News Feeds

Our solar system is home to a wide diversity of planetary bodies, boasting eight planets, five officially recognized dwarf planets, and almost 1,000 confirmed moons. The eight planets consist of the four rocky (terrestrial) planets of the inner solar system and the four gas giant planets of the outer solar system. The largest planet in our solar system is Jupiter, measuring a radius and mass of 11 and 318 times of Earth, respectively. However, the discovery of exoplanets quickly altered our understanding of planetary sizes, as several have been discovered to have masses and radii several times that of Jupiter. So, how big can planet get, and are there limits to their sizes?

Grounded until at least April, NASA's giant moon rocket is headed back to the hangar this week for more repairs before astronauts climb aboard.

Researchers at University of Victoria's Astronomy Research Centre (ARC) and the University of Minnesota study the changes in the chemical composition at the surface of red giant stars.

Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system

A review of This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why Our Minds Are Making Us Sick by Helen Pilcher.

In the early years of Viagra, “the little blue pill” that generated such excitement about its sexual effects on men, I read an account by a woman who decided to try it herself, because isn’t what’s good for the gander good for the goose? (Answer: Not always.) She took that little blue pill and described the exhilarating night of lovemaking that ensued. The best sex she’d ever had! Rapture divine! When she awoke in the morning, she saw that the blue pill she had swallowed was an Aleve (naproxen). At least she didn’t get a headache.

Most people know about the placebo, the inert “sugar pill” given to a control group in a clinical trial when the experimental group gets the active medication. This method allows researchers to rule out the effects of expectations on a new drug’s medical benefits, if any. (Placebo-controlled tests of Viagra for women found that women did slightly better on the placebo, which ended Pfizer’s efforts to double their market.) Expectations can be powerful: the bigger the biologically inactive placebo—a larger pill, a bigger injection—or the more complex the intervention, even a sham surgery, the greater its benefits. Placebos have been used in many settings, most dramatically on the battlefield, where suffering, dying soldiers plead for morphine that has long run out of supply. Given a saline solution but told it is that powerful pain-killer, their pain vanishes.

This Book May Cause Side Effects: Why Our Minds Are Making Us Sick by Helen Pilcher. (Abrams Press, 2026)

Where the placebo goes, can the nocebo be far behind? In This Book May Cause Side Effects, Helen Pilcher, a science writer and TV presenter with a PhD in cell biology, delves into the placebo’s “evil twin”—the myriad ways that our negative expectations affect us. If you had chills, fatigue, or headaches after getting a COVID shot, she writes, they were likely due to your being told those are frequent “side effects.” If you read the list of symptoms that your newly prescribed drug “might” produce, chances are you will experience one or more of them—and possibly decide not to take that drug after all. “If just the thought of eating a certain food makes you feel sick,” she writes, “it’s highly likely that placebo’s evil twin has struck again. Indeed, many of those who believe they have intolerances to certain ingredients, such as lactose or gluten, may well owe their misery to psychological rather than physical processes.” When self-reported “gluten intolerant” people are given gluten-free bread but told that the bread contains gluten, very often they develop gastrointestinal symptoms. “And when some gluten-intolerant people are covertly fed regular bread but told that it’s gluten-free, they don’t get symptoms,” Pilcher writes. “It’s the idea of gluten that they are intolerant to, rather than theprotein itself.”

The combination of “sometimes” with dramatic anecdotes weakens her case that the nocebo affects all illness.

Pilcher makes her case for the nocebo’s malevolent antics in 12 chapters, starting with deaths from hexes to “psychogenic” deaths that have no apparent physiological cause to the downsides of labelling mental and physical illnesses and thereby creating more cases of them. “The nocebo effect can conjure blindness and paralysis, seizures, vomiting and asthma attacks. With no brain injury in sight, it can trigger the symptoms of concussion … With no allergen present, it can induce features of an allergic reaction—watery eyes, runny nose and an itchy rash—that are indistinguishable from the more common, pollen-triggered alternative.” 

There is really no scientific reason to distinguish placebos from nocebos, since both terms describe the way that beliefs, expectations, and apprehensions affect our bodies. But the nocebo is hot; “the nocebo effect has been promoted from academic footnote to nerdy hot potato,” she notes, and Pilcher makes the most of that hotness. The nocebo “is far more pervasive and potent than most people had realized,” she writes. “All symptoms, all illness and all disease has [sic] the potential to be negatively impacted by the thoughts that swirl around inside our heads.” All disease? Yes: “Hiding in plain sight, the phenomenon is part of all illness and all disease, where it makes us more unwell than we need to be.” Does she literally mean “all” or do all diseases merely have the “potential” to be impacted?

That fuzziness undermines her reporting. To be sure, giving us details of every one of the many studies she describes could become stultifying; yet, by not providing actual numbers and percentages of people in an experiment who were affected by a nocebo, and by speaking vaguely of “most” people or “some” people who have the “potential” to succumb, we cannot assess the strength of the finding. For example, she writes that in one study, “people who were falsely ‘diagnosed’ with the ‘bad’ version [of a fictitious gene that allegedly influences their response to exercise] did much worse. They had less endurance and their lung capacity was reduced.” “People”? All of them? One tenth? How many people? 3? 30? Lung capacity “reduced” by how much? How long did that reduction last after they went home? Or, in noting that “some” people die from the stress of bereavement or surviving a plane crash, she adds “that’s certainly not to imply that intense stress is going to kill us all. These deaths are rare. You are far more likely to muddle your way through life’s major stressors than you are to die from them, but sometimes it happens.” The combination of “sometimes” with dramatic anecdotes (Johnny Cash died four months after his wife June) weakens her case that the nocebo affects all illness. Did he die of a broken heart? Or complications from diabetes, respiratory failure, autonomic neuropathy, and pneumonia? 

