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In his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, Jonathan Rauch argues that Christianity is a “load-bearing wall” in American democracy. As Christianity has been increasingly co-opted by politics, Rauch believes it is straying from its core tenets and failing to serve its traditional role as a spiritual and civic ballast. He blames this shift for the decline of religiosity in the United States, as well as collapsing faith in democratic institutions.

The Rise of the Nones and Its Effects 

Rauch writes that his book is “penitence for the dumbest thing I ever wrote,” a 2003 essay for The Atlantic about the rise of what he called “apatheism”—a “disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s.” The essay argued that the growing number of people who aren’t especially concerned about religion is a “major civilizational advance” and a “product of a determined cultural effort to discipline the religious mindset.” Rauch cites John Locke’s case for religious tolerance and pluralism to argue that the emergence of apatheism represented the hard-fought taming of “divisive and volatile” religious forces. 

In Cross Purposes, Rauch explains why he now repudiates this view. First, he argues that the decline of religion has led Americans to import “religious zeal into secular politics.” Second, he believes Christianity is losing its traditional role in shaping culture—the faith now reflects American society and culture instead of the other way around—and argues that this has been corrosive to the civic health of the country. Third, Rauch claims that “there is no secular substitute for the meaning and moral grounding which religious life provides.” 

All of these arguments rely on shaky assumptions about modern religiosity and the influence of secularism in America. In 2003, Rauch rightly questioned the idea that “everyone brims with religious passions.” While he acknowledged that human beings appear “wired” to believe, he also recognized that secularization, in the aggregate, is a real phenomenon. He now rejects this observation in favor of the increasingly fashionable view that religiosity never really declines but can only be repurposed: “We see this in the soaring demand for pseudo-religions in American life,” he writes. These pseudo-religions, he observes, include everything from “wellness culture” to wokeness and political extremism. 

But Americans have held quasi-religious, supernatural beliefs throughout history—including during periods of much greater religiosity than today. The popularity of practices like astrology and tarot reading isn’t a recent development, and pagan religions like Wicca originated and spread in the God-fearing middle of the twentieth century. Belief in UFOs and extraterrestrial encounters surged in the 1940s and 1950s, an era when over 90 percent of Americans were Christians. In the early 1990s, 90 percent of Americans still identified as Christians compared to 63 percent today. But a 1991 Gallup poll of Americans found a wide array of paranormal and other supernatural beliefs—nearly half believed in extrasensory perception (ESP), 36 percent believed in telepathy, 29 percent believed houses could be haunted, 26 percent believed in clairvoyance, and 25 percent believed in astrology. Religious belief wasn’t much of a bulwark against these other beliefs. Even in cases when those beliefs contradicted traditional Christian teachings—such as reincarnation—significant proportions of Christians believed them. 

The secularism of Western liberal democracies is a historical aberration. For most of history, the separation of church and state didn’t exist.

Rauch argues that “it has become pretty evident that secularism has not been able to fill what has been called the ‘God-shaped hole’ in American life.” He continues: “In today’s America, we see evidence everywhere of the inadequacy of secular liberalism to provide meaning, exaltation, spirituality, transcendence, and morality anchored in more than the self.” But the evidence Rauch is referring to—aside from the latest spiritual fads, many of which have been adopted by religious and irreligious Americans alike—is thin. He cites a 2023 survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NORC, which found that the percentage of Americans who say religion is “very important” to them fell from 62 percent in 1998 to 39 percent in 2023. The survey also found that the proportion of Americans who regard patriotism, community involvement, and having children as “very important” declined over the same period. Meanwhile, a growing proportion of Americans said money is very important. 

While it’s possible that secularization has played a role in making Americans more greedy and less community or family-oriented, it isn’t enough to merely assert that rising secularism is to blame for the decline of these values in the United States. Even if it’s true that secularism has some social costs, those costs would need to be weighed against its benefits. “As a homosexual American,” Rauch writes, I owe my marriage—and the astonishing liberation I have enjoyed during my lifetime—to the advance of enlightened secular values.” Rauch argues that the Founders believed the governance system they set up would only work if it remained on a firm foundation of Christian morality. He cites John Adams, who declared that the Constitution was “made only for a moral and religious people.” But he also could have cited Thomas Jefferson’s trenchant criticisms of Christianity or Thomas Paine’s argument in The Age of Reason that many Christian doctrines are, in fact, deeply immoral, superstitious, and corrosive to human freedom. 

While Rauch doesn’t appear to regard his own secularism as an impediment to patriotism or any other civic virtue—and thus he doesn’t need religion—he appears to believe that other Americans do. He invokes an argument made by Friedrich Nietzsche nearly 150 years ago: “When religious ideas are destroyed one is troubled by an uncomfortable emptiness and deprivation. Christianity, it seems to me, is still needed by most people in old Europe even today.” A central theme of Cross Purposes is a paternalistic view that, while it’s possible for some people to be good citizens and live lives of meaning without religion, it’s not possible for many others. 

Without religion, Rauch argues, most people will be adrift with no grounding for their moral values. He claims that “moral propositions … must have some external validity.” He observes that “scientific or naturalistic” foundations for morality fail because they “anchor morality in ourselves and our societies, not in something transcendent.” He asks: “If there is no transcendent moral order anchored in a purposive universe—something like God-given laws—why must we not be nihilistic and despairing sociopaths?” However, he qualifies his argument… 

Now, speaking as an atheist and a scientific materialist, I do not believe religions actually answer that question. Instead, they rely on a cheat, which they call God. They assume their conclusion by simply asserting the existence of a transcendent spiritual and moral order. They invent God and then claim he solves the problem. … The Christians who believe the Bible is the last word on morality—and, not coincidentally, that they are the last word on interpreting the Bible—are every bit as relativistic as I am; it’s just that I admit it and they don’t. 

After presenting this powerful rejoinder to the religious pretension to have a monopoly on objective morality, Rauch writes: 

That is neither here nor there. I am not important. What is important is that the religious framing of morality and mortality is plausible and acceptable to humans in a way nihilism and relativism are not and never will be. 

But this is a false dichotomy—the choice isn’t between religious morality and nihilistic relativism. The choice is between religious morality and an attempt to develop an ethical system that is far more epistemically honest and humble. Instead of relying on the God “cheat”—a philosophical sleight of hand Rauch feels he is equipped to identify, but one he evidently assumes most people are incapable of understanding—we can attempt to develop and ground ethical arguments in ways that don’t require the invention of a supernatural, supervising entity. As he writes: 

For most people, the idea that the universe is intended and ordered by God demonstrably provides transcendent meaning and moral grounding which scientific materialism demonstrably does not. … God may be (as I believe) a philosophical shortcut, but he gets you there—and I don’t. 

But Rauch just admitted that religion only “gets you there” in an illusory way. It may be comforting for believers to convince themselves that there’s a divine superintendent who ensures that the universe is morally intelligible, but the religious are no closer to apprehending fundamental moral truth than nonbelievers. 

Rauch also argues that “purely secular thinking about death will never satisfy the large majority of people.” While he personally doesn’t struggle with the idea of mortality, he once again assumes that a critical mass of people “rely on some version of faith to rescue them from the bleak nihilism of mortality.” While Rauch presents this view in a self-deprecating way—“I am weird!” he informs the reader—it’s difficult to shake the impression that he believes himself capable of accepting hard realities that others aren’t equipped to handle. 

While Rauch believes his scientific materialism and secular morality is some kind of exotic oddity, these views were at the heart of the Enlightenment and they have informed centuriesof Western philosophy. A fundamental aspect of Enlightenment thought was that religious authorities don’t have a monopoly on truth or morality. Secularists like David Hume resisted religious dogma and undermined the notion that morality must be grounded in God. Secularism was rare and dangerous hundreds of years ago, but it has gone mainstream. Pew reports that the number of Christians in the United States fell from around 90 percent in 1990 to 63 percent in 2024. Gallup found that other measures of religiosity have declined as well, such as church attendance and membership. Pew has also recorded substantial and sustained declines in religious belief across Europe. 

The idea that there’s a latent level of religiosity in human societies that remains static over the centuries is dubious.

Rauch was right in 2003—plenty of people are capable of leading ethical and meaningful lives without religious faith. There are more of these people today than there used to be, and this doesn’t mean they have all been taken in by some God-shaped superstition or cult. The idea that there’s a latent level of religiosity in human societies that remains static over the centuries is dubious—in pre-Enlightenment Europe, religious belief was ubiquitous and mandated by law. Heretics were publicly executed. So were witches. Scientific discoveries were suppressed and punished if they were seen as conflicting with religious teachings. Regular people had extremely limited access to information that wasn’t audited by religious authorities. Science often blended seamlessly with pseudoscience (even Newton was fascinated by alchemy and other aspects of the occult, along with his commitment to biblical interpretation). Incessant religious conflict culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, which caused millions of deaths—with some estimates ranging as high as around a third of central Europe’s population. 

The last execution for blasphemy in Europe was the hanging of Thomas Aikenhead in Edinburgh in 1697, whose crimes included criticizing scripture and questioning the divinity of Jesus Christ. Aikenhead was a student at the University of Edinburgh, where Hume would attend just a couple of decades later. It wouldn’t be long before several of the most prominent philosophers in Europe were publicly making arguments that would have once sent them to the gallows. Drawing upon the work of these philosophers, less than a century after Aikenhead’s execution the United States would be founded on the principle of religious liberty. The world has secularized, and this is exactly what Rauch once believed it to be: a major civilizational advance. 

When the Load-Bearing Wall Buckles 

Rauch believes the decline of religion is to blame for many of the most destructive political pathologies in the United States today. He argues that the “collapse of the ecumenical churches has displaced religious zeal into politics, which is not designed to provide purpose in life and breaks when it tries.” According to Rauch, when the “load-bearing wall” of Christianity “buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too.” Much of Cross Purposes is an explanation for why this buckling has occurred. 

Rauch fails to demonstrate why Christianity is a necessary foundation for morality.

Rauch organizes the book around what he describes as Thin, Sharp, and Thick Christianity. Thin Christianity describes a process whereby the faith is “no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends.” One of these functions is the export of Christian values to the rest of society. “My claim,” he writes, “is not just that secular liberalism and religious faith are instrumentally interdependent but that each is intrinsically reliant on the other to build a morally and epistemically complete and coherent account of the world.” This is the claim we discussed in the first section—Rauch fails to demonstrate why Christianity is a necessary foundation for morality. He explains that people may find it easier to ground their values in God and why religion makes mortality easier to handle, but these are hardly arguments for the necessity of faith in the public square. 

Rauch is particularly concerned about what he describes as Sharp Christianity—a version of the faith that is “not only secularized but politicized, partisan, confrontational, and divisive.” Instead of focusing on the teachings of Jesus, Rauch writes, these Christians “bring to church the divisive cultural issues they hear about on Fox News” and believe “Christianity is under attack and we have to do something about it.” Sharp Christianity is best captured by the overwhelming evangelical support for Donald Trump, who received roughly 80 percent of the evangelical vote in 2020 and 2024. An April Pew survey found that Trump’s support among evangelicals remains strong after his first 100 days in office—while 40 percent of Americans approve of his performance, this proportion jumps to 72 percent among evangelicals. 

Rauch challenges the view held by many Sharp Christians that their faith is constantly under assault from Godless liberals. He critiques what he regards as an increasingly powerful “post-liberal” movement on the right, which argues that the liberal emphasis on individualism and autonomy has led to the atomization of society and the rejection of faith, family, and patriotism. Rauch acknowledges that liberalism on its own doesn’t inspire the same level of commitment as religion, and he rightly notes that this is by design: “the whole point of liberalism was to put an end to centuries of bloody coercion and war arising from religious and factional attempts to impose one group’s moral vision on everyone else.” 

While Rauch does an excellent job critiquing the post-liberal right, he grants one of its central claims: that Christianity is the necessary glue that holds liberal society together. As he notes: “liberals understood they could not create and sustain virtue by themselves, and they warned against trying.” It’s true that liberalism is capacious enough to encompass many competing values and ideologies, but there are certain values that are in the marrow of liberal societies—such as individual rights, pluralism, and democracy. Mutual respect for these values can cultivate virtues like openness, tolerance, and forbearance. 

Rauch emphasizes the achievements of liberalism: “constitutional democracy, mass prosperity, the scientific revolution, outlawing slavery, empowering women, and—not least from my point of view—tolerating atheistic homosexual Jews instead of burning us alive.” That he should have added that many of these advancements were made in the teeth of furious religious opposition brings us to a central problem with Cross Purposes—Rauch would argue that all the Christian bloodletting, intolerance, and authoritarianism throughout history is based on a series of misconceptions about what Christianity really is. His central demand is that American Christians rediscover the true meaning of their faith, which he regards as an anodyne and narrow reading of Jesus Christ’s essential teachings. He reduces millennia of Christian thought and the whole of the Bible to a simple formula (which he first heard from the Catholic theologian and priest James Alison): “Don’t be afraid. Imitate Jesus. Forgive each other.” But Rauch then admits: “I am in no position to judge whether those are the essential elements of Christianity, but they certainly command broad and deep reverence in America’s Christian traditions.” 

While this tidy formula does capture some central elements of Jesus’ teachings, it intentionally leaves out other less agreeable (but no less essential) aspects of Christianity. Jesus urged his followers not to be afraid because he would return and they would be granted eternal life in the presence of God. He told his Apostles that their “generation will not pass away” before his return, so they could expect their reward in short order. For those who did not accept his gospel, Jesus had another message: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Rauch may be correct that “Don’t be afraid” captures one of Jesus’ core messages, but this is a message that only applies to believers—all others should be very afraid. As for the idea of forgiveness, Jesus clearly believed there were some limits—once the “cursed” are consigned to “eternal fire,” redemption appears to be unlikely. 

Even at its best, Christianity is inherently divisive.

While Rauch admits that he is in “no position to judge … the essential elements of Christianity” (nor am I), but any summary of the faith that leaves out Jesus’ most fundamental teaching of all—that his followers must accept the truth of Christianity or face eternal destruction—isn’t in touch with reality. It’s also untenable to present an essentialized version of Christianity that leaves out the entire Old Testament, which is crammed with scriptural warrants for slavery, genocide, misogyny, and persecution on a horrifying scale. There’s a reason Christianity has been such a repressive force throughout history—despite the moderating influence of Jesus, the Bible is chockablock full of justifications for the punishment of nonbelievers and religious warfare. Even at its best, Christianity is inherently divisive—the “wages of sin is death,” and there’s no greater sin than the rejection of the Christian God. Because Christianity is a universalist, missionary faith, believers have a responsibility to deliver the gospel to their neighbors. If you believe, as evangelicals do, that millions of souls are at stake, the stripped-down, liberal version of Christianity offered by Rauch may seem like a deep abrogation of responsibility. 

“If we wanted to summarize the direction of change in American Christianity over the past century or so,” Rauch writes, “we might do well to use the term secularization.” While Rauch argues that some secularization has been good for Christianity by helping it integrate with the broader culture, he also argues that the “mainline church cast its lot with center-left progressivism and let itself drift, or at least seem to drift, from its scriptural moorings.” He cites the historian Randall Balmer, who observed in 1996 that many Protestants “stand for nothing at all, aside from some vague (albeit noble) pieties like peace, justice, and inclusiveness.” But this is just what Rauch is calling for—the elevation of vague pieties about forgiveness and courage to a central role in how Christianity interacts with the wider culture. 

Rauch argues that American evangelicals have become “secularized.” The thrust of this argument is that evangelicals thought they would reshape the GOP in their image when they became more political in the 1980s, but the opposite occurred. For decades, white evangelicals have been one of the largest and most loyal Republican voting blocs, and Rauch observes that this has been a self-reinforcing process: “Republicans self-selected into evangelical religious identities and those identities in turn reinforced the church’s partisanship.” Rauch points out that church attendance and other indicators of religiosity have declined among evangelicals in recent decades. He even argues that evangelical Christianity has become “primarily a political rather than religious identity.” 

While there are some signs that evangelicals aren’t quite as committed to their religious practices as they were at the turn of the century, the idea that politics has displaced their faith is a bold overstatement. According to the latest data from Pew, evangelicals remain disproportionately fervent in their beliefs and religious behaviors: 97 percent believe in a soul or spirit beyond the physical body; 72 percent say they pray daily; 82 percent consider the Bible very or extremely important; 84 percent believe in heaven; and 82 percent believe in hell. American history demonstrates that piety and politics don’t cancel each other out. Rauch explains why Christians are tempted to enter the political arena by summarizing several of the arguments political evangelicals often make: 

…some might expect conservative Christians to meekly accept the industrial-scale murder of unborn children, the aggressive promotion of LGBT ideology, the left’s intolerance of traditional social mores, and the relentless advance of wokeness in universities, corporations, and the media; but enough is enough. It is both natural and biblical for Christians to stand up for their values. 

Rauch challenges these claims and argues the “war on Christianity” frequently invoked by evangelicals is imaginary. The current U.S. Supreme Court is extremely pro-religious freedom, American evangelicals are protected by the First Amendment, most members of Congress are Christians, and surveys show that the vast majority of Americans approve of Christianity. But evangelicals’ perception is what matters—they have felt like their faith is under attack for decades, which has pushed them toward political action. Rauch cited a 1979 conversation between Ronald Reagan and the evangelical Jim Bakker in which the GOP presidential candidate asked: “Do you ever get the feeling sometimes that if we don’t do it now, if we let this be another Sodom and Gomorrah, that maybe we might be the generation that sees Armageddon?” 

It’s an inconvenient fact for Rauch’s argument that Christianity can coexist so comfortably with hyper-partisanship and authoritarianism.

While it’s fine to call for a gentler and more civically responsible Christianity, Rauch appears to believe that any version of the faith that inflames partisan hatreds or focuses on the culture war is, by definition, un-Christian. But this isn’t the case. When Reagan worried about the United States becoming Sodom and Gomorrah and ushering in Armageddon, he wasn’t “secularizing” Christianity by blending it with worldly politics. He was allowing his religious beliefs to inform his political views, which many Christians regard as morally and spiritually obligatory. 

The secularism of Western liberal democracies is a historical aberration. For most of history, the separation of church and state didn’t exist—everyone in society was forced to submit to the same religious strictures, and the punishment for failing to do so was often torture and death. One reason for this history of state-sanctioned dogma and repression is that eschatology is central to Christianity. The idea that certain actions on earth will lead to either eternal reward or punishment is a powerful force multiplier in human affairs, which is one of the reasons the European wars of religion were so bloody and why the role of religion in many other conflicts around the world has been to increase the level of tribal hatred on both sides. Modern religion-infused politics is just a return to the historical norm.

Photo by Julian GentileTrump: God’s Wrecking Ball 

Then there is President Donald Trump. “Absolutely nothing about secular liberalism,” Rauch writes, “required white evangelicals to embrace the likes of Donald Trump.” If there’s one argument in favor of the idea that evangelicals have allowed politics to distort their faith, it’s the overwhelming support President Trump still commands within their ranks. Rauch cites a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, which reported that evangelicals were suddenly much less concerned about the personal character of elected officials after they threw their weight behind Trump. In 2011, just 30 percent of evangelicals said an “elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life”—a proportion that jumped to 72 percent in October 2016. 

There are many reasons evangelicals cite for supporting Trump, from his nomination of pro-life Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade to the conviction that he’s an enthusiastic culture warrior who will crush wokeness. Because evangelicals are consumed by the paranoid belief that they’re an embattled group clinging to the margins of the dominant culture, they decided that they could dispense with concerns over character if it meant mobilizing a larger flock and gaining political and cultural influence. Over three-quarters of evangelicals believe the United States is losing its identity and culture, so the idea of making America great again appeals to them. Rauch cites Os Guinness, who described Trump as “God’s wrecking ball stopping America in its tracks [from] the direction it’s going and giving the country a chance to rethink.” But Rauch is right that arguments like this don’t explain the depth of evangelical support for the 45-47 President or the fact that “they did not merely support Trump, they adored him.” 

“Whatever the predicates,” Rauch writes, “embracing Trump and MAGA was fundamentally a choice and a change.” It’s true that it would have once been difficult to imagine evangelicals supporting a president like Donald Trump. It’s also true, as Rauch contends, that evangelicals now appear to follow “two incommensurable moralities, an absolute one in the personal realm and an instrumental one in the political realm.” But Cross Purposes isn’t just about the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of American evangelicals or the post-liberal justifications for Trumpism. Rauch is calling for a revival of public Christianity in America, and the evangelical capitulation to Trump raises questions about the viability of that project. 

It’s an inconvenient fact for Rauch’s argument that Christianity can coexist so comfortably with hyper-partisanship and authoritarianism. Rauch insists that evangelical Christianity is the product of a warping process of secularization—the “Church of Fear is more pagan than Christian,” he insists. But as Pew reports, evangelicals are disproportionately likely to attend church, pray daily, believe in the importance of the Bible, and so on. Rauch is in no position to adjudicate who is a true believer and who isn’t (nor is anyone else, me included), and if it’s true that the only real Christianity is the reassuring liberal version he endorses, the vast majority of Christians throughout history were just as “secularized” as today’s evangelicals. 

“Mr. Jefferson, Build Up that Wall” 

Because Rauch has such an innocuous view of “essential” Christian theology, he believes Christianity doesn’t need to “be anything other than itself” to ensure that Christians keep their commitments to “God and liberal democracy.” If only it were so easy. Despite the steady decline of Christianity in the United States, 63 percent of the adult population still self-reports as Christian—a proportion that has actually stabilized since 2019. In any religious population so large, there will always be significant variation in what people believe and how they express those beliefs in the public square. Christianity doesn’t necessarily lead to certain political positions—the faith has been invoked to support slavery and to oppose it; to justify imperialism and to condemn it; to damn nonbelievers as heretics bound for hell or to embrace everyone as part of a universalist message of redemption. Of course, it would be nice if all Christians adopted Jonathan Rauch’s version of civic theology, but there will always be scriptural warrants for other forms of theology that Rauch believes are corrosive to our civic culture. 

Americans who believe that Christianity is untrue and unnecessary for morality should continue to make their case in the public square.

According to Pew, Trump’s net favorability rating among American agnostics is just 17 percent, and it falls to 12 percent among atheists. On average, nearly half of American Protestants view Trump favorably—a proportion that falls to 25 percent among the “religiously unaffiliated,” which includes atheists, agnostics, and those who define their religious beliefs as “nothing in particular.” Rauch presents the rise of post-liberal Christianity and the politicization of American evangelicals as examples of secular intrusions of one kind or another. He doesn’t entertain the possibility that hisconception of Christianity as conveniently aligned with liberal democracy is a modern, secularized vision that isn’t consistent with how Christianity has historically functioned politically—or with the Bible itself. 

