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Generations have been taught that evolution implies there is no overarching purpose to our existence, that life has no fundamental meaning. We are merely the accumulation of tens of thousands of intricate molecular accidents. Some scientists take this logic one step further, suggesting that evolution is intrinsically atheistic and goes against the concept of God.

With respect to our evolution, nature seems to have endowed us with competing dispositions, what Wilkinson calls the dual potential of human nature. We are pulled in different directions: selfishness and altruism, aggression and cooperation, lust and love.

By using principles from a variety of scientific disciplines, Yale Professor Samuel Wilkinson provides a framework for human evolution that reveals an overarching purpose to our existence.

Wilkinson claims that this purpose, at least one of them, is to choose between the good and evil impulses that nature has created within us. Our life is a test. This is a truth, as old as history it seems, that has been espoused by so many of the world’s religions. From a certain framework, Wilkinson believes that these aspects of human nature—including how evolution shaped us—are evidence for the existence of a God, not against it.

Closely related to this is meaning. What is the meaning of life? Based on the scientific data, it would seem that one such meaning is to develop deep and abiding relationships. At least that is what most people report are the most meaningful aspects of their lives. This is a function of our evolution. It is how we were created.

Samuel T. Wilkinson is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Yale Depression Research Program. He received his MD from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His articles have been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He has been the recipient of many awards, including Top Advancements & Breakthroughs from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation; Top Ten Psychiatry Papers by the New England Journal of Medicine, the Samuel Novey Writing Prize in Psychological Medicine (Johns Hopkins); the Thomas Detre Award (Yale University); and the Seymour Lustman Award (Yale University). His new book is Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of our Existence.

Shermer and Wilkinson discuss:

• evolution: random chance or guided process?
• selfishness and altruism
• aggression and cooperation
• inner demons and better angels
• love and lust
• free will and determinism
• the good life
• the good society
• empirical truths, mythic truths, religious truths, pragmatic truths
• Is there a cosmic courthouse where evil will be corrected in the next life?
• theodicy and the problem of evil: Why do bad things happen to good people?

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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Could humans unknowingly be a part of a larger superorganism—one with its own motivations and goals, one that is alive, and conscious, and has the power to shape the future of our species? This is the fascinating theory from author and futurist Byron Reese, who calls this human superorganism “Agora.”

In We Are Agora, Reese starts by asking the question, “What is life and how did it form?” From there, he looks at how multicellular life came about, how consciousness emerged, and how other superorganisms in nature have formed. Then, he poses eight big questions based on the Agora theory, including:

• If ants have colonies, bees have hives, and we have our bodies, how does Agora manifest itself? Does it have a body?
• Can Agora explain things that happen that are both under our control and near universally undesirable, such as war?
• How can Agora theory explain long-term progress we’ve made in the world?

In this unique and ambitious work that spans all of human history and looks boldly into its future, Reese melds science and history to look at the human species from a fresh new perspective. We Are Agora will give readers a better understanding of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how our fates are intertwined.

Byron Reese is an Austin-based entrepreneur with a quarter-century of experience building and running technology companies. A recognized authority on AI who holds a number of technology patents, Byron is a futurist with a strong conviction that technology will help bring about a new golden age of humanity. He gives talks around the world about how technology is changing work, education, and culture. He is the author of four books on technology; his previous title The Fourth Age was described by the New York Times as “entertaining and engaging.” Bloomberg Businessweek credits Reese with having “quietly pioneered a new breed of media company.” The Financial Times reported that he “is typical of the new wave of internet entrepreneurs out to turn the economics of the media industry on its head.” He and his work have been featured in hundreds of news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Entrepreneur, USA Today, Reader’s Digest, and NPR.

Shermer and Reese discuss:

• What is an organism and what is a superorganism?
• What is life?
• Why do things die?
• the origins of life, multicellular life, and complex organisms
• What is the self?
• emergence
• consciousness
• social insects: bees, ants, termites
• Is the Internet a superorganism?
• Will AI create a superorganism?
• Is AI an existential threat?
• Could AI become sentient or conscious?
• the hard problem of consciousness
• cities as superorganisms
• planetary superorganisms
• Are we living in a simulation?
• Why are we here?

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

What happens when sex is more about identity than pleasure, intimacy, or interaction? And what happens when culture warriors gang up on sexuality—and from several directions? And has this affected our mental health? After over 40 years and 40,000 sessions with individuals and couples as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist, I am growing alarmed at the changes I see taking place in our society— most notably, the prospects for using sexuality to nourish ourselves physically or emotionally are declining. Simply stated, sex is seen less and less as an activity that contributes to mental health. Instead, it’s increasingly seen as an abstraction, only vaguely related to the currently more important activity of establishing and policing identity.

Changing Definitions

Even though our culture today seems dominated by sexual issues, it isn’t really sex that many people have on their mind. These days, cultural conversations about sexuality often focus on issues such as skepticism regarding true consent in heterosexual sex, a huge expansion of the definition of trauma, the invention and legitimation of “sex addiction,” and newly imposed limits on when it is acceptable to express interest in sex with someone for the first time.

Many Americans increasingly seem to want to protect themselves from sex, rather than embrace it. Note that enthusiastically pursuing your sexual identity or orientation is not the same thing as embracing sexuality itself. And knowing what you don’t want is not the same as knowing what you do want.

In fact, many of the newly minted sexual identities and orientations are about not having sex: asexual (lacking in sexual attraction to others), graysexual (inbetween asexual and sexual), aromantic (little to no romantic feelings toward others), or lithromantic (can feel romantic love but has no need for those feelings to be reciprocated). When people talk about sexual identity, they’re referring less to what they do, and more to the community to which they belong. In fact, as Temple University’s Jennifer Pollitt says, “There is a huge difference between orientation, behavior, and identity. The sexual or romantic behavior you engage in does not necessarily correlate with the identity that you’re using to describe your experiences or orientation.”1

If behavior “does not correlate with identity,” then what is identity based on? And on what basis do individuals decide to accept their own erotic behavior? Until recently, the convergence of behavior and identity was considered an important aspect of mental health. Now, in addition to turning language on its head, this conception of sex seems to endorse “splitting” (black-and-white, all-or-nothing thinking), which most psychologists—from the most Freudian to the most modern—agree is psychologically harmful.

Those attached to gender discourse may use the language of sex, but what they’re really talking about is self-image and community, not sexuality. Their conversations are not about a dyadic connection with another, which has been, historically, considered a hallmark of adult development and mental health.

Trends

Not surprisingly, the two generations that have gone through puberty most recently indeed have sex less than previous generations of late teens and young adults. UCLA’s annual California Health Interview Survey is the country’s largest state health survey. In 2021, it found that the number of Californians ages 18–30 reporting no sexual partners in the prior year reached 38 percent,2 almost double the number a mere ten years earlier. This trend is, I submit, part of a larger society-wide mental health challenge.

With the ubiquity of internet, social media, and smartphones, young people are less interested in distraction-free, in-person relating. They don’t develop the necessary skills to create or enjoy it, which include patience, listening, fluency in social cues, reading the impact of what they say on others, and tolerating/ignoring the possibility that something interesting is happening somewhere else.

The demand to feel emotionally safe and unchallenged as much as possible interferes with intimacy as well. Readers will recognize countless instances of young people being “offended” instead of disagreeing, bristling at “microaggressions” and “cultural appropriations” that aren’t about them, and not wanting to debate those who view things differently. In addition, young people are now launching into adulthood later, so they don’t have as much privacy or money, and don’t aspire to being in a couple nearly as much. Consequently, one of the main things about sex—“it’s what you do in a dyad”—has less appeal. The current ease of masturbating to pornography exacerbates this by facilitating erotic experiences that are about seeing and imagining, rather than feeling physically and emotionally.

At the same time, many young people are self-identifying with new versions of sexual identity and orientation at higher rates than ever before. According to a 2022 Gallup poll, the percentage of U.S. adults who identify as something other than heterosexual has doubled over the last 10 years, from 3.5 percent in 2012 to 7.1 percent.3 The change is mostly seen among those age 30 and under.

Identity and Community

American society now instructs young people to express their ordinary alienation, angst, anxiety, identity concerns, and resentments in the language of gender (along with race). This automatically provides many of today’s youth with a community in which they can participate and to which they can belong. Naturally, almost everyone wants to feel that they belong to something—that’s part of mental health. Yet it’s easy to see that claiming membership in these various communities is not completely harmless.

The now-common insistence that everyone reveal their pronouns (i.e., their gender identity) in completely non-sexual environments (such as university lectures, medical settings, commercial websites, email signature lines, and social media profiles) is accompanied by the new insistence that anyone who prefers not to do so is declaring that they are unfriendly toward LGBT people. Little consideration is given to the possibility that someone might not consider their gender to be the most salient part of their identity (which, for example, might be their race, religion, ethnicity, or profession). Or that they feel it is a private matter and no one else’s business.

These communities can even harm one’s health in the form of permanent and irreversible interventions, such as puberty blockers and surgeries intended to change sex. Advocates for gender-affirming care have worked hard to portray it as lifesaving and suicide prevention by fearmongering with inflated statistics about suicidal ideation. But when researchers compared transgender youth with teens suffering from mental health problems, there was little difference in suicide rates between the groups. Transgender youth are not much more suicidal than teens with garden variety mental illness, which means that failing to affirm a child’s transgender identity does not drive suicidal behavior. A recent study analyzed data from the world’s largest pediatric gender clinic, the UK’s Tavistock, and found the rate of completed youth suicides to be 0.03 percent, which is hardly a suicide epidemic.4 In reality, very few youths who identify as transgender ever commit suicide. And it really is true that concerned parents are being fed false suicide statistics that misleads them into believing their child is likely to kill themselves if they don’t consent to puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries for them.

Claims that scientific studies show clear mental health benefits of gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender youth are not supported by evidence. Some of the studies commonly touted as demonstrating positive mental health outcomes show no or possibly even negative association between administering hormones and mental health. Studies purporting to demonstrate mental health benefits are often misleading due to their short follow up durations, often spanning just a few months to two years. There is no long-term data on this experimental protocol, and it is typically within the 4–8 year range that individuals start expressing regret.

But frightened, unhealthy thinking about sexuality is not limited to any political or cultural viewpoint. As I detailed in my book America’s War On Sex,5 the conservative religious Right generally opposes whatever makes sex simpler, safer, more enjoyable, and easier to separate from stable monogamous relationships. Rather than focusing on healthy pleasure (including how satisfying sex supports stable marriage), they tend to focus more on the unhealthy aspects of sex, such as emotional danger, STIs, coercion and violence, and unwanted pregnancies.

The Right has always disliked the optionality and autonomy of sexual exploration, opposing unmarried women having easy access to birth control pills; fighting the availability of sex toys; and restricting TV advertising of products such as condoms and tampons. Today’s manifestation of this instinct now extends to banning books from public and school libraries; restricting gender medicine; banning private swing clubs; and requiring registration to watch internet porn (currently enacted in Utah, Virginia, and Louisiana, with a dozen more states pending).

Masturbation and Mental Health

Whether we like to acknowledge it or not, masturbation is the primary sex life of almost everyone. And how you manage and accept or reject this fact can have a large influence on your mental health. Masturbation typically involves fantasy, and so talk of masturbation inevitably turns to pornography. Unfortunately, commentators and activists of all ideologies seem to agree that viewing pornography somehow colonizes a viewer’s brain so that he (always a he) becomes a dangerous, amoral predator who wants to have sex with every woman except his own mate.

Whether our fantasies involve pornography or not, they reveal a common theme about humans— that privately, we’re all perverts.

In their 2011 book A Billion Wicked Thoughts,6 data scientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Goddam revealed the most common sexual terms among 400 million internet searches. Being coerced is by far the most common sexual fantasy of women. Large (i.e., taboo) age differences between partners is a very popular fantasy of both men and women. This tells us that people’s public pronouncements about others’ masturbation are mostly performative, designed to imply that “I’m moral, I’m not over-sexed, and I definitely don’t have risky sexual impulses inside me.”

The fear of sexual fantasy reaches its climax with the anti-masturbation and anti-pornography NoFap movement. It currently claims over 300,000 members, and its website logs almost two million monthly visitors. With an anti-science tradition stretching back to noncredentialed activist Gary Wilson and to Christian fundamentalism, the group claims a wide range of harms from masturbating and watching porn, and corresponding benefits in abstaining from them—without any valid empirical evidence.

Of course, some people do masturbate or use pornography in self-defeating ways, but they often have mental health struggles with, for example, OCD, depression, bipolar disorder, Asperger’s or autism, or borderline personality disorder.

While masturbation itself is not a prerequisite for mental health, vilifying it and obsessively struggling to maintain abstinence can undermine having a healthy mental life. Those compensatory behaviors tend to demonize one’s own sexual impulses, which are then often experienced as rage and shame—turned in on oneself (which typically leads to depression), or focused outward (as explosiveness or even violence). As Andrew Sullivan wrote, “the suppression of these core emotions [sexuality] and the denial of their resolution in love always leads to personal distortion and compulsion and loss of perspective.”7

Psychology, Sex, and Mental Health

American psychotherapy has never been comfortable or well-educated about sexuality—for example, you can get a license to practice without hearing the words “vibrator” or “oral sex” in your training. And now the profession has extended its distance from ordinary or positive sexuality by instead focusing more on trauma and identity while disparaging pornography. Meanwhile, it has no answer to common issues such as desire discrepancy, infidelity after the other partner has lost desire, purity culture, adolescent sexuality, or the impact of technology on sexuality.

Psychologists used to include sexual desire and satisfaction in their profile of mental health. Today, the focus regarding sex is about trauma, consent, sex addiction, porn addiction, love addiction, “emotional affairs,” and sexual identity and orientation.

As a profession, psychologists are refusing to challenge even the most extreme activists, instead abandoning kids and families to gender-affirming specialists. While psychology has extensively studied questions such as “Why can’t some alcoholics take even one drink a year?” and “What’s the difference between sadness and depression?” and “What predicts whether a couple will divorce?” it dares not touch tough questions such as “Why is ‘asexual’ suddenly a complex orientation rather than a simple preference?” or “If children can’t consent to sex with an adult, why are they competent to select their gender?” or “How do we account for concentrated clusters of young teens claiming they’re transgender or non-binary in certain schools, when there aren’t similar clusters across town?”

As a result, psychology has only limited tools in dealing with children or adults with questions about gender or orientation. Almost overnight, gender-affirming specialists have acquired great status and professional power.

But by validating even the extremes of gender choice, gender spectrum, and gender activism industry in schools, the media, psychology, medicine, and elsewhere, our society now encourages young people to express their ordinary alienation, angst, anxiety, identity concerns, and resentments in the language of gender. Wouldn’t it be better if young people would simply say “It’s my life!” instead of “I just discovered I’m gender queer and demand hormones and surgery.”

Sexual Intelligence

Despite all these issues we can be intelligent about sex. To that end, there are three dimensions to enjoyable sex: self-acceptance, communication, and emotional skills. Together, these make up what I call Sexual Intelligence. Despite the contrasting public policy and psychosocial goals of both the political Left and the Right, each side in the culture wars should promote Sexual Intelligence as a vehicle for both societal and individual mental health.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
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Sexual Intelligence enables individuals to make choices that fit their own values, create stable erotic partnerships, resist mass media messages of perfectionism, encourage thoughtful decision-making, and resist impulsivity while allowing for self-expression. These are all good for mental health. And they are contrary to aggressive activism, name-calling, discrimination, and feeling threatened by others’ choices, from any direction or worldview.

Sexual Intelligence also depends on recognizing that information itself is not the enemy. Talking about sexuality and asking questions does not equal discrimination or “violence.” Likewise, acknowledging that humans are a varied group is a simple acceptance of the fact that adults need the skills of getting along with each other—i.e., communication and respect.

That approach to sexuality would greatly promote the mental health of everyone. It would also help cool down the culture wars. Healthy sex, after all, benefits all of society.

About the Author

Marty Klein has been a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Sex Therapist for 42 years—over 40,000 sessions with individuals and couples. Marty is an outspoken critic of many popular and clinical ideas about sexuality and emotional health; for example, he is regarded as the foremost critic of the concept of sex addiction. A former instructor at Stanford Medical School, Marty’s humor, insights, and down-to-earth approach are regularly featured in the national media, such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR. He is the author of seven books on sexuality, including Sexual Intelligence and Beyond Orgasm.

References

1. https://tinyurl.com/3ctw74z7
2. https://tinyurl.com/393wx5f7
3. https://tinyurl.com/552wpktv
4. https://tinyurl.com/ysdrce7b
5. https://tinyurl.com/4pz8e4df
6. https://tinyurl.com/abctfwm7
7. https://tinyurl.com/mr3cbzu5

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Have you ever noticed that what is thrilling on Monday tends to become boring on Friday? Even exciting relationships, stimulating jobs, and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible. They get used to dirty air. They stay in abusive relationships. People grow to accept authoritarianism and take foolish risks. They become unconcerned by their own misconduct, blind to inequality, and are more liable to believe misinformation than ever before.

But what if we could find a way to see everything anew? What if you could regain sensitivity, not only to the great things in your life, but also to the terrible things you stopped noticing and so don’t try to change?

Now, neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor (and presidential advisor) Cass R. Sunstein investigate why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to “dishabituate” at the office, in the bedroom, at the store, on social media, and in the voting booth. This groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, illuminates how we can reignite the sparks of joy, innovate, and recognize where improvements urgently need to be made. The key to this disruption — to seeing, feeling, and noticing again — is change. By temporarily changing your environment, changing the rules, changing the people you interact with — or even just stepping back and imagining change — you regain sensitivity, allowing you to more clearly identify the bad and more deeply appreciate the good.

Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. She is the founder and director of the Affective Brain Lab. She has written for outlets including the New York Times, Time, Washington Post, has been a repeated guest on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, a presenter on the BBC, and served as an advisor for global companies and government projects. Her work has won her prestigious fellowships and prizes from the Wellcome Trust, American Psychological Society, British Psychological Society, and others. Her popular TED talks have accumulated more than a dozen million views. Before becoming a neuroscientist, Sharot worked in the financial industry. She is the author of award-winning books: The Optimism Bias and The Influential Mind. Her new book, co-authored with Cass Sunstein, is Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There.

Shermer and Sharot discuss:

• the best day of her life
• the evolutionary origins of habituation
• habituation at work, at home, and in the bedroom
• Why don’t we habituate to extreme pain?
• Twilight Zone episode: criminal Henry dies and goes to heaven where he gets everything he wants but grows bored and wants to go to the other place
• Conflicting Problem: Why is it that even when we have wonderful things in our life – a great job, a loving family, a comfortable house – those things don’t necessarily bring us daily joy when they really should? Why is it that even when terrible things are happening around us — sexism, racism, cracks in our personal relationships, inefficiencies at the workplace – we often carry on and perhaps don’t even notice, and therefore don’t try to change these things?
• midlife crisis
• marriage, romance, monogamy, infidelity
• depression
• happiness and variety
• Negativity Bias
• social media
• creativity and habituation disruption
• lying and misinformation
• Trump: habituation to his lies, lawsuits, etc.
• Illusory Truth Effect: the tendency to believe repeated statements
• Truth Bias: the tendency to believe what we are told
• Tali’s experience getting scammed in London
• risk habituation
• discrimination, anti-Semitism, racism, bigotry
• tyranny
• moral progress: we have to overcome the habituation of lacking rights (women in the 1970s)
• preference falsification: people often fail to say what they like and think because of existing social norms
• pluralistic ignorance and the rise of the Nazis.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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A new economic war for critical minerals has begun, and The War Below is an urgent dispatch from its front lines. To build electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, and other vital building blocks. But mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate change and powering crucial technologies. These tensions have sparked a worldwide reckoning over the sourcing of necessary materials, and no one understands the complexities of these issues better than Ernest Scheyder, whose exclusive access to sites around the globe has allowed him to gain unparalleled insights into a future without fossil fuels.