90 percent of the symptoms that people reported when on statins were also what they experienced when on the placebo.

More worrisome is Pilcher’s enthusiastic endorsement of experiments long discredited and unreplicated, such as Robert Rosenthal’s “Pygmalion” study, in which teachers allegedly raised the IQs of the randomly chosen students they had been told would intellectually bloom that year, simply by the power of their expectations. And because Pilcher so enjoyed meeting Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychology professor who became famous for her decades-old “chambermaid” and “counterclockwise” studies, she suspended scepticism, not even doing a quick google search that would have revealed what was wrong with those studies. In the former, hotel maids were said to have lost weight and lowered their blood pressure simply by being told their activities were “exercise” rather than “work.” But the experimenters relied on the women’s subjective self-reports, so they could not rule out whether the women actually—consciously or subconsciously—increased their activity level or changed their diet. And the 1979 “counterclockwise” study, which supposedly showed that having eight men in their 70s live in a simulated 1959 environment for a week would physically reverse their frailty and other signs of aging, was never published in a peer-reviewed journal or replicated. (It later became a made-for-TV stunt with celebrities.) Langer actually said to the participants, "we have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this, you will feel as you did in 1959." No bias there.

Although these lapses give one pause, Pilcher provides the details in other studies that rise to a “wow” level. In one, 60 patients who had stopped taking statins because they couldn’t stand the side effects were persuaded to try again. They were given 12 bottles of pills: four containing statins; four containing identical-looking placebo pills; and four empty bottles. The patients used one bottle per month, in a randomly prescribed order, over one year, recording their symptoms daily on their smartphones. The study was double blinded, so neither patients nor doctors knew which tablets the participants were taking (or none). The researchers found that 90 percent of the symptoms that people reported when on statins were also what they experienced when on the placebo. This means that most of the side effects of statins are caused by expectations, not the tablet’s content. 

You’ve nothing to lose and possibly a world of delicious bread to gain.

In her final chapter, Pilcher offers ways of countering, if not overcoming, the nocebo’s influence. Reframe the aftereffects of an injection not as painful “side effects” but as evidence the medication is working; if you need a medication, cautioning that 20 percent of the people taking it get headaches, focus on the 80 percent who don’t; and if you have been diagnosed with a serious disease, you can ask your doctor for “personalized informed consent:” telling you about possibly serious symptoms that would require medical attention, but none of the milder symptoms were more likely to be evoked by the nocebo. And if you are one of the thousands of people who think they are allergic to gluten—unlike those with celiac disease, who most definitely are—why not ask a friend or partner to subject you to a nice double-blind experiment? You’ve nothing to lose and possibly a world of delicious bread to gain.

One way of studying and understanding distant, hard-to-reach locations elsewhere in the Solar System is to find analogues of them here on Earth. For example, deserts and lava fields are often used to understand aspects of the Martian surface. In new research, scientists collected samples from natural geysers in the Utah desert to try to understand the Solar System's icy ocean moons.

Expert birdwatchers have changes in their brain structure compared with novices, which probably help them better identify birds and may even protect against age-related cognitive decline

I’m not sure who Frederick Alexander is, but he’s written an intriguing article at The Gadfly (click below to read for free)

Alexander lists five types of “progressives”, and although their characteristics are distinct, he avers that their natures interlock to reinforce “progressivism”, which he sees, as most of us do, as performative wokeness that serves as a form of virtue signaling.  And yes, two of the subspecies really believe the ideology. I’ll give the five types (indented), but it’s fun to try to think of examples of each one.  I have omitted some of the descriptions in the interest of space.

The True Believers are the rarest and most dangerous type. Usually found in university admin or HR, they genuinely think that questioning any aspect of progressive orthodoxy constitutes harm. The moment they make eye contact with reality, their pupils dilate, and they assume a glazed, faraway look like someone’s talking to them through an earpiece only they can hear.

It’s the Tavistock clinician who dismissed parents’ concerns about rushing children into transition as “transphobia”. It’s the university administrator who considers “women” a radioactive word and the niqab an expression of female empowerment. It’s the civil servant who enforces unisex toilets because questions of “dignity” matter more than safeguarding.

The Careerists know it’s all nonsense but have mortgages. They privately roll their eyes at the latest pronoun updates but champion them in the board meeting with the enthusiasm of a North Korean newsreader.

Examples include the BBC editor who knows “pregnant people” is absurd but issues the apology on behalf of the female presenter who corrected the autocue to “women”. It’s the museum curator who rewrites exhibition labels to acknowledge “problematic legacies” to satisfy the demands of the True Believer, who controls the money.

The Cowards are everywhere. They know exactly what’s happening, hate it, but will never say so out loud. They’re the sort who’ll text you “100% agree!” after you’ve been fired but somehow missed every opportunity to back you up before the True Believer called you in about your unconscious bias.

When Kathleen Stock was hounded out of Sussex University, the Coward thought it was outrageous right up to the moment they realised they could be next. Then they recalibrated the events in their mind and took a different view.

. . .The Opportunists don’t care either way but have spotted the angles. Young, ambitious, and morally vacant, they add a dozen causes to their personal website and say things like “centring marginalised voices” without meaning a word of it.

The Opportunist will launch a DEI consultancy today and charge an HR True Believer ten grand tomorrow to tell a roomful of Careerists they’re racists. Or they’ll be the author who went from wellness influencer to decolonisation expert in 18 months and set up a podcast in between. It’s the academic who discovered that adding “queer theory” to their research proposal tripled their funding chances.

