Way back in 2000, author Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point, a book that explains how ideas and messages spread like viruses. With catchy phrases of its own, like “the law of the few”–which attributes the success of any social epidemic to 20 percent of the population–The Tipping Point led to an explosion in the pop science genre.

While Gladwell’s work has been greatly debated, scientists working far from the literary spotlight have produced complex, but no less compelling, findings in the realm of tipping points. The latest came out this summer when scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York published a paper with findings that truly trump Gladwell’s assertions. They found that when 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, the majority of the society will eventually adopt it.

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The recent British film In Our Name is a returning-soldier drama featuring a married woman, Suzy, who leaves her husband and little girl to fight in Iraq. Because she’s involved in the killing of a little girl during her tour—this part is based on a true story, but it happened to a man—she returns home only to steadily fall apart under the stress of soul-destroying anxieties.

In real life, Ethan McCord was involved in a now-infamous episode that took a strangely similar turn. It became one of the most shocking (and hopefully awakening) revelations by Wikileaks: the video now dubbed “Collateral Murder” that was taken from an Apache helicopter as its gunners massacred a group of civilians in a Baghdad suburb in 2007. Addressing a Southern California audience about his role in the episode this past June, McCord described how he saw two small children mangled by gunfire from the helicopter and thought of his own two children at home.

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This country is famous for one of the most organized and inspiring nonviolent movements in modern history. It unfolded sixty years ago in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe and focused on the racism that was an unresolved legacy of the Civil War. It was brilliant, but sadly, not enough.

Last week in Mississippi, Deryl Dedmon, Jr. and John Aaron Rice, along with a group of ‘psyched up’ white teens, left a party with the intention of finding an African American to ‘mess with.’ Driving sixteen miles to the other side of town they set upon the first man they saw—James Craig Anderson—and beat him viciously. Eighteen-year-old Dedmon, now charged with murder, stayed behind long enough to run Anderson over with his truck and leave him for dead. To top it off, his lawyer went beyond human decency to protect his client, insisting that it was not a racially motivated crime.

Maybe, on some level, it’s a positive sign that we do not want to admit that there is still racism in this country, despite the experience of people living in James Craig Anderson’s community, immigrant families in Arizona, farmworkers in California, or sleeping children in Afghanistan. But denial isn’t going to make the problem go away. What will make it finally go away is a recognition that racially motivated crimes have a cause and that we can get to it by shifting our awareness from hate crimes to just simply hate.

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Sebastian Junger, embedded.

Science writer John Horgan on Sebastian Junger on war:

Describing himself as an antiwar liberal (who thinks the U.S. botched its occupation of Afghanistan but fears that worse bloodshed will result if the U.S. abruptly withdraws), [Junger] said his reporting and research led him to the disturbing conclusion that war stems from innate male urges. I disagree. Here are some counterarguments to Junger’s contention that we’re “hardwired” for war:

• The evidence that war is in our genes is flimsy to nonexistent. Lethal raiding among chimpanzees, our closest relatives, is often cited as strong evidence that human warfare is ancient and innate. But as I pointed out in a previous post, scientists have observed a total of 31 chimpicides over the past half century; many chimp communities have never been observed engaging in deadly raids. Even Wrangham has acknowledged that chimpanzee raids are “certainly rare.”

• The oldest clear-cut evidence for lethal group violence by humans dates back not millions or hundreds of thousands of years but only 13,000 years. Moreover, as an excellent recent article on this Web site points out, tribal societies in regions such as the U.S. Southwest did not fight continuously; they lived peacefully for centuries before erupting into violence. These patterns are not consistent with behavior that is instinctual or “hardwired.”

• Young men who are willing and even eager to fight certainly help make wars possible, but that doesn’t mean that these young men cause wars or that all young men are itching for a fight. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney launched the current U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they went to great lengths as young men to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. (This irony brings to mind something that World War II hero Sen. George McGovern said in 1971: “I’m tired of old men dreaming up wars for young men to fight.”)

