News Feeds

Pseudoscience can often survive because of the continuous publication and dissemination of alleged new discoveries that cast doubt on the findings of “official science.” Mass media regularly republish these “discoveries,” which question otherwise clear and well-established findings. The Shroud of Turin is a perfect example: each year, new statements and new “studies” surface, and instill in the public the (false) idea that there is sufficient evidence to think that the relic is not medieval, but does in fact date back to the time of Christ.

For example, in recent weeks newspapers around the world have reported1 that a group of Italian researchers discovered an innovative way to date the fabric of the Shroud of Turin, and that this dating disproved the results of radiocarbon dating carried out in 1988 (which had placed the creation of the Shroud to somewhere between the 13th and 14th centuries). According to these media reports, the cloth is likely to be around 2,000 years old.

However, this “information” is incorrect, and the media did not bother to check the reliability of what they published. If we examine the reports closely, here is what actually happened:

1. The article by the Italian scholars was published in 2022, so it is not new.2 The simple facts are that a news outlet in the U.S. broke the news two years late—and then many others simply copied from it.
2. The proposed dating system is not normally used nor has it been validated by the scientific community. It is based on the use of X-rays (Wide- Angle X-ray Scattering, or WAXS), which are supposed to measure the degradation of cellulose fibers. This system was invented in 2019 by these very same authors, and for the purpose of dating the Shroud, and so is not used by anyone else.3
3. The method is highly unreliable, because tissue aging is strongly influenced by environmental factors, such as humidity, temperature, light exposure, storage conditions, and the possible presence of microorganisms or of various chemicals, all of which are unpredictable variables that can heavily alter the results. Thus, it cannot provide a reliable dating that is remotely comparable to that provided by the proven Carbon-14 method, which dates the Shroud as being of medieval origin.
4. The inventors of the WAXS method are not neutral scientists; they are sindonologists (i.e., people who study the Shroud of Turin from a believing perspective; from the Greek word sindòn, used in the Gospels to define the type of fine fabric, undoubtedly linen, with which the corpse of Jesus was believed to be wrapped), and who for years have been trying hard to prove that the Shroud is authentic. None of them are experts in either dating or textiles. The main proponents of the research are Giulio Fanti and Liberato De Caro. Both share the commonality of being followers of the Italian pseudomystic Maria Valtorta, who died in 1961, and who, bedridden by illness, told of receiving heavenly messages and seeing the entire life of Christ, which she described in many books. Although the Catholic Church has put these books on the Index (that is, a catalog of writings condemned as contrary to faith or morals), Fanti and De Caro believe in Valtorta’s visions. Fanti also believes he received personal messages from Jesus and Our Lady, and De Caro, a deacon, is known for his belief in creationism.
5. The authors were never allowed to extract material directly from the Shroud. What they used was a very small sample (approx. 0.5 mm × 1 mm), which they claim originally belonged to the Shroud.
6. Between 2014 and 2022, these two authors have already invented four different systems to date textiles in order to authenticate the Shroud: measurement of the mechanical properties of individual linen fibers, Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (Fanti), and WAXS (De Caro).
7. Their conclusions are considered so unreliable that even a journal published by the Center for Sindonology in Turin (which pursues proof of the Shroud’s authenticity) urged people to be cautious of their conclusions.4

Display of the Shroud in the chapel of the Dukes of Savoy; miniature from the Prayer Book donated in 1559 by Cristoforo Duc of Moncalieri to Margaret of Valois. Turin, Royal Library, Varia 84, f. 3v. Courtesy of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, Regional Directorate for Cultural and Landscape Heritage of Piedmont

Around that same time, an article published in The Telegraph5 (and later recycled by other outlets) garnered significant interest. It stated that “new research by Cicero Moraes, a world leader in forensic facial reconstruction software, showed it could not have enveloped a corpse.” In fact, “the expert found the image on the shroud could only be created if a cloth was placed over a bas-relief of a human figure, such as a shallow stone carving.” Cicero Moraes is right, but his research is not particularly groundbreaking. For at least four centuries, we have known that the body image on the Shroud is comparable to an orthogonal projection onto a plane, which certainly could not have been created through contact with a three-dimensional body.

Without any need for computer imaging, practical experiments of putting a piece of cloth on a statue or on a human body have been conducted and described in a book published exactly four hundred years ago by French historian Jean-Jacques Chifflet.6 A little over two hundred years later, in the 19th century, Italian historian Lazzaro Giuseppe Piano wrote: “Let the face of a statue be dyed with color and let a white cloth be applied to it; if, after having pressed it a bit by hand, the cloth is removed and spread out, one will see on it a distorted image, much wider than the face itself.”7 Cicero Moraes has certainly created some beautiful images with the help of software, and for that his efforts are to be appreciated, but he certainly did not uncover anything that we did not already know.

Why study a shroud?

I have devoted myself to studying the Shroud of Turin for over a decade,8 along with all the faces of sindonology, and the set of scientific disciplines tasked with determining the authenticity of such relics. My work began with an in-depth analysis of the theory linking the Knights Templar to the relic,9 and the theory according to which the Mandylion of Edessa (more on this below) and the Shroud are one and the same.10 Studying the fabric also revealed that the textile has a complex structure that would have required a sufficiently advanced loom, that is, a horizontal treadle loom with four shafts, probably introduced by the Flemish artisans in the 13th century, while the archaeological record provides clear evidence that the Shroud is completely different from all the cloths woven in ancient Palestine.11

As a historian I was more interested in the history of the Shroud than in determining its authenticity as the burial cloth of Jesus, although the evidence is clear that it was not. That said, for a historiographical reconstruction seeking to address the history of the relationship between faith and science in relation to relics, the Shroud does offer a useful case for understanding how insistence on a relic’s authenticity, along with a lack of interest on the part of mainstream science, leaves ample room for pseudoscientific arguments.

Relics

The Christian cult of relics revolves around the desire to perpetuate the memory of illustrious figures and encourage religious devotion towards them. Initially limited to veneration of the (sometimes alleged) bodies of martyrs, over the centuries it extended to include the bodies of saints and, finally, objects that had come into contact with them. As Christianity spread, the ancient custom of making pilgrimages to the burial places of saints was accompanied by the custom of transferring their relics (or parts of them) to the furthest corners of the Christian world. These transfers, called “translations,” had several effects:

1. They increased devotion towards the person from whom the relic derived.
2. They were believed to protect against war, natural disasters, and disease, and to attract healings, conversions, miracles, and visions.
3. They heightened interest in the place hosting the relics, thus attracting pilgrims and so enriching both the church and the city that housed them.
4. They increased the prestige of the owners of relics.

Relics are objects without intrinsic or objective value outside of the specific religious environment that attributes a significance to them. In a religious environment, however, they become semiophores, or “objects which were of absolutely no use, but which, being endowed with meaning, represented the invisible.”12 However, enthusiasm for relics tended to wane over time unless it was periodically reawakened through constant efforts or significant events, such as festivals, acts of worship, or translations, along with claims of healings, apparitions, and miracles. When a relic fails to attract attention to itself, or loses such appeal, it becomes nearly indistinguishable from any other object.

As the demand for relics grew among not only the faithful masses but also the fortunate abbots, bishops, prelates, and princes owning or associated with them, the supply inevitably increased. One of the effects of this drive was the frenzied search for ancient relics in holy places. Though the searches were often conducted in good faith, our modern perspective, equipped with greater historical and scientific expertise, can hardly consider most of these relics to be authentic. It was thus almost inevitable that relic intermediaries and dealers emerged—some honest, believing, brokers, but others outright dishonest fraudsters. There were so many of the latter that St. Augustine of Hippo famously spoke out against the trade in martyrs’ relics as early as the 5th century.

The Matter of Relic Authenticity

For a long time, many scholars did not consider relics to be objects deserving of interest to professional historians because the cult of veneration surrounding them was regarded as a purely devotional set of practices. Historians who study relics from the perspective of the history of piety, devotion, worship, beliefs, secular or ecclesiastical politics, and social and economic impact, should also speak to the origin of such relics, and hence their authenticity. In the case of relics of lesser value—those that have been downgraded, forgotten, undervalued, or removed from worship—the historian’s task is relatively simple.

By contrast, historians and scientists face greater resistance when dealing with fake relics that still attract great devotional interest. Many historians sidestep the authenticity issue by overlooking the question of the relic’s origin, instead focusing only on what the faithful have believed over time and the role of the relic in history. While this approach is legitimate, what people most want to know about holy relics like the Shroud of Turin today is their authenticity.

The Shroud of Turin is part of the trove of Christ-related relics that were never mentioned in ancient times. When the search for relics in the Holy Land began—with the discovery of the (alleged) true cross, belatedly attributed to Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine—no one at that time ever claimed to have found Jesus’ burial cloths, nor is there any record of anyone having thought to look for them.

There is more than one shroud.

The earliest travel accounts of pilgrims visiting the sites of Jesus in the 4th century show that people venerated various relics, but they do not mention a shroud. By the beginning of the 6th century, pilgrims to Jerusalem were shown what were claimed to be the spear with which Jesus was stabbed, the crown of thorns, the reed and sponge of his passion, the chalice of the Last Supper, the tray on which John the Baptist’s head was placed, the bed of the paralytic healed by Jesus, the stone on which the Lord left an imprint of his shoulders, and the stone where Our Lady sat to rest after dismounting from her donkey. But no shroud. It was not until the second half of the 6th century that pilgrims began to mention relics of Jesus’ burial cloths being in Jerusalem, albeit with various doubts as to where they had been preserved and what form they took.

The next step was the systematic and often unverified discovery of additional—and preposterous— relics from the Holy Land, including the bathtub of baby Jesus, his cradle, nappy, footprints, foreskin, umbilical cord, milk teeth, the tail of the donkey on which He entered Jerusalem, the crockery from the Last Supper, the scourging pillar, His blood, the relics of the bodies of Jesus’ grandparents and the Three Wise Men, and even the milk from the Virgin Mary and her wedding ring. Obviously, objects related to Jesus’ death and resurrection could easily be included in such a list. Predictably, the movement of such relics from Jerusalem—be they bought, stolen, or forged—reached its peak at the time of the Crusades.

The beginning of the 9th century was a time of intense traffic in relics. One legend, built up around no one less than Charlemagne himself, held that he had made a journey to Jerusalem and obtained a shroud of Jesus. According to this legend, the cloth was then taken to the imperial city of Aachen (in modern Germany), and then, perhaps, to Compiègne, France. There are accounts of a shroud in both cities, and Aachen still hosts this relic today.

The coexistence of these relics in two important religious centers has not prevented other cities from claiming to possess the very same objects. Arles and Cadouin (France), as well as Rome (Italy), all boast a shroud, although in 1933 the one in Cadouin was revealed to be a medieval Islamic cloth. There is an 11th-century holy shroud in the cathedral of Cahors (France) as well as in Mainz (Germany) and Istanbul (Turkey), and dozens of other cities claimed to possess fragments of such a relic.13 An 8th-century sudarium is still venerated in Oviedo, Spain, as if it were authentic.14

The Shroud of Turin

With this background it might not surprise readers to learn that the Shroud of Turin, in fact, is not one of the oldest but rather one of the most recent such relics. It is a large cloth that resembles a long tablecloth of over four meters in length, whose uniqueness is a double monochromatic image that shows the front and back of a man. The man bears marks from flagellation and crucifixion, with various red spots corresponding to where blows were received. The Turin Shroud first appeared in the historical record in France (a place that already hosted many competing shrouds) around 1355 CE. It is different from all the previous shrouds in that the others did not display the image of the dead Christ, and until then no source had ever mentioned a shroud bearing such an image (although Rome hosted the well-known Veil of Veronica, a piece of cloth said to feature an image of the Holy Face of Jesus). The explanation behind its creation can be found in the contemporary development of a cult of devotion centered on the representations of the physical suffering of Christ and His wounded body.

Pilgrimage badge of Lirey (Aube), dated between 1355 and 1410, depicts the first appearance of the Shroud. (Photo © Jean-Gilles Berizzi / RMN-Grand Palais, Musée de Cluny, Musée National du Moyen Âge).

The Shroud of Turin made its first appearance in a small country church built in Lirey, France, and by an aristocratic soldier Geoffroy de Charny. As soon as this relic was put on public display, it immediately became the subject of debate. Two local bishops declared the relic to be fake. In 1389, the bishop of Troyes, France, wrote a letter to the Pope denouncing the falsity of the relic and accusing the canons of the Church of Lirey of deliberate fraud. According to the bishop, the canons had commissioned a skilled artist to create the image, acting out of greed and taking advantage of people’s gullibility. The Pope responded by allowing the canons to continue exhibiting the cloth, but simultaneously obliging them to publicly declare that it was being displayed as a “figure or representation” of the true Shroud of Christ, not the original.

Various erasures and acts of subterfuge were required to cover up these historical events and transform an artistic representation into an authentic shroud of Jesus. The process began after 1453, when the relic was purchased by a noble family, the House of Savoy (and which reigned as Kings of Italy from 1861 to 1946).

Historians loyal to the court constructed a false history of the relic’s origins, deliberately disregarding all the medieval events that cast doubt on its authenticity.