. . .The Fanatics think they’re True Believers except they dial it up to eleven. Pronouns and watermelon emojis in the bio, sure. But they also believe in decolonising logic and think the world is going to end tomorrow if we don’t do what they tell us. Every cause connects to every other cause, and all causes connect back to the same enemy.

It’s the student activist who screams at a Jewish classmate for three hours about Zionism, then files a complaint claiming she felt unsafe. It’s the protester who glues himself to a motorway, causes an ambulance delay, then calls the criticism “ableist”. The Fanatic cannot maintain eye contact except when talking about Palestine, at which point his eyes fix unblinkingly on yours, daring you to push back on his claims of genocide.

I could name a specimen of each of these, but will refrain on the grounds that you wouldn’t know most of them. Fanatics, though, include Robin DiAngelo, and True Believers the many biologists who assert that sex is a spectrum. (Some of the latter could be “careerists” as well, knowing that they can sell books and write articles, advancing themselves, by supporting nonsense.

Then, in an analysis that I like a lot, Alexander explains why these types are self-reinforcing, advancing “progressivism” as a whole (I hate calling it that; how about “wokeness”?):

Identifying these types isn’t an exact science, and they overlap to various degrees. The crucial thing to understand is that they need each other.

True Believers provide the moral authority, write the policies, and enforce the rules with genuine conviction. They absorb the ideology and give it form. Without them, it would all feel like a game of pretend (which it is).

Careerists provide the manpower. They actually implement the nonsense without stopping to think much about what any of it means.

Cowards provide the silence and the illusion of consensus, allowing the system to expand unopposed.

The Opportunists provide the raw energy, finding new ways to monetise moral exhibitionism because they see progressive orthodoxy as a business opportunity. Celebrity activists – indeed the whole entertainment industry – fall into this category.

Fanatics provide the threat. They’re the enforcers who make the Careerists think twice about cracking a joke since every joke has a victim. The Coward looks at them and thinks at least I’m not that person in an effort to assuage the sense of disgust at their own lack of integrity.

The system rewards all of them. True Believers get authority. Careerists get promotions. Cowards keep their heads down and Opportunists get book deals. Fanatics get the attention they crave, which is why we’re forever seeing clips of them in our social feeds waving Palestinian flags or throwing soup at Van Gogh.

What they all get – every single one – is protection from consequences.

Why? Because progressive orthodoxy is sustained by particular incentives. It’s got nothing to do with the strength of the ideas, most of which are obviously terrible when examined under daylight. It’s about the incentives that come with compliance and the costs that come with dissent.

In the end, Alexander still thinks the ideology is doomed to disappear:

The good news is that every protection racket collapses eventually – and progressivism will be no exception. The lawsuits will become too expensive, the backlash too loud to ignore. Those politicians who told us that men can be women will explain with a frown that these were “challenging times” rather than a gruesome display of moral cowardice. Pronouns in bios will become so mortifyingly embarrassing that those who had them will pretend, even to themselves, that they never dreamt of anything so silly.

Well, I’m not so sure he’s right here, but one can hope. The Democratic Party has been influenced too long by “progressivism,” and that shows no signs of disappearing. Indeed, it’s growing, to the point where Nate Silver lists Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the two top Democratic candidates for President. (Remember, though, that it’s early days.) AOC is clearly a progressive, a combination of Fanatic and Careerist, while Gavin Newsom used to be progressive but, starting to realize he can’t win the Presidency that way, has been moving towards the center. He’s clearly a combination of Careerist and Opportunist.

In the meantime, have fun by listing below individuals falling into the five classes given above.

An examination of bones has revealed one of the largest prehistoric mass killings known in Europe, with women, adolescents and children making up most of the 77 victims

How we feel about a night’s sleep can have a bigger impact on mood and grogginess than actual hours of rest. Here’s how to change your mindset to feel more energised

Temnothorax kinomurai, a parasitic ant species found in Japan, reproduces asexually and all of its young develop into queens that try to take over other ants’ colonies

Horses use their larynx to make two sounds simultaneously, so they are effectively singing and whistling at the same time

Fascination with UFOs (unidentified flying objects) is endless. I get it – I was into the whole UFO narrative when I was a child, and didn’t shed it until I learned science and critical thinking and filtered the evidence through that lens. I credit Carl Sagan for initiating that change. In his excellent series, Cosmos (still worth a watch today), he summarized the skeptical position quite well. To paraphrase – after decades, there isn’t a single hard piece of evidence, not one unambiguous photo or video. He gave a couple of examples of evidence (widely cited at the time) that were completely useless. Now -four decades later – the situation is the same. The evidence, in a word, is crap. It is exactly what you would expect (if you were an experienced skeptic) from a psychocultural phenomenon, without any evidence that forces us to reject the null hypothesis.

So why does belief in UFOs (meaning that some of them are alien spacecraft) not only persist but are experiencing a resurgence? Ostensibly this was triggered by the release of the Pentagon videos. I have already dealt with them – they are just more low-grade evidence. In fact, as I have argued, the low-grade quality of the images is the phenomenon. UFOs, or UAPs as the Pentagon now calls them, are not an alien phenomenon, they are an “unidentified” phenomenon. Mick West has arguably done the most thorough analysis of these videos. He convincingly shows how they are just misidentified birds, balloons, and planes. If you look at the videos you will see that they are blobs and shadows and lights. They are not clear and unambiguous images of spacecraft. Believers must infer that they are spacecraft by their apparent properties – and that is where the technical analysis comes in. A sprinkle of motivated reasoning, or simply lack of expertise, is enough to convince yourself that these are fast moving large objects. But a better analysis (again, see Mick West above) shows this is not the case. They are small, moving with the wind, or flying at the speed of a bird.

