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As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly integrates into health care, a new study reveals that all generative AI models may recommend different treatments for the same medical condition based solely on a patient's socioeconomic and demographic background.

What if we spend decades building advanced telescopes to search for life on other planets and come up emptyhanded? A recent study exploring what we can learn about life in the universe -- even if we don't detect signs of life or habitability. Using advanced statistical modeling, the research team sought to explore how many exoplanets scientists should observe and understand before declaring that life beyond Earth is either common or rare.

Tariff policy has been a contentious issue since the founding of the United States. Hamilton clashed with Jefferson and Madison over tariff policy in the 1790s, South Carolina threatened to secede from the union over tariff policy in 1832, and the Hawley-Smoot tariff generated outrage in 1930. Currently, Trump is sparking heated debates about his tariff policies. 

To understand the ongoing tariff debate, it is essential to grasp the basics: Tariffs are taxes levied by governments on imported goods. They have been the central focus of U.S. trade policy since the federal government was established in 1789. Historically, tariffs have been used to raise government revenue, protect domestic industries, and influence the trade policies of other nations. The history of U.S. tariffs can be understood in three periods corresponding with these three uses. 

From 1790 until the Civil War in 1861, tariffs primarily served as a source of federal revenue, accounting for about 90 percent of government income (since 2000, however, tariffs have generated less than 2 percent of the federal government’s income).1 Both the Union and the Confederacy enacted income taxes to help finance the Civil War. After the war, public resistance to income taxes grew, and Congress repealed the federal income tax in 1872. Later, when Congress attempted to reinstate an income tax in 1894, the Supreme Court struck it down in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co. (1895), ruling it unconstitutional. To resolve this issue, the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, granting Congress the authority to levy income taxes. Since then, federal income taxes have provided a much larger source of revenue than tariffs, allowing for greater federal government expenditures. The shift away from tariffs as the primary revenue source began during the Civil War and was further accelerated by World War I, which required large increases in federal spending.

The 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913, granting Congress the authority to levy income taxes.

Before the Civil War, the North and South had conflicting views on tariffs. The North, with its large manufacturing base, wanted higher tariffs to protect domestic industries from foreign competition. This protection would decrease the amount of competition Northern manufacturers faced, allowing them to charge higher prices and encounter less risk of being pushed out of business by more efficient foreign producers. By contrast, the South, with an economy rooted in agricultural exports (especially cotton) favored low tariffs, as they benefited from cheaper imported manufactured goods. These imports were largely financed by selling Southern cotton, produced by enslaved labor, to foreign markets, particularly Great Britain. The North-South tariff divide eventually led to the era of protective tariffs (1860-1934) after the Civil War, when the victorious North gained political power, and protectionist policies dominated U.S. trade.

For more than half a century after the Civil War, U.S. trade policy was dominated by high protectionist tariffs. Republican William McKinley, a strong advocate of high tariffs, won the presidency in 1896 with support from industrial interests. Between 1861 and the early 1930s, average tariff rates on dutiable imports rose to around 50 percent and stayed elevated for decades. As a point of comparison, average tariffs had declined to about 5 percent by the early 21st century. 

Republicans passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff in 1930, which coincided with the Great Depression. While it is generally agreed among economists that the Hawley-Smoot Tariff did not cause the Great Depression, it further hurt the world economy during the economic downturn (though many observers at the time thought that it was responsible for the global economic collapse). The widely disliked Hawley-Smoot Tariff, along with the catastrophic effects of the Great Depression, allowed the Democrats to gain political control of both Congress and the Presidency in 1932. They passed the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) in 1934, which gave the president the power to negotiate reciprocal trade agreements. 

The RTAA transitioned some of the power over trade policy, i.e., tariffs, away from Congress and to the President. Whereas the constituencies of specific members of Congress are in certain regions of the U.S., the entire country can vote in Presidential elections. For that reason, regional producers generally have less political power over the President than they do over their specific members of Congress, and therefore the President tends to be less responsive to their interests and more responsive to the interests of consumers and exporters located across the nation. Since consumers and exporters generally benefit from lower tariffs, the President has an incentive to decrease them. Thus, the RTAA contributed to the U.S. lowering tariff barriers around the world. This marked the beginning of the era of reciprocity in U.S. tariff policy (1934-2025) in which the U.S. has generally sought to reduce tariffs worldwide.

World War II and its consequences also pushed the U.S. into the era of reciprocity. The European countries, which had been some of the United States’ strongest economic competitors, were decimated after two World Wars in 30 years. Exports from Europe declined and the U.S. shifted even more toward exporting after the Second World War. As more U.S. firms became larger exporters, their political power was aimed at lowering tariffs rather than raising them. (Domestic companies that compete with imports have an interest in lobbying for higher tariffs, but exporting companies have the opposite interest.)

The World Trade Organization (WTO) was founded in 1995. Photo © WTO.

The end of WWII left the U.S. concerned that yet another World War could erupt if economic conditions were unfavorable around the world. America also sought increased trade to stave off the spread of Communism during the Cold War. These geopolitical motivations led the U.S. to seek increased trade with non-Communist nations, which was partially accomplished by decreasing tariffs. This trend culminated in the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947, which was then superseded by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. These successive organizations helped reduce tariffs and other international trade barriers.

Although there is a strong consensus among economists that tariffs do more harm than good,2,3,4 there are some potential benefits of specific tariff policies.

Pros

1. National Security: In his 1776 classic The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith acknowledged that trade restrictions could be justified when used to protect industries essential to national defense. In times of war, a nation's wealth is secondary to its security, and tariffs can protect essential industries. However, it is often challenging to determine which industries are truly vital for defense, and some firms have exploited this argument to gain protection, even when their goods are not crucial to national security. 
2. Negotiating Tool: Tariffs can also provide leverage in negotiations. For example, in early 2025, President Trump threatened Mexico and Canada with tariffs, but then (temporarily as it turns out) removed the threat once they agreed to address the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. However, this tactic is a dangerous game. For the threat of tariffs to work, the nations you are negotiating with must believe you are willing to impose the tariffs you are threatening. This can lead to a difficult decision wherein you either have to back down from your threat and lose reputation, or follow through and impose the tariffs even though you do not want to.
3. Protection of Infant Industries: It is possible that imposing tariffs on specific goods can foster the growth of developing industries that would not have been able to grow in the environment of foreign competition that existed without tariff protection. It is also possible that these protected industries could create more wealth for the nation once they are grown than would have been generated in the no-tariff scenario. Most economists argue that there is not much historical evidence of this occurring. Although the infant industry argument is possible, it relies on the assumption that the government can effectively identify which firms are going to prosper and bring greater economic benefits than would be accrued due to free trade. The government not only has to identify which infant industries to protect, but it also must have the appropriate incentives and mechanisms to carry out the protection. In reality, no one can consistently identify the appropriate infant industries to support.
4. Revenue: Tariffs can raise revenue for the government, but they are not capable of funding the current levels of government spending for many developed nations.