Interpretations of this first part of the history of the Shroud diverge significantly between those who accept the validity of the historical documents and those who reject it. However, the following developments are almost universally agreed upon. Deposited in the city of Chambéry, capital of the Duchy of Savoy, the Shroud became a dynastic relic, that is, an instrument of political-religious legitimization and referenced by the same symbolic language used by other noble European dynasties. After surviving a fire in 1532, the Shroud remained in Chambéry until 1578. It was then transferred to Turin, the duchy’s new capital, where a richly appointed chapel connected to the city’s cathedral was specially built to house it in the 17th century.

Historians loyal to the court constructed a false history of the relic’s origins, deliberately disregarding all the medieval events that cast doubt on its authenticity and attested to the intense reluctance of contemporary ecclesiastical authorities to accept it. In the meantime, the papacy and clergy abandoned their former prudence and began to encourage veneration of the Shroud, established a liturgical celebration, and initiated theological and exegetical debate about it. The court of the Duchy of Savoy, for its part, showed great devotion to its relic and at the same time used it as an instrument of political legitimization,15, 16 seeking to export the Shroud’s fame outside the duchy by gifting painted copies that were in turn treated as relics-by-contact (there are at least 50 such copies known to still exist throughout the world).

Having survived changes of fortune and emerging unscathed from both the rational criticism of the Enlightenment and the turmoil of the Napoleonic period, the Shroud seemed destined to suffer the fate of other similar relics, namely a slow decline. Following a solemn exhibition in 1898, however, the Shroud returned to the spotlight and its reputation began to grow outside Italy as well. Two very important events in the history of the relic took place that year: it was photographed for the first time, and the first historiographical studies of it were published.

Shroud Science

Photography made available to everyone what previously had been viewable by only a few: an image of the shape of Christ’s body and face, scarcely discernible on the cloth but perfectly visible on the photographic plate. It was especially visible in the negative image, which by inverting the tonal values, reducing them to white and black, and accentuating the contrast, revealed the character of the imprint.

“Santo Volto del Divin Redentore” (Holy Face of the Divine Redeemer), a detail of the Shroud of Turin. Photo by Giuseppe Enrie, taken during the 1931 public exhibition of the Shroud of Turin. It is a negative photographic image, meaning that the lighter areas represent the darker areas of the Shroud.

Photographs of the Shroud, accompanied by imprecise technical assessments claiming that the photograph proved that the image could not possibly have been generated artificially, were circulated widely. This prompted scholars to seek through chemistry, physics, and, above all, forensic medicine an explanation for the origins of the image impressed on the cloth. More recently, these disciplines have been joined by palynology, computer science, biology, and mathematics, all aimed at demonstrating the authenticity of the relic experimentally, or at least removing doubts that it might have been a fake. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were many scientific articles published on the Shroud and discussions held in distinguished forums, including the Academy of Sciences in Paris.

The scientist associated with the birth of scientific sindonology is the zoologist Paul Vignon, while Ulysse Chevalier was the first to conduct serious historical investigations of the Shroud. Both were Catholics (the latter indeed being a priest), but they held completely contrasting positions: the former defended the Shroud’s authenticity while the latter denied it. Chevalier was responsible for publishing the most significant medieval documents on the early history of the Shroud, showing how it had been condemned and declarations of its falseness covered up, and wrote the first essays on the history of the Shroud to employ a historical-critical method (Chevalier was an illustrious medievalist at the time). The debate became very heated in the historical and theological fields, and almost all the leading history and theology journals of the time published articles on the Shroud.

After the early 20th century, almost no one applied themselves to thoroughly examining the entirety of the historical records regarding the Shroud (much less comparing it against all the other shrouds). After a period of relative lack of interest, new technologies brought the Shroud back into the limelight. In 1978, a group of American scholars, mostly military employees or researchers associated with the Catholic Holy Shroud Guild, formed the STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project) and were allowed to conduct a series of direct scientific studies on the relic. They did not find a universally accepted explanation for the origin of the image. Some members of the group used the mass media to disseminate the idea that the image was actually the result of a supernatural event: in this explanation, the image was not the result of a body coming into contact with the cloth, perhaps involving blood, sweat, and burial oils (as believed in previous centuries) but rather caused by irradiation. At this time the two most popular theories formulated—despite their implausibility—as to the historical origin of the Shroud were:

1. The Shroud and the Mandylion of Edessa are one and the same object. (The Mandylion is another miraculous relic known to have existed since at least the 6th century BCE in the form of a towel that, according to the faithful, Jesus used to wipe His face, miraculously leaving the mark of His features on it).
2. The Knights Templar transported the Shroud from the East to the West. (It was based on statements extracted under torture from the Templars during their infamous trial of 1307–1312.)

The clash between sindonology and science reached its peak in 1988; without involving STURP but with permission from the Archbishop of Turin, the Holy See, and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a radiocarbon examination was carried out that involved 12 measurements conducted in three different laboratories. As expected, the test provided a date that corresponds perfectly with the date indicated by the historical documents, namely the 13th–14th century. As often happens when a scientific finding contradicts a religious belief, however, from that moment on attempts to invalidate the carbon dating proliferated. These included conspiracy, pollution of the samples, unreliability of the examination, enrichment of the radiocarbon percentage due to the secondary effects of the resurrection, among others.

Dating the Shroud

In 1945, chemist Willard Libby devised the Carbon-14 (C14) radiocarbon dating method. Despite rumors that Libby was against applying the C14 method to the Shroud, I found proof that at least twice he stated precisely the opposite, declaring his own interest in performing the study himself.17 In the early 1970s, the test had been repeatedly postponed, first because it was not yet considered sufficiently reliable, and later because of the amount of cloth that would have to be sacrificed as the procedure is destructive. By the mid-1980s, however, C14 was accepted universally as a reliable system of dating, and was regularly used to date archeological artifacts as well as antiques. Several C14 laboratories offered to perform the testing for free, likely under the assumption that, whatever the result, it would bring them publicity.

The cloth of the Shroud can be assigned with a confidence of 95 percent to a date between 1260 and 1390 CE.

Once Cardinal Ballestrero, who was not the relic’s “owner” but only charged with the Shroud’s protection, had made the decision to proceed, he asked for the support and approval of the Holy See. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences was invested with the responsibility to oversee all operations. For the first time in its history, the papal academy was presided over by a scientist who was not a priest, biophysicist Carlos Chagas Filho. The scientists’ desire was to date the Shroud and nothing more, and they did not want the sindonologists to take part in the procedure. The Vatican’s Secretary of State and the representatives of Turin agreed to supply no more than three samples. Seven laboratories were proposed from which three selected: those at the University of Arizona, Tucson, the University of Oxford, and Zurich Polytechnic, because they had the most experience in dating small archaeological fragments.

The day chosen for the extraction was April 21, 1988. The textile experts examined the fabric and discussed the best place to extract samples; they decided to take a strip from one of the corners, in the same place in which a sample had already been taken for examination in 1973. The strip was divided into smaller pieces and each of the three laboratories received a sample. The procedure was filmed while being performed under the scrutiny of over 30 people.

The results were published in the world’s leading multidisciplinary scientific journal, Nature. Conclusion: the cloth of the Shroud can be assigned with a confidence of 95 percent to a date between 1260 and 1390 CE. In response, the Cardinal of Turin issued this statement:

I think that it is not the case that the Church should call these results into question…. I do not believe that we, the Church, should trouble ourselves to quibble with highly respected scientists who until this moment have merited only respect, and that it would not be responsible to subject them to censure solely because their results perhaps do not align with the arguments of the heart that one can carry within himself.18Prof. Edward Hall (Oxford), Dr. Michael Tite (British Museum) and Dr. Robert Hedges (Oxford), announcing on October 13, 1988, in the British Museum, London, that the Shroud of Turin had been radiocarbon dated to 1260–1390.

Predictably, Shroud believers rejected the findings and started to criticize the Turin officials who had cut the material. Others preferred to deny the validity of the radiocarbon dating.

Sindonologists tried to discredit the result of the C14 testing by claiming the samples were contaminated. This hypothesis asserts that through the centuries the Shroud picked up deposits of more recent elements that would contain a greater quantity of carbon; the radiocarbon dating, having been performed on a linen so contaminated, would thus have produced an erroneous result. Candidates for the role of pollutants are many: the smoke of the candles, the sweat of the hands that touched and held the fabric, the water used to extinguish the fire of 1532, the smoggy Turin skies, pollens, oil, and many more.

On the surface, these may seem convincing, especially to those who do not know how C14 dating works; in reality, however, they are untenable. Indeed, if a bit of smoke and sweat were enough to produce a false result, the Carbon-14 method would have been almost completely useless and certainly not used still to this day to date thousands of objects every year. The truth is rather that the system is not significantly sensitive to any such pollutants.

So assume that the fabric of the Shroud dates back to the 30s of the first century and that the Shroud has suffered exposure to strong pollution (for example, around 1532, the year of the Chambéry fire). To distort the C14 dating by up to 1300 years, it would be necessary that for every 100 carbon atoms originally present in the cloth, another 500 dating to 1532 would have to have been added by contamination. In practice, in the Shroud, the amount of pollutant should be several times higher than the amount of the original linen, which is simply nonsensical.

If we assume that pollution did not happen all at the same time, but gradually over the centuries, there is still no mathematical possibility that pollution that occurred before the 14th century—even if tens of times higher than the quantity of the original material—could give a result of dating to the 14th century. It should be added, moreover, that all samples, before being radiocarbon dated, are subjected to cleaning treatments able to remove the upper patina that has been in contact with outside contaminants and this procedure was also used for the Shroud.

Those who allege that the Shroud was an object that could not be dated because it was subjected to numerous vicissitudes over the intervening centuries ignore the fact that often C14 dating laboratories work on materials in much worse condition, whether coming from archaeological excavations or from places where they have been in contact with various contaminants. For radiocarbon dating purposes, the Shroud is a very clean object.

A more curious variant of the pollution theory suggests that the radiocarbon dating was performed on a sample that was repaired with more recent threads. This would mean that the two (widely recognized) textile experts who were present on the day of the sampling were unable to notice that they had cut a piece so repaired, despite the fact that they had examined the fabric carefully for hours. To distort the result by 13 centuries, the threads employed in the mending would have had to have been more numerous than the threads of the part to be mended. To eliminate any doubt, in 2010 the University of Arizona reexamined a trace of fabric left over from the radiocarbon dating in 1988, and concluded:

We find no evidence for any coatings or dyeing of the linen…. Our sample was taken from the main part of the shroud. There is no evidence to the contrary. We find no evidence to support the contention that the 14C samples actually used for measurements are dyed, treated, or otherwise manipulated. Hence, we find no reason to dispute the original 14C measurements.19

Another possibility raised against C14 dating falls within the sphere of the supernatural. German chemist, Eberhard Lindner, explained to the 1990 sindonology convention that the resurrection of Christ caused an emission of neutrons that enriched the Shroud with radioactive isotope C14.20 Miraculous explanations can be cloaked in scientific jargon, but they simply cannot be tested scientifically, given that there are no available bodies that have risen from the dead emitting protons and neutrons. They are, however, extremely convenient because they are able to solve any problem without having to submit the explanation to the laws of nature.

With all of the available evidence, it is rational to conclude—as some astute historians had already established more than a century ago—that the Shroud of Turin is a 14th century artifact and not the burial cloth of a man who was crucified in the first third of the 1st century CE.

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

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

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

I felt that I should, and believed that I could, develop my own, independent judgment. I would do my own research, and I would draw my own conclusions based on what I learned.

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

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

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

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

“Is your child on the autism spectrum?” To help Misha, I needed to switch the predicate and envisage a different question: “How toxic is your child?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Misha had received three-in-one vaccines: DTP and MMR. The holistic experts now told me that these vaccines contain dangerous metals, including mercury and aluminum.

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

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

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

“The science right now is inconclusive,” Barack Obama said in 2008. Thousands of media outlets around the world reported a controversy between two legitimate sides.

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

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

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

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

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

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

♦ ♦ ♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t.” Clever and concise, Offit’s polemic nonetheless begged the relevant questions. Who decides what works? Fundamental science is one thing; therapeutic interventions are quite another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The compounds prescribed for Misha said they contained asparagus, bark, boldo leaf, goldenrod, goldenseal, horsetail, juniper, marigold, milk thistle, parsley, passionflower, Scottish pine root, and other herbs and plants of which I’d never heard.

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

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

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

♦ ♦ ♦

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

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

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

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

Misha, an actual immunologist confirmed, had no food allergies in the first place. Was my son ever really burdened by toxins?

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

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

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

The “homotoxicology” that Coyle practiced had sounded to me like a branch of toxicology. But the two fields turn out to have nothing in common.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One part of me still craves holism’s beautiful notions. Another part recognizes in their desiccated spiritualism the return of a repressed pagan unconscious.

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

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

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

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

In 2007, I was studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. I had been there for five weeks, my eyes wide with the excitement of navigating a foreign culture, my heart aflutter over a nerdy boy I’d met at a classical music recital. It all seemed like a glorious dream, until it became a nightmare. On November 1, a local burglar named Rudy Guede broke into the apartment I shared with three other young women, two Italian law interns and a British exchange student named Meredith Kercher. Meredith was the only one home that night. Rudy Guede raped her, stabbed her to death, and then fled the country to Germany.

