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It seems obvious that we live in the era of cancel culture, but what does that mean, exactly? To many on the left, “cancel culture” is merely a whiny self-defensive term offered by justifiably banished academics, writers, and celebrities—“cis white intellectuals” as one online writer disdainfully put it—who face no realistic threats to their freedom or livelihoods. Others think it is an overblown label for the eternal ideological wars between the left and the right, in which each extreme complains that the other side is censoring them while working hard to censor that other side. Or is cancel culture something new, describing a phenomenon that has become far more insidious, widespread, and dangerous for free speech and democracy? Spoiler alert: I’m going with the latter.

Let’s stipulate at the outset that most people would prefer that their political opponents, intellectual enemies, and annoying challengers to their opinions would just shut up and go away. There’s nothing new about that desire, which has manifested throughout the centuries in the censorship, shunning, banishment, or imprisonment of those daring to differ. In my own lifetime, I have observed a dizzying turn of the academic and political wheels, as ascendant conservatives try to oust Commie-pinko-oversexedsocialist liberals until ascendant liberals try to oust fascist-racist-puritanical-authoritarian conservatives.

I was born in the heyday of the Red Scare (1947–1957) and grew up watching the censorship or ostracism of anyone remotely tainted with membership in, or even holding supporting opinions about, left-wing groups. My older half-brother was dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Army in the early 1950s because of his prolonged and unrepentant association with a “known member of the Communist Party”—our father, who had briefly joined the Party in the 1930s. (The Supreme Court eventually overturned that discharge.)

Observing these right-wing efforts to stifle or expel liberals (defined as anyone less ideologically conservative than they, including other conservatives), I was optimistically, if delusionally, certain that the liberal commitment to free speech, open debate, and scientific evidence would prevail if the tables were ever turned. It was clear who the enemy was. In sexology, it was and remains religious fundamentalists eager to ban any research on sexuality they fear and detest (actually, all of it, but especially evidence of the normalcy of childhood sexual play, premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation). I could not have imagined, as Pogo, the star of Walt Kelly’s great comic strip, said, that “we have met the enemy—and he is us.” I could not have imagined how many liberal sexologists and other scientists today would be eager to ban research on sexuality that they fear and detest (especially evidence that disputes transgender activists’ claims of the safety and necessity of adolescent medical interventions). And not just ban this research—excoriate, expel, and attempt to cancel the publications, lectures, and even the careers of those who conduct it. Just ask the eminent sexologists Kenneth Zucker (for showing that the great majority of gender nonconforming young boys grow up to be gay, not trans), Stephen Levine (for questioning the claims of gender-affirming therapies), and evolutionary biologists Carole Hooven and Colin Wright, anthropologist Robert Lynch, and philosophers Alex Byrne and Holly Lawford-Smth (for arguing that there are two biological sexes). On that subject, I’m sure, these scientists would never have imagined being in bed with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Today, when I read accounts by consummate scientists such as anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss (this issue), who found herself caught between (1) the naïve but widespread belief that Native Americans were pacifists and (2) the empirical evidence, written in their bones, of their legacy of brutal battles, I see another light going out on the road to our national Endarkenment.

Cancel culture is the impulse to punish or expel anyone who says the wrong thing or holds the wrong beliefs.

I remember the first straw in the pile that would eventually disillusion me. In 2007, at my alma mater, Brandeis University, Donald Hindley, an esteemed professor of political science who had been at the university for 45 years, was explaining to his Latin American politics class the origin of the disparaging insult “wetback”—a slur against Mexican migrants entering Texas by swimming across the Rio Grande. One or two students were offended and immediately complained to the provost, who, in the words of Hindley’s eventual attorneys, “indulged the students’ fantasy that they were crusaders against racism.” She told Hindley that “The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty,” also accusing him of inflicting “significant emotional trauma” on his students by forcing them to hear such an offensive term. As punishment, a monitor would sit in on his classroom for the rest of the term and he would have to attend racial-sensitivity training classes. This Hindley refused to do.

