in biophilia, you know, I also think that that heavily nature line faiths illustrate this as well, such as like Shinto comes to mind, you know, the Japanese UH mentality that there is UH. You know, there's a there's a spiritual energy

and all things. And granted some of that includes rocks but statues, but it can you know, certainly includes a natural forms as well an organism UH. And there's actually an excellent article in the New York Times from this week. By the time you hear it, it it will be like a couple of weeks old, I guess. But it's about resurgent religious faith in China and the environmental activism that is coming with it. And it's hardly an underground thing.

President Jijin Ping has a champion to return to interest in Chinese culture and particularly Taoism and Confusism. So and part of this is countering Western influences, but he's called for China to return to its roots as a quote, ecological civilization. Now, the article also points out that the movement as vote motivating Chinese Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims as well. And you know, it's it's always I think worth reminding everyone that the China is is home to fifty five

distinct ethnic groups, even if Han is the majority there. Uh, and they're also numerous religious faiths. Now, I wonder how this initiative plays into the Chinese government's enabling of heavy polluting industry. I mean, of course they're not unique in government to enable that. But no, no, that's a that's a a fair fair criticism, and I think that's certainly

a conflict in uh in China, uh presently um. And you know, there are other motivations as well, such as with you know, the U S sort of taking a a lesser role in the environmental leadership, that there's a place for someone like China to step up and assume power. So there's power here as well. Uh, that's that's at stake.

But as this article by Javierra see Hernandez points out, there's there's more of an emphasis in these resulting environmental movements on living in harmony with nature rather than what is perceived as a Western take on saving the Earth. To come back to the distinction we were talking about earlier, so it's don't kill the whales, not save the whales, right, Yeah. And I think this is interesting in light of by affiliate, because I think it's very in keeping with the message

of stewardship understanding biodiversity. But at the same time we see that that very savior message, uh, you know, invoked in materials promoting Edward Wilson and biophilia that like that Harrison Ford video we're talking about. He describes that quote as an epic battle to save our planet and it will involve swords and magic staves. And then you know, there are some people will actually bring a technology into this argument as well. Wilson himself said that the more

we understand organisms through science, the closer we become to them. Uh. And while technology can arguably distance ourselves from nature as well, it can bring us closer. Molecular biology and genetic engineering, for example, bring us closer to nature because is a greater understanding. And you can even argue that the search

for extraterrestrial life too is a biophilic endeavor. Oh, I mean, the CT is almost perfect example of biophilia if there is any merit to the idea, because like, there are millions of planets out there that we could be interested in, and what are we interested in. We're interested in the

ones that have life on them. Now that could you could say that there there's just sort of like a cognitively recognized self preservation instinct right that we we say, Okay, if there's another planet with life on it out there could be a threat to us, could help us, so that we have motivations based in our cognitive capacities to understand that life has this this value out there. But that's not the only kind of life we're interested in. People have been looking for microbes in the soil of

Mars for decades. Now, you know, we scoop up the soil of Mars and we want to see things alive in it. Why do we care so much about that? I mean, and that's not just scientists who care. I understand why scientists care because it's part of their life's work. But the average person really does care. Usually whether there's

life on Mars. That's an interesting question to them. Why, Well, because the answer ends up saying I mean, it ends up saying something about ourselves and about life itself, you know. But but also I think just because life is interesting, that the presence of life somewhere makes that place so much more fascinating than an otherwise dead rock covered in loose soil and stones. This makes me want to see more sort of darkly Edward Wilson type characters and some

of our sci fi horror. You know, someone who's going to really just reach out and touch the xenomorphs and love them. I guess we do see characters like that in the various alien films that Brad Dworf comes to mind in the Alien Resurrection. I can't speak any anything positive but Thelian Resurrection. Let's move on. All right, Well, let's move on to DA Let's take one more quick break, and when we come back we'll get into measurable bio