Before the forensic evidence came back, showing unequivocally that Rudy Guede was responsible for this crime, the police and prosecution focused their attention on me. It was a logical place to start. Of all the roommates, I knew Meredith the best. I was the one who discovered that our house was a crime scene and notified the police. They told me I was their most important witness, that any small detail I might remember could be the clue they needed to find out who had done this to poor Meredith.

Over the five days after Meredith was murdered, the police questioned me for a total of 53 hours, without a lawyer and almost entirely without a translator.

A week later, I was in jail, charged with Meredith’s murder. Two years later, I was convicted and sentenced to 26 years in prison. I went on to win my appeal and in 2011 I was acquitted, after four years incarcerated. Even after this vindication, however, so convinced were the Italian authorities that I was guilty, they overturned my acquittal, put me on trial in absentia for the same crime, convicted me again, and sentenced me to 28.5 years in prison. It wasn’t until 2015 that my legal nightmare ended when I was definitively acquitted by Italy’s highest court per non aver commesso il fatto — for not having committed the act. How and why did this happen? A big part of the answer has to do with cognitive bias and motivated reasoning.

Over the five days after Meredith was murdered, the police questioned me for a total of 53 hours, without a lawyer and almost entirely without a translator, and all in a language I spoke about as well as a ten-year-old. I was young (20), scared, and naïve to the ways of the criminal justice system. My final round of questioning went long into the night as they deprived me of sleep, of food, and of bathroom access. When I told them over and over again that I didn’t know what happened to Meredith and that I was at my boyfriend’s house that night, they refused to accept my answers. They slapped me, and they told me that I had amnesia, that I was so traumatized by what I’d witnessed that I had blocked it out.

Instead of listening to what I was telling them, they pushed me to “remember” something I didn’t remember, namely meeting my boss, Patrick Lumumba, at my house that night. Why? They’d found a text message on my phone. I worked at a local cafe, and Patrick had given me the evening off on the night Meredith was killed. I had thanked him, and I texted him back in my broken Italian, “Ci vediamo più tardi,” my best attempt at “See you later.” But to the Perugian authorities, this English idiom didn’t translate as a casual, “I’ll see you when I see you.” To them, it meant I had made an appointment to meet Patrick later that night. You met Patrick, they told me. We know you brought him to the house. I told them that was wrong countless times, but they wouldn’t believe me.

Motivated reasoning was already in full effect among the investigators. Some early lost-in-translation moments outside the house once the police arrived had given them suspicions about my candor. There was confusion over whether Meredith regularly locked her door or merely closed her door (in Italian, the word for “to lock” is “to close with a key”). And as there was nothing obviously stolen from the apartment, they leapt to the conclusion that the break-in — the rock, the smashed window — was staged. The prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, even assumed, as he said much later in a documentary about the case, that only a woman would cover the body of a murder victim with a blanket. Oh really? And how does he know this?

I was simply naïve to the fact that police lie to suspects to get a confession, even a false one.

My behavior was also grossly misinterpreted. With a flurry of panicked Italian whipping past me, I often didn’t understand what was happening. When my other roommate looked into Meredith’s room once they kicked the door down, she started screaming about what she saw. But I never saw into Meredith’s room, and I didn’t quite understand what she was so upset about. The idea that Meredith had been killed was just so far out of my world of possibilities that I couldn’t even imagine it. So when I stood outside the crime scene, looking dazed but not obviously hysterical, this was interpreted as me looking cold and unemotional in the face of my roommate’s murder, a fact I had yet to fully comprehend.

It didn’t help that I did lie to them early in my questioning. My Italian roommates, who were both big pot smokers, begged me not to tell the police about the marijuana, to deny that anyone in the house smoked it, because they’d lose their law internships if anyone found out. Coming from pot-friendly Seattle, and thinking this was small potatoes and quite irrelevant to what had happened to Meredith, I did what they asked me. But the police had found evidence of marijuana in the house, and they knew I wasn’t being honest. I came clean immediately, but it was too late. That small lie, coupled with the other misunderstandings, were anchoring biases that shaped how the investigators interpreted everything afterward and led them to believe that I was withholding something, that I wasn’t telling them the whole truth about that night. Hence their erroneous certainty that the benign text message to Patrick was evidence of something nefarious.

Photo of Amanda Knox by Patrik Andersson

My own biases led me to trust them. I was nearly 6,000 miles from home, my friend had just been murdered, the killer was on the loose, and I was scared. I thought if anyone would keep me safe, if anyone had my best interests and wellbeing in mind, it was the authorities. This was my fundamental prior belief, shaped by my own privileged upbringing: the cops are the good guys. I’d never had a bad interaction with the police. I had no reason to think they would lie to me. So when they did lie, when they told me that Raffaele, my boyfriend of a week, had turned on me and denied my alibi (he hadn’t), when they lied that they had evidence that I was home that night (they didn’t), I tried to make sense of it. If they weren’t lying, then what other explanation was there? After hours and hours of this intense pressure, I started to believe them that I did have amnesia, and I honestly tried to remember what might have happened. I tried to imagine meeting Patrick like they said I did. They typed up a statement from these blurry incoherent ramblings, and, utterly exhausted, well past the edge of my sanity, I signed it. I was simply naïve to the fact that police lie to suspects to get a confession, even a false one.

It didn’t matter that I recanted that statement almost immediately once I was out of the pressure cooker of the interrogation room and had recovered my senses and reasoning. That false admission sealed my fate. And it became the biggest anchoring bias that would shape the case for the next eight years and my own reputation to this day.

Once you see how the false confession I signed became a fundamental prior for the investigators and prosecution, everything else starts to make sense.

We know how unreliable such interrogation methods are from DNA exonerations. According to the Innocence Project, nearly one in four proven wrongful convictions involves a false confession. And yet, it’s so hard for anyone who hasn’t been through a coercive interrogation to understand how a person could sign false statements implicating themselves or others. Even the police on the other side of the table don’t understand it. They truly think they’re just cracking a suspect and getting them to admit the truth. But they are suffering from a cognitive bias that we are all susceptible to, the idea that our own experience of the world is a reasonable reference. They’ve never signed false statements, so why would a suspect?

Once you see how the false confession I signed became a fundamental prior for the investigators and prosecution, everything else starts to make sense. When the forensic evidence came back weeks later implicating a sole perpetrator, Rudy Guede, they had to find a way to fit this new evidence with their prior belief. This is just what humans do.

A recent study argues that nearly all the cognitive biases we are susceptible to — confirmation bias, the anchoring bias, the framing effect, and so on — can be reduced to “the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward belief-consistent information processing.” The prosecution, holding my coerced statements as a fundamental prior belief, tried to force the new forensic information implicating Rudy Guede to be consistent with the idea that I was present that night. And thus, with no evidence, and contrary to my own character and history, they invented a motive and wove a story out of whole cloth about a sex game gone awry and a three-way murder plot involving Rudy, a man whose name I didn’t even know, and my boyfriend of a week.

Source: Statista

It was never a satisfying answer to me that the people responsible for my wrongful conviction were evil, or uniquely incompetent. And once I learned about how common wrongful convictions are even in the U.S., this was even more obvious to me. I wanted to know why this had happened to me, and how mostly well-intentioned people who wanted to repair the rend in the fabric of their community, to bring a perpetrator to justice, and to bring closure to Meredith’s grieving family, could have gotten it so, so wrong. Nothing has been more illuminating for me on this question than diving deeply into the research on cognitive bias.

Most of the specific biases I’m about to discuss are reducible to a general pattern of a fundamental belief and belief-consistent information processing, but I find the added specificity useful to help me see these types of errors in my own thinking.

The anchoring bias is the tendency to rely on the first piece of information, regardless of its validity, when interpreting later information. Thus, early suspicion against me shaped how all later evidence was interpreted. This has also impacted my reputation, and explains why I still receive so much vitriol. Despite my definitive acquittal, the first thing most people heard about me was that I was a suspected killer, and that colors everything else they ever hear about me.

And if they persist in believing conspiracy theories about my guilt, they are helped along by the base rate fallacy, the tendency to ignore general information and focus only on the specifics of one case. Those who think I’m guilty rarely look at general information regarding murders and wrongful convictions. If they did, they’d see how vanishingly rare it is for women to commit knife killings against other women, and how common the errors in my case were. It features all the hallmarks of wrongful convictions, many of which result from cognitive biases themselves.

The most general form of this is often called confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out information that confirms a hypothesis and ignore information that disconfirms it. With wrongful convictions, this is known as tunnel vision. The anchoring bias of an initial hunch shapes the investigators’ search for more information. They magnify the significance of any tiny thing that confirms the anchor and write off large things that don’t. Thus, much weight was put on a kiss between Raffaele and me, while the fact that my DNA was not present in the room where the murder happened and that it was impossible to have participated in such a violent struggle without leaving any traces of oneself, was ignored. This is sometimes called the conservatism bias, the tendency to insufficiently revise one’s prior beliefs in light of new evidence.

The conjunction of many small cognitive biases by the authorities and media is enough to explain the massive debacle the case became.

Then there’s the salience bias: the tendency to ignore unremarkable items and focus on striking ones. The prosecution did this to me, and many people continue to succumb to this bias still. Malcolm Gladwell makes this mistake in his analysis of my case. Like the prosecution and tabloid media, he overlooked the copious moments of unremarkable behavior and highlighted the few moments of so-called “odd” behavior, putting great explanatory weight on them and framing me as someone who acts guilty despite my innocence.

That bias is tied in with the fundamental attribution error: the tendency to overemphasize personality-based explanations for others’ behavior and to de-emphasize the role of context. Thus, in judging my behavior in those early days, people ignored the fact that I was alone, far from home, my roommate had just been murdered, and the killer was on the loose. It was a scary and traumatizing experience, and people react in many ways to trauma. Instead, people often strip my behavior from this context and conclude that I must be weird, “off,” or suspicious. This same bias often comes into play when people reflect upon the false statements I signed. Instead of explaining those false statements by the brutal and coercive context I was in, they leap to a conclusion about my character, that I must be an untrustworthy liar.

Selection bias magnifies all these initial biases by shaping what gets reported. There are no news articles from 2007 about all the moments that I looked sad, or scared, or exhausted. There are no deep-dive articles about my perfectly benign upbringing, complete lack of a history of violence or mental illness, about my strong community and loving family. But one small moment caught on camera of me seeking comfort from the young man I’d met five days previous, sharing a chaste kiss while confused and scared, gets endlessly republished, repeated, and played on loop.

At trial, a host of other cognitive biases came into play. Stereotyping was used to paint me as an American “girl gone wild,” though I was in fact a nerdy poetry and language student. The rhyme as reason effect, in which something that rhymes is seen as more truthful, was used against me. Thus, the moniker “Foxy Knoxy” shaped opinion of me as sly and devious. In Italian, they translated this as Volpe Cattiva, the wicked fox.

The framing effect was used repeatedly at trial to present benign behaviors as suspicious. She ate pizza after her friend had been murdered? Why wasn’t she wasting away, sobbing? Literally, the fact that I ate pizza was used against me as evidence that I was not sufficiently morose, as if a grieving and scared person can’t also be hungry.

All of that framing was repeated for eight years of trial, and it affects me to this day through the continued influence effect, the tendency to believe previously learned misinformation even after it has been corrected. My reputation has not been fully restored. Many people still think that, even if I’m not guilty of murder, I must have had something to do with the crime, or I must have somehow brought suspicion upon myself.

The proportionality bias is our tendency to assume that big events have big causes, when often they are caused by many small things. The massive decade-long series of trials with global media coverage doesn’t need an underlying conspiracy as a cause. It doesn’t require that I was grandly suspicious, nor does it require that the authorities were grandly corrupt. The conjunction of many small cognitive biases by the authorities and media is enough to explain the massive debacle the case became, but the proportionality bias leads us to think there must be a bigger reason.

As far as my continued reputational damage, I can thank the illusory truth effect, the tendency to believe a statement is true if it’s easier to process or has been repeated many times. “Amanda Knox is Bad” is a lot simpler than explaining the miscarriage of justice. This is related to the availability cascade, in which a collective belief is seen as more plausible through repetition in public discourse. The hundreds (thousands?) of media articles painting me as a killer have shaped this perception that many people still have of me.

People wrongly assume that there can only be one true victim, and that if we are to honor the victim of the original crime, we must deny that anything wrong happened to the person wrongfully convicted. In truth, wrongful convictions multiply victimhood.

I try to counter that perception by acting honorably and putting thoughtful work into the world. However, the structures of social media and psychological factors create further selection bias. If I tweet about criminal justice reform, I get maybe a dozen retweets. If I make a joke about my wrongful imprisonment, the tweet spreads far and wide, and I pop onto others’ radar in that context. They don’t see the vast amount of serious work I do, and only see the highly retweeted joke, and conclude that I’m purely flippant.