It’s a shame that Rauch regards his 2003 essay about the value of secularization as the “dumbest thing I ever wrote.” While there’s nothing wrong with emphasizing the aspects of Christian theology that support liberal democracy, there’s a more effective way to resist post-liberal Christianity, MAGA evangelicalism, and all the other intersections between faith and politics today. Americans who believe that Christianity is untrue and unnecessary for morality should continue to make their case in the public square. Rauch is wrong to argue that Christianity is a load-bearing wall in American democracy. The real load-bearing wall in the United States is the one constructed by Jefferson at the nation’s founding, and which has sustained our liberal democratic culture ever since: the wall of separation between church and state.

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“It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” —Mark Twain

When it comes to opinions concerning standardized tests, it seems that most people know for sure that tests are simply terrible. In fact, a recent article published by the National Education Association (NEA) began by saying, “Most of us know that standardized tests are inaccurate, inequitable, and often ineffective at gauging what students actually know.”1 But do they really know that standardized tests are all these bad things? What does the hard evidence suggest? In the same article, the author quoted a first-grade teacher who advocated teaching to each student’s particular learning style—another ill-conceived educational fad 2 that, unfortunately, draws as much praise as standardized tests draw damnation.

Indeed, a typical post in even the most prestigious of news outlets3, 4 will make several negative claims about standardized admission tests. In this article, we describe each of those claims and then review what mainstream scientific research has to say about them.

Claim 1: Admission tests are biased against historically disadvantaged racial/ethnic groups.

Response: There are racial/ethnic average group differences in admission test scores, but those differences do not qualify as evidence that the tests are biased.

The claim that admission tests are biased against certain groups is an unwarranted inference based on differences in average test performance among groups.

The differences themselves are not in question. They have persisted for decades despite substantial efforts to ameliorate them.5 As shown in the table above and reviewed more comprehensively elsewhere,6, 7 average group differences appear on just about any test of cognitive performance—even those administered before kindergarten. Gaps in admission test performance among racial groups mirror other achievement gaps (e.g., high school GPA) that also manifest well before high school graduation. (Note: these group differences are differences between the averages— technically, the means—for the respective groups. The full range of scores is found within all the groups, and there is significant overlap between groups.)

Group differences in admission test scores do not mean that the tests are biased. An observed difference does not provide an explanation of the difference, and to presume that a group difference is due to a biased test is to presume an explanation of the difference. As noted recently by scientists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja, the existence of group differences on standardized tests is well known; what is not well understood is what causes the disparities: “genetic differences, societal issues such as poverty, past and present racism, cultural differences, poor access to educational opportunities, the interaction between genes and social environments, or a combination of the above.”8 Test bias, then, is just one of many potential factors that could be responsible for group disparities in performance on admission tests. As we will see in addressing Claim 2, psychometricians have a clear empirical method for confirming or disconfirming the existence of test bias and they have failed to find any evidence for its existence. (Psychometrics is that division of psychology concerned with the theory and technique of measurement of cognitive abilities and personality traits.)

Claim 2: Standardized tests do not predict academic outcomes.

Response: Standardized tests do predict academic outcomes, including academic performance and degree completion, and they predict with similar accuracy for all racial/ethnic groups.

The purpose of standardized admission tests is simple: to predict applicants’ future academic performance. Any metric that fails to predict is rendered useless for making admission decisions. The Scholastic Assessment Test (now, simply called the SAT) has predictive validity if it predicts outcomes such as college grade point average (GPA), whether the student returns for the second year (retention), and degree completion. Likewise, the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) has predictive validity if it predicts outcomes such as graduate school GPA, degree completion, and the important real world measure of publications. In practice, predictive validity, for example between SAT scores and college GPA, implies that if you pull two SAT-takers at random off the street, the one who earned a higher score on the SAT is more likely to earn a higher GPA in college (and is less likely to drop out). The predictive utility of standardized tests is solid and well established. In the same way that blood pressure is an important but not perfect predictor of stroke, cognitive test scores are an important but not perfect predictor of academic outcomes. For example, the correlation between SAT scores and college GPA is around .5,9, 10, 11 the correlations between GRE scores and various measures of graduate school performance range between .3 and .4,12 and the correlation between Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores and licensing exam scores during medical school is greater than .6.13 Using aggregate rather than individual test scores yields even higher correlations that predict a college’s graduation rate given the ACT/SAT score of its incoming students. Based on 2019 data, the correlations between six-year graduation rate and a college’s 25th percentile ACT or SAT score are between .87 and .90.14

Standardized tests do predict academic outcomes, including academic performance and degree completion, and they predict with similar accuracy for all racial/ethnic groups.

Research confirming the predictive validity of standardized tests is robust and provides a stark contrast to popular claims to the contrary.15, 17, 18 The latter are not based on the results of meta-analyses19, 20 nor on studies conducted by psychometricians.21, 22, 23, 24, 25 Rather, those claims are based on cherry-picked studies that rely on select samples of students who have already been admitted to highly selective programs—partially because of their high test scores—and who therefore have a severely restricted range of test scores. For example, one often-mentioned study26 investigated whether admitted students’ GRE scores predicted PhD completion in STEM programs and found that students with higher scores were not more likely to complete their degree. In another study of students in biomedical graduate programs at Vanderbilt,27 links between GRE scores and academic outcomes were trivial. However, because the samples of students in both studies had a restricted range of GRE scores—all scored well above average28—the results are essentially uninterpretable. This situation is analogous to predicting U.S. men’s likelihood of playing college basketball based on their height, but only including in the sample men who are well above average. If we want to establish the link between men’s height and playing college ball, it is more appropriate to begin with a sample of men who range from 5'1" (well below the mean) to 6'7" (well above the mean) than to begin with a restricted sample of men who are all at least 6'4" (two standard deviations above the mean). In the latter context, what best differentiates those who play college ball versus not is unlikely to be their height—not when they are all quite tall to begin with.

Students of higher socioeconomic status (SES) do tend to score higher on the SAT and fare somewhat better in college. However, this link is not nearly as strong as many people … tend to assume.

Given these demonstrated facts about predictive validity, let’s return to the first claim, that admission tests are biased against certain groups. This claim can be evaluated by comparing the predictive validities for each racial or ethnic group. As noted previously, the purpose of standardized admission tests is to predict applicants’ future academic performance. If the tests serve that purpose similarly for all groups, then, by definition, they are not biased. And this is exactly what scientific studies find, time and time again. For example, the SAT is a strong predictor of first year college performance and retention to the second year, and to the same degree (that is, they predict with essentially equal accuracy) for students of varying racial and ethnic groups.29, 30 Thus, regardless of whether individuals are Black, Hispanic, White, or Asian, if they score higher on the SAT, they have a higher probability of doing well in college. Likewise, individuals who score higher on the GRE tend to have higher graduate school GPAs and a higher likelihood of eventual degree attainment; and these correlations manifest similarly across racial/ethnic groups, males and females, academic departments and disciplines, and master’s as well as doctoral programs.31, 32, 33, 34 When differential prediction does occur, it is usually in the direction of slightly overpredicting Black students’ performance (such that Black students perform at a somewhat lower level in college than would be expected based on their test scores).

Claim 3: Standardized tests are just indicators of wealth or access to test preparation courses.

Response: Standardized tests were designed to detect (sometimes untapped) academic potential, which is very useful; and controlling for wealth and privilege does not detract from their utility.

Some who are critical of standardized tests say that their very existence is racist. That argument is not borne out by the history and expansion of the SAT. One of the long-standing purposes of the SAT has been to lessen the use of legacy admissions (set-asides for the progeny of wealthy donors to the college or university) and thereby to draw college students from more walks of life than elite high schools of the East Coast.35 Standardized tests have a long history of spotting “diamonds in the rough”—underprivileged youths of any race or ethnic group whose potential has gone unnoticed or who have under-performed in high school (for any number of potential reasons, including intellectual boredom). Notably, comparisons of Black and White students with similar 12th grade test scores show that Black students are more likely than White students to complete college.36 And although most of us think of the SAT and comparable American College Test (ACT) as tests taken by high school juniors and seniors, these tests have a very successful history of identifying intellectual potential among middle-schoolers37 and predicting their subsequent educational and career accomplishments.38

Students of higher socioeconomic status (SES) do tend to score higher on the SAT and fare somewhat better in college.39 However, this link is not nearly as strong as many people, especially critics of standardized tests, tend to assume—17 percent of the top 10 percent of ACT and SAT scores come from students whose family incomes fall in the bottom 25 percent of the distribution.40 Further, if admission tests were mere “wealth” tests, the association between students’ standardized test scores and performance in college would be negligible once students’ SES is accounted for statistically. Instead, the association between SAT scores and college grades (estimated at .47) is essentially unchanged (moving only to .44) after statistically controlling for SES.41, 42

Standardized tests have a long history of spotting “diamonds in the rough”—underprivileged youths of any race or ethnic group whose potential has gone unnoticed.

A related common criticism of standardized tests is that higher SES students have better access to special test preparation programs and specific coaching services that advertise their potential to raise students’ test scores. The findings from systematic research, however, are clear: the effects of test preparation programs, including semester-long, weekly, in-person structured sessions with homework assignments,43 demonstrate limited gains, and this is the case for the ACT, SAT, GRE, and LSAT.44, 45, 46, 47 Average gains are small—approximately one-tenth to one-fifth of a standard deviation. Moreover, free test preparation materials are readily available at libraries and online; and for tests such as the SAT and ACT, many high schools now provide, and often require, free in-class test preparation sessions during the year leading up to the test.

Claim 4: Admission decisions are fairer without standardized tests.

Response: The admissions process will be less useful, and more unfair, if standardized tests are not used.

According to the fairtest.org website, in 2019, before the pandemic, just over 1,000 colleges were test-optional. Today, there are over 1,800. In 2022–2023, only 43 percent of applicants submitted ACT/SAT scores, compared to 75 percent in 2019–2020.48 Currently, there are over 80 colleges that do not consider ACT/SAT scores in the admissions process even if an applicant submits them. These colleges are using a test-free or test-blind admissions policy. The same trend is occurring for the use of the GRE among graduate programs.49

The movement away from admission tests began before the COVID-19 pandemic but was accelerated by it, and there are multiple reasons why so many colleges and universities are remaining test-optional or test-free. First, very small colleges (and programs) have taken enrollment hits and suffered financially. By eliminating the tests, they hope to attract more applicants and, hopefully, enroll more students. Once a few schools go test-optional or test-free, other schools feel they have to as well in order to be competitive in attracting applicants. Second, larger, less-selective schools (and programs) can similarly benefit from relaxed admission standards by enrolling more students, which, in turn, benefits their bottom line. Both types of schools also increase their percentages of minority student enrollment. It looks good to their constituents that they are enrolling young people from historically underrepresented groups and giving them a chance at success in later life. Highly selective schools also want a diverse student body but, similar to the previously mentioned schools, will not see much of a change in minority graduation rates simply by lowering admission standards if they also maintain their classroom academic standards. They will get more applicants, but they are still limited by the number of students they can serve. Rejection rates increase (due to more applicants) and other metrics become more important in identifying which students can succeed in a highly competitive academic environment.

The admissions process will be less useful, and more unfair, if standardized tests are not used.

There are multiple concerns with not including admission tests as a metric to identify students’ potential for succeeding in college and advanced degree programs, particularly those programs that are highly competitive. First, the admissions process will be less useful. Other metrics, with the exception of high school GPA as a solid predictor of first-year grades in college, have lower predictive validity than tests such as the SAT. For example, letters of recommendation are generally considered nearly as important as test scores and prior grades, yet letters of recommendation are infamously unreliable—there is more agreement between two letters about two different applicants from the same letter-writer than there is between two letters about the same applicant from two different letter-writers.50 (Tip to applicants—make sure you ask the right person to write your recommendation). Moreover, letters of recommendation are weak predictors of subsequent performance. The validity of letters of recommendation as a predictor of college GPA hovers around .3; and although letters of recommendation are ubiquitous in applications for entry to advanced degree programs, their predictive validity in that context is even weaker.51 More importantly, White and Asian students typically get more positive letters of recommendation than students from underrepresented groups.52 For colleges that want a more diverse student body, placing more emphasis on such admission metrics that also reveal race differences will not help.

Without the capacity to rely on a standard, objective metric such as an admission test score, some admissions committee members may rely on subjective factors, which will only exacerbate … disparate representation.

This brings us to our second concern. Because race differences exist in most metrics that admission officers would consider, getting rid of admission test scores will not solve any problems. For example, race differences in performance on Advanced Placement (AP) course exams, now used as an indicator of college readiness, are substantial. In 2017, just 30 percent of Black students’ AP exams earned a qualifying score compared to more than 60 percent of Asian and White students’ exams.53 Similar disparities exist for high school GPA; in 2009, Black students averaged 2.69, whereas White students averaged 3.09,54 even with grade inflation across U.S. high schools.55, 56 Finally, as mentioned previously, race differences even exist in the very subjective letters of recommendation submitted for college admission.57

Removing tests from the process is not going to address existing inequities; if anything, it promises to exacerbate them.

Without the capacity to rely on a standard, objective metric such as an admission test score, some admissions committee members may rely on subjective factors, which will only exacerbate any disparate representation of students who come from lower-income families or historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. For example, in the absence of standardized test scores, admissions committee members may give more attention to the name and reputation of students’ high school, or, in the case of graduate admissions, the name recognition of their undergraduate research mentor and university. Admissions committees for advanced degree programs may be forced to pay greater attention to students’ research experience and personal statements, which are unfortunately susceptible to a variety of issues, not the least being that students of high socioeconomic backgrounds may have more time to invest in gaining research experience, as well as the resources to pay for “assistance” in preparing a well-written and edited personal statement.58

So why continue to shoot the messenger?

If scientists were to find that a medical condition is more common in one group than in another, they would not automatically presume the diagnostic test is invalid or biased. As one example, during the pandemic, COVID-19 infection rates were higher among Black and Hispanic Americans compared to White and Asian Americans. Scientists did not shoot the messenger or engage in ad hominem attacks by claiming that the very existence of COVID tests or support for their continued use is racist.

Sadly, however, that is not the case with standardized tests of college or graduate readiness, which have been attacked for decades,59 arguably because they reflect an inconvenient, uncomfortable, and persistent truth in our society: There are group differences in test performance, and because the tests predict important life outcomes, the group differences in test scores forecast group differences in those life outcomes.

The attack on testing is likely rooted in a well-intentioned concern that the social consequences of test use are inconsistent with our social values of equality.60 That is, there is a repeated and illogical rejection of what “is” in favor of what educators feel “ought” to be.61 However, as we have seen in addressing misconceptions about admission tests, removing tests from the process is not going to address existing inequities; if anything, it promises to exacerbate them by denying the existence of actual performance gaps. If we are going to move forward on a path that promises to address current inequities, we can best do so by assessing as accurately as possible each individual to provide opportunities and interventions that coincide with that individual’s unique constellation of abilities, skills, and preferences.62, 63

When people think of fashion, they often picture runway shows, luxury brands, pricey handbags, or the latest trends among teens and young adults. Fashion can be elite and expensive or cheap and fleeting—a statement made through clothing, hairstyles, or even body modifications. Regardless of gender, fashion is frequently viewed as a way to signal income, social status, group affiliation, personal taste, or even to attract a partner. But why does fashion serve these purposes, and where do these associations come from? An evolutionary perspective offers surprising insights into the role of fashion in signaling status and sexual attraction.

The adaptive nature of ornamentation is something that has been long admired and studied in a wealth of nonhuman species. Most examples are ornaments the animals grow themselves.1 Consider the peacock’s tail, a sexually selected trait present only in males.2 Peahens are attracted to males with the largest and most symmetrical tails.

The ability of males to grow a large and symmetric tail is related to their overall fitness (the ability to pass their genes into the next generation), so that females that mate with them will have better quality offspring. Studies have shown that altering the length and symmetry of peacock tails influences mating success—shorter tails lead to less mating opportunities for the males. Antlers are primarily found on male members of the Cervidae family, which include elk, deer, moose, and caribou (the one species in which the females also grow antlers).3 Antlers, unlike horns, are shed and regrown every year. They are used as weapons, symbols of sexual prowess or status, and as tools to dig in the snow for food. Antlers increase in size until males reach maturity, and grow larger with better nutrition, higher testosterone levels, and better health or absence of disease during growth. The size of a male’s antlers is also influenced by genetics and females prefer to mate with males with larger antlers compared to smaller ones (much like in the peacocks).4, 5

In many species, exaggerated male structures like tails, antlers, bright coloration, and sheer size can serve as a weapon in intrasexual competition and as an ornament to signal genetic quality and thereby promote female choice. As a result, much attention has been focused on male ornamentation in nonhuman animals and what it indicates.6 Moreover, males of various species add outside materials to their bodies, nests, and environments specifically to attract mates. Consider the caddisfly, the bower bird, and even the decorator crab; all use decoration to attract females.7 Interestingly, in what are often referred to as sex role-reversed species, such as the pipefish,8 it is the females who are more competitive for mates and are more highly ornamented. But what about humans? Has ornamentation or fashion in humans also been shaped by sexual selection?

Humans do not have “natural” ornaments like tails or antlers to display their quality.

Humans have a fascination with fashion, as best summed up by the psychologist George Sproles:9 “Psychologists speak of fashion as the seeking of individuality; sociologists see class competition and social conformity to norms of dress; economists see a pursuit of the scarce; aestheticians view the artistic components and ideals of beauty; historians offer evolutionary explanations for changes in design. Literally hundreds of viewpoints unfold, from a literature more immense than for any phenomenon of consumer behavior.” To be fair, humans do not have “natural” ornaments like tails or antlers to display their quality. They also do not have much in the way of fur, armor, or feathers to protect their bodies or to regulate temperature, so “adornment” in the form of clothing was necessary for survival. However, humans have spent millennia fashioning and refashioning what they wear, not just according to climate or condition, but for status, sex, and aesthetics.

If fashion has been such a large part of human history with deep evolutionary roots, why do so many trends, preferences, and standards fluctuate across cultures and time? This is because fashion is a display of status as well as mating appeal. Many human preferences are influenced by context. For example, male preferences for women’s body size and weight shift with resource availability; in populations with significant history of food shortages, larger or obese women are prized. Larger women are displaying that they have, or can acquire, resources that others cannot and have sufficient bodily resources for reproduction.10 When resources are historically abundant, men prefer thinner women; in this context, these women display that they can acquire higher-quality nutrition and have time or resources to keep a fit, youthful figure. When tan bodies indicated working outside, and therefore lower standing, pale skin was preferred. When some societies shifted to tan bodies reflecting a life of resources and leisure, they gave tanning prestige, and it became “fashionable.”11

The shifts in what is fashionable can be attributed to these environmental changes, but one principle remains constant: if it displays status (social, financial, or sexual), it is preferred.12 A good example of this would be jewelry, which shifts with fashion trends—whether gold or silver is in this season, or whether rose gold is passé. However, if the appeal of jewelry was just aesthetic—to be shiny or pretty—people would not care whether the jewels were real and expensive or cheap “costume” jewelry. However, they do care, because expense indicates greater wealth and status. This is so much so that people often make comments regarding the authenticity or the size (and therefore cost) of jewels, such as the size of diamonds in engagement rings.13

Fashion for Sexual Display

It would be surprising if fashion and how humans choose to ornament themselves was not influenced by sexual selection. Humans show a number of traits associated across other species that are sexually selected, including dimorphism in physical size and aggression, delayed sexual maturity in males, and greater male variation in reproductive success (defined as the number of offspring).14 Men typically choose clothing that emphasizes the breadth of their shoulders and sometimes adds to their height through shoes with lifts or heels. In many modern western populations, men also spend significant time crafting their body shape by weight lifting to attain that triangle shaped upper body without the benefit of shoulder pads or other deceptive tailoring signals. These are all traits that females have been shown to value in terms of choosing a mate.15

Illustration by Marco Lawrence for SKEPTIC

Examining artistic depictions of bodies provides particular insights into human preferences, as these figures are not limited by biology and can be as exaggerated as the artist wants. We can also see how the population reacts to these figures in terms of popularity and artistic trends. The triangular masculine body shape has been historically exaggerated in art and among fictional heroes, and this feature continues today as comic books and graphic artists create extreme triangular torsos and film superhero costumes with tight waists and padded shoulders and arms. These costumes are not new and do not vary a great deal. They mimic the costume of warriors, soldiers, and other figures of authority or dominance. As cultural scholar Friedrich Weltzien writes, “The superhero costume is an imitation of the historical models of the warrior, the classic domain of heroic manhood.”16

If it displays status (social, financial, or sexual), it is preferred.

Indeed, military personnel and heroes share behaviors and purposes (detecting threats, fighting adversaries, protecting communities, and achieving status in hierarchies). These costumes act as physical markers and are used to display dominance in size, muscularity, and markers of testosterone. Research has found that comic book men have shoulder-to-waist ratios (the triangular torso) and upper body muscularity almost twice that of real-life young men, and that Marvel comic book heroes in particular are more triangular and muscular than championship body builders. What is remarkable is that even with imaginary bodies, male comic book hero “suits” have several features that, not coincidentally, exaggerate markers of testosterone and signal dominance and strength. Even more triangular torsos are created by padded shoulders and accents (capes, epaulets) and flat stomachs (tight costumes with belts, abdominal accents) with chest pieces that have triangular shapes or insignia, large legs and footwear (boots, holsters), and helmets and other face protection that create angular jawlines.17

Men’s choice of clothing and jewelry … convey information about status and resources that are valued by the opposite sex for what they may contribute to offspring success.

The appearance of a tall, strong, healthy masculine body shape is often weighted strongly by women in their judgments of men. There is also an interaction between sex appeal and status. Women choose these men in part because the men’s appearance affects how other men treat them. Men who appear more masculine and dominant elevate their status among men, which makes them more attractive to women.18 Men’s choice of clothing and jewelry or other methods of adornment can not only emphasize physical traits but also convey information about status and resources that are valued by the opposite sex for what they may contribute to offspring success. Some clothing brands (or jewelry) are more expensive and are associated with more wealth, and so are likely to attract the attention of the opposite sex; think of brand logos, expensive watches, or even the car logo on a keychain as indicators of wealth.19

Female fashion also shows indications of being influenced by its ability to signal mate value or enhance it, sometimes deceptively. In many mammals, female red ornamentation is a sexual signal designed to attract mates.20 Experimental studies of human females suggest that they are more likely to choose red clothing when interacting with an attractive man than an attractive woman;21 the suggestion being that red coloration can serve a sexual signaling function in humans as well as other primates. Red dyes in clothing and cosmetics have been extremely popular over centuries, notably cochineal, madder, and rubia. In fact, the earliest documented dyed thread was red.22

One of the primary attributes that women have accentuated throughout time is their waist-to-hip ratio, a result of estrogen directing fat deposition23—a signal of reproductive viability. The specific male preferences regarding waist to hip ratio have been documented for decades.24 But is this signal, and its amplification, really a global phenomenon? It is easy to give western examples of waist minimization and hip amplification—corsets, hoop skirts, bustles, and especially panniers,25 or fake hips that can make a woman as wide as a couch. Even before these, there was the “bum roll”—rolled up fabric attached to a belt to create a larger bulge over the buttocks.

