Kokura's luck

In Fluke: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Brian Klaas says that we give simplified, rational explanations for the world. We like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. We tend to ignore or minimize the importance of arbitrary, tiny changes that can have a huge impact on our lives. Some of these events we will never realize were consequential. Yet, when we try to explain the world, we ignore a truth: but for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be very different. 

He gives an example. On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson checked into Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. During their six-day stay, they soaked the beautiful sights in Kyoto - its historic temples, lovely gardens, the mudstone hill, the Japanese maples and ginkgo trees in full bloom... But that tourist visit turned out to be the most consequential sightseeing trip in human history.

Fast forward nineteen years. The Nazis surrendered on May 7, 1945. The focus now shifted to the Pacific where the Asian leg of the war showed no sign of ending. But in the hills of New Mexico, the scientists and soldiers saw a potential savior: the atomic bomb, a new weapon of unimaginable destruction. No successful test had yet been carried out to demonstrate the weapon’s full potential, but everyone involved knew they were getting close. 

On May 10, a group of 13 physicists and generals gathered at a top-secret location code-named Site Y three days after the Nazis had surrendered. This group would decide which cities should be chosen to introduce the bomb to the world. They thought that targeting Tokyo wasn’t a good idea, as heavy bombing had already devastated the new capital. After weighing up the alternatives, they decided that the first bomb would be dropped on Kyoto.

Why Kyoto? It was home to new wartime factories, including one that could churn out four hundred aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, leveling a former capital would deal a crushing blow to Japan’s morale. Kyoto was an intellectual hub with an educated population, home to the prestigious Kyoto University. Those who survived would, the committee supposed, recognize that this weapon represented a new era in human history and that the war had already been lost. 

The committee also agreed on three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. The target list was sent to President Truman. On July 16, 1945, a successful test explosion of the atom bomb was carried out in rural New Mexico. Military strategists consulted detailed maps of Kyoto and decided on ground zero for the explosion: the city’s railway yards. But, on August 6, 1945, the bomb code-named Little Boy fell from the sky not on Kyoto, but on Hiroshima killing 140,000 people, most of them civilians. 

Three days later, on August 9, another atom bomb code named Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, adding roughly 80,000 casualties to the horrifying death toll. But why was Kyoto spared? And why was Nagasaki — a city that hadn’t even been considered a top-tier bombing target — destroyed? Astonishingly, whether over 200,000 people lived or died depended on the nostalgia of a tourist couple and a cloud.

The intended blast in Kyoto site was only half a mile away from the Miyako Hotel, where Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson had stayed two decades earlier. By 1945, Mr. H. (Henry) L. Stimson had become America’s secretary of war, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. When the Target Committee picked Kyoto for destruction, Stimson put his foot down. He insisted that there was “one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.” Yet, despite his insistence, Kyoto kept reappearing on the targeting list. 

The Generals kept saying that Kyoto was a nerve center of the Japanese war machine and needed to be bombed. Stimson went straight to the top. He met with President Truman twice in late July 1945, each time outlining his vehement opposition to destroying Kyoto. Truman finally relented and Kyoto was taken out of consideration. The final targeting list contained four cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and a late addition, Nagasaki. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead of the original target of Kyoto. 

The second bomb was to be dropped on the city of Kokura on August 9. But as the B-29 bomber approached the city, an unexpected cloud cover made it dicult to see the ground below. The pilot circled, hoping the clouds would clear. When they didn’t, the crew decided to attack a secondary target rather than risking a botched drop. As they approached Nagasaki, that city was also obscured by cloud cover. With fuel running low, they made one last pass, the clouds parted at the last possible minute and the bomb was released. 

Nagasaki’s civilians were doubly unlucky: the city was a last-minute addition to the backup targeting list, and it was leveled because of a tiny window of poor weather over another city. If the bomber had taken off a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, countless residents of Kokura might have been incinerated instead. To this day, the Japanese refer to “Kokura’s luck” whenever someone unknowingly escapes from disaster.