And then they judge me for making light of a tragedy, but fail to distinguish between the tragedy that befell Meredith and the one that befell me. This is the zero sum bias, assuming incorrectly that if one person gains, another must lose. In this case, they assume that respecting my victimhood by the Italian justice system is tantamount to disrespecting Meredith’s victimhood for being murdered by Rudy Guede. I’ve coined my own term for this specific situation: the single victim fallacy.

You see it often in wrongful conviction cases. People wrongly assume that there can only be one true victim, and that if we are to honor the victim of the original crime, we must deny that anything wrong happened to the person wrongfully convicted. In truth, wrongful convictions multiply victimhood. Meredith is a victim of murder. I am a victim of a miscarriage of justice. Both our families are also victims of this miscarriage of justice, which has denied them closure and put our families through hell. Because of this single victim fallacy, I am told I should never joke about the injustice I suffered, because it is conflated with the injustice done to Meredith by someone else. Because of this fallacy, I am told to shut up and disappear.

These cognitive biases have caused a lot of pain in my life, and in the lives of others touched by this case. And they have also gotten in the way of potential healing. I still hope one day to be able to come together with Meredith’s surviving family in recognition of our shared and overlapping victimhood from the actions of Rudy Guede and the Italian authorities. But as far as I know, they remain in thrall to the single victim fallacy.

I don’t know if that day will ever come, but in the meantime, I take solace in the fact that I have such a great opportunity to see these cognitive errors up close. I was able to see how poorly many people judge this complicated case that took over my life, particularly the facts and the individuals involved in it. To see how wrongly they judge me. This makes me a better thinker. It helps me to better avoid all the cognitive biases that caused my wrongful conviction, that led to slanderous media coverage, and that are still responsible for the hate I regularly receive.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the bias blind spot, the tendency to see yourself as less biased than others. Knowing these biases exist doesn’t make me immune to them. I know I can fall prey to them just as much as the people who imprisoned me. So if you have to have a fundamental prior belief that shapes your reasoning, let it be a belief in your own susceptibility to cognitive bias.

“Fashion” and “Style” typically refer to products and practices that are valued in specific cultures and time periods. In the contemporary U.S., vintage clothing, athleisure, and oversize water bottles are in style, whereas cigarettes, neckties, fur coats, wood paneling, shag carpets, and white wall tires are out.

Ideas also vary in their popularity and prestige across cultures and times. These days, mindfulness, sustainability, plant-based diets, and pet parenting are fashionable, while eugenics, homophobia, hierarchical work environments, and colonialism are not.

Perhaps the most fashionable current idea is that the binary distinction of females and males—and girls and boys, and women and men—is scientifically incorrect and harmful. Instead, leading social scientists, activists, and even professional journals and organizations, have adopted the view that sex should be considered a nonbinary variable, either a continuous spectrum or something with more than two categories.

Yet, the traditional, binary view of sex, despite being unpopular, is basically correct. Crucially, I am confident that holding this view is in no way at odds with being fully respectful to individuals who are transgender or intersex. Here are eight reasons for affirming that biological sex is binary.

Let’s review each of them in more detail.

1. Evolutionary biologists define sex based on gametes, a binary framework. Although scientifically fruitful, this doesn’t work for many individuals.

Reproduction is fundamental to life. Although there are many ways of reproducing, one basic distinction is that of asexual reproduction versus sexual reproduction. In asexual reproduction, sometimes called cloning, an organism reproduces without the participation of another organism. Although asexual reproduction occurs in some vertebrate animals, including reptiles as large as Komodo dragons, it is rare. Instead, most vertebrates, including humans, only reproduce sexually, meaning that two organisms combine their genetic material to produce offspring.

In all vertebrate species, including humans, there are two kinds of sexual reproducers: females and males. Females contribute an egg, which is a gamete (i.e., sex cell) package with a large nutrient bundle and no ability to move. Males contribute sperm, which is a gamete package with no nutrients, but excellent mobility, usually because of a flagellum, a miniature tail. In humans, a single egg is roughly 100,000 times larger than a single sperm.

In all vertebrate species, including humans, there are two kinds of sexual reproducers: females and males.

Most evolutionary biologists, including Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne, define sex according to gametes, whether the individual produces eggs (female) or sperm (male).1, 2, 3, 4, 5 This gametes framework undergirds our understanding of reproduction across all sexually reproducing animal species. For instance, in terms of parental responsibility, producing eggs is a high investment strategy whereas producing sperm is a low investment strategy. Building on this initial pattern, in all placental mammals, females, but not males, gestate offspring and provide milk once they are born.

Although the gametes framework has proven highly fruitful for evolutionary biology, it has two key drawbacks when applied to humans. One is that gametes in mammals can’t be observed easily—we don’t lay eggs as do all birds and most reptiles. A second drawback is that, although this framework works well for species or populations, it doesn’t work for many individuals. Postmenopausal women generally don’t produce eggs and neither do women who have had their ovaries removed. Boys don’t produce sperm, and neither do men who have had their testes removed.

2. People in all societies define sex based on reproductive traits, another binary framework. This framework builds on the gametes definition and is far more practical.

Because of the limitations of the gametes framework, I propose the following two “new definitions” of sex based on reproductive traits that are related to gametes.

In humans, a female should be defined as an individual who possesses, or is on a trajectory to possess, or previously possessed, the traits necessary for reproduction as an egg producer; these traits include ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, and vagina. These traits are often referred to as the primary sex characteristics.In humans, a male should be defined as an individual who possesses, or is on a trajectory to possess, or previously possessed, the traits necessary for reproduction as a sperm producer; these traits include the testes, penis, and scrotum.

I put “new definitions” in quotes to make the point that, although I am arguing we should use this pair of definitions, it is more accurate to say that we should acknowledge our traditional use of them, rather than thinking of them as new. This is because people in all human societies distinguish between males and females, and, historically, they must have done this by observing a newborn’s external genitals. What other option could they have had?

Even in modern industrial societies, where blood and tissue tests are often available, genital inspection is still the main method of sex categorization, although that often now occurs by looking at ultrasound images months prior to birth.6

Of course, outside of the birthing room, most of us rarely examine anyone’s genitals to learn their sex. Instead, we use various traits that typically, but not always, co-occur with the primary reproductive traits. These include secondary sex characteristics, which are physical traits that are not necessary for reproduction but that usually accompany the respective set of reproductive traits, particularly after puberty. In women, these include enlarged breasts and widened hips; in men, they include facial hair and Adam’s apples. There are other relevant traits, including men’s generally lower vocal pitch and their greater height and upper body musculature. Even facial shape is extremely helpful: adults can, with high accuracy, correctly determine another adult’s sex from pictures alone.7, 8

In addition, many components of fashion and style serve, in part, to signal the wearer’s sex. For example, women typically have fuller lips than men, and the current popularity of lip filler procedures can be understood as means of amplifying femininity. Many other products and practices work similarly, including jewelry, piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, makeup, and clothing. Thanks to all this biological and cultural information, most of us interact with many people each day and rarely have doubts about whether a person is female or male.

Even in modern industrial societies, genital inspection is still the main method of sex categorization.

Nonetheless, it bears stressing that the initial assignment of a newborn’s sex, apparently in all societies, is based on external genitalia. In fact, this assignment can be considered part of our universal folk knowledge, “common sense” that sometimes turns out to be correct. Moreover, this universal folk knowledge about sex isn’t limited to knowing that sex is assigned based on external genitalia; it also includes recognizing that there are two, and only two, kinds of human reproducers, that only females bear children, and that females can only reproduce if they have had sexual intercourse with males.

Is this folk knowledge about sex universal, meaning that it has occurred in all human societies that ever existed? Logically, of course, nobody can prove that any belief or behavior is universal; there could always be some exceptional society that has never been studied.9 Nonetheless, we can be highly confident that these patterns are universal or nearly so. The reason is that, for the past few hundred years, cultural anthropologists, ethnographers, missionaries, and explorers have traveled the world documenting exotic beliefs and practices, such as taboos against eating nutritious foods or body modification that involves painful procedures. This attention to describe cultural beliefs extends to sexuality. We know, for example, that in some traditional societies, people believe (incorrectly) that a woman can only get pregnant if she is inseminated repeatedly;10 in other societies, people believe (incorrectly) in partible paternity, meaning that a child can have two biological fathers;11 in others, people believe (incorrectly) that a woman becomes impregnated by a spirit but that a penis must first open the vagina to allow the spirit’s entrance.12 If there were a society where people believed in a third manner or mode of reproduction or were unaware that penile-vaginal intercourse is, with very few exceptions, necessary for conception, we can be confident anthropologists would have studied it and described it by now.

3. Sex is consequential for many reasons, including that it is women who have babies, not men.

In addition to the ones just noted, humans hold other universal beliefs and practices. A fundamental practice in all societies is that there are distinct words for girls and boys, women and men, mother and father, and daughter and son.13 These words exist everywhere because they indicate reproductive roles, and reproduction is always potentially consequential. Even in contemporary countries with sub-replacement level fertility, a substantial portion of women bear children, an event with major consequences for education, work, recreation, family life, and, indeed, survival.

Healthcare is a particularly notable sphere where sex, based on reproductive traits, is consequential. Practitioners aiming to provide the best care frequently must consider if their patient is female or male. Diseases that differ substantially in prevalence, manifestation, or treatment, include Alzheimer’s, COVID-19, depression, diabetes, influenza, pneumonia, and several kinds of cancer.14

Some have asked whether our society would be better off if we simply ignored sex. Although this seems desirable in some situations, it is not practical in many others.15

4. Third genders are nonbinary, but they do not challenge the biological sex binary, reproductive traits framework.

Another frequent question is whether societies with so-called third genders pose a problem for the binary, reproductive traits framework. For example, in Samoa, there is a third gender kind of person called Fa’afafine, which roughly translates to “in the manner of a woman.” Fa’afafine are biological males who often dress in female-typical clothing, adopt feminine names, and do female-typical, people-oriented jobs such as teaching and nursing; they are exclusively attracted to male-typical, masculine men as sexual partners.16

Third gender individuals either do not reproduce or they reproduce in the typical male or female manner.

Fa’afafine are accepted in Samoa as a third kind of person, neither a typical male nor a typical female. However, everyone there recognizes that Fa’afafine do not reproduce in a third way; they rarely or never reproduce, and, if they do, they do so as men. In other societies, there are other kinds of third gender individuals, including biological females who adopt male-typical roles and, in other societies, individuals who do not conform to either a male-typical or female-typical role.17 However, the story is essentially the same everywhere: everyone knows that third gender individuals either do not reproduce or they reproduce in the typical male or female manner.

Many people, even educators and policymakers, express confusion about third gender individuals and claim they challenge the idea that sex is binary. However, this is attributable to many scholars and activists using the terms “sex” and “gender” interchangeably. They will say things such as, “The Fa’afafine embody a third gender and sex.”

Gender has a rich and broad web of meanings, but we don’t need to unpack them all to address the confusion. We only need to remember that what we can call gender roles associated with biological sex—that is, doing male-typical or female-typical things—can be nonbinary. That is, there can be three or more genders or gender roles, and there can be intermediate genders. Further, there are many other traits that are associated with biological sex that are nonbinary; these include skeletal traits, hormones, and personality. None of this, however, contradicts the binary reproductive traits framework discussed above. Again, there are exactly two kinds of sexual reproducers, male and female, and people in all societies—even societies with third genders—recognize this binary distinction, and they recognize it as consequential.

5. Intersex individuals challenge the binary, reproductive traits framework, but they don’t invalidate it because they do not reproduce in a third way.

A more substantial challenge to the binary, reproductive traits framework comes from intersex individuals, who are sometimes described as having DSDs (Disorders or Differences of Sexual Development). These individuals are born with genetic, hormonal, or physical characteristics that are unusual for males or females. For example, a person might have male-typical chromosomes (e.g., XY) yet their phenotype or appearance may be female. A critical point is that, unlike most third gender individuals, intersex individuals typically do not possess a full set of traits necessary for reproduction, and often they are unable to reproduce. Frequently discussed intersex conditions include complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD), and ovotesticular disorder (also called true hermaphroditism). In some communities, some intersex conditions occur fairly commonly (e.g., 5-ARD), and people with this condition may be described as embodying a third gender.18

Source

There is debate about the frequency of intersex conditions with some writers claiming that 1 in 60 live births is intersex and others suggesting the true frequency is roughly 1 in 5,000. The debate largely centers on what counts as a true intersex condition. Using a very broad definition,19, 20 anyone who doesn’t fit their “exacting criteria” for being a typical male or female should be considered intersex, making the prevalence relatively high. In this perspective, a man with a short but functional penis could be called intersex, as could a boy with hypospadias (i.e., their urethra opens on the underside of their penis instead of at the tip) or a woman who bore three children but learned later in life that her androgenic hormones were unusually high.

The binary nature of human reproduction is about as complete a binary distinction as one can find in the natural world.

However, if we reserve the label intersex for individuals who do not possess all traits necessary for successful reproduction, whose chromosomal sex does not match their phenotypic sex (e.g., XY female), or for whom there was genuine uncertainty about their birth sex—all of which might be called classic intersex conditions—the more accurate estimate is roughly 1 in 5,000.21 This estimate is not particularly controversial; it was cited without challenge in 2020 in a progressive editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine advocating for the removal of sex designations on birth certificates.22

Regardless of whether they are fairly common (1 in 60) or truly rare (1 in 5,000), some intersex individuals do not fit neatly into the binary, reproductive traits framework. Nevertheless, they don’t invalidate the framework for two reasons.