The War Below reveals the explosive brawl among industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether some places are too special to mine or whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches.

With vivid and engaging writing, Scheyder shows the human toll of this war and explains why recycling and other newer technologies have struggled to gain widespread use. He also expertly chronicles Washington’s attempts to wean itself off supplies from China, the global leader in mineral production and processing. The War Below paints a powerfully honest and nuanced picture of what is at stake in this new fight for energy independence, revealing how America and the rest of the world’s hunt for the “new oil” directly affects us all.

Ernest Scheyder is a senior correspondent for Reuters, covering the green energy transition and the minerals that undergird it. He previously covered the US shale oil revolution, politics, and the environment, and held roles at the Associated Press and the Bangor Daily News. A native of Maine, Scheyder is a graduate of the University of Maine and Columbia Journalism School. Visit his website at ErnestScheyder.com and follow him on Twitter @ErnestScheyder.

Shermer and Scheyder discuss:

• how, as a Reuters reporter, Scheyder came to this issue
• rare earth metals
• lithium and copper
• aluminum and other precious metals
• How much rare earth metals will we need by 2050, 2100, and beyond?
• How do lithium-ion batteries work compared to lead-acid? What are the alternatives?
• How crucial are these technologies necessary to combat climate change?
• Will EVs completely replace all other automobiles?
• Can renewables completely replace fossil fuels without nuclear?
• recycling electronic waste
• how mining works in the U.S., China, Chile, Russia, elsewhere
• types of mines: hard-rock vs. soft-rock, open-pit vs. deep earth
• public vs. private ownership of mines (Bureau of Mines)
• what companies like Apple and Tesla are doing about the coming problem
• Native American rights to land containing valuable mines
• third world labor exploitation
• electric leaf blowers and weed wackers.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Throughout most of the last century, both political Right1 and Left2 were unified, a rare occurrence in itself, in their opposition to the decriminalization of marijuana. By 2023, public opinion had shifted. Most Americans now support legalization for medical and recreational use,3 and this support extends across the political divide. Nearly two-thirds of the electorate supports legalization, making it one of the least divisive issues in the country.4 At this writing, 23 states have legalized recreational marijuana, along with Washington, DC, and Guam.5

The third that opposes legalization remains, though, and there are reasoned arguments against legalization. Significant research establishing the adverse effects of marijuana consumption exists, noting its correlation with neurophysical decline,6 cognitive impairment,7 highway deaths,8 lower educational attainment,9 addiction,10 and other adverse health effects.11 Within the last decade, correlations have been found between both distal and proximal drug use (including the use of marijuana) and sexual aggression.12

Buchanan, Michigan (Callie Lipkin / Gallery Stock), “The Nicest Place in America (2020)”

There are also reasonable arguments against legalization based on the burdens it is claimed it would produce on society: the tax revenue received from the longstanding legal sale of alcohol and tobacco pales in comparison to the costs of healthcare for the individuals who consume them.13 So some argue marijuana legalization would only further increase the costs to the taxpayer.

In 2019, Alex Berenson of the New York Times published Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. In it, Berenson warned that paranoia, one of the established side effects of marijuana consumption, is likely to trigger violence in those suffering from psychosis.14 The book was predictably lauded by those pundits who saw it as a revelatory argument against legalization.15 Berenson cited stories such as that of Raina Thaiday, who stabbed eight children to death, seven of which were her own (the eighth was her niece). Berenson noted the ruling of schizophrenia for Thaiday, in which the Justice who presided over her case wrote, “All the psychiatrists thought that it is likely that (Thaiday’s) long-term use of cannabis caused (Thaiday’s) mental illness schizophrenia to emerge.”16 Tell Your Children is chock full of historical tragedies such as Thaiday’s from the 1970s to the present day. The book describes scalping, mutilation, mass shootings, and spousal murder by psychotic perpetrators triggered by smoking marijuana. The author warned that today’s marijuana is considerably more potent (that is, higher concentration of THC) than that used 40+ years ago, and so predicted that such atrocities will only get worse. Yet Berenson’s argument is not new. Cannabis-induced violence has been argued by the U.S. Department of Justice for decades.17

New research challenged the Department’s claims, examining the rates of violent crime in states that had legalized medical and recreational marijuana. The data suggested that legalization not only failed to increase violent crime rates, but it also possibly led to a decline in crimes such as homicide, robbery, and aggravated assault.18 Likewise, Tell Your Children was challenged by many in the scientific community. They argued the author was guilty of confusing correlation with causation and selectively selecting his data, and even likened his anecdotal data to the long-discredited “reefer madness” panic of the past.19

Having grown up during the 1980s at the height of the War on Drugs, I read Tell Your Children with interest, and asked myself if Berenson’s fears were valid. Was he right? Turns out, I live in a small Michigan community that offers an ideal cluster sample in which to test his claims. It’s called Buchanan.

In the fall of 2020, I heard a radio ad calling for nominations to be considered for Reader’s Digest’s Nicest Place in America. I wrote about Buchanan. My essay won.20 Reporters from around the world covered the story.21 Coincidentally, that same year, Buchanan fully implemented marijuana legalization.22 Michigan had passed a medical marijuana law in 2008, and we’d spent the previous 10 years respectfully debating whether or not to follow suit in our small town. In the fall of 2019, the city adopted a plan for six dispensaries.

Location of marijuana dispensaries in Buchanan, MI

The Nicest Place in America has since become the go-to destination for Michigan stoners. At this writing, there is one legal dispensary for every 860 residents, one of the highest per capita ratios in the state.23 We even have a local marijuana ambassador, Freddie “The Stoner” Miller, who’s been seen on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! TV show.24

Buchanan seemed like the perfect case study of the effects of marijuana legalization. Did The Nicest Place in America see an increase in violent crime rates in the years following its adoption of recreational marijuana? I began by looking up our demographics. I found that, in many ways, Buchanan is a microcosm of America. We have a population of 4,270 and enjoy a diverse citizenry that is 83.2 percent White, 11 percent Biracial, 4.38 percent African American, Hispanic (.445 percent), and Asian (.445 percent). We have a poverty rate of 7.85 percent and a median household income of $43,668.

Much of Buchanan’s demographic data is comparable to that of the United States as a whole, though the U.S. has a considerably larger Hispanic population (18.2 percent), a larger median household income ($64,994), and a higher poverty rate (12.8 percent). Buchanan’s industrial statistics are likewise similar to those of the nation, with the workforce distributed across manufacturing, education, retail trade, and professional and technical services.25 Perhaps most significantly, Buchanan’s unemployment insurance claims skyrocketed to record levels in April 2020, as did those throughout the country.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
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I then called Sean Denison, Buchanan’s mayor. He told me he’d seen no evidence of violent crime increase since 2020. When I called Tim Ganus, our Police Chief, he told me that he also doubted crime spiked. Still, though, to really know, you need data. I submitted a Freedom of Information Act Request to the Buchanan Police Department to obtain arrest records for violent crimes from 2016 to 2022. Chief Ganus called me again to establish what I meant by “violent crime.” I told him he knew more about this than I did, so I’d leave it up to him. He suggested arrests for assault and for those that would constitute a felony. I concurred. One week later, I had the information in hand. Each report encompassed one calendar year.

Here’s what I found:

There was a total of 855 adult arrests between January 1, 2016, and December 31, 2022. Of these, there were a total of 105 (12.2 percent) arrests deemed “violent.” These offenses included nonaggravated assault, aggravated felonious assault, sexual assault, parental kidnapping, and robbery.

• In 2016, there were 29 arrests, one for parental kidnapping, one for sexual assault, 21 nonaggravated (misdemeanor level) assaults, and six aggravated (felonious) assaults.
• In 2017, there were 17 arrests, one for robbery, 12 for non-aggravated (misdemeanor level) assaults, and four for aggravated felonious assault.
• In 2018, there were 23 arrests, one for robbery, 17 for non-aggravated assault, and five for aggravated felonious assault.
• In 2019, there were 21 arrests, two for sexual assault, 17 for non-aggravated assault, and two for aggravated felonious assault.
• In 2020, the first full year of implementation, there were 21 arrests, two for sexual assault, 15 for non-aggravated assault, and four for aggravated felonious assault.
• In 2021, the second year of implementation, there were 19 arrests, one for parental kidnapping, three for sexual assault, one for forcible sexual contact, nine for non-aggravated assault, and four for aggravated felonious assault.
• In 2022, the third year of the implementation, there were 22 arrests, 16 for non-aggravated assault and six for aggravated felonious assault.

Did violent crime increase in Buchanan after 2020? Hardly. Any fears of increased violent crime following marijuana legalization in The Nicest Place in America proved unwarranted. We’re still safe, and so, I’m glad to report, is our title.

About the Author

John D. Van Dyke is an academic and science educator. His personal website is www.vandykerevue.org.

References

1. https://rb.gy/17hag
2. https://rb.gy/fzigf
3. https://rb.gy/rkncw
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6. https://rb.gy/4a3e9
7. https://rb.gy/36zd3
8. https://rb.gy/eft8n
9. https://rb.gy/m2mcd
10. Shover, C.L., David, C.S., Gordon, S.C., & Humphreys, K. (n.d.). Association between medical cannabis laws and opioid overdose mortality has reversed over time. PNAS, 116(26).
11. https://rb.gy/m2mcd
12. https://rb.gy/wofyp
13. https://rb.gy/ifprp
14. https://rb.gy/hi3zc
15. https://rb.gy/iibix
16. Berenson, A. (2019). Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence. Free Press.
17. Inciardi Inciardi, J. A., & Saum, C. A. (1998). Legalizing Drugs Would Increase Violent Crime (From Illegal Drugs, p. 142–150, 1998, Charles P. Cozic, ed. See NCJ-169238).
18. https://rb.gy/k7fmq
19. https://rb.gy/luf2z
20. https://rb.gy/c1xun
21. https://rb.gy/annph
22. https://rb.gy/cg4xr
23. https://rb.gy/cqg5s
24. https://rb.gy/1xmah
25. https://rb.gy/0is0v

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Four years on, Covid is clearly here to stay. So what do we do now? Drawing on his expertise as one of the world’s top virologists, Dr. Paul Offit helps weary readers address that crucial question in this brief, definitive guide.

As a member of the FDA Vaccine Advisory Committee and a former member of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices to the CDC, Offit has been in the room for the creation of policies that have affected hundreds of millions of people. In these pages, he marshals the power of hindsight to offer a fascinating frontline look at where we were, where we are, and where we’re heading in the now-permanent fight against the disease.

Accompanied by a companion website populated with breaking news and relevant commentary, this book contains everything you need to know to navigate Covid going forward. Offit addresses fundamental issues like boosters, immunity induced by natural infection, and what it means to be fully vaccinated. He explores the dueling origin stories of the disease, tracing today’s strident anti-vax rhetoric to twelve online sources and tracking the fallout. He breaks down long Covid—what it is, and what the known treatments are. And he looks to the future, revealing whether we can make a better vaccine, whether it should be mandated, and providing a crucial list of fourteen takeaways to eradicate further spread.

Paul A. Offit, M.D. is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania. He has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, 60 Minutes, and many other programs. Offit has published more than 170 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC and WHO. In 2021 he was awarded the Edward Jenner Lifetime Achievement Award in Vaccinology from the 15th Vaccine Congress. He is the author of numerous books including: Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitamins, Supplements and All things Natural; Vaccinated: From Cowpox to mRNA, the Remarkable Story of Vaccines; Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All; You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusion to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation; and Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong. His new book is Tell Me When It’s Over: An Expert’s Guide to Deciphering Covid Myths and Navigating Our Post-Pandemic World.

Shermer and Offit discuss:

• How do you know that the Covid-19 vaccines are not the 8th story of science gone wrong, or part of the long and risky history of medical innovation?
• Loss of trust in medical and scientific institutions (Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins)
• Overall assessment of what went right and wrong with the Covid-19 pandemic
• Pandemic vs. epidemic
• Influenza caused 800,000 hospitalizations & 60,000 deaths
• Testing, masking, social isolation
• Mandates vs. recommendations
• Is the cure worse than the disease?
• Closing of schools, restaurants, salons, parks, beaches, hiking trails, etc.
• The cost to the economy of the shut downs
• The cost to the education of children of the shut downs
• Comparative method: which countries and states did better or worse?
• Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley
• Lab Leak hypothesis vs. Zoonomic hypothesis
• Living with SARS-CoV-2 and its variants
• Vaccines and autism
• RFK, Jr. and his conspiracy theories
• Debating anti-vaxxers (Rogan and elsewhere)
• Treatments: hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, remdesivir, Vitamin D, Paxlovid, Tamiflu, retroviral medicines, monoclonal antibodies, convalescent plasma
• High risk vs. low risk groups; age, sex, race, pregnancy, weight, preconditions, immune compromised
• Myocarditis, Robert Malone, mRNA vaccines, Joe Rogan, RFKJ, Peter Hotez, Del Bigtree
• Spike protein made by Covid vaccines: toxic? (the spike protein the mRNA vaccines make cannot fuse to our cells. Normally, SARS-CoV-2 attaches to cells via the spike protein, then enters cells through a process called fusion….p. 107
• Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya censored for signing the Great Barrington Declaration (“focused protection” of the people most at risk): Wall Street Journal OpEd: “Is the Coronavirus as Deadly as They Say?”, which argued there was little evidence to support shelter-in-place orders and quarantines In March 2021, Bhattacharya called the Covid-19 lockdowns the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made” and argued that “The harm to people is catastrophic”. Blacklisted by Twitter.

How civilization might change:

• Medical: Coronavirus is here to stay—herd immunity naturally and through vaccines
• Personal and Public Health: handshakes, hugs, and other human contact; masks, social distancing, hygiene
• Economics and Business
• Travel, conferences, meetings
• Marriage, dating, sex, and home life
• Entertainment, vacations, bars and restaurants
• Education and schools
• Politics and society (and a better understanding of freedom and why it is restricted).

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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In this raw coming-of-age memoir, in the vein of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, The Other Wes Moore, and Someone Has Led This Child to Believe, Rob Henderson vividly recounts growing up in foster care, enlisting in the US Air Force, attending elite universities, and pioneering the concept of “luxury beliefs” — ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting costs on the less fortunate.

Rob Henderson was born to a drug-addicted mother and a father he never met, ultimately shuttling between ten different foster homes in California. When he was adopted into a loving family, he hoped that life would finally be stable and safe. Divorce, tragedy, poverty, and violence marked his adolescent and teen years, propelling Henderson to join the military upon completing high school.

An unflinching portrait of shattered families, desperation, and determination, Troubled recounts Henderson’s expectation-defying young life and juxtaposes his story with those of his friends who wound up incarcerated or killed. He retreads the steps and missteps he took to escape the drama and disorder of his youth. As he navigates the peaks and valleys of social class, Henderson finds that he remains on the outside looking in. His greatest achievements — a military career, an undergraduate education from Yale, a PhD from Cambridge — feel like hollow measures of success. He argues that stability at home is more important than external accomplishments, and he illustrates the ways the most privileged among us benefit from a set of social standards that actively harm the most vulnerable.

Rob Henderson grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and the rural town of Red Bluff, California. He joined the US Air Force at the age of seventeen. Once described as “self-made” by the New York Times, Rob subsequently received a BS from Yale University and a PhD in psychology from St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and more. His weekly newsletter is sent to more than forty thousand subscribers. Learn more at RobKHenderson.com. His new book is Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.

Shermer and Henderson discuss:

• Autobiographies and memoirs and the hindsight bias
• Memoirs: Tara Westover, Educated; Amber Scorah, Leaving the Witness; J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy; Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom
• Genes, Environment, and Luck/Contingency
• Childhood: drug-addicted mother, absence father, 10 different foster homes
• 60% of boys in foster care are later incarcerated; 3% graduate from college
• Marriage, divorce and childhood outcomes; one parent vs. two
• Poverty, welfare programs, and social safety nets
• The trouble with boys and men: competitiveness, risk taking, and violence, “the young male syndrome, Margo Wilson and Martin Daly
• Alcohol, drugs, depression
• Choice: top 1% of educational attainment or top 1% of childhood instability
• Luxury beliefs of educated elites
• College education vs. having a parent who cares enough to make sure you get to class
• Wealthy but unstable home vs. low-income but stable home
• How many who wield the most influence in society only pay lip service to inequality
• What it was like in the military
• What it was like at Yale
• What it was like at Cambridge
• What does it mean to be “self-made”?
• Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works
• Jonathan Haidt’s lecture on the telos of universities
• Nicolas Christakas and Yale’s privileged students
• Jordan Peterson
• The Coddling and Canceling of the American Mind
• Self-Help books
• Warrior-Scholar Project.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

The public is frequently told to “trust the science,” and then ridiculed for holding any views that differ from what is reported to be the scientific consensus. Should non-experts then naively accept the authorized narrative, or are there good reasons to be skeptical?

Is sugar-free gum good for your teeth?

When we’re told that four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum, we assume that five dentists independently examined the evidence and four of them concluded that chewing gum is good for your dental health. However, those dentists aren’t examining completely independent evidence. They sat through the same lectures in dental school, they have ready access to the same studies, they go to the same conventions, and they talk to each other, so we should worry about correlated errors.

Even worse, most dentists may have never even read a study about chewing gum, let alone conducted one of their own. Suppose they heard that most dentists recommend sugarless gum; they might well figure those other dentists are probably doing so for good reason, and so they would recommend it too. In other words, the dentists are following the herd mentality and just going along to get along. Perhaps most dentists believe chewing gum is good for dental health because they believe that most other dentists believe this, even though few if any of them have any good, independent reason to think this is true.

Herding can be a rational behavior. It would not be a good use of time or money for every dentist to conduct an independent study to assess the evidence and determine whether sugarless gum is good for dental health. However, herding can lead an entire scientific community to converge on the wrong answer, and they typically won’t know whether they’ve converged on the right or the wrong answer.

We can see how a dangerous emperor-has-no-clothes situation could easily arise. Suppose a dentist questions whether chewing gum really is good for dental health. He or she considers raising the issue at a convention but then remembers that most dentists recommend gum and worries that they’ll be mocked for questioning the consensus view. So they decide to keep quiet, the field moves on, nobody’s beliefs are challenged, and no new evidence is collected.

This may be a low-stakes example, and there probably are good scientific reasons to believe that chewing sugar-free gum is good for dental health. But herding is a problem in many scientific fields, including those studying arguably more important questions, such as the health of democracy.

How We Vote

Consider this example from an academic subfield I happen to know well. Among scholars of political behavior, there is a broad consensus that American voters don’t know or care much about policy, and their voting decisions are largely driven by party identity. Such claims are commonplace in academic papers, conferences, classrooms, textbooks, and public writings. To a member of the general public who has never taken a political science class, this claim might seem absurd. The average American may not be as informed as we would hope, and their policy preferences might diverge from ours. Yet even a brief conversation with a voter would likely reveal that they know and care about policy and think about it when they decide which candidates to support in elections. How can such a strong claim unsupported by good evidence be the scientific consensus?

When I challenged this scientific consensus,1 I received significant public and private criticism from scholars of political behavior. A few of my critics engaged with my arguments and evidence, but most did not. Instead, they typically made appeals to authority, such as, “How dare you challenge what’s been established wisdom for seven decades?”.

In other words, they were herding. They assumed that something must be right because that’s been the consensus view in their field for a long time. They were not able or willing to provide further evidence or arguments in support of their position, and they simply dismissed anyone who challenged them, thereby creating a strong incentive for other scholars to uphold the consensus.

The Good and the Bad Scenario

Roughly speaking, there are two different ways in which an apparent scientific consensus might arise. In the good scenario, scientists are conducting genuinely good work, rigorously vetting each other’s work, and the theory, the evidence, and the analyses supporting the consensus view are all really strong. In this scenario, if reasonable, objective, intelligent individuals from outside the field examined all of the evidence, they too would be provisionally confident in the consensus.