But the US military is taking UAPs seriously. This is actually not a surprise – unidentified anomalous phenomena might be Chinese spy balloons, or Russian fighter planes. This has always been at the core of the government’s interest. it is now policy to scramble fighter jets for visual confirmation of anything not identifiable on radar. And now that they are doing that – 100% of UAPs so far have been identified as mundane objects, mostly balloons. In fact, the US military is happy to encourage public belief in “UFOs” because it is a convenient cover for their own top secret projects. It is not a coincidence that UFO sightings tend to cluster around military bases.

Another factor in the recent upsurge in interest is the media. The media, of course, loves stories that generate a lot of interest, and UFOs fit the bill. However, they also know that UFO stories are fringe and often based on rumor or testimony from dubious sources, so they are often relegated to “fluff” stories. They are like the ghost stories that circulate every Halloween – journalists know they are nonsense, but make great headlines. But now – the media feels they have permission from the US government to take UFO stories seriously, so they gleefully are. Here is an example from the New York Times. The author, a regular columnist, Roth Douthat, has four questions for the Trump administrations. Do they have more videos, why are there so many apparent whistle-blowers, why are some US senators calling for disclosure, and is the US government pursuing research into UFO experiencers and paranormal phenomenon (which they have in the past)?

These sound like serious questions, and so a serious journalist can write a column about them without looking silly. But the thing is – we already have the answers to these questions. The Pentagon has done a thorough analysis of all the evidence the US government has, and concluded – there is no evidence of aliens. As predicted, the whole thing is a giant nothing-burger. Except for the newer videos, most of the evidence is old and long-debunked nonsense by the same cast of characters that have been peddling this pseudoscience for decades. Why are people interested in this – because other people are interested in it. But whenever you dig down, there is simply nothing there. I have been following the UFO story for literally 50 years, and nothing has changed.

This brings me to another reason we are seeing a resurgence in interest in UFOs – because that is the natural cycle. Each generation, since the 1940s, has a fascination with UFOs. This lasts for a decade or so, then wanes for a decade or so, then comes back. This is because people get hyped up about some apparently new evidence or claim, or a movie, or now some social media video, and we get another round of people learning about UFOs for the first time. This interest lasts for a while, with many people feeling as if some big disclosure is right around the corner. They see the recent activity as a trend, rather than just as the cycle it is, and expect some big government announcement, or the proverbial aliens landing on the White House lawn.

But of course – nothing happens. Eventually, nothing becomes boring. There are always die-hards who keep the flames going, or turn their UFO interest into a job, but public interest fades and turns to something else. UFO enthusiasts then wait for another generation to forget how boring the whole thing is, or who never experienced it before, and then fan the flames back into fire, which will also eventually burn itself out.

Meanwhile, skeptics like me, who have been at this for awhile, see it coming a mile away. We can immediately respond because we have seen it all before – it’s the same tired arguments and the same lame evidence. But we still have to be careful not to seem dismissive. We are not – we’ve just been here before so we have a head start. Also we (collectively – there is a lot of dividing and conquering going on) do the detailed analysis, the hard work necessary to demonstrate convincingly that whatever new evidence is being put forward is what it is.

UFO believers reading this blog, at this point, are likely to leave in the comments – “well, what about this evidence?” Hit me. Give me your best evidence. I am happy to do a deep dive and see what we got. But you should first look for skeptical analysis of the claim – be your own most dedicated skeptic first. If you still think the evidence is worthwhile, send it my way. (And don’t tell me to read thousands of pages of low grade evidence – give me your best evidence.) Decades of making this challenge has not resulted in anything (for example), but I am willing to keep going. Also, keep in mind, if aliens were visiting the Earth, I would want to know, and if the evidence were compelling, I would have every motivation in the world to support and promote that conclusion. And I would have much to lose if I wrongfully denied a genuine phenomenon – arguably the most interesting and impactful phenomenon in human history. I would not want to be on the wrong side of that story. So yeah – convince me.

But you should be open to the possibility that you are wrong, that all the evidence is best explained as a psychocultural phenomenon without any need to invoke aliens. I strongly believe that is the case, and it would take compelling evidence to convince me otherwise. Such evidence does not exist, because if it did, we wouldn’t need to be debating this anymore. That is why believers have to invoke conspiracy theories or make the absurd claim that aliens are just teasing us with the possibility of their existence but withhold any solid evidence. Maybe that worked in the 1950s, but 75 years later it’s increasingly untenable.

 

The post Why UFOs Are Back first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

We often stop noticing things we’ve become too accustomed to, as a side effect of our brains protecting us from sensory overload. Columnist Helen Thomson shares the evidence-backed ways to learn how to notice again

Returning from my hiatus, I couldn't decide on a specific new topic, mainly because so much bad stuff happened in my absence. So, in this post I back up a bit to reflect on how RFK Jr.'s "make America healthy again" is nothing new. What is new is that the antiscience-cranks are in charge.

The post MAHA: Everything old is new again, except this time antiscience cranks (like Stanislaw Burzynski) are in charge first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Far beyond Neptune, in the frozen depths of the Kuiper Belt, many ancient objects oddly resemble giant snowmen made of ice and rock. For years, scientists wondered how these delicate two-lobed shapes could form without violent collisions tearing them apart. Now researchers at Michigan State University have recreated the process in a powerful new simulation, showing that simple gravitational collapse can naturally produce these cosmic “snowmen.”

