Paleorobotics, revisiting the landscape of fear, and a book on the future of imagination
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This is the Science Podcast for October 25th, 2024. I'm Sarah Crespi. First up this week, a new study of an iconic ecosystem doesn't support the landscape of fear concept. This is the idea where bringing back apex predators like wolves has a huge impact on the behavior of their prey, eventually altering the rest of the ecosystem. Contributing correspondent Virginia Murrell joins us to talk about the new findings.

Next, researcher Michael Ashida talks about studying evolutionary history by creating robotic versions of extinct creatures. Finally, in the last in our series of books on an optimistic future, Books host Angela Saini talks with author Ruha Benjamin about her book, "Imagination: A Manifesto," which explores the part that imagination plays in creating new and radical futures.

In the mid-1990s, wolves were reintroduced into part of Yellowstone National Park in the United States and began hunting this enormous population of elk. In the following decades, a resurgence of trees and birds in the park has led some researchers to hypothesize that the presence of wolves changed behavior patterns of the herbivores like elk enough to reshape the ecosystem. Basically, there weren't enough wolves to eat

all the elk that were there, but they were seeing these big changes in the park and the things that the elk were eating. So this was this idea of a landscape of fear caused by wolves on the elk, which had this huge impact on the ecosystem as a whole. Contributing news correspondent Virginia Morrell is here to add even more complexity to this scenario. Hi.

Hi, Virginia. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, Sarah. Nice to see you. Thank you for inviting me. Sure. This is a longstanding theory. I think it was first proposed in 2004. And so it's kind of 20 years-ish or published in 2004? 2001 actually was the...

The landscape of fear hypothesis had been around since at least the late 90s. And then in 2001, it was proposed that it applied to Yellowstone and the reintroduction of wolves. All right. And so in the years since, has it been widely embraced? This is something that people have kind of converged around as a way of describing. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yellowstone wolves saved the rivers. They saved the forest. They brought back everything from songbirds to grasshoppers, etc.

It's been widely accepted and it's been applied to a park in Mozambique most recently, I think. And then it's been suggested that be applied to the Scottish Highlands, that they should restore wolves there as well. And then you see cases such as in Australia where they would like to increase the number of Tasmanian devils to eat herbivores that are eating the plants. We need to reintroduce carnivores because not only do they predate on herbivores, but they also...

change their behavior. Just the presence alone supposedly scared the animals, so they changed their behaviors and altered where they fed. So they weren't eating the prime plants, predominantly young trees that they like to graze on, that they were avoiding needs. And the trees were recovering. They were actually growing taller. And eventually the hope was that we would once again have materialistic

mature aspen stands in northern Yellowstone. And let's just talk a little bit about the numbers through the 90s and early 2000s. How many elk were there when the population was at its height? And then how many wolves got introduced? We're talking the northern part of Yellowstone National Park. So it's the area that's closest to Montana. And

And it's a very nice range area for the elk to gather. This population had grown to approximately 20,000 by 1994. In the 1920s, park authorities had held intentional hunts to eliminate all predators, or most of the predators in the park. They got rid of wolves and cougars. They left the bears. But by getting rid of those animals, they really reduced the predation on these elk herds.

In 1995, they decided to bring back the wolves. Cougars returned on their own. Initial reintroduction was, I think, 14 wolves in 1995. By 1997, they had brought back 41. And they released them all into this northern area. They have spread out around the park.