The “Chicken War” of the 1960s was a trade dispute between the United States and the European Economic Community (EEC), triggered by the EEC’s introduction of tariffs on imported chicken to protect its domestic poultry industry, leading to US retaliatory tariffs on trucks and other goods. Graphic courtesy of the Library of Congress.Cons

1. Economic Inefficiency: Let us imagine a scenario where person A and person B are trading with each other. The government then imposes a tax on the purchase of person B’s goods. Both person A and B are affected because person A must pay more for person B’s goods and person B cannot sell as many goods to person A. The same logic applies to tariffs. This is the process by which tariffs distort markets and lead to deadweight economic loss. Often, people assume that tariffs help the imposing country and hurt the country forced to pay them. This is incorrect. Tariffs hurt both countries, as both persons A and B are harmed due to the loss of economic efficiency. In addition, protectionist tariffs shelter domestic industries from competition, thereby allowing them to be less efficient. Lessened efficiency leads to poorer quality products and higher prices. Lastly, tariffs can disrupt supply chains that span multiple countries. For example, US tariffs on Chinese goods increased costs for American manufacturers that rely on parts imported from China.5 Disrupting supply chains also leads to economic inefficiency.
2. Higher Prices for Consumers: In our thought experiment above, person A must pay more for person B’s goods after the tariff is imposed. This is how tariffs raise prices for domestic consumers.
3. Trade Wars: Tariffs can spark trade wars that end up greatly decreasing the amount of trade across nations. When country A imposes tariffs on country B, country B may react by imposing counter-tariffs on country A. This causes an expanding cycle that leads to further decreases in trade and economic efficiency. A well-known example is the “Chicken War” in the 1960s, in which the U.S. imposed a 25% tariff on light trucks from Western Europe, which is still in place today.
4. Corruption: Once tariffs are enacted, they are politically difficult to remove. The costs of tariffs are thinly spread over millions of Americans, whereas the benefits are concentrated in a comparatively small number of people involved in specific industries. This makes the beneficiaries more politically motivated to maintain the tariffs than the general populace is to resist them, leading to long-lasting tariffs that aid a powerful few while harming the public.

Although tariffs have some theoretical benefits in specific situations, the competence and incentives of the U.S. political system often do not allow these benefits to come to fruition. Tariffs almost always come with the cost of economic inefficiency, which is why economists generally agree that tariffs do more harm than good. Does the increase in U.S. tariffs, particularly on China, since 2016 mark the end of the era of reciprocity or is it just a blip? The answer will affect the economic well-being of Americans and people around the world. 

The history of tariffs described in this article is largely based on Clashing Over Commerce by Douglas Irwin (2017).

The author would like to thank Professor John L. Turner at the University of Georgia for his invaluable input.

Throughout the early modern period—from the rise of the nation state through the nineteenth century—the predominant economic ideology of the Western world was mercantilism, or the belief that nations compete for a fixed amount of wealth in a zero-sum game: the +X gain of one nation means the –X loss of another nation, with the +X and –X summing to zero. The belief at the time was that in order for a nation to become wealthy, its government must run the economy from the top down through strict regulation of foreign and domestic trade, enforced monopolies, regulated trade guilds, subsidized colonies, accumulation of bullion and other precious metals, and countless other forms of economic intervention, all to the end of producing a “favorable balance of trade.” Favorable, that is, for one nation over another nation. As President Donald Trump often repeats, “they’re ripping us off!” That is classic mercantilism and economic nationalism speaking.

Adam Smith famously debunked mercantilism in his 1776 treatise An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith’s case against mercantilism is both moral and practical. It is moral, he argued, because: “To prohibit a great people…from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.”1 It is practical, he showed, because: “Whenever the law has attempted to regulate the wages of workmen, it has always been rather to lower them than to raise them.”2

Producers and Consumers

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was one long argument against the mercantilist system of protectionism and special privilege that in the short run may benefit producers but which in the long run harms consumers and thereby decreases the wealth of a nation. All such mercantilist practices benefit the producers, monopolists, and their government agents, while the people of the nation—the true source of a nation’s wealth—remain impoverished: “The wealth of a country consists, not of its gold and silver only, but in its lands, houses, and consumable goods of all different kinds.” Yet, “in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost always constantly sacrificed to that of the producer.”3

Adam Smith statue in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo by K. Mitch Hodge / Unsplash

The solution? Hands off. Laissez Faire. Lift trade barriers and other restrictions on people’s economic freedoms and allow them to exchange as they see fit for themselves, both morally and practically. In other words, an economy should be consumer driven, not producer driven. For example, under the mercantilist zero-sum philosophy, cheaper foreign goods benefit consumers but they hurt domestic producers, so the government should impose protective trade tariffs to maintain the favorable balance of trade.  

But who is being protected by a protective tariff? Smith showed that, in principle, the mercantilist system only benefits a handful of producers while the great majority of consumers are further impoverished because they have to pay a higher price for foreign goods. The growing of grapes in France, Smith noted, is much cheaper and more efficient than in the colder climes of his homeland, for example, where “by means of glasses, hotbeds, and hotwalls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland” but at a price thirty times greater than in France. “Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of claret and burgundy in Scotland?” Smith answered the question by invoking a deeper principle: 

What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them.4

This is the central core of Smith’s economic theory: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” The problem is that the system of mercantilism “seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.”5 So what?

When production is the object, and not consumption, producers will appeal to top-down regulators instead of bottom-up consumers. Instead of consumers telling producers what they want to consume, government agents and politicians tell consumers what, how much, and at what price the products and services will be that they consume. This is done through a number of different forms of interventions into the marketplace. Domestically, we find examples in tax favors for businesses, tax subsidies for corporations, regulations (to control prices, imports, exports, production, distribution, and sales), and licensing (to control wages, protect jobs).6 Internationally, the interventions come primarily through taxes under varying names, including “duties,” “imposts,” “excises,” “tariffs,” “protective tariffs,” “import quotas,” “export quotas,” “most-favored nation agreements,” “bilateral agreements,” “multilateral agreements,” and the like. 

Such agreements are never between the consumers of two nations; they are between the politicians and the producers of the nations. Consumers have no say in the matter, with the exception of indirectly voting for the politicians who vote for or against such taxes and tariffs. And they all sum to the same effect: the replacement of free trade with “fair trade” (fair for producers, not consumers), which is another version of the mercantilist “favorable balance of trade” (favorable for producers, not consumers). Mercantilism is a zero-sum game in which producers win by the reduction or elimination of competition from foreign producers, while consumers lose by having fewer products from which to choose, along with higher prices and often lower quality products. The net result is a decrease in the wealth of a nation.

The principle is as true today as it was in Smith’s time, and we still hear the same objections Smith did: “Shouldn’t we protect our domestic producers from foreign competition?” And the answer is the same today as it was two centuries ago: no, because “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.”  

Nonzero Economics

The founders of the United States and the framers of the Constitution were heavily influenced by the Enlightenment thinkers of England and the continent, including and especially Adam Smith. Nevertheless, it was not long after the founding of the country before our politicians began to shift the focus of the economy from consumption to production. In 1787, the United States Constitution was ratified, which included Article 1, Section 8: “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises to cover the debts of the United States.” As an amusing exercise in bureaucratic wordplay, consider the common usages of these terms in the Oxford English Dictionary. 

Tax: “a compulsory contribution to the support of government”
Duty: “a payment to the public revenue levied upon the import, export, manufacture, or sale of certain commodities”
Impost: “a tax, duty, imposition levied on merchandise”
Excise: “any toll or tax.” 

(Note the oxymoronic phrase “compulsory contribution” in the first definition.)

A revised Article 1, Section 8 reads: “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, taxes, taxes, and taxes to cover the debts of the United States.”

A revised Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution reads: “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, taxes, taxes, and taxes to cover the debts of the United States.” Photo by Anthony Garand / Unsplash

In the U.K. and on the continent, mercantilists dug in while political economists, armed with the intellectual weapons provided by Adam Smith, fought back, wielding the pen instead of the sword. The nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat, for example, was one of the first political economists after Smith to show what happens when the market depends too heavily on top-down tinkering from the government. In his wickedly raffish The Petition of the Candlemakers, Bastiat satirizes special interest groups—in this case candlemakers—who petition the government for special favors: 

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light, that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price.... This rival... is none other than the sun.... We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights and blinds; in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures.7

Zero-sum mercantilist models hung on through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even in America. Since the income tax was not passed until 1913 through the Sixteenth Amendment, for most of the country’s first century the practitioners of trade and commerce were compelled to contribute to the government through various other taxes. Since foreign trade was not able to meet the growing debts of the United States, and in response to the growing size and power of the railroads and political pressure from farmers who felt powerless against them, in 1887 the government introduced the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC was charged with regulating the services of specified carriers engaged in transportation between states, beginning with railroads, but then expanded the category to include trucking companies, bus lines, freight carriers, water carriers, oil pipelines, transportation brokers, and other carriers of commerce.8 Regardless of its intentions, the ICC’s primary effect was interference with the freedom of people to buy and sell between the states of America.