A Martian volcano once thought to be the result of a single eruption turns out to have a much more complex past. Orbital imaging and mineral data show it developed through multiple eruptive phases, all powered by the same evolving magma system underground. Shifts in mineral composition reveal the magma changed over time, hinting at different depths and storage histories. Mars’ interior was far more active than previously believed.

Searching for life beyond Earth has rapidly advanced in recent years. However, directly imaging an exoplanet and all their incredible features remain elusive given the literal astronomical distances from Earth. Therefore, astronomers have settled by exploring exoplanet atmospheres for signatures of life, also called biosignatures. This is currently conducted by analyzing the starlight that passes through an exoplanet’s atmosphere, known as spectroscopy, as it passes in front of its star, also called a transit. But improvements continue to be made to better explore exoplanet atmospheres, specifically cleaning up messy data.

For decades, scientists have searched the skies for signs of extraterrestrial technology. A study from EPFL asks a sharp question: if alien signals have already reached Earth without us noticing, what should we realistically expect to detect today?

On the Biology of Why We Laugh … and a Brief History on Why We Stopped

In today’s America, humor—like nearly everything else—has become serious business, and in ways at once unusual and plain to see. Never before has every half-drunk joke, or every stumble of language, been so on the record. Welcome to the social media century. Never before have young people been more uptight, more afraid than old people, now labeled as the anxious generation. Never before has stand-up comedy in Republican Texas felt more cutting edge than in New York City. 

The comedian Norm Macdonald has called this age a crisis of “clapter”—diagnosing a humorless age where jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter. It is a mark of social retardation and nervous conformity. A strange fate for one of humanity’s oldest and most complex behaviors. As such, this essay is on the origin of humor, its evolutionary function, and its history in the United States.

The Origin of Humor

Babies do it. It exists in every known culture. We even see it in other species. Since Darwin, scientists have developed three ways to test for whether or not a trait evolved by natural selection for adaptive purposes. And by every test, laughter qualifies. That is to say, whatever else humor is, it is first and foremost, a fact of our evolved biology.

To this day, however, neither the scientists nor comedians (nor anyone else for that matter) has been able to produce what might be recognized as “a complete theory of humor.” What follows instead are the core components of a consilient model. These are ideas that do not compete so much as they combine, each explaining a different dimension that converge on a single theme.

1. Humor as play. The most fundamental and widely accepted finding in the study of humor is that it evolved as a function of mammalian play behavior—a way to test limits and roughhouse the rules. Dolphins laugh when they butt heads; elk laugh when they wrestle; and all the apes, including human children, laugh when we are being chased, like playing tag. All of these interactions are games that simulate aggressive predator-prey behavior; like fighting, stalking, hunting, or fleeing, it’s easier to learn the rules of conflict when the danger is make-believe. Laughter, on this account, evolved as a signal to the predator-in-pretend that he is not being perceived as a threat and that playtime can continue.

Laughing out loud is not just a reaction, it is a social tool that helps young mammals learn how to walk the line between aggression and cooperation, between pushing limits and maintaining bonds. It’s a training ground for managing social complexity. And so while we may be the only species that tells jokes, the logic is the same. Louis C.K. explaining that “you should never rape anyone unless you want to cum in them and they won’t let you” or Norm Macdonald reminiscing about “the old days when tweeting meant stabbing a hooker” is what scientists call “verbal play.” Here is how Jerry Seinfeld put it: “Comedy is a very aggressive art form. You put the brain into a vulnerable state [the setup] and then attack and destroy it [the punchline].” 

Understanding the role of laughter in distinguishing between aggression and play explains why humor—like no other form of speech—is allowed to not make sense, to cross the line, and to have it not matter. As Louis C.K. often puts it after his punchlines: “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

2. Laughter is a hard to fake signal. Birds laugh, dogs laugh, rats laugh, cows laugh. There are—so far as we have counted—over sixty animal species that laugh. But there is only one species that can fake a laugh, and that’s us. It’s what biologists call nonduchenne laughter (tactical, deliberate, and carefully timed), as opposed to duchenne laughter (involuntary and honest). A duchenne smile—named after anatomist Guillaume Duchenne who first identified it, is characterized by the simultaneous contraction of the zygomatic major muscle (lifting mouth corners) and the orbicularis oculi muscle (crinkling eyes, forming “crow’s feet”), distinguishing it from a forced smile that only uses mouth muscles. 

The duchenne smile evolved in humans because we are the only species that has language. In a world where deceiving others has obvious survival and reproductive advantages, language enhances our ability to manipulate beliefs and rig behaviors to our benefit, whether by lying about resources, alliances, or why the basement smells like bleach. In other words, it gives us the ability to influence each other, not just through force or direct observation, but through stories, symbols, and imagination. Try convincing a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising eternal paradise or warning of a mythical curse and see what happens. Tell the right story to a human, however, and they might just give you all of their arable lands. 

All this is to say that once we have language we also have bullshit, and so what we really need is a way to tell who’s full of it. Biologists call it an “honest signal,” and for a slick-tongued species of tricksters, the best we’ve got is duchenne laughter. Less corruptible than speech and harder to counterfeit, it works as a backchannel of communication by revealing genuine and honest feelings inside, unfiltered by words.

Studies suggest that few people can voluntarily produce crow’s feet in their eyes (the telltale sign of duchenne laughter) without feeling genuine joy—it is easy to identify and we respond more positively to it than the fake stuff. 

But a laugh, real or not, means little until you know what provoked it.