• Junger claims that the “moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers [in Afghanistan] much, and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero.” The Americans in Restrepo may be fighting for fighting’s sake, but surely that isn’t true of their Taliban and al Qaeda opponents. Moreover, does anyone really think that the young men who have been battling in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria lately are not fighting for a higher cause?

Read more at Scientific American.

On the most recent episode of WNYC’s Radiolab, the hour was devoted to finding out why one creature might stick its neck out for another. Using their endlessly entertaining approach to deconstructing the sciences, hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich tell three uniquely relevant stories in an attempt to explain the logic behind altruism.

The first one is about biologist George Price, who was left emotionally scarred by an equation he created that basically proved no act of self-sacrifice was purely altruistic. He spent the better part of his life thereafter trying to prove himself wrong, by giving away all his money to help the homeless.

The second story looks at a few people who were awarded the Carnegie Hero Fund for risking their life “to an extraordinary degree while saving or attempting to save the life of another person.” None of these people can really explain why they put themselves in such danger for a complete stranger, though some do feel as though they were called to do it—in a way that indicated (to me) an inner sense of the Golden Rule.

The final segment shows altruism through the eyes of political game theorists who have constructed computer models that calculate if being good (i.e. not antagonistic) is a winning strategy. The answer is yes, but with a sort of Old Testament perpsective of be nice, but be ready to take an eye for an eye. Not surprisingly, this is the segment I found most troubling, if only because I think it would benefit from the growing research in the field of civil resistance.

All in all, however, this Radiolab episode is well worth a listen, as you are guaranteed an entertaining and insightiful look at the science behind one of our most complex human traits.

We humans can’t help but empathize. It’s in our DNA. And new research shows that we are evolving to empathize on a global level. This is particularly encouraging, as economist Jeremy Rifkin points out in the above video, because it may be the key to our salvation from such things as war and environmental destruction.

Rifkin is the founder of The Foundation on Economic Trends and together with the Royal Society of Arts and Cognitive Media, he created this great illustrated video that explains how emotion has evolved over time. (h/t Yes! Magazine)

As genetically modified organisms become more prevalent, so do protests against them. In just the past few months, French activists have uprooted GM vines at a research center, Spanish activists have destroyed experimental GM Maize crops, and Haitian farmers have burned Monsanto seeds. But are these destructive direct actions the best form of protest against the rising corporate control of the food system and its very genetic material?

My good friend Zack Denfeld, a self-described information ecologist and lecturer at Pacific Northwest College of Art, is developing a creative form of resistance through his Center for Genomic Gastronomy. Taking a somewhat Yes Men-inspired, tongue-in-cheek approach, Zack is extending the logic of GMO’s to their unnatural conclusion by putting them in situations their inventor’s never considered.

In his first experiment with the Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Zack made sushi rolls out of GloFish—a patented brand of GM fluorescent zebrafish, which is publicly available as a pet. The idea, as Zack explains in the above video, is to give people the opportunity to beta test transgenic fish before the FDA approves GM salmon—soon to be the first genetically-engineered animal for human consumption.

We’ve made a number of recipes with these [GloFish], so you don’t have to wait for approval from the government to try these transgenic fish if you’re interested. What’s really interesting about this is they’ve been existing in science labs and all of a sudden one guy had a really interesting market strategy, which was to make them available to the public. And we think that’s really innovative and we’re building on his innovation by cooking with them. I don’t know how happy he is about that, but I want to ask you how happy you are with these recipes. If you’re all for transgenic foods, you’ll love my sushi rolls. If you don’t like my glowing sushi rolls you may want to tell the US FDA to hold off on that transgenic salmon. The decision is up to you. You are no longer passive. You are active in this process.

In another experiment—this time going after the secret nature of GM research—Zack created a recipe called Vegetarian Bouillabaisse. It calls for something known as the Fish Tomato—a somewhat mythical GM design that involves a tomato being inserted with a cold-tolerant gene from a fish.