The ICC was followed in 1890 with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which declared: “Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal. Every person who shall make any contract or engage in any combination or conspiracy hereby declared to be illegal shall be deemed guilty of a felony,” resulting in a massive fine, jail, or both. 

When stripped of its obfuscatory language, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the precedent-setting cases that have been decided in the courts in the century since it was passed, allows the government to indict an individual or a company on one or more of four crimes: 

1.  Price gouging (charging more than the competition) 
2. Cutthroat competition (charging less than the competition)
3. Price collusion (charging the same as the competition), and 
4. Monopoly (having no competition).9, 10 

This was Katy-bar-the-door for anti-business legislators and their zero-sum mercantilist bureaucrats to restrict the freedom of consumers and producers to buy and sell, and they did with reckless abandon.  

Completing Smith’s Revolution

Tariffs are premised on a win-lose, zero-sum, producer-driven economy, which ineluctably leads to consumer loss. By contrast, a win-win, nonzero, consumer-driven economy leads to consumer gain. Ultimately, Smith held, a consumer-driven economy will produce greater overall wealth in a nation than will a producer-driven economy. Smith’s theory was revolutionary because it is counterintuitive. Our folk economic intuitions tell us that a complex system like an economy must have been designed from the top down, and thus it can only succeed with continual tinkering and control from the top. Smith amassed copious evidence to counter this myth—evidence that continues to accumulate two and a half centuries later—to show that, in the modern language of complexity theory, the economy is a bottom-up self-organized emergent property of complex adaptive systems. 

Adam Smith launched a revolution that has yet to be fully realized. A week does not go by without a politician, economist, or social commentator bemoaning the loss of American jobs, American manufacturing, and American products to foreign jobs, foreign manufacturing, and foreign products. Even conservatives—purportedly in favor of free markets, open competition, and less government intervention in the economy—have few qualms about employing protectionism when it comes to domestic producers, even at the cost of harming domestic consumers.

Citing the need to protect the national economic interest—and Harley-Davidson—Ronald Reagan raised tariffs on Japanese motorcycles from 4.4 percent to 49.4 percent. Photo by Library of Congress / Unsplash

Even the icon of free market capitalism, President Ronald Reagan, compromised his principles in 1982 to protect the Harley-Davidson Motor Company when it was struggling to compete against Japanese motorcycle manufactures that were producing higher quality bikes at lower prices. Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, and Suzuki were routinely undercutting Harley-Davidson by $1500 to $2000 a bike in comparable models.

On January 19, 1983, the International Trade Commission ruled that foreign motorcycle imports were a threat to domestic motorcycle manufacturers, and a 2-to-1 finding of injury was ruled on petition by Harley-Davidson, which complained that it could not compete with foreign motorcycle producers.10 On April 1, Reagan approved the ITC recommendation, explaining to Congress, “I have determined that import relief in this case is consistent with our national economic interest,” thereby raising the tariff from 4.4 percent to 49.4 percent for a year, a ten-fold tax increase on foreign motorcycles that was absorbed by American consumers. The protective tariff worked to help Harley-Davidson recover financially, but it was American motorcycle consumers who paid the price, not Japanese producers. As the ITC Chairman Alfred E. Eckes explained about his decision: “In the short run, price increases may have some adverse impact on consumers, but the domestic industry’s adjustment will have a positive long-term effect. The proposed relief will save domestic jobs and lead to increased domestic production of competitive motorcycles.”11

Photo by Lisanto 李奕良 / Unsplash

Whenever free trade agreements are proposed that would allow domestic manufacturers to produce their goods cheaper overseas and thereby sell them domestically at a much lower price than they could have with domestic labor, politicians and economists, often under pressure from trade unions and political constituents, routinely respond disapprovingly, arguing that we must protect our domestic workers. Recall Presidential candidate Ross Perot’s oft-quoted 1992 comment in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) about the “giant sucking sound” of jobs being sent to Mexico from the United States.

In early 2007, the Nobel laureate economist Edward C. Prescott lamented that economists invest copious time and resources countering the myth that it is “the government’s economic responsibility to protect U.S. industry, employment and wealth against the forces of foreign competition.” That is not the government’s responsibility, says Prescott, echoing Smith, which is simply “to provide the opportunity for people to seek their livelihood on their own terms, in open international markets, with as little interference from government as possible.” Prescott shows that “those countries that open their borders to international competition are those countries with the highest per capita income” and that open economic borders “is the key to bringing developing nations up to the standard of living enjoyed by citizens of wealthier countries.”12

“Protectionism is seductive,” Prescott admits, “but countries that succumb to its allure will soon have their economic hearts broken. Conversely, countries that commit to competitive borders will ensure a brighter economic future for their citizens.” But why exactly do open economic borders, free trade, and international competition lead to greater wealth for a nation? Writing over two centuries after Adam Smith, Prescott reverberates the moral philosopher’s original insight:

It is openness that gives people the opportunity to use their entrepreneurial talents to create social surplus, rather than using those talents to protect what they already have. Social surplus begets growth, which begets social surplus, and so on. People in all countries are motivated to improve their condition, and all countries have their share of talented risk-takers, but without the promise that a competitive system brings, that motivation and those talents will only lie dormant.13

The Evolutionary Origins of Tariffs and Zero-Sum Economics

Why is mercantilist zero-sum protectionism so pervasive and persistent? Bottom-up invisible hand explanations for complex systems are counterintuitive because of our folk economic propensity to perceive designed systems to be the product of a top-down designer. But there is a deeper reason grounded in our evolved social psychology of group loyalty. The ultimate reason that Smith’s revolution has not been fulfilled is that we evolved a propensity for in-group amity and between-group enmity, and thus it is perfectly natural to circle the wagons and protect one’s own, whoever or whatever may be the proxy for that group. Make America Great Again! 

For the first 90,000 years of our existence as a species we lived in small bands of tens to hundreds of people. In the last 10,000 years some bands evolved into tribes of thousands, some tribes developed into chiefdoms of tens of thousands, some chiefdoms coalesced into states of hundreds of thousands, and a handful of states conjoined together into empires of millions. The attendant leap in food-production and population that accompanied the shift to chiefdoms and states allowed for a division of labor to develop in both economic and social spheres. Full-time artisans, craftsmen, and scribes worked within a social structure organized and run by full-time politicians, bureaucrats, and, to pay for it all, tax collectors. The modern state economy was born.

In this historical trajectory our group psychology evolved and along with it a propensity for xenophobia—in-group good, out-group bad. In the Paleolithic social environment in which our moral commitments evolved, one’s fellow in-group members consisted of family, extended family, friends, and community members who were well known to each other. To help others was to help oneself. Those groups who practiced in-group harmony and between-group antagonism would have had a survival advantage over those groups who experienced within-group social divide and decoherence, or haphazardly embraced strangers from other groups without first establishing trust. Because our deep social commitments evolved as part of our behavioral repertoire of responses for survival in a complex social environment, we carry the seeds of such in-group inclusiveness today. The resulting within-group cohesiveness and harmony carries with it a concomitant tendency for between-group xenophobia and tribalism that, in the context of a modern economic system, leads to protectionism and mercantilism.

And tariffs. We must resist the tribal temptation.

I think it’s increasingly difficult to argue that the recent boom in artificial intelligence (AI) is mostly hype. There is a lot of hype, but don’t let that distract you from the real progress. The best indication of this is applications in scientific research, because the outcomes are measurable and objective. AI applications are particularly adept at finding patterns in vast sets of data, finding patterns in hours that might have required months of traditional research. We recently discussed on the SGU using AI to sequence proteins, which is the direction that researchers are going in. Compared to the traditional method using AI analysis is faster and better at identifying novel proteins (not already in the database).