The university was barraged with messages from outraged faculty and alumni like me, along with public mockery and condemnation. I wondered if Brandeis still offered the brilliant course I had taken years earlier on the history of anti-Semitism, which caused no end of “significant emotional trauma” in every class meeting and reading, though we called it “education.” The provost backed down, ultimately telling Hindley the matter was closed and she trusted he had learned his lesson, whatever that was.

Looking back, I see that all the seeds of cancel culture— the impulse to punish or expel anyone who says the wrong thing or holds the wrong beliefs—were present in Hindley’s story:

• indulging the student’s inability or unwillingness to speak to the professor directly, in the classroom or privately, instead rewarding the student for going to a grown-up to solve a complaint for them.
• indulging the student’s self-righteousness in punishing a “racist.”
• failing to enable the student to separate an emotional association with a word from an intellectual understanding of its origins and usage.
• according a word the same trauma-generating status and seriousness as an action, along with blurring a speaker’s intention and motivation. I like knowing the varied and surprising origins of the ethnic slur kike, but don’t call me one.
• holding closed-door committee meetings in which a professor’s sins are debated and determined, in the absence of any avenue of participation or defense from the accused.
• humiliating a professor, in this case one with a lifelong commitment to social justice for the poor and minorities, by demanding he attend racial-sensitivity training and accept a babysitter in the class to make sure he doesn’t say any other bad word.
• establishing “racial sensitivity” workshops as punishment and virtue signaling, without pausing to assess their methods and outcomes. Do these programs achieve their goals, or do they make their involuntary participants stubborn and angry? Come to think of it, haven’t a few other institutions and governments tried to forcibly reeducate disobedient, troublemaking citizens? How did those work out?

Today, Hindley’s experience seems mild compared to the deluge of cases that followed. After all, he was not suspended or fired, nor was he a victim of social media mobs out for blood as compensation for a scratch. Mobs, real and virtual, have made it hard if not impossible for university presidents, company CEOs, and publishers to maintain positions of integrity and defend open debate, but mob influence is new only in the technology that allows it to congeal in a nanosecond and get that offender gone. At The New York Times in 2021, more than 150 young staffers felt entitled to howl for the firing of an honored older colleague, Donald McNeil, who had dared say the wrong word, even in an educational context. “Our community is in pain,” they wrote. They couldn’t possibly work with him and feel safe, they said. And they prevailed. No doubt they would look at my list of the elements of Hindley’s story that distressed and infuriated me and say “So? Brandeis did everything right.”

That is why cancel culture is so worrisome: not because it reflects the familiar political divide between left and right, but because it reflects a generational war between old and young, a war between liberals and illiberals across parties. Liberals in my generation are surprised, and not a little uncomfortable, to find themselves opposing illiberals to their left and supporting conservatives to their right, sharing concern about cancel culture’s methods and the take-no-prisoners ideology that justifies them.

In their extensive assessment of the origins and extent of the problem, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind1documents case after enraging case that escalated in the years since Hindley. (The “American” mind extends to Canada and the UK.) Lukianoff, a lifelong liberal who joined the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2001 and is now its CEO, is well positioned to survey the changing landscape and report from the trenches. Schlott, a “right-leaning libertarian,” is a Gen Z journalist. Their collaboration is the point: left and right staking out a path between extremes of both sides.

Lukianoff and Schlott’s definition of cancel culture is broader than the individuals who are “fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished” for speech that should be protected by America’s first amendment standards. Their definition adds “…and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted.” In polls they cite, the majority of Americans of all parties and ages are reluctant to share their views on topics of politics, race, sexual orientation, gender, or religion, fearing loss of their jobs, grades, or social support. In the preface, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who was coauthor with Lukianoff on this book’s predecessor, The Coddling of the American Mind,2 notes that cancel culture “has metastasized and spread far beyond universities… [now infecting] journalism, the arts, nonprofits, K–12 education, and even medicine.” Because cancel culture seeks to punish anyone who says or does the “wrong” thing, absent knowledge of their motivation or context, people censor themselves. “Show me an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially,” Haidt adds, “and I’ll show you an organization that has become structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission.”