But most recently, the numbers that were used in this new study that cited a population of 101 wolves. I think they're a little more than that in the northern part of the park at this point. And how are the elk doing on that same timeline? Well, the elk numbers dropped dramatically in the next decade after the wolves were brought back. By 2007, I think the number of elk was reduced to about 8,000.

maybe a little less than that. So this kind of points out the problem, like the wolves were eating the elk and the elk were, maybe they were scared, but they didn't scare them to death. Like how did a hundred wolves eat like 12,000 elk? Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the question, you know, so over the years, other scientists have looked at that question of

what was actually happening to the elk and how had their numbers dropped? And was it simply because they were so afraid and they weren't mating? Females were having fewer offspring because they didn't have this nutritious diet, all of these questions. And so over the years, people have looked at, well, how many elk do grizzly bears or black bears take? And they take a lot in the spring when they wake up from hibernation and the elk are having their calves. And we'll

Both of those bear populations, they take a significant number of elk cows. And the cougar, I don't remember now how many there are, but they take at least an elk or a deer about every nine days. Then there's also the human hunt. I was going to say, the big hunters, the humans also have a role in this play. And the human hunt, it turns out, actually takes the most.

They're probably why the elk numbers dropped as precipitously as they did. And so you end up with this guild of predators who are all targeting the elk. People weren't saying, well, the elk went away and that's why this ecosystem has recovered. They have said, wolves came, all this cascade of things happened, and...

They didn't look to see whether or not elk were being hunted out, that the elk population had diminished by such an extent? They knew that the elk numbers were dropping because every year they do surveys and count the elk because the state of Montana has a winter hunt

They have hunts almost all year round, actually, on the elk. Those elk, of course, they come out of the national park and they go across southern Montana into what would be their summer range. And as they come out of the park, they're targeted by hunters. And they have this specific hunt

that they started for a while in the late 90s, which allowed hunters to take antlerless elk. So that meant bulls that had dropped their antlers and pregnant females. Consequently, the numbers, of course, dropped dramatically, especially if you're targeting fertile females. But

the wolves were still credited with both having killed too many elk and with having scared them. So that was why the numbers were supposed to be as low as they were. We've been talking elk and wolves, but

what are the main outcomes of this is what happens with the trees, particularly with the aspen. And so this new research is taking a look at this data over... I think they have about 29 years of data that they've collected. Okay. And what is the data? What is the focus of the analysis there? Well, the aspen trees were one of the big concerns, those in willow stands. And willow stands were along the river, so they were thought to gather a lot of

because of the size of their host and all they damaged riverbanks and caused a lot of erosion and then the aspen stands they would graze on the newest young shoots of aspen that were trying to start and these weren't the cloned aspen but they were like seedling aspens hugely important because they were introducing new genetics but they were always being stopped you

you know, at a certain level because the elk would graze on them. So they couldn't grow into mature trees. The wolves presumably came along and they scared the elk from being able to graze like they used to on these young stands of aspen. When these researchers looked at their data and they had collected data on 113 stands of aspen in

in various habitats across the northern range in Yellowstone, they didn't see that the young aspen trees were actually recovering. They saw very little sign that any of them were reaching maturity. They have to grow beyond about 120 centimeters in order for the elk to stop grazing on them. And their numbers indicate that if there has been recovery, it's patchy at best. What does this suggest about, does it say anything about the landscape of fear?

There are weak effects of the fear. So one of the things they found was that the male elk, which are, it surprised me to hear this, they tend to be more heavily predated by the wolves than the females.

But when they lose their antlers and they've lost muscle mass after the rut, they tend to be at risk of being attacked by the wolves. They are the ones that are avoiding aspen stands. And then the elk also avoid aspen stands in the winter. That's where you would think that it would be most helpful for them to graze because of the lack of food in the wintertime. So those little aspen trees are probably a real prime part of their diet in the winter. They see a little effect of

of them stopping both grazing in the winter and the bull elk avoiding the stands. And then the elk are very smart. You know, they've figured out that if they avoid the stands at dawn and at dusk, they're more likely to avoid the wolves. So there are what they call weak effects, but they don't add up to enough of an effect to see the resurgence of aspen trees that

people have thought that they were seeing. Beyond the aspen trees, what about the songbirds and the grasshoppers and all this like downstream of the trees restoration? That's the interesting thing is that you do see this resurgence of some biodiversity and it

