'Make a Difference—and Make Money': Why It's Time to Re-evaluate The Social Role of Businesses [A] The climate emergency and Covid pandemic brought home the role that businesses can play in wider society. Now, more investors than ever are looking to support companies that have a positive impact on the world. The mantra "greed is good" has been associated with the corporate and financial world ever since it was immortalised in the 1987 film Wall Street. But in recent years the mantra could arguably be rewritten as "green is good". [B] Investors' increased focus on companies' social and environmental credentials forms part of a broader shift in the world of business and finance as investors and consumers pay more attention to the social impact and responsibilities of companies. Just as consumers have been changing their spending habits to support more ethical businesses, investors have been judging companies on so-called ESG factors—their performance against environmental, social and governance criteria. [C] "It's a trend that has been building for a decade but in the last two years we have hit tipping point," says Jessica Fries, executive chair of The Prince's Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S). "Climate is the key driver: as the material, financial impacts of climate change are starting to become clear, we're seeing key stakeholders from the financial community coming together with individual investors to bring pressure on organisations to change." [D] Alongside the climate emergency, the Covid pandemic has brought home the role played by businesses in tackling or exacerbating wider societal problems. The crisis has shown us how interconnected we all are and the importance of pulling together for the common good. It has also made issues such as inequality feel even more tangible and urgent. [E] One stark indication that a fundamental shift in values has taken place is the fact that the trend intensified during the sharp economic downturn sparked by the pandemic— defying those cynics who had assumed that socially responsible investing was just a "fair weather" trend that would be abandoned at the first sign of economic difficulties. According to the Investment Association, in 2020, investors put almost ￡1bn a month into responsible investment funds in the UK, taking the total under management to more than ￡56bn, an increase of 66% over the year. Likewise, shareholder resolutions on climate change have started to dominate company meetings as investors try to influence companies' approaches on ESG issues. [F] Last year's advances aside, socially responsible investing has a long history, driven initially by religious groups such as the Quakers (贵格会) and Methodists (循道宗信徒) that avoided "sin stocks", such as alcohol and tobacco. Likewise, the concept of ethics plays a role in Islamic finance. Today's ascendency of responsible investing, however, is also driven by the belief that ESG criteria also have financial relevance: poor standards of sustainability and social governance are often linked to a higher risk of financial underperformance. In short, there is no longer necessarily a trade-off between doing good and making a profit. [G] Positive choices can often mean positive returns, says Shalin Shah, a senior fund manager at Royal London. "We're seeing individuals thinking they can make a difference with the way they invest and make money in the process. That helps more investors gain confidence." Shah notes that while many investors are focused on climate-related risks, social investment is still crucial. "As investors we are always looking for areas that are undervalued while being strong on ESG. Many funds are focused on the environment but there is also value to be found in the social side of ESG," he says. "For example my fund invests significantly in social housing bonds. You're lending to finance the building of new homes for people who really need them, but at the same time we have to keep in mind we're looking to make a decent return for clients." [H] One of the main challenges, however, is the need for common standards when it comes to ESG metrics. A number of organisations have been established to set standards, encourage disclosure and measure performance. Companies can often achieve wildly varying scores depending on who they use, because criteria differ. "We need consistent, comparable information to be able to understand where the opportunity and the risk lies, and be able to respond and monitor performance effectively," says Fries. "Frameworks are starting to be put in place to ensure the quality of the information that companies issue is more in line with the standards of financial reporting discipline we now have, but there is a way to go." [I] Indeed, the Financial Conduct Authority recently released a discussion paper on how to improve transparency and labelling. Until there is full transparency, investors and asset managers will still need to "look carefully under the bonnet", as Shah puts it. Partnering with asset managers who are well-placed to do due diligence on ESG claims and to interrogate the companies that make them is one option for investors. As well as highlighting the important analysis undertaken by Royal London's fund managers, Shah points out that Royal London's status as a mutual provides it with the advantage of being able to assemble portfolios with a high degree of independence. "We don't have shareholders or dividend targets, and that means we can invest for the long term," he says. "That lends itself to issues like sustainability." [J] Indeed, companies with a mutual ownership structure are another reminder that, despite the recent buzz around ESG investing, there is nothing newfangled or faddish about placing values alongside profits. Likewise, there is nothing new about striving towards a better world for everyone. Last year's widespread re-evaluation of the social roles of businesses was therefore also an extension of people's long-held desire for a brighter and more secure future.