Outside of Western cultures, one can find a variety of “wrappers” (le pagne in Francophone African cultures), yards of fabric wrapped around the hips and other parts of the body to accentuate and amplify the hips.26 Not surprisingly, these are also a show of status as the quality of the fabric is prioritized and displayed.

Just as with men, this specific attribute is wildly exaggerated in fictional depictions of women, from ancient statues to contemporary comic, film, and video game characters. One study concluded that “when limitations imposed by biology are removed, preferred waist sizes become impossibly small.”27 Comic book heroines are drawn with skintight costumes and exaggerated waist-to-hip ratios. They have smaller waists and wider hips than typical humans by far; the average waist-to-hip ratio of a comic book woman was smaller than the minimum waist-to-hip ratio of real women in the U.S. Heroine costumes further accentuate this already extreme curve by use of small belts or sashes, lines, and color changes. Costumes are either skintight or show skin (or both), with cutouts on the arms, thighs, midriff, and in particular, on the chest to show cleavage. The irony of battle uniforms that serve no protective purpose has been pointed out many times in cultural studies.28

Another feminine feature that plays a role in fashion is leg length. Various artistic depictions of the human body throughout history show that while the ideal leg length in women has increased over time, the preference for male leg length has not shifted. This increase appears to emerge during the Renaissance, which may be due to increases in food security and health during that time. As with many physical preferences in humans, leg length can be an indicator of health, particularly in cases of malnutrition or illness during development. This is another important reminder that preferences are shaped by resources, and consistently shift toward features that display status. What is the ideal leg length? One study found that if a woman’s height was 170 cm (5 foot 7 inches), the majority favored a leg length that was 6 cm (2.36 inches) longer, a difference that corresponds to the average height of high-heeled shoes.29 You can probably see where this is going: Sexual attractiveness ratings of legs correlate with perceived leg length, and legs are perceived as longer with high-heeled shoes. It should come as no surprise that women may accentuate or elongate their legs with high heels.

Photo by Ham Kris / Unsplash

High heeled shoes were not originally the domain of women, as they are thought to have originated in Western Asia prior to the 16th century in tandem with male military dress and equestrianism. The trend spread to Europe, with both sexes wearing heightened heels by the mid-17th century.30 They have remained present in men’s fashion in the form of shoes for rockstars and entertainers (e.g., Elton John), and boots worn by cowboys and motorcyclists. However, these heels are either short or hidden as lifts to make the men appear taller. By the 18th century, high heels became worn primarily by women, particularly as societies redefined fashion as frivolous and feminine.

As one might expect, high heels do more than elongate legs and increase height. High heels change the shape of the body and how it moves. Women wearing heels increase their lumbar curvature and exaggerate their hip rotation, breasts, and buttocks, making their body curvier. As supermodel Veronica Webb put it, “Heels put your ass on a pedestal.” When women walk in heels, they must take smaller steps, utilize greater pelvic rotation, and have greater pelvic tilt. All of these changes result in greater attractiveness ratings. Wearing high heels also denotes status—high heel shoes are typically more expensive than flat shoes, and women who wear them sustain serious damage if they have occupations that require a lot of labor. Therefore, women who wear heels appear to be in positions where they do less labor and have more resources. Research has asked this question directly, and both men and women view women in high heels as being of higher status than women wearing flat shoes.31

Fashion can also signify membership in powerful groups, such as the government, the military, or nobility.

At this point, it’s hardly surprising to learn that, compared to actual humans, comic book women are depicted with longer legs that align with peak preferences for leg length in several cultures, while men are shown with legs of average length. Women are also far more often drawn in heels or on tiptoe, regardless of context. Women are even drawn on tiptoe when barefoot, in costume stocking feet, and even when wearing other types of shoes or boots. This further elongates their already longer legs.32

Fashion as Status Signaling

Social status, as previously mentioned in terms of traits valued by the opposite sex, is also often displayed through fashion in ways relevant to within-sex status signaling, particularly when it comes to accessories. Men making fashion choices that indicate masculinity and dominance include preferences for expensive cars and watches—aspects of luxury consumption.33 Women not only emphasize their own beauty but also carry bags, for example, that are brand conscious, conveying information about their wealth and perhaps their preferences for specific causes, as in the popularity of animal welfare friendly high-end brands such as Stella McCartney.

Unlike high-end cars, however, which signal status to possible mates as well as status competitors, men are largely unaware of the signals sent from women to other women by such accessories. Women are highly attuned to brands and costs of women’s handbags, while most men do not seem to recognize the signaling value.34 While luxury products can boost self-esteem, express identity, and signal status, men tend to use conspicuous luxury products to attract mates, while women may use such products to deter female rivals. Some studies have shown that activating mate guarding motives prompts women to seek and display lavish possessions, such as clothes, handbags, and jewelry, and that women use pricey possessions to signal that their romantic partner is especially devoted to them.35

Fashion can also signify membership in powerful groups, such as the government, the military, or nobility. It can also signify the person’s role in society in other ways, for example, whether someone is married, engaged, or betrothed (by their own volition or by family). There are several changes in fashion that are specific to the various events surrounding a wedding, each with its own cultural differences and symbolism, and far too many to review here.36 Several researchers have explored the prominence and the symbolic value of a bride’s traditional dress in different societies.37 However, these signifiers are not just specific to the wedding rituals; what these women wear as wives (and widows) is culturally dictated for the rest of their lives.

These types of salient markers of female marital status are present in a number of societies. For example, not only are Latvian brides no longer allowed to wear a crown, but they may be given an apron and other displays (such as housekeeping tools) that indicate that they are now wives. In other cultures, girls will wear veils from puberty to their wedding day, and the removal of the veil is an obvious display of the change in status. Some cultures symbolically throw away the bride’s old clothes, as she is no longer that person; she is now the wife of her husband. In Turkey, married Pomak women cut locks of hair on either side of their head, and their clothing is much simpler in style than the highly decorated daily clothing of unmarried Pomak women. However, wives do wear more expensive necklaces—gold or pearls rather than beads.38 Notice that this is not only a signal of marital status, but also a signal of the groom’s wealth.

An evolutionary perspective suggests … people who choose to tattoo and pierce their bodies are doing so … because it serves as an advertisement or signal of their genetic quality.

Meanwhile, for men, the vast majority of cultures possess only one marker for married men—a wedding ring—which is also expected of women. Why are there more visible markers of marital status for women than for men? This seems likely to be a product of the elevated sexual jealousy and resulting proprietariness employed by men to prevent cuckoldry—what evolutionary psychologists call mate guarding. Salient markers of marital status for women show other men that she is attached to, or the property of, her husband. If the term “property” seems like an exaggeration, cultures have been documented to have rituals specifically for the purpose of transferring ownership of the bride from her parents to her husband, with the accompanying changes in appearance to declare that transfer to the public.39

Tattoos as Signals of Mate Quality, Social Status, and Group Membership

Body modifications, such as tattoos and piercings, have become increasingly prevalent in recent years in Western culture, with rates in the United States approaching 25 percent.40 Historically, tattooing and piercing were frequently used as an indicator of social status41 or group membership, for example, among criminals, gang members, sailors, and soldiers. While this corresponds with all of the other types of adornment we have reviewed, other researchers have suggested that these explanations don’t fully illuminate why individuals should engage in such costly and painful behavior when other methods of affiliation, such as team colors, clothing, or jewelry are less of a health risk. Tattoos and piercings are not only painful but entail health risks, including infections and disease transmission, such as hepatitis and HIV.42 One could suggest that the permanence of body modifications is a marker of commitment or significance, but an evolutionary perspective suggests an additional level of explanation: that people who choose to tattoo and pierce their bodies are doing so not only to show their bravery and toughness, but also because it serves as an advertisement or signal of their genetic quality. Good genetic quality and immunocompetence may be signaled by the presence and appearance of tattoos and piercings in much the same way as ornamentation, much as the peacock’s tail (in its size and symmetry), serves as a signal of male health and genetic quality.43

Photo by benjamin lehman / Unsplash

Even with tattoos, the same areas of the body are accentuated as we see in clothing.44 Researchers have reported sex differences in the placement of tattoos such that their respective secondary sexual characteristics were highlighted, with males concentrating on their upper bodies drawing attention to the shoulder-to-hip ratio. Females had more abdominal and backside tattoos, drawing attention to the waist-to-hip ratio. The emphasis seems to be on areas highlighting fertility in females and physical strength in males, essential features of physical attractiveness.45 In fact, female body modification in the abdominal region was most common in geographic regions with higher pathogen load, again suggesting that such practices may serve to signal physical and reproductive health.46 Recent work has also indicated social norms influence how tattoos affect perceptions of beauty such that younger people and ones who themselves are tattooed see them as enhancing attractiveness.47

Tattoos and piercings are not only painful but entail health risks, including infections and disease transmission, such as hepatitis and HIV.

Studies on humans and nonhuman animals have indicated that low fluctuating asymmetry (that is, greater overall symmetry in body parts) is related to developmental stability and is a likely indicator of genetic quality.48 Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), which is defined as deviation from perfect bilateral symmetry, is thought to reflect an organism’s relative inability to maintain stable morphological development in the face of environmental and genetic stressors. One study found49 FA to be lower (that is, the symmetry was greater) in those with tattoos or piercings. This effect was much stronger in males than in females, suggesting that those with greater developmental stability were able to tolerate the costs of tattoos or piercings, and that these serve as an honest signal of biological quality, at least in the men in this study.50 Researchers have also tested the “human canvas hypothesis,” which suggests that tattooing and piercing are hard to fake advertisements of fitness or social affiliations and the “upping the ante hypothesis,” which suggests tattooing is a costly honest signal of good genes in that injury to the body can demonstrate how well it heals. In short, tattoos and piercings not only display a group affiliation, but also that the owner possesses higher genetic quality and health, and these tattoos are placed on areas that accentuate “sexy” body parts. Thus, we have come full circle with humans: Just as other species like peacocks, people show off ornamentation to display their quality as mates and access to resources. Even taking into account cultural differences and generational shifts, the primary message remains.

Social Factors in Human Ornamentation

In addition to all of the evidence we have presented here, ornamentation is not just about mating or even signaling social status. Humans also signal group membership or allegiance through fashion. Modern sports fans show their allegiance to their sports teams by various shirts, hats, and other types of clothing—think the “cheese head” hats worn by Green Bay Packers fans at the team’s NFL home games. Fans of various musical performers, from Kid Rock to Taylor Swift, display their loyalty with concert shirts and other apparel. Typically, they also feel an automatic sense of connection when they encounter others sporting similar items. As discussed, tattoos can be seen as signals of genetic quality or health, and over the last twenty or so years tattoos have also increasingly become seen as statements of individuality. And yet, many serious sports fans, for example, have similar tattoos representing their favorite teams. Marvel fans sport Iron Man and Captain America illustrations on their skin, while fans of the television show Supernatural have the anti-possession symbol from the show tattooed on their torso. It may be that in many populations with weak social and family connections, individuals are seeking connection, and adornment is one way of indicating participation in a community or group. You can also see this in terms of political allegiance and the proliferation of Harris-Waltz and MAGA-MAHA merchandise during the 2024 election cycle in the United States.

While it is clear that an adaptationist approach to ornamentation can explain many aspects of fashion related to signaling social status (whether honest or not), group membership, or mate quality, much research remains to be done, including more work on what aspects are cross-culturally consistent and that are constrained more by unique cultural aspects or the local ecology. Not everything is the product of an adaptation; some aspects of fashion that seem less predictable or may be less enduring are unlikely to be explained by ornamentation and signaling theory because they are not rooted in mating or social motives. That being said, many fashion choices, including our own (for better or worse) make a lot of sense in the light of evolutionary processes. For all the small shifts from generation to generation and across cultures, the main themes remain the same. As Rachel Zoe noted: “Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak.”

What do your fashion choices have to say?

Their exciting nature, combined with the fact nobody's ever won one, make paranormal challenge prizes important educational tools.

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When navigating the modern world with its varied conveniences and modes of leisure, it seems that we humans are completely detached from the harsh environments that our species evolved out of thousands of years ago. Under stress, or in moments of crisis, however, the tools that our minds have evolved to deal with danger or imminent threat become quite apparent. During times like the recent global COVID-19 pandemic, when resources become unpredictably unavailable, we can turn to rather selfishly acquiring large quantities of particular products. From toilet paper rolls to baking flour, perceived essentials are coveted and cached away, hidden from other individuals, reserved for personal use in the future.

During such periods of uncertainty and upheaval, we aim also to construct meaning and a story line from the world rapidly changing around us—one by-product of which is the development of conspiracy theories. While such actions may be frowned upon in today’s society, and can be explained by hardwired behavioral reactions, they also point out the sophisticated cognitive tools that were likely critical to our evolutionary survival, indeed success, namely: recall of specific past events, future planning, the attribution of mental states to other individuals (theory of mind), a strong belief in some source of causation, and an underlying curiosity about the world we live in.

Thankfully, perhaps, we are not the only species with a tendency to cache goods when resources become scarce or when environments are risky—this is a trait we share with over 200 other vertebrates.1 Food-caching behavior is particularly impressive among birds such as the Clark’s nutcracker. This species lives in harsh seasonal environments and can cache tens of thousands of pine seeds within a season. Remarkably, they are able to remember and retrieve the seeds with great accuracy over nine months after storing them.2 The scrub jay on the other hand, caches a smaller number of more varied items, some of which perish relatively quickly (insects and olives, for example), and must therefore also keep track of the decay rates of different food items, and the passage of time, in order to successfully retrieve edible snacks.3 Are these remarkable behavioral feats potentially underpinned by sophisticated cognitive tools like our own, or can they be explained in terms of simpler, hard-wired behavioral predispositions?

The Clark’s nutcracker can cache tens of thousands of pine seeds within a season and remember and retrieve the seeds with great accuracy over nine months after storing them.

Ethologists and comparative psychologists who study some of the cleverest organisms on the planet have grappled with such questions concerning the nature and origin of intelligence for decades, across a wide variety of different contexts and animal taxa. The comparative study of animal cognition has raised a number of critical questions over the years, including: Are other animals conscious?4 Can they “mentally travel in time” by storing specific memories and imagining the future?5 Are non-human animals able to attribute mental states to other individuals,6 and does curiosity motivate their interaction and exploration of these abstract phenomena?7 Ultimately, what is it about human cognition that sets us apart from other animals, and why? Trying to answer these types of questions is more important than ever. Not only does it give insight into the nature and origins of our own thinking and behavior, tackling these questions can also help us better understand, build, and predict artificial forms of intelligence, which are becoming increasingly embedded in the fabric of society and our daily lives.8

Though comparative cognition is a vast field, researchers are unified by a central challenge: unlocking the secrets of animal minds, which are like black boxes whose contents are neither directly visible nor accessible. Unlike work in human psychology that can partly rely on participants to report their own subjective experiences, research in animal cognition must employ creative behavioral tasks and interventionist approaches in order to test causal hypotheses about mechanisms that underlie behavior. This is the only way to tease apart hardwired responses or simpler forms of associative learning from more complex forms of cognition that could potentially explain behavior in question.9

Take, for example, the remarkable (and often frustrating) ability of ant colonies to identify and efficiently transport food from sparsely scattered patches in the environment to their nests. Research employing mazes has shown that Argentine ants are capable of solving fiendishly difficult transport optimization problems, flexibly finding the shortest path to food sources, even when known routes become blocked off.10 When watching individuals zealously journey out of the nest and back again, in close coordination with one another, it would be reasonable to assume that each ant had an understanding of the transport problem being solved, or that a central organizing force was shaping the behavior of the colony. Yet this feat is an example of self-organizing collective intelligence; a phenomenon that does not require a global controller, or even that the individuals be aware of the nature of the challenge that they are solving together. By adhering to simple, fixed rules of pheromone following and production, individual ants by means of only local interactions can produce complex collective behavior that does not rely upon any sophisticated cognition at all. This example highlights the need to employ carefully crafted experiments to elucidate correctly the true nature of behavioral processes.

Ants efficiently solve complex transport problems, working together through simple rules of pheromone following, showing self-organizing collective intelligence, without needing a leader or central control. (Photo by Ivan Radic, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Initially, comparative studies of complex cognition focused primarily on other primate species.11 Their close evolutionary relation to humans means they provide something of a window into the ancestral origins of our sophisticated cognition, and by comparison, the novel idiosyncrasies that characterize human intelligence (although they too have evolved both their bodies and their behavior in response to the selective pressures they have encountered since their split from us and our common ancestor). Nonetheless, it is anthropocentric to assume that complex cognition is exclusive to primates. Indeed, research on primate cognition has generated two influential hypotheses for the evolution of advanced intelligence that are applicable to a wide range of taxa. The Ecological Intelligence Hypothesis suggests that challenges associated with efficiently finding and processing food promote sophisticated cognition,12 while the Social Intelligence Hypothesis argues that activities involved in group living, including the need to cooperate with and potentially deceive others, drive the evolution of sophisticated cognition.13

Understanding the nature of intelligence is a tricky business but comparative psychology provides us with experimental tools that offer a window into the mind’s eye of other animals.

Over the last three decades increasing evidence has accumulated to show that a similar combination of selective pressures has driven the evolution of comparably complex cognition in other animal groups, notably the corvids.14 This group of birds, which includes crows, jays, ravens, and jackdaws, is capable of remarkable behavioral feats. These include the manufacture and use of tools for specific tasks,15, 16 and even the ability to “count out loud” by producing precise numbers of vocalizations in response to numerical values.17 The discovery of such behaviors points to complex underlying cognition, and given that primates and corvids diverged some 300 million years ago, it also suggests that advanced intelligence evolved independently at least twice within animals as the result of convergent evolutionary pressures.

In order to closely elucidate the nature of intelligence in animals, it is instructive to first identify natural behavior that may reflect complex cognitive processes, especially ones that can also be studied in controlled laboratory conditions. The food caching behavior of birds has proven to be a powerful model through which to investigate the nature of animal intelligence across a range of domains, including recall of past events, future planning, and the ability to attribute mental states to other individuals (“Machiavellian intelligence”). In particular, laboratory studies on scrub jays have leveraged that species’ propensity to cache a variety of perishable foods, but not eat items that have degraded. How do individual birds efficiently recover the hundreds of spatially distinct caches they make daily, given that different food items decay at different rates?

Western Scrub-Jay, Aphelocoma californica (Photo by Martyne Reesman, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, via Wikimedia)

In a notable study published in Nature,18 researchers hypothesized that jays use a flexible form of memory that previously had been thought exclusive to humans—episodic memory. Episodic memory allows us to recall specific events that have occurred in our mind’s eye, and we experience these memories as our own, with a sense that they represent events that have occurred in the past. In the absence of a method to ascertain whether jays subjectively experience memories as we do, the researchers proposed behavioral criteria that would indicate “episodic-like” memory: an ability to retrieve information about “where” a unique event or “episode” took place, “what” occurred during the event, and “when” it happened. To test this, they conducted a series of experiments in which jays were presented with perishable worms that could be cached in trays at one site and non-perishable nuts that could be cached at another. The results of the experiments showed that when given the option to recover caches after a short time, the birds preferred to search for the more desirable, tasty worms, but switched to searching for the less attractive nuts after longer delays, when the worms had decayed. These experiments demonstrated for the first time that a non-human animal can recall the “what-where-when” of specific events in the past using abilities akin to episodic memory in humans.

While birds might rely on recall of specific events to successfully retrieve cached items, the initial act of caching itself is prospective, functioning to provide resources for the future when they might otherwise be scarce. This raises the possibility that non-human animals are capable of future planning, mentally traveling forwards in time to anticipate future needs that differ from present ones. However, caching may also simply be a hardwired behavioral urge, rather than a flexible response that is reliant on learning. To explore this, researchers tested scrub jays using a “planning for breakfast” paradigm.19 Over a period of six days the jays were exposed daily to either a “hungry room” where breakfast was never provided, or a “breakfast room” where food was available in the morning. Otherwise, the jays were provided with powdered (uncacheable) food in a middle room that linked the other two. Then, the birds were offered nuts in the middle room, and the opportunity to cache them in either the hungry or breakfast room. The results showed that the birds spontaneously strongly preferred to cache the nuts in the hungry room, indicating for the first time that a non-human animal can plan for the future, guiding its behavior based on anticipated future needs independent of their present motivational state.

The examples above demonstrate the ability of birds to “mentally travel in time” and form representations of their own past and future. To recover their caches successfully, however, each individual bird must also pay attention to the other birds who might attempt to steal their caches. To lessen the risk of that happening, individual birds employ a range of strategies to protect their stored food, including caching food behind barriers, out of the sight of other birds, and producing decoy caches that do not contain any edible items. To explore the cognitive processes involved in cache protection behavior researchers allowed scrub jays to cache food when alone, or while being watched by another bird. The caching birds were then provided the opportunity to recover their caches while in private, giving them a chance to re-cache the hidden food items that might be vulnerable to pilfering. Interestingly, not all birds re-cached the items most at risk of being stolen (those cached in front of the conspecific). Only those scrub jays who were experienced pilferers themselves decided to re-cache items that had been watched by another individual.20 The implication is that birds who have been thieves in the past project their experience of stealing onto others, thereby anticipating future stealing of their own caches. In other words, it takes a thief to know one! This experiment therefore raises the possibility that the jays simulate the perspectives of other individuals, suggesting that like humans, they may be able to attribute mental states to others, and therefore have a knowledge of other minds as well as other times.

The approach employed in these studies highlights the utility of exploring behavioral criteria indicative of complex cognitive processes by using a carefully controlled experimental procedure. One advantage of this approach is that it is widely applicable, since it relies on externally observable behavior, rather than obscure internal states, and can therefore be used to investigate a diverse range of intelligences. Recently, comparative psychologists have started to apply these techniques to systematically investigate the intelligence of soft-bodied cephalopods—the invertebrate group comprised of octopus, cuttlefish, and squid.21 These remarkable animals have captured the imagination of naturalists for hundreds of years and reports suggest they are capable of highly flexible and sophisticated behaviors. For example, veined octopuses transport coconut shells in which they hide themselves when faced with a threatening predator, raising the possibility that they may be able to plan for the future. Further, the male giant Australian cuttlefish avoids fights with other males by deceptively changing their appearance to resemble that of females—perhaps they are capable of attributing mental states to other members of their species.

A coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus), hides from threatening predators between a coconut shell and a clam shell. Using its tentacles, it carries the shells, while pulling itself along. Sensing a threat, the octopus clamps itself shut between the shells. (Photo by Nick Hobgood, Wikimedia)

Recently, laboratory experiments with the common cuttlefish have shown that like some birds, apes, and rodents, they are able to recollect “what-where-when” information about past events through episodic-like memory.22 Unlike other species however, episodic memory in cuttlefish does not decline with age, offering exciting opportunities to study resistance to age-related decline in cognition.23 As with food caching among corvids, behavioral experiments with cuttlefish have also revealed prospective, future-oriented behavior: after learning temporal patterns of food availability, cuttlefish learn to forgo immediately available prey items in order to consume more preferred food that only becomes available later.24, 25 Presently, however, it is not clear whether this reflects genuine future planning, which requires individuals to act independently of current needs—and so presents an exciting avenue for future research.