In the bad scenario, the scientists are not always conducting good work, don’t rigorously vet each other’s work (or they engage in selective vetting based on whether or not they like and/or agree with the conclusions of a study), and the theory, the evidence, or the analyses supporting the consensus are not robust. In this scenario, a reasonable, objective, intelligent individual from outside the field who examined the evidence, the analyses, and the theory would be, at best, genuinely uncertain. Nevertheless, some scientists and all too many media pundits and politicos repeatedly state that there is a scientific consensus in support of their preferred view. Dissenters, whether scientists themselves or not, are ostracized.

Unfortunately, the bad scenario occurs too often— much more often than many scientists, commentators, and cultural leaders presume. We already saw one way in which the bad scenario can arise—herding. Here are some additional ways in which the bad scenario can arise and why skeptics should view appeals to scientific consensus, on their own, as uncompelling. I also discuss how non-experts can better distinguish between the good and bad scenarios, and how scientists can do more to avoid the latter.

The Illusion of Scientific Consensus

Commentators and leaders often assert that their position is the consensus view, but without providing direct evidence of that consensus. Just as social media and public discourse don’t accurately reflect the views of regular Americans, they also need not accurately reflect the views of scientists. Making it even more difficult to assess scientific consensus, those who do not hold the views of the purported consensus are often dismissed as not being legitimate members of the scientific community.

In the rare cases in which we are presented with systematic evidence on the views of the scientific community, the results are often underwhelming. Doran and Zimmerman conducted a survey of earth scientists to assess the extent of scientific consensus on climate change, and they concluded that “the debate on the authenticity of global warming and the role played by human activity is largely nonexistent among those who understand the nuances and scientific basis of long-term climate processes.”2 Specifically, in one question, they asked earth scientists “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?” and 82 percent of them said yes. The meaning of significant is open to interpretation, and even among people who answer yes, there could be genuine disagreement about the extent to which climate change is a problem and the right ways to address it. Furthermore, the survey’s response rate was only 31 percent, and we don’t know if those responding are representative of all scientists who were contacted. Even still, nearly one in five scientists surveyed did not answer yes to this seemingly anodyne question. So maybe the consensus isn’t as strong as we’re frequently told.

Doran and Zimmerman further find that the apparent scientific consensus on climate change gets stronger as they restrict their sample. For example, if they focus on scientists who actively and primarily publish papers on climate change, 97 percent of those scientists answered yes to the question above. One potential interpretation is that when people become immersed in climate science research, they increasingly converge to the truth. Another is that earth scientists who do not hold the desirable view on this question are prevented from publishing papers on climate science. The recent admissions of one climate scientist suggest that journals indeed will not publish the papers of authors who do not conform to the preferred narrative.3

Broad Consensus Doesn’t Mean High Certainty

Scientists in a particular field all have access to essentially the same information, so I would expect many of them to have similar beliefs on many scientific questions. How confident are they in those beliefs?

Even if 100 percent of earth scientists agreed that human activity is a significant contributing factor to an increase in mean temperature readings from around the globe, it would still tell us nothing about the certainty with which they held those beliefs. If someone is only 51 percent sure of a claim, they might answer yes to the forced-choice two-option question. So for all we know, although 82 percent of earth scientists answered yes, all of those individual scientists might still be genuinely uncertain.

For this reason, the percentage of scientists who agree with a statement is not a very informative statistic. How sure are they that human activity influences global mean temperature? (Also, how much do they think human activity influences temperature? If it’s a small effect, we’ll want to consider the other costs and benefits before making any rash decisions; if it’s a large effect, we should allocate more resources to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.) For some questions, 49 percent certainty might be more than enough to warrant taking a costly action— if you were 49 percent sure that your car was going to explode in the next minute, you would get out and run. For other questions, 51 percent certainty is not nearly enough—if you were 51 percent sure that you were going to win the lottery, you wouldn’t quit your job.

Unfortunately, surveys of scientists typically elicit no information about the certainty with which the respondents hold their beliefs. However, since 18 percent of scientists did not agree that human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures, and since those 18 percent have access to largely the same information as the majority, I would be surprised if all of the 82 percent who agree with the statement hold that belief with strong certainty. Indeed, it would be quite strange if 82 percent of experts were virtually certain while 18 percent of experts weren’t even sure enough to say yes to the binary question.

Correlated Errors

A scientific estimate can diverge from the truth for many reasons, but the hope of the scientific community is that if we conduct a lot of studies, the errors will cancel out, and when we conduct meta-analyses, our estimates will converge to the truth.

The problem with this logic is that not all errors cancel each other out. Often, scientific studies are biased, meaning that even if we repeated them over and over with infinitely large sample sizes, we still wouldn’t get closer to the truth. Further, the biases of different, related studies are likely correlated with one another.

Consider the increasingly common claim that diet sodas are bad for your health. Although we currently lack a compelling biological explanation as to why, dozens of scientific studies report that consuming diet soda and other artificially sweetened beverages causes a host of health problems including obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks. What’s the evidence for this claim? People who regularly consume diet soda typically have more health problems than people who don’t consume sweet beverages (people who drink sugary beverages are usually excluded or analyzed separately).

Why is there a strong correlation between diet soda and health problems? It could be that diet soda causes health problems. Alternatively, health problems might cause people to drink diet soda. For example, perhaps people switch from regular soda to diet soda after they become obese or diabetic. Or there could be confounding factors that influence both diet soda consumption and health. For example, perhaps people with a sweet tooth are more likely to consume diet soda and also more likely to consume sugary desserts, which cause health problems. These latter possibilities are sources of bias. Because of reverse causation and confounding, the correlation between diet soda consumption and health is not, in and of itself, convincing evidence that diet soda is bad for you. For all we know, it could be good for you insofar as it’s a substitute for sugary foods and beverages.

It doesn’t matter how many observational, correlational studies we conduct on this topic. They will likely all yield similar results, and we still would not learn much about the actual effects of diet soda on health. If all the studies are biased in the same direction, a scientific consensus could emerge that is based on hundreds or even thousands of studies and still be wrong.

Selective Reporting

Scientific results that happen to align with the predispositions of journal editors and peer-reviewers are more likely to be written up and published than those that go against the accepted wisdom in a field. Scientists often conduct multiple tests and selectively report those that are the most publishable, meaning that the published record is often biased, even if each individual analysis is unbiased. In some cases, scientific results might be skewed in the direction of sensational, surprising, or newsworthy findings. However, once a field has settled upon an apparent consensus and desires to maintain it, perhaps we should worry that results affirming the consensus are much more likely to be published than those that conflict with that consensus.

Archives of Sexual Behavior, a scientific journal published by Springer Nature, recently retracted an article on rapid onset gender dysphoria in response to criticism from activists.4 The retraction note says nothing about the scientific validity of either the data or analysis in that article. Rather, the paper was purportedly retracted on the grounds that participants in a survey did not consent to participate in a study, a claim that the author of the study contests.5

In 2017, Hypatia, an academic philosophy journal, published a paper entitled “In Defense of Transracialism” [that is, changing one’s racial identity].6 Hundreds of academics signed an open letter asking the journal to retract the paper.7 The open letter did not seriously engage with the arguments in the paper; rather, it asserted that the availability of the paper causes harm. The associate editors of the journal issued an apology and condemned the paper. The editor-in-chief criticized the associate editors and defended the journal’s review process but resigned soon after.8 Ultimately, the paper was not retracted, but the philosophy community has signaled that certain arguments and conclusions would not be allowed in their field.

There are many more examples of academic studies being retracted or condemned for reasons unrelated to merit, credibility, integrity, or validity. And unfortunately, these cases are just the tip of the iceberg. For every public retraction, there are likely many more studies that never make it through peer review because of their undesired or unpalatable results. And for every one of these, there are likely many more studies that never get written up and submitted because the author reasonably infers that a paper with such results would either not be published or would harm their reputation.

Some scientists and journal editors openly admit to engaging in this kind of selective reporting. In 2022, the editors of Nature Human Behavior published new ethics guidelines for their journal.9 They reserved the right to decline publication of any submitted paper and retract any published paper that might cause “substantial risk of harm.” In other words, the editors of the journal can reject or retract any study for reasons that are completely unrelated to its scientific validity. So, if the results and conclusion of one scientific result are deemed to be safe by journal editors, while those in another are deemed harmful, only the safe study gets published. This would lead to a scientific consensus around the safe result, even if it were factually wrong.

Fraud

Another obvious but important reason the scientific record might fail to reflect the truth is that some scientists engage in fraud. They might manipulate data points to make their results more favorable or even fabricate entire data sets whole cloth. We would all hope that this kind of outright scientific misconduct is rare, but it does happen. Two prominent behavioral scientists from Harvard and Duke University both independently appear to have intentionally manipulated or fabricated data in different parts of the same study—ironically, a study about dishonesty.10 The president of Stanford recently resigned (but kept his faculty appointment) after evidence came to light that strongly suggests he intentionally manipulated images in his neuroscience studies.11 And these are just recent, high-profile examples that made the news. There are likely more cases of fraud that don’t come to light, don’t make the news, and do not lead to a correction of the scientific record.

Career Incentives

Partly because of the phenomena discussed above, we can’t know if a scientist who publicly supports a conclusion genuinely holds that view. To publish papers, secure grants, get a good job, get tenure, receive praise, and avoid banishment, scientists must not question the key tenets of their field. Some of this is natural. A biochemist is not likely to make much progress in her field if she doesn’t accept the atomic theory or the periodicity of elements, and biochemistry as a field won’t make much progress if it has to devote significant journal space and lab time to questions that are already well settled. However, most scientific claims aren’t nearly so well-established, and we’ll never know if they’re truly right or wrong if scientists aren’t able to publish novel theoretical perspectives, data, or analyses that challenge them. Paradigms, as defined by Thomas Kuhn, could simply never shift.

In addition to the incentives for individual researchers, scientific fields as a whole often have a strong incentive to collectively uphold a consensus. Virologists won’t be able to secure as much funding and support for their research if the public and the rest of the scientific community were to think that virology researchers caused a global pandemic. As a result, others outside the field shouldn’t necessarily be persuaded by the sheer fact that virologists oppose the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 origins, which, it just so happens, would be very bad for their careers.

Science vs. Values

Not all important questions are scientific questions. What is the effect of eating bacon on my chances of having a heart attack? is a scientific question. Should I eat bacon? is not. When you consider whether or not to eat bacon, you’ll want to think about a lot of things that can be scientifically quantified such as health risks, nutritional value, economic costs, and so on. However, you’ll also want to think about other questions such as How much do I enjoy eating bacon?, What are the ethical implications of eating pig products?, and Does my enjoyment of bacon outweigh the health risks and ethical downsides?. These latter questions are about your personal values, and by the personal experiential nature of the questions, scientists are probably less equipped to answer them than you are.

Just as individual decision-making involves values, so does public policy. So, If we banned the sale of bacon, how much would it increase unemployment in Iowa? is a scientific question, while Should we ban the sale of bacon? is not. And scientists’ values aren’t necessarily any more enlightened than those of citizens, elected officials, and bureaucrats in deciding the latter. So we should consider scientific evidence when assessing the costs or benefits of different policy decisions, but science alone cannot dictate which policies to implement.

Unfortunately, the difference between science questions and value judgments is often forgotten or ignored by scientists themselves. We’re often told things such as, there is a scientific consensus that we should raise the gas tax, economists support surge pricing for parking, education researchers oppose standardized testing, or a scientific journal endorses a political candidate,12 and similar statements should be roughly as persuasive as anthropologists prefer mayonnaise over mustard. Scientists shouldn’t be in the business of telling people what to do. They should provide people with information so that they can make better decisions and policies conditional on their values.

Politicization

This article presents a number of different explanations for the potential emergence of an unreliable scientific consensus. All of these concerns are exacerbated when a scientific question becomes politicized or is of great public interest. If a particular scientific claim happens to align with the values, policy preferences, or political objectives of scientists, you can imagine that the incentives for misrepresenting the scientific consensus, selectively reporting results, accepting the conclusions of biased studies, and herding become even greater. And if an undesirable result can lead a scientist to be ostracized by not just their peers but by journalists, friends, family, and activists, the distortionary incentives become even stronger.

This poses a vexing problem for the otherwise-promising practice of evidence-based policy. All else equal, the more relevant science is for policy, the less reliable it will likely be. This is because scientists, like everyone else, are individuals with their own values, biases, and incentives. They probably already had strong views about policy before they analyzed any data, which means they’re even more likely than normal to report results selectively, publish biased studies, herd on a politically desirable conclusion, and so on. Unfortunately, this means that we should be more skeptical of scientific findings when that question is particularly politicized or policy-relevant.

All that said, avoid nihilism or worse.

Consumers of scientific information should be skeptical of an apparent scientific consensus, and they should think about some of the factors discussed here when deciding how skeptical they should be. How politicized is this topic? What are the career incentives for the scientists? How easy would it be for scientists to selectively report only the favorable results? Would a study have been published if it had found the opposite result or a null result? The answers to these questions will not definitively tell us whether the scientific consensus is right or wrong, but they should help us decide the degree to which we should simply trust the consensus or investigate further.

Although skepticism is warranted, nihilism is not. Even when a topic is highly politicized and when there are good reasons to worry about biased studies, selective reporting, herding, and so on, the scientific community can still find the right answer. The debate over evolution by natural selection would seem to feature many of the problems I’ve discussed, and yet, the scientific consensus is almost surely right in that case. However, you shouldn’t think evolution is right just because it’s the scientific consensus. You should think it’s right because the evidence is strong. And if scientists want to convince more people about evolution, they shouldn’t simply appeal to scientific consensus. They should present and discuss the evidence.

Science is a process, not a result.

If we want to learn more about the universe for the sake of enjoyment or with the goal of improving our lives, science is our best hope. So don’t become a nihilist, and don’t replace science with something worse such as random guessing or deference to authority, religious or political. Remember that science is just the word we use to describe the process by which we generate new knowledge by questioning, experimenting, analyzing, and testing to see if we are wrong rather than confirming that we are right. It involves repeated iterations of hypothesizing, experimenting, analyzing, empirical testing, and arguing.

If a group of so-called scientists stop theorizing, testing, and challenging, then they’re no longer engaged in science. Perhaps they’re engaged in advocacy, which is a respectable thing to do, particularly if the theory, evidence, and arguments on their side are strong. Yet advocacy and science are distinctly different activities and shouldn’t be conflated.

Science is not a specific person13 or even a group of people. Science is not a particular result or conclusion. It is not content but method. It is to remain always open to skepticism while never succumbing to cynicism. The goal of science is not for everyone to agree or behave in the same way. To the extent that there is a goal or purpose of science, it’s for us to challenge what we thought we knew, to obtain new information, and thereby get successively closer to the truth. Of course, we don’t know what the truth is, and the scientific process is imperfect, so, as part of a healthy scientific process, we can sometimes move away from the truth. However, if we’re doing this correctly, we will get successively closer to truth more often than not.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
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At various points in our history, there has been a scientific consensus that the sun revolves around the earth, that humans do not share a common ancestor with other animals, that force equals mass times velocity, and that bloodletting is an effective medical treatment. More recently, doctors told people for decades to treat soft-tissue injuries with ice, while the most current evidence now suggests that cold therapy delays healing.14

To its credit, the scientific process has allowed us to correct these mistakes. However, the scientific record is imperfect and ever-changing. So even if the scientific consensus might be right more often than not, we should not accept it on faith alone.

* * *

The scientific community should actively work to address the problems discussed here. It should try to set up better institutions and career incentives to reduce the prevalence of biased studies, selective reporting, and herding. It should do a better job of conveying the uncertainty associated with any scientific claims and beliefs. And it should not impose its values on others. In the meantime, members of the public should continue to be skeptical, but not cynical, while asking for better evidence and arguments before reflexively accepting a reported scientific consensus.

About the Author

Anthony Fowler is a Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is the editor-in-chief of the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, an author of Thinking Clearly with Data, and a host of Not Another Politics Podcast.

References

1. Fowler, A. (2020). Partisan Intoxication or Policy Voting?. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 15(2), 141–179.
2. Doran, P.T., & Zimmerman, M.K. (2009). Examining the Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union, 90(3), 22–23.
3. https://rb.gy/9h54n
4. https://rb.gy/23irm
5. https://rb.gy/gulwn
6. Tuvel, R. (2017). In Defense of Transracialism. Hypatia, 32(2), 263–278.
7. https://rb.gy/fys22
8. https://rb.gy/24iw4
9. https://rb.gy/5qmym
10. https://rb.gy/acict
11. https://rb.gy/ihwxa
12. https://rb.gy/vmjj7
13. https://rb.gy/adckm
14. Wang, Z. R., & Ni, G. X. (2021). Is It Time to Put Traditional Cold Therapy in Rehabilitation of Soft-Tissue Injuries Out to Pasture?. World Journal of Clinical Cases, 9(17), 4116.

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The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment.

It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of knowledge through reasoned inquiry that should inform the work of public health.

Across fifty essays, Within Reason chronicles how public health became enmeshed in the insidious social trends that accelerated under Covid-19. Galea challenges this intellectual drift towards intolerance and absolutism while showing how similar regressions from reason undermined social progress during earlier eras. Within Reason builds an incisive case for a return to critical, open inquiry as a guiding principle for the future public health we want—and a future we must work to protect.

Shermer and Galea discuss: his immigrant experience in the U.S. coming from Malta • why he left practicing medicine for public health • public health vs. private health • mask/vaccine recommendations vs. mandates • the case against moralism in public health • Medicare for all, UBI, generous social safety net, reparation for slavery, liberal immigration policies, commonsense gun safety reform • public health and: race, class, sex/gender • moralizing and public health.

Dr. Sandro Galea is a physician, epidemiologist, author and the Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. He previously held academic and leadership positions at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has published more than 1000 scientific journal articles, 75 chapters, and 24 books, and his research has been featured extensively in current periodicals and newspapers. Galea holds a medical degree from the University of Toronto and graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University. Dr. Galea was named one of Time magazine’s epidemiology innovators and has been listed as one of the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.” He is past chair of the board of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health and past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Epidemiological Society. He is the author of The Contagion Next Time and Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health. His new book is Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time.

Shermer and Galea discuss:

• his immigrant experience in the U.S. coming from Malta
• why he left practicing medicine for public health
• What is public health?
• public health vs. private health
• mask recommendations vs. mandates
• vaccine recommendations vs. mandates
• the case against moralism in public health
• Galea’s progressive views: Medicare for all, UBI, generous social safety net, reparation for slavery, liberal immigration policies, commonsense gun safety reform
• public health/healthcare and: race, class, sex/gender
• moralizing and public health.

Show Notes

Stigma: smoking: “We can now plausibly say the choice to smoke or not smoke is, in a sense, a choice between right and wrong. The same was to some extent true of COVID-19. We did know that wearing masks and limiting our physical interaction would reduce the spread of the disease. Taking these steps was—there’s no getting around it—a matter of personal responsibility, a moral consideration, and it was right for us to acknowledge this.”

Working remotely adversely affected the poor over the rich, as did closing schools, restaurants, etc. “If we ignore the populations whose lives are shaped by conditions different from those that shape our own, we are acting contrary to the spirit of liberalism. COVID provided many examples of how such conditions create gaps in the lived experience of populations. We know, for example, that there is a clear link between income quartile and ability to physically distance by working remotely. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has shown that 62 percent of earners in the top twenty-fifth quartile were able to work remotely, compared with just 9 percent of those in the bottom twenty-fifth. In stigmatizing those who do not adhere to physical distancing protocols, we risk targeting those with the least personal control over whether they do so.”

At a fundamental level, it would be characterized by social and economic justice. By economic justice, I mean a world where economic systems are geared toward fairness rather than the inequality that currently benefits the well-off few at the expense of the less well-off many. By social justice, I mean a world where no one is unfairly held back by characteristics of identity—whether race, sexual orientation, or gender.