First, many definitions of real-world phenomena— including of species, vegetables, or games—become fuzzy or must admit exceptions if scrutinized.23 This is true even of binaries that we usually take for granted:

• Nearly all of the earth’s water can be classified as freshwater or saltwater, yet there are transitional, intermediate areas, which are sometimes called brackish.
• When coins are flipped, they land on one side or the other, heads or tails, however, coins occasionally land on their edge.
• In all societies, people are considered dead or alive, yet, with modern medicine, some individuals may exist in intermediate states, including comas and brain death.

A second, and more crucial, reason that intersex individuals don’t invalidate this framework is that this framework is based on female and male modes of reproduction, and intersex individuals do not reproduce in a third way. All intersex individuals who reproduce, reproduce in either the male or the female manner. To summarize: the binary framework accommodates all modes of sexual reproduction in humans, but it does not (quite) accommodate all humans.

It’s worth stressing that, as Dawkins has eloquently explained,24 the binary nature of human reproduction is about as complete a binary distinction as one can find in the natural world.

6. Hyde and colleagues’ (2019) popular nonbinary definition of sex is indefensible.

What about the nonbinary definitions of sex? Because these have become influential, one might assume that they are better than the binary definitions. I want to note that there is apparently no nonbinary definition of sex that has been recognized as being the best. Nevertheless, a good place to start is with a review article by Hyde and colleagues entitled, “The Future of Sex and Gender in Psychology: Five Challenges to the Gender Binary.”25 This article was published in 2019 in the American Psychologist, a leading journal of the American Psychological Association, the largest psychological society in the world. Hyde is one of the most influential sex and gender scholars, and this article has already been cited more than 1,100 times—a very high number for any academic article, particularly one published so recently. Hyde et al. offer this definition of sex: “The term sex is used here to refer to biological systems involving the X and Y chromosomes, pre- and postnatal sexual differentiation, and hormones that influence sexual differentiation of the external genitals, which, in turn, serve as the basis for sex assignment at birth.”

This is a terrible definition, on several counts. The first issue is that it fails to acknowledge the unifying or organizing feature of the properties included in the definition—that unifying feature being, of course, reproduction. Imagine someone defined a door as: “A human-created object, situated in a house, dwelling, or vehicle, that can be comprised of various materials, that can be decorative, and that can have other objects affixed to it.” These stated properties of doors are all true, yet this is an inadequate definition because it doesn’t state that the chief purpose of a door is to serve as a movable barrier. Similarly, it would be a poor definition of an eye if someone listed many of its components (e.g., cornea, lens, retina) but failed to mention that the eye’s function is to see (that is, to transduce some property of some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum into neural impulses).

A second issue is that Hyde et al. have not explained why a new definition of sex is needed. A basic principle of communication is that if there is an established definition, one should not alter it, or introduce a new one, without justification. Of relevance here is that the gametes definitions of sex developed by biologists is well established—it has been used for more than 100 years and has proven extremely fruitful. (Yes, it’s true that earlier in this article I proposed defining sex based on reproductive traits, however, I explained why this is a sensible extension of the gametes definitions and that it is best viewed as an acknowledgment of our intuitive, universal folk knowledge.)

A third problem is that Hyde et al. have not provided a constructive, practical definition of sex. To make this clear, recall that according to the reproductive traits framework, an individual is female if they possess (or did possess or will possess) the traits necessary for reproduction as an egg producer, and they are male if they possess (or did possess or will possess) the traits necessary for reproduction as a sperm producer, or they are outside the binary if they don’t possess traits for either of these modes of reproduction. There will always be a few edge cases requiring further careful consideration. That said, the vast majority of people can be categorized easily by the reproductive traits framework.

Hyde et al. don’t offer anything similarly useful. They do not state what, according to their definition, the various kinds or categories of sex are—whether it be three, four, five, or more categories. Or, if they consider sex a gradient or spectrum, rather than a categorical variable, they do not specify what concepts or variables that gradient represents. This is worth emphasizing: Based on those very definitions, one cannot categorize a single person as female, male, a third sex, or some intermediate sex. Practically speaking, a 99.9 percent easy classification (i.e., the reproductive traits framework) is preferable to a 0 percent classification!

What issues do Hyde et al. address in their article? One emphasis is defining additional terms, such as “gender,” “transgender,” “cisgender,” “nonbinary,” “agender,” and “genderfluid.” This creates the impression that sex is mixed up with these other terms. The other approach Hyde et al. take—and this comprises most of the article—is to argue that most traits that typically differ between women and men are affected by many factors that can be placed on a gradient or spectrum. These traits include the amounts of various hormones, the size of various brain structures, and the amount or frequency of cognitive abilities, social behaviors, romantic attraction, and feeling like a man or a woman. Although it’s true that these traits are nonbinary, that is not at odds with the reproductive traits framework. The take-home message of that framework is not that all sex-differentiated traits are binary; it’s that the two modes of reproduction—and the reproductive traits that support them—are binary.

So, how does the review by Hyde et al. deal with the fact that reproduction is binary? It doesn’t—it simply ignores the issue. In particular, although it is more than 20 journal pages and over 14,000 words, the words “gamete,” “baby,” “child,” “pregnancy,” “mother,” or “parent,” do not appear, except in parentheses or in the references section. There are a few mentions of “reproductive phases” and “reproductive structures,” but there is no acknowledgment that people bear and raise children, that these events are important, or that reproduction should be considered when defining sex.

Of course, Hyde et al. might argue that ignoring reproduction is a feature, not a bug—indeed, one that justifies their new definition of sex. Perhaps so, but this then raises the question of what trait should serve as the foundation for defining sex. Since they do not provide any answer, I submit the reason is that no nonbinary definition is defensible.

Without a theoretically defensible definition of sex to provide the endpoints of a gradient or spectrum, no individual could be placed on any female-male spectrum for any trait.

Imagine that someone proposed that the amount of testosterone a person is exposed to prior to birth should be the foundation for defining sex, an idea that seems reasonable given that such exposure is known to correlate with variation in several typically sex-differentiated important areas, including play preferences, work preferences, cognitive abilities, and sexual orientation. Although apparently reasonable, one might argue that it is in fact an adult’s current level of circulating testosterone, not their prenatal exposure, that is the more salient measure; another might suggest that prenatal estrogen exposure as the key measure; a fourth might posit that yet another hormone is critical.

The resulting situation is actually more nebulous because other scholars might just as reasonably claim that hormones are no more important than brain shape, skeletal anatomy, personality, or other areas, and each area has many possible measures. There is simply no single area or measure that is more defensible than the others.

In addition, a more fundamental problem is that any scoring system requires a reference point, and scholars who do not accept a binary definition of sex have committed themselves to abandoning the reference point of binary sex. This issue is relevant to every kind of trait—behavioral, anatomical, physiological—that might be considered a candidate for characterizing sex along a spectrum. Without a theoretically defensible definition of sex to provide the endpoints of a gradient or spectrum, no individual could be placed on any female-male spectrum for any trait.

7. No better nonbinary definition has been offered.

If the definitions and ideas proposed by Hyde et al. in 2019 are unworkable, then perhaps there is some other framework that works better? Though I follow the scholarship and discussions in this area closely, I’ve yet to encounter one.

In debates and essays, scholars arguing against the “sex is binary” position, including Alice Dreger26 and Steven Novella,27 invariably echo the points made by Hyde et al., including that some intersex individuals do not fit the binary and that most traits related to sex are not binary. However, these scholars never cite nor develop a viable nonbinary alternative framework, and they fail to acknowledge the fact that all humans who reproduce do so in either the male or female mode, never in a third or intermediate way.

I’ve long taught the course, “Psychology of Sex Differences,” and so am familiar with the leading textbooks in this field, and have participated in a content analysis of the leading textbooks.28 These books also deny that sex is binary yet fail to offer any constructive nonbinary alternative. Furthermore, although they invariably address reproduction and childrearing in later chapters, when they first introduce and define the terms sex and gender in their opening chapters, they do not acknowledge either that reproduction exists or that it should be incorporated into a definition of sex.

8. Nonbinary definitions of sex are popular because they are viewed as being progressive. However, one can hold progressive political views while still retaining the traditional binary view of sex.

If the binary framework of sex based on reproduction is solid and the nonbinary alternatives are so weak, why have the nonbinary alternatives gained so much traction? Why is the nonbinary view presented not only in texts but especially in the media?

The short answer is that scholars, especially evolutionary biologists, haven’t done an adequate job in making the binary basics accessible. While concentrating on the logical and heuristic power of the gametes framework, including its applicability to species where individuals can alter their sexual strategies or reproduce asexually, evolutionary biologists have neglected to provide intuitive and practical definitions for nonspecialists. I hope this article has made the case for how and why a reproductive traits framework—which builds on the gametes framework and makes explicit humans’ universal folk knowledge—remedies this problem.

Those with intersex conditions don’t fully fit the traditional binary pattern, and neither do gay people, or third gender individuals.

A second reason nonbinary definitions of sex have become popular is that they seem to accommodate better the diverse and varied biologies, psychologies, and experiences of individuals who do not conform to the traditional binary pattern, i.e., that most people have male or female reproductive traits, and this difference is accompanied by a corresponding package of female-typical or male-typical nonreproductive traits.29 Among many others, these include secondary sex traits (e.g., enlarged breasts, facial hair), normative social roles and interests (e.g., homemaker, breadwinner), heterosexual orientation, and identifying with one’s biological sex (cisgender). Those with intersex conditions don’t fully fit the traditional binary pattern, and neither do gay people, or third gender individuals. Further, in the U.S. and other Western societies, traditionally there has not been any third gender category or categories, but this is changing as increasing numbers, especially of younger people, identify as transgender.

Although there have always been people who don’t fit the traditional binary pattern, in recent years the visibility of these individuals—and the respect and legal rights afforded to them—has increased tremendously. A major contributor to this change has involved rejecting the presumed practical and moral superiority of the traditional binary pattern. Some scholars call this the cisgender heteronormative pattern. Whatever the nomenclature, the critical point is that more and more individuals have recognized that it is fine and safe to be, for example, a biological woman who is sexually attracted to women, a biological man who identifies as a woman, a biological woman who prefers fixing cars rather than crocheting baby blankets, or an intersex person whose reproductive traits do not allow categorization as being strictly male or female.

For many, myself included, such rejection of the superiority and dominance of the traditional binary pattern represents true ethical and political progress. However, doing this does not require abandoning the scientifically accurate view that sex is binary.30, 31

Astronomers have known for some time that nearby supernovae have had a profound effect on Earth’s evolution. For starters, Earth’s deposits of gold, platinum, and other heavy metals are believed to have been distributed to Earth by ancient supernovae. The blasts of gamma rays released in the process can also significantly affect life, depleting nitrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer, and causing harmful levels of ultraviolet radiation to reach the surface. Given the number of near-Earth supernovae that have occurred since Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, these events likely affected the evolution of life.

In a new paper by a team of astronomers from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), a nearby supernova may have influenced the evolution of life on Earth. According to their findings, Earth was pummeled by radiation from a nearby supernova about 2.5 million years ago. This burst of radiation was powerful enough to break apart the DNA of living creatures in Lake Tanganyika, the deepest body of water in Africa. This event, they argue, could be linked to an explosion in the number of viruses that occurred in the region.

The study was led by Caitlyn Nojiri, a recent graduate of the USCS Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She was joined by Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, a USCS Professor of astronomy and astrophysics, and Noémie Globus, a postdoctoral fellow at USCS and a member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University and the Astrophysical Big Bang Laboratory. The paper that describes their findings appeared on January 15th in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The image of Lake Tanganyika was acquired in June 1985. Credit: NASA

For their study, the team examined samples of iron-60 retrieved from the seafloor of Lake Tanganyika, the 645 km-long (400 mi) lake in Africa’s Great Rift Valley that borders Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This radioactive isotope of iron is produced by supernovae and is extremely rare on Earth. They obtained age estimates based on how much the samples had already broken down into nonradioactive forms. This revealed two separate ages for the samples, some 2.5 million years old and the others 6.5 million years old.

The next step was to trace the origin of the iron isotopes, which they did by backtracking the Sun’s motions around the center of the Milky Way. Roughly 6.5 million years ago, our Solar System passed through the Local Bubble, a region of lower density in the interstellar medium (ISM) of the Orion Arm in the Milky Way. As the Solar System entered the Bubble’s stardust-rich exterior, Earth was seeded with the older traces of iron-60. Between 2 and 3 million years ago, a neighboring star went supernova, seeding Earth with the younger traces of iron-60.