One SGU listener asked an interesting question after our discussion of AI and protein sequencing that I wanted to explore – can we apply the same approach to DNA and can this result in reverse-engineering the genetic sequence from the desired traits? AI is already transforming genetic research. AI apps allow for faster, cheaper, and more accurate DNA sequencing, while also allowing for the identification of gene variants that correlate with a disease or a trait. Genetics is in the sweet spot for these AI applications – using large databases to find meaningful patterns. How far will this tech go, and how quickly.

We have already sequenced the DNA of over 3,000 species. This number is increasing quickly, accelerated by AI sequencing techniques. We also have a lot of data about gene sequences and the resulting proteins, non-coding regulatory DNA, gene variants and disease states, and developmental biology. If we trained an AI on all this data, could it then make predictions about the effects of novel gene variants? Could it also go from a desired morphological trait back to the genetic sequence that would produce that trait? Again, this sounds like the perfect application for AI.

In the short run this approach is likely to accelerate genetic research and allow us to ask questions that would have been impractical otherwise. This will build the genetic database itself. In the not-so-medium term this could also become a powerful tool of genetic modification. We won’t necessarily need to take a gene from one species and put it into another. We could simply predict which changes would need to be made to the existing genes of a cultivar to get the desired trait. Then we can use CRISPR (or some other tool) to make those specific changes to the genome.

How far will this technology go? At some point in the long term could we, for example, ask an AI to start with a chicken genome and then predict which specific genetic changes would be necessary to change that chicken into a velociraptor? We could change an elephant into a wooly mammoth. Could this become a realistic tool of deextinction? Could we reduce the risk of extinction in an endangered species by artificially increasing the genetic diversity in the remaining population?

What I am describing so far is actually the low-hanging-fruit. AI is already accelerating genetics research. It is already being used for genetic engineering, to help predict the net effects of genetic changes to reduce the chance of unintended consequences. This is just one step away from using AI to plan the changes in the first place. Using AI to help increase genetic diversity in at-risk populations and for deextinction is a logical next step.

But that is not where this thought experiment ends. Of course whenever we consider making genetic changes to humans the ethics becomes very complicated. Using AI and genetic technology for designer humans is something we will have to confront at some point. What about entirely artificial organisms? At what point can we not only tweak or even significantly transform existing species, but design a new species from the ground up? The ethics of this are extremely complicated, as are the potential positive and negative implications. The obvious risk would be releasing into the wild a species that would be the ultimate invasive species.

There are safeguards that could be created. All such creatures, for example, could be not just sterile but completely unable to reproduce. I know – this didn’t work out well on Jurassic Park, nature finds a way, etc, but there are potential safeguards so complete that no mutation would fix, such as completely lacking reproductive organs or gametes. There is also the “lysine contingency” – essentially some biological factor that would prevent the organism from surviving for long outside a controlled environment.

This all sound scary, but at some point we could theoretically get to acceptable safety levels. For example, imagine a designer pet, with a suite of desirable features. This creature cannot reproduce, and if you don’t regularly feed it special food it will die, or perhaps just go into a coma from which it can be revived. Such pets might be safer than playing genetic roulette with random breeding of domesticated predators. This goes not just for pets but for a variety of work animals.

Sure – PETA will have a meltdown. There are legitimate ethical considerations. But I don’t think they are unresolvable.

In any case, we are rapidly hurtling toward this future. We should at least head into this future with our eyes open.

The post Will AI Bring Us Jurassic Park first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A framework inspired by evolution may demonstrate why two observers see the same non-quantum world emerge from the many fuzzy probabilities of the quantum realm

I've long said that the antivax movement is borderline eugenicist (or at least social Darwinist) in nature. Now that a second child has died of measles, it's time for me to take a look at the "soft eugenics" of the antivax movement.

The post Measles, MAHA, and “soft eugenics” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

In 1986, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made a flyby of Uranus. It gave us the first detailed images of the distant world. What was once only seen as a featureless pale blue orb was revealed to be...well, a mostly featureless pale blue orb. The flyby gave astronomers plenty of data, but the images Voyager 2 returned were uninspiring. That's because Voyager only viewed Uranus for a moment in time. Things change slowly on the ice giant world, and to study them you need to take a longer view.

Yesterday I spent quite a few hours at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, part of a free field trip sponsored by the Biological Sciences Divison (or so I think). It’s the third largest Holocaust Museum in the world, probably after Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, which I visited, and (perhaps) the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which I haven’t. This one is very large, and is full of interesting photos, articles, relics, and other memorabilia.

I guess it has so much stuff because Skokie, where the Museum resides, was mostly a Jewish suburb, and there were many Holocaust survivors who contributed items, as well as many Jews who donated money for this very large building.

We had a guided tour, though I had a tendency to wander off by myself to look at stuff.  If you’re in Skokie and have an interest in these things, I recommend it highly. First, a few photos (I didn’t remember to take photos until later in the tour), which aren’t great because they were taken with my camera.

The two Nuremberg “Race Laws”, passed in 1935, not only defined as who counted as a Jew or an Aryan, but also forbade “intermingling” of Jews and non-Jews. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” stipulated this:

The second Nuremberg Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, banned marriage between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. It also criminalized sexual relations between them. These relationships were labeled as “race defilement” (Rassenschande).

The law also forbade Jews to employ female German maids under the age of 45, assuming that Jewish men would force such maids into committing race defilement. Thousands of people were convicted or simply disappeared into concentration camps for race defilement.

Here’s a photo of two people who violated that law, and it struck me as particularly noxious.  The woman is holding a sign that reads (my translation; note that it rhymes in German) “I am the biggest pig in this place and only associate with Jews.”  The guy’s sign reads, “As a Jewish boy, I always take only German girls with me to my room.”  The guy’s sign rhymes as well.  I have no idea what happened to these people, but the Jewish man was almost certainly taken to the camps, and that almost certainly led to death.

Nazi armbands (real ones).  Many of the inhabitants of Skokie were (and some still are) survivors of the Holocaust, and donated things like this to the Museum. The pin in the middle is, as you can see from the placard, a Hitler Youth Membership pin.

Below is a (genuine) postcard celebrating the “Anschluß“, when Germany annexed Austria on March 11-13 of 1938, claiming that the country was ethnically German.  Later in the year, the UK, France, and Italy agreed that it was okay as well for Hitler to annex the part of Czechoslovakia also containing “ethnic” Germans, an area called the Sudetenland. This “Munich Agreement,” did not involve any Czechoslovakian participation. Hitler promised to leave the rest of the country alone and that he had no more territorial ambitions (he was lying, of course). Britain’s PM, Neville Chamberlain, returned to England with great approbation, declaring that he’d achieved “Peace for our time.”  He was dead wrong, of course, and his loss of face when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 led to Chamberlain’s ouster in 1940 (he died the same year).

I digress: this card is about the Anschluß, and reads: “13 March, 1938.  One people, one country, one leader.”

Below is a very fancy hand-done document, labeled “Declaration of the State of Israel created by Arthur Szyk, 1948.  On loan from Cipora Fox Katz.” It’s lovely, and Szyk, a Polish-American artist, has his own Wikipedia page, which says this:

Arthur Szyk was granted American citizenship on May 22, 1948, but he reportedly experienced the happiest day in his life eight days earlier: on May 14, the day of the announcement of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Arthur Szyk commemorated that event by creating the richly decorated illumination of the Hebrew text of the declaration.

And, sure enough, here it is. Click photo to enlarge it and see its beauty:

I stopped by the gift shop on my way out, and among the many interesting thing was this “Bag of Plagues”: toys for kids commemorating the plagues visited on Egypt because Pharaoh wouldn’t let the Jews go:

Finally, one of the best parts of the Museum is a hologram of a Holocaust survivor, one of several created by the Shoah Foundation. When the survivors were alive, they spoke for about a week to the interviewers, and their answers were recorded. Their accounts were combined with modern technology and AI to enable the audience to ask questions of the hologram, and there is so much data recorded for each person that the holograms can answer almost any question (see the video at bottom for more details). Here’s a short recording I did of one survivor named Eva.  Eva lived in Amsterdam as a child, where she was friends with Anne Frank. After the war, when Eva had lost her father and brother and Anne Frank her own sister and mother, Eva’s mother married Anne Frank’s father, Otto.

