Survivor separates by race

‘Survivor’ to Divide Teams Along Racial Lines

For the first time since it went on the air in 2000, the hit CBS reality television program “Survivor” will divide its teams — or tribes, as they are known on the show — along racial lines.

For the first half of the series this fall, four teams of five members will be made up of blacks, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and whites. They will compete in weekly challenges against each other, and the losing group will have to vote out a member of its own team.

Mark Burnett, the series producer, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the decision to organize the teams by race was made in group discussions with CBS executives and was in no way intended to promote racial divisiveness.

“In America today,” Mr. Burnett said, “I really don’t believe there are many people who hate each other because of their race. But even though people may work together, they do tend in their private lives to divide along social and ethnic lines.”

Mr. Burnett noted that in many cities, members of ethnic groups tended to cluster in neighborhoods. “In New York you will find areas like Little Afghanistan,” he said. “Maybe in the year 3010, when we’re all coffee-colored, it really will make no difference. But right now, it is what it is.”

The Quiet Crisis

Achievement gap

Trust your instincts

You animals!

Do you really need that flat-pack wardrobe or would the foldaway futon be a better buy? Why not have lunch and think about it? Then you might need to choose between pickled herring or Swedish meatballs. Everywhere we are confronted with difficult choices. In Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man, the eponymous hero makes all his decisions by rolling a dice. Few of us would trust to a life ruled by chance, so we tend to think carefully about the complex decisions (the wardrobe or the futon) but are content to trust our instincts with the simpler things (meatballs or herring). New research by Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam suggests that we would be better off thinking about the simple choices, and leaving the life-changing decisions to our unconscious mind.
Dijksterhuis asked his test subjects to choose between four hypothetical cars on the basis of a set of specifications (whether the car had a sunroof, low mileage, etc) that could be either simple (only four specifications) or complex (12 specifications). One group was given four minutes to consider the problem; the other group was shown the specification and then immediately distracted by another task. Surprisingly, the subjects with plenty of time to think fared better when faced with a simple decision (four specifications) but worse when the problem was more complex (12 specifications).

This and other similar experiments go to the heart of the vexing question of whether consciousness is any use to us. Our brain seems to be split between the actions we can take with little or no conscious control (although scientists prefer to talk about "attention"), such as riding a bike, and those that require conscious attention, such as arithmetic. We tend to think of our unconscious mind as the more primitive arm of cognition, with consciousness in reserve for the hard problems. But Dijksterhuis's research suggests we have it the wrong way around.

If our conscious mind isn't much use for making hard decisions, what is it good for? It may seem that our voluntary actions are driven by consciousness, but many scientists believe this is an illusion. Nearly a century ago the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley argued that consciousness has no more influence on our actions than a steam whistle has on the locomotion of a train. This view was boosted in recent years by the neurobiologist Benjamin Libet at the University of California. In an experiment he asked subjects to perform a simple task, eg wiggle their little finger, at a time of their own choosing, and measured accompanying brain activity. Surprisingly, Libet could detect brain activity that predicted imminent finger wiggling nearly half a second before the subjects were aware they had decided to wiggle their finger!

Libet's experiments suggested that our brain makes up its mind long (in neurobiological terms) before we become aware of any conscious intention to act. Consciousness seems to be a mere bystander with just an illusion of control. Where does this leave free will or personal responsibility?

Dijksterhuis points out that consciousness is good at following precise rules - arithmetic, solving anagrams, etc - but has only limited capacity for handling more complex problems. He proposes the "deliberation without attention" hypothesis, whereby complex problems are best solved by the parallel-computing capabilities of the unconscious mind. So bear this in mind the next time you need to choose between the flat-pack wardrobe and the futon: trust your instincts.

· Johnjoe McFadden is professor of molecular genetics at the University of Surrey

More the same...

than different.
Tight-knit family: even microbes favor their own kin

New research published by Rice University biologists in this week's issue of Nature finds that even the simplest of social creatures - single-celled amoebae - have the ability not only to recognize their own family members but also to selectively discriminate in favor of them.

The study provides further proof of the surprisingly sophisticated social behavior of microbes, which have been shown to exhibit levels of cooperation more typically associated with animals .

"By recognizing kin, a social microbe can direct altruistic behavior towards its relatives," said postdoctoral researcher Natasha Mehdiabadi, the lead author of the study.

Recognizing one's own family is a common trait among animals - be they chimpanzees, ground squirrels or paper wasps - and because kin recognition can strongly influence cooperative behaviors it can also significantly impact the social evolution of species.

While scientists have repeatedly documented cases of kin recognition, the Rice study is among the first to document the more sophisticated trait of kin discrimination in a social microorganism.

The new study is based on an examination of single-celled Dictyostelium purpureum, a common soil microbe that feeds on bacteria. In the wild, when food runs short, D. purpureum aggregate together by the thousands, forming first into long narrow slugs and then into hair-like fruiting bodies. Resembling miniature mushrooms, these fruiting bodies consist of both a freestanding stalk and the spores that sit atop it. Ultimately, the spores are carried away, usually on the legs of passing creatures, to start the life cycle all over again. But in order to disperse the spores, some of the colony's individuals must altruistically sacrifice themselves in order to make the stalk.

Mehdiabadi and others in the lab of Rice evolutionary biologists Joan Strassmann and David Queller sought to find out whether D. purpureum discriminate by preferentially directing this altruism toward their relatives.

The team collected wild strains of D. purpureum from the Houston Arboretum and took them back to the lab where they were cultured in dishes. In each of 14 experiments, a pair of strains were placed in a dish in equal proportion, and one of the strains in each pair was labeled with a fluorescent dye.

Food was withheld, causing the microbes in each dish to form dozens of slugs and fruiting bodies. Upon observing their social development, the team found that individual fruiting bodies contained predominantly one strain or the other.

"Our experiments ruled out potential differences in developmental timing and showed that these organisms preferentially associate with their own kin," said Strassmann, the Harry C. and Olga K. Wiess Professor in Natural Sciences, who also chairs Rice's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

It's unclear how D. purpureum distinguishes relatives from non-relatives, but Mehdiabadi said the process likely relies on a genetic mechanism.

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