John Hopkins University DEI Office, Diversity Word of the Month

“Privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group. Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups. In the United States, privilege is granted to people who have membership in one or more of these social identity groups: White people, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, cisgender people, males, Christians, middle or own class people, middle-aged people, English-speaking people. Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and are granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.”

Galea: “To answer every challenge with a call for complete upheaval of all that came before is to be neither serious nor effective as a movement. We may not want to use the language of overthrow when pragmatic reform is called for, just as we may not want to talk about incremental reform when our speech might support something bolder. If we continually cry “revolution” when we really need basic, commonsense reforms, we are liable to drive otherwise sympathetic partners out of our coalition. We also risk being taken less seriously when systemic change really is necessary, with our calls for bold action falling on ears that have long since ceased to listen.”

Great Barrington Declaration

It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of “focused protection”, by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection.

5 Obstacles to a Full Restoration of Public Health Liberal Ideals

1. Science/public health have become politicized
2. We have forgotten our roots (free speech and thought, reasoned methodology, pursuit of truth)
3. We have become poor at weighing trade-offs
4. Media feedback loops have become the new peer review
5. We have prioritized the cultivation of influence over the pursuit of truth.

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In Against the New Politics of Identity, philosopher Ronald A. Lindsay offers a sustained criticism of the far-reaching cultural transformation occurring across much of the West by which individuals are defined primarily by their group identity, such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Driven largely by the political Left, this transformation has led to the wholesale grouping of individuals into oppressed and oppressor classes in both theory and practice. He warns that the push for identity politics on the Left predictably elicits a parallel reaction from the Right, including the Right’s own version of identity politics in the form of Christian nationalism. As Lindsay makes clear, the symbiotic relationship that has formed between these two political poles risks producing even deeper threats to Enlightenment values and Western democracy. If we are to preserve a liberal democracy in which the rights of individuals are respected, he concludes, the dogmas of identity politics must be challenged and refuted. Against the New Politics of Identity offers a principled path for doing so.

Dr. Ronald Lindsay, a philosopher (PhD, Georgetown University) and lawyer (JD, University of Virginia) is the author of The Necessity of Secularism and Future Bioethics. Although his non-fiction works focus on different topics, two threads unite them: Lindsay’s gift for thinking critically about accepted narratives and his strong commitment to individual rights, whether it’s the right to assisted dying, the right to religious freedom, or the right of individuals to be judged on their own merit, as opposed to their group identity. In addition to his books, Lindsay has also written numerous philosophical and legal essays, including the entry on Euthanasia in the International Encyclopedia of Ethics. In his spare time, Lindsay plays baseball—baseball, not softball. The good news is he maintains a batting average near .300; the bad news is his fielding average is not much higher. A native of Boston, Ron Lindsay currently lives in Loudoun County, Virginia with his wife, Debra, where their presence is usually tolerated by their cat. His new book is: Against the New Politics of Identity: How the Left’s Dogmas on Race and Equity Harm Liberal Democracy and Invigorate Christian Nationalism.

Shermer and Lindsay discuss:

• Who is worse, the Left or the Right?
• Critical Race Theory (CRT)
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
• identity politics: identity or politics?
• overt racism vs. systemic racism
• liberalism vs. illiberalism
• What is progressive? What is woke?
• What are the true motives of woke progressive leftists?
• How widespread is the problem of woke ideology?
• standpoint epistemology
• equality vs. equity
• race and class
• cancel culture on the political Left and Right
• Christian nationalism and its agenda
• abortion
• Why do Blacks make less money, own fewer and lower quality homes, work in less prestigious jobs, hold fewer seats in the Senate and House of Representatives, run fewer Fortune 500 companies, etc.?

Show Notes From the Skeptic article “Systemic Racism—Explained”

The article, by Mahzarin R. Banaji, Susan T. Fiske & Douglas S. Massey, appeared in Skeptic 27.3.

Race is baked into the history of the U.S. going back to colonial times and continuing through early independence when slavery was quietly written into the nation’s Constitution. Although the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution ended slavery and granted due process, equal protection, and voting rights to the formerly enslaved, efforts to combat systemic racism in the U.S. faltered when Reconstruction collapsed in the disputed election of 1876, which triggered the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.

From 1876 to 1900, 90 percent of all African Americans lived in the South and were subject to the dictates of the repressive Jim Crow system; 83 percent lived in poor rural areas, occupying ramshackle dwellings clustered in small settlements in or near the plantations where they worked.

Between 1900 and 1970, millions of African Americans left the rural South in search of better lives in industrializing cities throughout the nation. As a result of this migration, by 1970 nearly half of all African Americans had come to live outside the South, 90 percent in urban areas. It was during this period of Black urbanization that the ghetto emerged as a structural feature of American urbanism, making Black residential segregation into the linchpin of a new system of racial stratification that prevailed throughout the U.S. irrespective of region.

In 1924, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers adopted a code of ethics stating that “a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood”

Redlining through the 1960s…

By 1970, high levels of Black residential segregation were universal throughout metropolitan America. As of 1970, 61 percent of Black Americans living in US metropolitan areas lived under hypersegregation, a circumstance unique to Americans. Although in theory, segregation should have withered away after the Civil Rights Era, it has not.

In 2010, the average index of Black–White segregation remained high and a third of all Black metropolitan residents continued to live in hypersegregated areas. This reality prevails despite the outlawing of racial discrimination in housing (the 1968 Fair Housing Act) and lending (the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act).

In the early 1960s, more than 60 percent of White Americans agreed that Whites have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhoods. By the 1980s the percentage had dropped to 13 percent.

Although overt discrimination in housing and lending has clearly declined in response to legislation, covert discrimination continues. Rental and sales agents today are less likely to respond to emails from people with stereotypically Black names or to reply to phone messages left by speakers who “sound Black.” A recent meta-analysis of 16 experimental housing audit studies and 19 lending analyses conducted since 1970 revealed that sharp racial differentials in the number of units recommended by realtors and inspected by clients have persisted and that racial gaps in loan denial rates and borrowing cost have barely changed in 40 years.

Audit studies, conducted across the social and behavioral sciences, include a subset of resume studies in which researchers send the same resume out to apply for jobs, but change just one item: the candidate’s name is Lisa Smith or Lakisha Smith. Then, they wait to see who gets the callback. The bias is clear: employers avoid “Black-sounding” names.

No other group in the history of the U.S. has ever experienced such intense residential segregation in so many areas and over such a long period of time.

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A pediatric neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital diagnosed my son, Misha, with autism spectrum disorder at age three. At Massachusetts General Hospital, another pediatric neurologist answered my call for a second opinion only to rebuff my hope for a different one. “I did not find him to be very receptive to testing,” the expert sighed. Both neurologists observed that Misha didn’t respond to their request to identify colors, body parts, or animals, that he averted his eyes from theirs, that he pawed their examination table when he didn’t flap his arms. Autism, the doctors said, constituted a lifelong condition. Medical science didn’t understand its causes or cures, and scarcely comprehended the limits of its woes.

How could the neurologists deduce such a bleak judgment from 90 minutes in the bell jar of their examination rooms? If they knew so little about autism, then how could they gavel down a life sentence? I remembered reading somewhere that a properly trained neurologist ought to be able to argue both for and against any single diagnosis in a stepwise process of elimination. I opened the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), leafed to the entry under autism, and plucked out of its basket several inculpating symptoms. Aggrieved, I sought out the Handbook of Differential Diagnosis, a companion volume, and underlined an admonitory passage: “Clinicians typically decide on the diagnosis within the first five minutes of meeting the patient and then spend the rest of the time during their evaluation interpreting (and often misinterpreting) elicited information through this diagnostic bias.” Now what?

As an educated citizen of progressive Cambridge, Massachusetts, I consumed large volumes of such second-hand, semi-digested information. I felt that I should, and believed that I could, develop my own, independent judgment about Misha’s condition. I would do my own research, and I would draw my own conclusions based on what I learned.

These virtues turned out to be constituent features of my error. My skepticism and sense of responsibility blended with my stubbornness as I struggled to evaluate a welter of “holistic” attitudes about medicine and health. Several fixed ideas confronted me. Autism, I read, is neither the psychopathology listed in the DSM nor the organic twist of disease supposed by neurologists. Autism, these alternative sources explained, is one among an epidemic of preventable chronic illnesses that American children contract from toxins in the environment. Holistic therapy, according to another, contains the requisite resources. Vitamin therapy, homeopathy, and antifungal treatment could heal children like Misha of their injuries.

The claim that autism is a treatable, toxin-induced chronic illness is a half-century old. Its history forms a pattern of culture and credulity imprinted on our own time. Today, indeed, as one in every 36 children receive the diagnosis, and as controversies swirl around COVID-19, more people than ever turn to holistic remedies to treat illnesses real and imagined. Homeopathic remedies fly off the shelves at pharmacies, alongside an array of alleged immunity-boosting, anti-inflammatory vitamins and herbal supplements.

Critics view the vogue for holism as the product of an irrational transaction between charlatans and suckers. As I reflect on my experience with Misha in the grassroots of autism agonistes, however, I find the issues don’t divide so tidily. The question isn’t whom to trust or what to believe, but how to make an existential choice between incommensurable propositions.

A family friend introduced me to Mary Coyle, a homeopath at the Real Child Center in New York. Coyle said Misha had likely contracted autism from contaminants in the environment. Was I aware of the epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicting children like him? Some of them, Coyle explained, received diagnoses of asthma, chronic fatigue, or dermatitis. Others were diagnosed with fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, or PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal Infections). Pathogens lying at the nexus between the body and the environment fooled medical specialists at places like Boston Children’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. Coyle urged me to abandon their dead-end query, “Is your child on the autism spectrum?” To help Misha, I needed to switch the predicate and envisage a different question: “How toxic is your child?”

My kitchen turned into an ersatz pharmacy of unguents, powders, drops, and tablets.

Why not find out? Although I had never heard of homeopathy or Coyle’s sub-specialty of homotoxicology, I believed that with some study I could probably draw the necessary distinction between evidence and interpretation in the test results. Coyle herself had been trained by conventional physicians before seeking out propaedeutic instruction in holistic medicine. Holism sounded nice.

We started out with an “Energetic Assessment.” Measuring Misha’s rates of “galvanic skin response,” Coyle said, would weigh the balance of electrical vibrations conducted through his pores. Toward this end, she deployed an electrodermal screening device that deciphered imbalances in his “meridians,” or “pathways.” Toxic metals, alas, appeared from the results to be obstructing his “flow” of energy.

With Coyle’s theory confirmed, she referred me to Lawrence Caprio to canvass for food and environmental allergens. Caprio, like Coyle, had defected from conventional to alternative medicine. I learned that while attending medical school at the University of Rome he had befriended a homeopath in the Italian countryside and lived “a very natural lifestyle”; the experience led him to pursue naturopathy.

Misha—Caprio now reported—turned out to be “intolerant” of bread, butter, eggplant, oatmeal, peanuts, potatoes, and tomatoes. Misha also displayed a “sensitivity” to bananas, car exhaust, cheese, chlorine, chocolate, cow milk, dust mites, garlic, onions, oranges, soy beans, and strawberries. Caprio flagged “phenolics” such as malvin (in corn sweeteners) and piperin (in nightshade vegetables and animal proteins).

Next, I mailed urine and stool samples to the Great Plains Laboratory in Kansas. The director there, William Shaw, had worked as a researcher in biochemistry, endocrinology, and immunology at the Centers for Disease Control before he quit and set up his own laboratory. Shaw suspected lithium in “the bottled water craze” and fluoridation in the public water supply as just two of the causes of autism. He came to believe that government scientists woefully misunderstood such sources. He compared their dereliction to the Red Cross’s failure to intervene in the Holocaust. Shaw also found toxic levels of yeast flooding Misha’s intestines.

Homeopathy, naturopathy, and renegade biochemistry cast me outside the institutions of science where Misha’s neurologists practiced. But to grasp how these new realms might be objective correlates of Misha’s condition—and how toxins, foods, and yeast might be culprits—I had only to remind myself of the progressive demonology that made the diagnosis seem plausible.

Industrial corporations have been chewing up the land, choking the air, and despoiling the water, I read, turning the whole country into a hazardous materials zone. I’d read Silent Spring, in which ecologist Rachel Carson claimed that our bodies weren’t shields, but permeable organisms that absorbed particulates. I’d heard Ralph Nader liken air and water pollution to “domestic chemical and biological warfare.” I’d finished Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature with the requisite dread. Listening to progressive news media about “forever chemicals” evoked moods that swung between indignation and paranoia. I paid for eco-friendly cribs, de-leaded the windows in our apartment, and tried to shop organic.

As Coyle, Caprio, and Shaw whispered in my ear, though, my imagination boggled with an even greater catalogue of possible pathogens. Our food contained more pesticides, hormones, and insecticides than I had suspected. Our air is filled with methanol and carbon monoxide. Chlorine, herbicides, and parasites degraded our tap water. Mold festered in our walls, floors, and ceilings. Formaldehyde lurked in our furniture. Heavy metals hid in our lotions, shampoos, and antiperspirants. Synthetic chemical compounds—polychlorinated biphenyls, phthalates, bisphenol A, polybrominated diphenyl ethers—seeped into our toys, diapers, bottles, soaps, and appliances. Even our Wi-Fi, cell phones, refrigerator, light bulbs, and microwave oven emitted radiation through electromagnetic fields.

Had the dystopia of the contemporary world poisoned my son? Coyle, Caprio, and Shaw not only defined autism as a preventable, “biomedical” illness, they traced the mechanism of harm to his pediatrician’s office.

Misha had received three-in-one vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTP) and measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) according to the recommended schedule. The holistic experts now told me that these vaccines contain dangerous metals, including mercury and aluminum. The vaccines, I read, could have spread from Misha’s arm to his gut and persisted long enough to perforate an intestinal wall. Mercury, a neurotoxin, could have leaked into his bloodstream and surreptitiously addled his brain. Or his pediatrician could have set off a chain reaction that had the same effect. The antibiotics she gave him for petty infections could have reduced the diversity of natural flora that controlled yeast in his gastrointestinal tract. An overabundance of yeast could have generated enzymes that perforated his intestines even if live-virus vaccines had not done so directly.

Either way, undigested food molecules such as gluten (in wheat) and casein (in dairy) could have joined forces with environmental toxins and heavy metals and attached to Misha’s opiate receptors, disrupting his neurotransmitters and triggering allergic reactions. The ballooning inflammation would have thwarted his immune responses. If so, then his “toxic load” could be starving his cells of nutrients. Escalating levels of “oxidative stress” could be congesting his metabolism. No wonder he lacked muscle tone, coordination, and balance!

How could I dismiss their diagnosis of “autism enterocolitis,” AKA “leaky gut?” My liberal education prided open-mindedness, after all. In 1998, a midlevel British lab researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a study warranting the diagnosis in The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. Wakefield’s paper, it turned out, “entered his profession’s annals of shame as among the most unethical, dishonest, and damaging medical research to be unmasked in living memory,” according to Brian Deer’s The Doctor Who Fooled the World.

In the meantime, both liberal and conservative politicians echoed the implications of Wakefield’s hoax. “The science right now is inconclusive,” Barack Obama said in 2008. Thousands of media outlets around the world reported a controversy between two legitimate sides. “Fears raised over preservatives in vaccines,” a front-page headline in the Boston Globe announced. Wakefield appeared on television with articulate parents by his side. “You have to listen to the story the parents tell,” he said on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Reputable television programs did just that. ABC’s Nightline, Good Morning America, and 20/20, NBC’s Dateline, and The Oprah Winfrey Show broadcast the gravamen of the indictment out of the mouths of well-educated parents.

The accusation against antibiotics resonated with definite misgivings that I held over the dispensations of American medicine. Doctors in the United States order more excessive diagnostic tests, perform more needless caesarean sections, and prescribe more superfluous antibiotics than their counterparts around the world. A prepossessing dependence on technology encourages American medicine to treat symptoms rather than people. From this indubitable truth, Coyle, Caprio, and Shaw drew an uncommon inference that aggressive medical care had sabotaged Misha’s birthright immunity.

Misha, so endowed, could have repaired the damage done, no matter whether vaccines or antibiotics had upset his “primary pathways.” His body would have availed “secondary pathways” such as his skin and mucous membrane. Coyle said his innate capacity for adaptation had been telegraphing itself in his fevers, his eczema, his ear infections, even his runny noses. Yet his pediatrician had stood blind before the hidden meaning of these irruptions. Reaching into her chamber of magic bullets, she prescribed steroid creams for his eczema, acetaminophen for his headaches, amoxicillin for his ear and sinus infections, antihistamines for his coughs and runny noses, and ibuprofen for his fevers. This “Whac-a-Mole mentality,” Coyle despaired, had plugged his “secondary pathways” as well.

The trio of virtuoso healers would help me sidestep the adulterated dialectic of science and charm Misha’s autism out of its chronic condition.

A vicious cycle set in. Vaccines and/or antibiotics had predisposed Misha’s microbiome to harbor viruses, bacteria, and fungi. Turning toxic, they invaded his cells, tissues, and fluids. The foreign occupation precipitated allergies. The allergies provoked inflammation, which arrested metabolic energy, which led to anemia, which invited recurring infections. His pediatrician perpetuated those with cascading doses of foreign chemicals. “Rather than freak out and take medication and look to suppress,” Coyle counseled, “we should celebrate that the body is working and go and look at the primary pathways and clear out the blockages.” Up to 103 degrees Fahrenheit, “the fever might be a good thing.”

If I could accept that “allopathic” medicine did not stand apart and speak objectively, but instead reflected the sickness of American society, then the trio of virtuoso healers would help me sidestep the adulterated dialectic of science and health. A holistic treatment protocol would charm Misha’s autism out of its chronic condition and turn it into a treatable medical illness. “The body’s infinite wisdom,” Coyle said, “would take care of the rest.” As the protocol purged and flushed his toxins, the fawn of nature would close the holes in his intestines. His allergies would ebb, reducing inflammation, reviving cellular respiration, and reconnecting his neurotransmitters. The realignment of his meridians would reflow his energy. “Once you clear,” Caprio said, “the whole thing just changes dramatically.”

* * *

Autism parents first embraced holistic treatments in the 1960s and 1970s, when emphatic personal testimonials, printed and distributed in underground newsletters, led to the formation of grassroots groups such as Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) and ushered in the “leaky gut” theory. DAN! grew out of the psychologist Bernard Rimland’s Autism Research Institute. Rimland’s 1964 book Infantile Autism blew up the prevailing, psychogenetic thesis of autism’s origins, which blamed mothers for failing to love their children enough.

The Today Show and The Dick Cavett Show had given psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, the chief exponent of the “refrigerator mothers” thesis, free reign to liken them to concentration camp guards. Rimland’s Infantile Autism refuted that thesis. Letters poured into his Autism Research Institute from grateful parents attesting to the efficacy of the holistic approach: vitamin therapy, detoxification, and elimination dieting. Pharmaceutical companies rolled out new childhood vaccines for measles (1963), mumps (1967), and rubella (1969) and combined the immunizations against pertussis, diphtheria, and tetanus into one injection. Rimland began distributing an annual survey that queried parents about the effects.

Belief in an etiology variously called “leaky gut,” “autism enterocolitis,” or “toxic psychosis” awkwardly amalgamated elements from both ancient and modern medical philosophy. The old idea of disease as a sign of disharmony with nature queued behind the modern concept of infection through the invasion of microorganisms. But no theory of etiology needs to be complete for a treatment to work. “Help the child first,” Rimland urged, “worry later about exactly what it is that’s helping the child.”