Given the broad applicability of the experimental approach developed in comparative psychology, it is worth considering the utility of experimental paradigms to investigate the behavior of non-organic forms of intelligence. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are becoming increasingly embedded in the way that we work, solve problems, and learn, perhaps best exemplified by the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, now ubiquitous by their use in content creation and even serving as a source of knowledge.26 It is more important than ever that we develop an understanding of the behavior of these forms of intelligence. Fortunately, decades of research aimed at understanding the minds of animals has provided us with the conceptual tools needed to elucidate the processes underlying artificial behavior, and the means to build a form of artificial intelligence that is more flexible and less biased. Though reports of ANNs besting humans in traditionally complex, strategic games such as poker abound,27 some have argued that these wins are often restricted to very specific domains, and that ANNs are far from displaying the general intelligence of animals, let alone humans.28

Interdisciplinary efforts, however, are helping to close this gap. Inspired by research in cognitive psychology, computer scientists have incorporated an analogue of episodic memory into the architecture of ANNs. Endowed with the ability to compare present environmental variables with those encountered during specific points in the past, ANNs are able to behave much more flexibly.29 Recently, influenced by classic tasks in comparative psychology, psychologists and computer scientists have collaborated to produce a competition testing the relative cognitive abilities of ANNs.30 Dubbed the “Animal-AI Olympics,”31 this competition should help to promote the development of artificial forms of intelligence capable of mirroring the general intelligence displayed by animals, and perhaps one day, humans.

Understanding the nature of intelligence is a tricky business, but comparative psychology provides us with experimental tools that offer a window into the mind’s eye of other animals. In the future, these approaches may prove invaluable in providing insights into the behavior of artificial forms of intelligence, and one day, perhaps, into the behavior of organic life that looks very different from that on Earth.

Skeptics are well aware that there are issues with eyewitness testimony as evidence. These issues are popular topics of discussion at skeptical conferences and are the impetus for numerous skeptical articles. Human perception and memory are notoriously inaccurate, indeed malleable. Preconceptions and cognitive biases shape both our immediate perceptions of events and how we later recall, interpret, and relate them.

The testimony issue goes beyond simple eyewitness accounts, i.e., the descriptions people give of things they visually saw. Testimony can include any description or characterization of something that a person draws from the memory of their perceptions. Something they heard, felt, smelled, read, viewed indirectly, or sensed in any way.

While skeptics find it logically correct to point out these problems, it’s not going to do anyone any good if all that happens is you make people angry.

In discussing contentious topics, the interpretation of testimony can become highly emotional and swiftly evolve into an overly polarized argument that misses the nuance of the situation. I routinely encounter this type of reaction to my examination of testimony, in particular with UFO witnesses. At first I found this rather surprising. After all, I was just trying to be logical, follow the facts, and cover all the bases—one of which being the possibility of false witness testimony. But I was often met with an unexpectedly angry response.

This is something we need to avoid. Anger, of course, is rarely helpful in scientific communication. While skeptics find it logically correct to point out these problems, it’s not going to do anyone any good if all that happens is you make people angry. In fact, if you are perceived (as I often have been) of attacking, disrespecting, or denigrating a witness, then this can affect your credibility and destroy communication opportunities in other areas too.

Over the last couple of decades of encountering this problem, I’ve come across a few important concepts that have been helpful to keep in mind. Essentially, they are blind spots on the part of the supporters of the testimony, but if we don’t take them into account, they become our blind spots too.

Truth & Lies

When I explain that I don’t believe an individual’s testimony is true then their supporters will assume I’m accusing the witness of lying. This then drags the conversation either down the irrelevant path of “why would they lie” or the more perilous road of “how dare you suggest this wonderful person is lying!”

This is a false dichotomy. It’s not a simple matter of “truth” vs. “lies”. There are other options. Yet, even great minds fall into the trap. Here is Thomas Paine on miracles in his 1794 classic The Age of Reason:

If we are to suppose a miracle to be something so entirely out of the course of what is called Nature that she must go out of that course to accomplish it, and we see an account given of such miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is: Is it more probable that Nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, Nature go out of her course, but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.

That paragraph gives me deeply mixed feelings each time I read it. Paine was examining the possibility of miracles from a rationalist perspective. He asked the reader to consider that people verifiably lie all the time, but miracles are both rare and lacking in scientific evidence. So which is more likely? In this dichotomy, the witness lying seems by far the most probable.

So this classic skeptical quote is fatally flawed, enough to make it useless because the opposite of truth is not lies. The opposite of truth is falseness. Truth means a statement is correct, in agreement with fact or reality. The opposite concept, falseness, means a statement is incorrect, and is contradicted by fact or reality, whether or not a person is lying. Paine’s contemporary, David Hume, in his analysis of miracles in his 1758 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, acknowledged that in addition to deceiving (lying) people can also be deceived:

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.” When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

There are many more ways for people to be deceived than to deceive, yet it’s oh-so-easy to fall for the false dichotomy of true vs lie. As evidenced by the rather clumsy and unfamiliar set of antonyms we have for “truth” (“falseness,” “falsity,” “untruth”), the idea that if someone speaks falsely then they are lying is familiar, quite understandable and inevitable, and so we must take great pains to explicitly avoid that misperception and give other options their appropriate weight.

There are many more ways for people to be deceived than to deceive, yet it’s oh-so-easy to fall for the false dichotomy of true vs lie.

If someone is not telling the truth, then they might be lying, but they might also simply be wrong—perhaps they are misinterpreting something, or they made a mistake, or they succumbed to some perfectly ordinary illusion. Either way, the fact that they are saying something that is false does not mean they are lying. Giving people the benefit of the doubt, skeptics should focus on the possibilities other than lying. Before accusing people of lying, one might perhaps ask, “Perhaps they made a mistake?” “What if they misremembered?” “Could it have been an optical illusion?”

Of course, people lie, and we shouldn’t rule that out entirely, but my experience with believers in UFOs, conspiracy theories, and strange phenomena, the majority of witnesses are quite honest in their descriptions, and unless you are dealing with an obvious charlatan it’s best to avoid even mentioning the lie hypothesis because it will immediately become the focus of outrage and resistance. Focus instead on the possibilities of mistakes, misperceptions, faulty memory, illusions, and hallucinations, and assume lies will be revealed in the process of deeper investigation.

Illustration by James Bennett for SKEPTICTrusting the Victim

When a witness to an event or situation is also a victim (i.e., they have been hurt, assaulted, become ill, or suffered other harm) then things become even more fraught with highly charged emotional obstacles to investigation and communication. The witness testimony of victims is simultaneously revered as sacrosanct, yet it is also known to be unreliable.

Nevertheless, as a general principle the accounts of victims should not be automatically disbelieved. I think everyone deserves a fair hearing with the assumption that they are acting in good faith. Examining the accounts of people who were hurt, especially emotionally, is a tricky path to tread, and very easily leads to the perception of the skeptic being on the attack. In response, a blocking defense attenuates further discussion.

In recent years I’ve focused on the UFO community, and while skeptics don’t usually think of UFOlogists as being victims, many people who feel they had some kind of extraterrestrial encounter often feel they suffer from an associated emotional trauma. Sometimes this is from what they feel happened to them (which can be quite extreme, with perceived physical effects, even abductions and physical examinations) but can also be the result of years of being disbelieved.

The witness testimony of victims is simultaneously revered as sacrosanct, yet it is also known to be unreliable.

It is even more of an issue when the harm a victim is experiencing is the main evidence, or the actual contended phenomenon. Here any examination of the validity of their testimony can readily be perceived or reframed as a personal attack on the individual, and that’s the end of the discussion.

This deference to victims crops up in many areas of interest to skeptics. In the curious case of Havana syndrome, discussed in depth in Vol. 26 No. 4 of Skeptic, several people have become very ill, and were then convinced that their symptoms were related to a loud noise they heard, or sensation they felt, which they now attribute to some kind of directed energy weapon attack. Since they are obviously suffering, it makes it difficult to critique their testimony without seeming callous.

My own experience with this issue dates back to 2006, when a condition known as “Morgellons disease” was getting some media attention. According to sufferers of the malady, their symptoms of itching and general malaise consistent with aging coincided with what they described as “fibers” that wormed their way out of their skin.

Morgellons disease is a form of delusional parasitosis in which individuals report fibers or filaments emerging from the skin, often accompanied by itching, pain, and persistent sores. While sufferers attribute symptoms to an infectious or environmental cause, most scientific studies have found no underlying pathogen—linking the condition instead to psychiatric disorders.

From their descriptions, their testimony, and the occasional images and video provided, it seemed quite apparent that they were simply finding normal hairs and clothing fibers. I blogged about this, describing how I could find similar fibers on my own skin (they are literally everywhere), and how the accounts of fibers emerging from skin were probably a mistake from not understanding the prevalence of microscopic fibers (a base rate error in Bayesian reasoning).

In response to my explanation, I was attacked, portrayed as someone who was accusing the victims of malingering or making up their symptoms, which I certainly was not. But because my initial skeptical approach was to point out what they had got wrong it came across as contradicting their entire testimony. While the fibers were almost certainly unrelated to their experiences, they were actually suffering from a variety of physical symptoms and conditions.

The Morgellons experience taught me that we need to first treat the victim testifier with respect. Their suffering is real, regardless of the cause. Acknowledge that and avoid describing their testimony in absolutes. Instead, as with the “truth vs. lies” issue, raise other possibilities as considerations for them, not assertions from you. Instead of leading an assessment of a traumatic alien abduction story with “that’s nonsense, obviously they dreamt the whole thing!” instead ask “is it possible that sleep paralysis might have played a part here?”

Highly Trained Observers

On a near daily basis I am accused of dismissing the eyewitness testimony of highly trained observers. For example, Commander David Fravor, a decorated U.S. Navy pilot, has testified that he saw a 40-foot Tic-Tac-shaped UFO engage his plane in a short dogfight, and then shoot off at incredible speed with no visible means of propulsion.

I don’t know what he saw, but from his description of how the object seemed to perfectly mirror him, I suspected he had mistaken the size of the object and hence fallen for a parallax illusion that made it seem to move much faster than it actually was (if it was moving at all.) So I proposed this idea and was met with a range of responses, mostly derisive and angry that I would have the temerity to insult the testimony of a highly trained observer like a U.S. Navy pilot.

The notion of a “trained observer” is something of a myth.

These moving responses included the perception that I was accusing Fravor of lying, or being incompetent, stupid, or insane. But I was doing none of those things; rather, I was simply pointing out that he might have made an understandable mistake.

U.S. Navy Commander David Fravor was flying an F/A-18 Hornet when he reported seeing a UFO, later nicknamed the “Tic Tac.” The object hovered over the ocean, appeared to respond to the jets, and perplexed those who watched it. Fravor described the encounter in a report for the Navy and has since been a proponent of the theory that he encountered alien life.

The notion of a “trained observer” is something of a myth. Of course military personnel are trained to observe things, but they are trained to observe specific known things, and not things that are highly unexpected (like a giant flying tic-tac) or out of the realm of human experience (like craft exhibiting non-Newtonian physics.)

Fast-moving UFOs are not something that pilots are trained to observe.

Military pilots’ training in observation of airborne objects comes largely in the form of recognizing other known planes. Since the 1940s pilots have been issued Visual Aircraft Recognition study cards, which show a variety of known friendly and enemy aircraft, usually in silhouette from various angles. More sophisticated recognition training takes place in simulators. But fast-moving UFOs are not something that pilots are trained to observe.

In fact, this intensive training might make matters worse. Being highly trained to identify a particular set of things can mean you will shoehorn outliers into that set. When Fravor saw the Tic-Tac he had no way of judging how large it was, but he settled on 40-feet, because he felt it was about the same size as an F/A-18, the most common plane he saw in the air. Would he have picked the same size if he had been a commercial pilot of larger jets?

No matter how valid my hypothesis, and the potential for error on Fravor’s part, the “how dare you!” reaction prevents wider consideration of the hypothesis. Even though it seems annoying, I find it works better if I set the scene by explicitly explaining how I don’t think he’s lying, or incompetent, stupid, or crazy. I have to establish that I do think he’s a highly skilled pilot, with years of experience, and trained in observing other aircraft. Then when this is established, I can tentatively explore how an understandable mistake might have been made by such a highly trained observer.

This awareness of the emotional reactions to criticism of witness testimony, and the techniques for avoiding those reactions, feels annoying and even unnecessary, as if pandering to bad thinking. But the goal here is effective communication, so getting people to consider an alternative hypothesis is best done by understanding them in the hope that they, in turn, will understand you.

Here are many popular myths about chocolate. How many can you tell are true or not?

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The new Pope Leo XIV can make history by at long last releasing the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank and expose one of the church’s darkest chapters.

The Catholic Church has a new leader—Pope Leo XIV—born in 1955 in Chicago, Robert Francis Prevost is the first American to head the church and serve as sovereign of the Vatican City State. Many Vatican watchers will be looking for early signs that Pope Leo XIV intends to continue the legacy of Pope Francis for reforming Vatican finances and for making the church a more transparent institution.

There is one immediate decision he could make that would set the tone for his papacy. Pope Leo could order the release of the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank, the repository with files that would answer lingering questions of how much the Catholic Church might have profited from wartime investments in Third Reich and Italian Fascist companies and if it acted as a postwar haven for looted Nazi funds. By solving one of last great mysteries about the Holocaust, Pope Leo would embrace long overdue historical transparency that had proved too much for even his reform-minded predecessor.

The Vatican is not only the world’s largest representative body of Christians, but also unique among religions since it is a sovereign state.

What is sealed inside the Vatican Bank archives is more than a curiosity for historians. The Vatican is not only the world’s largest representative body of Christians, but also unique among religions since it is a sovereign state. It declared itself neutral during World War II and after the war claimed it had never invested in Axis powers nor stored Nazi plunder.

In my 2015 history of the finances of the Vatican (God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican), I relied on company archives from German and Italian insurers, Alliance and Generali, to show the Vatican Bank had invested in both firms during the war. The Vatican earned outsized profits when those insurers expropriated the cash values of the life insurance policies of Jews sent to the death camps. After the war, when relatives of those murdered in the Holocaust tried collecting on those life insurance policies, they were turned away since they could not produce death certificates.

When relatives of those murdered in the Holocaust tried collecting on life insurance policies, they were turned away.

How much profit did the Vatican earn from the cancelled life insurance policies of Jews killed at Nazi death camps? The answer is inside the Vatican Bank archives.

Also in the Vatican Bank wartime files is the answer to whether the bank hid more than $200 million in gold stolen from the national bank of Nazi-allied Croatia. According to a 1946 memo from a U.S. Treasury agent, the Vatican had either smuggled the stolen gold to Spain or Argentina through its “pipeline” or used that story as a “smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].”

Photo by Karsten Winegeart

The Vatican has long resisted international pressure to open those wartime bank files. World Jewish Congress President Edgar Bronfman Sr. had convinced President Bill Clinton in 1996 that it was time for a campaign to recover Nazi-looted Jewish assets. Clinton ordered 11 U.S. agencies to review and release all Holocaust-era files and urged other countries and private organizations with relevant documents to do the same.

The Vatican refused to join 25 nations in collecting documents across Europe to create a comprehensive guide for historians.

The Vatican refused to join 25 nations in collecting documents across Europe to create a comprehensive guide for historians. At a 1997 London conference on looted Nazi gold, the Vatican was the only one of 42 countries that rejected requests for archival access. At a restitution conference in Washington the following year, it ignored Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s emotional plea, and it opted out of an ambitious plan by 44 countries to return Nazi-looted art and property, settle unpaid life insurance claims and reassert the call for public access to Holocaust-era archives.

Subsequent requests for opening the files by President Clinton and Jewish organizations went unanswered. Historians were meanwhile inundated with millions of declassified wartime documents from more than a dozen countries and only a handful of Jewish advocacy groups pressed the issue during the last years of John Paul II’s papacy and the eight years of Benedict XVI.

Pope Francis opened millions of the Church’s documents.

To his credit, in March 2020, Pope Francis opened millions of the church’s documents about its controversial wartime pope, Pius XII. That fulfilled in part a promise Pope Francis had made when he was the cardinal of Buenos Aires: “What you said about opening the archives relating to the Shoah [Holocaust] seems perfect to me. They should open them [the Holocaust files] and clarify everything. The objective has to be the truth.”

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani

And while Pope Francis was responsible for reforming a bank that had often served as an offshore haven for tax evaders and money launderers and frustrated six of his predecessors, he nevertheless kept the Vatican Bank files sealed.

Pope Leo XIV is the Vatican Bank’s sole shareholder. It has only a single branch located in a former Vatican dungeon.

Pope Leo XIV is the Vatican Bank’s sole shareholder. It has only a single branch located in a former Vatican dungeon in the Torrione di Nicoló V (Tower of Nicholas V). The new Pope can order the release of the wartime Vatican Bank archives with the speed and ease with which a U.S. president issues an executive order. It would be a bold move in an institution with a well-deserved reputation for keeping files hidden sometimes for centuries. It took more than 400 years for the Church to release some of its Inquisition files (and at long last exonerate Galileo Galilei), and more than 700 years before it cleared the Knights Templar of a heresy charge and opened the trial records.

Opening the Vatican Bank’s wartime archives would send the unequivocal message that transparency is not merely a talking point, but instead a high priority that the new Pope plans to apply to the finances of the church, both in its history as well as going forward. Such a historic decree will mark his Papacy as having shed some light on one of the church’s darkest chapters. In so doing, Pope Leo will pay tribute to the families of victims of World War II who have been long been demanding transparency and some semblance of justice.

A review of The Trump Revolution: A New Order of Great Powers by Aleksandr Dugin, Arktos Media, 2025, 136 pages.

Aleksandr Dugin has been described as the Kremlin’s chief ideologue for his substantial influence on Russian politics, promoting nationalist and traditionalist themes and publishing extensively on Russia’s central role in world civilization. He is also a long-time supporter of Donald Trump, and in his new book, The Trump Revolution: A New Order of Great Powers, Dugin celebrates the election of America’s 47th president as the culmination of his life’s work.

In an earlier article in Skeptic, I called Dugin “a mystical high priest of Russian fascism who wants to bring about the end of the world,” but also noted that is he is a philosopher who specializes in the study and use of ideologies. In the 1990s, Dugin set himself the task of synthesizing a new ideology to replace the defunct communist movement as the foundation for the Kremlin’s international fifth column. For a while he played with the idea of uniting all antiliberal ideologies, including socialism, fascism, and ecologism, into a single allegedly profound “fourth political theory.”

Ultimately, however, Dugin was drawn toward the Third Reich’s National Socialism, which he found to be admirable. Dugin came to realize that the essence of Nazism was not its historical particulars, but Hitler’s key political insight, namely that there is no contradiction between nationalism and socialism. On the contrary, it is only by invoking the tribal instinct that a leader can arouse the passion needed to realize the full collectivist program, whose top priority is not the collectivization of property, but the eradication of individual reason and conscience through the collectivization of minds.

As Dugin saw it, every country could have its own tribal-collectivist movement. He thus proceeded on this principle to organize an “Alt-Right” Comintern with parties in nearly every Western nation all based on the same template, combining militant national chauvinism, most often mobilized around anti-immigrant sentiment. Participating units in this franchise include the French National Rally led by Marine Le Pen, the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the followers of Nigel Farage in the UK, Victor Orbán’s party in Hungary, and similar parties in the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Slovakia, and many other European countries. In The Trump Revolution, Dugin welcomes what he sees as the triumph of its American branch.

The sunwheel-like swastika used by the Thule Society and the German Workers’ Party.(Source: Wikipedia, by NsMn, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Arktos Media, the publisher of Dugin and a long list of other ultra-nationalist writers, derives its name from the Thule Society, which was devoted to the historical and anthropological search for the origin of the superior Germanic race, and which provided much of the mystical antecedents for the Nazi movement (the society’s logo adopted the Sanskrit symbol for “good fortune”—a hooked cross called the svastika). Accordingly, Arktos Editor in Chief Constantin von Hoffmeister provides the book’s preface by trumpeting its message in suitably Wagnerian terms—“the world ended.”

It ended in a neon blizzard, and electric storm of shattered paradigms. … We have Trumpism 2.0, and it is a revolution beyond revolutions–a final reckoning that promises to devour the remains of the corrupted system and rebuild something ancient, something powerful, something terrifying in its purity. … The Globalist Cathedral is in ruins. The Swamp has been burned, and from its ashes rises something ancient, something terrible, something divine. This is the Trumpian Ragnarök. This is history breaking apart and reassembling itself in a new form. Welcome to the Renewed World Order. It is not for the weak.

Dugin takes up the mantle from there:

Trumpism has emerged as a unique phenomenon, combining the long-marginalized national-populist agenda of paleoconservatives with an unexpected shift in Silicon Valley, where influential high-tech tycoons have begun aligning with conservative politics. … Thus, Trump’s second term has become the final chord in the geopolitics of a multipolar world, marking the overturning of the entire liberal-globalist ideology.

Dugin’s war is against the West, considered both as a creed whose Enlightenment liberal humanism threatens the principle of the need for unlimited tyranny (in Russian the “Silnaya Ruka,” or strong arm) underpinning Kremlin rule, and as a concrete geostrategic military power that must be defeated to expand Russian global dominion. He celebrates the election of Trump as serving both of those purposes:

This “illiberal nationalism” has become the ideological axis of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. The United States is no longer presented as the global distributor of liberal democracy and its guarantor on a planetary scale. Instead, it is redefined as a Great Power–focused on its own greatness, sovereignty, and prosperity.

Thus, under Trump, there is no reason for the U.S. to maintain its alliances with other liberal democracies, supporting the system of collective security of the free world superpower, or what Dugin decries as the “unipolar world.” Instead, the U.S. can become, alongside Russia and China, one of several predatory Great Powers dominating continental spheres of influence within a new “multipolar world.”

Call it political transactionalism or moral nihilism if you prefer. I think evil hits the nail right on the head.