In our research we found documents that proved this very much did exist. This brings up really important questions. Is the Fish Tomato vegetarian? Is it an animal? Is it a plant? We don’t know. But it’s important to eat this, taste this and find out. The problem is we can’t because both the genome and the data that came out of the research vanished in a cloud of confidential business information and corporate appropriation. The issue here is that if we don’t have the data we’re not doing science. Scient is about verifiability and repeatability. So we need to stop calling the people who don’t give us data scientists. They’re not scientists. They’re just biohackers like me and you. Until they make their data public we should not call them scientists.

When I spoke with Zack about his work, he stressed the imporance of being able to reach these so-called scientists with our concerns. They are people after all. And they can be reasoned with and persuaded to reconsider their actions. But when their work is challenged destructively, they, like most people, respond with indifference. They just write off the protesters. If however, the protests are targeted at discrediting their work and exposing their inability to anticipate its consequences, they are far more willing to listen. Having scientists on our side, instead of on the corporation’s side, may be the key to preserving control over our food systems.

Over the course of his career primatologist and popularizer Frans de Waal has had a sustained interest in the relationship between human nature and violence. Circumstances in the study of our primate relatives has forced the issue: in the 1970s chimpanzees, which were previously thought to live in Edenic tranquility, were observed conducting raids and even killing one another. Meanwhile, their close relatives, the bonobos, entered the popular imagination as the hope for more utopian future: their females are empowered, and they resolve conflicts in tender orgies. Over at 3QuarksDaily, de Waal summarizes the debate about apes and human violence and thinks about how to apply it to violent conflict in the modern world. His essay is accompanied by a short video produced by the impressive Department of Expansion:

Here’s de Waal:

In recent history, we have seen so much war-related death that we imagine that it must always have been like this, that warfare is written into our DNA. In the words of Winston Churchill: “The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.” But is Churchill’s warmongering state-of-nature any more plausible than Rousseau’s noble savage?

[…]

Comparisons with apes hardly resolve this issue. Since it has been found that chimpanzees sometimes raid their neighbors and take their enemies’ lives, these apes have edged closer to the warrior image that we have of ourselves. Like us, chimps wage violent battles over territory. Genetically speaking, however, our species is exactly equally close to another ape, the bonobo, which does nothing of the kind. Bonobos can be unfriendly to their neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females often rush to the other side to have sex with both males and other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into a peaceful gathering. Lethal aggression among bonobos has been unheard of.

The danger in any discussion like this is that we might bind the sense of possibility for ourselves by what happens to be reflected in both human history and the natural world. That’s a false restraint; things can change. Social arrangements possible in the modern world, from the United Nations to mass genocide, would have after all been unthinkable in past ages. What we see among apes should expand our sense of human possibility but certainly not contract it.

Click for full-size chart and reference.

To Churchill’s point, one can just as easily say the opposite is true, and far more so. Peace reigns over ordinary life far more than war, even if it goes unnoticed while violence excites our attention. So much is this the case that, in the early history of anthropology, it was thought that “primitive” tribal societies were on the whole blessedly peaceful compared to the turbulence of modern states. Like the observations of chimpanzees for so long, this turned out to be the error of impatient observers; wait around long enough, and they will fight. And they will die, on average, at actually far higher rates than were found in Europe and the US in the 20th century (see chart).

De Waal insists in the end that, given the chance, humans and other animals will opt for less killing. We’re caught between ancient, dueling inclinations to kill and to coexist. The latter, he believes, is the stronger.

In this fascinating video, neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran gives a brief overview of the recently discovered mirror neurons, or what he likes to call “Gandhi neurons,” at a recent TED conference. As he describes in his talk, a mirror nueron is a motor neuron in your brain that:

fires when I reach and grab something, but it also fires when I watch Joe reaching and grabbing something. And this is truly astonishing. Because it’s as though this neuron is adopting the other person’s point of view. It’s almost as though it’s performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person’s action.

Ramachandran then describes another type of mirror neuron that works similarly with the sense of touch:

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