Like anti-psychiatry activists, breast cancer patients, and AIDS activists, autism parents confronted physicians with the backlash doctrine of “consumer choice” in specialist medical care. “The parent who reads this book should assume that their family doctor, or even their neurologist or other specialist, may not know nearly as much as they do about autism,” William Shaw wrote in Biological Treatments for Autism.

The first television program to elevate parental intuitions, Vaccine Roulette, aired in 1982 on an NBC affiliate in Washington, DC. The show promoted the vaccine injury theory—and won an Emmy Award. Accelerating rates of the diagnosis over the next decades brought the injury theory from a simmer to a boil. In the 1960s, an average of one out of every 2,500 children received the diagnosis. By the first decade of the 21st century, the prevalence rose to one out of every 88, an increase of over 2,500 percent. Up to three-quarters of autism parents used some form of holistic treatment on their children.

A Congressional hearing in 2012 featured their cause, heaping suspicion on vaccines, speculating on gut flora, and praising the efficacy of vitamins, homeopathy, and elimination dieting. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio and one-time Presidential candidate, expressed outrage over the spectacle of “children all over the country turning up with autism.” Kucinich blamed “neurotoxic chemicals in the environment,” particularly emissions from coal-burning power plants. Like the autism parents in attendance at the hearing, Kucinich did his own research and drew his own conclusions.

“There’s no such thing as ‘conventional’ or ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ or ‘integrative’ or ‘holistic’ medicine,” alternative medicine skeptic Paul Offit complained the next year. “There’s only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t.” Clever and concise, Offit’s polemic nonetheless begged the relevant questions. Who decides what works? Fundamental science is one thing; therapeutic interventions are quite another. “Evidence-based medicine,” introduced in 1991, supplies a template of criteria to translate medical science into clinical medicine. Atop its hierarchy sits the “randomized control trial,” a methodology loaded with social and financial biases. Even when a therapy works incontrovertibly, that fact doesn’t free its applications of ambiguity. Antibiotics work. We’ve known that since the 1930s. But which of their benefits are worth which of their costs?

When does an accumulation of confirmed research equal a consensus of reasonable certainty? In 1992, ABC’s 20/20 exposed a cluster of autism cases in Leominster, Massachusetts. A sunglasses’ manufacturer had long treated the city as a dumping ground for its chemical waste. After the company shuttered, a group of mothers counted 43 autistic children born to parents who had worked at the plant or resided near it. Commenting on the Leominster case, the eminently sane neurologist Oliver Sacks voiced a curious sentiment. “The question of whether autism can be caused by exposure to toxic agents has yet to be fully studied,” Sacks wrote, three years after epidemiologists from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health determined that no unusual cluster of cases had existed in that city in the first place. Who gets to decide the meaning of “fully studied”?

Bernard Rimland and the autism parents in his movement answered the question for themselves. “There are thousands of children who have recovered from autism as a result of the biomedical interventions pioneered by the innovative scientists and physicians in the DAN! movement,” Rimland insisted in the group’s 2005 treatment manual, Autism: Effective Biomedical Treatments.

William Shaw and Mary Coyle, both DAN! clinicians, adapted Rimland’s manual for Misha. Coyle vouched personally for the safety and efficacy of the holistic treatment therein. She swore she used it to “recover” her own son.

Interdicting toxins marked the first step on the “healing journey.” Taking it obliged me to decline Misha’s pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (for pneumonia) and his varicella vaccine (for chickenpox). Meanwhile, I eliminated from our cupboard and refrigerator the foods for which Caprio had proved Misha sensitive and intolerant, and I prepared a course of “optimal dose sub-lingual immunotherapy” to “de-sensitize” him. Coyle drew up a monthly schedule to detoxify him with homeopathic remedies from a manufacturer in Belgium. Shaw itemized vitamins and minerals to supplement Misha’s intake of nutrients, plus probiotics and antifungals to control his yeast and rehabilitate his intestinal tract. My kitchen turned into an ersatz pharmacy of unguents, powders, drops, and tablets.

Every morning, I inserted two tablets of a Chinese herbal supplement, Huang Lian Su, into an apple. This would crank-start his digestion. I added half a capsule of methylfolate into his breakfast. This would juice his metabolism. Ten minutes after he finished breakfast, I stirred Nystatin powder into warm coconut water, drew two ounces into a dropper, irrigated his mouth, and ensured that he abstained from eating or drinking for ten more minutes. Fifteen minutes before his midday snack, I squeezed six drops of a B12 vitamin under his tongue. Every evening, I slipped him two more Huang Lian Su tablets.

An exception in federal law places vitamins, supplements, and homeopathic remedies outside the FDA’s approval process. Only their manufacturers know what these dummy drugs contain.

To fortify his glucose levels, I could elect to give him two vials of raisin water every other hour. To normalize his alkaline levels, I added a quarter-cup of baking soda to his baths. The “de-sensitizing drops,” however, had to be dribbled onto his wrists twice every day. Misha also needed regular, carefully calibrated doses of boron, chromium, folic acid, glutathione, iodine, magnesium, manganese, milk thistle, selenium, vitamins A, C, D, E, and zinc.

Homotoxicology, the core modality, entailed his daily ingestion of homeopathic “drainage remedies” to purge toxins and open pathways. The bottles arrived in the mail. Coyle provided a table of equivalencies, linking particular remedies to organs. This compound for his small intestines; That one for his large intestine; This one for his kidney; and That one for his mucous membrane.

At the same time, homeopathy’s whole-body scope of intervention claimed to relieve a wide range of illnesses. Shaw and his colleagues said the modality could treat autism, plus sensory integration disorder, central auditory processing disorder, speech and language problems, fine motor and gross motor problems, oppositional defiance disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, headaches, eczema, and irritable bowel syndrome. The marketing materials that accompanied Misha’s compounds claimed that they could treat bloating, constipation, cramps, flatulence, nausea, night sweats, and sneezing.

I learned the shorthand rationale as part of my self-education. Homeopaths stake their claim on a manufacturing process that distinguishes their remedies from pharmaceutical medicaments. It’s called “succussion.” A label that reads “4X,” for example, indicates that the original ingredient has been diluted four times by a factor of 10—the manufacturer has succussed it 10,000 times. “12X” indicated that the original ingredient has been succussed one trillion times.

The compounds prescribed for Misha said they contained asparagus, bark, boldo leaf, goldenrod, goldenseal, horsetail, juniper, marigold, milk thistle, parsley, passionflower, Scottish pine root, and other herbs and plants of which I’d never heard. Having been succussed, though, the remedies actually contained no active ingredients. In the bottles remained “the mother tincture,” a special kind of water said to “remember” the original ingredient. The only other ingredient listed on the label was an organic compound that served as a solvent and preservative. Thirty-one percent of some of Misha’s remedies contained ethanol alcohol, a proof as strong as vodka or gin. Coyle instructed me to “gas off the alcohol” on the stove before serving him.

Succussion confused me. Misha’s reaction worried me. He looked a fright. Black circles ringed his eyelids. Yeast blanketed his nostrils and lips. Rashes and red spots appeared all over his body. Pale and lethargic, he oscillated between diarrhea and constipation. He broke out with recurring fevers. He stopped gaining weight. Because he didn’t speak, or reliably communicate in any other manner, I couldn’t understand why his emotions seemed to be running at an unusually high pitch.

Coyle explained that different glands and organs in the body stored specific feelings. The kidneys stored fear. The pancreas stored frustration. The thyroid stored misunderstanding, the liver anger, the lungs grief, the bladder a sense of loss, and so forth. Those emotions poured out as his body excreted toxins. I shouldn’t regard the worsening of his symptoms as a side effect, but rather as a necessary condition of his recovery—“aggravations,” in homeopathy’s parlance. A Table of Homotoxicosis charted the correspondences with the precision and predictability of biochemistry. Nor should I abandon the treatment. To do so would be to “re-toxify” him. I must allow the treatment to fully fledge. I must keep my nerve.

* * *

I lost my nerve. It took 18 months of gnawing doubt and thousands of dollars out the door. Then one day I swept all the vitamins, antigens, probiotics, antifungals, and homeopathic remedies into the trash bin. I restored Misha to a regular diet, caught him up on his vaccines, and demanded (and received) a full refund from Coyle.

I had blundered into a non sequitur. The environment is toxic. Conventional medicine does reflect the sickness of our culture. Yet that doesn’t render holism any better. The supplement industry, I came to understand, has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into thousands of clinical studies without demonstrating that vitamins, herbal products, or mineral compounds are either safe or effective, much less necessary. The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) neither tests the industry’s marketing claims nor regulates its product standards.

Caprio and Coyle regard Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as a reproach to modern, Western medicine. TCM, they pointed out, is 5,000 years old. Actually, I learned, Chairman Mao Zedong contrived TCM after 1950 as a means of controlling China’s rural population and burnishing the regime’s reputation abroad. In 1972, during Richard Nixon’s tour of Chinese hospitals, his guides stage-managed a demonstration of TCM’s miracles. American media reported the healing event at face value and launched the holistic health movement stateside. Several years later, the FDA sought to regulate the vitamin and supplement industry. Manufacturers fought back with a marketing campaign centered on “freedom of choice” and convinced Americans to stand up for their right not to know which ingredients may (or may not) be contained in their daily vitamins.

I needed to file a public records request with the Connecticut Department of Public Health to discover that Lawrence Caprio had been censured and fined for improperly labeling medication, for practicing without a license, and for passing himself off as a medical doctor. I also learned that Caprio’s naturopathy license had been suspended for two years after the FDA determined his bogus “sensitivity tests” violated its regulations. Misha, an actual immunologist confirmed, had no food allergies in the first place.

Was my son ever really burdened by toxins? Coyle said the results of the “energetic assessments” revealed that Misha carried quantities of heavy metals. Degrees of dangerousness were measured against a standard range credited to “Dr. Richard L. Cowden.” I sent Misha’s results to Cowden. I stated my belated impression that meaningful ranges for heavy metals don’t exist—we all have traces—and my belief that autism cannot be reversed. “I have reversed advanced autism in many children,” Dr. Cowden snapped. “I saw reversal of more than a dozen cases of full-blown autism, including my own grandson. So I am pretty sure the parents of those dozen+ children would debate you on your IMPRESSION/BELIEF.”

Cowden advised me to repeat Misha’s energetic assessment through the Internet and to place him into an “infrared sauna” to detoxify him. I declined.

Even before Misha’s first energetic assessment, the FDA had accused the device’s manufacturer of making unapproved claims. The FDA had approved it only for measuring “galvanic skin response.” But the company’s marketing materials had crossed over into unapproved diagnostic and predictive territory when they claimed that the “software indicates what is referred to as Biological Preference and Biological Aversion.” The software was recalled. “Dr. Cowden,” I also learned too late, was not the “Board Certified cardiologist and internist” that he advertises. He surrendered his medical license in 2008 after the Texas Board of Medical Examiners twice reprimanded him for endangering his patients. According to the American Board of Internal Medicine, Cowden’s certifications are “inactive.”

The “homotoxicology” that Coyle practiced had sounded to me like a branch of toxicology. But the two fields turn out to have nothing in common. An analysis of clinical trials of homotoxicology established that it is “not a method based on accepted scientific principles or biological plausibility.” Actual toxicologists pass a rigorous examination for their board certifications and adhere to a code of ethics. Homotoxicologists become so simply by declaring themselves homotoxicologists.

As for vitamins, supplements, and homeopathic remedies: an exception in federal law places them outside the FDA’s approval process. Only their manufacturers know what these dummy drugs contain. Last year, after fielding numerous reports of “toxic” reactions, finding “many serious violations” of manufacturing controls, and recording “significant harm” to children, the FDA warned the consuming public.

Homeopathy offers no detectable mechanism of action, nor any reason to believe that “aggravating” the primary symptoms of an illness is necessary to cure it. Water does not “remember,” at least not if the laws of molecular physics hold true. The tinier the dosage, homeopaths insist, the more potent the therapeutic effect the mother tincture will deliver. By this logic, a patient who misses a day might die of an overdose.

As I steered Misha back toward medical science, though, I remembered the gap that holism fills for parents like me. I took him to a “neuro-biologist,” a “neuro-psychologist,” and a “neuro-immunologist.” His “neuro-ophthalmologist” ordered an MRI. His “neuro-radiologist” read the images with algorithms—and pronounced his brain “normal” due to the absence of indications of damage.

That determination proved only the vacuity of scientific materialism. The “biological revolution” that seized psychiatry in the 1980s aspired to network the anatomical, electrical, and chemical functions of the brain. A procession of neuroimaging technologies held out the promise of progress: electroencephalography (EEG); computerized axial tomography (CAT); positron emission tomography (PET); magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS); magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The resulting studies have always fallen pitifully short of a credible evidentiary threshold and have never done anything to expand treatment options. Mainly, neuroimaging has furnished opportunities to market the research industry, a breakthrough culture that has never broken through.

Holism, by contrast, answers prayers in the immaterial world, bidding to restore harmony through an aesthetically elegant fusion of mind, body, and spirit. As Coyle explained on her website: “Homotoxicology utilizes complex homeopathic remedies designed to restore the child’s vital force and balance the biological flow system.”

One part of me still craves holism’s beautiful notions. Another part recognizes in their desiccated spiritualism the return of a repressed pagan unconscious. I can no more believe in goblets of magic water and occult energy than I can conceal my disappointment with “neuro-radiology.”

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
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Scientists long ago dispatched the “leaky gut” theory with a series of disproof. Holistic parents, researchers, and clinicians, however, continue to reject what they contend are the false revelations of cold, mechanical instrumentalism. Tylenol, electromagnetic fields, “toxic baby food,” COVID-19 vaccines, HPV inoculation, “geo-engineering,” and genetically modified foods top the current indictment. William Shaw published a paper in 2020 purporting to demonstrate “rapid complete recovery from autism” through antifungal therapy. Mary Coyle attested last year to having healed her son’s chickenpox through “natural” remedies.

Many of the holistic advocacy organizations intermittently lost access to social media platforms during COVID. Yet censorship has deepened the martyrdom ingrained in this theodicy of misfortune. A spiritual war against invisible enemies animates their imaginations and elevates their personal disappointment to the status of a historical event. Rebaptized in nature’s holy immunity by ascetic protocols of abstinence and purification, they turn over a new leaf, as it were, and crave vindication above all else. “This book offers you two messages,” Bernard Rimland promised of the testimonials that he collected in Recovering Autistic Children: “You are not alone in your fight, and you can win.”

Here’s another message: Children need love and respect above all. As René Dubos wrote in Mirage of Health, “As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as ‘Nature.’ There are only homes.”

About the Author

John Summers is a writer, historian, and Editor-in-Chief of Lingua Franca Media, Inc., an independent research institute in Cambridge, MA. He received his PhD in American history from the University of Rochester. For a decade, he taught at Harvard University, Boston College, and Columbia University. After leaving academia, he edited The Baffler magazine for five years. He is a father of a boy with autism.

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Former Google data scientist and bestselling author of Everybody Lies Seth Stephens-Davidowitz turns his analytic skills to the NBA.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times, a lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. He received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Harvard. He is the author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are and Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life.

Shermer and Stephens-Davidowitz discuss:

• how he used AI to help write this book
• players systematically undervalued in the draft
• Are clutch shooters born or made?
• the percent of 7-footers in the NBA
• why tall NBA players are worse athletes than short NBA players
• the greatest NBA players adjusted for height
• names as proxies for success (or not)
• why some countries produce so many more NBA players than others
• who would be the best NBA player of all time if every player were the same height
• What percent genetic is basketball talent? And how does this compare to other sports?
• What advantages do NBA player fathers pass on to their sons?
• How much do NBA coaches matter and what do they do?
• Will any time win 11 NBA titles like Bill Russell’s Celtics did?
• why no one hits .400 in baseball any more
• Six sigma in sports and life
• nature/nurture in sports and life
• In a population of 8 billion today compared to centuries past, where are all the Mozarts, Beethovens, Da Vincis, Newtons, Darwins, etc.?
• the Moneyball revolution in sports
• how to apply the moneyball system in life
• What makes people happy?
• How much do good looks matter?
• How much does height and competent faces influence elections?

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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If you’ve ever wanted mental health support but haven’t been able to get it, you are not alone.

In fact, you’re part of the more than 50% of adults and more than 75% of young people worldwide with unmet psychological needs. Maybe you’ve faced months-long waiting lists, or you’re not sure if your problems are ‘bad enough’ to merit treatment? Maybe you tried therapy but stopped due to costs or time constraints? Perhaps you just don’t know where to start looking? The fact is, there are infinite reasons why mental health treatment is hard to get. There’s an urgent need for new ideas and pathways to help people heal.

Little Treatments, Big Effects integrates cutting-edge psychological science, lived experience narratives and practical self-help activities to introduce a new type of therapeutic experience to audiences worldwide: single-session interventions. Its chapters unpack why systemic change in mental healthcare is necessary; the science behind how single-session interventions make it possible; how others have created ‘meaningful moments’ in their recovery journeys (and how you can, too); and how single-session interventions could transform the mental healthcare system into one that’s accessible to all.

Jessica L. Schleider, Ph.D. is an American psychologist, author, and an associate professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University. She is the lab director of the Lab for Scalable Mental Health. She completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Harvard University and her Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology at Yale School of Medicine. She has received numerous scientific awards for her work in this area and her work is frequently featured in major media outlets (Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Washington Post). In 2020, she was selected as one of Forbes Magazine’s ‘30 Under 30’ in Healthcare. She has developed six evidence-based, single-session mental health programmes, which have served more than 40,000 people to date. She is the author of The Growth Mindset Workbook for Teens and co-editor of the Oxford Guide to Brief and Low Intensity Interventions for Children and Young People. Her new book is Little Treatments, Big Effects: How to Build Meaningful Moments That Can Transform Your Mental Health.

Shermer and Schleider discuss:

• her own experience with mental illness in an eating disorder
• 80% of people meet criteria for a mental illness at some point in their life
• What is the goal of therapy?
• navigating therapy modalities, access, payments, insurance, etc
• What prevents people from getting the mental health help they need?
• a brief history of asylums, institutions, deinstitutionalization and othering of mental healthcare
• disease model of mental illness
• What are outcome measures to test different therapies? “Works”?
• traditional therapy vs. single-session interventions
• growth mindset: personality, academic performance and personal outcomes can be changed if we treat setbacks as opportunities to grow and improve
• Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)
• You don’t have to feel ready for recovery to take steps towards it.
• mental health issues that can be addressed through single session interventions: eating disorders, anxiety disorders, depression, suicidality, ADHD, substance/alcohol use disorder, OCD, self-injury
• difference between goals and values (wellness/health, family, compassion/helping, wisdom/education, relationships/kinship, joy/pleasure, spirituality/religion, perseverance, independence, community
• action brings change.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

The human colon may represent the most biodense ecosystem in the world. Though many may believe that our stool is primarily made up of undigested food, about 75 percent is pure bacteria—trillions and trillions, in fact, about half a trillion bacteria per teaspoon.

Do we get anything from these trillions of tenants taking up residence in our colon, or are they just squatting? They pay rent by boosting our immune system, making vitamins for us, improving our digestion, and balancing our hormones. We house and feed them, and they maintain and protect their house, our body. Prebiotics are what feed good bacteria. Probiotics are the good bacteria themselves. And postbiotics are what our bacteria make.

Our gut bacteria are known as a “forgotten organ,” as metabolically active as our liver and weighing as much as one of our kidneys. They may control as many as one in ten metabolites in our bloodstream. Each one of us has about 23,000 genes, but our gut bacteria, collectively, have about three million. About half of the cells in our body are not human. We are, in effect, a superorganism, a kind of “human-microbe hybrid.”

Having coevolved with us and our ancestors for millions of years, the relationship we have with our gut flora is so tightly knit as to affect most of our physiological functions. Yet our microbiome is probably the most adaptable component of our body. Gut bugs like Escherichia coli (E. coli) can divide every twenty minutes. The more than ten trillion bugs we churn out every day can therefore rapidly respond to changing life conditions. Every meal, we have the opportunity to nudge them in the right direction.