3. Comedy is surprises. Arguably the most obvious feature of any joke is that the punchline arrives unexpected and upside down. Across cultures and contexts, the most consistent finding in humor research is that without surprise, there is no laugh.

The human brain, at its most basic, is a prediction making machine, honed by natural selection for survival in environments where knowing what’s going to happen before it does keeps you one step ahead of the predators. To know where the predator lurks, when the fruit will ripen, how an ally will behave—all in advance of the fact—is arguably a chief advantage of our big brained species over others. We are, put simply, pattern-seeking junkies—so wired that we are likely to see patterns that don’t exist (patternicity). As such, our awareness is often not of things as they are, but as we expect them to be. 

Even our most basic experiences are not records of the present but guesses about what’s to come. Take, for example, drinking water. Our cells do not absorb the intake until about twenty minutes after the fact, but feeling quenched happens almost immediately. It is the brain, anticipating the chemistry that will follow, extending to us in the present the comfort of a future state. Most of life is lived in this way—on credit, in trust—our minds forever writing promissory notes for what the world has not yet delivered. 

The advantage of the man with a sense of humor is that he is able to act more rationally by considering multiple angles and weighing their contradictions

But as much a benefit as there is in good predictions, there is a cost to bad ones. Evolution, therefore, had to do more than just adapt us to anticipate. It had to make us eager to correct our mistakes when reality proved us wrong. Laughter, in this view, evolved as a reward signal for fixing a bad prediction—an outburst of joy that marks the moment our model of the universe just got more accurate. One after another, it is a comedy of errors—predictions misfiring, intentions slipping—that keeps the system honest and the mind awake. As Norm Macdonald explains:

At times, the joy that life attacks me with is unbearable and leads to gasping hysterical laughter. I find myself completely out of control and wonder how life could surprise me again and again and again, so completely. How could a man be a cynic? It is a sin.

Yet if laughter were merely a private reward for cognitive course correction, it would be a silent, internal affair. But it isn’t. It is loud, contagious, and social. This is because the same mechanism that helps an individual update their model of the world becomes, in a social species, a powerful tool for establishing shared truths.

4. It’s funny because it’s true. Whether it’s making fun of someone else, making fun of ourselves, or making fun of the situation, we laugh because in some hidden, half-said sort of way, the joke forces us to connect the dots already in our head. It is an unspoken reality suddenly made obvious, but only to the people laughing. Anthropologists call it the encryption model of humor, and it explains humor’s widest social function. 

As it suggests, the whole ludic apparatus works like the German Enigma machine of World War II, in which messages were sent via code to receivers who can crack it. In order to “get” a joke, you must share some background knowledge or belief that allows recognition to snap into place. This means that when people are laughing at the same thing, they are effectively signaling that they all possess the same information and preferences, thereby marking themselves as members of the same ingroup. 

“You had to be there.” “If you know, you know.” In this way, all jokes are inside jokes, and research shows that the more encrypted comedy is, the funnier people find it. The writer E.B. White once compared explaining a joke to dissecting a frog—you understand it better but the frog dies in the process. Humor is like a bubble, he observed: 

It won’t stand much blowing up, and it won’t stand much poking. It has a certain fragility, an evasiveness, which one had best respect. Essentially, it is a complete mystery.

And it is this very quality that allows humor to do its dirtiest work—exposing suppressed beliefs, humbling status, challenging groupthink, and revealing unseen truths.

5. We’ve all got a little Jeffrey Dahmer in us—and those of us who deny it rarely laugh at all. Research suggests that people who have a harder time acknowledging difficult truths find less humor in the world. In studies using the self-deception questionnaire, for example, subjects are asked to rate how much they agree (on a scale from “not at all true” to “very true”) with statements such as “More than once it felt good when I heard on the news that someone had been killed” or “I have never done anything that I am ashamed of.” Those who mark more claims as “not true” are scored as higher in self-deception and later observed to laugh less than individuals more able and willing to confess their sins. Other statements on the survey include: “Once in a while I think of things too bad to talk about.” Or: “I have never wanted to rape or be raped by someone.”

If self-deception hides the inconvenient angle, laughter drags it into view by forcing honesty not meant for show.

The results reflect two competing adaptations in the evolutionary arms race between liars and lie detectors. On the one hand, self-deception works in service of deceit, allowing lies to roll off the tongue with all the same confident fluency as truth. In other words, by believing our own lies we are less likely to show external cues of deception (e.g., sweaty palms, nervous voice changes, or averted eye contact), which makes them harder to detect. Its function is to protect us from admitting beliefs that might expose weakness, lower status, or trigger shame. Ninety-four percent of professors, for example, think they are in the top half of their field.

But if self-deception hides the inconvenient angle, laughter drags it into view by forcing honesty not meant for show. Chris Rock’s joke that “a man is as faithful as his options,” for example, plays on a familiar tension between our grandiose theories about marriage being a sacrament and our deep animalistic understanding that it’s easy to be faithful if nobody else wants to have sex with you.

Where self-deception narrows the field of vision, humor splits it open. The advantage of the man with a sense of humor is that he is able to act more rationally by considering multiple angles and weighing their contradictions. As Samuel Crothers wrote for The Atlantic in 1899: 

The pleasure of humor is of a complex kind. There are some works of art that can be enjoyed by the man of one idea. To enjoy humor one must have at least two ideas. There must be two trains of thought going at full speed in opposite directions, so that there may be a collision. Such an accident does not happen in minds under economical management, that run only one train of thought a day.

It is what the poet John Keats called “negative capability”—the ability to keep in mind two incompatible truths that circle one another without resolution. Shakespeare, he argued, possessed this quality to an extraordinary degree, forcing his audience to hold both the positive and negative aspects of a character for as long as possible, denying them the sort of quick and facile judgment most of us make about most things all the time.