Exactly how that figures into what's happening in northern Yellowstone, that remains to be seen. If we can figure out what else is going on. We do know there's been a long-term drought that's affecting aspen stands across the western United States. So aspen elsewhere besides northern Yellowstone are struggling. And how that affects the aspen there in Yellowstone, that's

That's an open question. And then beaver were returned. Actually, they were restored to areas outside of the park. They've since made their way back in. So they are helping to capture water, which helps increase the number of willow and should help the aspen over the long term. All of these things, you know, I mean, it just shows how tangled ecosystems are and to try to start teasing these things apart, what a challenge it represents. Absolutely. You know, you talked to some of the

authors of the original work on the landscape of fear in Yellowstone, what was their take on this new study and kind of what it says about this concept? They stand by their research, of course. They're quite convinced that what they have seen in the past, what they reported seeing, which is the recovery of

of aspen, especially they point out, especially they're talking about the early years right after the reintroduction of wolves, that they did see this resurgence of growth among the aspen and willows and alder trees. And so they disagree and they also disagree with the way that measurements in this study were taken as opposed to how they were done in their studies.

So that's the debate that's going on in the scientific journals. What are the implications if this continues to get taken apart and it's not so clear that bringing wolves or apex predators into ecosystems does

help recover something that's been kind of like trampled by herbivores. Right. Well, now they're faced with a really difficult situation in northern Yellowstone because without the elk occupying all of the prime places, the bison have moved in. They're a much larger animal and much more destructive in terms of trampling stream sites. So they're right now working on a buffalo management plan. Normally, they allow a certain number of buffalo to leave the park and they are shot or

carted off to different places that would like to have buffalo. Bison, I guess, is the correct word, but it's an interesting dilemma. Wolves will take a number of bison. The hunters certainly are allowed to shoot a number of bison as they leave the park.

It's an unfolding drama, you can say. I think also one of the results that the study shows pretty strongly is that this idea that you can just bring back a predator and that animal is going to serve as your ecosystem management tool and save your ecology and save the landscapes and so forth. I think that that idea probably may be looked at again, re-evaluated. Yeah, absolutely. There are

reintroductions of wolves happening in many different parts of the U.S., not just Yellowstone. Do you feel like this is an argument that's been used to make the case that wolves should be reintroduced and it might actually become more difficult? Having the whole guild of predators on the landscape is a really good thing. And I don't think that they're questioning that. They help keep down the numbers of mesopredators, like the coyotes and raccoons and so forth.

They help to limit their numbers. And so they are a very key part of any ecosystem. You want to have those apex predators. I don't think it's a study that says don't do this, but perhaps don't be too optimistic about what results you may see in terms of the vegetation changes. Thanks, Virginia. It's been really fun talking about this.

Thanks for the good question, Sarah. It's been fun talking with you. Yeah. Virginia Murrell is a contributing correspondent for Science. You can find a link to the story we discussed at science.org slash podcast. Don't go anywhere. Next up, we have paleorobotics with researcher Michael Ishida. ♪

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Maybe bio-inspired robotics is old news. I don't know. My kid has a book on biomimetic robots. You know, that's a sign that a field has reached maturity, right? This week in Science Robotics, Michael Ishida and colleagues wrote about a new direction for bio-inspired robotics, paleorobotics. Sadly, this does not mean Mechagodzilla is on the horizon, but it does mean that we can learn a lot more about the ancient past using the latest robotic technology.

Hi, Michael. Welcome to the Science Podcast.

Hi, thanks for having me. So I know I've already expressed my sadness that we're not 3D printing a life-size T-Rex, but what is this? What are we doing? Why make robots that look like extinct animals? The problem with extinct animals is just they don't exist today, right? So you can't go out in the wild, you can't see how they move, you can't see their behavior. By building robots, our hope is that we can now collect data that was previously inaccessible to researchers before.

