Propagandists of obscurantism also do not sleep

Popularizer of science Alexander Sokolov – about the future of man and scientific humor

Oleg Sokolenko, Forbes, 02/24/2021

Alexander Sokolov is the founder and editor–in-chief of the popular science portal "Anthropogenesis.<url>", head of the organizing committee of the educational forum "Scientists against Myths" and the anti-award "Honorary Academician LIED", member of the RAS Commission on Combating Pseudoscience. 

His book "The Strange Monkey. Where did the wool go and why people of different colors" this year was shortlisted for the Enlightener Award in the category "Natural and Exact Sciences". You can view the full list of nominees on the award website. The winners will be announced on February 25.

– Why did you decide to write a book on such a narrow and unusual topic – why do people have little hair on their bodies, and skin and eyes of different colors?

– This is my third book. The first ("Myths about human evolution". – Forbes Life) was about anthropogenesis in general. By the way, she also reached the final of the Enlightener Award in 2015. But now comes the era of more niche books in the scientific community. And to write another book about human evolution in general would mean to retell some things that others have already repeatedly told about.

It seemed interesting to me to take a certain aspect of evolution, which, on the one hand, concerns everyone, and on the other hand, is very difficult to study. After all, paleontologists usually deal with skeletons, the skin and hair of ancient people are not preserved. And it is interesting to find out what tricks experts resort to to get around this problem. Moreover, they succeed: from completely speculative fantasies by the beginning of the XXI century, scientists have come to more reasonable hypotheses. It was on the review of these hypotheses that I built my book.

– What is the most interesting thing you personally learned while working on the book?

– It's amazing what unusual experiments scientists have sometimes put on. For example, we now know that vitamin D is synthesized in the skin. But to establish this, once it was necessary to feed pieces of human skin to rats.

And it also turned out that some seemingly obvious ideas are still the subject of controversy, including due to the insufficiency of the experimental base. For example, who warms up more in a hot climate – owners of light or dark skin? It would seem logical that the latter, and this idea as a kind of paradox was discussed at the end of the XIX century. But, oddly enough, in fact, this is still not strictly shown in the experiment.

– In the book, you also raise near–medical questions - for example, about the role that vitamin D or folic acid plays in our body. Are you thinking of writing a separate book about this in the future, with practical recommendations on nutrition and lifestyle?

– Firstly, I am not a doctor, and such books - with practical recommendations to people about their health – should still be written by specialists. And secondly, my interests lie in another area. Perhaps my next book will be about medicine, but it's about something completely different – about transplanting animal organs to humans.

Such ideas have actually been in the air for more than a hundred years, and back in the XVIII century experiments were carried out like transplanting lamb skin or cornea from a pig to a person. But, as a rule, such experiments ended sadly. And now, with the development of transplantation and genetic engineering techniques, this direction has become promising, and it is going to clinical trials of organ transplantation from transgenic pigs to humans. Such experiments have already been successfully performed on monkeys. But if I'm going to write a book on this topic, then in conjunction with some transplant surgeon.

– There is a lot of humor in the text of your book, as well as in the illustrations to it. Do you think it helps readers to assimilate information?

– Sure. After all, we need to hook a wide audience. And humor is one of the classic tools for this. Too serious, gloomy scientific pop, few people will be interested in reading. Our task is to evoke positive emotions in the reader, and here we cannot do without humor.

– A lot of attention in your book is paid to sexual selection. It turns out that if people have different preferences about the appearance of sexual partners in different parts of the world, then evolution goes differently there?

At the level of microevolution– yes. We see that human populations differ from each other, for example, by the intensity of beard and mustache growth – in Mongoloids this feature is less pronounced than in Caucasians. Women's preferences on this matter also differ in different parts of the world. One can cautiously assume that one is related to the other. And then the hypotheses begin, which I write about in my book.

– Speaking about such preferences, is it possible to clearly distinguish the influence of momentary fashion and the actual biological mechanisms that affect evolution? 

– This is really very difficult to do, but it is still possible to a certain extent due to the design of research. For example, in surveys that studied the effect of the presence or absence of a beard on the attractiveness of men, residents of both large megacities and a small island, where there is only one cinema and there are no billboards, participated. That is, the locals were significantly less influenced by fashion. But the survey showed that their preferences for men's beards are the same as those of residents of large cities. This means that we are talking more about some universal mechanisms than about fashion.

– We live in the era of globalization, when people move massively all over the planet, representatives of different populations mix with each other. Does this not stop the action of those evolutionary mechanisms, because of which people in different parts of the world began to look different?

– To some extent, yes. When everyone is so mixed up, in theory it prevents the emergence of populations that are very different from others. This requires isolation, and now it is difficult to find completely isolated groups of people. In addition, now people create their own habitat for themselves, so that a light–skinned Caucasian can live quite normally at the Equator, and a dark-skinned African can live beyond the Arctic Circle. On the other hand, if globalization becomes absolute, it will not be very soon: while people are still separated by borders and distances.

What all this will lead to is still difficult to say. In previous centuries, following the era of Great Geographical Discoveries, mass migrations of people between continents have already led to the formation of whole new racial types – for example, in Latin America or South Africa. Evolution continues, it is just partly driven by other mechanisms.

– In your book, we are talking about how our hair, skin and eye pigmentation have changed over the course of human evolution. Is it possible to extrapolate these patterns into the future and imagine what we will look like in hundreds and thousands of years?

