In his new book, The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Our Conscious Brains, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux assigns himself the simple tasks of explaining how consciousness developed and redefining how we create and experience emotions.

Obviously, I'm being facetious. There's nothing simple about these tasks, yet in Ledoux's capable hands the reader is led, step by step, through the past four billion years of life on this planet. Consciousness, a phenomenon responsible for your ability to read and understand these words (as well as much, much more), often feels like a given, yet that's only because human life is short and evolution is so very long.

Ledoux writes about history splendidly. In his last book, Anxious (which I write about here and here), he investigates the development of nervous systems, entertaining the prospect that anxiety and fear are not innate physiological states but rather assembled experiences that can be sorted through and overcome. Throughout the book he overturns common assumptions about behavior and cognition.

Ditto Deep History. Ledoux writes that consciousness is "often a passive observer of behavior rather than an active controller of it." This conflicts with the assumption that every decision we make is of our own volition. He also argues that emotions "are cognitively assembled states of autnoetic consciousness," products of the same processes experienced via higher-order circuitry. Emotions are not separate from thoughts; they too are created in our nervous system by the same mechanisms.

From a 30,000-foot view this makes sense. Humans did not arrive on the planet whole-cloth. We are constructed from parts that started self-assembling billions of years ago, the consequence of billions of years of chemistry, biology, and physiology. Deep History is an engrossing investigation of the human condition through the lens of ancient evolutionary history.

No single summation could suffice to cover this book's depth and complexity, nor should itsome arguments take time to unfold. Below are five fascinating passages pulled from the brain of one of the most thoughtful neuroscientists alive.

Survival precedes behavior.

It's easy to believe there's a reason for every action, yet reason comes after the survival instinct. Humans do many things for seemingly strange (or no) reason, only later attempting to explain the cognitive process that led to the actionfilling in a psychological gap rather than actually defining the event. The mind likes to insert itself in places evenespeciallywhen it's late to the game.

"Behavior is not, as we commonly suppose, primarily a tool of the mind. Of course, human behavior can reflect the intentions, desires, and fears of the conscious mind. But when we go deep into the history of behavior, we can't help but conclude that it is first and foremost a tool of survival, whether in single cells or more complex organisms that have conscious control over some of their actions. The connection of behavioral to mental life is, like mental life itself, an evolutionary afterthought."

Neuroscience is, relatively speaking, still new.

It is common to assign certain brain regions as responsible for the creation and/or management of functions, which is a bit misleading. As far as neuroscience has advanced the field is still in its infancy. Brain scans track blood flow; that does not mean specific functions are limited to that region. (Of course, as Ledoux's friend and mentor, Michael Gazzaniga (listen to my interview with him here) has shown in his work in split-brain patients, localization does matter in certain regards; Ledoux even co-wrote a book with him on the topic.)

"Functions are not, strictly speaking, carried out by areas, or even by neurons in areas. They come about by way of circuits that consist of ensemble of neurons in one area that are connected by nerve fibers of axons to ensembles in other areas, forming functional networks. As with other features, the wiring pattern of sensory and motor systems is evolutionarily conserved across the vertebrates."

Don't get comfortable.

We like to believe ourselves to be separate from our environment. This is a false assumption. Life has always been about the interaction of species within their environment. Humans are no different. As everyone on the planet is experiencing the consequences, to varying degrees, of climate change, Darwinian fitness matters. Those trying to coast by on previous standards might find themselves in a rough situation.

"What works in a given environmental situation is determined by natural selection, but as the environment changes, or the group moves to a new niche, new traits become important and previously useful traits become detriments."

Pain is a state of mind.

Ledoux writes that pain and pleasure are often treated as emotions, but that's not quite true. There are no specific receptors for fear, joy, or anger. By contrast, certain receptors are activated when experiencing pain or pleasure, yet even those are subjective. For example, certain painful sensations are required for one person's erotic pleasure, while in others those same sensations might be translated as traumatic. Even chronic pain, it turns out, can be overridden at times.

"If a person with chronic pain is distracted by a funny joke, he does not experience the pain while laughing. The nociceptors are still responding, but the subjective pain is not noticed."

Humans are unique. So is every species.

Many people believe Homo sapiens represent the apex of the animal world. Some even believe we have a divine mandate to lord over other species. In reality, we are a quick blip in the long history of species. Ledoux points out factors that truly make humans uniquelanguage, autonoesis, complex emotions. He also warns against the dangers of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. Fitness means adapting to the environment. Over the course of the last century we've arguably accomplished the opposite.

"Differences, while important in defining a species, do not endow some with greater value than others in the vast scheme of life. We may prefer the kind of life we lead, but in the end there is no scale, other than survivability, that can measure whether ours is a better or worse kind of life, biologically speaking, than that of apes, monkeys, cats, rats, birds, snakes, frogs, fish, bugs, jellyfish, sponges, choanoflagellates, fungi, plants, archaea, or bacteria. If species longevity is the measure, we will never do better than ancient unicellular organisms."

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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His next book is Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy.

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5 important features of your brain, according to a top neuroscientist - Big Think

It's well-trod advice: To eat, work, or play moderately is the healthiest way to live.

In fact, humans have been contemplating this concept for much of history. One of the phrases carved into the Ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi was meden agan, or: "nothing in excess. Aristotle believed that every virtue falls in the middle of two extremesexcess and deficiency, something he called "the doctrine of the mean." Confucian texts refer to zhongyong zhong translating to "bent neither one way or another," and yong to "unchanging": Consistent moderation.

So why is it that after centuries of championing this approach, we abandon moderation every New Years Eve, flinging ourselves toward extreme resolutions? We seek to eradicate habits altogether, or to start intensely doing something new. I'm no longer going to eat added sugar. I'm going to go to CrossFit every day. I'm not going to use my phone before bed ever again.

This is probably one reason why about 80 percent of people give up on their resolutions by February. "I strongly believe this is the case, because people go from 0 to 200 miles per hour in setting their goals," said Marco Palma, the director of a human behavior laboratory at Texas A&M University.

How might Aristotle make a New Year's resolution? This year, try a moderation challenge. This would involve identifying the things in your life you want to change, and instead of quitting them entirely, intentionally continue to do thembut at a lower frequency.

Shayla Love

A moderation challenge would seek to make a resolution that falls somewhere in the middle of the two extreme ends of the spectrum for a certain behavior. Easy right? Actually, no. What makes moderation such difficult advice to follow is that it's vague. What is the mean between no exercise and The Rock's workout regimen (and the excess of cod he consumes)?