biological evidence for biophilia as well as some evidence against it. Alright, we're back. So so far we've been talking not super rigorously about science. We've been talking about general anecdotal observations about people's behavi of vir about culture, about our own feelings, and that's fine, but that's not going to prove a

scientific hypothesis and make it a workable theory, right. And and Edward Wilson has has been pretty clear throughout his career with this that like, there's not strong evidence for it, that there I think he more recently said, yeah, there's stronger evidence for it, but he's not He realizes that the evidence is not there yet. A lot of more research is required. But some of the measurable evidence that's

out there. We've already touched on this a little bit, but measurable physiological responses and humans that are exposed to sometimes just images of snakes or spiders, right, There has been actual empirical research on this, and and it's comparing our responses as humans to the responses especially of other primates, to say, like, is there some inherited, uh genetic component

to our reactions to these animals that's not just culturally learned. Yes, that in a way, there's just like there's there's awareness, there's an important like sub cognitive awareness, you know. And to go back to the the idea of biophobia, this would be a biophobia that Wilson would include underneath his definition of biophilia, it would be a natural focus or

attention that we give to certain types of organisms. Now, another big area and this is this is certainly an area where there been a number of of studies over the years, and we can easily do a whole episode on it. But the importance of sunlight on mood and productivity.

Mm hmm, Now how would that because obviously the sunlight is not like an organism, so right, but it's it's I believe the argument is that you're getting into the idea that like being being outdoors, being in nature, there are there are aspects of nature that yes, aren't directly aligned with organisms but aren't but is responsible for organisms that we're going to have this innate connection with. So

this is expanding the definition. And I have seen this done and some people who talk about the subject expanding the definition to say that it's not just the desire to affiliate with organisms, it with natural environments. Like when people talk about how it's people want to seek out water, being by the water or something like that, and that's you know, not necessarily being by a pool, but being by a natural river, lake or something like that. Uh, that could be Yeah, I guess that could be a

peripheral or related type of idea. Now, another area of measurable effect here ties in with study by Roger Yuruk which found that patients recovering from surgery actually recovered much more effectively uh if they were viewing trees and shrubs as opposed to those who would just had a view out their window of a brick wall. They also ended up taking half the painkillers and made half the nursing calls.

So there was like a change in their behavior, and not just in their reported effect, but in what they actually did. If they could see some vegetation, Yeah, if they just if they could just see some trees and you know, and you know, presumably maybe some squirrels and birds in there as well. M So this is part of a broader body of literature on the benefits of vegetative environments. There's been a lot of research like this, some of it also associated with the same guy uh

Roger Ulric and across different studies. People have this positive aesthetic reaction to plant filled environments, and these environments are usually found to have some kind of stress reducing effect or somehow this otherwise restorative effect on mood and on behavior. And this goes beyond vegetation as well. For example, people tend to report reductions in stress or show fewer stress behaviors in the presence of an aquarium has live fish

in it. Or how about the often report. I mean, we don't need to tell you about all of the tons of studies that report the health benefits and mood benefits of exposure to pets, companion animals, you know, lowering your blood pressure and all, you know, all the stuff like that over the years. Yeah, I think it's one of the reasons that you you have these hospital animals

that make the rounds and just meeting Greek people. Uh, just the idea being that this will this will improve their their condition at least in a small sense, but a measurable sense. One other thing I've read about this interesting is the idea of humans preference for certain geometric patterns. For example, uh So, geometric patterns can be expressed in terms of what are called fractal patterns, that are repeating patterns that are often said to resemble designs found in

biological organisms and in nature. So if you look down at surfaces of the earth from above, say winding rivers through a plain or how mountain, how you know, the the drainage areas in mountains form these these spiky patterns looking down from above, or if you look at the branches of trees, or of ferns, or of the spirals and flowering plants. I mean, it gets into the golden ratio, right.

