The Explorer’s Gene by Alex Hutchinson #
The Explorer’s Gene: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map by Alex Hutchinson (audio). This book was a welcome and surprisingly interesting investigation into the nature of exploration and why our species (and particular people and subgroups therein) seems to have a penchant for it. I came in expecting a lot of cliches about mountaineering and sea-faring, but instead was pleasantly surprised to learn early on about DRD4, both the particular dopamine receptor and the gene encoding it. Studies, besides linking it to ADHD, have argued that it plays a major role in novelty-seeking behavior.These include both neuroimaging studies as well as large-scale demographic studies of non-identical twins. Hutchinson combines adept expositions of these studies with the mathematics of exploration-exploitation tradeoffs (in the form of multi-armed bandies) with interesting historical episodes, both personal and not. We learn about the Swedish speed skater Nils van der Poel and his unusual training reset, the history of Étienne Brûlé, and the author’s own escapades in the backcountry and orienteering. Along the way, we make pit stops at the landscape of ideas, the science of hot streaks, the effort paradox, and the meaningfulness of effort scale.This Atlantic piece is mostly an excerpt from the relevant section of the book on these last two topics.
I was most pleasantly surprised by a nice discussion of play and Bernard Suits’ The GrasshopperSubtitle: Games, Life, and Utopia. and its definition of playing a game as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. This work and definition first came across my radar many years ago via Thi Nguyen’s great piece on the aesthetics of rock climbing. This context makes sense: both the goal of getting to the top of a rock and the methods for so doing are highly unnecessary.Boulder long enough, and everyone has the experience of a young kid on top asking: why not just walk to the top? What was new to me (having not actually read the Suits) comes from the subtitle: Suits argues that game-playing in his sense stands as the highest expression of humanity, since it is what one would do in a utopia with all physical needs met. It doesn’t take a very complex syllogism then to conclude that rock climbing is the highest human calling.At least one of; I’m happy for there to be ties and for a thousand flowers to bloom. Although this is partially tongue-in-cheek and may seem nearly as self-serving as Plato’s argument for philosopher-kings, it actually does reflect a deep underlying reason for why climbing has resonated with me so much and why I have pursued it with the relative intensity that I have over the years.
The book concludes somewhat meekly: after discussing the dopaminergic impulse and the increasing frenzy of a society that encourages pursuing it, Hutchinson briefly turns self-help guru and finishes with “five rules for how to explore better”. Aside from this small cringe, the book lost a bit of structure as it went: while it was broken up into well-done and self-contained parts, they did not always speak to each other. For example, the gene that gives the book its title features prominently early in the book, almost to be entirely forgotten after the first part. These quibbles aside, however, the book did do waht the best books do for me: triggered interesting thoughts and sent me investigating new-to-me topics. Time to go play with those ideas. Grade: A-