Many organizations and institutions now fit that description, including Harvard and other elite universities, the ACLU, even the Unitarian Universalist Church, and Lukianoff and Schlott offer an illuminating history of the “slow-motion trainwreck” by which they went off the rails. The “First Great Age of Political Correctness, 1985–1995” gave us the term, pretty much confined to college campuses; its pompous usages were eventually laughed off. But there was nothing funny about the ensuing shift of position by the political left, which began equating freedom of speech, which they had long championed as a bedrock liberal value, with freedom of hate speech, which they were determined to eradicate. Social justice goals began trampling the once-inviolate goal of protecting minority opinions, even if “hateful” opinions come from the minority individuals whose rights you otherwise care about. And who defines what “hate speech” is? We all agree that slurs and insults count. But am I guilty of hate speech if I publish a study whose findings you find hateful, hold an opinion about racism or gender that doesn’t conform to yours, or speak Words That Must Not Be Said? In the UK, Lukianoff and Schlott report, more than 3,000 people in 2016 alone were “detained and questioned by police for non-crime ‘hate incidents’ related to what they had said online.”

Between 1995 and 2013, Lukianoff and Schlott write, “viewpoint diversity on college campuses plummeted, tuition skyrocketed, and campus bureaucracy swelled.” In 2010, cancel culture “struck like lightning on college campuses.” The new generation of anti-free-speech activists began demanding speech codes, trigger warnings, and the monitoring of microaggressions. Speakers—the famous, the eminent, the provocative—were being disinvited, which made national news, which generated more speaker bans. DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies, at first a well-intentioned and overdue approach to making universities and companies more welcoming of people of color, have become, Lukianoff and Schlott document, an “ideological litmus test” that faculty and students question at their peril. Students applying for admission and scholars applying for academic positions must display evidence of their commitment to diversity and social justice, but only some kinds of diversity are acceptable: if you care about including working class people, economically disadvantaged people, or conservative people, forget it. Everyone knows the rule: conform or you’re out.

Two other societal factors fed into cancel culture. By 2013, university administrators had enacted policies that accommodated new student “demands” because they couldn’t afford not to. Once students became high-paying consumers rather than, well, students, administrators had to retain them no matter how badly they behaved, no matter how many rules of civil discourse they violated. With a student’s high tuition at stake, deciding between a professor’s expertise and a student’s hurt feelings was a no-brainer. And why the hurt feelings? The year 2013, as Haidt and Lukianoff have argued, also marked the emergence of a generation of overprotected, “overcoddled” children. In their view, parents’ panic over their children’s physical and emotional safety led them to sharply curtail their children’s free play and independence, while intervening constantly to protect their children from the challenges, shocks, setbacks, teasing, risks, disappointments, anxieties, and losses that we all need to become socially and emotionally competent. The result was a cohort of fearful, fragile young adults obsessed with finding safe spaces and safe ideas, with trigger warnings to help them avoid dangerous ideas.

A “trigger warning,” says the Cambridge Dictionary, is “a statement at the beginning of a piece of writing, before the start of a film, etc., warning people that they may find the content very upsetting, especially if they have experienced something similar. Trigger warnings are supposed to protect people from posttraumatic flashbacks.” Enabled by the expanding traumatology industry, which blurred the line between “I feel distressed” and “I feel traumatized,” trigger warnings eventually became almost meaningless, because one person’s “trigger” (a cat who looks just like their dear departed Boots) is nothing to a person who hates cats. If everything can be a trigger for someone, where does it end? It doesn’t, at least on the website doesthedogdie.com, where you can find “crowdsourced trigger warnings” for anything that might upset you while viewing a show or reading a book. Personally, I would welcome a chocolatechip- ice-cream warning to protect me from myself.