6. Funny is when the world won’t fit our ideas. Incongruity theory is the most supported scientific explanation for why humans laugh, and explains laughter as a shock moment of mismatch between the world we know and the world we thought we knew. In other words, comedians tell jokes that violate our expectations, identifying incongruities that can only be resolved by a shift in perspective. The setup creates an expectation, the punchline violates it, and laughter signals the change in perspective.

Take, for example, the old Onion headline: “School Bully Not So Tough Since Being Molested.” The setup primes us to cheer the bully’s downfall … until out of nowhere, like a trigger yanked too soon, the last word detonates that expectation. Had, for example, the line read “School Bully Not So Tough Since Being Cut From The Team”— it would have ended in simple justice, within the range of predicted ends. Instead, “molested” hurls a monkey-wrench perspective onto the tracks. In a flash, it turns the bully we wanted punished into the victim we want to protect—our original point of view bent, broken, flipped end over end like a compass needle snapped loose from north. Put another way, the joke forces contempt and pity to occupy, for a split second, the same moment of experience.  

Its feeling is awkward, ambiguous, uncomfortable, bewildering; requiring the mind to twist in on itself, tight and ugly, in order to get the joke. As the character Marlo Stanfield says in season four of The Wire, “[We] want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.”

We want the world to be drawn in clean lines, with answers settled and nonsense gone. But experience proves otherwise.

Humor and Democracy in America

It was for the first time in 1789 that a new generation of men on a whole new continent chose to work with their flaws and make use of the mess. They were a generation of men who laughed at pretension, heckled certainty, and made a sport of nonconformity. This was, in part, because they had an American sense of funny. Only on this side of the Atlantic was humor fully let off the leash, divorced from the polite understanding that jokes ought leave the order intact. In Europe, mockery operated within a fixed aristocratic structure—a pressure valve in a system not designed to change its fundamental hierarchy. In America, however, ridicule was integrated into a self-correcting democratic project.

Historian Henry Steele Commager called American humor a “comedy of circumstance” that made fun of every man, who “at one time or another [had] aimed too high, adventured too boldly [or] boasted too loudly.” It mocked rich people like poor people, made fun of smart people in the same ways as dumb people; because in the United States, no man is allowed to stay king. Commager goes on to describe the American sense of humor like this:

It was fundamentally outrageous, and in this reflected the attitude towards authority and precedent. It celebrated the ludicrous and the grotesque with unruffled gravity … It bore the impress of the frontier long after the frontier had passed. It was leisurely and conversational; the tall story was usually a long story and was designed to be heard rather than read. American humor was shrewd, racy, robust, and masculine …  It was generous and good-natured, and malicious only when directed against vanity and pretense. It cultivated understatement not, as with the British, as a sign of sophistication, but as an inverse exaggeration … It was democratic and leveling, took the side of the underdog, ridiculed the great and the proud, and the politician was its natural butt.

And as the democratic experiment hurtled forth, so too did its comedic counterpart, growing louder, meaner, and goofier. From the rambling tall tales of the frontier sprang, one after the other, a hard plain line of distinctly American inventions, including vaudeville, the comic strip, sketch shows, and stand-up comedy. 

But now, as Americans slip back into the Old World habits we once escaped, both democracy and humor are dying of the same disease.

The Unfunny Revolution

In 2008, near the peak of his career, Louis C.K. taped what would become one of the most talked-about comedy specials in comedic history. Dedicating the set to his hero George Carlin, who had died earlier that year, Louis began his special with a joke modeled on one of Carlin’s most famous bits—the “seven dirty words”—that in 2008 became “nigger, cunt, faggot.” Operating under the same premise, both jokes asked what kind of society still has forbidden words. Some found it funny, some found it offensive, some found it stupid, and some didn’t care at all. But in 2009, one of the most obscene jokes in American comedy was nominated for an Emmy by the high and mighty Television Academy. 

Fifteen years later, that world is unrecognizable. The culture has shifted so completely that now even Jerry Seinfeld—a comedian whose most offensive material pokes fun at airplane food—refuses to play college campuses, citing excessive political correctness. As Chris Rock, another comedian who no longer performs at universities, put it, “You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

Cartoon by Oliver Ottitsch for SKEPTIC

The shift is not just in what Americans find funny. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and function of humor. In a culture that now treats laughter as a moral act, it’s been bent out of shape by all sides; its purpose twisted into a dog and pony proof of allegiance. On the right, the rules are clear enough—mock the leader, mock the faith, and you’re done. The threat is old school dictatorship. On the left, nobody’s in charge, but everyone’s policing everyone else. The result is a social bureaucracy so sprawling and self-contradictory that no one, least of all the people enforcing it, can tell you where it starts, what it’s for, or whether anyone is still keeping score. Can a man tell a rape joke? Can a woman? Do gay, Black, or fat comedians (or any others belonging to oppressed or marginalized groups) have the exclusive right to make fun of their own group?

But beneath all the shouting lies something simpler: a handful of inconvenient facts that neither orthodoxy can accept.

1. Comedy has no responsibility. Jokes aren’t Hallmark cards. There’s no lesson. No moral mission. Funny has nothing to do with right or wrong, good or bad. If people laugh—the joke works. If they don’t, it doesn’t. It’s that simple. As Seinfeld put it, “The audience is the only judge. If they laugh, it’s funny.” 

And whether they laugh for the right reasons, the wrong reasons, or no reason at all, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same currency. Because again, no committee, no critic, no theoretical or ethical standard, not even comedians themselves, can determine what is funny. Only laughter can. 