Facial Expressions Do Not Reveal Emotions [A] Do your facial movements broadcast your emotions to other people? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under contentious debate. Some experts maintain that people around the world make specific, recognizable faces that express certain emotions, such as smiling in happiness, scowling in anger and gasping with widened eyes in fear. They point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion. They also often cite Charles Darwin's 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to support the claim that universal expressions evolved by natural selection. [B] Other scientists point to a mountain of counterevidence showing that facial movements during emotions vary too widely to be universal beacons of emotional meaning. People may smile in hatred when plotting their enemy's downfall and scowl in delight when they hear a bad pun. In Melanesian culture, a wide-eyed gasping face is a symbol of aggression, not fear. These experts say the alleged universal expressions just represent cultural stereotypes. To be clear, both sides in the debate acknowledge that facial movements vary for a given emotion; the disagreement is about whether there is enough uniformity to detect what someone is feeling. [C] This debate is not just academic; the outcome has serious consequences. Today you can be turned down for a job because a so-called emotion-reading system watching you on camera applied artificial intelligence to evaluate your facial movements unfavorably during an interview. In a U.S. court of law, a judge or jury may sometimes hand down a harsher sentence, even death, if they think a defendant's face showed a lack of remorse. Children in preschools across the country are taught to recognize smiles as happiness, scowls as anger and other expressive stereotypes from books, games and posters of disembodied faces. And for children on the autism spectrum, some of whom have difficulty perceiving emotion in others, these teachings do not translate to better communication. [D] So who is right? The answer involves an unwitting physician, a scientific error and a century-long misinterpretation of Darwin's writing. Ironically, his own observations offer a powerful resolution that is transforming the modern understanding of emotion. [E] The assumption of universal facial expressions can be traced back to several sources, most notably a set of photographs by 19th-century French physician Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne. In the early days of photography, Duchenne electrically stimulated people's facial muscles and photographed the contractions. His photographs inspired Darwin to propose in Expression that certain facial movements were universal signs of emotion. In happiness, Darwin wrote, people smile. In sadness, they frown. The way the story is usually told, Darwin discovered that emotions have innate, biologically based expressions that are made and recognized universally and shared with other animals. That story presents facial movements as a sort of signaling system in which you can look at a person's face, detect their emotional state and receive important information to keep you—and them—alive and healthy. [F] Or so it would seem. A preponderance of evidence shows that Darwin was wrong, and his mistake was a doozy. In real life, people express a given emotion with tremendous variability. In anger, for example, people in urban cultures scowl (or make some of the facial movements for a scowl) only about 35 percent of the time, according to meta-analyses of studies measuring facial movement during emotion. Scowls are also not specific to anger because people scowl for other reasons, such as when they are concentrating or when they have gas. The same tremendous variation occurs for every emotion studied—and for every other measure that purportedly tells us about someone's emotional state, whether it's their physiology, voice or brain activity. [G] Emotion AI systems, therefore, do not detect emotions. They detect physical signals, such as facial muscle movements, not the psychological meaning of those signals. The conflation of movement and meaning is deeply embedded in Western culture and in science. An example is a recent high-profile study that applied machine learning to more than six million internet videos of faces. The human raters, who trained the AI system, were asked to label facial movements in the videos, but the only labels they were given to use were emotion words, such as "angry," rather than physical descriptions, such as "scowling." Moreover there was no objective way to confirm what, if anything, the anonymous people in the videos were feeling in those moments. [H] There's also considerable evidence that facial movements are just one signal of many in a much larger array of contextual information that our brain takes in. Show people a grimacing face in isolation, and they may perceive pain or frustration. But show the identical face on a runner crossing the finish line of a race, and the same grimace conveys triumph. The face is often a weaker signal of a person's internal state than other signals in the array. [I] Darwin's Expression suggests that instances of a particular emotion, such as anger, share a distinct, immutable, physical cause or state—an essence—that makes the instances similar even if they have superficial differences. Scientists have proposed a variety of essences, some of which are easily seen, such as facial movements, and others, such as complex, intertwined patterns of heart rate, breathing and body temperature, that are observed only with specialized instruments. This belief in essences, called essentialism, is compellingly intuitive. It's also pernicious because it is virtually impossible to prove that an essence doesn't exist. People who believe in essences but fail to observe them despite repeated attempts often continue to believe in them anyway. Researchers, in particular, tend to justify their belief by suggesting that tools and methods are not yet sufficient to locate the essences they seek. [J] A solution to this conundrum can be found in Darwin's more famous book On the Origin of Species, written 13 years before Expression. Ironically, it is celebrated for helping biology "escape the paralyzing grip of essentialism," according to biologist Ernst Mayr. Before Origin was published, scholars believed that each biological species had an ideal form, created by God, with defining properties—essences— that distinguished it from all other species. Think of this as the "dog show" version of biology. In a dog show, each competitor is judged against a hypothetical ideal dog. Deviation (偏差) from the ideal is considered error. [K] Darwin's Origin proposed, radically, that a species is a vast population of varied individuals with no essence at its core. The ideal dog doesn't exist—it is a statistical summary of many diverse dogs. Variation is not error; it is a necessary ingredient for natural selection by the environment. When it came to emotions, however, Darwin fell prey to essentialism, ignoring his most important discovery. [L] Darwin's Expression is best viewed as a historical text, not a definitive scientific guide. That leads to a deeper lesson here: Science is not truth by authority. Science is the quantification of doubt by repeated observation in varied contexts. Even the most exceptional scientists can be wrong. Fortunately, mistakes are part of the scientific process. They are opportunities for discovery.