To confirm this theory, Nojiri and her colleagues conducted a simulation of a near-Earth supernova, which indicated that it would have bombarded Earth with cosmic rays for 100,000 years after the blast. This model was consistent with a previously recorded spike in radiation that hit Earth around that time. Given the intensity of the radiation, this raised the possibility that it was enough to snap strands of DNA in half. In the meantime, the authors came upon a study of virus diversity in one of Africa’s Rift Valley lakes and saw a possible connection. Said Nojiri in a UCSC news release:

“It’s really cool to find ways in which these super distant things could impact our lives or the planet’s habitability. The iron-60 is a way to trace back when the supernovae were occurring. From two to three million years ago, we think that a supernova happened nearby. We saw from other papers that radiation can damage DNA. That could be an accelerant for evolutionary changes or mutations in cells. We can’t say that they are connected, but they have a similar timeframe. We thought it was interesting that there was an increased diversification in the viruses.”

Lead author Caitlyn Nojiri is now applying for graduate school and hopes to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics. Credit: UCSC

Shortly after their paper was published, Nojiri became the first UCSC undergraduate to be invited to give a seminar at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP) at Ohio State. Nojiri did not initially set out to be an astronomer but eventually arrived at UCSC, where Prof. Ramirez-Ruiz encouraged her to apply for the University of California Leadership Excellence through Advanced Degrees (UC LEADS) program. This program is designed to identify undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds who have the potential to succeed in STEM.

She also participated in the Lamat program (“star” in Mayan), which was founded by Ramirez-Ruiz to teach students with great aptitude and nontraditional backgrounds how to conduct research in astronomy. Because of her experience with these programs, Nojiri has decided to apply for graduate school and become an astrophysicist.

“People from different walks of life bring different perspectives to science and can solve problems in very different ways,” said Ramirez-Ruiz. “This is an example of the beauty of having different perspectives in physics and the importance of having those voices.”

Further Reading: UC Santa Cruz, The Astrophysical Journal

The post New Study Proposes that Cosmic Radiation Altered Virus Evolution in Africa appeared first on Universe Today.

Beyoncê (real name Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter) is wildly popular, but it’s a popularity I find baffling. I have listened to a fair amount of her music, trying to understand the key to her musical fame—perhaps the use of catchy tunes or inventive lyrics—but I have come up dry. It is, as modern rock and pop tends to be, formulaic and trite. But most such music vanishes without a trace, yet forgettable songs like hers get Grammys. 35 of them!

Take, for example, song below, “Texas Hold Em”, the flagship song of her recent Grammy-winning album, “Cowboy Carter.”  As Wikipedia notes:

Music critics praised “Texas Hold ‘Em” for its playful tone, authentic sound, Beyoncé’s vocal performance, and its celebration of the Black roots of country music. Country artists and country radio managers also praised the song for elevating the accessibility of country music for a wider audience. It ignited discussions on Black musicians’ place within country music, boosted the listenership of Black country artists and country radio in general, and increased the popularity of Western wear and culture. It was nominated for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Country Song at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards.

I am stymied. The “playful tone” involves rhyming words like “Texas” and “Lexus”, and it is not in any sense authentic country music: it just uses country tropes and a country rhythm to convey essentially meaningless sentiments. I suspect the vocal performance is autotuned. The only part I like is the banjo introduction.

The song is a failed attempt to meld two genres, but the critics love. love, love it.  As for igniting interest in black country music, well, this is not black country music (see Charlie Pride for that); it is standard pop music striving to be countrified. It’s like putting a drop of Cointreau in a cocktail and calling it French.

But listen for yourself. Is this a song for the ages? I don’t think so.

Here are the lyrics, and—please forgive me—they seem so incompetent and ham-handed that I laughed when I read them. The first verse, with its risible rhyming of “Texas” and “Lexus”, is especially rich. Likewise rhyming “panic” and “dramatic.” I’ve put the dumbest lines in bold: Lyrics This ain’t Texas (woo), ain’t no hold ’em (hey)
So lay your cards down, down, down, down
So park your Lexus (woo) and throw your keys up (hey)
Stick around, ’round, ’round, ’round, ’round (stick around)
And I’ll be damned if I can’t slow dance with you
Come pour some sugar on me, honey too
It’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedown
Don’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now, woo, huh (woo) There’s a tornado (there’s a tornado) in my city (in my city)
Hit the basement (hit the basement), that shit ain’t pretty (shit ain’t pretty)
Rugged whiskey (rugged whiskey) ’cause we survivin’ (’cause we survivin’)
Off red cup kisses, sweet redemption, passin’ time, yeah Ooh, one step to the right
We headin’ to the dive bar we always thought was nice
Ooh, run me to the left
Then spin me in the middle, boy, I can’t read your mind This ain’t Texas (woo), ain’t no hold ’em (hey)
So lay your cards down, down, down, down
So park your Lexus (woo) and throw your keys up (hey)
Stick around, ’round, ’round, ’round, ’round (stick around)
And I’ll be damned if I can’t slow dance with you
Come pour some sugar on me, honey too
It’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedown
Don’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now (woo) And I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with you
Come pour some liquor on me, honey too
It’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedown
Don’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now (woo) Woo-hoo
Woo-hoo
Woo-hoo There’s a heatwave (there’s a heatwave) coming at us (coming at us)
Too hot to think straight (too hot to think straight)
Too cold to panic (cold to panic)
All of the problems just feel dramatic (just feel dramatic)
And now we’re runnin’ to the first spot that we find, yeah Ooh, one step to the right
We headed to the dive bar we always thought was nice
Ooh, you run to the left
Just work me in the middle, boy, I can’t read your mind This ain’t Texas (woo), ain’t no hold ’em (hey)
So lay your cards down, down, down, down, oh
So park your Lexus (hey), throw your keys up (hey)
Stick around, ’round, ’round, ’round, ’round (stick around)
And I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with you
Come pour some sugar on me, honey, too
It’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedown
Don’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now (woo) And I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with you
Come pour some liquor on me honey, too
It’s a real life boogie and a real life hoedown
Don’t be a-, come take it to the floor now, ooh Take it to the floor now, ooh
Hoops, spurs, boots
To the floor now, ooh
Tuck, back, oops (ooh, ooh, ooh)
Shoot
Come take it to the floor now, ooh
And I’ll be damned if I cannot dance with you
Baby, pour that sugar and liquor on me too
Furs, spurs, boots
Solargenic, photogenic, shoot Unlike some of the hard-to-understand songs of, say, Steely Dan, these are just a bunch of fragmentary thoughts strung together, and one sense there’s no message beneath them. Now some of her songs, like “Lemonade”, do tell a story (in that case, the unfaithfulness of her partner), but I find the music lame.  And while words can be lame in a song that’s nevertheless good, it is good because of the music.

But is there a greater meaning here?  A site purporting to give this “meaning” resorts almost completely to simply reiterating what Texas tropes appear in the lyrics. For example (lyrics in bold; dodo’s interpretation in plain text):

“There’s a tornado (There’s a tornado) in my city (In my city)
In the basement (In the basement), that shit ain’t pretty (Shit ain’t pretty)
Rugged whiskey (Rugged whiskey) ’cause we survivin’ (‘Cause we survivin’)
Off red cup kisses, sweet redemption, passin’ time, yeah”

Texas has more tornadoes passing through it than any other US state, and here, Beyoncé regales the listener with a tale of how a twister has forced her and her partner underground.

She subsequently paints a visceral picture of a crude, sparse setting, as they resolve to get through the violent weather with the help of country music’s No. 1 – or perhaps more accurately, No. 7 – painkiller: some good old Jack Daniels whiskey.

Beyoncé throws in another country trope by referencing the red solo cups that regularly pop up in Friday night anthems by the likes of Luke Combs, Morgan Wallen and more.

“Ooh, one step to the right
We headin’ to the dive bar we always thought was nice
Ooh, run me to the left
Then spin me in the middle, boy, I can’t read your mind”

Here, Beyoncé details some of the moves as she guides her hesitant partner through the dance in their local dive, putting him at ease. She again underlines her hopes that he’ll open up to her more, as she frustratedly highlights how she can’t read his mind.

Well, isn’t that special?  I wanted to listen to this song again, for the fourth or fifth time, before I posted this, but I find I can’t bear to hear it again. If any reader wants to tell me why this is such a great song, I’ll be glad to hear it—but I doubt I’ll agree.

I’m not alone in my criticism here; just read the Washington Post‘s article, “Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ isn’t a country album. It’s worse.”

This is an album that posits its lack of ideas as big ideas. Only in its final seconds, when Beyoncé sings about how “old ideas are buried here,” does “Cowboy Carter” start to feel less like an extravagant awards telecast, and more like a clear-eyed comment on the state of the nation — a grand, sprawling, overcrowded place with nowhere else to go.

Freddie deBoer  gives us what I think is the main reason why Beyoncé is so lauded (his piece is largely about Kendrick Lamar, but the lessons apply). The bolding is mine:

We’re left in this bizarre space where no one is willing to flourish, to succeed, without simultaneously calling themselves an underdog, their talents unrecognized and their tastes disrespected. This is planet “Nobody believed in me!,” and facts never get in the way.

Thus, to pick a paradigmatic example, we still get a thousand thinkpieces a year arguing that Beyonce is terribly mistreated and overlooked – Beyonce, a billionaire with the most Grammys in history, every other kind of award that humanity has to bestow, influence in every sphere of human achievement, multiple films and books about her genius, every material, social, artistic, and cultural laurel we as a society can give. Look how fucking long this list of awards is! The only human being on earth who enjoys a combination of celebration and wealth and access and privilege and power that equals that of Beyonce is Taylor Swift, and both are constantly referred to as disrespected and marginalized underdogs in our most prestigious publications. Beyonce has thirty-five Grammys. What would be enough? Seventy? Seven hundred? Honey, the whole point is that nothing could ever be good enough for her. Indeed, the evidence that Beyonce is an immensely lauded human being is so vast that this kind of talk inspires an admonition I get a lot in my career – you’re right, but we don’t talk about that.

. . . . The idea that your moral value is determined by what you do has given way to the assumption that your moral value is determined by what you like. If you’re an aging dad who likes Sabrina Carpenter, you must be an open-minded and discerning feminist. And if you’re a white person who likes Kendrick Lamar, well, you must have all the right attitudes about race.

And so it is with Beyoncé. Calling her mediocre, as I just did, is just asking for vilification.

 

h/t: Greg Mayer for the deBoer reference

If you think you’re beleaguered by political correctness in America, just thank your lucky stars that you’re not living in New Zealand.  There you are increasingly surrounded by demands that you abide by the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, but, worse, you can be demonized or fired simply because you think it’s outdated and there needs to be court-mandated interpretation of what it means, or, worse, adopt a New Zealand Constitution.

For in that country, which I love, virtually area of endeavor is subject to Equity Demands and Diktats that you respect indigenous “ways of knowing.” Today the subject of discussion is pharmacy, which is being rapidly colonized by this ideology. But note the bit about real estate at the bottom.

An anonymous New Zealander sent me this article from The Breaking News site in that lovely but increasingly benighted land.

You can verify Kennedy’s claims by going to the official pharmacy standards site (click on link to get pdf).

As you can see from the top headline, it’s a bit of a rant, but everything that Mr. Kennedy says about the pharmacy standards is true.

First, the aim of the Pharmacy Council is a general one: to help all New Zealanders. From pp. 3-4 of the second document:

Through skilled and safe practice, pharmacists contribute to better health outcomes for New Zealanders. We aspire to have pharmacists operate at the top of their scope of practice and to not only be competent and professional in their roles but to continually work towards being the best pharmacist they can be.

. . . . The purpose of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act (HPCAA) 2003 is to protect the health and safety of the public by providing mechanisms to ensure that health practitioners are competent and fit to practise their profession.

So consideration #1 should be merit: the quality of service provided by pharmacists.  However, if you look at the first three “domains” of competence (there are seven), you see this:

Yep, the very first thing in which you must be competent as a pharmacist is understanding the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi (“Te Tiriti o Waitangi”), which of course says nothing about pharmacy. The treaty simply guaranteed the indigenous Māori their lands, gives them all the rights of British citizens, and places governance of the indigenous people to England.  There are several versions of the treaty, not all Māori tribes signed onto it, and it’s used to justify all kinds of stuff which are not in any of the texts but fall under a recent interpretation “Māori are to get at least half of everything.” That includes having their ways of knowing taught in science classes.  And remember, just 17.8% of New Zealanders are Māori, while 17.3% are Asians (67.8% are of European descent.  Somehow the Asians got left out of the pharmacy standards.

So once again the most important aspect of “competence” you need as a New Zealand pharmacist is respect and understanding of the Treaty, along with deference to the indigenous people.  Extreme deference.  The first four paragraphs below are Kennedy’s take (and his bolding), while the rest are word-for-word from the second source above.

Unfortunately the Pharmacy Council NZ has gone all woke and racist and apparently now thinks that practicing safe, competent dispensing of medicine and advice depends on a deep knowledge of 27 different aspects of Maori customs, beliefs, traditions, practices, superstitions, intergenerational historical trauma, familiarity with mana whenua and kaumatua, the Treaty of Waitangi, structural racism and colonisation and many other alleged Maori-related issues – such is the depth of knowledge required by pharmacists of Maori culture, beliefs and Te Reo etc. etc., that it would seem that every pharmacist who achieves all these competencies that are totally, completely, categorically, undeniably and irrefutably unrelated to safe dispensing of medicines will have earned a Bachelor’s degree in Maori Studies!