The impulse to sanitize humor in the name of safety is a well-intentioned but misguided coddling that infantilizes the very people it claims to protect.

It is for this reason that comedian Ricky Gervais argues you should never apologize for laughing—because it is an involuntary reflex, born of recognitions we can’t fully name; maddeningly hard to locate, explain, or repeat. Whatever insights, however real, are accidents, not assignments. A joke may be philosophical, but it must not philosophize. It may be moral, but it must not moralize, because life is serious and comedy is not.

2. There is no such thing as punching down. It is a conceit that rests on the fantasy that people exist within a clear hierarchy of oppression and that comedians should consult a moral spreadsheet before telling a joke. Humans, however, are messy, and power is multidimensional. If the joke lands, it’s good, and not because it “punched up,” but because it’s funny. As comedian Rowan Atkinson put it:

You’ve always got to kick up? Really? What if there’s someone extremely smug, arrogant, aggressive, self-satisfied, who happens to be below in society? … There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up.

Humor, rather than reinforcing hierarchies, scrambles them, making a carnival of power, where prince and pauper swap faces and butts. People can be both victims and perpetrators at the same time. If a rich guy mocks a poor guy for being poor, he’s an asshole; if a poor guy does it, he’s an asshole too.

The impulse to sanitize humor in the name of safety is a well-intentioned but misguided coddling that infantilizes the very people it claims to protect. To be teased is to be an equal; to be seen as resilient enough to take a joke and confident enough to play along. Because good humor, by refusing to grant anyone a permanent victim’s pass, reminds us that our shared humanity, not our segregated identities, is the ultimate leveler.

3. The subject is not always the target. I heard a joke at an open mic the other day about a newspaper headline that read “World’s Worst Pedophile.” The story was about a man who had molested hundreds of children. After reading the headline, the comedian asked, “Shouldn’t he be the world’s best pedophile? I mean …  the world’s worst pedophile—he’s been trying for years. He can’t afford the good candy, so he hands out stale trail mix. His van won’t start …” If you think the joke is making fun of molesting children or that it’s about finding pedophilia funny, you’re an idiot. It’s making fun of reporters and sloppy language.

But even if the joke actually was about pedophilia—as in Louis C.K.’s Saturday Night Live monologue, where he compares the joy of eating his favorite candy bar to what sex with children must be like for a child molester—treating a topic playfully doesn’t erase its gravity; it just recognizes that serious issues need not always be handled seriously.

Forcing comedy to seek 100 percent approval is like demanding a surgeon operate with a butter knife—you remove the danger, but you also remove the point. 

4. Failure is the process. Even the best comics bomb; but in a decontextualized culture incentivized to screenshot rather than understand, we’ve made a habit of demanding perfection on the first try. The trouble is that, while great jokes look effortless, they’re the end result of a process that’s anything but. As David Chase said about the hundred hour weeks he spent making The Sopranos—“hard work looks like magic.” Seinfeld once said he spent 20 minutes fine-tuning a single syllable. Chris Rock worked on three of his jokes in a recent Netflix special for over a decade. Being funny is hard—and comics need the space to fail. If you’ve ever watched open mics and seen the same comedians go up week after week to tinker with their bits, you know that the difference between killing and bombing often hinges on a single well-timed pause. Perhaps comedian Ari Shaffir summed it up best:

Failing is part of my process … A new bit never works the first time. I figure I have to bomb seven times to make it good. So I tweak it. Then maybe the next time it will do great … but then it will fall flat again. So I’ll make more adjustments. Then it will be great, then it will be terrible again … and all of that is okay.

This is why people who understand the function of humor tend to be more forgiving when things go wrong; and comedians are the most likely to forgive a failed joke. Dave Chappelle, for instance, responded to Michael Richards (Kramer on Seinfeld) calling a heckler a “nigger” at the Laugh Factory—an incident widely perceived as genuinely racist—by saying that he learned that he was 20 percent Black and 80 percent comedian: 

The Black part of me was offended and hurt, but the comedian part was like, “Whoo, dude is having a bad set. Hang in there, Kramer!”

The bottom line is this—good jokes can’t emerge without experimentation. If it kills—great. If it doesn’t, better—it means you’re part of a free society. 

5. Risk is the form. Most humor involves taking risks. Larry David, for example, compared stand-up comedy to diving. You get extra points for degree of difficulty. Seinfeld said that jokes are like leaping from one tall building to another—the further the distance, the harder the joke. There is a big payoff if you can bring the audience with you, but if you try to jump too far or the dive is too difficult and you aren’t yet good enough, the joke bombs. This is why the worst thing you can do as a comedian is play it safe. As Patrice O’Neal put it: “The idea of comedy, really, is not [that] everybody should be laughing. It should be about 50 people laughing and 50 people horrified.”

Forcing comedy to seek 100 percent approval is like demanding a surgeon operate with a butter knife—you remove the danger, but you also remove the point. 

The Last Laugh

Humor is not meant to be figured out, put to use, or taken seriously. It is meant to be experienced. But in a botox-bleached nation of caped crusaders wearing noise-cancelling headphones, deaf to anything but our own theme music and the imagined sound of unseen eggshells cracking beneath; Americans are being starved of the freedom to play without purpose.

Like an overzealous gardener who, in his war against the dandelion, has paved his entire yard with concrete, we are succeeding in eradicating the weed of offense but in the process killing the soil where flowers take root.

All of us, each so consumed in our own tiny corner of the universe, must be reminded every now and again that the world is what it is, and our ideas about it are not. It’s a ticklish business.