In Triggered Literature: Cancellation, Stealth Censorship and Cultural Warfare,3 John Sutherland, emeritus professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, wades into this controversy with entertaining reflections from a lifetime of teaching. We rarely burn books literally any more, he begins, but triggering is but one of “a range of other impositions on the creative act and product, namely, cancellation, prepublication bowdlerisation, suppression, ‘red flagging’, semi-tolerance,” and of course, the sensitivity reader, “creative literature’s superego.” Naturally he does not welcome these “impositions,” but he is sympathetic to the reasons for them, including #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, changing demographics in society and universities, and, as many have noted, the “whopping cost of fees” that transformed students in the UK and U.S. into “consumers wielding the big bazooka: purchaser power.” When, in 2014, the head of English studies at UCL dismissed trigger warnings by saying they were “treating people as if they were babies, and studying literature is for grownups,” Sutherland comments wryly that “There was a cheering chorus of ‘hear, hear!’ from those who saw themselves as grown(er) up(er) than fractious students with weak knees. But the tide was with youth.” Indeed it was, and by 2022, he reports, “British universities had covertly triggered over a thousand texts,” including the work of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Woolf, Twain, and even Agatha Christie.

Yet Sutherland’s take is not the familiar “woe are we” of an older generation. Northampton University, he tells us, triggered George Orwell’s 1984 for its “challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language”—the offensive language being bollox. Sutherland does not regard this decision, as the press did and as I do, as “egregious snowflakery” but a result of “careful, legitimately sensitive reading.” He himself falls between seeing triggers as “utter wokery” and “responsible pedagogic practice”: “Triggering is essentially an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought.” Agreed, though presumably that is what good instructors have always done when introducing their students to the readings at hand.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Sutherland begins with brief news stories, without comment, simply as signs of the times “of where we are and where we’re going.” In Part Two, he analyzes a variety of forms of control on literature, the “stealth censorship” of his subtitle, from creation to production to consumption. In Part Three, he provides “free-range meditations on triggered works,” concluding with a close examination of Thackeray, the Victorian author he most loved for “the sound of his rich clubman prose rising off the page.” Yet now, in his ninth decade, he confesses that his love for Thackeray is fading, “self-triggered, one might say.” Now he sees the “racist vein” that disfigures most of Thackeray’s fiction with its ugly portrayals of “darkeys,” “poltroons,” and “blackamoors.” Thackeray was an avowed supporter of the American confederacy and slavery; why, Sutherland asks of himself, did he not see this “suppurating stain” on Thackeray’s novels when he was younger? And what to do about teaching his novels now—try to sanitize them, as some have done with Huckleberry Finn, or not bring the matter up? “My hunch,” he concludes, “is that, without anyone saying much about it, Thackeray will slowly sink into oblivion… He is [already] no longer important enough to trigger.”

Where are matters today? FIRE’s cases have not abated; 2020 “was the worst year for free speech FIRE had seen in our history,” Lukianoff and Schlott report. “Cancellations exploded, both on campus and beyond.” Optimistically, they end their book with a chapter on “what to do about it”—suggestions for employers, parents, publishers, and everyone else. In my view, most solutions must start at the top, as the University of Chicago did in 2015, notifying incoming students that they would not be shielded “from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive”; already more than 100 colleges have signed on to the full Chicago Statement. If changes are not institutionalized, it will be left to individuals to decide whether to conform to keep their jobs or protest and risk trolls, suspension, media mobs, and, yes, cancellation. Nevertheless, cracks in the DEI’s ideological edifice are beginning to widen. Some solutions are bottom up, coming from individuals unwilling to conform. They are finding more allies every day. In other eras, they were called the resistance.

About the Author

Carol Tavris is a social psychologist and writer on many topics in psychological science. Her books include Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), with Elliot Aronson; Estrogen Matters; and The Mismeasure of Woman. A Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, she has received numerous awards for her efforts to promote science, skepticism, critical thinking, and gender equity.