Studies have found that people tend to define moderation in ways that justify their current behavior. If one person has dessert once a month, and another eats it every other day, they might both define moderation as their individual intake of sweetseven if those amounts are very different.

I went in search of more precision.

Peter Gollwitzer, a professor of psychology at NYU, studies how people translate goals into action. He said that people often confuse goals with plans. Making a goal gives the illusion of taking action, but it's a plan that allows us to achieve our goalsnot the goals themselves.

"For instance, people have the goal to save a certain amount of money every month, each month," he said. "Then they say, 'Now I have a plan.' Nope, they don't have a plan. They only have a goal.

A plan needs to be specific. How will you accomplish saving that amount of money? When and where will it happen? Gollwitzer said if/then statements can help. Like: If I go out to eat, then I will not buy a drink or appetizer. Or: If I get my paycheck, then I will put $200 into my saving account.

Ultimately, moderation is just a feature of a goal, not a plan. You have the same old problem again," Gollwitzer said. "You have a goal, which is to be more moderate, but you don't have a plan on how to implement that action.

Moderation, by definition, decrees that there will be moments when you dont stick to your resolution. So plan it out. It may feel counterintuitive to plan to eat junk food if your goal is to stop eating junk food. Or, to splurge if youre trying to save money. But as long as it's intentional, it may help your resolution in the long run.

A study from 2016 found that it's not harmful to have what researchers called planned hedonic deviations," or scheduled pleasurable detours from your resolutions. They found that continued abstinence and inhibition from a habit could lead to irresistible urges and cravings, so it may be good in the long run to behave 'badly' on occasion, when it is planned."

It is critical that these deviations are planned in advance, so that going against a resolution doesnt make you feel like you messed up. (That could trigger a what-the-hell effectwhen you think, "Oh, what the hell," and double down on whatever youre indulging in. Its also referred to as a failure cascade.)

In the study, hedonic deviations accounted for 15 percent of the subjects overall activity. Lets say you want to refrain from drinking during the work week, as youve been finding yourself coming home each day and pouring a glass of wine that turns into two or three. 15 percent of 5 weekdays is .75, which we can round up to 1. Perhaps when you first make your resolution, you plan that if it's a Wednesday, then youll take a break and deviate from your resolution and have one drink.

Once you decide how frequently youre going to have a planned hedonic deviation, you can create other if/then statements that suit your lifestyle or needs:

If it's a Friday night, then I will have 2 drinks with my friends.

If its date night with my partner, then I will have a dessert with them.

If its Sunday morning and I'm tired, then I will skip the gym, sleep in, and read the paper in bed.

The study found that the deviations in advance didnt derail people from achieving what they wanted.

This kind of intentional moderation better lines up with how our self control works too, Palma said. In the past, some thought self-control was a resource that could get used up, like a battery losing charge, while others theorized that if you practiced self-control, you could get better at it, and exerting it was a positive thing.

In 2018, Palma did a study to see which of these theories were more accurate, and found them both to be somewhat true. Testing people in a self-control task, he found that it was possible for them to burn out and deplete their self-control resources. But when people took a self-control break before they reached that threshold, they were able to improve their overall levels of self-control, and have more self-control later.

Palma said it revealed that self-control is like a muscle. If it's worked out safely, and in moderation, it can get stronger. If it's over-exerted, it can be injured or too sore, and be out of commission.

If we overdo it by setting too-high goals that are too extreme, then we rapidly get to a region in which we're starting to look at this fatigue effect of self-control resources, and they start to deplete, Palma said.

Achievement begets motivation, not the other way around. Another study similarly found that people are more likely to keep their resolutions if they feel an immediate reward from their efforts. The most sustainable way to consistently feel a sense of accomplishment, Palma said, is to have moderate plansand not trigger the failure cascade.

Why does moderation feel like failure? Because we're programmed to believe that more is always better, said Alan Cohen, an epidemiological researcher at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. And therefore, doing less is bad. This is a concept called linearity, which Cohen summarized in a graph:

Courtesy of Alan Cohen.

This feel intuitive: Isn't more money always better? More good health? But, in truth, we may only be seeing a piece of the bigger picture.

Courtesy of Alan Cohen.

Doing something to the extreme often isn't worth it. Infinite increase doesn't necessarily lead to infinite rewardthe benefit could plateau at a certain point. And it could even be harmful: An extreme focus on healthy eating can veer into an eating disorder, or too much exercise can lead to injury or exercise addiction.

In addition to making it easier to commit to our goals psychologically, moderation can help remind us that keeping a small amount of what we're trying to get rid of won't kill us.

One of my resolutions is typically to be less stressed. Yet, a small amount of stress might actually be good for me. There's something called Yerkes-Dodson Law, which says that an optimal amount of stress can boost concentration, and provide the body with levels of adrenaline and cortisol that are helpful, rather than harmful.

Of course, there are certain thingslike highly toxic substance or cigarettesthat are always harmful. But the kinds of vices people often seek to give up on New Year's are more mild: sugar, lazing around on the couch, alcohol, stress at work, or spending money. Intentionally moderate resolutions could help us to not see the world in black and white, or enforce the idea those habits are unilaterally bad.

To be less stressed in a moderate way, I could recognize that there will be times that I'll likely be stressed, but not view it as a what-the-hell moment and give into the anxiety. I can remember that a small amount of what I'm trying to quit isn't the end of the world, and I'm not a failure for eliminating it completely.

I could also plan an if/then situation for 20 minutes each day. If I come home from work feeling frazzled, then I can set a time for 20 minutes and go hog-wild with worry. Fret about how my apartment is embarrassingly dusty, dwell on how I dont have enough Twitter followers, wonder if I texted a new friend something stupid, and marinate on how everyone noticed me toppling over in yoga class this morning. Then, when the timer goes off, I walk away.

When I have my planned freak-out each day, I'll know that I'm not only working towards my goals, but acting virtuously, according to millennia of human thinkers at least.