There is on offer here something akin to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, under which the United States gets North America, China gets east Asia and south Asia, and Russia gets Eurasia, “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” It takes little imagination to see why such a division of spoils might appeal to the political leaders of Russia. But the fruition of such a great-power realignment very much depends upon the Americans abandoning their role as crusaders for the cause of world freedom. Fortunately, says Dugin, Trump is on board with this new alignment:

Trump and his ideology categorically reject any notion of internationalism, and rhetoric about so-called “universal human values,” “world democracy,” or “human rights.” Instead Trump appears to envision a final rupture with both the Yalta system and the unipolar globalist movement. He has therefore set out to dismantle all international institutions that symbolize the past eighty years–the UN, globalist structures like the WHO and USAID, and even NATO. Trump sees the United States as a new empire, and himself as a modern Augustus, who formally ended the decaying Republic. His ambitions extend beyond America itself–hence his interest in acquiring Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and even Mexico. [italics in original]

Dugin’s ideas may appear to be quite mad, but they are actually instructive in revealing possible motivations for the actions of the Trump administration during its opening months. For example, abolishing USAID was justified by the Trump administration as a fiscal responsibility measure, but Dugin contends that entirely other motivations were operational:

The liquidation of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an event whose significance can hardly be overstated. When the Soviet Union abolished the Comintern … structures that advocated the ideological interests of the USSR on a global scale, it marked the beginning of the end for the international Soviet system. … Something similar is happening in America, as USAID was the main operational structure for the implementation of globalist projects. Essentially, it was the primary transmission belt for globalism as an ideology aimed at the worldwide imposition of liberal democracy, market economics, and human rights.The banning of USAID is a critical, fundamental move, the importance of which, as I said, cannot be overstated. This is especially true because countries like Ukraine largely depend on the agency, receiving significant funding through it. All Ukrainian media, NGOs, and ideological structures were financed by USAID. The same applied to almost the entire liberal opposition in the post-Soviet space, as well as liberal regimes in various countries, including Maia Sandu’s Moldovan administration and many European political regimes, which were also on USAID’s payroll.

Dugin presents Ukraine as central to Russia’s strategic objectives within the envisioned multipolar world order, framing it as a pivotal asset in the redistribution of global influence:

Zelensky undoubtedly realizes that his time is running out, and with it the history of Ukraine comes to an end. … The current U.S. leadership does not intend to continue this policy of support, and therefore Zelensky finds himself in a dead-end situation. His desperate attempts to intervene in the situation resemble a frog trying to climb out of a bucket of milk. He seeks to draw attention to himself despite the fact that no one is asking him, and no negotiations are being conducted with him. The main discussions will be centered on the strategic dialogue between Putin and Trump, concerning not only Ukraine but also the global order. … This is the essence of building a multipolar world, in which Ukraine has no place.

A U.S. disengagement from Ukraine would precipitate a broader decline of European stability, triggering a wider unraveling of the continent’s geopolitical coherence and power:

Handing over a half-decayed, toxic corpse, exuding radiation and stench, is hardly a worthy gift for one’s allies and friends. In this context, Ukraine appears to be just such a toxic waste. Trump is seemingly eager to rid himself of this burden. If Europe is left to face Russia alone, the collapse of the globalist liberal elite will accelerate. Thus, the Trojan gift–the assignment of responsibility to Europe for waging war against Russia in Ukraine–is presumably Trump’s strategy to quickly weaken, and possibly even dismantle his trade competitors while undermining his ideological opponents in Europe. The European elite openly opposes Trumpism.

For example, when Trump suggested the annexation of Greenland, Denmark responded by declaring its willingness to fight. Simply astonishing! Add this to Ukraine, with its decaying society and a frenzied population driven to a state of subhuman aggression–filled with rage towards everyone, clamoring for more money and weapons–this terrorist entity reveals the clear reality that the responsibility for this conflict will fall squarely on the shoulders of the European Union.

If the EU assumes responsibility for Ukraine, it will become the most effective way for Trump to rid himself of a toxic asset that shackles him and places him at a disadvantage in the ongoing redrawing of the geopolitical map. While this will not lead to Europe’s greatness, it will instead hasten its disintegration.

In this vision, Europe is probably gone, although Dugin does admit the outside possibility that during the process of the dissolution of NATO and the EU the German revanchist AfD might be able to step up and Make Europe Great Again. One can readily conceive of how such an eventuality might not work out so well for Russia, but Dugin seems unconcerned.

Dugin—not unlike Trump—does not seem to believe that there is any reality to the concepts of right and wrong. Rather, they only believe in advantage and disadvantage.

There is one fly in the ointment of Dugin’s brave new multipolar world of predatory great powers feasting on the weak. That is Israel. For some irrational reason, says Dugin, Trump “takes a staunchly pro-Israel stance.” What does this mean for Dugin’s multi-polar world order?

I believe Trump is making his first major geopolitical miscalculation in shaping the new world order in the Middle East. He is alienating the Islamic world–a powerful force that he fails to recognize as an independent geopolitical pole. This is especially true regarding his antagonism towards Iran and the Shiite factions that maintain staunchly anti-Zionist and anti-Israel positions. … I hope that, despite his radical rhetoric and actions, once he fully assumes a role as a key global political architect, he will begin to take reality into account. Otherwise he risks ending up like the liberals he ousted.

Dugin freely mixes current Kremlin propaganda lines into his analysis. For example, in line with Putin’s effort to portray Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine as a replay of the Soviets’ Great Patriotic War of resistance against Hitler (known as the Second World War to the rest of us), Dugin denounces the Ukrainians as Nazis. It is not only untrue, but hypocritical because in the past Dugin has repeatedly stated his affinity not only for the Waffen SS, but for the work of foundational Nazi intellectuals, including Hitlers’ geopolitical mentor Professor General Karl Haushofer, philosopher Martin Heidegger, and legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Indeed, it is Schmitt’s argument that the idea of fundamental human rights is an intolerable restraint on the Will of the People as expressed through its Leader that is at the core of Dugin’s case against liberalism.

Perhaps to make himself more appealing to some elements of Trump’s political base, Dugin goes out of his way in his book to represent himself as a Christian, and to describe his cause as the defense of “White Christian civilization.” This is quite remarkable, not only because of the identification of Christianity with the interests of a particular race, but because in the past Dugin had openly celebrated Nazi paganism, going so far as to sponsor an artistic cult devoted to its promotion. Indeed, the anti-Christian nature of Dugin’s mystical theology is so rabid that in 2014 Lutheran bishop James Heiser wrote an entire book diagnosing it as systemically evil.

I am not a theist, so some of Heiser’s arguments pass me by. Yet I think that in a fundamental sense he is onto something. Dugin—not unlike Trump—does not seem to believe that there is any reality to the concepts of right and wrong. Rather, they only believe in advantage and disadvantage. On the basis of this “transactionalist” belief structure, Dugin believes the Trump administration is leaning towards abandoning America’s role as “the watchmen on the walls of world freedom,” an outcome that Dugin has devoted his life to obtain. (“We are the watchmen on the walls of world freedom,” is a famous line from the speech that President John F. Kennedy intended to give at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, but he was gunned down before by Lee Harvy Oswald, an ex-Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union.)

Yet it is precisely the collective security arrangements and international system of free trade underlying what Dugin decries as the “unipolar world” that have prevented a general war or a depression since 1945. This unprecedented 80 year-long period of peace, prosperity, and progress has showered enormous blessings not only on America and Europe, but most emphatically Russia as well. Over the course of the final four decades of the “multipolar world” that preceded the establishment of the Pax Americana, Russia was defeated or devastated by war no less than five times. Between the Russo-Japanese War, World War I, the Russian Civil War, the Russo-Polish War, and World War II, well over fifty million Russians were violently sent to their graves. Horrors on that scale ended in 1945. Yet that is the world that Dugin ardently seeks to recreate.

Call it political transactionalism or moral nihilism if you prefer. I think evil hits the nail right on the head.

Rising temperatures, biodiversity loss, drought, mass migration, the spread of misinformation, inflation, infertility—these are just some of the major challenges facing societies around the globe. Generating innovative solutions to such challenges requires expanding our understanding of what’s currently possible. But how do we cultivate the necessary imagination? By debunking counterproductive myths about imagination, Occidental College cognitive developmental scientist Andrew Shtulman might just provide us with a starting point. “Unstructured imagination succumbs to expectation,” he writes, “but imagination structured by knowledge and reflection allows for innovation.” (p. 12)

Imagination Myths

In Learning to Imagine: The Science of Discovering New Possibilities, Shtulman challenges the highly intuitive, yet obstructive notion that great imagination stems from a place of ignorance. Through the sharing of everyday examples and detailed experimental studies, Shtulman effectively tackles the pervasive deficit view of imagination—that it’s something we engage in a great deal during childhood and sadly lose as we get older.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Shtulman demonstrates that children’s imagination, relative to adults’, is constrained by what they think is physically plausible, statistically probable, and socially and morally acceptable. While some early philosophers and social scientists considered children to be lacking intelligence and their minds to be a blank slate, a contemporary swing of the pendulum has led to a confusing romanticization of children as “little scientists” capable of unacknowledged insight. A more informed view recognizes that though children’s minds are not blank slates, they do often conflate what they’ve personally experienced with what “could be.” To a child’s mind, what they can’t imagine, can’t exist.

“Unstructured imagination succumbs to expectation, but imagination structured by knowledge and reflection allows for innovation.” —Andrew Shtulman

Shtulman notes how young children often deny the existence of uncommon but entirely possible events, such as finding an alligator under a bed, catching a fly with chopsticks, and a man growing a beard down to his toes. Children find these situations as impossible as eating lightning for dinner. While children often engage in pretend play, it often mimics mundane aspects of real life, such as cooking or construction. Children also often believe in magic and fantastical beings such as Santa Claus, but such myths were not spontaneously created by children, they were first endorsed by adults they trust. Children rarely generate novel solutions to problems as they tend to fixate on the rules and norms familiar to them, often correcting others when they have deviated from what is expected and sometimes become offended by “rule” violations.

Learning to Imagine is not only about children’s cognition; it is fundamentally a book about human reasoning and contains insights that are applicable to all of us. Shtulman sheds light on the many important ways in which adults continue to constrain their own imagination through self-interest, habit, fear, and a fixation on conforming to one’s social group. For example, we may constrain ourselves with resistance to adopting new technologies like artificial intelligence because they reduce the need for our skillset or simply engender fear of the unknown. We may resist something that requires us to change our habits (e.g., carrying reusable bags), to something that forces us to take risks (e.g., trusting a quickly developed vaccine), or to deviate from our in-group (e.g., advocating for a new theory or openly sharing an unpopular opinion).

What is Imagination, Anyhow?

So, just what is imagination? Shtulman argues that it is the ability to abstract from the here and the now, to contemplate what could be or what could have been. Imagination is an evolved cognitive skill that is used for the purpose of everyday planning, predicting, and problem-solving. We imagine what we would buy at the store, how a meeting at work might go, how if we had only said something a different way, then we could have avoided that fight with our spouse, and so on. Simply put, imagination is the ability to ask “What’s possible?”. Imagination can be engaged in for our subjective experiences (e.g., imagining how life would have been different if path B was chosen instead of path A), and for what might be more relevant to others (e.g., works of art, new policies, technologies).

Simply put, imagination is the ability to ask “What’s possible?”.

Even though Shtulman’s case for imagination is grounded in this “what’s possible” definition, how it is intertwined with closely related constructs such as “creativity” and “innovation” is somewhat less clear. What can be discerned from his book is that while imagination can be collaborative in the sense that we draw on human knowledge to ask, “what if,” it is largely a personal endeavor. Creativity, on the other hand, is the product of imagination that can be shared with others. Building upon imagination and creativity, innovation is the product of extraordinary imagination and can be developed and refined.

Mechanisms for Expanding What’s Possible

What are the proposed means by which we expand our knowledge, thereby improving the likelihood that we shift our imagination from the ordinary to the extraordinary? Shtulman outlines three ways of learning, specifically through: (1) examples, (2) principles, and (3) models.

The first mechanism, learning through examples, involves learning about new possibilities via other people’s testimony, demonstrations, empirical discoveries, and technological creations. Through education, others’ knowledge becomes our knowledge. However, expanding our imagination through examples is the easiest but also the most limited means by which to expand our own. On one hand, new possibilities are added to our database of what could be, but in doing so, we are potentially limited by overly fixating on the suboptimal (yet adequate) solution we have learned; as Shtulman notes, we “privilege [our] expectation over observation.” For example, we tend to copy the necessary and unnecessary actions of others when trying to achieve the same goal—we fixate on the solution we are familiar with rather than engage in the little effort required to abstract a more efficient solution. Children are even more susceptible to such a process. For example, imagine you see a toy with a handle that is stuck at the bottom of a long tube, and you are provided with a straight pipe cleaner. How might you reach and retrieve the toy? You likely imagine bending the pipe cleaner, yet most preschoolers tasked to reach the toy in this scenario are unable to imagine how the pipe cleaner can be used as a sufficient tool.

The second mechanism, learning through principles, refers to generating a new collection of possibilities by learning about abstract theories about “how” and “why” things operate. These include learning about scientific/cause-and-effect, mathematical, and ethical principles. As a means for expanding imagination, principles are more valuable than examples because they can help us extrapolate possibilities from one situation and apply it across different domains. One illustrative example is the physicist Ernest Rutherford, who won a Nobel prize in chemistry. Rutherford hypothesized (correctly) that electrons, like planets orbiting a sun, may orbit a nucleus. By using the principle of gravity and applying it in a different context, Rutherford generalized an insight from physics to innovate in the field of chemistry. Engaging with principles allows us to practice applying our knowledge and better understand novel relationships. While most of us are not scientists striving to win a Nobel prize, we can still learn new principles that expand our imagination. However, principles can be overgeneralized, and Shtulman argues that new applications should still be tested and replicated to confirm the connection.

An artist recreates childrens’ drawings as if they were real creatures. (Source: Things I Have Drawn)

The third mechanism, learning through models, might be the most exciting as it concerns expanding our ideas about what is possible by immersing ourselves in simulated versions of reality that can be manipulated with little to no consequences. These simulations allow for personal reflection through the process of mental time travel. This includes expanding our imagination through pretense (i.e., pretend play), fiction, and religion. Pretense allows us to expand our symbolic imagination by toying with alternative possibilities somewhat rooted in reality because the real-world elements of pretend play help to make it meaningful. For example, when children and many adults are asked to draw an animal that doesn’t exist, the product is usually an amalgamation of existing animal parts rather than a completely unique creature. Such mental play supports the development of logical reasoning. Through different mediums such as books and film, fiction expands our imagination by allowing us to experience the social world through the eyes and thoughts of others. We see how others react to situations we haven’t experienced and contemplate how we might respond if we were in their shoes.

You have to represent reality before you can tinker with it, to know the facts before you can entertain counterfactuals.

Religion is rooted less in the here and now but may enable us to expand metaphysical ideas and explore moral reasoning by directing thoughts and behavior according to the core values of a specific religion. Ultimately, models allow us to experience the lessons of working out various problems without the risks associated with acting on them in real life. On the other hand, sometimes models may communicate false information that we mark as true. Though models may sometimes lead us astray, Shtulman argues that they “provide the raw materials. … You have to represent reality before you can tinker with it, to know the facts before you can entertain counterfactuals” (p. 12).

The numerous examples that Shtulman provides for how examples, principles, and models expand imagination generate a convincing case for the central thesis of his book—that, unlike the current conventional wisdom, children’s lack of knowledge, experience, and reflection make them less imaginative than adults. However, attempts to distinguish many overlapping concepts within in the book (e.g., religious models vs. fictional models; social imagination vs. moral imagination) is sometimes disorientating.

Should You Read This Book?

Will this book provide you with a specific list of ways to quickly develop a more “imaginative mindset” for yourself and others? No, it is not a self-help book. Instead, you’ll spend hours on an engaging (and, dare we say, nourishing) tour of the limitations and achievements of human imagination. By the end, you’ll know a lot more about how the human mind develops and reasons, and about the cognitive mechanisms that impede and enhance innovation across eras, societies, and an individual lifetime. Through your newfound knowledge, you may begin to imagine solutions to both personal and global challenges that you hadn’t considered before.

She may have gotten her start as Houdini's sidekick, but Rose Mackenberg became a giant of unmasking fraudulent mediums.

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Kids love dinosaurs. I know I certainly did. So much so that when I was in kindergarten and still hadn’t learned to read, I kept pestering my brother (5 years my elder) to keep bringing home books about them from the school library just so I could look at the pictures. He finally asked our mother to intervene and explain to me that they simply wouldn’t let him renew the same books every week.

And once kids—or adults, in the case of frequenters of the Creation Museum—get past taking The Flintstones as gospel, they want to know, “What killed the dinosaurs?” and “Why did those big dangerous dinos all die when so many other creatures survived?”

When I was growing up in the 1950s, the usual answer was that while they sure were big, as the late, great Muhammad Ali would say of his opponents, they “didn’t have a chaaaance” because they were just “too slow, too dumb,” and yes, “too ugly!” Smaller, but much smarter, nice furry mammals showed up on the evolutionary time scale and gobbled up the dinosaur’s eggs. After all, those newly arrived mammals were obviously superior in all but size—they had insulating hair rather than conductive scales, carried their young rather than laying eggs exposed to predation, and being warm-blooded, they were active and fast, while those dinos were coldblooded, slow, and so, opposite to Count Dracula, only active while the sun shined. And dino brains were kinda small—especially compared to their huge body size. But those mammals had much bigger brains relative to their much smaller body size! A Darwinian drama where the smart, little guys win, ready-made for an animated Disney drama (cue in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring) or a classroom film—Triumph of the Nerdy Mammalians.

There have been other explanations for Dino-geddon, before and since. We now know that the dinosaurs did not go extinct because:

• They just got too big. Why not? Because the biggest dinosaurs lived in the Jurassic Period (201.4 to 145 million years ago), which was millions of years before the geologically sudden mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, approximately 66 million years ago.
• The arrival of those smart little egg-eating mammals caused their extinction. Why not? Because mammals had actually coexisted with dinosaurs for 150 million years before Dino-geddon.
• They were thick-headed, but thin-shelled. Why not? Some of their eggs had thin shells, some thick. And living birds (whom we now know are their direct lineal descendants) and reptiles (collateral cousins) have survived quite well laying their own thin-shelled eggs.
• Climate change made the earth get hotter or colder—so all the dinosaurs hatched as males. (Sex is determined by outside temperature among living gators and crocs; too hot or too cold yields females, while males need the “just right” temperatures). Why not? It’s somewhat hard to test whether dinosaurs even had temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD), but why did the direct ancestors of today’s TSD gators and crocs survive?
• The dinosaurs really were just too dumb! Why not? As best we can guess, the intelligence of various dinosaur species varied. But they all went extinct, not just the dumber ones. (Well, kind of. Their bird-brained relatives not only survived but thrived). And whatever their intelligence, they were certainly brighter than many other animal groups that did survive. And it wasn’t just dinosaurs—around half of the species living at that time went extinct.

As for the aforementioned, foreordained, straight-ahead Darwinian drama often shown in the schoolbooks of my time that started with a mindless amoeba at the bottom of the Scala Natura and progressed up ascending rungs of increasing intelligence and consciousness until modern man— usually, White and kinda Nordic—emerged at the top? Alas, as with most such stories, it just ain’t so.

We now know what actually did happen. In 1980, geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis, proposed that an asteroid collision wiped out the dinosaurs. Since then, evidence for their hypothesis has accumulated, as has evidence against the aforementioned alternatives.

So it wasn’t bad brains that got the big, dumb, ugly dinos. It was bad luck!

But what if that asteroid had hit some other piece of space junk and altered course just enough to miss hitting the Earth? Skeptic icon Stephen Jay Gould famously opined in Wonderful Life (1989), “Replay the tape [of life] a million times … and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again.”

Paleontologist Dale Russell with his Dinosauroid—a hypothetical, human-shaped theropod, invented during the early 1980s and sculpted by Ron Séguin (Photo credit: Canadian Museum of Nature)

Right? Well, maybe half right—but then, maybe not. Seven years before Gould declared that evolution (indeed, history) operated more on the basis of contingency than on necessity, paleontologist Dale Russell, Curator of Fossil Vertebrates at the Canadian Museum of Nature, had proposed, as a thought experiment, the possibility that some relatively brainier dinosaur lineage might have eventually evolved into a really big-brained dinosauroid that would have had forward-looking eyes, an erect stance, grasping hands, and big brains had that asteroid only missed Planet Earth. Why? Because of convergent evolution, that is, when two organisms look and/or behave in a very similar way, even though they’re only distantly related. And that means they’ve evolved those similarities independently rather than inheriting them from a common ancestor. Convergence in evolution happens regularly—as does non-convergence.

Here are a few examples:

• Sharks, dolphins, and the extinct ichthyosaurs each developed a streamlined body to swim far faster than any Olympian.
• Camera-type eyes evolved separately in mammals, and earlier in cephalopods (octopuses and squids).
• Some sort of opposable “digit” evolved separately in primates, opossums, koalas, giant pandas, and chameleons that allows for grasping—though the primates may have first evolved theirs to move through the trees. The giant panda hijacked a wrist bone so it could be used for grasping leaves. And only millennia later did humans hit upon using their opposable thumbs to type text messages.
• Flight—a major accomplishment in transformation of locomotion—evolved separately among insects, in the extinct pterosaurs, and in mammals (bats) and birds, only to be lost later when there was an advantage in doing so to assist in running (ostriches) or swimming (penguins).
• Echolocation is a pretty demanding feat of bioengineering. Yet it evolved separately among cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and bats.
• A form of bio-antifreeze evolved separately in Arctic fish and in Antarctic fish, which are only very distantly related.
• There are many more examples, including really unpleasant ones like stinging and blood sucking.

My personal favorite example of convergent evolution is Ankylosaurus (left) and Glyptodon (right). I had an Ankylosaurus in my childhood set of dinosaur models and was surprised to find out those two tank-like herbivores weren’t even distantly related when I first encountered Glyptodon in a textbook years later.

Ankylosaurus was indeed a dinosaur that lived from 160–65 million years ago; Glyptodonts, however, were mammals that lived only 38 million to 10 thousand years ago, of which Glyptodon is the best known species. Each had an armor-like carapace (like a Galápagos tortoise), large body size, stiff back, and club-like tail that the fossil record shows evolved to become stiff before the tip of the tail expanded into a dangerous weapon. Each evolved similar traits to take advantage of a particular ecological niche because despite the difference in time, there can only be a few good solutions to similar selective pressures.

So, play the tape only few times, and some of those times something very similar happens (though not always). The real questions then are not if convergent evolution can happen, but when, why, and how much it happens.

Not Necessarily the Same, but Similar

So if the asteroid had veered off just a little along the way, maybe some dinosaurs could have evolved higher intelligence and, starting with Troodon, evolved into something like Russell’s hypothetical forward looking, erect (which Troodon already was) and big-brained dinosauroid, with grasping hands that could have inherited the Earth. Even before Russell, another Skeptic icon, Carl Sagan, musing on extraterrestrial intelligence in The Dragons of Eden, speculated that, had they not gone extinct, one group of dinosaurs might have achieved the brain size and intelligence sufficient even to develop an octal numbering system, given their number of digits.

The point here is that Russell’s argument was a thought experiment to prompt us to consider what evolution is and how it works.

The Meaningful Measurement of Minds

Defining intelligence for humans is hard enough, and trying to measure it has been open to debate and criticism. But since neither extinct species nor ETs can take IQ tests how can anyone even speculate as to their intelligence?