I mean the idea that if you if you do any image editing out there, you you know, you often bring one of these overlays, even sometimes like I used the rule of thirds one a lot, which is a very in organic way of of breaking up your photo. But you can also bring in essentially a snail shell

so you can see this curve. Because so you end up with situations where people are like, they may not be actually thinking this, but essentially they're looking at an image and saying, oh this this photograph of race cars is great, but I'd love it a little bit more. It evoked an image of a snail shell, you know. Now, yeah,

you probably don't think it consciously, but people do. In some studies show preferences for fractal patterns, geometric fractal patterns at certain levels of of density branching, and these basically are said to correspond to the most common patterns seen in natural organisms. So if you're thinking about branching trees or mangrove roots or things like that, these are geometric

patterns that are brains seem to prefer looking at. Now, of course, one question about that is if we're respond in the geometric patterns through some innate preference in our brain that's not just culturally learned, but we we've got these inherited genetic preferences for things that spike at this

angle this many times. One wonder is if that means you could trick your brain into satisfying any kind of biophilic impulse to whatever extent that is real, just by looking at dead geometric patterns or things like that that simulate whatever it is we notice in nature that we like, Yeah, and I think here we get we get down to this situation where biophilia it's kind of like the echoes of biophilia throughout our our life and our culture and

our creations. Even things that don't you know, aren't overtly a statue of an animal or the the avocation of of an animal's form, Uh, there's still aspects of it there that are resonating through most of what we do. Now, I think it's time to talk about some criticisms of the idea because if you if you can't tell I've got some reservations about aphilia. At the same time that I find it strongly, intuitively persuasive, I also recognize that

the idea it's got some problems. So I wanted to talk about one study I read that was published inn and the journal Environmental Values, which is a peer reviewed environmental ethics journal by the author's joy and to Block called Nature and I are to a critical examination of the biophilia hypothesis. And like I said, while I I intuitively respond to a lot of what Wilson and people like him have said, I think this article makes some

good points. So they're arguing against the biophilia hypothesis, and they don't argue that we don't have natural inherited tendencies to focus on living things. But they're more talking about whether biophilia, as a commonly understood idea is a coherent scientific construct. So this is the author's take. Biophilia is presented as a hypothesis, and they say, Okay, that's fine, because when you're at the hypothesis age in science. You're not saying this is a proven theory or something like that.

You're just saying, we're speculating about something that appears to be the case. Let's do some experiments and find out if it's true. That would be fine. But there's one key criterion for a hypothesis, and that's that it needs to be falsifiable. Now, this is buying into one particular theory about the demarcation problem separating science from pseudoscience. We've talked about that before, but this is a very commonly

accepted solution of the demarcation problem. A hypothesis should be a statement that you can come up with some kind of way of showing whether it's true or false, that you could prove it false. Now, they turned to the biophelia definition that's often offered by E. O. Wilson, which is quote, the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. And they break that into three key parts, which is a the innate tendency be to focus and

see on life or lifelike processes. So they start by talking about life or life like processes, and this is a good point. They say, Okay, so how is life like defined? The hypothesis is often expanded to include things like, we've been talking about natural landscapes water features as the object of biophilia, So is a waterfall an object of biophilia?

Obviously a waterfall is not alive, but biophilia theorists sometimes assert that moving water features and other things are lifelike enough that they can be grouped under the biophilia rubric. And on what basis do we conclude that? Like what gets ruled in? And do people looking at a waterfall really start thinking of it in the same way they would think of an organism? I'm not sure that there's

strong evidence for that. Well, I mean, I mean, if you take the waterfall and you just think about flowing water, I mean, flowing waters is a habitat for organisms. Uh. And then you know, in any place where there's some sort of a dynamic with flowing water, there's a potential for the the capture and consumption of said organisms. Yeah.