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If You Want to Change Your Habits, You Have to Plan to Mess Up Sometimes - VICE

This past summer I wrote about the case of Michelle Carter, a minor who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for verbally encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, to commit suicide. Carters case established a rather unique legal precedent in the state of Massachusetts. As I explained at the time:

Although states can and do criminalize assisted suicide, Massachusetts had no such statute at the time Carter was convicted. Moreover, although assisted suicide was/is a common law crime in Massachusetts, as with many state statutes, the common law wasexplicitly tailored around doctor-prescribed suicide. Accordingly, Carters case is inapplicable to all Massachusettss law relating to assisted suicide because unlike doctor-prescribed suicide, Carter neither provided the means nor physically participated in the act. In fact, it was the older Roy alone who would research the method of suicide, obtain the means to do so, and in the end, physically carry out an act he had attempted multiple times before. In other words, it was Carters speech alone that formed the basis of her conviction, but not for the crime of assisted suicide as many might think. Rather, Carters conviction was based on a common law standard of behavior categorized as wanton and reckless verbal conduct constituting involuntary manslaughter.

Creating a category of verbal conduct within common law involuntary manslaughter allowed the Massachusetts courts to argue Carters speech belongs within thesupposedly but not really at allwell-defined and narrowly limitedspeech integral to criminal conductfederal exception to free speech protection.

In Carters petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn her Massachusetts involuntary manslaughter conviction, her attorneys focus on the argument that the common laws verbal conduct standard lacks any clear, meaningful, and constitutional way to determine the line between criminal and permissible encouragement of suicide. In fact, the Massachusetts Supreme Court acknowledged in its decision of the Carter case that not all instances of encouraging suicide are the same. Accordingly, Carters federal petition argues any family member who encourages a sick loved one to die with dignity, or to avoid what they view as unnecessary suffering, exists at the mercy of a Massachusetts prosecutor of being charged with involuntary manslaughter.

The obvious danger with laws that offer no clear indication as to whether citizens have broken them or not is that prosecutors/government can apply them with bias, using them as a pretext to target dissent for example. More important to consider, however, is the fact that vague laws have recently been overturned by a bipartisan majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Massachusetts legislature is at least now attempting to define the parameters of its newly established involuntary manslaughter verbal conduct standard to include instances where the will of 1 person is substituted for the wishes of another.

The common law standard established by the Carter case is currently being played out in another Massachusetts court room with the case of Alexander Urtula and Inyoung You. Similar to the Michelle Carter case, the defendant, Inyoung You, is being portrayed by the prosecution as some kind of monster who verbally established complete control over Urtulas suicide. Further complicating the issues of personal responsibility is the substantial evidence that both the suicide victim and the defendant in both the Carter and You cases suffer(ed) from some form of psychological disorder. In the You case, Mr. Urtulas friends had at one point tried to intervene in the relationship by observing that You, not Urtula, needed professional help.

When it is discovered that a criminal defendant suffers from some form of neurological disorder, not only do our moral intuitions often change, the law can strive to change as well. Objective, scientific reasons have been put forth for why our morals and laws should shift in such circumstances. As neurological scientist Sam Harris has explained, brain disorders appear to be just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions, and that above all luck, or lack thereof, is the ultimate factor in every human decision. Therefore, according to Harris, even when it comes to the most disturbing or repulsive examples of human behavior:

We should admit that a person is unlucky to inherit the genes and life experience that will doom him to psychopathy. That doesnt mean we cant lock him up, or kill him in self-defense, buthatinghim is not rational, given a complete understanding of how he came to be who he is. Natural, yes; rational, no. Feeling compassion for him would be rational, however or so I have argued.

We can acknowledge the difference between voluntary and involuntary action, the responsibilities of an adult and those of a child, sanity and insanity, a troubled conscience and a clear one, without indulging the illusion of free will. We can also admit that in certain contexts, punishment might be the best way to motivate people to behave themselves. The utility of punishment is an empirical question that is well worth answering.

I would question the legal and moral utility of the criminal punishment in both the Carter and the You cases, not discounting any opinion as to the abhorrent nature of the behavior by each. That is not to say nothing should be done, just that having law enforcement and the criminal justice system tackle this particular harm with incarceration by utilizing difficult to define verbal conduct standards seems inapt.

Unfortunately, there is ample evidence law enforcement and the criminal justice system is substantially burdened by being one of the primary regulators of mental health patients in this country. Of course, to alleviate the current burden on law enforcement would first require exercising the moral will to defer even repulsive behavioral cases from criminal mechanisms, to ones more tailored to alleviating harms due to mental health. As preposterous as state funding for metal health infrastructure might sound to some, given how much we currently spend on locking mentally ill patients up, and if trillion dollar a year budgets and historic tax (tariff) increases are now things conservatives budget hawks in Congress support, we eventually might get around to funding a mental health system capable of addressing the harm.

Tyler Brokers work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free toemail himor follow him onTwitterto discuss his column.

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The Law Of Personal Responsibility And The Illusion Of Free Will - Above the Law

RICHMOND, Va. Virginia has executed nearly 1,400 people in its 412-year history more than any other state. But as a new Democratic majority prepares to begin the legislative session, some see an opportunity to end executions in Virginia.

A bill to abolish the death penalty has been filed by Del. Lee Carter, a Democrat from Manassas, and several additional bills are expected.

The push is backed by Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, along with some powerful voices: loved ones of murder victims. Thirteen family members sent a letter to the General Assembly in November asking lawmakers to abolish the death penalty.

Rachel Sutphin, the daughter of Cpl. Eric Sutphin, who was fatally shot in 2006, said she felt no closure or solace when her father's killer was executed in 2017.

A lot of people, they want families to have this moment that heals them or makes things completed. And for me, it did not," Sutphin said, describing her reaction to the execution of William Morva.

It was instead, more hurt," she said. I felt, well, now there are two people dead."

Eric Sutphin, who worked for the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, was shot while participating in a manhunt for Morva, an escaped prisoner who had shot and killed a hospital security guard. Sutphin was shot when he encountered Morva in Blacksburg.

Rachel Sutphin, who was 9 at the time, said she wasn't aware of Virginia's death penalty until much later.

In 2016, she wrote letters to then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe urging him to commute Morva's sentence to life without parole.

Morva was executed In July 2017. No one has been executed in Virginia since then.

No death sentences have been imposed in the state since 2011, and only three people remain on Virginia's death row. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, the state is second only to Texas in number of executions, at 113.

Carter said the new Democratic majority gives death penalty opponents the best chance we've had in a very long time, but he acknowledges that entrenched attitudes toward the death penalty in Virginia could make abolishing it difficult.

Unfortunately, there are still people in both major parties who are still in the mindset of the 1980s, 1990s, tough on crime, more punishment, more punishment, more punishment," Carter said. "But if the death penalty worked as advertised as a deterrent then we wouldn't need to use it.

Even with the slim majority Democrats hold in both the Senate and House of Delegates, the push to abolish the death penalty could have an uphill battle.