References

1. Lukianoff, G., & Schlott, R. (2023). The Canceling of the American Mind. Simon and Schuster.
2. Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Penguin Press.
3. Sutherland, J. (2023). Triggered Literature. Biteback Publishing.

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Panspermia is an innately attractive idea that’s gained prominence in recent decades. Yet, among working scientists, it gets little attention. There are good reasons for their relative indifference, but certain events spark renewed interest in panspermia, even among scientists.

The appearance of Oumuamua in our Solar System in 2017 was one of them.

Panspermia is the hypothesis that life can travel throughout the Universe by hitching an unintended ride with space dust, meteoroids, asteroids, comets, and even rogue planets.

It’s an ancient idea, which only increases its resonance for some. The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was the first to propose it. He coined the term ‘panspermia’ and said that the Universe was full of life and that some of it fell to Earth. It remains on the fringe of science because it can’t explain how life started, and it’s not testable. But it is enduring.

Oumuamua’s appearance sparked renewed interest in Panspermia. After the object came and went rapidly in 2017, scientists attempted to determine what it actually was. Maybe it was a comet, maybe it was an asteroid, maybe it was a chunk of frozen hydrogen. Many hypotheses were presented. Now, we simply call it an interstellar object, or ISO.

From the perspective of panspermia, Oumuamua’s classification isn’t the most pressing concern. It was a visitor to our Solar System from elsewhere, and that’s the most salient point.

In a new paper, a trio of researchers examine how many of these types of objects might exist and what properties they’d need to protect and transport life throughout the galaxy. The paper is titled “The Implications of ‘Oumuamua on Panspermia.” The lead author is David Cao, a high school student who also served as an intern at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“Panspermia is the hypothesis that life originated on Earth from the bombardment of foreign interstellar ejecta harbouring polyextremophile microorganisms,” the authors write. “By utilizing ‘Oumuamua’s properties as an anchor, we estimate the mass and number density of ejecta in the ISM.”

Throughout their work, they acknowledge that “panspermia is an extraordinarily difficult theory to quantitatively model and assess.” But it’s still worth an attempt because of Oumuamua. “The recently discovered ‘Oumuamua merits a reexamination for the possibility of panspermia, the hypothesis that life seeded on Earth from the bombardment of life-bearing interstellar ejecta and that life can be transferred from one celestial body to another.”

Panspermia is the idea that life is spread throughout the galaxy, or even the Universe, by asteroids, comets, and even minor planets. Credit: NASA/Jenny Mottor

The trio determined the minimum size of ejecta needed to protect extremophiles from radiation, especially from supernovae. Intense gamma rays can sterilize ejecta if they’re not large enough for extremophiles to survive in their interiors, shielded by rock or water ice. Ejecta also needs to be large enough to protect any lifeforms from impact with another body. But the size depends on the nature of the ejecta.

“We consider the four most common elemental compositions of asteroids (chondritic, stony and metallic) and comets (water-ice) in our own Solar System: silicate, nickel, iron, and water-ice,” they write. Nickel has the highest attenuation and the smallest minimum size needed to shelter life. Water-ice requires the maximum size.

The authors explain, “We make an assumption that the number density abundances and varying compositions of interstellar ejecta mirror the content of minor bodies in our own Solar System.” Based on that, they settled on a minimum size of 6.6 meters.

They also tried to determine the likelihood that extremophiles could have seeded Earth, though they acknowledge that many of the factors involved are poorly understood and poorly constrained. In order to seed life, an ejecta carrying extremophiles had to have arrived at Earth early, before the earliest evidence of fossilized life. “Second, we estimate the total number of impact events on Earth after its formation and prior to the emergence of life (? 0.8 Gyr).”

They calculate impact rates for objects of different sizes. For objects at least 10 meters in diameter, they calculate that about 40,000 of them could’ve impacted Earth in its first 800,000 years.