Here’s she’s answering an audience question about what her typical day at Auschwitz was like:

Here’s Leslie Stahl interviewing holograms of  Holocaust survivors who had died before the interview. Yes, they are interviews with people who weren’t alive! This is an absolutely fantastic way to keep not just the accounts alive, but also the survivors themselves.

 

Today is Sunday, which means that we have a batch of butterfly photos from John Avise.  John’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Butterflies in North America, Part 17 

This week continues my many-part series on butterflies that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m continuing to go down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  We’re getting near the end of the alphabet, so this is the penultimate post of my photographic tour of our continent’s Lepidopterans.

Tiny Checkerspot (Dymasia dymas):

Tropical Checkered Skipper (Burnsius oileus), male upperwing:

Tropical Checkered Skipper, female upperwing:

Umber Skipper (Poanes melane), upperwing:

Umber Skipper, underwing:

Viceroy (Basilarchis archippus):

Viceroy, underwing:

Wandering Skipper (Panoquina errans), upperwing:

Wandering Skipper, underwing:

West Coast Lady (Vanessa annabella):

West Coast Lady, underwing:

West Coast Lady, larva;

Mars exploration technology has seen a lot of recent successes. MOXIE successfully made oxygen from the atmosphere, while Ingenuity soared above the red planet 72 times. However, to date, no one has ever achieved one thing that will be absolutely critical to any long-term presence on Mars - making drinkable water. There have been plenty of ideas on how to do that. Still, NASA recently started funding a Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) graduate student named Lydia Ellen Tonani-Penha to look into the problem under their Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities (NSTGRO) funding program. Her Project Tethys will examine ways to purify the frozen or liquid brine that Mars is infused with.

NASA's Perseverance was scanning the rim of Jezero Crater when it spotted a Martian dust devil overtake and consume another smaller one. The rover was about a kilometer away from the larger dust devil, which was about 65 meters wide. The smaller one was about 5 meters wide. This isn't Perseverance's first encounter with dust devils. It's seen clusters dancing around it and even captured audio of a dust devil on Mars for the first time.

Did you spot the orange cat amongst the oranges from this morning’s post?  I’ve circled it in red below. I thought this was fairly easy but not dead easy.

You may have already read about this new cat coat color, undoubtedly found as a single mutation in a single individual. Popular Mechanics describes the color, called “salmiak”, or “salty licorice” in the article below. “Salmiak licorice” is flavored with ammonium chloride (!), and, according to Wikipedia, is “a common confection found in the Nordic countries, Benelux, and northern Germany ” I tried it once in Sweden, but wasn’t a fan.

Presumably this coat was named because it resembles a variety of this confection that is coated with salt, like these:

Marcin Floryan, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

To read about the color and see photos, click the headline below to go to an article in Popular Mechanics, which is also archived here, and also go to the article at My Cat DNA. Photos are below, too.

From Popular Mechanics:

You’ve probably heard of spooky black cats, chaotic orange cats, and distinguished-looking tuxedo cats. If you’re really into cats, you might have even lesser-known color variants like seal point and ticked tabby. But there’s officially a new cat color in town— salmiak, or ‘salty liquorice.’ You can see one here.

The pretty black, white, and grey shade—named for a popular snack food in Finland, where this coat color has been making itself known—is thanks to a fur strand that starts off black near the root, but grows whiter and whiter out towards the tip. The coat was first spotted in 2007, and in 2019, it was brought to the attention of a group of cat experts lead by feline geneticist Heidi Anderson. Since then, the group has been trying to figure out exactly what causes this shade to express itself, and recently, they finally figured it out. A paper on the discovery has been published in the journal Animal Genetics.

Here’s a two-minute video of this fur pattern:

And from My Cat DNA, which runs down the genetics (this is a single genetic mutation, a “knockout” mutation that inactivates a gene because there’s a big deletion of the DNA outside that gene).

The salmiak colour pattern was found to be recessively inherited, meaning it requires one copy of the salmiak variant from both parents in order for the trait to be visible. Although white spotting patterns can lead to hearing impairment in cats as well as dogs, researchers did not note any signs of deafness. However, they recommended BAER (brainstem auditory evoked response) testing in the future to rule out this possibility. The allele appears to be quite rare, with only 5 cats found to be positive for the pattern, and another 3 carriers for it, out of 183 Finnish domestic cats screened. The variant has not yet been found in other domestic cat populations.

Two additional domestic cats were also genotyped, one domestic cat from Romania and one from the UK, which manifested a similar type of white patterning referred to as “karpati,” of yet-unknown molecular cause. This pattern has been used as the basis of the creation of a new breed, called the “Transylvanian.” The term karpati is related to “Carpathian,” the region where local cats were noted to have this pattern. Researchers confirmed that the salmiak allele was absent in both of the karpati-coloured cats. Both karpati and salmiak may be described as being similar to roan colouring in other domestic species.

Here’s the paper in Animal Genetics. Click to read (note that they use the word “flavor” in the title, which is not an accident):

. . . and a picture from the paper (caption also from paper);  Some of these do resemble salted licorice, especially (a) and (f):

FIGURE 1.  Salmiak coloring in cats. Prominent features of the coloring are: “tuxedo” (a.k.a. bicolor) white spotting in the absence of white spotting alleles (Ws, g), and additional gradation of the pigment within hairs of primary color toward no pigmentation at the tips in the body, legs and tail. Additionally, there is primary colored spotting in the white areas of the front legs and chest, more intense coloring in the scapular region, and a very pale tip of the tail. (a) Salmiak solid black cat (aa/wsalwsal), (b) salmiak solid blue cat (diluted black, aa/dd/wsalwsal), (c) salmiak brown mackerel tabby (wsalwsal) (right) and his normal-colored brother heterozygous for salmiak (wsalw), (d) salmiak phenotype on a long-haired solid black cat (not genotyped), (e) salmiak solid black cat (aa/wsalwsal) and (f) salmiak phenotype on a tortoiseshell cat (not genotyped). Cat a was sequenced, and cats b, c and e were genotyped for salmiak. Photo credits: (a) Ari Kankainen and (b–e) courtesy of the cat owners.

The authors sequenced entire cat genomes, and found that the salmiak pattern is associated with a huge deletion (95 kb, or 95,000 bases) outside the KIT gene, a gene responsible for the distribution of white patterning in cats.  This region of the DNA is presumably not translated into a protein, but somehow controls the expression of KIT, knocking it out. And that’s what produces the color.   “Regulatory” regions of genes are often very distant from protein-coding genes themselves, making it hard to find out how a gene’s expression is controlled.

The top line is a map of the cat chromosome containing the KIT gene (chromosome B1), the second line is a normal “wild type” cat with an intact KIT and control region, and the third line is the genotype of a cat with the salmiak allele, showing the bit deletion that moves the KIT gene closer to the KDR gene.

This probably produces the salmiak color (we can’t be 100% sure). The authors of the paper say this:

Other structural variants downstream of the KIT gene have been previously associated with coat color phenotypes in cattle, goats and horses (Brooks et al., 2007; Henkel et al., 2019; Küttel et al., 2019). In two Pakistani goat breeds, of which one is completely white and another one is white with colored patches, there is a copy number variation starting ~63 kb downstream of KIT and spanning a ~100 kb region that has a disrupted variant in a genomic region most similar to the salmiak variant (Henkel et al., 2019). In summary, comparative data from other species and genotype segregation analysis support the newly discovered KIT region deletion as potentially being a cause of salmiak coat color in cats.

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This article from the Washington Post, by Sam Sanders, tells you how to play with your moggy. Click on the headline below or find the article archived here.

A summary (quotes are indented):

Pick the right toys.

For toys, Ellis says, “the texture and shape are what truly matter.”