Republican Sen. Ben Chafin said he thinks it's unlikely an abolition bill will pass.

The General Assembly has crafted over many years careful categories of crimes that can potentially receive the death penalty, Chafin said.

Those crimes are the most heinous of crimes," Chafin said. They're the unthinkable types of human behavior that truly those who commit them deserve to receive death and not be incarcerated at the taxpayer's expense for the rest of their lives."

Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said 21 states have abolished the death penalty, but it often takes years of drawn-out political battles. He said repeal could be more difficult in the South, where many states have a long history of executions and ingrained attitudes about the death penalty.

From a symbolic perspective, abolition in Virginia would have national significance because it would be the first of the Southern states to voluntarily repeal capital punishment, Dunham said.

"The change in the composition of the legislature brought about by the blue wave may be enough to put abolition over the top. But even then, success is unlikely unless there is a bipartisan component of it."

Republican Del. Rob Bell said he understands the feelings of crime victims' family members who do not want to see the death penalty imposed. But he said he would not support a blanket repeal of the death penalty.

The thoughts of the surviving family members are always important, and in cases where no family member wants it, the prosecutor could decide not to proceed that way," he said.

Here, what's being proposed would take it away from all families, those that want it and those that do not."

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Opponents Push to Abolish Death Penalty in Virginia - The New York Times

In full disclosure, I've got quite a few behaviors I'd like to change--I like to down French fries when I'm stressed out, for example. And since you're human like me, I'm guessing you've got some areas you'd like to tackle, too. You also might need to initiate change within your team to keep your company competitive in a rapidly shifting market.

In a June 2019 Ted Talk, Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, asserted that the answer isn't just providing lots of information, even in the age of Big Data. And it's not to try to get the people themselves to change, either.

1. Reduce friction.

On one hand, this can mean simply reducing as many obstacles to the new behavior as possible, making the new behavior easier to adopt. For example, if you want you and your team to organize folders a particular way, you could ensure that all of the supplies necessary to do so are together in a single location, rather than scattered in different cabinets or closets.

But sometimes, reducing obstacles is not always possible to do. So more broadly, reducing friction means that you have to make the new behavior seem equal to the old behavior in terms of perceived risk, benefits and effort. For instance, you could have your tech support team ensure that a log-in process for a new application you want to implement is as similar as possible to the log-in process for the application your team is already familiar with. Once you've leveled the playing field like this, switching what you do isn't as scary and seems just as reasonable as what you used to do.

But having two equal options isn't necessarily going to move you to select one or the other, or even to take action at all. So what really tips the scale to behavioral change is the second point.

2. Add a motivator.

Now, Ariely aptly points out that figuring out the best motivator can be quite challenging. Lots of options can work, depending on the unique circumstances that your workers are in. So as a leader, you have to be willing to do the footwork and learn and constantly reevaluate what those circumstances are. And if what you did previously stops getting the result you want, you must be willing to pivot.

But in a case study Ariely describes, what got people to save money the most was simply tracking their saving by scratching on a coin. Why did this work? It was effective because it took the goal--setting funds aside--and made it highly visible and hard to forget.

In the same way, workers need ways to track progress on a new behavior and see the effect their effort is having. And this ties closely to what multiple research studies and surveys have shown--the biggest desire for most people is to have a sense of purpose. They stay motivated when they see their influence.

So identify a solid "why" for whatever behavior you want to do. Make sure the evidence of the hard work is not, as the proverb goes, hidden under a bushel basket, so that you have accountability as well as a reminder of the path you want to take and the success you've already achieved. Once you've gained some confidence from reaching your goal, your only job is to repeat the process for behaviors that will take you even higher.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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Want to Change Your Behavior? Make These 2 Changes to Your Environment First - Inc.

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There is no recognizable human behavior in Uncut Gems. - Slate

By Eva FrederickDec. 23, 2019 , 3:00 PM

One day in 2014, primatologist Yuko Hattori was trying to teach a mother chimpanzee in her lab to keep a beat. Hattori would play a repetitive piano note, and the chimp would attempt to tap out the rhythm on a small electronic keyboard in hopes of receiving a tasty piece of apple.

Everything went as expected in the experiment room, but in the next room over, something strange was happening. Another chimpanzee, the mothers son, heard the beat and began to sway his body back and forth, almost as if he were dancing. I was shocked, Hattori says. I was not aware that without any training or reward, a chimpanzee would spontaneously engage with the sound.

Hattori has now published her research showing that chimps respond to sounds, both rhythmic and random, by dancing.

This study is very thought-provoking, says Andrea Ravignani, a cognitive biologist at the Seal Rehabilitation and Research Centre who researches the evolution of rhythm, speech, and music. The work, she says, could shed light on the evolution of dancing in humans.

For their the study, Hattori and her colleague Masaki Tomonaga at Kyoto University played 2-minute clips of evenly spaced, repetitive piano tones (heard in the video above) to seven chimpanzees (three males and four females). On hearing the sound, the chimps started to groove, swaying back and forth and sometimes tapping their fingers or their feet to the beat or making howling singing sounds, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. All of the chimps showed at least a little bit of rhythmic movement, though the males spent much more time moving to the music than females.

To find out whether the animals were dancing to a specific beator whether any series of sounds would move themHattori singled out one chimp, Akira, who was an enthusiastic dancer on past trials. She and her colleagues tested Akira over a period of 24 days to see whether he would sway in response to random sounds as well as rhythmic beats. Unlike humans, Akira danced just as much on average when he heard a random sequence of sounds than when the sounds were lined up in a measured tempo, the team found.(Experiments testing for rhythmic responses in human babies show that people are much more likely to move in response to a sound when its rhythmic, like music, instead of random, like speech.)

The lab chimps lack of discrimination lines up with chimpanzees behavior in the wild, Hattori says. The animals are known to perform rain dances, swaying and strutting when they hear the random sound of raindrops falling in the forest. Movements in response to random natural sounds may be the beginning of the evolution of dance, Hattori says, with humans later narrowing the behavior to rhythmic sounds.

The matching of sound and movement, Ravignani says, was likely the most important event in the development of dance. One of the key differences between us and our closest living relatives might be that somewhere our evolutionary history, these two things got connected, he says.

Chimps and other animals likely began to make rhythmic sounds as a coping mechanism for loud and overwhelming stimuli in nature, Hattori speculates. Somewhere along the line, human ancestors probably developed an awareness of rhythms, and then began to match their body movements to the beat.