Well, in the case of extinct species, but not ETs until and unless some UFOlogist produces the real remains of one, we often have their fossilized skeletons. Particularly instructive is the brain case—the cranial bones that once enclosed their brain. And from the brain case we can get an endocast—an internal cast of the brain once so enclosed. Sometimes we have to make an internal cast by inserting some rubbery material. But sometimes we get lucky and nature has already made an endocast through fossilization. The advantage here is that we not only have the overall size and shape of the brain, we also can determine the proportions occupied by the different brain areas (lobes) and in some cases even something about the extent of folding. And folding is important because it allows more brain matter to fit within a skull of given size.

So much for brain size, what about intelligence? Over the long haul of evolutionary time and the wide range of animal species we can observe a strong relation between neural size and neural complexity on the one hand and general behavioral complexity and adaptability on the other. And this is more so within a particular evolutionary lineage than when comparing across lineages. Of course, there will be exceptions for specialized abilities and the strength of the relation becomes harder to tease out if we try to compare individuals or groups within a given species.

Brain size, then, gives us one metric by which to estimate the intelligence of both living and extinct animals. But we know from observing living animals that brain size varies a lot just based on sheer body size. Given that neurons have a relatively uniform size across species, a more meaningful measure of neural complexity is brain size relative to body size. And that’s why for so long dinos have been considered so dumb. Despite their massive body sizes (as estimated from their fossilized skeletons) they had really minuscule brains (as approximated by endocasts). Well, at least most did.

Neuroscientist Harry Jerison developed an even more sophisticated and accurate measure termed the Encephalization Quotient (EQ). And from EQs it’s then possible to estimate the number of Extra Neurons. The Encephalization Quotient for a species is the ratio between its observed brain size (whether measured directly at autopsy/ necropsy or from an endocast) and the predicted brain mass for that species given its size and taxon. More technically, it’s predicted from a nonlinear regression across a range of related reference species. By comparing the measured EQ of a given species to the predicted EQ for an animal in its taxonomic group having its average measured body size, we can get a measure of its Extra Neurons. And Extra Neurons are like extra RAM in your computer or smart phone—the more of them you have, the more information you can process and the faster you can do so.

Ratios of Brain Size to Body Size & Encephalization Quotients for Various Species

As the figures in the table show, across a range of living species, the Ratios of Brain Size to Body Size and especially the Encephalization Quotients correspond pretty well with both our armchair estimations of the intelligence of living animals and with their behavioral complexity and learning capacity as determined by controlled experiments.

What about those dumb dinos? Well, the four-legged herbivores such as the well-known Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops, all fall below living gators and crocs (at about 1.0). But bipedal carnivores, a group that includes T. rex, have higher EQs. Some scientists have even claimed these carnivorous dinosaurs achieved EQs comparable to those of a baboon! More recent estimates have scaled those back to the crocodilian range. Troodon’s EQ ends up being possibly five times higher than that of your average dino. So, if the asteroid had missed, could dinosauroids have inherited the Earth?

The big problem for Russell’s thinking exercise is that dinosaurs likely had brains similar to birds. Assuming that their brains had the same avian nuclear type of pallial organization, rather than the mammalian-type cortical organization, no dinosaur could have achieved the brain complexity required for higher mammalian-type behavioral complexity. Or so it was assumed.

Mammalian cortical brains have a laminar architecture— they are arranged in layers, one atop the other. (Think plywood or chocolate seven-layer cake). Avian brains have a pallial or nuclear architecture—clusters of similar nerves separated by a mass of different type cells. (Think knots in a sheet of pine or meatballs in a large tray of spaghetti). The cortical organization of mammalian brains allows more layers to be packed in one on top of the other (like stuffing as many clothes in your suitcase as possible). With the brain cells close to one another, transmission is short, simple, and fast. And the layers can be folded, like squishing up a towel, so that you can fit even more in a given space. Avian-type brains, on the other hand, simply could not achieve the volume or the neural transmission speed required to support higher intelligence. At least that was the theory. However, as Albert Einstein is said to have said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice—in practice there is.”

If the asteroid had missed, could dinosauroids have inherited the Earth?

When inferring behavior, brain size, or even structure, let alone from the endocasts of extinct species, we only see through a glass darkly. Looking more closely at the actual behavior of living birds has now demonstrated that while most birds can fly, their minds are anything but flighty. Pigeons can distinguish cubist style paintings from impressionistic styles, crows not only make useful tools but pass on those skills to others, and parrots can learn words and use them to communicate with us. Pigeons can even be trained to communicate their differing internal experience upon receiving uppers, downers, or placebos—to another pigeon! Bird brains have now racked up so many cognitive accomplishments that some neuroanatomists have argued that the cortex-like cognitive functions of the avian pallium demand a new neuroanatomical terminology that better reflects not their differences but rather the homologies (similarities in function) between avian and mammalian brains.

So bird brains—and by implication smart dinosaur brains—are sufficiently high enough on the evolutionary scale and complex enough to allow for complex cognitive behaviors. And just how much neural complexity is required for complex cognition? Well, we now know that honeybees, who are insects with a vastly simpler nervous system, are able to discriminate Monet paintings from Picasso’s after extracting and learning the characteristic visual information inherent in each painting style.

Still, only humans can solve the mirror self-recognition test. OK, only humans and the great apes. Wait, only humans and primates—no, humans, primates—and elephants—and dolphins and killer whales. Actually, given the proper training, magpies can too. And so can those pigeons! And that’s for a test that uses visual stimuli. As with public opinion polls, the answer you get in an experiment may all lie in how you ask the question. Vision is a dominant sense for humans—and for those birds as well. Yet, as dog owners know, for canines—unlike humans or birds—olfaction is the dominant sense over vision. Before we can truly evaluate the intelligence of other species, we need to at least make an attempt at understanding the world as they experience it. And that’s just what one German biologist did.

Umwelts and the Enneadic Brain of the Octopus

Baron Professor Jakob Johann von Uexküll (1864–1944) was a German biologist whose research ranged from physiology to animal behavior. His most important contribution was introducing the concept of Umwelt and developing its importance for biology, specifically for the understanding of animal behavior. Literally translated as the “around world,” von Uexküll defined the Umwelt as the surrounding environment as perceived by a particular animal species given its specific sensory system. That concept has since influenced fields ranging from sensory and cognitive biology to environmental design engineering, cybernetics, semiotics, and even existential philosophy.

To better understand just what von Uexküll meant by the term Umwelt, consider some very relevant differences between dogs and people. First, dogs have only two-way (dichromatic) color vision, not three-way (trichromatic) vision like humans. Our eyes have three types of color receptors, termed cones, that allow us to recognize and identify a palette consisting of reds, blues, greens, and their combinations. Dogs, on the other hand, possess only two types of cones—blue and yellow. A dog’s Umwelt does not include the range of colors from red to green (along with blue) that we see but rather just shades of yellow, blue, and grey. Grass, for example, only appears yellowish or brown to dogs.

But dogs can smell so much more than we can. It has been estimated that dogs can smell anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 times better than humans. They have 40 times more smell-sensitive receptors, and their nasal cavities are far more complex thus amplifying their advantage in mere number of receptor cells. Some breeds, such as bloodhounds, that have been specifically bred for scent tracking are more sensitive sniffers than others. Those such as whippets and greyhounds, bred for visual tracking of fast-running prey, have sacrificed some olfactory for enhanced visual acuity, though even their sense of smell far exceeds ours.

And whereas vision is, well, line-of-sight, and transitory (out of sight, out of mind), smell is multidirectional (though affected by wind) and lasting. Even among us olfactorily-challenged humans, sensations of smell evoke some of our strongest and most enduring emotional reactions, from the sensual scent of a loved one’s perfume or cologne lingering on the pillow case to the stench of rotting garbage left uncollected on the big city street below. A mind that has evolved to handle predominantly olfactory input will construct a far different Umwelt than one built around overwhelmingly visual stimuli. And then there are the cetaceans, especially porpoises and dolphins, who construct their mental world based on auditory stimuli and whose motor responses have evolved to function in a different medium (water). While the canine olfactory Umwelt and the cetacean auditory Umwelt “map” to our human visual Umwelt, and vice versa, each “misses” a lot of the other two’s moment-by-moment experience.

Now suppose that not only are the sensory and motor systems of different species different, what if the unit that processes those inputs and generates their outputs to create their respective Umwelts is vastly different? Consider then the octopus, smartest of the invertebrates. They’re quite good at learning to get through mazes and they employ tools in constructing their well-known “gardens.”

The octopus has the highest brain size to body size ratio among those without a backbone and about as many total neurons as a dog. Instead of one brain, it has nine! Well, one generalized, central hub in the head and a smaller specialized processor in each of its eight arms, each with its own set of neurons. And if an arm is removed, the octopus can regenerate it! What might be their mental map of the world?

If the octopus could evolve human-level intelligence, would it think in terms of dichotomies of good versus bad or political liberal versus conservative the way we do? Or would the octopus have a much more nuanced enneadic view of things given its nine brains? Could distributed brains ever evolve the level of intelligence achieved by centralized brains?

Have we, as a byproduct of our great success as a species, dumbesticated ourselves?

Truly accurate and meaningful measurement and comparison of the intelligence of various species, living or extinct, would therefore have to take into account their entire Umwelt: their sensory inputs, motor responses, and the structure of the intellect that processes them. Until then, we’re left to deal with approximations. The more closely related the subjects we’re comparing, the more accurate the comparison.

Intelligence Costs, So Stupidity Sometimes Pays

If there is such an advantage to increases in intelligence over the course of evolutionary history, why are there any “dumb” animals left? The most basic and perhaps only law of economics is “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Since you can’t get something for nothing, getting one thing means giving up something else. And animal intelligence, like artificial intelligence, is very expensive, and the brain is the most energy-expensive organ in the body. Brain tissue uses 20 times the metabolic energy as an equivalent mass of muscle. Therefore, increases in intelligence must bring a significant selective advantage or they won’t take place and would not have taken place over the course of evolutionary history in so many lineages. But sometimes they don’t.

There indeed can be evolutionary advantages in being stupid. If an organism can get by with its existing intelligence, increases may actually decrease survivability. Perhaps that’s why about half of the domesticated species decreased their brain size compared to their wild ancestors. So domestication, as often as not, results in “dumbestication.” And what of the seemingly “smarter”—to our minds—domesticated ones? Are dogs such as Border Collies that humans can train to herd sheep and obey over 500 commands, using both words and hand signals, really smarter than wolves that successfully navigate much harsher environments, often outsmarting both people and dogs?

Consider that the average human brain size has decreased over the last 10,000 years, with our transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists. Being a hunter-gatherer calls for brains as well as brawn, and you’re regularly facing many life-determining novel situations compared to all those regular, repetitive days on the farm. Have we, as a byproduct of our great success as a species, dumbesticated ourselves, and, if so, is that still going on today? Does the relaxed selection pressure resulting from the benefits of modern technological society foster similar changes as our transition to agriculture? Clearly, evolving increased intelligence is not the sure and only path to survival and success, nor is such success guaranteed.

A Tale Told by an Intellect, Filled With Chance and Necessity

Nonetheless, over the course of evolution, there has been an increasing, self-perpetuating, competitive advantage to be derived from increases in neural complexity (which can be approximately, variously, though somewhat fuzzily estimated by brain size) and behavioral complexity (gauged in like manner through various tests of intelligence, reaction time, and cognition). Our best tests of intelligence involve the process of decontextualization—removing a stimulus from its immediate sensory meaning.

A prime example is when a set of arbitrary marks are used to represent sounds, and then some of those marks are used in a completely different context to represent concepts unrelated to those sounds. The equation E=mc2 is about as decontextualized as you can get. There’s nothing in those sounds or marks that directly represents energy, mass, and the speed of light, or the process of multiplying a quantity by itself, which can be represented geometrically by a shape called the square. Yet, that equation has certainly increased the power in humanity’s hand—enough to power or annihilate whole cities. Across human history, we see how our increased intelligence has been put to work to harness increasing amounts of that energy and turn that into increased levels of societal complexity.

And with that increase in intelligence, one hopes, there has been a similar competitive advantage in ever-increasing awareness of the environment, including and especially the minds of other individuals of our own group and of our own species, and with that in developing consciousness, and even conscience.

Illustration by Chris Wisnia for SKEPTIC

Alas, the race of life is not to get ahead—it’s to get ahead of somebody else. Another species, whether predatory or competing, another group, or an individual in the same group competing for food, range, or mates, rival relatives or siblings, even for resources in the womb in the case of twins and other multiple births. Differential outcomes depend on group and individual differences. And without individual differences, the very concept of intelligence itself would be meaningless—group differences being merely the aggregated individual differences.

Things didn’t have to happen exactly as they did, but given enough chances, either in various evolutionary lineages over the course of geological time—or even other places in the cosmos over the course of astronomical time—the odds are in favor of something very much, though by no means exactly, like that eventually happening somewhere sometime. Will Homo sapiens’ particular instantiation of “higher minds”—those with not only intelligence, emotion, consciousness, but possibly even conscience—ever encounter lesser, equal, or superior others before our evolutionary run runs out, whether through chance external encounter or necessitated by self-indulgent failure to use our intelligence?

The answer to that question lies less with scientists than with philosophers, to wit—

“Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity.” —DEMOCRITUS“… or vice versa!” —YOGI BERRA

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While investigating Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) for the UK Ministry of Defence, I was exposed to conspiracy theories that allege that the government is covering up proof of an alien presence. I’ve since become an occasional media commentator on conspiracy theories and have even been the subject of one myself, with some people claiming that I’m still secretly working for the government on the UAP issue. Most conspiracy theories are binary: we either did or didn’t go to the moon; Lee Harvey Oswald either did or didn’t act alone; 9/11 either was or wasn’t an inside job—and if it was an inside job, the choice is binary again: The Government Made It Happen or The Government Let It Happen.

The Covid pandemic generated multiple conspiracy theories, but the fact that most have been proven to be false shouldn’t lead people to conclude that what might be termed “the official narrative” about Covid is necessarily true in all aspects. It wasn’t.

A flawed “everyone’s at risk” narrative was promoted.

Covid wasn’t a “plandemic” orchestrated by nefarious Deep State players. Neither did the vaccines contain nanobots activated by 5G phone signals. But not everything we were told about Covid was correct: lockdowns and cloth masks didn’t have anywhere near the impact on slowing community spread or lowering mortality rates that was originally hoped for and subsequently claimed. Some studies now suggest the benefits were statistically insignificant. The vaccines didn’t stop transmission. And in one staggering admission—written by a New York Times journalist, no less!—a child was statistically more likely to die in a car accident on the way to school, than of Covid caught at school: “Severe versions of Covid, including long Covid, are extremely rare in children. For them, the virus resembles a typical flu. Children face more risk from car rides than Covid.”

A flawed “everyone’s at risk” narrative was promoted, in a situation where elderly people and others with comorbidities were vastly more likely to have serious health outcomes. The benefits of natural immunity were downplayed, and obesity as a risk factor was hardly discussed, perhaps because of politically correct sensitivities about fat-shaming. Partly, all this was because Covid was new, with key pieces of the puzzle unknown—especially in the early days of the pandemic. Later, it reflected the difficulty of interpreting statistics and analyzing data, especially where there were different ways of doing so, in different countries, or at different times. The debate over whether someone died of Covid (i.e., the virus killed them) or died with Covid (they died of some other cause and happened to be infected with the virus) is one example of this.

Obesity as a risk factor was hardly discussed, perhaps because of politically correct sensitivities about fat-shaming.

Nothing exemplifies the more nuanced nature of Covid conspiracy theories than the lab leak debate. Was Covid a case of zoonotic emergence, centered on a wet market in Wuhan, or an accident involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology? According to previous assessments by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, some parts of the U.S. Intelligence community favored one theory, some favored the other, while some were undecided. Then, on April 18, 2025,  www.covid.gov and www.covidtests.gov were both redirected to a new White House website titled “Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19.”

Screenshot of the White House webpage: “Lab Leak: The True Origins of Covid-19.”

Particularly in the early days of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was portrayed as a crazy conspiracy theory and was seen by many as being a rightwing dog whistle, along with any mention of Sweden’s more laissez-faire policies, the Danish Mask Study, and much more besides. This was part of the wider politicization of the virus, or rather, the official response to the virus. Broadly speaking, in the first weeks of the pandemic the American Left downplayed it, while the Right rang alarm bells, a trend that soon reversed entirely—ultimately the Left believed the pandemic was more serious than did the Right, and the Left supported the various mandates to a greater extent than the Right.

Should we err on the side of caution, especially in the beginning when we just don’t know, but do know the history of earlier pandemics?

Defining a conspiracy theory is tricky, and we shouldn’t conflate an elaborately constructed false narrative with a disputed fact. But when the line can be blurred, and when “conspiracy theorist” is itself sometimes used as a pejorative, the polarized debate over Covid can be tricky to navigate. “Covid vaccines didn't work” is false, but “Covid vaccines didn’t stop transmission, so mandating them, especially for those at little risk, was unnecessary” is true. Then again, if there’s any doubt at the time, why not err on the side of caution? Vaccination has proven to be among the most successful methods of modern medicine and much, much cheaper and less disruptive than shutdowns. “Masks didn’t work” is false, but “cloth masks generally had only a statistically insignificant health benefit” when deployed at scale is true. Then again, when in doubt, should we err on the side of caution, especially in the beginning when we just don’t know, but do know the history of earlier pandemics?

Why does any of this matter, especially as the pandemic fades into the rearview mirror? First, the truth is important, and we owe it to ourselves and to posterity to tell as full and accurate a story as possible, especially about such a major, impactful event. Secondly, we need to have a conversation about the failed response to Covid because not only were the various mandates on lockdowns, masks, vaccines and school closures much less effective than claimed, but also, many of those who questioned governmental and institutional narratives were demonized.

Authorities bet the farm on measures that were both divisive—mandates are almost always going to fall into this category—and ineffective.

On social media, dissenting voices were deplatformed or shadow-banned (a user’s content is made less visible or even hidden from others without the user being explicitly banned, or notified, or even aware that it has happened). So we never had an open and honest debate about possible alternative strategies, such as the Great Barrington Declaration authored by the Stanford physician-scientist and current NIH director Jay Bhattacharya. The authorities bet the farm on measures that were both divisive—mandates are almost always going to fall into this category—and ineffective. Dying on the hill of dragging traumatized 2-year old children off airplanes because they couldn’t keep a mask on was bizarre and even perverse, as was closing playgrounds, hiking trails, and beaches, and even the risibly ridiculous arresting of a lone paddleboarder off the coast of Malibu. Across the board, civil liberties were set back for years, while the consequences of school closures—both in terms of education and social development—have yet to be properly assessed (although preliminary studies indicate that students may be at least one year behind where they should be). And what about the level of preparedness of hospitals and medical equipment manufacturers? We need to talk about all this.

The next pandemic may have an attack rate and a case fatality ratio that would make Covid look like, well, the flu.

But most of all, this matters because of the next pandemic. It may be bird flu, the Nipah virus or mpox. Alternatively, it’ll be a Disease X that comes suddenly and unexpectedly from left field. But it’s inevitable, and the next pandemic may have an attack rate and a case fatality ratio that would make Covid look like, well, the flu. Such a pandemic would need a “we’re all in this together” response, just when half the country would regard such a soundbite as an Orwellian reminder of what many refer to as “Covid tyranny.” Trust in the public health system, and many other institutions, is at an all-time low. We need to depoliticize healthcare and ensure that never again do people misappropriate science by appealing to it but not following it (“masks and lockdowns, except for mass BLM protests”). We need a data-led approach and not a dogma-led one.

Having a full, robust and open national conversation about Covid—with accountability and apologies where necessary—is vital. That’s because identifying the mistakes and learning the lessons of the failed response to the last pandemic is essential in preparing to combat the next one.

Nick Pope’s new documentary film on which this essay is based is Apocalypse Covid. Watch the trailer here and the full film here.

“It is fundamental in science that no knowledge is protected from challenge. … Knowledge that requires protection is belief, not science.” —Peter Winsley

There is growing international concern over erosion of objectivity in both education and research. When political and social agendas enter the scientific domain there is a danger that they may override evidence-based inquiry and compromise the core principles of science. A key component of the scientific process is an inherent skeptical willingness to challenge assumptions. When that foundation is replaced by a fear of causing offense or conforming to popular trends, what was science becomes mere pseudoscientific propaganda employed for the purpose of reinforcing ideology.

When Europeans formally colonized New Zealand in 1840 with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the culture of the indigenous Māori people was widely disparaged and their being viewed an inferior race. One year earlier historian John Ward described Māori as having “the intellect of children” who were living in an immature society that called out for the guiding hand of British civilization.1 The recognition of Māori as fully human, with rights, dignity, and a rich culture worthy of respect, represents a seismic shift from the 19th century attitudes that permeated New Zealand and much of the Western world, and that were used to justify the European subjugation of indigenous peoples. 

Since the 1970s, Māori society has experienced a cultural Renaissance with a renewed appreciation of the language, art, and literature of the first people to settle Aotearoa—“the land of the long white cloud.” While speaking Māori was once banned in public schools, it is now thriving and is an official language of the country. Learning about Māori culture is an integral part of the education system that emphasizes that it is a treasure (taonga) that must be treated with reverence. Māori knowledge often holds great spiritual significance and should be respected. Like all indigenous knowledge, it contains valuable wisdom obtained over millennia, and while it contains some ideas that can be tested and replicated, it is not the same as science. 

When political and social agendas enter the scientific domain there is a danger that they may override evidence-based inquiry

For example, Māori knowledge encompasses traditional methods for rendering poisonous karaka berries safe for consumption. Science, on the other hand, focuses on how and why things happen, like why karaka berries are poisonous and how the poison can be removed.2 The job of science is to describe the workings of the natural world in ways that are testable and repeatable, so that claims can be checked against empirical evidence—data gathered from experiments or observations. That does not mean we should discount the significance of indigenous knowledge—but these two systems of looking at the world operate in different domains. As much as indigenous knowledge deserves our respect, we should not become so enamoured with it that we give it the same weight as scientific knowledge. 

The Māori Knowledge Debate 

In recent years the government of New Zealand has given special treatment to indigenous knowledge. The issue came to a head in 2021, when a group of prominent academics published a letter expressing concern that giving indigenous knowledge parity with science could undermine the integrity of the country’s science education. The seven professors who signed the letter were subjected to a national inquisition. There were public attacks by their own colleagues and an investigation by the New Zealand Royal Society on whether to expel members who had signed the letter.3

Ironically, part of the reason for the Society’s existence is to promote science. At its core is the issue of whether “Māori ancient wisdom” should be given equal status in the curriculum with science, which is the official government position.4 This situation has resulted in tension in the halls of academia, where many believe that the pendulum has now swung to another extreme. Frustration and unease permeate university campuses as professors and students alike walk on eggshells, afraid to broach the subject for fear of being branded racist and anti-Māori, or subjected to personal attacks or harassment campaigns. 