Thousands of years ago, Hippocrates is attributed as saying that all diseases begin in the gut or, more ominously, “death sits in the bowels.” Of course, he also thought women were hysterical because of their “wandering uterus.” (“Hysteria” comes from the Greek husterikos for “of the womb.”) So much for ancient medical wisdom. The pendulum then swung to the point of incredulity when the medical community refused to accept the role of one gut bug, Helicobacter pylori, as the cause of stomach and intestinal ulcers. Out of frustration, one of the pioneers chugged a brew of the bugs from one of his ulcer patients to prove the point, before finally being vindicated with the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his discovery.

In some ways, the pendulum has swung back, with overstated causal claims about the microbiome’s role in a wide range of disparate diseases that are casually bandied about. Perhaps the boldest such claim dates back more than a century to Élie Metchnikoff, who argued that senility and the disabilities of old age were caused by “putrefactive bacterial autotoxins” leaking from the colon. He was the first to emphasize the importance of the gut microbiome to aging. He attributed healthy aging to gut bacteria that fermented carbohydrates into beneficial metabolic end products like lactic acid and associated unhealthy aging with putrefaction, the process in which bacteria degrade protein into noxious metabolites as waste products.

There is no shortage throughout history of oldtimey crackpots with quack medical theories, but Metchnikoff was no slouch. He was appointed Louis Pasteur’s successor, coined the terms “gerontology” and “probiotics,” and won the Nobel Prize in medicine to become the founding “father of cellular immunology.” More than a century later, some aspects of his theories on aging and the gut are now being vindicated.

Young at Gut

Full-term, vaginally delivered, breastfed babies are said to start out with the gold standard for a healthy microbiome, which then starts to diverge as we age. The microbiomes of children, adults, the elderly, and centenarians tend to cluster together, such that a “microbiomic clock” can be devised. Dozens of different classes of bacteria in our gut so reliably shift as we age that our age can be guessed based on a stool sample within about a six-year margin of error. If these changes turn out to play a causal role in the aging process, then, hypothetically, our future high-tech toilet may one day be able predict our lifespan as well.

The transition from adulthood into old age is accompanied by pronounced changes to the microbiome. Given large interpersonal differences, there is no “typical” microbiome of the elderly, but the trends are in the very direction Metchnikoff described: a shift from the fermentation of fiber to the putrefaction of protein. This deviation from good bugs to bad is accompanied by an increase in gut leakiness, the spillage of bacterial toxins into the bloodstream, and a cascade of inflammatory effects. This has led to the proposal that this microbiome shift is a “primary cause of aging-associated pathologies and consequent premature death of elderly people.”

The most important role a healthy microbiome has for preserving health as we age is thought to be the prevention of systemic inflammation.

As profound a change in microbiome composition from early adulthood into old age, there’s an even bigger divergence between the elderly and centenarians. When researchers analyzed centenarian poop, they found a maintenance of short-chain fatty acid production from fiber fermentation. For example, in the Bama County longevity region in the Guangxi province of China, fecal sample analyses found that centenarians were churning out more than twice as much butyrate as those in their eighties or nineties living in the same region. Butyrate is an anti-inflammatory short-chain fatty acid critical for the maintenance of gut barrier integrity. At the same time, there were significantly fewer products of putrefaction, such as ammonia and uremic toxins like p-cresol. The researchers concluded that an increase of dietary fiber intake may therefore be a path toward longevity. An abundance of fiber feeders also distinguished healthy individuals ninety years and older from unhealthy nonagenarians.

Centenarian Scat

Interestingly, the microbiomes of Chinese centenarians shared some common features with Italian centenarians, suggesting that there could be certain universal signatures of a longevity-promoting microbiome. For example, centenarians have up to about a fifteenfold increase in butyrate producers.

A study of dozens of semi-supercentenarians (those aged 105 to 109) found higher levels of health-associated bacteria, such as Bifidobacteria and Akkermansia. In vaginally delivered, breastfed infants,

Bifidobacteria make up 90 percent of colon bacteria, but the level may slip down to less than five percent in adult colons and even less in the elderly and those with inflammatory bowel disease. But centenarians carry more of the good bacteria in their gut.

Bifidobacteria are often used as probiotics, but anti-aging properties may exist in their postbiotics. Bifidobacteria are one of the many bacteria that secrete “exopolysaccharides,” a science-y word for slime. That’s what dental plaque is—the biofilm created by bacteria on our teeth. Exopolysaccharides produced from a strain of Bifidobacteria isolated from centenarian poop were found to have anti-aging properties in mice, reducing the accumulation of age pigment in their brains and boosting the antioxidant capacity of their blood and livers.

Akkermansia muciniphila is named after the late Dutch microbiologist Antoon Akkermans and from Latin and Greek for “mucus-lover.” The species is the dominant colonizer of the protective mucus layer in our gut that is secreted by our intestinal lining. Unfortunately, that mucus layer thins as we age, a problem exacerbated by low-fiber diets. When we eat a fiber-depleted diet, we starve our microbial selves. Our famished flora, the microbes in our gut, have to then compete for limited resources and may consume our own mucus barrier as an alternative energy source, thereby undermining our defenses. Mucus erosion from bacterial overgrazing can be switched on and off on a day-to-day basis in mice supplanted with human microbiomes with fiber-rich and fiber-free diets. You can even show it in a Petri dish. Researchers successfully recreated layers of human intestinal cells and showed that dripping fiber (from plantains and broccoli) onto the cells at dietary doses could “markedly reduce” the number of E. coli bacteria breaching the barrier. Aside from eating fiber-rich foods, A. muciniphila helps to directly restore the protective layer by stimulating mucus secretion.

A. muciniphila is a likely candidate for a healthy aging biomarker, as its abundance is enriched in centenarians and it is particularly scarce in elders suffering from frailty. A comparative study was undertaken of the microbiomes of people in their seventies and eighties experiencing “healthy” versus “non-healthy” aging, defined as the absence or presence of cancer, diabetes, or heart, lung, or brain disease. Akkermansia, the species most associated with healthier aging, were three times more abundant in the fecal samples of the healthy versus non-healthy aging cohort. Among centenarians, a drop in A. muciniphila is one of the microbiome changes that seems to occur about seven months before death, despite no apparent changes in the physical status, food intake, or appetite at the time. To prove a causal role in aging, researchers showed that feeding A. muciniphila to aging-accelerated mice significantly extended their lifespans.

Cause, Consequence, or Confounding

A recurring recommendation from centenarian poop studies is the promotion of high-fiber diets, one of the most consistently cited pieces of lifestyle advice in general for extreme longevity and health. An alternative proposal is a fecal transplant, from a cocktail of centenarian stool. Both approaches assume a cause-and-effect relationship between fiber-fueled feces and long lives, but there remains much controversy over whether age-related microbiome changes are cause, consequence, or confounding.

Aging is accompanied by dysbiosis, an unhealthy imbalance of gut flora characterized by a loss of fiber-fed species. Rather than a changing microbiome contributing to the aging process, it’s easier to imagine how aging could instead be contributing to a changing microbiome. Loss of taste, smell, and teeth with age could lead to decreased consumption of fiber-rich foods, replaced by salted, sweetened, easier-to-chew processed foods. The drop in the quantity and diversity of whole plant foods—the only naturally abundant source of fiber—could result in a dysbiosis that leads to early death and disability. Or, the decline in diet quality could directly dispose to disease, with the dysbiosis just an incidental marker of an unhealthy diet.

There are also ways aging can be connected to dysbiosis independent of diet. While the rates of antibiotic prescriptions in childhood and through middle age have dropped in recent years, prescription rates among the elderly have shot up. Even non-antibiotic pharmaceuticals can muck with our microbiome. A study pitting more than a thousand FDA-approved drugs against forty representative strains of gut bacteria found that 24 percent of marketed drugs inhibited the growth of at least one strain. Reduced physical activity could also contribute to sluggish, stagnant bowels that could leave our gut bugs no other choice but to turn to protein for putrefaction once preferred prebiotics are used up. Nursing home residents are often fed the kind of low-fiber diet that can contribute to the “decimation” of a healthy microbiome.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.4
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So, while researchers have interpreted the link between dysbiosis and frailty as a poor diet leading to poor gut flora leading to poor health, the arrows of causality could potentially go in every which direction. Maybe there’s even a chicken-or-the-egg feedback loop in play. With so many interrelated factors, you can imagine how hard it is to tease out the causal chain of events.

These questions crop up all the time in microbiome research. For example, the microbiomes of centenarians aren’t just better at digesting fiber. They’re better at detoxifying industrial pollutants, such as petrochemicals; food preservatives like benzoate and naphthalene, used in petroleum refinement; and haloalkanes, widely used commercially as flame retardants, refrigerants, propellants, and solvents. None of these detoxification pathways was found in the microbiomes of the Hadza, one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa. Did the enhanced detoxification in centenarian guts (compared to younger individuals) contribute to their longevity, or did their longevity contribute to their enhanced detoxification (given their longer lifetime exposure and accumulation of chemicals)?

The microbiomes of centenarians and semi-supercentenarians are better able to metabolize plant fats than animal fats, but maybe that’s just due to their eating more plant-based diets. The Bama County longevity region centenarians who had such an abundance of fiber feeders were eating more than 70 percent more fiber (38 g versus only 22 g per 2,000 calories) compared to those aged eighty through ninety-nine living in the same region. The only way to know if their longer lives eating more healthfully just led to a better microbiome or if their better microbiome actually contributed to their living longer is to put it to the test.

Fecal Transplant Experiments

Longevity researchers have good reason to suspect a causal, rather than bystander, role for age-related microbiome changes, given fecal transplant studies showing that the lives of old animals can be extended by receiving gut bugs from younger animals. Centenarian stool has anti-aging effects when fed to mice. Researchers fed mice fecal matter from a 70-year-old individual that contained Bilophila wadsworthia, a pro-inflammatory bacteria enriched by a diet high in animal products, versus feces from a 101-year-old containing more fiber feeders. Mice transplanted with the centenarian microbiome ended up displaying a range of youthful physiological indicators, including less age pigment in their brains. This raises the possibility that we will one day be using centenarian fecal matter to promote healthy aging. Why bathe in the blood of virgins when you can dine on the dung of the venerable?

Plugging Leaks with Fiber

One of the mechanisms by which intestinal dysbiosis may accelerate aging is a leaky gut. This can lead to tiny bits of undigested food, microbes, and toxins slipping through our gut lining and entering uninvited into our bloodstream, triggering chronic systemic inflammation. Thankfully, there’s something we can do about it.

To avoid gut dysbiosis, inflammation, and leakiness, plants should be preferred. The reason vegetarians tend to have a better intestinal microbiome balance, a high bacterial biodiversity, and enhanced integrity of the intestinal barrier, and also produce markedly less uremic toxins in the gut, is likely that fiber is the primary food for a healthy gut microbiome. Cause and effect was established in a randomized, double-blind, crossover study of pasta with or without added fiber.

Dysbiosis Inflammation Immunosuppression

The most important role a healthy microbiome has for preserving health as we age is thought to be the prevention of systemic inflammation. Inflammaging is a strong risk factor not only for premature death. Those with higher-than-average levels of inflammatory markers in their blood for their age are more likely to be hospitalized, frail, and less independent, and suffer from a variety of diseases, including common infections.

In Japan, for example, more than 40 percent of all centenarian deaths are due to pneumonia and other infectious diseases. In one of the largest studies, involving nearly 36,000 British centenarians, pneumonia was the leading identifiable cause of death. Inflammaging has not only been shown to increase susceptibility to coming down with the leading cause of bacterial pneumonia but older adults with more inflammation also tend to suffer increased severity and decreased survival.

As we age, our immune system macrophages (from the Greek for “big eaters”) start to lose their ability to engulf and destroy bacteria. The same happens in regular mice. But mice raised microbe-free don’t suffer from the leaking gut, subsequent inflammation, and loss of macrophage function. To connect the dots between the inflammation and loss of function, researchers found that the macrophage impairment could be induced in microbe-free mice by infusing them with an inflammatory mediator, which, when dripped on macrophages in a Petri dish, could directly interfere with their ability to kill pneumonia bacteria. Because our immune system is also responsible for cancer defense, immune dysfunction caused by the inflammation resulting from dysbiosis may also help explain why cancer incidence increases so steeply as we age (and why microbe-free mice have fewer tumors and live longer).

Avoiding Dietary Antibiotics

Other than getting enough fiber, what else can we do to prevent dysbiosis in the first place? There are a number of factors that contribute to microbiome imbalance. For example, on any given day, an average of about two and a half doses of antibiotics are consumed for every one hundred people in Western countries. The havoc this can play on our microbiome may explain why antibiotic use predicts an increased risk of cancer, though confounding factors, such as smoking, that are associated with both, could also potentially explain this link.

Up to three-quarters of antibiotic use is of questionable therapeutic value. Avoiding unnecessary use of antibiotics and using targeted, narrow-spectrum agents whenever possible can help protect our gut flora, but most people may not realize they’re consuming antibiotic residues every day in the meat, dairy, and eggs they eat. As much as 80 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States doesn’t go to treat sick people but rather is fed to farm animals in part as a crutch to compensate for the squalid conditions that now characterize much of modern agribusiness. But do enough antibiotics make it onto our plates to make a difference?

Infections with multidrug-resistant bacteria are on target to become the world’s leading cause of disease and death by the year 2050, poised to surpass even cancer and heart disease. Excessive antibiotic use can result in our guts becoming colonized with these superbugs, so researchers set out to calculate how many animal products one would need to eat to achieve antibiotic concentrations in our colon to give resistant bugs an advantage. Single servings of beef, chicken, or pork were found to contain enough tetracycline, ciprofloxacin, tilmicosin, tylosin, sarafloxacin, and erythromycin to favor the growth of resistant bacteria. One and a half servings of fish (150 g) exceeded minimum selective concentrations of ciprofloxacin and erythromycin. Two cups of milk could tip the scales for tetracycline, ciprofloxacin, tilmicosin, tylosin, and lincomycin. And, legal levels of erythromycin and oxytetracycline in two eggs could also exceed safe levels.

We need to stop squandering lifesaving miracle drugs just to speed the growth of farm animals reared in unhygienic conditions, and we also need to stop the reckless overuse in medicine.

Excerpted from How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier as You Get Older by Michael Greger. Copyright © 2023 by Michael Greger. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Michael Greger, M.D. FACLM is a graduate of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and the Tufts University School of Medicine. He is a practicing physician and author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching and Carbophobia: The Scary Truth Behind America’s Low Carb Craze. Three of his recent books—How Not to Die, the How Not to Die Cookbook, and How Not to Diet—became instant New York Times Best Sellers. Greger has lectured at the Conference on World Affairs and the National Institute of Health, testified before Congress, and appeared on shows such as The Colbert Report and Oprah Winfrey.

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As a society we are self-censoring at record rates. Say the wrong thing at the wrong moment to the wrong person and the consequences can be dire. Think that everyone should be treated equally regardless of race? You’re a racist who needs to be kicked out of the online forum that you started. Believe there are biological differences between men and women? You’re a sexist who should be fired with cause. Argue that people should be able to speak freely within the bounds of the law? You’re a fascist who should be removed from your position of authority. When the truth is no defense and nuance is seen as an attack, self-censorship is a rational choice. Yet, our silence comes with a price. When we are too fearful to speak openly and honestly, we deprive ourselves of the ability to build genuine relationships, we yield all cultural and political power to those with opposing views, and we lose our ability to challenge ideas or change minds, even our own.

In No Apologies, Katherine Brodsky argues that it’s time for principled individuals to hit the unmute button and resist the authoritarians among us who name, shame, and punish. Recognizing that speaking authentically is easier said than done, she spent two years researching and interviewing those who have been subjected to public harassment and abuse for daring to transgress the new orthodoxy or criticize a new taboo. While she found that some of these individuals navigated the outrage mob better than others, and some suffered worse personal and professional effects than others, all of the individuals with whom she spoke remain unapologetic over their choice to express themselves authentically. In sharing their stories, which span the arts, education, journalism, and science, Brodsky uncovers lessons for all of us in the silenced majority to push back against the dangerous illiberalism of the vocal minority that tolerates no dissent— and to find and free our own voices.

Katherine Brodsky is a journalist, author, essayist and commentator who has been taking an especially keen interest in emerging technologies and their impact on society. She has contributed to publications such as Variety, the Washington Post, WIRED, The Guardian, Esquire, Newsweek, Mashable, and many others. Over the years she has interviewed a diverse range of intriguing personalities including numerous Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Pulitzer, and Nobel Prize winners and nominees—including the Dalai Lama.

Shermer and Brodsky discuss:

• What it’s like growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union and Israel
• Why the Jews
• Why liberals (or progressives) no longer defend free speech
• Cancel culture: data and anecdotes
• Is Cancel Culture an imagined moral panic?
• Cancel Culture on the political Left
• Cancel Culture on the political Right
• Social media and Cancel Culture
• Free speech law vs. free speech norms
• Pluralistic Ignorance and the spiral of silence
• Solutions to cancel culture
• Identity politics
• Cancel culture, witch crazes, and virtue signaling
• Free speech, hate speech and slippery slopes
• How to stand up to cancel culture.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

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If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself? And would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind?

In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering truth: but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different.

Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents?

Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.

Brian Klaas grew up in Minnesota, earned his DPhil at Oxford, and is now a professor of global politics at University College London. He is a regular contributor for The Washington Post and The Atlantic, host of the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, and frequent guest on national television. Klaas has conducted field research across the globe, interviewing despots, CEOs, torture victims, dissidents, cult leaders, criminals, and everyday power abusers. He has also advised major politicians and organizations including NATO, the European Union, and Amnesty International. His previous book, for which he appears on this podcast, was Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us. His new book is Fluke: Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters. You can find him at BrianPKlaas.com and on X @brianklaas.

Shermer and Klaas discuss:

• contingency and necessity/convergence
• chance and randomness
• complexity and chaos theory
• Jorge Luis Borges “The Garden of Forking Paths”
• self-organized criticality
• limits of probability in a complex, ever-changing world
• frequency- vs. belief-type probability
• ceteris paribus, or “all else being equal” but things are never equal
• economic forecasting
• free will, determinism, and compatibilism
• Holy Grail of Causality
• Easy Problem of Social Research and the Hard Problem of Social Research
• Was the original theory wrong, or did the world change?
• When Clinton lost, Silver pointed to his model as a defense: 71.4 percent isn’t 100 percent! There was nearly a 30 percent chance of Clinton losing in the model, so the model wasn’t wrong—it was just something that would happen nearly a third of the time!
• Special Order 191 and the turning point of the Civil War
• Implicit in the baby Hitler thought experiment is the idea that without Hitler the Nazis wouldn’t rise to power in Germany, World War II wouldn’t happen, and the Holocaust would be avoided. It therefore assumes that Hitler was the sole, or at least the crucial, cause of those events. Many historians would take issue with that viewpoint, arguing that those cataclysms were all but inevitable. Hitler might have affected some outcomes, they’d say, but not the overall trajectory of events. The Nazis, the war, and the genocide were due to larger factors than just one man.
• weak-link problem
• complex world defined by tipping points, feedback loops, increasing returns, lock-in, emergence, and self-organized criticality
• QWERTY and path dependency, Betamax vs. VHS, cassette v. CD v. streaming.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

Leonardo da Vinci was a man of many talents. He was one of the few individuals to have made contributions to both the arts and science. His work extends to civil engineering, chemistry, geology, geometry, hydrodynamics, mathematics, mechanical engineering, optics, physics, pyrotechnics, warfare, and zoology.