If you can build a robot that can then walk on the ground or swim in the water, you can collect a lot more data about this animal than you could just by looking at fossils that are these static snapshots in time that just happen to be preserved. So with a robot, we can design movements, we can test things that we think happened, we can test movements that we think didn't happen, and we can collect all this kind of data that then can help us make better hypotheses, build better robots,

understand animals today more and understand animals of the past more. So this is a review paper, so it's kind of a big overview of the development of this field. What are some of the key questions that could be addressed with this approach, like looking at evolutionary history of animals

and then applying robotics to those questions. Yeah, we are very interested in evolutionary transitions. So this can be things like the first aquatic animals that started to come out of the oceans and the rivers to walk on land. Or it could be something like the first flighted animals

that went from fully terrestrial, running, walking on the ground, to flapping and taking off. Any of these transitions can be very exciting because it doesn't just happen overnight. An animal that doesn't have the anatomy to walk on land is never going to be able to walk on land. So

So, paleontologists theorized that all of these creatures had to develop the anatomy while they were still fully aquatic. They're swimming underwater only, and somehow, for some reason, they started developing anatomy that would allow them to support their body weight on land. Now, it seems like kind of counterintuitive, right?

Why would evolution incentivize this fully aquatic animal to develop these structures? Hopefully with robots, we can test hypotheses. We can, let's say, measure the force on the ground when it's walking underwater, measure forces of it swimming underwater, measure energy usage, and kind of understand how and why these structures might have naturally developed while these animals were in a different environment.

Why can't you do this with computational models? We have pretty good ability to model limbs moving on the ground or moving in water. We can definitely do a lot of computational modeling. One thing that we like to think about in physical robotics is that this interaction with the ground or this interaction with the fluid water around it.

We can immediately show with a robot that this is realistic and this is accurate. Whereas with computational modeling, it takes a lot more energy, a lot more expertise, and a lot more

understanding of these interactions with the natural world that isn't really even a part of the question we're trying to answer. And so by building something and by putting it in the environment, we don't have to worry about is this simulation of how a dinosaur walks in mud accurate? We can take a robot and put it in the mud. And by definition, this modeling of the mud is realistic.

Isn't it hard to make something walk like a dinosaur from the past? Isn't that a difficult challenge for robotics to do something very like an animal? Yeah, it's incredibly difficult. And I think that one of the tools we advocate for in this paper is

understanding how to make a model of an animal. So for example, we're never going to even really replicate the exact human leg to put it on a robot. There's many different factors we have to consider things like motors instead of muscles, soft materials instead of ligaments and tendons. So by definition, anything we build is not going to be exactly anatomically the same as what we would get in a living creature.

understanding the right level of abstraction, the right level of generality, how we can simplify this very complicated thing that is an animal down to something we can build and something that will still give us information about the animal is an

an open question. It's something that bio-inspired roboticists have been thinking about for a long time. And paleo-inspired robotics really builds off of that expertise and just extends it one step further to animals that we no longer can see today. But the principles and the techniques are very similar. What are some of the advantages over looking at animals that we see today that are related, like looking at dinosaurs, you know, based on what we know about how birds work?

It does seem like you have an advantage with a robotic version because you could vary either individual features or more complex features and keep others still. And you can't do that on a living animal, right? Right. We call this the ceteris paribus principle.

where you keep many things the same and change only the feature of interest. And so any difference in measurement or any difference in performance, you can then attribute specifically to the one single thing you've changed. Now, if you were to explore how a larger fish fin would affect the way a fish swims, well, you can look for a fish with a bigger fin, but chances are that this fish will be generally larger or all of the fins of the fish, not just the

fin you're interested in might also be larger. But with a robot, you can take off the fin, put on a different fin. You can't really do that with an actual fish. That would be impossible. It would be cruel. It would be any number of things. But with a robot, you can design it exactly how you want it to be. You can design it to exactly test the hypothesis you're interested in. That's the explanatory power of a robot over just biological observations.