I see that, But that that almost begs a greater expansion of the statement of the hypothesis, right, It seems like that would make it an innate tendency to focus on life or lifelike processes or environments that could sustain life or lifelike processes. But then you can also come back and say, what is a what is a branching uh, waterway but a bit of branching vein through a body? Like does the form of the flowing water evoke the flow of blood through an organism or the you know,

the chambers inside a plant. I mean, that's a good point, but I guess I guess the question would be are people really seeing it that way? Like, is that is that entering their minds? Or are they just responding to water because sometimes you get thirsty, yeah, Or it's just really loud, or they just like these moving features, or there's some other thing about it that's yeah. So I think that's a decent point to raise. The next thing

they focus on is the idea of focusing. So in that definition, there's some wishy washing us about what the human who experiences biophilia does. Like sometimes biophilia is treated as the desire to quote affiliate with other organisms, And to me, that means we would assume it to mean that you want to be near them, you want to look at them, you want to touch them, you want to interact with them. But other times there's this more

neutral word focus used. And and because of our biophilia, the ideas we focus on living organisms, they sort of command our attention living organisms or lifelike processes. But they point out that there's there's not necessarily consistency here. Ulric seems to define biophilia as a positive affiliation with life forms. Wilson himself includes biophobia within the definition of biophilia, and one of his primary examples, as we talked about, is

this nearly universal mental obsession with snakes and frightening snake imagery. Um, so they say that, you know, this part of the definition really does need to be more specific. We need to figure out what we're talking about here. Is it just what we like or is it what gets our attention or what is going on? Well, and this raises

questions too. I mean, it makes me think about about deer hunters, you know, which you can relate to having grown up uh in the South in Tennessee because it was not a deer hunter myself, but nor I have known many. Yeah, and there's a it's sometimes tricky I think for for people who aren't affiliated with that culture or haven't really given it much thought to to understand. But there is a love for nature, and you're gonna love for deer, I think with with a lot of

maybe even most maybe all deer hunters. You know, there's a and there's this at times kind of difficult to understand reverence for the deer. You know, you see like deer stickers on people's car and the trophies of of their heads, um, you know, hung in their homes almost with a like a religious zeal, almost like it's some some ancient uh you know antler god. Well, I mean

it mimics the behavior of our ancient ancestors. Who would you who might, in some kind of religious way take pieces of an animal that they had killed primarily for material resources. You know, you'd want its meat, you'd want its hide for clothing or something like that. But what do you do with the antlers? They become some kind of religious artifact, your tools. Yeah, all right, Well what about part A that innate part? Right? Then this is

another important part. So this means that biophelic tendencies are are not learned through culture, but they're inherited biologically. And this would generally be accepted to mean that they had adaptive value in the past, right, they served us some purpose, and so we adapted to favor them. And there's not always agreement on what form these adaptive mechanisms take, what whether they stem from the same general mechanism, or what

their relative importance is. So the authors reformulate the hypothesis to fit all the nuances they've just brought in, and it becomes there is a set of genetic predispositions of different strength, involving different sorts of affective states toward different

kinds of lifelike things. You can see the problem here, right, that this is becoming so broad as to accommodate almost anything, and it becomes really hard to falsify since there's just so much wiggle room in that in that definition of the proposition, and it creeps more towards just a pure ethos or philosophy as opposed to something you can scientifically test for. Right. Uh Now, to be fair to the biophelia theorists, the authors point out that this could be

a sort of unreasonably broad definition. Uh. That's an artifact of the fact that they're trying to synthesize the work of different researchers working within the biophelia framework, and that it's possible for one individual scientist maybe to have a tighter, sturdier, more testable version of the hypothesis, though the authors don't really seem to favor any of the particular ones they've

come across. But if so, I think what they're thinking needs to happen is that biophelia theorists should identify the leaner, more specific hypothesis and unify their experiments underneath it. They also they attack some of the specific evidence given for the common legs of the biophilia hypothesis, for example, the savannah preference hypothesis, the idea of us loving companion animals

and are quote vegetated settings. You know that we surround ourselves with potted plants and things like that, even though there's no apparent material reason or benefit for doing so.