Does the toy feel furry like a mouse? Does it have feathers like a bird? These are good signs that your cat will enjoy the toy. Cats slice with their teeth instead of chewing, so hard, durable toys used for dogs typically don’t work for cats. Cats also prefer toys that are smaller in size, similar to the size of the prey they hunt.

Move your cat’s toy in a pattern that mimics their prey. 

. . . To mimic a bird, glide a wand toy in large sweeping movements or figure eights mirroring natural flight patterns. Create “S-shaped” wiggles on the floor with a wand to mimic a worm or snake. Tuck a toy under your rug like a hiding mouse.

Let your cat win.

As you move their toy in prey-like motions, periodically let your cat “win” by capturing the toy, and don’t immediately rip it away. This allows them to finish the predator cycle. Let them celebrate their successful hunt with additional kicks, bats and bites before reengaging for additional playtime.

DO NOT USE LASER DOTS. I have always thought that this frustrates the cat and is more for the amusement of the staff than of the cat. Two more tips (there are additional ones in the piece):

Create multisensory experiences through sound.

Adding sound brings dimension to a cat play session. “Cats can hear in an ultrasonic range,” says Delgado. “Their close-up vision is very fuzzy, with a focal point of only a few meters away, so they use their hearing to know if prey is nearby.”

Create noises that mimic what cats would hear in the wild, like a high-frequency chirp or squeak. The rustling sound of paper, tissue paper or cardboard while playing with a toy can mimic the sound of rustling through leaves. Try hiding treats in the paper pile, creating an immersive food puzzle.

Try turning the lights down low. 

Cats need play throughout the day, but engaging in a play session during low-light conditions is another opportunity to provide a novel and enriching play session. “Cats are crepuscular, meaning they are most active at dawn and dusk,” says Delgado. As dawn and dusk change throughout the seasons, your cat’s play habits will change, too. Take this as an opportunity to give your cat a high-intensity play session as the sun is setting to help them (and you!) get a restful night of sleep.

Read the rest at the archive and then start playing with your cat PROPERLY!

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Finally, from the AP news (click on the headline), you can read about bodega cats: those cats in NYC that inhabit small, often Hispanic-owned stores. If you’ve been to NYC, you may know that many bodegas have resident cats. But I didn’t know it was illegal.

An excerpt:

New York City’s “bodega cats” are beloved fixtures in the Big Apple — but they’re on the wrong side of the law.

The convenience store cats that live at many of the city’s bodegas and delis look innocent enough, spending their days lounging in sun-soaked storefronts or slinking between shelves of snack foods as they collect friendly pets from customers.

Officially, though, state law bars most animals from stores that sell food, with bodega owners potentially facing fines if their tabby is caught curling up near the tins of tuna and toilet paper.

The pets’ precarious legal position recently came into the spotlight again when a petition circulated online that advocated for the city to shield bodega cat owners from fines, racking up more than 10,000 signatures.

But inspecting bodegas is a state responsibility. The New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets said in a statement that its goal is to ensure compliance with food safety laws and regulations, though it noted that inspectors aim to offer “educational resources and corrective action timelines and options” before looking at fines.

Many fans argue that the cats actually help keep the stores clean by deterring other ubiquitous New York City creatures, like rodents and cockroaches.

Indeed.  Bodega-cat inspectors are EVIL! And bodega cats help in many ways:

However, some shopkeepers say the felines’ most important job is bringing in customers.

At one bodega in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a fluffy gray and white cat named Mimi has become even more of a star attraction after a customer posted a video of her to TikTok that was viewed over 9 million times

Sydney Miller, the customer who shared the video, said the experience has helped her build a lasting rapport with Mimi’s caretaker, Asam Mohammad, a Yemeni immigrant who has only been in the U.S. for a few years.

“Ultimately, the cats are a symbol of community building and the special, unique type of connection that happens in a city like New York,” said Miller, a poet and digital content producer.

Here’s Mimi!

@girl.brain

Replying to @Cleotrapa a little update on mimi the bodega cat #cat #bodega

♬ original sound – sydney

You can sign the petition here (it’s over 11,000 signatures now). I signed it!

And here’s a short video about bodega cats and the push to protect them from Cat Pecksniffs:

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Lagniappe: Two of them today. First, a rescued cougar. Listen to its noises!

. . . . and a cat becomes a sundial.

h/t: Barry, Debra

What's the Word: enantiodromia; News Items: AI Protein Sequencing, Solving the Bat Cocktail Party Problem, The Extremely Large Telescope, CIA and the Ark of the Covenant, 23&Me Selling Personal Data; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: RFK Jr and Vaccines, Counterintuitive Math Problem; Science or Fiction

We’re running a bit low on photos, so if you have good ones, send them in.

Today’s batch comes from our most regular regular, Dr. Mark Sturtevant, but with an unusual theme. Mark’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

And now for something completely different. Over the past few years, I have been exploring a type of photography called light painting. This term can refer to different kinds of artistic photography, but the one I practice involves taking multiple long exposures of a still-life scene illuminated only by a flashlight. The images are then imported into a photo editing program and blended together using digital paintbrushes. This technique can produce a single image with dramatic lighting effects that would be impossible to achieve in a single shot. While the process requires patience and basic familiarity with image editing software, I believe only minimal artistic skills are necessary. Anyone can do this!

In this small set of pictures, I showcase some of my light painting still-life projects. Since they incorporate natural and scientific objects, they may align with Readers’ Wildlife Photos in a broad sense.

The first images illustrate the initial steps of the light painting process. It begins by arranging a still-life scene in front of a camera on a tripod. I always take a few bright-field shots like this first picture. While a preliminary image like this may appear quite ordinary, and the surroundings can be cluttered, this step is useful in order to figure out the composition. The shells in this picture are part of my large collection of marine and freshwater specimens.

Next, the camera is set for a long exposure (typically 15-20 seconds). After turning off the room lights, I work in total darkness while “painting” over a portion of the scene with a small flashlight. After the shutter closes, I repeat the process with another long exposure, illuminating a different part of the scene. It’s essential to avoid moving the camera between exposures, and it is essential to keep the flashlight moving in order to create soft shadows. Here are two examples of such images, taken straight out of the camera.

This sequence is repeated several more times. In this case, I took approximately two dozen pictures, though I likely didn’t use all of them in the final picture.

The next step involves loading the images into a photo editing program and selectively blending them together. While many photographers use Photoshop for this, I prefer GIMP, which is a free alternative to Photoshop. I do nearly all of my photo editing in GIMP. The images are stacked as layers, one on top of the other, so that each picture is perfectly aligned. This alignment is why it’s crucial to keep everything stationary during the photography process.

A layer mask filter is applied to the top layer, and this allows me to use a digital paintbrush to selectively make parts of the top image transparent to reveal the corresponding areas of the image beneath it. This technique is non-destructive, meaning the pixels in the top image remain intact and can easily be restored if needed.

Once I’m satisfied with how the first two images are blended, I merge them into a single picture layer. I repeat this process for each subsequent layer until the final composition is complete.

And with that, here is the finished image of the seashells.

Next, I’d like to share a few more light painting projects. This is a human skull that I’ve had most of my life and it is called “Uncle Herbert.” Based on the shape of the eye sockets and other details, I consider Uncle Herbert was a male, though I could be mistaken. This was my very first light painting, and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the process was!

In this final scene, Uncle Herbert is used again alongside objects related to “Human Biology,” which is what I call this picture. The old microscope belonged to my father, and the human vertebra in the foreground is a well-worn teaching specimen I purchased long ago.

For anyone interested in trying out this kind of photography, here is a tutorial about using a flashlight. (Click on “Watch on YouTube”).

And here is a tutorial on using layer masks in Gimp. Photoshop would be very much the same, and I expect there are other photo editing programs.

Finally, one can find a couple more of my light painting photos here, including a very complicated one that almost broke me.

 

Yes, Gary the orange cat is there with the oranges. Can you spot him?

Click picture to enlarge but DO NOT say in the comments where you found him. Let others have fun finding him.