Other animals such as Snowball the cockatoo and some California sea lions have been observed bobbing their heads in time to music or beats. What makes the chimps different, Hattori says, is the fact that they do it spontaneously, with no reward offeredand that theyve been seen dancing in nature.

The study raises the idea that great apes are perhaps better living models for human ancestors than they have been acknowledged for, says Adriano Lameira, a primatologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Warwick. (Lameira himself has shown that chimpanzees have dance moves: He recently analyzed zoo chimps caught on camera in the midst of a conga line, although no music was playing in that case.)

But Lameira says the new study might not add much to the current understanding of the evolution of dance for a number of reasons. For instance, previous studies had already shown primates showing rhythmic displays, so although the new works reveals that the creatures dance in response to a few different kinds of sounds, the behavior itself is not entirely novel.

Lameira also notes the researchers use a loose definition of rhythmic. For the chimps in the study to exhibit a rhythmic behavior, they simply had to do the same action three times. Instead, he says, rhythm should be defined as a behavior that obeys a precise, strict tempo.

Originally posted here:
Dancing chimpanzees may reveal how humans started to boogie - Science Magazine

Last fall, UC Berkeley hosted Half Earth Day, a symposium to explore the idea of setting aside 50 percent of Earths lands and oceans for conserving biodiversity. The Half Earth concept was conceived by E.O. Wilson, the eminent biologist, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and noted myrmecologist (thats someone who studies ants). As Wilson wrote in the January/February 2016 edition of Sierra:

Only by committing half of the planet's surface to nature can we hope to save the immensity of life-forms that compose it. Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global biodiversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth. The Half-Earth proposal offers a first, emergency solution commensurate with the magnitude of the problem: By setting aside half the planet in reserve, we can save the living part of the environment and achieve the stabilization required for our own survival.

The ambitious goalwhich Wilson calls a moonshothas galvanized conservationists. Many environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, are now calling for preserving 30 percent of wild nature by 2030 as a stepping stone toward the Half Earth goal.

On the eve of the UC Berkeley gathering, I got the opportunity to sit down with Professor Wilson at the Graduate Hotel in Berkeley. Heres part of our conversation.

*

Sierra: I'm curious what your feelings are about the reception of the Half Earth idea. Are you in any way surprised by how people have responded?

E.O. Wilson: I was surprised when it first was presented in my book, Half Earth, in 2016. At that time, I expected that it probably would get a lot of opposition and dismissal, for no other reason that it's just too muchtoo far, too fast. But when I arrived at the quadrennial meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, in Honolulu, where I expected to receive either dismissal or a lot of objections and so on, I found almost universal enthusiasm.

What the book had done was just suggest that [the biodiversity crisis] was a big complicated problem that could be solved in one stroke. I called it a moonshot. Because conservation efforts around the world had consisted of targeted procedures to save a species here or there, or to save a habitat here or there. And the aggregate of all of this was supposed to be the protection that nature neededif [the procedures] were intense and wide enough to carry it through. But we knew even then, in 2016, that only about one-fifth of the species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red Listthat is, species in some immediate danger of going extincthad had the slide toward extinction slowed by all these efforts around the world. I think most of us realized that we were achieving many victories in a losing war. And now seemed appropriate, to me at least, that we go for a moonshot and try to see if we could do it all at once.

For folks who havent read the book, why half? Why not 35 percent or 65 percent? I mean, it's got a certain kind of equitable elegance to itfifty-fifty but why half from a biological or ecological standpoint?

I arrived at that figure partly for the reason that you just intimatedthat it's easy to remember. And half was, as it turns out, a hefty object to lift. But it would go far to solve the whole problem worldwide. In particular, from my theoretical measurements of what we knew about extinctions and the extinction process, [half] would be enough to save probably more than 80 percent of all the species on Earth, maybe 85. Now, when I arrived at this figure, I went back and thought about the theory that a young professor at Princeton University, Robert MacArthur, and I devised almost 50 years previously. I was a young professor at Harvard, and I decided to see if we could work out a projection of how area affects the numbers of species, because we were interested in what determines the variety of life on an islanda small island, a medium-sized island, and so on. And we recognized eventually that what we were doing applied to nature reserves as well.

This is the idea of island biogeography?

That is correctthe theory of island biogeography. And it has one result, which is immediately relevant at the present time. At this period, about 15 percent of the land has been put into reserves explicitly to try and protect the animal and plant species that are there, the biodiversity that is there. Fifteen percent of the land, and about seven and a half of the sea. (And that figure for the sea is, primarily, not open ocean but territorial waters.) So this 15 percent and seven and a half percentwhat would it do for us if we stuck with those figures? And it turns out that we would do much better than we thought we were doing [because of] the theory of island biogeography. That is based on the actual measurements that show that the number of species on an island (or in a reserve) increases as the fourth rootyou know, the fourth times to the figureof the area increases. If that is true, then saving about 10 percent of an area where you want to protect fauna and flora would allow you to save as much as 50 [of the species]. So then I started thinking, we need a moonshot. We need to do one big thing that people could get together on that would solve the problem. And I said to myself, well OK, how much should we be ready to really fight for? And it occurred to me that 80 percent or maybe 85 percent sounds pretty good. So, how much land would that be? Half.

What I'm hearing is that the Half Earth concept is, in a way, island biogeography scaled to an island that's floating in space.

Yeah, the figure of one-half came out of island biogeography. Actually, its more than just a guess. From databases, I knew that if we could save one-half of a given reserve, then we were somewhere in the vicinityat least a predictionthat 85 percent of the plants and animals would be saved.

Given that we're still pretty shy of the one-half goal, what needs to happen politically, globally to fulfill this vision? The numbers I'm hearing thrown around are trying to get to 30 percent by 2030 and 50 percent by the middle of this century. There's the political angle, and there's also the scientific angle. You've written about how little we know about the entire planet and all of its many inhabitants. Is there more research that needs to be done to also inform this?

Well, we have to start somewhere. I like to quote John Kennedy, when he announced that we were going to put a man on the moon in a decade. He did not say in his famous speech, We will, by the end of this decade, make significant progress toward putting a man on the moon and bring him home. He said, We will put a man on the moon and bring him back in by the end of this decade. So it was really important, in my mind, that we do a similar thing: We will put half of the surface of land that contains substantial amounts of native-born flora and fauna in reserve for nature. And keep it that way. And we will save the great majority of species on Earth.