– When anthropologists are asked about such forecasts, they usually laugh it off, because making a forecast is an irresponsible occupation. New factors are now beginning to influence human evolution, while others, once important, on the contrary, are becoming a thing of the past. Genetic engineering, plastic surgery, bionics and much more are developing. It is already more or less clear, for example, how eye color and hair color are genetically determined. I think in the future all this will lead to the fact that people themselves will partly design their appearance and the appearance of their children. At the same time, of course, new ethical questions will arise, but ethics also changes over time.

Therefore, it is impossible to predict how the human appearance will change in the future. We ourselves will influence this to a much greater extent than some external factors.

– Let's talk about things unrelated to the book. You founded the portal "Anthropogenesis" more than 10 years ago. How has the situation with scientific education in Russia changed during this time?

– In general, it seems to me, it has become better. There is much more high-quality popular science literature – both Russian and translated. Popular science events appeared, there were even a lot of them, and they began to compete with each other. Educational channels on the Internet are developing. This means that everyone who is interested in science has more choice: what to read, watch, listen to. 

But, unfortunately, I do not rule out that in the near future the situation may worsen due to the toxic legislative initiatives that have appeared now.

– Do you mean the resonant bill on educational activities in the Russian Federation?

Yes, I'm talking about him. However, I was recently assured that the bill is not directed against us, but against all kinds of pseudoscience – anti-vaccinators, Fomenkovites and others. But in the text of the bill that I have seen, it does not really say at all what mechanisms will be used and how they will be developed. Will officials consult with educators at the same time? Will they be interested in our opinion?

Let's go back a bit. Indeed, there have been more good popular science materials in recent years. But the propaganda of anti-scientific ideas has also intensified. How to deal with it?

Well, what did you want? Of course, this is a two-way process. Enlightenment is developing, but propagandists of all kinds of obscurantism also do not sleep and actively use different channels and forms of communication with the public. Therefore, it is impossible to relax. We are fighting this phenomenon, including the award "Honorary Academician LIED" for outstanding contribution to the dissemination of anti-scientific and pseudoscientific ideas.

– What other interesting projects do you have now?

Now, in addition to the main channel "Anthropogenesis" on YouTube, we have a second one – "Science Station", which we are doing together with the "Laboratory of Scientific Videos". Initially, this was the name of the monthly popular science lecture hall, which we launched in St. Petersburg before the pandemic. Now it has moved online, broadcasts are held twice a week in the format of meetings with scientists and answers to questions from viewers.

In addition, we have come up with the "Presence Effect" format: virtual excursions to unusual places with scientists as guides. Now that there are fewer opportunities to travel, this is especially important. For example, last Saturday a tour of the digitized Egyptian exposition of the British Museum was conducted by an Egyptologist invited by us. Now 3D tours of the most interesting objects are being posted on the Internet: ancient tombs, caves with paintings of the Stone Age, and so on. We even have a tour of the Brazilian National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which burned down in 2018.

We are engaged in experimental archaeology. Now we have been experimenting for six months: in Kemerovo, a sculptor girl and an assistant make a stone vase from diorite according to the ancient Egyptian method, without using metal tools. Only flint, bone, sand, water, leather. And this is continuously broadcast to the Internet directly from the workshop.

In addition, we are currently making a children's cartoon about human evolution together with a computer graphics specialist. With the help of crowdfunding, we have raised money for three series, and now the third one is in the works. Finally, we have a permanent exhibition on the topic of anthropogenesis in the Biological Museum and there is a mobile one that travels around the country. Now we will update this traveling exhibition.

I will also add that the volunteers who helped us at the "Scientists against Myths" have self–organized into the whole SciTeam movement - a community of people who help educational projects free of charge. There are already several hundred of them there, and they are very active.

– How else are your projects funded, besides crowdfunding?

– Until recently, our number one source of funding was the sale of tickets to the forums "Scientists against Myths". Now, due to the pandemic, it has become, of course, more difficult. Because we will be holding the third forum online, and the main broadcast is free. But we have all sorts of paid bonuses. 

Plus advertising monetization in YouTube and Patreon (a blog with a paid subscription system. – Forbes Life). We have our regular "patrons" (subscribers) who support us there. Also on our streams there is an opportunity to donate. Thanks to all this, we have a small budget and we can do our own projects.

– You are a mathematician by education. How did it happen that your projects are related to anthropology?

– On the one hand, this is a great personal interest since childhood. Many people were "sick" of dinosaurs in childhood, but at some point it became most interesting to me precisely the origin of man. I am an atheist, and from an early age I was very skeptical about all sorts of supernatural explanations of the world. I was interested in understanding human roots from a scientific point of view, hence the interest in anthropology and paleontology. Reading special literature, communicating with scientists led to the emergence of "Anthropogenesis" and other projects.

Indeed, I write on biological topics, being a mathematician by education. But I try to dive deeply into the topics I undertake, not only by reading special literature, but also by being in constant contact with specialists. This allows me, I hope, to avoid the professional dangers of a scientific journalist.

The award ceremony "Educator" will be held online on February 25 at 19:00 Moscow time. In addition to awarding the winners – the authors of the best popular science books of 2020 - the audience will see a performance in which educators will resist conspiracy theories, anti–scientific beliefs and fakes. The director of the production is Savva Saveliev (ex–creative producer of the Evening Urgant program, nominee for the Golden Mask Award – 2021). You can watch the ceremony on the website of the Enlightener Award, on the YouTube channel and on social networks (Facebook, VKontakte).

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