There will be a reveal at noon Chicago time. (h/t Stacy on Facebook)

An innovative new computational model developed by an engineer could lead to fast-charging lithium-ion batteries that are safer and longer-lasting.

Annie Dawid’s most recent novel revisits the Jonestown Massacre from the perspective of the people who were there, taking the spotlight off cult leader Jim Jones and rehumanizing the “mindless zombies” who followed one man from their homes in the U.S. to their death in Guyana, but as our notion of victimhood is improving, we’re also forced to confront the ugly truth: In the almost fifty years since Jonestown: large-scale cult-related death has not gone away.

On the 18th of November, 2024, fiction author Annie Dawid’s sixth book, Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown, celebrated its first birthday on the same day as the forty-sixth anniversary of its subject matter, an incident that saw the largest instance of intentional U.S. citizen death in the 20th Century and introduced the world to the horrors and dangers of cultism—The Jonestown Massacre. 

A great deal has been written on Jonestown after 1978, although mostly non-fiction, and the books Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People (1982) and The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple (2017) are considered some of the most thorough investigations into what happened in the years in the lead up to the massacre. Many historical and sociological studies of Jonestown focus heavily on the psychology and background of the man who ordered 917 men, women, and children to die with him in the Guyanese jungle—The Reverend Jim Jones. 

For cult survivors beginning the difficult process of unpacking and rebuilding after their cult involvement—or for those who lose family members or friends to cult tragedy—the shame of cult involvement and the public’s misconception that cult recruitment stems from a psychological or emotional fault are challenges to overcome. 

And when any subsequent discussions of cult-related incidents can result in a disproportionate amount of attention given to cult leaders, often classified as pathological narcissists or having Cluster-B personality disorders, there’s a chance that with every new article or book on Jonestown, we’re just feeding the beast—often at the expense of recognizing the victims. 

An aerial view of the dead in Jonestown.

Annie Dawid, however, uses fiction to avoid the trap of revisiting Jonestown through the lens of Jones, essentially removing him and his hold over the Jonestown story.

“He’s a man that already gets too much air time,” she says, “The humanity of 917 people gets denied by omission. That’s to say their stories don’t get told, only Jones’ story gets told over and over again.”

“I read so many books about him. I was like enough,” she says, “Enough of him.” 

Jones of Jonestown 

By all accounts, Jones, in his heyday, was a handsome man. 

An Internet image search for Jones pulls up an almost iconic, counter-culture cool black-and-white photo of a cocksure man in aviator sunglasses and a dog collar, his lips parted as if the photographer has caught him in the middle of delivering some kind of profundity. 

Jones’s signature aviator sunglasses may have once been a fashion statement, a hip priest amongst the Bay Area kids, but now he never seems to be without them as an increasing amphetamine and tranquilizer dependency has permanently shaded the areas under his eyes. 

Jim Jones in 1977. By Nancy Wong

“Jim Jones is not just a guy with an ideology; he was a preacher with fantastic charisma, says cult expert Mike Garde, the director of the Irish charity Dialogue Ireland, an independent charity that educates the public on cultism and assists its victims. “And this charisma would have been unable to bring people to Guyana if he had not been successful at doing it in San Francisco,” he adds. 

Between January 1977 and August 1978, almost 900 members of the Peoples Temple gave up their jobs, and life savings, and left family members behind in the U.S. to relocate to Guyana to begin moving into the new home: Peoples Temple Agricultural Mission, an agricultural commune inspired by Soviet socialist values. 

On November 19th, 1978, U.S. Channel 7 interrupted its normal broadcast with a special news report, and presenter Tom Van Amburg encouraged viewer discretion and described the horror of hardened newsmen upon seeing the scenes at Jonestown that had “shades of Auschwitz.” 

As a story, the details of Jonestown feel like a work of violent fiction, like a prototype Cormac McCarthy novel: A Hearts of Darkness-esque cautionary tale of Wild-West pioneering gone wrong in a third-world country with Jones cast in the lead role. 

“I feel like there’s a huge admiration for bad boys, and if they’re good-looking, that helps too,” Dawid says, “This sort of admiration of the bad boy makes it that we want to know, we’re excited by the monster—we want to know all about the monster.” 

Dawid understands Jones’ allure, his hold over the Jonestown narrative as well as the public’s attention, but “didn’t want to indulge that part of me either,” she says. 

“But I wasn’t tempted to because I learned about so many interesting people that were in the story but never been the subjects of the story,” she adds, “So I wanted to make them the subjects.” 

Screenshot of the website for the award-winning film Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple by Stanley Nelson, Marcia Smith, and Noland WalkerThe People of the Peoples Temple 

For somebody who was there from the modest Pentecostal beginnings of the Peoples Temple in 1954 until the end in Guyana, very little attention had ever been paid to Marceline Jones in the years after Jonestown. 

“She was there—start to finish. For me, she made it all happen, and nobody wrote anything about her,” Dawid says, “The woman behind the man doesn’t exist.” 

Even for Garde, Marceline was another anonymous victim of no significance beyond the surname connecting her to the husband: “My initial read of Marceline was that she was ‘Just a cipher, she wasn’t a real person,” he says, “She didn’t even register on my dial.” 

Dawid gives Marceline an existence, and in her book, she’s a “superwoman” juggling her duties as a full-time nurse and the Peoples Temple—a caring, selfless individual who lives in the service of others, mainly the children and the elderly of the Peoples Temple. 

“In the sort of awful way, she’s this smart, interesting, energetic woman, but she can’t escape the power of her husband,” Dawid says, “It’s just very like domestic violence where the woman can’t get away from the abuser [and] I have had so much feedback from older women who felt that they totally related to her.” 

The woman behind the man doesn’t exist.

Selfless altruism was a shared characteristic of the Peoples Temple, as members spent most of their time involved in some kind of charity work, from handing out food to the homeless or organizing clothes drives. 

“You know, I did grow to understand the whole sort of social justice beginnings of Peoples Temple,” Dawid says, “I came to admire the People’s Temple as an organization.” 

“Social justice, racism, and caring for old people, that was a big part of the Peoples Temple. And so it made sense why an altruistic, smart, young person would say, ‘I want to be part of this,’” she adds. 

Guyana 

For Dawid, where it all went down is just as important—and arguably just as overlooked in the years after 1978—as the people who went there. 

Acknowledging the incredible logistical feat of moving almost 1000 people, many of them passport-less, to a foreign country, Dawid sees the small South American country as another casualty of Jonestown: “I had to have a Guyanese voice in my book because Guyana was another victim of Jones,” Dawid says. 

The English-speaking Guyana—recently free of British Colonial rule and leaning towards Socialism under leader Cheddi Jagan—offered Jones a haven from the increasing scrutiny back in the U.S. amidst accusations of fraud and sexual abuse, and was “a place to escape the regulation of the U.S. and enjoy the weak scrutiny of the Guyanese state,” according to Garde. 

“He was not successful at covering up the fact he had a dual model: he was sexually abusing women, taking money, and accruing power to himself, and he had to do it in Guyana,” Garde adds, “He wanted a place where he could not be observed.” 

There may be a temptation to overstate what happened in 1978 as leaving an indelible, defining mark on the reputation of a country during its burgeoning years as an independent nation, but in the columns of many newspapers on the breakfast tables of American households in the years afterward, one could not be discussed without the other: “So it used to be that if you read an article that mentioned Guyana, it always mentioned Jonestown,” Dawid says. 

In the few reports interested in the Guyanese perspective after Jonestown, the locals have gone through a range of feelings from wanting to forget the tragedy ever happened, or turning the site into a destination for dark tourism. 

However, the country’s 2015 discovery of offshore oil means that—in the pages of some outlets and the minds of some readers—Jonestown is no longer the only thing synonymous with Guyana: “I read an article in the New York Times about Guyana’s oil,” Dawid says, “and it didn’t mention Jonestown.” 

From victimhood to survivorship: out of the darkness and into the light…Victimhood to Survivorship 

According to Garde, the public’s perception of cult victims as mentally defective, obsequious followers, or—at worst—somehow deserving of their fate is not unique to victims of religious or spiritual cults. 