When I look at the landscape of environmental politics, it seems to me that climate change sucks a lot of air out of the room. And yet there's this twin crisis of the extinction emergency. Do you sometimes get the sense that this other twin crisis is not getting as much attention?

Well, there is the possibility that our struggle to halt destructive climate change is going to make most of the people around the world very conscious of changes on the planetary level that need to be stopped, and species extinction is in that category. . . . Let me just suppose there are three great crises of the environment. What we will see soonit is on the horizonis a second great environmental crisis, and that's a shortage of freshwater. It's a shortage of freshwater that is rapidly growing, that's causing some of the most tragic humanitarian problems . . . in North Africa, and also in Central America, where climate change has destroyed a lot of the agriculture. A great many of the people who are hoping to come to this country are coming to basically avoid that problem. OK, that's a second great environmental crisis that we are now beginning to be aware of, and its going to get worse and worse.

And the third is the one that you and are seated here together to talk aboutand that is the mass species extinction. Even if you were to say, Well, we can do with fewer kinds of plants and animalsGod forbid we would ever take a position of indifference of that kindbut even if we did, then we would have to take into account the collapse of ecosystems. When you take out enough speciesparticularly the ones that we call the keystone species, the ones that have a big, positive impact on the rest of the ecosystemyou'll have a substantial possibility of seeing a complete collapse of the ecosystem. And then you have one of those irreversible impacts of human activity.

When you look at the literature, are there [species extinctions] that really keep you up at night? I'm thinking like the American chestnutsomething that so many other species depend on. Are there other species that you really worry about, or let's say a genus?

I specialize in ants, right? And believe it or not, there are species of ant that are endangered. And so I've mounted my own expeditions out of Harvard, to assess their status and to figure out how we can prevent these species from going extinct. One was in Sri Lanka. Ants that used to be dominant in the age of dinosaurs, they make up an entire family, the Aneuretinae.

I rediscovered them on the island of Sri Lanka and proposed what needs to be done to keep this ancient lineage alive. I also recently went to the country of Vanuatuused to be the New Hebrides, near the Solomon Islands in New Guineabecause it was there that a species of bull antsa big, hard stinging ant and the only species of that kind ever known outside of Australia, where the type is very commonhad been discovered on New Caledonia and then apparently disappeared around the 1880s. I mounted an expedition to find it on far-off Vanuatu just to make sure that something that interesting still might be saved. And we found it. And we prescribed what it needs to keep that alive.

Now, one species of ant on a place most people have never heard ofit's not exactly earthshaking. But the era that we have to create ahead of us is going to have to include action and research of that kind, in multiplicity. I mean, lots and lots of people involved in order to keep the whole planet and all the plants and animals in it. The role of each one could be important. We just haven't worked out what their importance might be. We should be able to save them long enough to understand them, and then find out howspecies by species and reserve by reservewe can hold on to them.

The fate of a single ant species on a single island, and the question of what is it good for, takes us back to your point about indifferencewhich is that we want to preserve these species, not just for their potential ecosystem services or their functions to us. They've got a right to exist in and of their own selves.

True. They are precious in themselves. And moreover, we need to study them all eventually, in order to understand how the living world works. We need case after case of the study of rare species, of common species, of species on the equator, species of the far Arctic. And we need to be constantly adding that knowledge and putting it together to determine where life came from, where we came from, and what we need to be preserving in order to make Earth a livable, habitable placea planet to be our home.

You're well known as being a synthetisttaking many different topics, themes, combining them. And youre also known as a great scientist in your own field of studying ants. This makes me think about your bookLetters to a Young Scientist. What's the push-pull between the microscopic view and the telescopic view?

That book, Letters to a Young Scientist, has in some ways been my most successful book, because, in part . . . well, let me put it this way: Its so American. The book could be titledHow to Be a Success in Science. It's a book that tends to challengealthough I don't do it very explicitly in the bookthe whole concept of STEM, which now dominates teaching. STEM: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

I'm very uneasy about telling young people who are enthusiastic about going into scientific studies and being part of the future of technology, telling them, Oh, to be a success and get that job, you need to go into science. Oh, and by the way, if you're going into science, and say, biology, especially, you're going to need chemistry. You gotta study chemistry. And while youre at it, says the STEM philosophy, to really understand the chemistry you need to remember that chemistry is based on physics. So plan on learning some physics; at least take a few courses of it. And while you're at it, I have to remind you that most sciences have a mathematical foundation. So don't be afraid of math. You've got to plunge in and learn some math. And once youve got all that stuff going, why, then you'll be ready to go on and become a junior scientist.

I think that's sort of the mood that we're creating now. And I'm against that vigorously. I think they got it backward. I think that kids should do the best they are able, and their mentors can help them to become scientists right away. And then as they develop enthusiasm, this would include, for example, going out and studying an ecosystem anywhere and finding out what species are there and what they're doing. Or going out and looking for a rare species of frog thats known to exist in the area. This is the kind of thing that gets kids going and excited. And once they get movinglike one who has been planted in front of a piano and so loves hammering those keys that in six months youve got to buy that kid a piano, and then give him or her the lessonthis student that you begin that way is going to believe you when you say, Well, now let's talk about what physics you need and what chemistry you need.

It seems to me that's equally applicable to the citizen scientists and the hobbyist naturalistsfollow your passion and the findings will come, the insights will come.

That's quite correct. There are so many people who find the greatest satisfaction in their lives to go out and enjoy nature. And as they do, become amateur field biologistslearning the birds, learning the frogs, learning the different species of flowering plants, and so on. This is a rapidly growing activity, of people brought back into science and enjoying every bit of it. And even contributing to science, by finding species, seeing the behavior of organismsbirds, for example, or grasshoppers or antsthat are very interesting. Then those findings get picked up by the active scientists.

You had boyhood experiences of being out in the woods, fishing, watching birds, and watching insects. Young people today have less of that access. This is really just musing, maybe we're way out on a limb here, lets say we accept your biophilia hypothesis that we've got this instinctive trait for an affinity for wild nature. As an increasingly urban species, what if there's an epigenetic on-off switch? You know, might this be a trait that could atrophy?

I'm not sure about that. Actually, we see in biophilia something like a true human instinct that's acquired and manifested following a period of learning. Actually, what we inherit as an instinct is a propensity to learn one thing and not another. So it's called program learning, gene culture co-evolutionthat phrase is the key to understanding the relationship between heredity and learning in human behavior.