This is racism on steroids, the woke, totally unnecessary, unwarranted imposition of irrelevant culture and beliefs on a professional group whose sole focus should be on the safe practice of pharmaceutical medicine!

The Minister of Health needs to stamp down immediately on this repugnant, racist, woke over-reach by the Pharmacy Council and weed out any of the incompetent and/or radical members of the Pharmacy Council!

Following is the list (from page 31) of the essential competency standards for all pharmacists, according to the Pharmacy Council: [JAC: as I say below, I’ve put in italics everything that seems to me completely irrelevant to competence as a pharmacist]

● being familiar with mana whenua (local hapū/iwi), mātāwaka (kinship group not mana whenua), hapū and iwi in your rohe (district) and their history,

● understanding the importance of kaumātua,

● being familiar with te Tiriti o Waitangi and He Whakaputanga o te Rangatiratanga o Nū Tīreni,

● advocating for giving effect to te Tiriti at all levels,

● understanding the intergenerational impact of historical trauma,

● understanding of the role of structural racism and colonisation and ongoing impacts on Māori, socioeconomic deprivation, restricted access to the determinants of health,

● being familiar with Māori health – leaders, history, and contemporary literature,

● being familiar with Māori aspirations in relation to health,

● developing authentic relationships with Māori organisations and health providers,

● having a positive collegial relationship with Māori colleagues in your profession/workplace,

● being proficient in building and maintaining mutually beneficial power-sharing relationships,

● tautoko (support) Māori leadership,

● prioritising Māori voices,

● trusting Māori intelligence,

● be clinically and culturally confident to work with Māori whānau, [JAC: family groups]

● understand one’s own whakapapa (genealogy and connections),

● have a basic/intermediate understanding of te reo Māori, [the language; and most Māori themselves don’t understand it]

● have a basic/intermediate understanding of the tikanga and the application of tapu (sacred) and noa (made ordinary),

● be familiar with Māori health models and concepts such as Te Pae Mahutonga9 and Te Ara Tika10,

● have a basic/intermediate understanding of marae (community meeting house) protocol,

● be confident to perform waiata tautoko (support song),

● be proficient in whakawhānaungatanga (active relationship building),

● integrate tika (correct), pono (truth), aroha and manaakitanga into practice,

● be open-hearted,

● be proficient in strengths-based practice,

● be proficient with equity analysis,

● practice cultural humility,

● critically monitor the effectiveness of own practice with Māori.

Only 1 out of 4 standards (7/28) seem to me at all relevant to competence in pharmacy, and I’m being generous.

Now I can understand that there should be a section in pharmacy school about “indigenous medicine” so that pharmacists can understand where a local is coming from if they want an herb rather than an antibiotic. But most of this statement It is simply irrelevant fealty to the indigenous people; a form of virtue signaling or “the sacralization of the oppressed.”

I needn’t go on, as you can see that most of the requirements for competence in this section are irrelevant to the aims of the Pharmacy Council.  Poor New Zealand!

But wait! There’s more!

Lagniappe: New Zealander loses realtor’s license for refusing to take Māori-centered DEI training. Click on the link to go to the New Zealand Herald article:

An excerpt:

Janet Dickson, the real estate agent facing a five-year ban for refusing to do a Māori tikanga course, has lost a court bid to block the threatened cancellation of her licence.

Today, the High Court turned down her request for a judicial review of decisions about agents’ professional development requirements, which required her to take a 90-minute course called Te Kākano (The Seed).

The module focused on Māori culture, language and the Treaty of Waitangi and was made compulsory for all real estate agents, branch managers and salespeople in 2023.

Agents who do not complete professional development requirements risk having their licences cancelled. People whose licences are cancelled cannot reapply for one for five years.

. . .She has called real estate work a vocation and a calling, citing her Presbyterian values. In her court case, she said the course’s references to Māori gods sat uncomfortably with her own monotheistic Christian belief.

She labelled the course “woke madness” in a Facebook post and vowed to fight “to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else”.

She told the court she considered the course would not add any value to the performance of her real estate agency work.

Poor New Zealand!

While thinking about about objections to the sex binary—usually discussed in humans but sometimes in other species—they all seem to come down to a single assertion:

“Sex is complicated in both development and expression, involving chromosomes, behavior, hormones, genitals and even psychology.  Therefore there are more than two sexes.”

One example of this is from the deeply misguided anthropologist Agustin Fuentes, who has a book coming out about why sex isn’t binary. On Twitter he says this:

It turns out that both Darwin and Bateman made assumptions that don’t always hold up across species. Plus, there is much biological research that challenges the assertion that diffs in gamete size (anisogamy) means the same thing, or has the same impact, across all animals.

So, at least some awareness of these important discussions is necessary before simply accepting that anisogamy, and gametes, tell you everything you need to know about sex for a species, and the individuals in it. Esp. if you are making laws based on this assumption.

But nobody has ever maintained that whether an individual falls under the definition of “male” or “female” tells you everything you need to know about sex for a species. You’d have to be a moron to accept that.  There is variation in how sex is determined, how biologists recognize sex, in secondary sexual characteristics and behavior (in seahorses, for example, the sperm-producing males actually incubate eggs from fertilized females, getting pregnant).

I keep pondering what kind of mentality would reject the male/female sex binary simply because there is variation in how sex is determined (not “defined”) and how sex is expressed in the bodies and behavior of different species.  When I sent the above to a colleague, she responded:

Is he then saying that a seahorse who produces sperm is a female?  I don’t even get the argument.

And that leads to the question posed to Fuentes on Twitter when he touted his book:

@Antrofuentes Since you are an expert, what would be the third or fourth sex, choose one of your choice that is not male or female and tell us what gametes it produces?

— Nemesi2024 (@Nemesi_Nemesi) February 19, 2025

It’s funny, but telling, that those who claim that sex is a spectrum or continuum never specify how many sexes there are, either in humans or other species.  I suspect that if they responded—based on their “multivariate, multidimensional” definition of sex—that “there are many, many sexes,” or “I can’t answer that”, they would be laughed out of the house.

But we all know that that the “spectrum” people are not dumb or willfully ignorant. They are simply imbued with a certain ideology.

For more on this, I defer to Richard Dawkins and his elegant explanation of the sex binary on one of his Substack posts.

Policy-based evidence making means working back from a predefined policy to produce underpinning evidence.

The post Dr. Vinay Prasad Embraces Policy-Based Evidence Making first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

If you’re a pop music fan, you’ve probably heard Karla Bonoff‘s songs—but may not know that she wrote them, for the most famous ones were popularized by others. Her two best, in my view, were covered by Linda Ronstadt (“Someone to Lay Down Beside Me“) and Lynn Anderson (“Isn’t it Always Love“). Yet Bonoff recorded both of these songs herself, and her versions—save for Ronstadt’s, which is a classic—are at least as good as the covers.

Bonoff does tour, but it’s hard to find good live videos of her performances.  I’ll show a couple. She’s now 73 but apparently is still drawing appreciative fans to her concert.

Here’s her best song performed live, and clearly done some time ago. The quality of the recording is poor, but gives an idea of her talent.

“Isn’t it Always Love”, played not that long ago:

“The Water is Wide” wasn’t written by Bonoff, but rather is derived from British folk songs that go back to the seventeenth century, and its beauty makes it one of my very favorite folk songs. Bonoff sings it frequently, and her versions, I think, are the best ones. Here’s a recent live performance with Nina Gerber playing accompaniment on the electric guitar (see Gerber’s great solo at 2:01, which sounds in places like a violin).

How can we explore Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, to include its surface and subsurface ocean, with the goal of potentially discovering life as we know it? This is what a recent study presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2024 Fall Meeting hopes to address as a team of students and researchers proposed the Thermal Investigation of Geothermal Regions of Enceladus (TIGRE) mission concept, which is designed to conduct in-depth exploration of Enceladus with an orbiter, lander, and drill, while laying the groundwork for future missions to icy moons throughout the solar system.

Here, Universe Today discusses this incredible mission concept with Prabhleen Kour, who is a senior at River Valley High School in Yuba City, CA, and lead author of the study, regarding the motivation behind TIGRE, how TIGRE can improve upon findings from NASA’s now-retired Cassini mission, potential landing sites on Enceladus, how TIGRE can improve missions to other icy moons, the next steps in making TIGRE a reality, and whether she thinks Enceladus has life. Therefore, what was the motivation behind TIGRE?

“TIGRE mission was born during our time with the NASA STEM Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) program in collaboration with UT Austin’s Center for Space Research,” Kour tells Universe Today. “As part of our internship, our team was tasked to design a space mission within our solar system based on a few assigned parameters. The designed mission had to be aligned to current work being performed by NASA but separate from active missions such as the Europa Clipper. Similarly, the main subject of our mission, Enceladus, and our goals with it, had to be chosen in accordance with the Decadal Survey which dictates what missions and priorities space agencies have. In our case, we were driven to explore a celestial body that might hold the signs of life.”

The TIGRE mission concept comes more than seven years after NASA’s Cassini-Huygen mission ended by performing an intentional dive into Saturn, resulting in Cassini breaking apart in Saturn’s atmosphere. During its storied mission, Cassini spent more than 13 years conducting the most in-depth exploration of Saturn and its many moons, including Titan, Mimas, Atlas, Daphnis, Pandora, Iapetus, Rhea, Dione, Pan, Hyperion, and Enceladus.

Of these moons, Titan and Enceladus are the only two that exhibit potential conditions for life, as Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere and contains lakes of liquid methane and ethane, while Enceladus boasts a large subsurface ocean that discharge geysers of liquid water from its large crevices in its south pole, dubbed Tiger Stripes. It is the geysers of Enceladus that Cassini not only discovered but flew through twice during its mission, identifying water, carbon dioxide, and a myriad of hydrocarbons and organic materials, the last of which exhibited density 20 times greater than predicted. Therefore, how does TIGRE improve upon findings from the Cassini mission?

Image of Enceladus’ south pole geysers obtained by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in June 2009. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

“Though Cassini’s flyby was incredible and provided us with great information, TIGRE aims to get an incredibly close look at Enceladus’ secrets,” Kour tells Universe Today. “Since TIGRE is designed to go on the surface of Enceladus, it will get more of the ‘inside scoop’ than Cassini. Cassini has already helped us by identifying the organic molecules contained within the ocean, now we want to explore other factors that might make life possible on Enceladus. We are planning to locate any potential regions of interest and stability of habitable zones, analyze samples for organic/inorganic indicators of prebiotic lifeforms, and utilize our findings for future missions. The TIGRE mission contains a drill design, which will reach the subsurface ocean and collect water samples for elements such as CHONPS.”

Enceladus’ Tiger Stripes consist of four main features officially named Damascus Sulcus, Baghdad Sulcus, Cairo Sulcus, and Alexandria Sulcus, with a smaller feature branching off Alexandria called Camphor Sulcus (sulcus being plural for sulci and is an astrogeology term meaning parallel ridges), and are responsible for the geysers that discharge Enceladus’ interior ocean into space. The thickness of the ice in this region is estimated to be approximately 5 kilometers (3.1 miles). Since one of the primary goals of the TIGRE mission is to obtain drill samples of the ocean and identify potential signs of life, the team targeted the Tiger Stripes as potential landing sites for a craft to land and obtain samples of the ocean.

To accomplish this, the team outlined specific landing site criteria to maximize mission success, including landing on relatively flat terrain near a geyser, but not directly on a geyser, to avoid being damaged by uneven terrain or disrupted during geyser activity. Additionally, they determined a low-elevation region would be substantial to minimize the amount of ice the drill would have to penetrate to obtain samples. In the end, the team chose a primary landing site located near the Baghdad stripe that met their landing criteria, located approximately 6.4 kilometers (4 miles) from a geyser and a surface elevation of approximately 450 meters (1,476 feet), along with potential backup landing sites.

Enceladus’ Tiger Stripes. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

“Our decision to land near the Baghdad stripe was due to the following: Flat terrain to prevent lander damage, proximity to a geyser, and low elevation to minimize drilling distance,” Kour tells Universe Today. “Any other location that met these requirements were deemed as backups. We analyzed multiple different locations throughout the four stripes, and there were a few that met the requirements on the Cairo stripe. More specifically, one location of interest was between a large geyser and a smaller geyser on the Cario stripe. However, because the location on the Baghdad stripe was close to multiple other smaller geysers, we chose the Baghdad location.”

As noted, Enceladus isn’t the only moon of Saturn that is deemed to potentially have life, as its largest moon, Titan, has a dense and hazy atmosphere caused by specific chemical reactions that scientists have hypothesized existed on early Earth. Additionally, its lakes of liquid methane and ethane have also become prime targets for astrobiologists. Outside of the Saturn system, other icy moons exist throughout the solar system that potentially once had life or could have life today, including Jupiter’s moons, Europa and Ganymede, with both presenting evidence of subsurface oceans circulating beneath their icy crusts.

Venturing closer to the Sun and inside the main asteroid belt orbits the dwarf planet Ceres, which NASA’s Dawn spacecraft identified frozen salts caused by a process known as cryovolcanism. Current models debate the interior structure of Ceres, but it is hypothesized that it once had liquid water long ago. Finally, venturing to the outer portions of the solar system orbits Neptune’s moon, Triton, which NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft identified active geysers on its surface comprised of cryolava lakes. Since one of the primary mission objectives of TIGRE is to improve future missions to icy moons, how will it accomplish this?