This figure from the study shows the total number of collisions by minimum shielding depth for Earth’s first 800,000 years. The different dotted, dashed, and solid lines represent distribution slopes. Image Credit: Cao et al. 2024

Existing estimates of the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way are available. Based on those, here’s what it all adds up to, keeping in mind all of the poorly constrained factors involved. “However, we find that panspermia is a plausible potential life-seeding mechanism for (optimistically) potentially up to ~ 105 (100,000) of the ~ 109 (one billion) Earth-sized habitable zone worlds in our Galaxy,” the authors write.

But the prospects that Earth itself was seeded by panspermia are very weak. “For the Earth in particular, we conclude that, independent of other hypotheses for the origins of life on Earth, panspermia remains improbable (< 0.001%).” In a way, it’s more of a thought experiment. The authors say that “the true relative probability for panspermia remains unknown.”

The panspermia idea will not disappear. It’s simply too compelling to discard, even though it cannot be tested.

Another way of looking at it is that Earth could be a source of panspermia rather than a receiver.

“The fraction of these rocky planets that possess magnetic fields, atmospheres, and liquid surface water capable of supporting life is currently unconstrained and unknown, but our work implies as many as 104 of these worlds in our Galaxy could be populated with life today via panspermia under the most optimistic assumptions that all of these worlds are capable of supporting ejecta-transported life, with Earth as one of the potential source planets.” The number could rise to 104 under the most optimistic conditions.

There are other factors to consider. We’re only beginning to determine the number of rogue planets or free-floating planets (FFPs). As we learn more about them and their abundance, the panspermia hypothesis will change. “The discovery of rogue-free floating planets (FFPs) suggests a significantly higher ISM ejecta number density than expected for large objects,” the authors explain.

This illustration shows a rogue planet travelling through space. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)

Also, the number of ejecta and their mass haven’t been constant. For example, during the hypothesized Late Heavy Bombardment, a much larger number of objects were crashing into the Earth and the other Solar System bodies. How would that have affected panspermia?

“~4 Gyr ago, the Earth is thought to have experienced an unprecedented number of impact events
that consequently ejected matter into the ISM, the era of Late Heavy Bombardment,” the authors write. The rate of bombardment was between 100 to 500 times greater than the present rate. If other solar systems experienced similar events, there would be substantially more potential for panspermia.

Artist concept of Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment period. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

The star formation rate also plays a role. “As more stars are formed, more mass will be ejected into the ISM in star formation regions, increasing the production of ISM ejecta number density,” the authors explain.

There are so many unknowns and so much conjecture that many scientists avoid the panspermia theory completely. But more and more data will keep coming our way, and as it does, the idea will be revised and reconsidered.

The Rubin Observatory Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will hopefully see its long-anticipated first light in early 2025. That telescope will undoubtedly detect many more ISOs and FFPs, filling in important gaps in our knowledge.

As that data comes in, expect more attention to be focused on the panspermia theory.

The post How Oumuamua Changes Our Perspective on Galactic Panspermia appeared first on Universe Today.

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Controlling the crystal phase of cobalt nanoparticles leads to exceptional catalytic performance in hydrogenation processes, scientists report. Produced via an innovative hydrosilane-assisted synthesis method, these phase-controlled reusable nanoparticles enable the selective hydrogenation of various compounds under mild conditions without the use of harmful gases like ammonia. These efforts could lead to more sustainable and efficient catalytic processes across many industrial fields.

A new study places the origin of the Imazighen in the Epipaleolithic, more than twenty thousand years ago. The research concludes that the genetic origin of the current Arab population of north Africa is far more recent than previously believed, placing it in the seventh century AD. The team has designed an innovative demographic model that uses artificial intelligence to analyze the complete genomes of the two populations.

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Recently, researchers developed a non-invasive method combining electrical impedance tomography and extracellular voltage activation to evaluate drug effects on ion channels. The resulting printed circuit board sensor allows real-time monitoring of how newly developed drugs can affect ion flow in channels, providing a cost-effective and accurate alternative to traditional methods like patch-clamp techniques and paving the way toward more efficient and shorter preclinical testing in the drug discovery process.