Let's go into some of these examples that you talk about, the case studies. So one is plesiosaurs, which I had no idea that there were so many kinds, that they had evolved in so many different directions and that they were around for so long. Can you tell us a little plesiosaurs? A plesiosaur is an ancient creature that swam in the ocean. If you think about a classic kind of dinosaur with a long neck and four legs, it's kind of similar to that, except instead of legs, it has flippers.

So what are some of the questions about plesiosaurs that paleoromatics might help address? We look at all these different studies and see how they examine single features of interest. One of the studies we highlight is this look at the fins of the plesiosaurs. Well, researchers observed in the plesiosaur that the front pair and the back pair were very closely matched. And this is such an unusual morphology for an animal that they...

They fabricated a robotic design based on these different morphologies. They tested it in controlled environments, looked at the fluid dynamics and the vortices coming off of them. And they showed that in certain circumstances, having these exact pairs of flippers was very beneficial to the swimming behaviors. This kind of analysis where we can not only observe the fossil, observe the design of this animal, but actually test how and why this might be beneficial is

is one of the powers of paleo-inspired robotics that we try to highlight. We're going to kind of turn things around here, and this is another new concept to me, which is robot evolution.

evolution, so changing robots through time. What is this exactly and how can paleo robotics, you know, kind of direct that side of the research? There's been a whole history of evolutionary robotics, and that's basically using simulation to optimize a certain design for a certain task. And you can mathematically define what makes a good performing robot or a bad performing robot in simulation. And you can design everything about how this evolutionary process works.

But just like we see with understanding nature, it's very important to consider an environment. So understanding evolutionary processes from the historical context gives us some idea of how to evolve robots in simulation where the environment might play a bigger role than what is currently being simulated. I think that a lot of this computational modeling

has been a huge benefit in robotics because these algorithms come up with ideas that humans may never have considered before. But on the flip side, sometimes they generate these shapes and structures that

might not be as optimized for realistic environments like you would have in evolution of animals. The final takeaway message that we want people to have from our review is that there's this fascinating and relatively underexplored opportunity for robotics to help us understand the history of life.

there's a great history of bio-inspired robotics where we look at nature, take inspiration from things around us that we can observe to help us make better robots and to understand the natural world around us. But I think taking it one step further into history and looking at

creatures that no longer exist is something that bio-inspired robotics techniques are well suited to do. And so we feel that the opportunity for paleo-inspired robotics really adds both another dimension to robotics as well as biology and paleontology to help answer questions that none of us can really understand.

understand on our own without this interdisciplinary nature of paleo-inspired robotics. All right, Michael, I'm really sad that we're not making giant life-size dinosaurs, but this is still really an exciting direction for robotics. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Hopefully some of the things we've learned in paleo-inspired robotics might help us build giant dinosaurs one day.

Definitely. Michael Luchita is a postdoctoral researcher in the Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab at the University of Cambridge. You can find a link to the science robotics review we discussed at science.org slash podcast. Stay tuned for the last in our six-part series on books looking to an optimistic future. This month, host Angela Saini talks with scholar Ruha Benjamin about the underestimated power of imagination and bringing about social change. ♪

Hello, I'm journalist and author Angela Saini. We've reached the final episode of our book series in which I've been interviewing authors on a particular theme. This year, that theme has been a future to look forward to. And of course, what could be more relevant to that question than imagination?

To explore that, I'm joined by Ruha Benjamin, who's a professor of African-American studies and the founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University. She's written many acclaimed books, including Viral Justice, How We Grow the World We Want, and Race After Technology, Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.

Her latest book, Imagination, A Manifesto, explores the part that imagination plays in creating new and radical futures.

Of course, everyone has the power to imagine. But as Benjamin explains, those with power and wealth are often given more license to do it than others. So if we want a society that truly serves everyone, she argues, we should start by making sure every person, especially the most marginalized and vulnerable, have the chance to let their imaginations run wild.

