The Breaking Science team revealed some new research suggesting 'a bad taste in your mouth' might be more than just metaphor. Here's a transcript:

Chris Smith: Hello, I’m Chris Smith and this is Breaking Science, which is produced in association with the Open University.

First, with news from across the scientific globe it’s time to join our science reporter, Dr Kat Arney. To kick us off, Kat, the headline in Science is quite funny but it only really works with an American accent which is ‘from oral to moral’, scientists are saying that the way we react to things that we find objectionable is all based originally on foods that we don’t like the taste of.

Kat Arney: Yes, we often use the phrase ‘it left a bad taste in my mouth’ to describe an activity or a situation that we find quite unpleasant. But now researchers writing in the journal Science have shown that there may actually be more to this metaphor than meets the eye.

Chris Smith: Pray tell why?

Kat Arney: Well the researchers, led by Hannah Chapman, wondered if there was any kind of link between the facial movements made when we eat disgusting food, you know, that sort of ‘urgh’, and when we see disgusting pictures or when we experience really unpleasant behaviour so they carried out some intriguing experiments using volunteers.

Chris Smith: I thought you were going to say for a moment you’ve been sampling my mother’s cooking. But go on, tell us, what did they do with their volunteers?

Close-up of dog taste buds.
[image © copyright Jupiterimages]

Kat Arney: Well to start with the researchers gave the volunteers different drinks, they were either neutral tasting, sweet or bitter, and then they took close up video images of their faces. And in particular they focused on the actions of a group of muscles called the levator labii, and these are the muscles that make us wrinkle up our noses and raise our upper lips when we taste something nasty. Now unsurprisingly they found that the bitter taste caused a big movement of these muscles compared to sweet or neutral tastes.

Chris Smith: Yes, but how does the disgust at things and the behaviour bit of it come into this?

Kat Arney: Well next the scientists showed people pictures of disgusting things, including poo, injuries, insects, things like that, and they compared these with pictures of sad things and then some neutral pictures for contrast, and the team found that only the disgusting pictures led again to the movement of these levator labii muscles, and the stronger the disgust that the person felt the more their muscles moved. So this is quite intriguing, and the team went on to look at situations where people experienced unpleasant or unfair situations. These were met with these same facial movements of disgust, say, seen with a nasty liquid or unpleasant pictures.

Chris Smith: So give us the bottom line, taking a financial analogy then, what does this mean in terms of how this behaviour maps onto what we actually do in real life?

Kat Arney: Well, the researchers think that this means that moral disgust and outrage actually has similar evolutionary roots to physical disgust, and they think that this physical response to something nasty has probably been co-opted during our social evolution to express our disgust at social and moral situations that we don’t like.

Chris Smith: Indeed.

Listen to the whole programme, as broadcast on BBC Radio Five Live February 2009

We often hear about the multitude of environmental challenges facing the world: be it water, energy and/or biodiversity crises. But it is not only the earth’s physical and biological resources that are at peril, but also cultural diversity.

Kaapse Klopse Carnival in Cape Town, South Africa. Behind the diversity of performers is Table Mountain, part of the Cape floristic Region (one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots).
[image by Yoseph Araya © copyright Yoseph Araya]

Simply defined culture could mean the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. Cultural diversity is a driving force of development, not only in respect of economic growth, but also as a means of leading a more fulfilling intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual life. [UNESCO defintion]

The disappearance of cultural diversity can at times be even worse than that of other biological diversity. For example, Professor Sutherland in his paper, Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species, notes: "Over the past 500 years, about 4.5% of the total number of described languages have disappeared, compared with 1.3% of birds and 1.9% of mammals."

Often the factors that determine the diversity of life and culture are very much similar. For example forest cover, tropical climates, heterogeneous topography and prevalence of pathogens are known to be associated with higher cultural diversity.

This emphasises the need to address the world’s heritage of biological, cultural and linguistic diversity together - as biocultural diversity.

Why?

There are many compelling scientific reasons for conservation of biocultural diversity – some of which relate to ecosystem of goods and services vital for our very existence on earth.

Moreover, extinction is forever, as the epitaph at the death of the very last Hawaiian snail in captivity sombrely reminds:

Here lies Partulina turgida: 1.5 million years BC to January 1996”

Lastly, on a more personal level, the earth is a very complex and fascinating place to live in and appreciate. The loss of a species, or the loss of human language diminishes the beauty of the world simply by removing a little of that complexity).

What can be done?

We should combine resources from all walks of life and work together to save our biocultural diversity. There are many approaches that could be tried.

Bringing awareness, documenting and sharing diversity knowledge go a long way in alerting experts as well as the general public.

Another approach is to explore new ways of linking cultural and biological diversity conservation schemes. There is currently growing interest as such e.g. religious communities are increasingly being involved into conservation activities and activism.

See, for example, BBC News reports on Faith leaders urging climate curbs or Beyond Belief: Linking faith and conservation from the WWF.

Watch: International Union for Conservation of Nature: Live Culture - An expert speaks

Not least is getting involved when possible or otherwise supporting organizations working towards this aim. Some notable examples include Terralingua and Global Diversity Fund.

Last word:

The well-versed advertisement for Patek Philippe, the Swiss watch company goes: “You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation.”

Taking this analogue, it would be a great shame (if not a crime) to bequeath an impoverished earth to our future generations.

Find out more

Saving Britain’s Past

BBC News: In defence of 'lost' languages

Terralingua: Index of Biocultural Diversity

Ecological influences on human behavioural diversity: A review of recent findings
Daniel Nettle, writing in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 2009

Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species
W J Sutherland, writing in Nature 423

Introducing Environment
Alice Peasgood and Mark Goodwin, Open University/Oxford University

OpenLearn: Diversity and difference in communication - free learning materials from the Open University.

About the author

Dr Yoseph Araya is a plant ecologist and associate lecturer at the Open University. He works on the biology and conservation of South African fynbos vegetation. Environmental education and the role of the public in research is one of his key interests.

Subscribe to Yoseph Araya's posts