And whether or not these criticisms of the lines of supporting evidence are correct, I'm somewhat persuaded by their criticism of the biophilia framework definition uh, and at the same time, I still feel persuaded by something about the general idea um Like I I do feel this urge to connect with nature in some sense and in the same way I was talking about Mars. Obviously, I think life commands our attention in a way that non living matter really does not seem to, even if it's not of immediate

relevance to our survival or something like that. But I don't know, maybe this could be culturally learned. I'm open to that possibility. So I'm somewhere in the middle on biophilia. I find it intuitively persuasive, but I also recognize that there could be a lot of problems with how it's framed as a scientific proposition, and maybe it needs to be narrowed down and made more specific and more falsifiable. Yeah, on a rational um level, I'm I'm, I'm, I think

I'm right there with you. But then if I if I look at it more emotionally, you know, and uh, and you know, philosophically, I guess I tend to decide with biophilia, especially since I my son is so biophilic. You know, he's just he loves animals so much, like he's not interested in cars or trucks or superheroes, but it's just it's just animals. He wants to draw animals, he wants to his the toys he has are generally

animal related. He needs to see animals. And and I do pick that apart, and I think, well, how much of this is you know, something that we have have nurtured in him? How much of this is just you know, has to do with his you know, with with nature itself and something out of our hands. Um, yeah, Like where does it come from? Is it? Is it biophilic and just a mirror like learnable sense or is it something deeper, something that that does have an origin in

his genes? So here's the real question. The thing we need to test for is we need to completely remove some human test subjects from all culture and put them on another planet and never communicate them with them at all, except we put some hidden cameras in and we give them the opportunity to either live in a in a in a sterile environment that satisfies all their material needs and gives them uh, food and entertainment and stuff like that, or an environment that's full of house plants and cats

and dogs and uh and gardens and flowers and access to walks in the woods. If they would go for the ladder, it does raise the question why do they want that? What? What is telling them to do that instead of just go to the place that meets all their material needs. You know, in discussing like sci fi scenarios here I can't help but but look back on the fabulous Bruce Dern movie Silent Running. Oh yeah, where he's trying to save the plants. Yeah, and he's yeah,

this is the situation in this movie. It's a great movie. See it if you if you haven't. But Bruce Dern basically plays like the the last biophilic human in our civilization. Like the forests of Earth are gone and they're only maintained within these giant biospheres aboard a series of they're not spaces, they're space ships, but they're kind of just in orbit and uh. And then the ruling comes up, the orders come up that they need to sine and

detonate all of the forests. Bruce Durn's character goes rogue and uh and you know, takes off towards Saturn with the last forests of Earth. It's the adult version of the lorax Y. He speaks for the trees um but yeah, it in that case, like he is that that's a vision of a humanity that has lost its biophilia that has drifted so far from it that they no longer feel and it's any attachment, and they no longer recognize the value of the natural world. Concrete, plastic, and steel

environments are good enough. Yeah, yeah, like cubes of food as opposed to the stuff that Bruce Durn's character is growing. I mean, that's part of my intuition. I just can't see us ever being cool with that. I just can't. But you know, maybe it's hard to it's hard to do an experiment to really test that. But maybe somebody will come up with a good way. So my my outlook on biophilia now is I recognize their problems with the framework, but but I think it could be salvaged.

I think people could come up with a with a leaner, more falsifiable version of the hypothesis and test the dickens out of it. All. Right, Well, there you have it, biophilia. Hopefully we provided a nice introduction to this if you weren't familiar with it, uh and and and if you were familiar with it, we uh we helped remind you about some of the I think some of the important

tenants of it. You know, certainly some of the potential problems with it, but also I think the overall positive message of biophilia as a you know, biodiversity focused view of humans humanity's interaction with nature. Now, take your dog out in the woods and get some ticks. Yeah, yeah, get out there all right. Hey. If you want to check out more episodes of Stuff about your Mind, head on over to stuff to Bowl your Mind dot com.

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