The Lunar Calendar 

Infatuation with indigenous knowledge and the fear of criticising claims surrounding it has infiltrated many of the country’s key institutions, from the health and education systems to the mainstream media. The result has been a proliferation of pseudoscience. There is no better example of just how extreme the situation has become than the craze over the Māori Lunar Calendar. Its rise is a direct result of what can happen when political activism enters the scientific arena and affects policymaking. Interest in the Calendar began to gain traction in late 2017. 

An example of the Maramataka Māori lunar calendar (Source: Museum of New Zealand)

Since then, many Kiwis have been led to believe that it can impact everything from horticulture to health to human behavior. The problem is that the science is lacking, but because of the ugly history of the mistreatment of the Māori people, public institutions are afraid to criticize or even take issue anything to do with Māori culture. Consider, for example, media coverage. Between 2020 and 2024, there were no less than 853 articles that mention “maramataka”—the Māori word for the Calendar which translates to “the turning of the moon.” After reading through each text, I was unable to identify a single skeptical article.5 Many openly gush about the wonders of the Calendar, and gave no hint that it has little scientific backing. 

Based on the Dow Jones Factiva Database

The Calendar once played an important role in Māori life, tracking the seasons. Its main purpose was to inform fishing, hunting, and horticultural activities. There is some truth in the use of specific phases or cycles to time harvesting practices. For instance, some fish are more active or abundant during certain fluctuations of the tides, which in turn are influenced by the moon’s gravitational pull. Two studies have shown a slight increase in fish catch using the Calendar.6 However, there is no support for the belief that lunar phases influence human health and behavior, plant growth, or the weather. Despite this, government ministries began providing online materials that feature an array of claims about the moon’s impact on human affairs. Fearful of causing offense by publicly criticizing Māori knowledge, the scientific position was usually nowhere to be found. 

Soon primary and secondary schools began holding workshops to familiarize staff with the Calendar and how to teach it. These materials were confusing for students and teachers alike because most were breathtakingly uncritical and there was an implication that it was all backed by science. Before long, teachers began consulting the maramataka to determine which days were best to conduct assessments, which days were optimal for sporting activities, and which days were aligned with “calmer activities at times of lower energy phases.” Others used it to predict days when problem students were more likely to misbehave.7

Fearful of causing offense by publicly criticizing Māori knowledge, the scientific position was usually nowhere to be found.

As one primary teacher observed: “If it’s a low energy day, I might not test that week. We’ll do meditation, mirimiri (massage). I slowly build their learning up, and by the time of high energy days we know the kids will be energetic. You’re not fighting with the children, it’s a win-win, for both the children and myself. Your outcomes are better.”8 The link between the Calendar and human behavior was even promoted by one of the country’s largest education unions.9 Some teachers and government officials began scheduling meetings on days deemed less likely to trigger conflict,10 while some media outlets began publishing what were essentially horoscopes under the guise of ‘ancient Māori knowledge.’11

The Calendar also gained widespread popularity among the public as many Kiwis began using online apps and visiting the homepages of maramataka enthusiasts to guide their daily activities. In 2022, a Māori psychiatrist published a popular book on how to navigate the fluctuating energy levels of Hina—the moon goddess. In Wawata Moon Dreaming, Dr. Hinemoa Elder advises that during the Tamatea Kai-ariki phase people should: “Be wary of destructive energies,”12 while the Māwharu phase is said to be a time of “female sexual energy … and great sex.”13 Elder is one of many “maramataka whisperers” who have popped up across the country. 

By early 2025, the Facebook page “Maramataka Māori” had 58,000 followers,14 while another, “Living by the Stars” on Māori Astronomy had 103,000 admirers.15 Another popular book, Living by the Moon, also asserts that lunar phases can affect a person’s energy levels and behavior. We are told that the Whiro phase (new moon) is associated with troublemaking. It even won awards for best educational book and best Māori language resource.16 In 2023, Māori politician Hana Maipi-Clarke, who has written her own book on the Calendar, stood up in Parliament and declared that the maramataka could foretell the weather.17

A Public Health Menace 

Several public health clinics have encouraged their staff to use the Calendar to navigate “high energy” and “low energy” days and help clients apply it to their lives. As a result of the positive portrayal of the Calendar in the Kiwi media and government websites, there are cases of people discontinuing their medication for bipolar disorder and managing contraception with the Calendar.18 In February 2025, the government-funded Māori health organization, Te Rau Ora, released an app that allows people to enhance their physical and mental health by following the maramataka to track their mauri (vital life force).

While Te Rau Ora claims that it uses “evidence-based resources,” there is no evidence that mauri exists, or that following the phases of the moon directly affects health and well-being. Mauri is the Māori concept of a life force—or vital energy—that is believed to exist in all living beings and inanimate objects. The existence of a “life force” was once the subject of debate in the scientific community and was known as “vitalism,” but no longer has any scientific standing.19 Despite this, one of app developers, clinical psychologist Dr. Andre McLachlan, has called for widespread use of the app.20 Some people are adamant that following the Calendar has transformed their lives, and this is certainly possible given the belief in its spiritual significance. However, the impact would not be from the influence of the Moon, but through the power of expectation and the placebo effect. 

No Science Allowed 

While researching my book, The Science of the Māori Lunar Calendar, I was repeatedly told by Māori scholars that it was inappropriate to write on this topic without first obtaining permission from the Māori community. They also raised the issue of “Māori data sovereignty”—the right of Māori to have control over their own data, including who has access to it and what it can be used for. They expressed disgust that I was using “Western colonial science” to validate (or invalidate) the Calendar. 

It is a dangerous world where subjective truths are given equal standing with science under the guise of relativism.

This is a reminder of just how extreme attempts to protect indigenous knowledge have become in New Zealand. It is a dangerous world where subjective truths are given equal standing with science under the guise of relativism, blurring the line between fact and fiction. It is a world where group identity and indigenous rights are often given priority over empirical evidence. The assertion that forms of “ancient knowledge” such as the Calendar, cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny as it has protected cultural status, undermines the very foundations of scientific inquiry. The expectation that indigenous representatives must serve as gatekeepers who must give their consent before someone can engage in research on certain topics is troubling. The notion that only indigenous people can decide which topics are acceptable to research undermines intellectual freedom and stifles academic inquiry. 

While indigenous knowledge deserves our respect, its uncritical introduction into New Zealand schools and health institutions is worrisome and should serve as a warning to other countries. When cultural beliefs are given parity with science, it jeopardizes public trust in scientific institutions and can foster misinformation, especially in areas such as public health, where the stakes are especially high.

Are things getting better?
For whom? What does “better” mean?

The economic and social phenomena so clear in everyday experience are invisible in the standard national accounts and GDP (Gross Domestic Product) statistics. The current concept of value added used to construct GDP numbers does not correspond to the views many people hold about societal value. This disconnect has given momentum to the Beyond GDP movement and to those similarly challenging the metrics of shareholder value that determine how businesses act. The digitalization of the economy, in shifting the ways economic value can be created, amplifies the case for revisiting existing economic statistics.

Without good statistics, states cannot function. In my work focusing on both the digital economy and the natural economy, I have worked closely with official statisticians in the ONS (Office for National Statistics), BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis), OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), INSEE (National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies), and elsewhere for many years. Without question there has been a widespread loss of belief in conventional statistics even among knowledgeable commentators, as the vigorous Beyond GDP agenda testifies.

Why Not Well-Being?

An alternative metric of social welfare that many people find appealing is the direct measurement of well-being. Economists who focus on well-being have differing views on exactly how to measure it, but the balance of opinion has tilted toward life satisfaction measured on a fixed scale. One such measurement is the Cantril Ladder, which asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10 and the worst possible life being a 0, and are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.

Although people’s well-being is the ultimate aim of collective action, using it as a measurement is problematic in several ways. One is the set of measurement issues highlighted in research by Mark Fabian. These include scale norming, whereby when people state their life satisfaction as, say, a 7 on a scale of 1 to 10 at different time periods, they are doing so by reference to the scale rather than events in their life.1, 2 One of the more firmly established behavioral facts is the idea of an individual set point, whereby individuals generally revert to an initial level of well-being after experiencing events that send it up or down, but this is hardly a reason for concluding that nothing can improve in their lives.

Although people’s well-being is the ultimate aim of collective action, using it as a measurement is problematic.

Another issue is that the empirical literature is atheoretical, providing a weak basis for policy intervention in people’s lives. The conclusion from my research project on well-being is that while national policy could certainly be informed by top-down life satisfaction survey statistics, at smaller scales people’s well-being will depend on the context and on who is affected; the definition and measurement of well-being should be tailored appropriately, and it is not a very useful metric for policy at an aggregate level.

Why Not an Alternative Index?

GDP is calculated by summing up the total value of all final goods and services produced within a country’s borders during a specific period, typically a year. Over the years, several single indices as alternatives to GDP have been proposed. However, indices internalize the trade-offs to present a single number that advocates hope will dethrone conventional measures. Some of these are explicit about the social welfare framework they involve.

Another alternative is provided by Jones and Klenow (2016),3 who include consumption, leisure, inequality, and mortality in social welfare. They convert other indicators into “consumption-equivalent welfare,” which has a long tradition in economics.4 In their paper, they observe that France has much lower consumption per capita than the United States—it is only at 60 percent of the U.S. level—but less inequality, greater life expectancy at birth, and longer leisure hours. Their adjustment puts France at 92 percent of the consumption-equivalent level of the United States.

A well-established alternative to GDP is the Human Development Index (HDI), inspired by Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach—improving access to the tools people use to live a fulfilling life. The index demonstrates the dangers of combining a number of indicators, each one measuring something relevant, without having a conceptual structure for the trade-offs and how the components should be weighted together. The late Martin Ravallion of the World Bank advocated for a multidimensional set of indicators, with the aggregation necessary to get to these being informed by talking to poor people about their priorities:

The role played by prices lies at the heart of the matter. It is widely agreed that prices can be missing for some goods and deceptive for others. There are continuing challenges facing applied economists in addressing these problems. However, it is one thing to recognize that markets and prices are missing or imperfect, and quite another to ignore them in welfare and poverty measurement. There is a peculiar inconsistency in the literature on multidimensional indices of poverty, whereby prices are regarded as an unreliable guide to the tradeoffs, and are largely ignored, while the actual weights being assumed in lieu of prices are not made explicit in the same space as prices. We have no basis for believing that the weights being used are any better than market price.5Why Not a Dashboard?

One frequent proposal, which certainly has intuitive appeal, is replacing the political and policy focus on GDP growth and related macroeconomic statistics with a broader dashboard. But there are three big challenges related to what to display on the dashboard. One, which indicators? A proliferation of alternatives has focused on what their advocates think is important rather than being shaped by either theory or broad consensus. So potential users face an array of possibilities and can select what interests them. Second, there are trade-offs and dependencies between indicators, and although dashboards could be designed to display these clearly, often they do not. Consequently, the third challenge is how to weight or display the various component indicators for decision purposes.

Table 1 lists the headline categories for four frequently cited dashboards, showing how little they overlap. The selection of indicators to represent an underlying concept is evidently arbitrary, in the sense that the lists do not have a clear theoretical basis, and the selection of indicators is generally determined by what data are available or even by political negotiation. For instance, I was told by someone closely involved in the process that the debate within the UN about the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) included a discussion about the definition of a tree; depending on the height specified in the definition, coffee bushes might or might not be included, which for some countries would affect their measure of deforestation. Practicality and arbitrary decisions certainly affect mainstream economic statistics too, but these result from decades of debate and practice among the community of relevant experts informed by a theoretical basis. We are not there yet with dashboards.

Still, there are many things people care about in life, even if one confines the question to their economic well-being. Indeed, one of my criticisms of using growth of real GDP as a guide was the flawed assumption that utility can be collapsed to a single dimension.

Comprehensive Wealth

If not well-being directly measured, nor (yet) a dashboard, nor a single index number alternative to GDP, what are the options? Consider comprehensive wealth. First, it embeds sustainability because of its focus on assets. Adding in effect a balance sheet recording stocks—or equivalently a full account of the flow of services provided by the assets—immediately highlights the key trade-off between present and future consumption. One measurement challenge is to identify the economically relevant assets and collect the underlying data. Focusing on assets revives an old debate in economics during the 1950s and early 1960s between the “two Cambridges”—Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to MIT and Harvard (where I did my PhD), and Cambridge, England (where I now work). That debate was about whether it made any sense to think of (physical) capital as a single aggregate when this would inevitably be a mash-up of many different types of physical buildings and equipment.

The American Cambridge (led by Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow) said yes, and the concept has become the “K” of production functions and growth accounting. The British Cambridge (particularly Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson) disputed this, arguing for example that different vintages of capital would embed different generations of technology, so even a straightforward machine tool to stamp out components could not be aggregated with a twenty-year-old equivalent. Even the review articles discussing the debate (Cohen and Harcourt 2003,6 Stiglitz 19747) take sides, but the mainstream profession has given total victory to the U.S. single-aggregate version.

A balance-sheet approach also helps integrate the role of debt into consideration of progress.

A second point in favor of a comprehensive wealth approach is that investment for future consumption always involves different types of assets in combination. This means it will be important to consider not just the stocks of different assets—whether machines, patents, or urban trees (which cool the ambient temperature)—but also the extent to which the services they provide are substitutes or complements for each other: What is the correlation matrix? A patent for a new gadget will require investment in specific machines to put it into production and may benefit from tree planting if the production process heats the factory; the trees may substitute for an air-conditioning plant and also for concrete flood defenses downstream if their roots absorb enough rain. A recent paper8 highlights the importance of understanding the complementarities: “So long as a particular irreversible capital good remains with its project, in many cases until it is scrapped, its contribution comes not solely on its own account but as a result of complementarity with other capital goods. The project’s income is not composed of distinct contributions from individual assets.”

A balance-sheet approach also helps integrate the role of debt into consideration of progress. Debt is how consumption occurs now at the expense of consumption in future. In addition to financial debt, whether issued by governments or businesses or owed by individuals, there is a large and unmeasured burden of debt to nature. In a range of natural capital assets, including a stable climate, past and current consumption is reducing future opportunities.

In summary, to track sustainable economic welfare, a comprehensive wealth approach is desirable, identifying separately the types of assets that contribute capital services to economic actors. Some of them have no natural volume units. (You can count the number of isotope ratio mass spectrometers, but how do you count the accumulated know-how of a top law firm?) Many will not have a market price at all, and if they do, it is likely not to be the shadow price relevant to social welfare, so the monetary valuation needed to aggregate individual assets (by putting them into a common unit of account) is problematic.9 And the complementarities and substitutability across categories need to be better understood, including non-market assets such as organizational capabilities. (The development economics literature talks about this in terms of institutions or social capital; Singapore had few physical assets and little manufacturing industry to speak of in 1946, so it clearly relied on other assets to become one of the world’s highest per capita income countries.)

This is a challenging measurement agenda to say the least, but it is an obvious path for statistical development. Some readers will find the sustainability argument the most persuasive. There are two other supporting rationales, though. One is that a significant body of economic theory (appealing to both neoclassical and heterodox economists) supports it:10, 11 An increase in comprehensive wealth, at appropriately measured shadow prices, corresponds to an increase in social well-being. The other is that the statistical community has already started heading down this path with the agreement of UN statistical standards for measuring (some) natural capital and the services it provides.

The 2025 System of National Accounts (SNA) revision will include a little more detail about how official statisticians should be implementing this. It is a giant step forward, conceptually and practically— although it does not go far enough in that it insists on the use of valuations as close as possible to market prices, when the main issue in accounting for the environment is that markets grotesquely misprice resource use. (SNA is an internationally agreed-upon framework for compiling economic data, providing a standardized approach to measuring economic activity, including GDP and other key economic variables, facilitating analysis and policy-making.)

Conclusion

Today’s official framework for measuring the economy dates from an era when physical capital was scarce and natural resources were seemingly unconstrained. Manufacturing was the leading sector of the economy, and digital technology was in its infancy. The original national accounts were created using a mechanical calculating machine, not on a computer. Digital technologies have transformed the structure of production and consumption, and at a time of such significant structural change the supply side of the economy needs to be taken seriously. Policy decisions taken now will affect people’s lives for decades to come because the structure of so many industries is changing significantly. It is no wonder industrial policy is back in fashion among policymakers.

Unfortunately, there are yawning gaps in our basic statistics. Official statisticians do important work even as many governments have been cutting their budgets. However, the focus of the statistical agencies is on incremental improvement to the existing System of National Accounts, which will change for the better but not by much when the new standards are confirmed in 2025. There are huge data collection and analytical gaps in what is needed now, comprehensive wealth and time use, and a huge intellectual agenda when those statistics do become available. Just as the production of the first GDP figures gave birth to theories of economic growth, so sustainable balance sheet and time-use metrics will be generative for economists thinking about how societies progress.

The critiques of the earlier Beyond GDP movement have given way to a more constructive period of statistical innovation.

There is no doubt this area of economic statistics will continue to expand—because it is all too obvious that something new is needed. The critiques of the earlier Beyond GDP movement have given way to a more constructive period of statistical innovation—and I have given some examples of fruitful new methods and types of data.

However, I think some conclusions are clear. Measures that account for sustainability, natural and societal, are clearly imperative; the comprehensive wealth framework does this, and can potentially provide a broad scaffolding that others can use to tailor dashboards that serve specific purposes. A second conclusion is that while ideas have always driven innovation and progress, their role in adding value is even more central as the share of intangible value in the economy increases.

Finally, economic value added cannot be defined and measured without an underlying conception of value. This normative conception varies greatly between societies and over time, not least because of profound changes in technology and structure. It is a question of public philosophy as much as economics. Welfare economics has hardly moved on from the heyday of social choice theory in the 1970s, with social welfare defined as the sum of individual utilities; the philosophically rich capabilities approach has made little headway in everyday economics, except perhaps for development economics.

It is not yet clear whether the OECD economies will break away from the public philosophy of individualism and markets that has dominated policy for the past half century, despite all the critiques of neoliberalism; but the fact of popular discontent and its political consequences suggest they might. No wonder commentators so often reach for Gramsci’s famous Prison Notebooks comment, “The old order is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Economic value added cannot be defined and measured without an underlying conception of value.

If a new shared understanding of economic value emerges from the changes underway now, it will look quite different. It will acknowledge the importance of context and variety, moving beyond averages and “representative consumers.” It will incorporate collective outcomes alongside individual ones, while recognizing the differences between them due to pervasive externalities, spillovers, and scale effects. And, it will embed the economy in nature, appreciating the resource constraints that limit future growth.

Excerpted and adapted by the author from The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters © 2025 Diane Coyle. Reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press.

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During her sojourns among the Inuit throughout the 1960s and 70s, pioneering anthropologist Jean Briggs observed some peculiar parenting practices. In a chapter she contributed to The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence, a collection of essays from 1994, Briggs describes various methods the Inuit used to reduce the risk of physical conflict among community members. Foremost among them was the deliberate cultivation of modesty and equanimity, along with a penchant for reframing disputes or annoyances as jokes. “An immodest person or one who liked attention,” Briggs writes, “was thought silly or childish.” Meanwhile, a critical distinction held sway between seriousness and playfulness. “To be ‘serious’ had connotations of tension, anxiety, hostility, brooding,” she explains. “On the other hand, it was highest praise to say of someone: ‘He never takes anything seriously’.”1 The ideal then was to be happy, jocular, and even-tempered.

This distaste for displays of anger applied in the realm of parenting as well. No matter how unruly children’s behavior, adults would refrain from yelling at them. So, it came as a surprise to Briggs that Inuit adults would often purposely instigate conflicts among the children in their charge. One exchange Briggs witnessed involved an aunt taking her three-year-old niece’s hand and putting it in another child’s hair while telling her to pull it. When the girl refused, the aunt gave it a tug herself. The other child, naturally enough, turned around and hit the one she thought had pulled her hair. A fight ensued, eliciting laughter and cheers from the other adults, who intervened before anyone was hurt. None of the other adults who witnessed this incident seemed to think the aunt had done anything wrong.

“Why Don’t You Kill Your Baby Brother?” The provocations didn’t always involve rough treatment or incitements to conflict but often took the form of outrageous lines of questioning.

On another occasion, Briggs witnessed a mother picking up a friend’s baby and saying to her own nursling, “Shall I nurse him instead of you?” The other mother played along, offering her breast to the first woman’s baby, saying, “Do you want to nurse from me? Shall I be your mother?”2 The nursling shrieked in protest, and both mothers burst into laughter. Briggs witnessed countless more of what she calls “playful dramas” over the course of her research. Westerners might characterize what the adults were doing in these cases as immature, often cruel pranks, even criminal acts of child abuse. What Briggs came to understand, however, was that the dramas served an important function in the context of Inuit culture. Tellingly, the provocations didn’t always involve rough treatment or incitements to conflict but often took the form of outrageous or disturbing lines of questioning. This approach is reflected in the title of Briggs’s chapter, “‘Why Don’t You Kill Your Baby Brother?’ The Dynamics of Peace in Canadian Inuit Camps.” However, even these gentler sessions were more interrogation than thought experiment, the clear goal being to arouse intense emotions in the children. 

The parents were training the children, using simulated and age-calibrated dilemmas, to develop exactly the kind of equanimity and joking attitude they would need to mature into successful adults.

From interviews with adults in the communities hosting her, Briggs gleaned that the purpose of these dramas was to force children to learn how to handle difficult social situations. The term they used is isumaqsayuq, meaning “to cause thought,” which Briggs notes is a “central idea of Inuit socialization.” “More than that,” she goes on, “and as an integral part of thought, the dramas stimulate emotion.” The capacity for clear thinking in tense situations—and for not taking the tension too seriously—would help the children avoid potentially dangerous confrontations. Briggs writes: 

The games were, themselves, models of conflict management through play. And when children learned to recognize the playful in particular dramas, people stopped playing those games with them. They stopped tormenting them. The children had learned to keep their own relationships smoother—to keep out of trouble, so to speak— and in doing so, they had learned to do their part in smoothing the relationships of others.3

The parents, in other words, were training the children, using simulated and age-calibrated dilemmas, to develop exactly the kind of equanimity and joking attitude they would need to mature into successful adults capable of maintaining a mostly peaceful society. They were prodding at the kids’ known sensitivities to teach them not to take themselves too seriously, because taking yourself too seriously makes you apt to take offense, and offense can often lead to violence. 

Are censors justified in their efforts at protecting children from the wrong types of lessons? 

The Inuit’s aversion to being at the center of any drama and their penchant for playfulness in potentially tense encounters are far removed from our own culture. Rather their approach to socialization relies on an insight that applies universally, one that’s frequently paid lip service in the West but even more frequently lost sight of. Anthropologist Margaret Mead captures the idea in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa, writing, “The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”4 People fond of spouting this truism today usually intend to communicate something diametrically opposite to its actual meaning, with the suggestion being that anyone who accepts rival conclusions must have been duped by unscrupulous teachers. However, the crux of the insight is that education should not focus on conclusions at all. Thinking is not about memorizing and being able to recite facts and propositions. Thinking is a process. It relies on knowledge to be sure, but knowledge alone isn’t sufficient. It also requires skills.

