The Global Consortium
The other thing is that, in my professional life, I was closing down my lab and really giving up my tenure, part of my job, everything, for somebody younger. They thought that was nice. I was just doing it so I can go fishing. I got together with two close friends, Tom Stevenson and Fabio Macciardi. We sat in the backyard with some steak from Texas and some Cabernet from California and started talking about how we take this information. We were sitting back there like three buddies who get together and work on a plan how they are going to change the world with this information. We were going to call ourselves the three musketeers. My wife had another name for us. But we decided on the Global Consortium. So if you get together with two of your friends, you call yourself a Global Consortium.
We went out looking for projects and funds. The main thing we were looking at was this transgenerational epigenetic violence and how this ‘gift’ keeps giving, both in terms of terrorism and local street stuff, bullying at home, and everything. We looked at how to test them, how to understand the brain, how to predict it, all this stuff.
We had started with the idea of intragenerational epigenetics, which is what happens in your own life. But then, on the right (note: in the video) it shows how this is passed down in generations, not only because you have or are mimicking the same behaviors, but also because their actual genetic marks go on. This is known from a Swedish study and from a Dutch study of famines. What happened to your grandfather, to your great-grandfather when they were a certain age, like, for example, they underwent a famine when they were five to nine years old (it is called the growing period), then you would grow up perhaps with high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes. People are popping up that word, they say: “I shouldn’t be fat, I shouldn’t be this, I shouldn’t be that”. Well, it looks like these things are passed not only one generation, but two generations. One of the most striking things was that the children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims started to get the same nightmares the people who have been through those experiences were getting, which means that the predilection for the terrible nightmares from the Holocaust was being transmitted, it was affecting the brain connections, the brain chemistry of these people who never saw any awful things. But it was being sent down the line.
Now we are starting to look at slavery. It is about hundreds of years of abuse, deprivation, and all sorts of stuff, and how that can really get into the fiber of a large number of people. It could happen anywhere in the world. This became an issue, one of the first thing to get involved with.
War-like characteristics
I went to the Sahara, into the deep desert, to look at nomads, Berbers and Bedouins, non-Arabic and Arabic Bedouins. In a certain way, they simulate the critical changeover point from hunter-gatherers nomadic lifestyle to settling down, so a different kind of war. They are kind of an early condition. I went there and interviewed them. You see (note: in the video) at the lower right the kids all over me, driving me crazy, they are the same everywhere. I was trying earlier to get saliva from them and tell them stories. But anyway, they are very sweet.
We went through looking for all these different genes having to do with war-like characteristics. As it turned out, all the nomads – whether Arabic or non-Arabic – had very little violence. It turns out that their pattern of warrior genes and the things associated with violence and aggression look just like Sicilians, which could be good news or bad news. Then I found out the way they dealt with it. I said: how do you deal with people who are ill-behaved? Well, they sent them down with an elder, then they let them fight for a while – a few minutes – and then, whether they are kids or adults, they pass judgment, and they never kill anybody. There is no capital punishment. They send you out into the desert, which is kind of capital punishment, but it is no direct killing. And there was still a part of the equation there that was off.
After this experience and looking at the genetics, I started to think and realize the importance of a harsh environment in our evolution, how this may have played into the amount of violence. I know you have had Steve Pinker here, he is a friend of mine who talked about how violence is going down. People just do not believe that there is less and less violence. It depends on how you look at it. I was really becoming interested in a part of this, which is the overall issue of defense and also war. I got contacted by Jack Pryor; Jack is right here (note: in the video) with Bob Scales. He is very interested in studying the effect of different genotypes and different brain patterns of young soldiers, how to prevent PTSD and also how to not up-regulate psychopathy when the troops come home, and how to differentiate between different kinds of empathy within troops. There is the Delta Force guy, kind of the lone wolf, who is a very different person than the elbow infantry person, who has a real kind of emotional empathy because they are fighting for each other. It is not about mom’s apple pie so much as if they are fighting for each other, they have very tight bond. You do not find that in a Delta Force guy, a lone hunter, a sniper type of person. Very different types. The idea is: “how do you get the right people in the right job?”
There are so many interesting things about this. The first thing is that the brain, the emotional part of the brain – the limbic system – and the dorsal stream are not in balance until you are about 25 years old for most people, 24, 25, 26 years old. The first obvious thing is that you don’t ever want to send anybody under 25 years old to wars. It is just asking for so much trouble, sort of out of desperation. But if you have to have the war, you better wait to have mature people that have been tested, so they do not ruin their lives and come back and ruin their families lives. That is an important part of this. But we still haven’t done all those things.
Another interesting part is, as Paul Zak talked about empathy, that you can create warm fuzzes between these individuals. Oxytocin sniffed by gangsters just make them better liars, better criminals who lie for each other. It doesn’t always end up being lovely stuff. In terms of society, it may not be always such a good thing.
I am halfway through my talk and there is a certain person who runs everything and who is behind me. So I better stop for questions. I said there is a lot of bad news about all of this in terms of what it means for public policy and behavior. But the same guy Fabio Macciardi, who works with geneticists and psychiatrists, just found something, pretty recently, that showed that these large scale epigenetic marks in the cortex can be reversed, which is so remarkable. This means there is actual hope for reversing things like psychopathy. This is the first data to show this. We are taking some of that information and now I am working at the Vatican with the Vatican Arts Council. We try to look at the opposite of psychopathy and violence, which is the Pope’s tenderness. We are trying to find two experiments to show exactly that in art and in his message. All this stuff really is the key to reverse the psychopathy.