“Whenever we use the words ‘cult’, ‘cultism’ or ‘cultist’ we are referring solely to the phenomenon where troubling levels of undue psychological influence may exist. This phenomenon can occur in almost any group or organization,” reads Dialogue Ireland’s mission statement. 

“Victim blaming is something that is now so embedded that we take it for granted. It’s not unique to cultism contexts—it exists in all realms where there’s a victim-perpetrator dynamic,” Garde says, “People don’t want to take responsibility or face what has happened, so it can be easier to ignore or blame the victim, which adds to their trauma.” 

While blaming and shaming prevent victims from reporting crimes and seeking help, there does seem to be recent improvements in their treatment, regardless of the type of abuse: 

“We do seem to be improving our concept of victims, and we are beginning to recognize the fact that the victims of child sexual abuse need to be recognized, the #MeToo movement recognizes what happened to women,” says Garde, “They are now being seen and heard. There’s an awareness of victimhood and at the same time, there’s also a movement from victimhood to survivorship.” 

Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown focuses on how the survivors process and cope with the fallout of their traumatic involvement with or connection to Jonestown, making the very poignant observation that cult involvement does not end when you escape or leave—the residual effects persist for many years afterward. 

“It’s an extremely vulnerable period of time,” Garde points out, “If you don’t get out of that state, in that sense of being a victim, that’s a very serious situation. We get stuck in the past or frozen in the present and can’t move from being a victim to having a future as a survivor.” 

Support networks and resources are flourishing online to offer advice and comfort to survivors: “I think the whole cult education movement has definitely humanized victims of cults,” Dawid points out, “And there are all these cult survivors who have their own podcasts and cult survivors who are now counseling other cult survivors.” 

At the very least, these can help reduce the stigma around abuse or kickstart the recovery process; however, Garde sees a potential issue in the cult survivors counseling cult survivors dynamic: “There can be a danger of those operating such sites thinking that, as former cult members, they have unique insight and don’t recognize the expertise of those who are not former members,” he says, “We have significant cases where ex-cultists themselves become subject to sectarian attitudes and revert back to cult behavior.” 

Whenever we use the words ‘cult’, ‘cultism’ or ‘cultist’ we are referring solely to the phenomenon where troubling levels of undue psychological influence may exist.

And while society’s treatment and understanding of cult victims may be changing, Garde is frustrated with the overall lack of support the field of cult education receives, and all warnings seem to fall on deaf ears, as they once were in the lead up to Jonestown: 

The public’s understanding seems to be changing, but the field of cult studies still doesn’t get the support or understanding it needs from the government or the media. I can’t get through to journalists and government people, or they don’t reply. It’s so just unbelievably frustrating in terms of things not going anywhere. 

One fundamental issue remains; some might say that things have gotten worse in the years post-Jonestown: “The attitude there is absolutely like pro-survivor, pro-victim, so that has changed,” Dawid says, “You know, it does seem like there are more cults than ever, however.” 

A History of Violence 

The International Cultic Studies Association’s (ICSA) Steve Eichel estimates there are around 10,000 cults operating in the U.S. alone. Regardless of the number, in the decades since Jonestown, there has been no shortage of cult-related tragedies resulting in a massive loss of life in the U.S. and abroad. 

The trial of Paul Mackenzie, the Kenyan pastor behind the 2023 Shakahola Forest Massacre (also known as the Kenyan starvation cult), is currently underway. Mackenzie pleads not guilty to the death of 448 people and charges of murder, child torture, and terrorism as Kenyan pathologists are still working to identify all of the exhumed bodies. 

“It’s frustrating and tragic to see events like this still happening internationally, so it might seem like we haven’t progressed in terms of where we’re at,” Garde laments. 

Jonestown may be seen as the progenitor of the modern-cult tragedy, an incident for which other cult incidents are compared, but for Dawid, the 1999 Colorado shooting that left 13 teenagers dead and 24 injured would shock American society in the same way, and leave behind a similar legacy. 

“I see a kind of similarity in the impact it had,” Dawid says, “Even though there had been other school shootings before Columbine….I think it did a certain kind of explosive number on American consciousness in the same way that Jones did, not just on American consciousness, but world consciousness about the danger of cults.” 

Victim blaming is something that is now so embedded that we take it for granted.

Just as everyone understands that Jonestown refers to the 917 dead U.S. citizens in the Guyanese jungle, the word “Columbine” is now a byword for school shootings. However, if you want to use their official, unabbreviated titles, you’ll find both events share the same surname—massacre. 

“All cult stories will mention Jonestown, and all school shootings will [mention] Columbine,” Dawid points out. 

In Memoriam 

The official death toll on November 18, 1978, is 918, but that figure includes the man who couldn’t bring himself to follow his own orders. 

According to the evidence, Jim Jones and the nurse Annie Moore were the only two to die of gunshot wounds at Jonestown. The entry wound on Jones’ left temple meant there was a very good chance the shooter wasn’t right-handed (as Jones was). It is believed that Jones ordered Moore to shoot him first, confirming for Garde, Jones’ cowardice: “We saw his pathetic inability to die as he set off a murder-suicide. He could order others to kill themselves, but he could not take the same poison. He did not even have the guts to shoot himself.” 

On the anniversary of Jonestown (also International Cult Awareness Day), people gather at the Jonestown Memorial at the Workers at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, but the 2011 unveiling of the memorial revealed something problematic. Nestled between all the engraved names of the victims is the name of the man responsible for it all: James Warren Jones. 

The inclusion of Jones’ name has outraged many in attendance, and there are online petitions calling for it to be removed. Garde agrees, and just as Dawid retired Jones from his lead role in the Jonestown narrative, he believes Jones’ name should be physically removed from the memorial. 

“He should be definitely excluded and there should be a sign saying very clearly he was removed because of the fact that it was totally inappropriate for him to be connected to this.” he says, “It’s like the equivalent of a murderer being added as if he’s a casualty.” 

In the years since she first started researching the book, Dawid feels that the focus on Jones: “There’s been a lot written since then, and I feel like some of the material that’s been published since then has tried to branch out from that viewpoint,” she says. 

It’s frustrating and tragic to see events like this still happening internationally.

Modern re-examinations challenge the long-time framing of Jonestown as a mass suicide, with “murder-suicide” providing a better description of what unfolded, and the 2018 documentary Jonestown: The Women Behind the Massacre explores the actions of the female members of Jones’ inner circle. 

While it may be difficult to look at Jonestown and see anything positive, with every new examination of the tragedy that avoids making him the central focus, Jones’ power over the Peoples Temple, and the story of Jonestown, seems to wane. 

And looking beyond Jones reveals acts of heroism that otherwise go unnoticed: “The woman who escaped and told everybody in the government that this was going to happen. She’s a hero, and nobody listened to her,” Dawid says. 

That person is Jonestown defector Deborah Layton, the author of the Jonestown book Seductive Poison, whose 1978 affidavit warned the U.S. government of Jones’ plans for a mass suicide. 

And in the throes of the chaos of November 18, a single person courageously stood up and denounced the actions that would define the day. 

For Christine, who refused to submit.

Dawid’s book is dedicated to the memory of the sixty-year-old Christine Miller, the only person known to have spoken out that day against the Jones and his final orders. Her protests can be heard on the 44-minute “Death Tape”—an audio recording of the final moments of Jonestown. 

The dedication on the opening page of Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown reads: “For Christine, who refused to submit.” 

Perceptions of Jonestown may be changing, but I ask Dawid how the survivors and family members of the victims feel about how Jonestown is represented after all these years. 

“It’s a really ugly piece of American history, and it had been presented for so long as the mass suicide of gullible, zombie-like druggies,” Dawid says, “We’re almost at the 50th anniversary, and the derision of all the people who died at Jonestown as well as the focus on Jones as if he were the only important person, [but] I think they’re encouraged by how many people still want to learn about Jonestown.” 

“They’re very strong people,” Dawid tells me.

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