Ruha, this is a profoundly hopeful book. What made you want to write it? In many ways, I'm writing for myself to sort of embolden myself and to keep motivating myself, hoping that it will also be useful to others. I think a big impetus for me is just being in the classroom with students 18 to 24.

two-year-olds the rest of my life, I sort of feel a responsibility not only to diagnose the past present in terms of what's killing us, but also provide tools and insights and motivation for this next generation to carry the torch and be able to do the work. And so with the diagnosis, I think needs to be

some form of prescription, some way of thinking about how we not only sort of combat what's harmful, but also, again, to be able to imagine, to seed alternatives. And in doing so, I think, you know, we can find examples all around us. And so what this work is trying to do is to give us a glimpse, shine a light on things, initiatives, organizations, frameworks that I think

can provide some direction. You really do draw on that educational background. For instance, you do mention this very famous study from the 1960s in which American schoolchildren were asked to think of different uses for a paperclip. Can you describe that study for us and how children performed that?

Yeah, this was a study, famous study by NASA. They were actually trying to figure out what provides this sort of creative capacity, this genius level, what they call divergent thinking, finding many different answers to a problem. And so they studied 1600 school children, a longitudinal study over many years and gave them basically a creativity test.

And what they found remarkably was in the initial study population, this capacity for creativity, imagination, divergent thinking, it was like 98% of five-year-olds exhibited this capacity. And then every single year it dropped. At 12 years old, it was like 15%. By the time they were adults, this cohort, it was at 2%. And so in many ways, you could think about this creative capacity as being schooled out of us.

That we find it in such a broad way across people. And then the more we're in these institutions that we should be able to turn to to incite our potential, it's where it's routinely squashed, standardized, you know, ground down. And so I think it's an invitation for us to rethink our approach to schooling.

And also think about creativity as not just a luxury, but as this human capacity that we are sort of not taking advantage of very well. And that question of schooling, then you do highlight alternatives. So for instance, the Finnish model,

Could you describe that? What is it that makes that successful? You know, we associate play with, again, the thing that happens is the icing on the cake. It's extra. It's not very crucial to our growth and development. And yet in the Finnish case, they take play really seriously so that students don't even learn to read and do math, etc. In the school setting, at least,

until they're seven, eight years old. They don't take any tests until they're almost done with school. And the educators are studying play. They're looking at children play. They're looking at all of the things that we gain through play, whether it's cooperation, healthy competition, communication, mutual respect, all of these capacities that in other places like in the US where recess time is being cut

arts are being cut from school, play is not taken seriously. The irony, of course, is that when these international organizations administer tests globally, Finnish students routinely out-test everyone else. And so there's this inverse relationship between a focus on testing and our ability to just skate through these tests. It is a

challenge though, isn't it, for educators? How do you get that balance between allowing children to just explore the world for themselves and knowing how well they're doing, measuring everything? What would be your ideal system then? So much of the way that we structure education is not prioritizing students or their learning and growth, but it's about management. It's about containment and order. I had

A longtime educator visit my class yesterday, and she just admitted like she loves young people. She loves education, but she said she couldn't really teach the way she wanted to in the classroom setting. So even those who are motivated to really give it their all, as you say, there is a structure in place, whether it has to do with

first of all, something as basic as how many students are in the room, right? And so if you're having to care for and teach 30 students versus 15 or 12,

which some schools have the luxury of, you all of a sudden can't necessarily engage in all of these out-of-the-box approaches and pedagogies. And so things as basic as student-to-teacher ratio, as fundamental as how we incentivize education, like how much we pay teachers, the resources, the fact that teachers have to crowdfund

supplies every year already tells us where our priorities as a society lie. And so it comes down to that material basis. And that material basis comes up later in your book when you look at

You interrogate really who it is that society allows to imagine. So for example, you write at length how tech billionaires, you know, these Silicon Valley, very wealthy people are given free reign to be radical and bold in imagining a future in which they're immortal or in which people can have VR fantasy lives or colonize other planets. You're quite skeptical of all this.