“The mission will help advance remote sensing, orbiting, landing, and thermal drilling technologies, setting a precedent for future exploration,” Kour tells Universe Today. “TIGRE consists of three main components: the orbiter, lander, and drill. This design is not limited to Enceladus’ surface alone. Instead, this design can be applicable to many other icy surfaces, including those on Earth like Antarctica and other icy moons. Data from the lander’s sampling devices, thermal drill, and the orbiter’s remote sensing will provide comprehensive insights into the composition and formation of Enceladus’s subsurface ocean. These findings could also inform our understanding of other icy moons, broadening our knowledge of potentially habitable environments in the outer Solar System.”

As Universe Today recently discussed with the VATMOS-SR mission concept, it can take anywhere from years to decades for a space mission to go from a concept to reality, involving a myriad of steps and phases, including design, funding rounds, testing, re-designs, re-testing, until it’s finally built and launched. This is followed by several years of traveling to the destination, arriving, and finally collecting science.

For example, the Cassini-Huygens mission was first proposed in 1982 and wasn’t launched until 1997, during which time it endured several years of studies and swapped between a solo NASA mission or a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission, the latter of which was settled upon. After launching in 1997, Cassini finally arrived at Saturn in July 2004, landing the Huygens probe on Titan in January 2005, and spent until 2017 obtaining treasure troves of images and data about Saturn and its many moons, even discovering a few moons along the way and diving through Enceladus’ plumes. Given the journey that Cassini endured, what are the next steps in making TIGRE a reality?

“One of the first steps in making TIGRE a reality is waiting for the completion of the Europa Clipper mission,” Kour tells Universe Today. “In waiting for the mission’s completion, we will be able to see what worked and failed to gather useful samples and what failed to navigate space’s harsh environment. In the meantime, we can advocate for the significance of finding life to enlarge NASA’s budget for active missions. This itself would be a step towards launching the TIGRE mission by opening the resources for improving and testing our mission’s main components (the orbiter, lander, and drill) against the extreme cold, ocean waters, and radiation.”

As noted, Enceladus is a prime target for astrobiologists in the search for life beyond Earth due to its vast subsurface ocean circulating beneath its icy shell. As demonstrated here on Earth, liquid water leads to life as we know it, so Enceladus having a liquid water ocean, even a subsurface ocean, is a strong indicator that it could potentially also have life as we know it, too.

The hydrocarbons discovered by Cassini when the spacecraft flew through Enceladus’ plumes included carbon-bearing molecules like formaldehyde, acetylene, propane, and methane, which is evidence for hydrothermal activity occurring on the ocean floor of Enceladus, much like hydrothermal activity exists on the ocean floors of Earth, specifically regarding the water-rock interactions that occur here, as well. Therefore, in Kour’s opinion, does Enceladus have life and what kinds of life does she foresee finding within their potential TIGRE samples?

“It is not a stretch of reason to state Enceladus could harbor life,” Kour tells Universe Today. “As previously mentioned, Enceladus has the components for life through key elements and has the energy activity to make the possibility of life more plausible. Within the depths of its oceans, Enceladus may very well have life. However, we do not want to explicitly state that there is something there, as there are so many factors at play – thin atmosphere, other chemicals that were potentially not detected by Cassini, and environmental conditions. If there is life and it is similar to the one on Earth, we could expect it to be one of close relations to Archaea. The representatives of this domain are quite primitive and unicellular, which aligns with our hypothesis of Enceladus being able to harbor a simple life form. However, it can also survive harsh conditions – such as extreme cold temperatures on the moon and radiation.”

How will TIGRE help scientists better understand Enceladus and potentially other icy moons throughout the solar system in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!

As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!

The post Sampling Enceladus’ Subsurface Ocean with TIGRE Mission Concept appeared first on Universe Today.

Did you find the squirrel in Berlin? Yes, it was a hard one, and I couldn’t find it until it was pointed out to me.  First, the original:

And then the reveal; I’ve circled the elusive rodent:

News Items: Bird Brains, Indoor Air Quality, Abortions and Infant Mortality, Black Holes Without Singularities, Banning Chemtrails; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Asteroid Hitting the Moon; Swindler's List: Tax Scams; Science or Fiction

First, it’s a cat holiday in Japan!  From Facebook:

*******************

The Kiffness is back, riffing on a cat’s meows. This time it’s “Kitty Caught a Mouse”, with tumpet and keyboard accompaniment. (Not the gratuitous appearance of a d*g.)

 

**********************

In this short video from Instagram, a cat not only makes biscuits, but also delivers them! (Props to whoever finds the original song in Spanish that accompanies this video.)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cats Doing Things (@catsdoingthings)

*********************

This event was covered by several British papers, including the times (click below, or find it archived here) as well as the BBC.  Yes, a cat got on a train and left home, but it all ended well.

From The Times:

Tilly had already shown her adventurous streak with solo trips to the local pub and the vet. This time, however, the two-year-old cat from Surrey decided to really go the extra mile.

Hopping aboard a train at Weybridge, Tilly proceeded to hitch an 18-mile ride into London, arriving at Waterloo station.

Michael Hardy and Emma Hill, her owners, said their affable cat had a reputation for straying, having caught buses before as well as climbing behind the bar of his local pub.

But even he admitted he was shocked when he received a call from a station officer informing him that his cat had found her way into central London.

“Luckily, I was working in London that day, but I had to drive across the city to go and collect her,” he said.

“The station staff couldn’t believe it. They said, ‘we have your cat, what the hell is she doing here?’, kind of thing. But she is always at the local station [in Weybridge]. People come from everywhere now to try to find her. The locals all know her.”

Hardy said he wouldn’t be surprised if his intrepid pet had even grander ambitions.

“Waterloo is the furthest she has ever made it. If she manages to get on the other line she could end up in Brighton,” he said.

“Summer is coming up, isn’t it? She might want to go to the beach. But she always comes back at some point.”

Hardy and Hill realised their cat was missing in November, but were in disbelief when they saw their Apple AirTag — which they bought specially to keep an eye on her — revealed that Tilly was on the train to London.

“We didn’t know where she was. We looked on the Apple tag and realised she had gone to Waterloo,” he said.

“The only way she can get there is on the train. You look at the tag and you see it going from one stop to another.”

Tilly’s journey from a Times graphic:

And her obligatory FB page:

Tilly’s reputation for adventure has won her fans from around the world. She has her own Facebook page called “Tilly the adventure cat”, which has more than 4,700 followers.

And a news video recounting Tilly’s Big Adventure:

********************

Lagniappe: A cat inhabiting what I think is the statue of Christ the Redeemer overlooking Rio. Click on it to see the Facebook video.

 

h/t: Amy, Divy, Mark, Chris

I think this is the hardest “spot the. . . ” picture that I’ve seen. It comes from Natalie in Berlin, who came across an Eichhörnchen (“squirrel” in German) while perambulating with her children.  You’ll have to enlarge it (click on the photo) and even then you might have trouble.

If you find it, do not give clues in the comments; let others have the fun. But you can say “I found it” or “I didn’t find it.”

The reveal will be at noon Chicago time.

Have you ever wondered how astronomers manage to map out the Milky Way when it’s so incredibly vast? One of the most powerful tools is something called 21cm radiation.

Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, plays a key role here. When the electrons in hydrogen atoms flip their spin direction, a specific type of electromagnetic radiation is emitted at a wavelength of 21 centimeters.

The Milky Way galaxy is packed with hydrogen atoms, and these atoms are constantly emitting 21cm radiation. The best part is that this radiation can travel long distances through the interstellar dust that often obscures our view of the galaxy in visible light. This makes 21cm radiation an incredibly useful tool for mapping the structure of the Milky Way.

This radiation reveals everything from star-forming gas clouds to the shapes of the galaxy’s spiral arms. Whereas visible light just gets caught up in all the interstellar dust at it tries to traverse the tens of thousands of light-years across the galaxy, 21cm radiation just sails right though.

But mapping the galaxy’s structure is just one part of the story. Astronomers can also learn about the Milky Way’s rotation by studying the redshift and blueshift of the 21cm radiation. When an object in space moves away from us, the wavelength of the light or radiation it emits gets stretched out, making it appear redder (redshift). Conversely, when an object moves toward us, the wavelength gets compressed, making it appear bluer (blueshift).

By analyzing the redshift and blueshift of the 21cm radiation from different parts of the galaxy, astronomers can determine how fast various regions of the Milky Way are rotating. This information helps them build a more comprehensive picture of our galaxy’s dynamics and motion.

The utility of 21cm radiation isn’t limited to the Milky Way alone. Astronomers can use these same techniques to study distant galaxies as well. By examining the neutral hydrogen gas clouds in far-off galaxies, they can estimate the masses of these galaxies. This is because the amount of 21cm radiation emitted is related to the number of hydrogen atoms present, which in turn gives clues about the galaxy’s overall mass.

21cm radiation is a powerful tool in the field of astronomy that allows astronomers to map the structure of our Milky Way galaxy, understand its rotation, and even estimate the masses of distant galaxies. This technique opens a window into the vast and complex universe, helping us unravel the mysteries of the cosmos with every new observation.

So next time you gaze up at the night sky, remember that there’s a whole lot more going on than meets the eye. Thanks to 21cm radiation, we’re able to peel back the layers of the Milky Way and explore the wonders of the universe in ways that were once unimaginable.

The post How Astronomers Make Deep Maps of the Milky Way appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA astronomers have been continuing to monitor the trajectory of asteroid 2024 YR4. The initial calculations suggested a 1.3% probability of an Earth impact event, which temporarily increased to 3.1% as more data came in. However, and with a sigh of relief, recent analysis brings encouraging news: the Earth impact probability has decreased significantly to 0.28%, though calculations now show a 1% chance of lunar impact. Observations will continue with the James Webb Space Telescope so stay tuned. 

Asteroids are rocky, airless worlds that are remnants left over from the formation of our Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago. They range in size from tiny pebbles to massive bodies hundreds of kilometres across. Most asteroids are found in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter although some follow paths that bring them closer to Earth.  Occasionally, they can pose a threat to Earth, which is why astronomers and space agencies closely monitor their orbits and develop potential deflection techniques.

Asteroid Ryugu as seen by Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft, which returned a sample of the ancient asteroid to Earth in 2020. Image Courtesy ISAS/JAXA

Asteroid 2024 YR4 is one such asteroid that has had gripped the nations media over recent weeks. It’s a near-Earth object that was discovered on 27 December 2024, by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile. Initially, it had an estimated 1.3% chance of impact with Earth in 2032, making it one of the highest-risk asteroids ever recorded. However, further observations raised that risk!

Atlas 2 on Mauna Loa

Astronomers use systems like ATLAS to identify near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a potential threat to our planet. It was developed by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA and consists of a network of telescopes positioned around the world to provide continuous sky surveys. Its primary goal is to detect asteroids before a potential impact, allowing for timely warnings and mitigation efforts. Since its installation, ATLAS has successfully discovered thousands of asteroids, including hazardous ones just like 2024 YR4. 

Understanding the level of threat from asteroids like 2024 YR4 requires time, time and observations. Imagine a game of tennis and the ball is hit, sending it flying over the net. A photographer sat in the crowd grabs a snapshot of the ball as it flies over the net. The picture is a clear, sharp capture of a point in time however analysis of the image can only reveal the exact location of the ball and not its trajectory. It’s the same with asteroids, once they are discovered, a single observation will reveal where it is but a series of observations are required to understand where it’s going. Ok so this is a simplistic view but it shows how important continued observations are to asteroids like 2024 YR4.

Further observations of asteroid 2024 YR4, conducted during the night of 19-20 February have revealed encouraging results. NASA’s planetary defence team have reported that the probability of an Earth impact has decreased to 0.28%. Monitoring will of course continue to refine trajectory predictions, but current calculations indicate a slight increase in the possibility of lunar impact, now estimated at 1%. These percentages are of course tiny and pose no cause for alarm but 2024 YR4 will continue to be observed over the coming months, just to be sure.

Source : Additional Observations Continue to Reduce Chance of Asteroid Impact in 2032

The post NASA Downgrades the Risk of 2024 YR4 to Below 1% appeared first on Universe Today.

A hybrid microscope allows scientists to simultaneously image the full 3D orientation and position of an ensemble of molecules, such as labeled proteins inside cells. The microscope combines polarized fluorescence technology, a valuable tool for measuring the orientation of molecules, with a dual-view light sheet microscope (diSPIM), which excels at imaging along the depth (axial) axis of a sample.

Agricultural fertilizers are critical for feeding the world's population, restoring soil fertility and sustaining crops. Excessive and inefficient use of those resources can present an environmental threat, contaminating waterways and generating greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide. Now, researchers have addressed those challenges with glass fertilizer beads. The beads control nutrient release, and the researchers say they're environmentally compatible.

Researchers are blurring the lines between robotics and materials, with a proof-of-concept material-like collective of robots with behaviors inspired by biology.