For example, when we have a free range of options to follow, as a species, to select certain environments and surroundings, this leads automaticallydepending on the degree of freedom we have as to where we live and what our income is and so onto a propensity to select certain environments to live in. Experiments conducted around the world discovered that people choose to live in an environment that has the following traits:

Youre on a rise. You have behind you a wall, a cliff wall, or a dense forest. You're looking out over grassland, dotted with copses trees. In other words, you're looking out over a savanna. And you have your place of residence next to a body of waterall those things together. And that's what experiments have shown, thats what people around the world prefer, that combination. And this, of course, when we were evolving as a species, was what gave our very, very different distant ancestors more safety and comfortable living. To live a little on a rise, where we can see animals we will hunt and enemies coming. Grasslands where the big animals live, which provide a good deal of our food to the extent that were carnivorous. Then, of course, water. Water that provides not just living but transportation and food, particularly in times of drought and hardship on the land.

In terms of what were evolutionarily developed for, youve pointed out that species that work well togetherants and termites and humansare the species that have taken over the planet. And yet, our knack for cooperation also seems increasinglyaccording to a lot of metricsself-destructive. I'm wondering, what are the other kinds of evidence of cooperation that you see that leave you more hopeful?

[Long Pause] Thats a very interesting question. Let me just think. [Pause] What sort of cooperation do I see? Perhaps you could say intrinsic, to human instinctive behavior?

I would say all cooperation except war, or other forms of violent inter-group activity. I believe the evidence is quite strongand now we're about to get into another subject altogetherthat the human species, through the Australopithecines and first direct human progenitors, all the way through primitive forms of likeHomo erectus and the Neanderthals has been marked by an evolution that included, as a driving force, competition between groups. Competition of group against group, with cooperation constantly increasing as a result of the competition. Because groups that are more cooperative among the members have been, I believe, a driving force of evolution.

The way it can be expressed: Within groups, selfish members beat altruistic members. But altruistic groups beat groups of selfish members. And that is a driving force that I think has been extremely important in the formation of what we consider us. Its the best trait of the human species.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

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A Conversation With E.O. Wilson - Sierra Magazine

Sing, O Muse, of geeks in garages. Then tell of Big Technologys fall.

Somewhere an epic tale is taking shape, and it goes something like this: Once, we found ourselves in a garden of information. Facts would set the world free. But too late we discovered that rumor, falsehood, and molten hatred could course along the pathways meant for truth. Age-old human impulses proved as adaptable as cockroaches, and have planted their flag in our new digital utopia.

Heightened by misgivings over the 2016 election, the backlash against Big Technology is now in full swing. The coming year promises new efforts to hold it to account, as Congress considers antitrust action and privacy initiatives, and Americans fret over the misuse of their personal data.

Until our great epic arrives, the growing spate of books on the Internets dark side will have to do. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Shoshana Zuboff lays important groundwork, conceding that her exhaustive study is just an initial mapping of the terrain.

An emerita professor at Harvard Business School, Zuboff began studying the rise of surveillance capitalism (her coinage) in 2006. Today, her alarm is palpable. In her estimation, virtually all of us are now imprisoned in a digital cage. A new, unprecedented form of power has entered the world. Promising greater connection, it concentrates might among a small number of companies. These companies have not naturally advanced the world toward the democratization of knowledge; instead, their formidable power serves commercial ends, through the manipulation of human behavior. Americans caught in this Faustian snare can either be defensive or pretend nothing is happening, but they cannot escape. If Zuboff is right, only a new era of progressive reform can save us.

Like most writers on what Big Tech has wrought, she ponders its prime movers, describing their mind-set as radical indifference. In The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Margaret OMara identifies an anti-authoritarian streak among the founders, tracing their mentality to post-Vietnam disillusionment. Her wonderfully accessible history of Big Technology spans 50-plus years, and brings home just how extraordinary the rise of the digital world has been.

As OMara notes, the key players combined disdain for authority with an entrepreneurial fervor. Both fell nicely into the political slipstream of the Reagan years. Yet as she also demonstrates, to a large but underappreciated extent, government aided the rise of Silicon Valley. By opening the Internet to commercial activity in the early 1990s, it provided a crucial foothold. As tech companies grew, politicians hung back from intervening, partly because they did not understand what they were regulating.

Big Tech was tightly controlled by a coterie whose heedless, white male ethos masqueraded as the free market. Nevertheless, OMara tends to give these titans the benefit of the doubt: Geeks caught up in designing cool stuff could not be expected to reckon with bad actors exploiting their creations.

Journalist Noam Cohen suggests, to the contrary, that todays tech billionaires have simply been masters at letting themselves off the hook. If anything unites them, it is their shared belief in their own benevolence. In The Know-it-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, Cohen presents a digital-age rogues gallery.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and others figure in a set of interlinked portraits illustrating how Big Techs disruptive dream darkened, infecting the world with a libertarian outlook that has been great for winners but destructive for almost everyone else. Amid Cohens hard-nosed cast is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, still evidently resentful toward his upbringing in small-town Wisconsin. Cohen wonders, not altogether facetiously, whether the world is being made to answer for Andreessens years of chopping wood and suffering through gym class.

New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz presents the Big Tech players as, primarily, naive optimists. In Anti-social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, he probes the destructive forces unleashed by their creations.

For years, online social networks have been used to promote a white nationalist agenda. Intrigued, Marantz entered the world of right-wing extremists and returned a changed man. While outlets such as Twitter and Facebook have begun to crack down, their overlords still seek cover in a First-Amendment absolutism.

The most disheartening aspect of Marantzs journey may be the fierce animosity toward mainstream news organizations he encountered along the way. Thanks partly to algorithms that tap into high arousal emotions, we seem locked in an inane contest between globalist elites and the real Americans. Marantz has turned into a reluctant institutionalist, defending the role of traditional media in what may be an emerging form of conservatism. In the meantime, he and others are creating a vital chronicle of an unprecedented era.

M.J. Andersen is an author and journalist who writes frequently on the arts.

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A boom, a backlash, and a reckoning with Big Tech - The Boston Globe

Its two days before Christmas, a bright and crisp day, and one can sense the world slowing down as people prepare for the holiday. Theres a casualness in the air, and people who dont even know one another exchange greetings.

In a second-floor office in the Chamberlain Block Building on Central Square in Keene, its still busy in the law office of Richard Guerriero. There are phone calls to be made, clients coming in for appointments and research tasks that must be completed for upcoming criminal cases.