Biological luck - IV

The problem is that, even with all this knowledge about how the brain is formed, it is still not possible to make a precise prediction about behaviour. Perhaps such a prediction is possible at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals. It is easy to predict what will happen to a person when a particular bone is broken. But in the case of behaviour, this level of precision is not possible. You can’t say for certain that a person who was abused repeatedly as a child will become an abusive adult.

When someone has extensive damage in the frontal cortex, you can say with certainty that their social behaviour will be inappropriate. But if you take someone who has had a very difficult childhood with abusive parents, malnutrition, etc. you can predict that the outcome won’t be good, but not much beyond that. Why is it that you can predict the effects of a fractured leg exactly but effects of various social factors on behaviour is difficult to predict?  Both cases are dependent on biological factors that are quite well understood. The difference is that they are qualitatively different biology.

When a bone shatters, the steps leading to inflammation and pain that will affect the person’s effort to walk immediately, is easy to know. That straight line of biology won’t be altered by variation in his genome, his prenatal hormone exposure, the culture he was raised in, or when he ate lunch. But all of those variables can influence social behaviours in our life i.e. the biology of the behaviours is always dependent on a number of factors that don’t affect something like a broken bone.

Let us suppose there is someone suffering from depression. Could you have predicted today’s behaviour by knowing about her biology? Suppose you know what version of the serotonin transporter gene she has. That probably gives you a predictive power of about 10 percent. Suppose you also know that she suffered from a traumatic event in childhood. Maybe your predictive power becomes 25 percent. Suppose you know in addition that she is living alone in poverty? Maybe now you have 40 percent predictive power. 

Suppose you also know the average level of stress hormones in her bloodstream today, if she’s living in an individualist or a collectivist culture, if she is menstruating (which typically exacerbates symptoms in seriously depressed women, making it more likely that they’ll be socially withdrawn). Maybe the predictability is now above 50 percent. If you add more factors, many of which have not yet been discovered, eventually your biological knowledge will give you the same predictive power as in the fractured-bone scenario. Science still knows about only a handful of those internal forces. 

Suppose you’re born to a poor, single mother. You are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there.  The stress hormones in your mother’s blood-stream will seep into your blood-stream through the placenta when you are in the womb thus affecting the development of your brain. The stress that your mother faces means that there  a good chance of her leaving you neglected, abused, and living in a crime-ridden neighbourhood. All this stress will further impact the development of the brain, specifically the frontal cortex. 

This early-life adversity thus makes it more likely that you’ll be spending the rest of your life in environments that present you with fewer opportunities than most. The type of brain you are saddled with make you less able to benefit from those rare opportunities — you may not understand them, may not recognize them as opportunities, may not have the tools to make use of them or to keep you from impulsively blowing the opportunity. Fewer of those benefits make for a more stressful adult life, which will change your brain into one that is unluckily bad at resilience, emotional control, reflection, cognition . . .

This continuous stream of interconnected factors ensures that luck does not average out over time. More luck later in life in most cases does not undo the effects of bad luck in early in life. Instead our world virtually guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified further. A report in the NYT says that a large-scale research study found that social mobility hadn’t changed much over time. To a large extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from that of your great-great-great-grandparents. 

When you look across centuries, at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many thought.  This is true whether you consider capitalism, democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution. The just world hypothesis is a lie. I can’t help agreeing with Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, "The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it ..."

All the nurses that I have had will have led difficult lives. Some will have a drunkard as a father or husband, some will be single mothers with their children in some hostel, some would have been ill-treated by a previous employer... It will be apparent that I have had far more lucky life. But, in spite of knowing all this, if somebody shouted at me now for what I think are trivial reasons, I often let my irritation get the better of me. A few minutes later, I will feel disappointed with myself and will tell myself that I should have exercised better self-control. 

I will think that if I had the person’s genes and life experience and an identical brain, I would have behaved in the same way as he or she did. In that situation, I could imagine a nurse going to an IIM and me being a nurse. It is a fallacy to think that our behaviour is independent of our personal histories. This present that I have now would not have been possible without the past that I had. Your personal history is not in the past but in the present "YOU". Our minds are the end products of all the biological moments that came before. But it is mighty hard to act according to this knowledge as I keep finding out. In a speech to Princeton graduates in 2012, Michael Lewis says:

In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.