Da Vinci was one of the best artists of his generation and many of his paintings are greatly admired today and command astronomical prices (his Salvator Mundi fetched the highest auction price ever). He was also an extraordinary illustrator, leaving thousands of manuscripts full of drawings of machines, fluid mechanics, humans, and many other topics. In addition, he was also a sculptor, architect, and more. As the type specimen of a Renaissance man, he put his mind to many different subjects, and he excelled at most of them. He was generally considered a genius by his contemporaries. In addition to all of this, he was described as a handsome and charming man, who was able to convince a whole room of the feasibility of something impossible.1 However, as it is sometimes said of promising but lazy children, some said that he would have been capable of even more accomplishments had he put his focus on them for longer and worked harder.

Revealingly, in his time, Leonardo was not considered to be at the same level as Michelangelo or even Raphael, perhaps because his notebooks were not published until much later. However, today many consider him superior to all his peers and—in a few extreme cases—some people fall into what we might call the “cult of Leonardo,” whose adherents believe that his genius was almost superhuman.

Consider a recently published article titled “Leonardo da Vinci’s Visualization of Gravity as a Form of Acceleration” by Morteza Gharib, Chris Roh, and Flavio Noca (henceforth GRN).2 In it, the authors propose that Leonardo understood gravity in a way that was not surpassed until the works of Galileo, Newton, and even Einstein. Had GRN presented their ideas in a less spectacular way, their article could have been a flawed, but mainly harmless one. Unfortunately, they chose to take the more risky path of venturing unfounded, under-researched, mind-blowing claims under the guise of solid scholarship, starting with the assertion that Leonardo saw gravity not as a force, but as an acceleration:

About 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci tried to uncover the mystery of gravity and its connection to acceleration through a series of ingenious experiments guided only by his imagination and masterful experimental techniques.

The shocking revelation that they put forth is that Leonardo “almost” (bit of wiggle room there) anticipated Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, in particular, the so-called “Equivalence Principle” (see Figure 1):

As with Galileo, Leonardo’s geometrical representation of the equation of motion is as insightful as Newtonian mechanics’ representations of equations of motion. […] After Newton, Albert Einstein referred to the equivalency of gravity and acceleration, when he introduced the principles of “strong equivalency” while developing his theory of relativity in the early twentieth century.

Figure 1. (Click image to enlarge) Einstein’s equivalence principle states that gravity is indistinguishable from being in an accelerated system of reference. This was famously illustrated by Einstein using a thought experiment: imagine we are in a closed room. Is there any way we can know if the down force that we feel is due to gravity? Maybe the room is in a spaceship, away from big masses and accelerating upwards with acceleration g. Einstein concluded that both situations are equivalent.

Considering gravity as an acceleration instead of a force is indeed a crucial difference between Einstein’s and Newton’s conceptions. The assertion that Leonardo could have hit upon this insight centuries before Einstein is the most preposterous claim in GRN’s article and likely what has made it so ballyhooed in the popular press. To give just a couple of examples of some of those reviews, here is one from Ars Technica:

[Leonardo attempted] to draw a link between gravity and acceleration—well before Isaac Newton came up with his laws of motion, and centuries before Albert Einstein would demonstrate the equivalence principle with his general theory of relativity.3

Here’s another one from CNET:

Before Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, it seems to be Leonardo da Vinci who started piecing together the gravity puzzle […] Rather, it’s kind of the same thing as acceleration…. [Einstein] called it the equivalence principle, and soon, this eye-opening concept would blossom into the mind-bending theory of general relativity. The rest, as they say, is history.4

Let’s summarize GRN’s argument. First, they assert that Leonardo had a good understanding of how objects fall with constant acceleration under the effect of gravity. Second, they present a thought experiment devised by Leonardo that, they claim, shows he understood that gravity is equivalent to being in an accelerated frame of reference. Finally, they present a quantitative model, purportedly based on Leonardo’s manuscripts, and they compare it against Newtonian mechanics. Let’s consider each of these points.

Acceleration of Falling Objects

To support their claim that Leonardo understood that gravity produces a constant acceleration on falling objects, GRN provide the following quote from Leonardo’s M manuscript: “a weight that descends freely in every degree of time acquires…a degree of velocity”5 (ellipsis in their article). They further tell us that “many scholars of Leonardo note that this statement indicates that Leonardo correctly understood that the velocity of a falling object is a linear function of time.”

Now consider Leonardo’s quote in full: “The free-falling body acquires a degree of displacement over each degree of time, and over each degree of displacement it acquires a degree of velocity.”6 It is not completely clear what Leonardo meant by this, since the original sentence can be translated in slightly different ways; but the simplest interpretation is that Leonardo didn’t have a full understanding of acceleration. He repeats similar ideas in various places,7 including in drawings and calculations.8 For the full quote, I have used a translation from Prof. Enzo Macagno, one of the scholars that GRN cite in support of their hypothesis. Macagno has this to say about Leonardo’s understanding of gravity relative to this quote:

what Leonardo is trying to express is that over equal intervals of time there are constant increments for both distance traversed and for velocity. If this is understood, we may study critically what Leonardo said to detect how far he went in his descriptions of motion during free fall. Even if he did not add anything new to this question, or actually detracted from it, it is still important to know his “degree” of understanding.9

However, Macagno then notes that, “In his descriptions of an accelerated motion, which could not be correct because of an intrinsic inconsistency between velocity and displacement,” an observation that is hardly in support of GRN’s claim.

Another point to consider is the concept of “free fall.” Today we apply it to objects moving exclusively under the influence of the Earth’s gravity. However, when Leonardo talks about free fall (“discienso libero”), he was probably referring to something different. Da Vinci was very conscious of the effect of air drag. In almost every case where he talks about falling objects, he mentions the effect of air and he even includes it in his simplified calculations.10 In his manuscripts, he has many things to say about the effect of air on falling objects and vice versa. To me, it is much more likely that for Leonardo, free fall meant something closer to what we now call “terminal velocity”— that is, that constant velocity which a falling object reaches due to the balance between gravity and air resistance.

Further, Leonardo mentions several times that, on sunny clear days, the air is lighter at higher altitudes, so that the air becomes thicker as the object falls. This means that he thought that, at terminal velocity, objects decelerate as they fall. This is actually true, although the effect is probably much weaker than what Leonardo implies. None of these considerations discussed at length by Da Vinci in his manuscripts are mentioned in GRN’s article.

Leonardo’s Thought Experiment

Having argued that Leonardo thought that objects fell with constant acceleration, the next step in GRN’s article is to “prove” that Leonardo had a deeper understanding, namely that he was somehow aware that gravitation was not a force, but an acceleration in a manner similar to Einstein’s equivalence principle (see Figure 1). To do this, GRN analyze a thought experiment that Leonardo described in slightly different forms in various parts of his manuscripts.

Figure 2. Leonardo’s thought experiment. The jar moves from left to right releasing beads as it moves (Manuscript M, 143r).

The experiment consists of an open “container” (a jar, a funnel, and even a cloud in his various descriptions) that moves horizontally as it allows some particles to fall (beads or hail grains). Leonardo then considers the geometry of the system, giving special consideration to the case where the jar moves horizontally at the same speed as the first released bead falls vertically. This can be seen in Figure 2 as drawn by Leonardo, where he explains that, in this particular case, the trajectory of the first bead, the one of the jar, and the line that connects all beads, form an isosceles right triangle.

Figure 3. GRN’s interpretation of the experiment. All movements are accelerated, and the beads follow parabolas.

GRN analyze this problem using a more modern Newtonian approach. As is commonly done in high school physics problems, they start by simplifying away the effect of the air—an unusual assumption in this case—given that Leonardo constantly talks about the effect of air on falling objects. They also use the perhaps more reasonable assumption that particles leave the jar at the same speed as the jar itself, not considering that they must be moving with some relative speed out of it. They show their results in a graphic similar to Figure 3.

Figure 2 is not identical to the one drawn by Leonardo, but some salient features are still there: an isosceles right triangle, abn, defined by the movement of the jar (an), the falling trajectory of the first bead (ab), and the straight line that connects all the beads (bn). GRN assert that this is what Leonardo had in mind and they use the fact that, in both cases, the line formed by the falling beads is a straight line as proof that their assumptions are correct. They contrast it against the case in which the jar moved at constant velocity while the beads fall accelerated by gravity, in which case the beads align, but in a vertical line. They never entertain the more logical possibility: that Leonardo thought that the beads fell vertically at more or less constant velocities.

Then GRN go on to explain that this system can be better understood from the point of view of the accelerated frame of reference of the moving jar, a technique not available in Leonardo’s time but in the toolbox of Newtonian mechanics. Probably, they do this to remind us of Einstein’s Equivalence Principle, wherein the connection between gravity and acceleration is deeper and where accelerated frames of reference are equivalent to gravity fields. To me, it is clear that GRN’s ulterior and ultimate motivation is to establish a connection with the General Theory of Relativity. Throughout the article they leave small hints of this; for example, they say that “Leonardo’s studies of objects in free fall demonstrate that gravitational and pseudo-acceleration fields are indistinguishable locally when their magnitudes are the same.” Here, the words “fields” and “indistinguishable locally” have nothing to do with anything Leonardo writes, but GRN say it anyway because it is a language that feels more Einsteinian. In another part of the article, they say: “in other words, he [Leonardo] switched time with space to be able to conduct this experiment,” which is a thinly veiled way of suggesting that Leonardo was wise to the space-time continuum.

Of course, Einstein’s Equivalence Principle is deeper than just comparing accelerations. That could have been done in Newtonian mechanics. The crucial point that Einstein understood is that the mass of an object subjected to a gravitational field plays no role in its dynamics. All objects are accelerated equally, even light! Leonardo never says that all objects fall at the same speed independently of their weight; quite the contrary. Leonardo gives various examples where they don’t, although he mentions air resistance as one reason. Famously, Galileo was the first person to prove that all objects fall at the same speed (not including the effect of air), and there is no reason to believe that Leonardo knew that before Galileo.

Figure 4. Leonardo’s Manuscript M 217r (left), and my translation (right). The image above has been mirrored from the original for ease of understanding. Leonardo wrote from right to left, using his left hand, to prevent smudging the ink as he wrote.

I have translated the page where Leonardo presents the experiment of the hail cloud (see Figure 4). My translation is quite literal, except that I have simplified the third paragraph which, to me, was a little bit reiterative and confusing. It is clear that Leonardo thought that hail grains fell mostly vertically, without any appreciable horizontal velocity, as indicated by the vertical lines that connect every grain with the location at the moment it was released. Leonardo thought that the effect of the air would make objects quickly stop any horizontal movement (see Figure 5). The fact that he also thought that this experiment could be performed substantiates the assumption that he was considering objects falling at constant velocity. Should we believe Leonardo was thinking that clouds could be seen accelerating to absurdly great speeds or that hail grains were not affected by air resistance?

Figure 5. Objects thrown at different angles. The image has been mirrored for ease of understanding (Codex Arundel 92v).

Simply by inspecting Figure 4 and the other pages that Leonardo devoted to this problem, it is clear that he was interested in a simpler geometrical problem: two things that start moving from the same point at the same constant speed but in perpendicular directions will have trajectories that define the two legs of an isosceles right triangle. And the trivial corollary is that if the velocities are different, the triangle will not be isosceles. Da Vinci draws examples of each of these cases and explains how this can be used to estimate the speed of the clouds.

If Leonardo really thought that the particles were following the beautiful parabolic trajectories shown in Figure 3, why didn’t he draw them that way rather than drawing, as he did, vertical lines of no clear meaning? GRN never comment on this obvious weakness in their claim.

Leonardo’s Model?

The next section in GRN’s article is truly strange. In what seems like a misguided attempt to perform a quantitative validation of Leonardo’s ideas on gravity, they make extraordinary assumptions and take huge leaps of faith. They interpret the line in Figure 4 labeled “equation of movement” (it can also be translated as “balanced movement”) as meaning that this figure encodes the actual physical equation of movement. After observing that Leonardo seemed to have bisected the axes, they decide that “presumably, the distance between consecutive bisecting locations represents the distance the object traveled during a fixed time step,” although Leonardo says nothing of the sort. He very clearly says that these bisections represent possible speeds of the cloud, relative to the speed of the hail. According to the supplementary materials provided by GRN, it seems that they came up with “Leonardo’s model” for gravity acceleration by looking at the figures, which may explain their misunderstanding.

GRN claim that “Leonardo’s model” is given by the formula: z(t) ∝ 2(t-1)n, where z is the vertical location of the object, t is time, n is the number of bisections, and ∝ means “proportional to.” It is a strange mixture of a discrete description in terms of bisections (n) and a continuous one in time (t). They recognize that this model is incorrect, but after a few additional assumptions which I will not discuss here, they realize that it is not as bad as it might seem initially. In fact, they say that in certain circumstances it is quite good. They write: “Leonardo’s gravitational constant is 0.9774 (95 percent confidence interval, 0.8535, 1.101), which is close to the nondimensional gravity of 1. These two observations suggest that Leonardo’s model of natural motion, while imperfect, was an accurate representation of his observation of falling objects.”

I don’t think this section requires detailed commentary. GRN start with their wrong interpretation of Leonardo’s manuscripts, invent a model based on what they think a figure means, make some unsupported assumptions, and end up with something that has nothing to do with what Leonardo might have had in mind. One could imagine that they wanted to end their article with some hard numerical results, and they distorted Leonardo’s meaning until it yielded something they could use.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.3
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There is, however, an additional point I would like to mention. The model they attribute to Leonardo is invalid for times close to zero (ironically, the only ones for which air drag is insignificant). The plot of z against t that they show in their article and in the supplementary materials does not begin at the origin. The object starts falling only after it is already eight percent of its way down!

* * *

As we have seen, there is no basis to believe that Leonardo da Vinci, genius though he undoubtedly was, had a knowledge of gravity ahead of his time, much less at the level of Newton or Einstein. Every year, thousands of articles are written with the only intention of entertaining casual readers. Their flaws are obvious to most knowledgeable readers. However, this article was published in a peer-reviewed journal by a well-known academic institution. The authors claim to have studied the topic scientifically and their conclusions are not easy to dismiss. One must dig into Leonardo’s large corpus of manuscripts to be able to properly analyze their claims, and few are willing or have the language skills to do so. I have tried my best to examine GRN’s claims carefully. After looking at all the evidence, I remain unconvinced.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest minds in history. He is unrivaled in having made significant contributions to both science and the arts. There is simply no need for GRN’s hyperbole that Leonardo was a genius who foresaw relativity theory centuries ahead of his time. Their claim is not supported by any fair reading of the original manuscripts. Rather, their paper is a generator of disinformation that has helped to decrease the already too low signal-to-noise ratio in public conversations about science.

About the Author

José María González Ondina is an Associate Researcher at the University of Florida. He received his PhD from Cornell University. He spent most of his career as an ocean modeler, studying underwater sound propagation and sediment transport at the Plymouth Ocean Forecasting Centre. He also spent a decade at the Ocean & Coastal Research Group (University of Cantabria, Spain) developing numerical models for coast engineering.

References

1. Giorgio, V. (1550) Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.
2. https://rb.gy/7sfix
3. https://rb.gy/8lhni
4. https://rb.gy/wvnhr
5. Manuscript M, folio 45r, folio 43r.
6. I am using the translation of Enzo Macagno from Leonardian Fluid Mechanics in the Manuscript M, page 18.
7. For example here: “Hence, in each doubling of the quantity of time the body doubles the length of fall and the velocity of its motion.” from Manuscript M, folio 44v.
8. Manuscript M, folio 45r.
9. Enzo Macagno, Leonardian Fluid Mechanics in the Manuscript M, page 18.
10. Manuscript M, folio 44v.

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As head of TED, Chris Anderson has had a ringside view of the world’s boldest thinkers sharing their most uplifting ideas. Inspired by them, he believes that it’s within our grasp to turn outrage back into optimism. It all comes down to reimagining one of the most fundamental human virtues: generosity. What if generosity could become infectious generosity? Consider:

• how a London barber began offering haircuts to people experiencing homelessness—and catalyzed a movement
• how two anonymous donors gave $10,000 each to two hundred strangers and discovered that most recipients wanted to “pay it forward” with their own generous acts
• how TED itself transformed from a niche annual summit into a global beacon of ideas by giving away talks online, allowing millions access to free learning.

In telling these inspiring stories, Anderson has given us “the first page-turner ever written about human generosity” (Elizabeth Dunn). More important, he offers a playbook for how to embark on our own generous acts—whether gifts of money, time, talent, connection, or kindness—and to prime them, thanks to the Internet, to have self-replicating, even world-changing, impact.

Chris Anderson has been the curator of TED since 2001. His TED mantra—“ideas worth spreading”—continues to blossom on an international scale. He lives in New York City and London but was born in a remote village in Pakistan and spent his early years in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where his parents worked as medical missionaries. After boarding school in Bath, England, he went on to Oxford University, graduating in 1978 with a degree in philosophy, politics and economics. Chris then trained as a journalist, working in newspapers and radio, and founded Future Publishing that focused on specialist computer publications but eventually expanded into other areas such as cycling, music, video games, technology and design. He then built Imagine Media, publisher of Business 2.0 magazine and creator of the popular video game users website IGN, publishing some 150 magazines and websites and employed 2,000 people. This success allowed Chris’s nonprofit organization to acquire the TED Conference, then an annual meeting of luminaries in the fields of Technology, Entertainment and Design held in Monterey, California. He expanded the conference’s remit to cover all topics, and now has TED Fellows, the TED Prize, TEDx events, and the TED-Ed program offering free educational videos and tools to students and teachers. Astonishingly, TED talks have been translated into 100 languages and garner over 1 billion views a year. His new book is Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading.

Shermer and Anderson discuss:

• how his life turned out (genes, environment, luck)
• what makes TED successful while other platforms failed or stalled
• TED talks go public for free vs. paying customers
• power laws and giving: do 10% donate 90%?
• Amanda Parker gave away her music and asked people to pay: survival bias—how many people have tried this and failed?
• blogs, podcast, Substack … saturation markets
• changing business landscape of charging vs. giving away
• What makes things infectious?
• What is generosity? Idea vs. character trait—virtue ethics
• altruism and reciprocal altruism, reputation and self-reputation
• religion and morality: do we need an “eye in the sky” to be good?
• Can people be good without God?
• philanthropy: 2700 billionaires have more wealth than 120 poorest countries combined
• giving & philanthropy seems like a rich-person’s game. How can average people participate?
• incentivizing giving as a selfish act: why “pay it forward”?
• public vs. private solutions to social problems
• How can one person make a difference?
• The Mystery Experiment
• Ndugu Effect
• donor fatigue
• Giving What We Can.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

The practice of discussing educational testing in the same sentence with the term “war” is not necessarily new or original.1 What may be new to readers, however, is to characterize current debates involving educational testing as involving a war against: (1) accurate perceptions about the way things really are (reality), and (2) sound judgment in practical matters (common sense).

Education, Testing, and the Real World

Education is compulsory in American society, and no one escapes testing—whether standardized or unstandardized—in their schooling experience, even before entering school. As newborns, infants are given Apgar scores to assess their overall health.2 When a child is ready to enter preschool, s/he may be assessed with a standardized test to determine school readiness in understanding basic concepts, cognitive and language development, and early academic achievement.

As children matriculate through the primary school years, they are required to pay attention to teacher lessons; resist natural impulses to fidget, talk out of turn, or bother one’s neighbor; complete worksheets quietly at one’s desk; complete and return homework assignments; and complete national or state-mandated standardized academic achievement tests that measure “what students know and can do.”3 In some cities, students must complete tests to determine eligibility for entrance into elite or specialty high schools,4 and students in some states must successfully complete tests in order to graduate high school.5 Well before students are scheduled to graduate, they have, until recently, been required to complete standardized college admissions tests in order for their applications to be competitive for colleges of their choice.6

Enter Basic Common Sense

When enough years are spent surrounded by age peers in schools, everyone—regardless of background, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status—intuitively understands that comparatively, some peers are intellectually smarter, other peers are roughly the same, and others are intellectually slower. These differences are most determinative of one’s overall level of academic achievement from kindergarten to high school graduation and beyond. Some pupils have a natural proclivity to be voracious readers and progress successfully through their academic programs much more quickly than others. They are able to grasp and understand difficult and abstract academic material more quickly, have a wide range of intellectual interests and hobbies, and are much more likely to be selected for admission to programs for the gifted and talented. These are generally the A and B students and tend to enroll in advanced foreign languages, trigonometry, pre-calculus, chemistry, and other advanced placement (AP) classes in high school.