It's not that we don't have an abundance of imagination. It's that it's unequally distributed in terms of who gets to materialize their imagination. So the idea that we would invest in space travel, but not free public transportation, we would invest in

AI super intelligence, but not canceling student debt. We invest in wars and weapons and not ceasefire and investing in people. And so again, thinking about where our imagination is allowed to run wild, where it's given license, and then where we're told, oh, that's unrealistic. We'll never be able to have healthcare for all. We'll never be able to have affordable housing or work that's dignified and pays well. And so part of the book is getting us to question this deep asymmetry of

And not necessarily to say we have to choose one or the other, but we really need to reckon where our investments currently go. And as it is, I think a small sliver of humanity is monopolizing our collective imagination in terms of setting priorities, in terms of funneling investments in one direction and not the other. In some ways, all scientific and technological developments require some leap of the imagination to a degree.

What limitations do you see, just drawing on what you've said so far, in the way that scientists currently exercise that blue sky thinking? So it occurred to me in grad school when I was studying the social dimensions of stem cell research and hanging out with scientists who were really explicit about how fictional accounts of the future really influenced their work, whether it was from Star Trek or other sort of sci-fi level fiction.

imaginings about what we could do in terms of regenerating body parts, in terms of health and digital worlds. There was one journalist whose report started, imagine growing cardiac cells beating in a petri dish. And so it was inviting us into this imagination of transforming our biological reality. And yet as a social scientist studying this deep $3 billion investment in this field in California at the time,

When we would bring up issues of health care for all, that was cast down as, oh, that's not a priority. On the very same ballot measure in which Californians voted up this investment in regenerative medicine, we voted down an investment to expand health care.

And so for me, the role of scientists is not to just narrowly be concerned about our own field, our own work, sort of tunnel vision, head in the sand or in the petri dish, but to care about the larger context in which our work is being deployed. Because as it stands, the more we come up with amazing new achievements, whether it's in healthcare or otherwise, it actually widens inequities. That is, the new things that are available are only available to some. And so

In some ways, we can understand that innovation is producing more inequity. It's not inevitable, but it's predictable because we're narrowly concerned about our own little corner of the

of the universe. And so in many ways, I think we need to bolden this tradition of anti-racist science, which goes back hundreds of years in which you do the work, but you also care about the society in which your work is being developed. And do you think, I mean, this is something you've explored in your other books as well, the demographic issues of who gets to do science, who gets to create new technology, even what you were saying about schools and class sizes, you know, that inequality then

Do you think demographics shifts will also shift the way that science and technology works? I definitely think it's necessary, but not sufficient to really transform the kind of status quo that we see. I think

diversity in terms of demographics and that is important. But I think that that can also serve as a placeholder for even more radical transformations, right? And so just because you have diversity behind the screen or in the lab, it doesn't necessarily change the economic context or the political context in which

Still, it can be still just a reserve for a few. That few can be more diverse now, but it doesn't necessarily invite more people into a democratic process of shaping the priorities, sort of thinking of public interest technology or public interest science.

Even if you're from a different background, you say you're not a white cis man from a wealthy background, you still go through the same training, the same medical training or tech training. So you're socialized into a certain disciplinary approach. And, you know, talking about expanding frames of thinking, you do also mention in the book a number of indigenous societies that over time have developed inspired and sustainable solutions.

to problems that they face, for example, living bridges made by Khasi communities in India, by guiding tree roots. Can these other systems of knowledge provide inspirations for a different kind of technological future? Do you see that happening? The potential for that is there if we can crack open these categories in which we cast certain groups, populations, communities as primitive,

or as backwards or as traditional. And it's precisely these knowledges that we need in terms of climate change, in terms of moving towards the future. So much of the futurism that's being sold to us by the tech elite ignores these traditions, ignores these forms of knowledge, presenting themselves as the solution. The very same people who've created the problems that we're dealing with now are now creating centers for the future, programs for the future. And I just want to tell all of them to have a seat.