Biological luck - III

Apparently, the Russian oligarch Mikail Khodorkovsky said before his fall from grace, "If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him. Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it." Every one had the same starting conditions? This guy must have been hallucinating when he said that. "Man is born free ...", said Rousseau. "All men are created equal" is found in the United States Declaration of Independence. All people are neither born free nor created equal. They are constrained by the interaction between the genes they inherited and the environment they were born into. Babies are already different by the time they are born. 

Environment doesn't begin at birth, it begins at conception. The biggest source of these influences of the pre-natal environment is what’s in the maternal circulation, — levels of a huge array of different hormones, immune factors, inflammatory molecules, pathogens, nutrients, environmental toxins, illicit substances, all which regulate brain function in adulthood. If the mother is poor, nuroimaging studies on fetuses have shown that the fetal brain is more likely to be bathed in stress hormones from her circulation which delays aspects of brain maturation. 

This means that there is increased vulnerability to depression and anxiety in your adulthood. Lots of androgens in your fetal circulation (coming from Mom; females secrete androgens, though to a lesser extent than do males) makes you more likely as an adult of either sex to show spontaneous and reactive aggression, poor emotion regulation, low empathy, alcoholism, criminality. A shortage of nutrients for the fetus, caused by maternal starvation, means there’s increased risk of schizophrenia in adulthood, along with a variety of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. Your mother's socioeconomic status is already beginning to influence what kind of brain you're going to have as an adult. Biological factors (e.g., hormones) don’t so much cause a behavior as modulate and sensitize, lowering thresholds for environmental stimuli to cause it.

That what kind of environment your womb was has all sorts of lifelong implications is shown by The Dutch Hunger Winter. This lasted from the start of November 1944 to the late spring of 1945. Europe was devastated by four years of brutal war. Western Netherlands was still under German control. A German blockade resulted in a big drop in the availability of food to the Dutch population. At one point the population was trying to survive on only about 30 per cent of the normal daily calorie intake. Over 20,000 people had died by the time food supplies were restored in May 1945.

The terrible shortages and suffering of this time also created a remarkable scientific study population. The Dutch survivors were a well-defined group of individuals all of whom suffered just one period of malnutrition, all of them at exactly the same time lasting about three months. Because of the excellent healthcare infrastructure and record-keeping in the Netherlands, epidemiologists have been able to follow the long-term effects of the famine. Their study had unexpected findings.

The effect of the famine on the birth weights of children who had been in the womb during that terrible period showed interesting variations. If a mother was well-fed around the time of conception and malnourished only for the last few months of the pregnancy, her baby was likely to be born small. If, on the other hand, the mother suffered malnutrition for the first three months of the pregnancy only (because the baby was conceived towards the beginning of this period), but then was well-fed, she was likely to have a baby with a normal body weight. The foetus seemed to have ‘caught up’ in body weight.

Foetuses do most of their growing in the last few months of pregnancy so this doesn’t seem surprising. But epidemiologists were able to study these groups of babies for decades and what they found was really surprising. The babies who were born small stayed small all their lives, with lower obesity rates than the general population. For forty or more years, these people had access to as much food as they wanted, and yet their bodies never got over the early period of malnutrition. 

Even more unexpectedly, the children whose mothers had been malnourished only early in pregnancy, had higher obesity rates than normal. They also had a greater incidence of other health problems as well, including certain tests of mental activity. Even though these individuals had seemed perfectly healthy at birth, something had happened to their development in the womb that affected them for decades after. And it wasn’t just the fact that something had happened that mattered, it was when it happened. Events that take place in the first three months of development, a stage when the foetus is really very small, can affect an individual for the rest of their life.

Even more extraordinarily, some of these effects seem to be present in the children of this group, i.e. in the grandchildren of the women who were malnourished during the first three months of their pregnancy. So something that happened in one pregnant population affected their children’s children. Audrey Hepburn spent her childhood in the Netherlands during the famine and despite her later wealth she had lifelong medical problems like anemia, respiratory illnesses, and œdema as a result. Subsequent academic research on the children who were affected in the second trimester of their mother's pregnancy found an increased incidence of schizophrenia in these children.