Then there are students who struggle with school—particularly as the curriculum becomes more conceptual, complex, and abstract. These students have often been identified as “slow learners,” and school generally becomes a profoundly aversive experience. In higher grades, many tend to select vocational courses or may sometimes drop out of school before graduation, and these are generally known as the C and D students in their classes. The majority of pupils, however, fall somewhere in between those two extremes.7

When interacting with curricula, brighter students can generalize learning more easily to new classes of similar information never before encountered, while slower students have more difficulty in remembering what has been previously learned. Using a simple illustration from the early elementary school years (and barring specific reading disabilities), teachers can teach brighter students the phonetic rules for sounding out words such as “groan” and “moan.” Later, when these students encounter similar words that they have not seen before, such as “Joan” or “loan,” they can more easily apply what they have previously learned and correctly sound out these new words as well as understand their meaning. In contrast, when slower students encounter new words that have the same phonetic spelling and pronunciation as previously learned words, they find it more difficult to spontaneously apply what they have previously learned to sound out these new words, and consequently, word identification mastery takes them more time.8

Similarly, slower students will be easily confused over the rules that govern the correct pronunciation of words with the same “ei” letter combination but different pronunciations, e.g., neighbor, heist, and weird. In contrast, brighter students will internalize these nuances more quickly, readily identify these words correctly, and so move on to master more complex words. These differences in word identification skills also influence reading comprehension.

To be sure, slower students will eventually learn how to pronounce correctly similar words governed by different phonetic rules, but teaching such students requires instruction where broader learning objectives are broken down into smaller hierarchical steps, teaching is much more intentionally explicit, and greater amounts of time are devoted to learning and practice.9 If you learned academic subjects more quickly than other students, you probably have found other areas (e.g., art, music, athletics, home and auto repair, cooking, or just learning to get along with others) that took you longer than others, including those who took longer than you on the purely academic subjects.

Regardless of grade level brighter students can more quickly internalize and consolidate the required mental schemata for representing material that is learned, and then use this knowledge as a foundation upon which to build new schemata.10 Slower students have more difficulty consolidating information to be learned, or at least it requires more time to consolidate prerequisite information compared to brighter age peers. When slower peers attempt to mentally consolidate new information built on a shaky foundation, new information is poorly understood.

Brighter students can generally follow along at the pace of regular instruction, while slower students cannot, and eventually fall further and further behind as they get older. The older pupils are, the more they begin to self-select into secondary school tracks that are more suitable to their intellectual capabilities and interests, resulting in extremely wide individual differences in academic performance at higher grades. By the time students reach 11th and 12th grades, for example, brighter students are able to solve complex mathematical equations while slower students still struggle with mastering elementary fractions. As a result, the brightest students in high school tend to enroll in advanced placement courses such as foreign languages, pre-calculus, chemistry, and physics, while slower students gravitate to vocational courses.

Anti-testing hostility has found a powerful, organized voice whose prime directive is to diminish the influence—if not the outright banishing—of standardized testing.

Psychologists refer to this basic phenomenon as “individual differences in mental ability and learning potential,”11 and no one knows this better than teachers. In the elementary grades, for example, teachers regularly come into contact with wide individual differences in performance on standardized achievement tests, despite all students being taught the same material under the same teacher. That’s why it is a bit unfair to hold teachers solely responsible for the achievement test performance of their students, since students can perform poorly on achievement tests despite exemplary teaching, and can also perform well on achievement tests despite mediocre teaching.

Enter Painful Realities

There are no racial, ethnic, language, or socioeconomic subpopulation groups, anywhere on any continent on the globe, that display equal means in their respective distributions of mental test scores.12 These individual differences in mental test scores, when consolidated and averaged, will inevitably result in statistically significant average differences in academic achievement across subpopulation groups. Of course, there is also significant overlap among these groups. Although the full range of test scores and performance—from severe intellectual disability to mental genius—can be found within all racial and ethnic subpopulation groups,13 it is nevertheless true that these abilities are not equally distributed across such groups. Group differences have been observed since the beginning of standardized testing. In fact, they begin as early as three years of age, remain consistent over decades, and have proven stubbornly resistant to intervention.14 The largest gaps between subpopulation groups in both mental test scores and the achievement outcomes that result from such scores will be most noticeable at the extremes of their respective distributions.15 Because this is such a sensitive subject it should be noted that these are average differences between groups and tell us nothing about the ability of any single member of any group.

Differences in academic achievement are not equally distributed across socioeconomic groups or across communities and school districts, as these have more or less different concentrations of low to high performing students. Studies consistently show that even massive allocation of funds to school districts, without other interventions, has no significant effect on raising academic achievement.16 School systems are keenly aware of this, which is why comparisons of achievement test scores across school districts are careful to use race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status as a covariate in comparing scores. That is, schools having similar concentrations of students from particular racial/ethnic groups and socioeconomic backgrounds are compared to other schools with similar backgrounds. This way, when schools having concentrations of students from similar backgrounds show significantly different levels of academic achievement, higher performing schools can be studied intensively to determine the key factors that are responsible for their relative success.17

For purposes of this analysis, the term education establishment refers to the constellation of education school professors, teacher education textbooks and journals, teacher certification training programs, and professional teaching associations (e.g., the American Educational Research Association, or AERA; the National Education Association, or NEA) that dominate thought and opinion within the education and teaching professions. Within that group, there are four arguments held by anti-testing critics that are given prominence that far outweighs their scientifically demonstrated validity.

Claims That Testing Harms Students

Eighteenth Century social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of children born in freedom and innocence, but eventually corrupted and enslaved by society,18 is the basic assumption that undergirds hostility toward standardized testing among many educators. According to critics, standardized testing places undue emotional stress on students due to test scores’ relation to important outcomes. They argue that testing fails to measure accurately the capabilities of students with different learning styles and penalizes pupils who are not good test takers.

Another common argument is that standardized testing fails to account for language deficiencies, empty stomachs, learning disabilities, difficult home lives, or cultural differences.19 The tests are said not to measure student progress or improve student performance, but rather penalize students’ critical thinking and creativity due to the multiple-choice testing format (or its opposite), namely, that tests confer an unfair advantage to students who perform well on multiple-choice tests by learning test-taking strategies without having deep knowledge of the subject matter.

Anti-testing hostility has found a powerful, organized voice in numerous movements whose prime directive is to diminish the influence—if not the outright banishing—of standardized testing in pre- and post-higher education. The opt-out movement, for example, began in New York in 2014 among mostly White, highly-educated, and politically liberal parents who were united in their refusal to have their children sit for standardized testing in schools.20 They claimed that judging teacher performance by students’ test scores is unfair and that testing unduly narrows the school curricula by creating a “teaching-to-the-test” instructional ethos. Some stated they were in outright opposition to the implementation of Common Core State Standards.21

It would not be an overstatement to say that certain criticisms have their origin in various neo-Marxist ideologies. There, standardized tests are portrayed as instruments of oppression designed by capitalistic test-construction companies to crush students’ dreams of a better life and trap them in the social classes in which they were born. One such critic writes:

Rather than providing for an objective and fair means of social mobility, the tests were a tracking mechanism limiting the odds of improving on one’s family’s economic and social position in America…. The SAT aptitude test in particular was designed from the beginning to facilitate social Darwinism, selecting for White Anglo-Saxon males; Jim Crow segregation, eugenics, and protecting the Ivy League’s racial stock provided the legal and cultural context in which the SAT was born.22

These criticisms are feeble, shallow, and above all, dishonest. Rebuttals to these fallacies, patiently documented and dissected by recognized testing scholars, are readily available to anyone with a fair and open mind.23

Claims of Cultural Bias in Tests

The critically acclaimed 1991 film Boyz N the Hood told the tale of three Black youths growing up in a South Central Los Angeles ghetto, and the differences in their eventual life outcomes as a function of having (or not having) a strong father figure. One of the boys has a strict but caring father figure (named Jason “Furious” Styles), while the other two do not. In numerous spots throughout the movie, Mr. Styles imparts pithy pearls of wisdom to the boys, intended to guide them throughout life. In one such sequence, he opines on the SAT requirement for college:

Most of those tests are culturally biased to begin with. The only part that is universal is the Math.24

Wrong. Although popularly believed, the claim that contemporary standardized mental testing is culturally biased is patently false, as revealed in hundreds of empirical studies.25 When critics accuse standardized tests of cultural bias, they typically mean that a test includes words, concepts, or ideas that are perceived to be more familiar to White middle-class examinees compared to other groups, or that a test’s standardization samples fail to include sufficient representation of non-White, lower socioeconomic status (SES) persons.26

Both of these conditions are alleged to foster an unfair disadvantage to lower SES non-White examinees, purporting to cause them to have lower average scores relative to more advantaged White test takers. While some critics may not be familiar with the content of tests or the racial/ethnic makeup of standardization samples, they nevertheless believe that standardized tests are biased simply because the average scores achieved by different subpopulation groups are not equal. Such a definition of test bias is widely rejected by contemporary testing experts.27

The cold reality, however, is that test companies, like all other companies that must be profitable in order to stay in business, routinely and carefully examine their test items for any evidence of statistical bias in the production phase, before any updated test revisions are published. Items that show actual evidence of statistical bias (i.e., items that statistically perform differently for test takers of different racial/ethnic groups) are discarded, and the results of statistical tests for biased test items are typically published in test manuals for open review by the general public.28

Crying Racism

Whenever attempts to tar and feather tests with charges of cultural bias fail, the next step is to simply smear them with the charge of racism. In today’s heated political climate few things are more effective in attracting panicked attention than labeling persons, organizations, or products as “racist.” In the 1990s, test critics began to point out that the term “aptitude” in the (then-called) Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT), could be perceived as measuring something innate that is impervious to effort or instruction.29 This, coupled with the fact that these tests reflect the significant subpopulation group differences in mean scores discussed above, prompted the College Board to change the middle word of the SAT from “aptitude” to the more bland descriptor “assessment” in 1993.30 That euphemism, however, did little to quell the ire of critics, who continued to accuse standardized college testing of being racist.31

In today’s heated political climate few things are more effective in attracting panicked attention than labeling persons, organizations, or products as “racist.”

To be fair, it is relatively easy to locate offensive quotes by 19th and early 20th-century testing supporters who freely ascribed the adjectives “inferior” and “superior” to racial groups on the basis of significant mean differences in IQ scores.32 It comes as little surprise, therefore, when Ibram X. Kendi, founder and director of the Center for Antiracist Research, declares that:

Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.33

Kendi and many others never doubt that contemporary testing must be racist, based on the false belief that such testing was birthed out of a history of racism.34 There is no doubt that these types of claims are very effective in poisoning contemporary public discourse, but such invective does not hold up under critical examination or hard evidence.

First, many early researchers were extremely cautious about, and resistant to, interpreting group differences in text performance as ironclad indicators of any innate inferiority/ superiority of groups. While racist attitudes were certainly more prevalent a century ago compared to today, many early American IQ test researchers were keenly aware of racial discrimination and unequal social circumstances of racial groups during the times in which they wrote, and so urged their peers to avoid hasty and intemperate generalizations from performance on tests until environmental disadvantages could be properly ruled out.35

Second, not a few early 20th-century researchers intentionally showcased the exceptional IQ test performance of high-scoring non-White (particularly African-American) students, who achieved scores several standard deviations above the general mean.36 Their writings disprove the assertion that there is something intentionally nefarious deeply embedded within mental tests that unfairly suppresses the intellectual capabilities of examinees who are not White and/or middle class.

Third, one study using a large and representative dataset of school-aged students in California, analyzed the sources that account for IQ test score variance (using Analysis of Variance, a long-standing, well-established, and widely-used statistical method), and demonstrated that the largest sources of IQ test score variability are within and between families that in many cases share the same racial group and social class.37 If two members of this same dataset are selected at random (regardless of race, ethnicity, social class, or family) and the difference in their IQ scores are calculated and averaged and the procedure repeated an infinite number of times, the average difference between randomly selected pairs of IQ scores is 17 points.

Given that the mean of modern IQ tests is 100 and its standard deviation is 15, this average 17-point difference between such randomly chosen pairs exceeds the average score differences between Black and White students in the dataset (i.e., 12 points). Simply stated, the average IQ point difference between siblings in the same family exceeds the average test score difference between African Americans and White Americans. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the oft-repeated claims that IQ and other mental tests are inherently flawed and discriminate unfairly along racial lines, are simply false. This won’t convince Ibram X. Kendi, however, since his definition of racism is any group difference of any kind anywhere, thereby rendering the concept unfalsifiable.

Lowering Standards

Whenever two or more subpopulation groups achieve unequal means in their test score distributions, any set cutoff score that a college or university uses to determine acceptance or rejection for admission will display unequal percentages across groups as to who is selected or rejected. That is a statistical reality. For admissions committees that champion Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) mandates, standards must be lowered for members of lower-scoring groups in a manner that camouflages what is actually being done.

Researchers have long acknowledged that obtaining data on college admissions decisions is an uphill battle, as colleges strive to prevent access to the criteria on which acceptance decisions are made. When such information is obtained, the results confirm what many have always suspected.

That is to say, Black and Latino applicants are admitted with test qualifications that are as much as one standard deviation or more below the average test scores of White and Asian applicants,38 and this practice has predictable consequences. To illustrate, many Black and Hispanic students find themselves on academic probation or switch majors (from the major into which they were initially admitted) to enter disciplines that are less demanding.39 Many of those so admitted will simply drop out and fail to graduate, creating “artificial failures” that would have been successful if properly matched to institutions that enroll students with comparable qualifications.40

This observation was solidly reinforced in Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor’s 2012 book Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. In it, the authors examined and compared enrollment, graduation rates, and doctorate/STEM graduate degrees of Black and Hispanic students in the state of California in the eras before and after Proposition 209 was passed in that state. Proposition 209 (Prop 209, also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative, or CCRI), was a ballot proposition approved in 1996, which prohibited state governmental institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in public employment, contracting, and education.

When comparing the pre-Prop 209 to the post-Prop 209 eras, the number of Black students receiving bachelor degrees from University of California (UC) schools, the number of UC Black and Hispanic freshmen who went on to graduate in four years (as well as graduate with STEM degrees), and the number of graduates with GPAs of 3.5 or higher all significantly rose. This hard data was used to support the general thesis that when students are matched (through objective standardized test scores) to institutions where all students are admitted under the same standards (and standards are not artificially lowered to satisfy diversity goals), minority students benefit significantly.

These practices are so pervasive, that Black students who meet the same college admissions requirements as their peers often write of their frustration and resentment at being unfairly judged by other students as having been admitted solely because of their race and under lower standards.41 In one particularly heartbreaking account, a successful Black journalist wrote of his frustrations taking two years out of his professional life to teach journalism to Black students, admitted under lowered academic standards, at a small, historically Black college. He writes of his reluctant efforts to repeatedly lower basic academic expectations in order to accommodate a critical mass of students whose attitudes, values, achievement motivation, academic preparation and qualifications, and intellectual capabilities demonstrated that they had no business being at an institution of higher learning.42

One strategy for justifying lowering standards is for college admissions committees to claim that their admission standards are “holistic.”43 That is, criteria for admission presumably must take into account a wide range of factors that provide a more “three-dimensional picture of the whole person,” as opposed to the more “narrow” consideration of standardized test scores. Yet critics charge that the deep subjectivity of such practices represents little more than academic flimflam.44

The oft-repeated claims that IQ and other mental tests are inherently flawed and discriminate unfairly along racial lines, are simply false.

Recently, testing companies have come to serve as enablers of lowered college admissions standards. For example, the College Board spent two years (2017–2019) creating an “adversity index,” a 100-point scale that provides a rough measure of the degree of adversity versus privilege in the life of a prospective applicant. In theory, adversity index scores could be used to balance lower standardized test scores in an effort to justify lower admissions standards. Ultimately, however, these efforts of testing companies to placate their critics once again proved futile.45

Another strategy is to claim that empirical research supports the benefits of having diverse academic settings compared to those not as diverse. For example, a DEI advocate cited research support for claims that students who enroll in more diverse classrooms earn higher GPAs, more diverse college discussion groups generate “more novel and complex analyses,” and that greater exposure to diversity in college settings increases civic attitudes and engagement.46

However, studies of such an important topic as the benefits of diversity in college admissions require at minimum systematic replication as well as hundreds of studies by independent researchers (conducted at a wide variety of institutions) if they are to yield results that can be subjected to appropriate meta-analyses.

One study, however, is notable for its elegance, clarity, and simplicity. In 2002, researchers specifically evaluated the claim that increased racial diversity in college enrollments enriches students’ educational experience and improves relations between students from different cultural groups.47 They argued that prior self-report data claimed to demonstrate support for this notion were misleading, as they suffered from biased item wording, methodological flaws, and the tendency for responses to reflect social desirability effects.

To correct for these flaws, the researchers analyzed self-report data from a random sample of more than 4,000 American college students, faculty, and administrators who were asked to simply evaluate various aspects of their educational experience and campus environment, but without any direct references to racial/ethnic diversity. They then correlated their data with the percentage of Black student enrollment in predominantly White student bodies. They found that, contrary to what diversity advocates would predict, no consistent positive correlation was found between increased diversity and respondents’ assessments of educational satisfaction.

Delete Standards Altogether

Eventually, what was previously unthinkable, has now become unavoidable: objective standards in and of themselves are seen as an impediment to the goals of achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion. Hence, testing necessary for demonstrating mastery of taught subject matter must itself be abolished.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.3
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In one example, the Oregon state legislature eliminated (for two years, until the state can re-evaluate its graduation policies) the long-standing requirement that students successfully pass a high school exit exam in order to demonstrate proficiency in reading, mathematics, and writing. This was done in response to criticisms that the testing requirement was inequitable because higher percentages of Black and Hispanic students failed the test.48

Various anti-testing writers and organizations applaud the news that more and more institutions of higher education no longer require standardized test scores as a condition for selection,49 under the pretense that “the social and academic costs of continuing to rely on…tests outweigh any possible benefits.”50

Where are we headed?

At the time of this writing, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (where race is used as one of many factors in student admissions) violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees equal protection for all U.S. citizens.51 In a videotaped reaction to the decision, President Biden stated that the decision “effectively ends affirmative action in college admissions,”52 a sentiment echoed by many who support the continued and fair race-neutral use of standardized tests. Nevertheless, many commentators have also suggested ways in which admissions committees can circumvent the decision by no longer requiring standardized testing, or by changing the manner in which applicants write their college essays to signal their racial group membership.53

There is simply no way to produce a mental test that effectively measures the abilities and skills needed to predict success in educational programs but at the same time satisfies the political goals of racially proportional representation as demanded by DEI advocates.54 Given this reality, the war involving standardized testing has by no means ended, but rather is just beginning.

About the Author

Craig Frisby is Associate Professor Emeritus in School Psychology from the University of Missouri, Columbia. He has served as an Associate Editor for School Psychology Review, the official journal of the National Association of School Psychologists, and Associate Editor for Psychological Assessment, a journal published by the American Psychological Association. He currently serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. He is the author of Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students: Data-based Guidelines for School Psychologists and Other School Personnel and co-editor of the recently published Ideological and Political Bias in Psychology: Nature, Scope and Solutions. Watch him on C-SPAN discussing education reforms to benefit the African American community

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8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
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26. Jensen, A.R. (1980). Bias in Mental Testing. Free Press.
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28. Ibid.
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