Every case has little pieces to it, and preparation is all, doing the work is everything talking to everyone, reading everything, says the 59-year-old Guerriero, whose office windows look out upon the Cheshire County Courthouse, only a chip-shot away.

That vital preparation is why he often puts in 60-hour workweeks. There is no end to the work.

His office is expansive, with one large conference-room table loaded with pending-case files, and the large wall behind his desk festooned with framed credentials, no doubt reassuring to clients with whom he meets. Among them are his law degree from Louisiana State University, and bar membership certificates from the United States Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals, before both of which hes tried cases. Theres also a certificate of membership to the prestigious American College of Trial Lawyers.

Guerriero is a criminal trial defense lawyer, the type most often depicted in television shows or movies. Yet hes quick to point out that the dramatic Hollywood version of criminal law bears little resemblance to what actually occurs.

Its not like television or in novels; its a whole lot more complicated than that, he says. Rarely does it involve winning by some clever legal stroke.

Also, he says, the legal system works slowly and deliberately, sometimes achingly so for defendants in criminal cases, placing people in limbo.

He has been defending people charged with crimes since the time he earned his law degree and passed the Louisiana Bar at the age of 24. Hes been working as a defense attorney in New Hampshire since 1994.

I love practicing law because the right to counsel is the difference between justice and mob justice. A defendant must be protected against the mob and from the government. Im here to make sure the government follows the rules, he says.

I see people after theyve made the worst decision of their life. But theyre still human beings. And for their sake and ours, we have to treat them fairly.

Guerrieros long, winding road to where he is now begins in Baton Rouge, La., where he was raised, the eldest of four children, three of them sisters. After high school he enrolled at Louisiana State University in that city and graduated in three years, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a bachelors degree in philosophy. He then enrolled in LSUs law school.

I hated my first year of law school. he admits. So, I quit.

That summer, though, he secured a job at a law firm consisting of defense attorneys in Baton Rouge. There, he was assigned research duties for pending criminal cases.

Once I got involved in real cases, it all made sense to me, he says. He changed his mind about law school, and re-enrolled. He worked three jobs to earn his tuition money and became a member of the Louisiana Law Review while there.

From 1984 to 1985, he clerked for Justice James Dennis at the Louisiana Supreme Court in New Orleans, who he says was his mentor, and the hardest working lawyer Ive ever known. Dennis is now a federal judge at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.

After the clerkship, he entered into private practice in Baton Rouge, where from 1985 to 1993 he had a general litigation practice, with most of his cases involving criminal defense.

Guerriero recalls his first time in court as a practicing attorney, in the criminal court division in Baton Rouge. I was nervous. A lawyer is constantly worrying about whether or not theyve thought about everything, he says, something that never goes away no matter how long an attorney has practiced.

He met his wife, Anne, in Baton Rouge, where she was working in the program Teach for America. She was moonlighting at the YMCA, and thats where we met. At the end of 1993, the couple moved to Boston because Anne wanted to return home to her native New England, and to enroll in graduate school at Boston College.

This was a big change for Richard, whod spent all of his life in Louisiana.

We first lived on Commonwealth Avenue, where everyone fought over parking spaces theyd carved out during snowstorms, he says. I remember the Boston Globe sponsored a contest to guess if the citys winter snowfall would be higher than Robert Parish, the 7-foot-tall Boston Celtic.

In 1994, Richard secured a job as an attorney at the N.H. Public Defender, a nonprofit law firm in Concord; its purpose to provide defense services to indigent citizens charged with federal and state crimes. Its the largest law firm in the state, employing 130 attorneys, and last year handled 27,866 cases from its 10 statewide offices.

He said that when he joined the firm, there were openings at several of the law firms offices, among them Keene.

We came to Keene, saw Main Street, ate at Timoleons and drove around the city. We loved it. His wife Anne eventually got a job as a math teacher at Keene Middle School, where she still works.

He began working at the firms Keene office, but later transferred to its Concord and Manchester offices. From 2000 to 2012, he was the firms litigation director. He served on a committee established by the N.H. Supreme Court to compile the N.H. Rules of Criminal Procedure, and served on the advisory committee for the United States District Court in Concord. In 2009 he received the N.H. Bar Foundations Frank Rowe Kenison Award for community service, named after the chief justice of the N.H. Supreme Court from 1952 to 1977. And, he was twice named Champion of Justice by the N.H. Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

Also, Guerriero is vice president of the N.H. Bar Association, slated to become president in 2021.

In 2013, he and a longtime colleague at N.H. Public Defender, Ted Lothstein, formed their own firm, Lothstein Guerriero, with offices in Keene and Concord, specializing in criminal cases throughout the state. I put 30,000 miles on my car a year, he says. We go to court a lot.

Also, unlike television, criminal defense attorneys rarely go before juries, most of the cases being negotiated through plea agreements. Were in front of juries maybe two or three times a year, he says. If everyone had a jury trial, the system would grind to a halt. Its not possible to have jury trials for everyone, or even wise.

His years defending those charged with crimes have given him many insights into both human behavior and the intricacies of the legal system. For example, he says that incarcerating those who are convicted often makes things much worse. Despite that, he recognizes that there are some evil people on this earth. Ive met them; I know there are some people who are so dangerous they cant live in society. Theyre rare, yet they should be treated fairly and humanely. But at a certain point, you have to protect people.

On the other hand, he says, most people are capable of changing their lives around. Not everyone, but most.

Guerriero also admits that people frequently lie and that many are unreliable.

All of us are limited by our perspectives, and we make assumptions when we make our decisions. Its hard to get to the truth even when everyone has good intentions, but truth is a pretty complicated and nuanced thing. Theres always more to a story.

Guerriero has, in the past, during his training of public defenders, used the case from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird to illustrate the complexity of the role of a public defender.

While the plight of the character Atticus Finch in the novel is complicated, Imagine being the court-appointed attorney for the character who spits on Atticus and later organizes the lynch mob that kills the defendant.

He says that the aim of criminal law is not simply to win, but to strive to see that defendants receive a fair result or negotiate a fair result.

In that regard, he claims that Cheshire County has an exemplary criminal justice system.

Were lucky in this county. Were very progressive with such things as the drug court and early-case resolution. He gives credit to County Prosecutor Chris McLaughlin, with whom he has a comfortable working relationship.

Guerriero says that he never tires of the tasks before him providing counsel to those who find themselves on the other side of the law, and cant imagine being retired, despite working as a defense attorney for 35 years.

This is what I love to do.

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'The right to counsel is the difference between justice and mob justice' - The Keene Sentinel