Inuit Children. Photo by UC Berkeley, Department of Geography.

Cognitive psychologists label knowing that and knowing how as declarative and procedural knowledge, respectively.5 Declarative knowledge can be imparted by the more knowledgeable to the less knowledgeable—the earth orbits the sun—but to develop procedural knowledge or skills you need practice. No matter how precisely you explain to someone what goes into riding a bike, for instance, that person has no chance of developing the requisite skills without at some point climbing on and pedaling. Skills require training, which to be effective must incorporate repetition and feedback. 

It’s good to be honest, but should you lie to protect a friend?

What the Inuit understood, perhaps better than most other cultures, is that morality plays out far less in the realm of knowing what than in the realm of knowing how. The adults could simply lecture the children about the evils of getting embroiled in drama, but those children would still need to learn how to manage their own aggressive and retributive impulses. And explaining that the most effective method consists of reframing slights as jokes is fine, but no child can be expected to master the trick on first attempt. So it is with any moral proposition. We tell young children it’s good to share, for instance, but how easy is it for them to overcome their greedy impulses? And what happens when one moral precept runs up against another? It’s good to share a toy sword, but should you hand it over to someone you suspect may use it to hurt another child? Adults face moral dilemmas like this all the time. It’s wrong to cheat on your spouse, but what if your spouse is controlling and threatens to take your children if you file for divorce? It’s good to be honest, but should you lie to protect a friend? There’s no simple formula that applies to the entire panoply of moral dilemmas, and even if there were, it would demand herculean discipline to implement. 

Conservatives are working to impose bans on books they deem inappropriate for school children. Left-leaning citizens are being treated to PC bowdlerizations of a growing list of classic books.

Unfortunately, Western children have a limited range of activities that provide them opportunities to develop their moral skillsets. Perhaps it’s testament to the strength of our identification with our own moral principles that few of us can abide approaches to moral education that are in any regard open-ended. Consider children’s literature. As I write, political conservatives in the U.S. are working to impose bans on books6 they deem inappropriate for school children. Meanwhile, more left-leaning citizens are being treated to PC bowdlerizations7 of a disconcertingly growing8 list of classic books. One side is worried about kids being indoctrinated with life-deranging notions about race and gender. The other is worried about wounding kids’ and older readers’ fragile psyches with words and phrases connoting the inferiority of some individual or group. What neither side appreciates is that stories can’t be reduced to a set of moral propositions, and that what children are taught is of far less consequence than what they practice.

Do children’s books really have anything in common with the playful dramas Briggs observed among the Inuit? What about the fictional stories adults in our culture enjoy? One obvious point of similarity is that stories tend to focus on conflict and feature high-stakes moral dilemmas. The main difference is that reading or watching a story entails passively witnessing the actions of others, as opposed to actively participating in the plots. Nonetheless, the principle of isumaqsayuq comes into play as we immerse ourselves in a good novel or movie. Stories, if they’re at all engaging, cause us to think. They also arouse intense emotions. But what could children and adults possibly be practicing when they read or watch stories? If audiences were simply trying to figure out how to work through the dilemmas faced by the protagonists, wouldn’t the outcome contrived by the author represent some kind of verdict, some kind of lesson? In that case, wouldn’t censors be justified in their efforts at protecting children from the wrong types of lessons? 

What could children possibly be practicing when they read stories? Wouldn’t the outcome contrived by the author represent some kind of verdict or lesson?

To answer these questions, we must consider why humans are so readily held rapt by fictional narratives in the first place. If the events we’re witnessing aren’t real, why do we care enough to devote time and mental resources to them? The most popular stories, at least in Western societies, feature characters we favor engaging in some sort of struggle against characters we dislike—good guys versus bad guys. In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, psychologist Paul Bloom describes a series of experiments9 he conducted with his colleague Karen Wynn, along with their then graduate student Kiley Hamlin. They used what he calls “morality plays” to explore the moral development of infants. In one experiment, the researchers had the babies watch a simple puppet show in which a tiger rolls a ball to one rabbit and then to another. The first rabbit rolls the ball back to the tiger and a game ensues. But the second rabbit steals away with the ball at first opportunity. When later presented with both puppets and encouraged to reach for one to play with, the babies who had witnessed the exchanges showed a strong preference for the one who had played along. What this and several related studies show is that by as early as three months of age, infants start to prefer characters who are helpful and cooperative over those who are selfish and exploitative.

Photo by Natasha Jenny / Unsplash

That such a preference would develop so early and so reliably in humans makes a good deal of sense in light of how deeply dependent each individual is on other members of society. Throughout evolutionary history, humans have had to cooperate to survive, but any proclivity toward cooperation left them vulnerable to exploitation. This gets us closer to the question of what we’re practicing when we enjoy fiction. In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, literary scholar Brian Boyd points out that animals’ play tends to focus on activities that help them develop the skills they’ll need to survive, typically involving behaviors like chasing, fleeing, and fighting. When it comes to what skills are most important for humans to acquire, Boyd explains: 

Even more than other social species, we depend on information about others’ capacities, dispositions, intentions, actions, and reactions. Such “strategic information” catches our attention so forcefully that fiction can hold our interest, unlike almost anything else, for hours at a stretch.10

Fiction, then, can be viewed as a type of imaginative play that activates many of the same evolved cognitive mechanisms as gossip, but without any real-world stakes. This means that when we’re consuming fiction, we’re not necessarily practicing to develop equanimity in stressful circumstances as do the Inuit; we’re rather honing our skills at assessing people’s proclivities and weighing their potential contributions to our group. Stories, in other words, activate our instinct, while helping us to develop the underlying skillset, for monitoring people for signals of selfish or altruistic tendencies. The result of this type of play would be an increased capacity for cooperation, including an improved ability to recognize and sanction individuals who take advantage of cooperative norms without contributing their fair share. 

Ethnographic research into this theory of storytelling is still in its infancy, but the anthropologist Daniel Smith and his colleagues have conducted an intensive study11 of the role of stories among the Agta, a hunter-gatherer population in the Philippines. They found that 70 percent of the Agta stories they collected feature characters who face some type of social dilemma or moral decision, a theme that appears roughly twice as often as interactions with nature, the next most common topic. It turned out, though, that separate groups of Agta invested varying levels of time and energy in storytelling. The researchers saw this as an opportunity to see what the impact of a greater commitment to stories might be. In line with the evolutionary account laid out by Boyd and others, the groups that valued storytelling more outperformed the other groups in economic games that demand cooperation among the players. This would mean that storytelling improves group cohesion and coordination, which would likely provide a major advantage in any competition with rival groups. A third important finding from this study is that the people in these groups knew who the best storytellers were, and they preferred to work with these talented individuals on cooperative endeavors, including marriage and childrearing. This has obvious evolutionary implications. 

Remarkably, the same dynamics at play in so many Agta tales are also prominent in classic Western literature. When literary scholar Joseph Carroll and his team surveyed thousands of readers’ responses to characters in 200 novels from authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, they found that people see in them the basic dichotomy between altruists and selfish actors. They write: 

Antagonists virtually personify Social Dominance—the self-interested pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. In these novels, those ambitions are sharply segregated from prosocial and culturally acquisitive dispositions. Antagonists are not only selfish and unfriendly but also undisciplined, emotionally unstable, and intellectually dull. Protagonists, in contrast, display motive dispositions and personality traits that exemplify strong personal development and healthy social adjustment. They are agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open to experience.12

Interestingly, openness to experience may be only loosely connected to cooperativeness and altruism, just as humor is only tangentially related to peacefulness among the Inuit. However, being curious and open-minded ought to open the door to the appreciation of myriad forms of art, including different types of literature, leading to a virtuous cycle. So, the evolutionary theory, while focusing on cooperation, leaves ample room for other themes, depending on the cultural values of the storytellers.

Photo by João Rafael / Unsplash

In a narrow sense then, cooperation is what many, perhaps most, stories are about, and our interest in them depends to some degree on our attraction to more cooperative, less selfish, individuals. We obsessively track the behavior of our fellow humans because our choices of who to trust and who to team up with are some of the most consequential in our lives. This monitoring compulsion is so powerful that it can be triggered by opportunities to observe key elements of people’s behavior—what they do when they don’t know they’re being watched—even when those people don’t exist in the real world. But what keeps us reading or watching once we’ve made our choices of which characters to root for? And, if one of the functions of stories is to help us improve our social abilities, what mechanism provides the feedback necessary for such training to be effective? 

Fiction can be viewed as a type of imaginative play that activates many of the same evolved cognitive mechanisms as gossip, but without any real-world stakes.

In Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, literary scholar William Flesch theorizes that our moment-by-moment absorption in fictional plots can be attributed to our desire to see cooperators rewarded and exploiters punished. Citing experiments that showed participants were willing to punish people they had observed cheating other participants—even when the punishment came at a cost13 to the punishers— Flesch argues that stories offer us opportunities to demonstrate our own impulse to enforce norms of fair play. Within groups, individual members will naturally return tit for tat when they’ve been mistreated. For a norm of mutual trust to take hold, however, uninvolved third parties must also be willing to step in to sanction violators. Flesch calls these third-party players “strong reciprocators” because they respond to actions that aren’t directed at them personally. He explains that 

the strong reciprocator punishes or rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator.14

His insight here is that we don’t merely attend to people’s behavior in search of clues to their disposition. We also watch to make sure good and bad alike get their just deserts. And the fact that we can’t interfere in the unfolding of a fictional plot doesn’t prevent us from feeling that we should. Sitting on the edge of your seat, according to this theory, is evidence of your readiness to step in.

It doesn’t matter that a story is fictional if a central reason for liking it is to signal to others that we’re the type of person who likes the type of person portrayed in that story.

Another key insight emerging from Flesch’s work is that humans don’t merely monitor each other’s behavior. Rather, since they know others are constantly monitoring them, they also make a point of signaling that they possess desired traits, including a disposition toward enforcing cooperative norms. Here we have another clue to why we care about fictional characters and their fates. It doesn’t matter that a story is fictional if a central reason for liking it is to signal to others that we’re the type of person who likes the type of person portrayed in that story. Reading tends to be a solitary endeavor, but the meaning of a given story paradoxically depends in large part on the social context in which it’s discussed. We can develop one-on-one relationships with fictional characters for sure, but part of the enjoyment we get from these relationships comes from sharing our enthusiasm and admiration with nonfictional others. 

Children who read Harry Potter discuss which House the Sorting Hat would place them in, but you don’t hear many of them enthusiastically talking about Voldemort murdering Muggles.

This brings us back to the question of where feedback comes into the social training we get from fiction. One feedback mechanism relies on the comprehensibility and plausibility of the plot. If a character’s behavior strikes us as arbitrary or counter to their personality as we’ve assessed it, then we’re forced to think back and reassess our initial impressions—or else dismiss the story as poorly conceived. A character’s personality offers us a chance to make predictions, and the plot either confirms or disproves them. However, Flesch’s work points to another type of feedback that’s just as important. The children at the center of Inuit playful dramas receive feedback from the adults in the form of laughter and mockery. They learn that if they take the dramas too seriously and thus get agitated, then they can expect to be ridiculed. Likewise, when we read or watch fiction, we gauge other audience members’ reactions, including their reactions to our own reactions, to see if those responses correspond with the image of ourselves we want to project. In other words, we can try on traits and aspects of an identity by expressing our passion for fictional characters who embody them. The outcome of such experimentation isn’t determined solely by how well the identity suits the individual fan, but also by how well that identity fits within the wider social group. 

We obsessively track the behavior of our fellow humans because our choices of who to trust and who to team up with are some of the most consequential in our lives.

Parents worried that their children’s minds are being hijacked by ideologues will hardly be comforted by the suggestion that teachers and peers mitigate the impact of any book they read. Nor will those worried that their children are being inculcated with more or less subtle forms of bigotry find much reassurance in the idea that we’re given to modeling15 our own behavior on that of the fictional characters we admire. Consider, however, the feedback children receive from parents who respond to the mere presence of a book in a school library with outrage. What do children learn from parents’ concern that single words may harm or corrupt them? 

Kids are graduating high school with historically unprecedented rates of depression and anxiety.

Today, against a backdrop of increasing vigilance and protectiveness among parents, kids are graduating high school and moving on to college or the workforce with historically unprecedented rates of depression16 and anxiety,17 having had far fewer risky but rewarding experiences18 such as dating, drinking alcohol, getting a driver’s license, and working for pay. It’s almost as though the parents who should be helping kids learn to work through difficult situations by adopting a playful attitude have themselves become so paranoid and humorless that the only lesson they manage to impart is that the world is a dangerous place, one young adults with their fragile psyches can’t be trusted to navigate on their own.

Even pre-verbal infants are able to pick out the good guys from the bad.

Parents should, however, take some comfort from the discovery that even pre-verbal infants are able to pick out the good guys from the bad. As much as young Harry Potter fans discuss which Hogwarts House the Sorting Hat would place them in, you don’t hear19 many of them talking enthusiastically about how cool it was when Voldemort killed all those filthy Muggles. The other thing to keep in mind is that while some students may embrace the themes of a book just because the teacher assigned it, others will reject them for the same reason. It depends on the temperament of the child and the social group they hope to achieve status in.

Should parents let their kids read just anything? We must acknowledge that books, like playful dramas, need to be calibrated to the maturity levels of the readers. However, banning books deemed dangerous deprives children not only of a new perspective. It deprives them of an opportunity to train themselves for the difficulties they’ll face in the upcoming stages of their lives. If you’re worried your child might take the wrong message from a story, you can make sure you’re around to provide some of your own feedback on their responses. Maybe you could even introduce other books to them with themes you find more congenial. Should we censor words or images—or cease publication of entire books—that denigrate individuals or groups? Only if we believe children will grow up in a world without denigration. Do you want your children’s first encounter with life’s ugliness to occur in the wild, as it were, or as they sit next to you with a book spread over your laps? 

What should we do with great works by authors guilty of terrible acts? What about mostly good characters who sometimes behave badly? What happens when the bad guy starts to seem a little too cool? These are all great prompts for causing thought and arousing emotions. Why would we want to take these training opportunities away from our kids? It’s undeniable that books and teachers and fellow students and, yes, even parents themselves really do influence children to some degree. That influence, however, may not always be in the intended direction. Parents who devote more time and attention to their children’s socialization can probably improve their chances of achieving desirable ends. However, it’s also true that the most predictable result of any effort at exerting complete control over children’s moral education is that their social development will be stunted.

My life changed in February of 1993. It began with an early morning phone call from a fellow student at our private Evangelical Christian college. I was informed that our mutual friend Tim had fallen asleep while driving home from a ski trip. He’d been critically injured in a terrible accident and was now lying unconscious in an Ohio hospital. Though it was over 100 miles away and we had class that morning, we left immediately.

Arriving, we were advised to prepare ourselves before seeing him. We tried, but how can one do so? We walked in and recoiled at what was left of our friend. Others came. We took turns praying over our dying friend after being assured by our spiritual leader that, if we prayed hard enough and believed, Tim would be healed.

Hovering over his body, we began our prayer. We held hands as we closed our eyes, me taking Tim’s left hand as we pleaded for a miracle. Tim lifted my hand in the air about six inches as we did so! I opened my eyes in wonderment, and considered interrupting the prayer, but chose to wait and show them. As soon as our leader said “Amen,” and everyone opened their eyes, Tim’s strength left and my hand fell with his.

If he was brain dead, how could he lift my hand?

Unsure what had happened, I told the others about Tim lifting my hand. It was unanimously agreed that God was communicating with me through Tim. It was such a fantastic coincidence that it could only be attributed to divine intervention. We asked ourselves, “If he was brain dead, how could he lift my hand?” And why, if not to send a message from God, did he do so at the precise moments our prayer began and ended?

A doctor examined Tim and told his parents their son’s pupils were not responding to light, he was brain dead, and his body was shutting down. He respectfully advised them that they needed to prepare themselves for his death. The most devout among us corrected the good doctor, assuring him (and me, specifically) that Tim would rise again. The doctor kindly responded, “No. He has one foot in the grave.” Our leader countermanded him, reminding us “Jesus had two feet in the grave.” I believed our leader.

Tim passed away three days later, as the doctor predicted he would. Our leader rationalized Tim’s death (and the false assurances that he would be healed) as having been God’s will. We convinced ourselves that Tim, as a fellow believer, was now rejoicing in heaven, where we would meet him when our time came. I adopted Tim’s hand raising my own into my testimony as I turned my life around.

My dying friend’s disinhibited spinal cord told him to raise his hand.

Over the years I’ve come to accept that my life-changing miracle of a hand-raising while brain dead was, in actuality, explainable. The kind doctor who tried to prepare Tim’s parents probably knew exactly why Tim lifted my hand, and he knew it wasn’t from divine intervention. My dying friend’s disinhibited spinal cord told him to raise his hand. My hand was lifted by a “reflex arc”—a residual signal passing through a neural pathway in Tim’s spinal column and not, crucially, through his (no longer registering) brain.1, 2 Neither Tim nor the Holy Spirit was responsible.

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor / Unsplash

Raising one’s limbs, in reality, is common for those experiencing brain death.3 First reported in 1974, “brain death-associated reflexes and automatisms” are frequent enough to have gained a moniker, “the Lazarus Sign.”4 People experiencing brain death have been recorded doing much more than raising another’s hand too, including hugging motions for up to 30 seconds, rapidly jerking all four limbs for up to eight inches, and symmetric movement of both arms.5

Raising one’s limbs, in reality, is common for those experiencing brain death.

There is another seemingly inexplicable facet to the story, though: If raising my hand can be explained naturally, what then of the incredible coincidence that my hand was raised and lowered at the same moment when the group prayer began and ended?

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung might describe my experience as an example of “synchronicity,” i.e., an acausal connecting principle.6 According to Jung and his adherents, science cannot offer a reasonable causal connection to explain why a brain-dead man lifted my hand at the exact moment a prayer began and dropped it at the exact moment the prayer ended.7 Jung adherents claim the odds are so improbable that the connection must be cosmic.8

Interpreting Tim’s act of lifting my hand as a ‘miracle’ was the result of my creative license, probability, and desire to find meaning.

But science can explain the coincidence. My profound coincidence was causal. Interpreting Tim’s act of lifting my hand at a certain moment as a “miracle” was the result of my creative license, probability, and desire to find a pattern and meaning through trauma. In fact, research through the years has revealed much about the phenomena of coincidence. This can be illustrated through a skeptical examination of seemingly much more widely known coincidences: A list of eerie comparisons between the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. The first of these lists appeared in the year following Kennedy’s assassination in a GOP newsletter and typically include the following:9

• “Lincoln” and “Kennedy” each have seven letters.
• Both presidents were elected to Congress in ’46 and later to the presidency in ’60.
• Both assassins, John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, were born in ’39 and were known by their three names, which were composed of fifteen letters.
• Both presidents were succeeded by southerners named Johnson. • Booth ran from a theater and was caught in a warehouse; Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.
• Oswald and Booth were killed before they could be put on trial.

And so on…10

How Coincidences Work1. Creative License and the Role of Context

First, the likelihood of noticing one becomes more flexible when defining what counts as a coincidence.11 Given enough creative license and disregarding context,12 one can find coincidences in any two events. Let us look, for example, at the two other assassinations, those of James A. Garfield and William McKinley. Both “Garfield” and “McKinley” have eight letters, both were Ohioans, both served as officers in the Civil War on the same side, both were shot twice in the torso, and both of their successors were from New York state.

Creative license is also used to justify such coincidences: Booth ran from a theater and was caught in a warehouse; Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater. Booth did run from Ford’s Theater, and Oswald was indeed apprehended in a movie house called “The Texas Theater.”13 John Wilkes Booth did not, however, get caught in a warehouse. A federal soldier named Boston Corbett shot him from outside a burning tobacco barn in Bowling Green, VA, on April 26, 1865. Booth was dragged out still alive and died later that day.14

Our brains are wired to create order from chaos.

Creative license is also used in, Both presidents were elected to Congress in ’46 and later to the presidency in ’60. The apostrophe preceding each numbered year omits the glaring inconsistency that Lincoln and Kennedy were elected to these offices 100 years apart from each other. In context, the “coincidence” doesn’t seem so incredible.

2. Probability

Coincidences are counterintuitive. Consider the probability found in three of the Lincoln and Kennedy coincidences:

Both presidents were elected to Congress in ’46 and later to the presidency in ’60. We only elect our representatives to Congress every two years, and a president every four years. This omits all odd-numbered years.

Both presidents were succeeded by southerners named Johnson. “Johnson” is second only to “Smith” as the most common surname in the U.S.15 Both northern presidents (Lincoln was from Illinois, Kennedy from Massachusetts) needed a southerner to balance the ticket. In the years following the American Civil War, it wasn’t until 1992 that a ticket with two southerners (Clinton and Gore) won the presidency.16

Oswald and Booth were killed before they could be put on trial.17 Booth and Oswald were the subjects of nationwide manhunts and unprecedented vitriol. It is little wonder they were murdered before their trials.

Being elected in years that end in the same two digits, having a successor with a popular surname, and an assassin who was killed before being brought to trial are not at all impossible; indeed, they are relatively probable.

3. Looking for Meaning

Science has shown us that people who describe themselves as religious or spiritual (that is, those seeking meaning and those searching for signs) are more likely to experience coincidences.18 Our brains are wired to create order from chaos,19 and the days following each presidential assassination were overwhelmingly chaotic. The country was shocked when Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy were assassinated, and it seemed just too simple that such inspiring leaders could be shot down by two relative nobodies who would otherwise be forgotten by history.

Photo by Alexei Scutari / UnsplashWas my experience with my dying friend a divine sign? Was it acausal? Probably not.

But both tragic events were really that simple. John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln while the president was watching Our American Cousin in Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.20 Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.21

Applying Creative License, Probability, and Looking for Meaning to My Profound Coincidence

Let us now return to my profound coincidence. I used creative license in accepting Tim raising my hand as miraculous. I was desperately looking for any sign that he could communicate with me and took it as such. The probability of my friend dying young in a car accident doesn’t defy probability at all. The National Safety Council reports that 6,400 Americans die annually from falling asleep while driving.22 Tim raising one of our hands is probable, too. Movement of the body from residual spinal activity has been found in up to a third of those suffering from brain death.23 During my time with Tim at the hospital, I was surrounded by Evangelicals who assured me of my friend’s resurrection. Being confronted with the unexpected loss of a loved one heightened my emotions. I was more susceptible to believing in miracles than in my normal, rational state.

Was my experience with my dying friend a divine sign? Was it acausal? Probably not. Science has shown me the spiritual “meaning” I once attributed to Tim raising my hand was, in reality, meaningless. As years have gone by, I still stay in touch with a few of my friends who surrounded Tim. We are middle-aged now, with children of our own. Sometimes we remember Tim together. And that’s enough.