If We Can Farm Metal from Plants, What Else Can We Learn from Life on Earth? [A] For the past couple of years, I've been working with researchers in northern Greece who are farming metal. In a remote, beautiful field, high in the Pindus mountains in Epirus, they are experimenting with a trio of shrubs known to scientists as "hyperaccumulators (超级累职务)": plants which have evolved the capacity to thrive in naturally metal-rich soils that are toxic to most other kinds of life. They do this by drawing the metal out of the ground and storing it in their leaves and stems, where it can be harvested like any other crop. As well as providing a source for rare metals— in this case nickel, although hyperaccumulators have been found for zinc, aluminium, cadmium and many other metals, including gold—these plants actively benefit the earth by remediating the soil, making it suitable for growing other crops, and by sequestering carbon in their roots. One day, they might supplant more destructive and polluting forms of mining. [B] The three plants being tested in Greece—part of a network of research plots across Europe—are endemic to the region. Alyssum murale, which grows in low bushes topped by bunches of yellow flowers, is native to Albania and northern Greece; Leptoplax emarginata—taller and spindlier, with clusters of green leaves and white petals—is found only in Greece; and Bornmuellera tymphaea, the most efficient of the three, which straggles across the ground in a dense layer of white blossom, is found only on the slopes of the Pindus. [C] What I have come to understand about these plants is that, by virtue of their evolutionary history and their close association with the soil, climate and wider ecosystem in which they have emerged, they embody a certain kind of knowledge: an understanding and accommodation with the places they have found themselves in. Humans have sought out deposits of rare metals for thousands of years, and developed ever-more violent ways of accessing them, but these plants have been around far longer, and have found more equitable and regenerative ways of doing much the same thing. Perhaps we have something to learn from them. [D] Hyperaccumulators are far from being the only non-humans that we might learn from, as scientific research in recent decades has shown us. Take slime moulds (黏菌): strange, unicellular creatures somewhere between fungi and amoebae, which turn out to be very good at solving some very hard mathematical problems. Researchers at Lanzhou University have shown that Physarum polycephalum (多头绒泡菌), a particularly lively slime mould, can solve the "travelling salesman" problem—a test for finding the shortest route between multiple cities—faster and more efficiently than any supercomputer humans have devised. [E] Cows, sheep, dogs and other animals have been shown to predict earthquakes in advance of tremors which register on seismographs (地震仪). Squids and octopuses, we have learned, spread their neurons out through their bodies in ways that allow their limbs, and perhaps other faculties, to act independently of a centrally controlling mind. Spiders store information in their webs, using them as a kind of extended cognition: a mind outside the body entirely. A new conception of intelligence is emerging from scientific research: rather than human intelligence being unique or the peak of some graduated curve, there appear to be many different kinds of intelligence with their own strengths, competencies and suitabilities. [F] We're also discovering all kinds of abilities which suggest whole worlds of being and awareness among non-humans we were previously unaware of. Plants, it turns out, hear and remember. In one experiment, they demonstrated the ability to respond with chemical defences to the particular sound of caterpillars (毛毛虫) munching on their leaves, even when it came from a tape recorder. In another, mimosa plants—which curl their leaves up when disturbed—learned to ignore being dropped a short distance when it proved harmless, and to react in the same way when tested days or weeks later, having in some way internalised this experience. [G] Meanwhile, beneath the forest floor, we have become privy to the commerce and conversations of trees as they trade nutrients and information between families and species through the networks of fungi which connect their roots, in ways we are only just beginning to understand. These, too, are kinds of intelligence: and among other things, they are the way other species have learned to survive life-threatening events. [H] In the struggle to mitigate and adapt to climate breakdown—and all the other entangled crises we face—we are starting to recognise that other ways of knowing and acting on the world, from indigenous knowledge systems to changes in our own consumption and patterns of life, are vital to surviving and thriving on a hotter, wetter and more conflicted planet. We know too that this survival is dependent not only on our own abilities and inventions, but on the survival of the other species we share the planet with. [I] The collapse of biodiversity which is already occurring makes it harder for us to hold back the collapse of whole ecosystems on which we too depend: for the pollination of crops, for disease resistance, for safe and sufficient food, for protection from fires and other natural disasters. We will flourish together, or not at all. [J] The deep knowledge that is possessed by animals, plants and others—their intelligence, we should begin to say—is another reason why we must preserve and protect them. But more than this: we should be listening to them, learning from them and working with them. The hyperaccumulator plants, for example, show us there are other ways of getting what we need from the planet; they also remind us that there are limits to what we should extract, as to turn them into another agroindustrial resource like soya beans or palm oil would be just as damaging. The knowledge that there are other ways of being intelligent on this planet should force us to reassess the centrality and usefulness of our own. Other worlds are not only possible, they have been growing around us all along.