Like, you've had your turn. Now we need to turn and really look to, you know, these forms of knowledge that have been dismissed, that have been cast aside. And certainly I have colleagues who that's the main concern of their work in terms of shining a light on it and gleaning from it in terms of paving the way forward, whether it's in terms of climate or approaches to education.

education or healthcare. We have everything we need. We just need to be able to value the people from which this knowledge is coming so that we can take advantage of it. One of the central themes of your book right the way through is this idea of breaking down walls, not just in real life, but in our minds, especially. What examples do

can you give of this happening already? Reasons to be hopeful. Yeah, I mean, just in the last few years, there's been a really major shift in terms of, let's say, ideas about how we engender safety in our communities. You know, thinking about how the idea that we can generate safety, not with more cops, but with more connection, more social connections, investments in social goods. You know, there's a movement underway now

Just as cities are trying to invest in more policing to manage inequity in these different locales. In the place where I went to college in Atlanta, there's a $90 million facility that they're trying to create called Cop City. And

There's at the same time a huge mobilization of residents from all walks of life that are pushing back against this, stop Pop City. And they're saying this $90 million investment to create this facility that will train law enforcement from all over the country could be better spent to actually get to the root causes of crime, of insecurity, of instability. And so as we're seeing, it's becoming more

I won't say mainstream, but the collective imagination of our communities is taking hold of this idea that we don't simply need to reform things that are harmful, make them a little less harmful and let's diversify police, you know, let's create mindfulness training, all of these cosmetic superficial attempts to

make it less bad. And they're saying, let's just imagine something wholly different than this set of institutions that is irredeemable. And let's think about the public goods, the forms of community connection. To approach imagination like a muscle or a capacity, I think too often we think of it as like, oh, it's the realm of the artists or the creatives. And we sort of put it in its own little box and say, no, this is something, again, that all children have that gets schooled out of us. So let's build this capacity back up.

And so there are questions, there are prompts, there's activities. We're working on a playbook that actually has games that different groups can play. And so in this chapter, everything from an icebreaker, one of my favorite icebreakers that kind of gets us just thinking in a different way is called MSU, which stands for making shit up.

And you get, and there's a diploma in the book from MSU University. And so rather, let's say, than introduce myself with the kind of boring titles of academia, I got my BA in this, my PhD in this, I would think about what makes me a person, not just to kind of, you know, my work titles, but I would say I have a BA in avoiding phone calls like the plague. I have a master's degree in

getting really silly after midnight. I have a PhD in trying to practice what I preach. And so if you're in a group setting, this starts us off in a different way where we can see beyond the typical categories and labels that reinforce hierarchy and pedigree and get us thinking about who we are more generally, what we bring to the table, our quirks and

And so, again, this is, again, drawing from a well-known educator, Michelle King, who introduced this to my lab. And then there are more serious activities like creating an abolitionist bill of rights or participatory budgeting prompts. You know, if we think about, again, imagination is not just up in the air.

but it's in the spreadsheets. It's in the Excel sheets about where money is going that tells us who and what is valued. Budgets are moral documents. And so what if in a group setting, we thought about what our city budget or a school budget or to think about where we would rather those funds go. And so many different activities, depending on whether you want to work as an individual, a group classroom, just to get us to stretch and strengthen our imagination as a starting point.

Professor Ruha Benjamin, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. And thanks also to you at home or wherever you are for listening. It's been such a pleasure hosting this series, and I hope you can pick up at least some of the books we've been discussing over the course of this year.

And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us at [email protected]. To find us on podcasting apps, search for Science Magazine, or you can listen on our website, science.org/podcast. This show was edited by me, Sarah Crespi, and Kevin MacLean. We had production help from Megan Tuck at Podigy.

Special thanks to Angela Saini for all six book interviews for this series. We are done. Please do check out the whole thing. And I guess now we have to come up with a new one for next year. Our music is by Jeffrey Cook and Wen Kui Wen. On behalf of Science and its publisher, AAAS, thanks for joining us.