News Feeds

Trust is a fragile yet critical resource for any institution. At the end of the day, civilization is mostly built on a handshake and a mutual agreement to follow the rules. This includes trust that designated experts have the expertise they claim, are competent, and are acting appropriately in the interest of others, rather than exploiting their position for self-dealing. A critical […]

The post Trust Me-I’m a Doctor first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Māori Knowledge Debate 

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

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

The Lunar Calendar 

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

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

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

Based on the Dow Jones Factiva Database

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Public Health Menace 

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

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

No Science Allowed 

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

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

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

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

AI-powered deepfake videos with altered facial expressions can display realistic heartbeats through skin colour changes, which may hinder one deepfake detection method

Human wounds take almost three times as long to heal as those of other primates, which may come down to our lack of fur

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

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

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

Why Not Well-Being?

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

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

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

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

Why Not an Alternative Index?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comprehensive Wealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Trump administration has dismissed all of the researchers working on the next installment of the National Climate Assessment, a crucial report on how climate change is affecting the country

Users of the r/ChangeMyView subreddit have expressed outrage at the revelation that researchers at the University of Zurich were secretly using the site for an AI-powered experiment in persuasion

The enigmatic Y chromosome has a tendency to disappear from cells with age. Now, research is revealing the long-term impacts this can have on disease risk and life expectancy

One of the most famous findings in physics could be wrong – the double-slit experiment was long thought to confirm that light can be a wave, but its results can be fully explained using only quantum particles

Putting air filters in classrooms seems to boost student attendance, which may be due to them reducing levels of air pollution, pollen, pathogens or all three

The Naturalistic Fallacy, which most of you surely know, it the erroneous equation of what does exist with what should exist.  Discussed extensively by Hume, it is the false equation of “is” with “ought”. In biology, it takes the form of observing some behavior in animals that is similar to a behavior in humans, and then justifying or saying the human behavior “natural”  or “good” because we see it in other species.

But this is a bad argument, for it cuts both ways. After all, animals show a lot of behavior that would be considered reprehensible or even immoral in humans.  In fact, Joan Roughgarden wrote a book, Evolution’s Rainbow, which describes sex and gender diversity in nature as an explicit way of justifying similar behaviors in humans as good—because they are natural. I reviewed the book for TLS and wrote this bit (review no longer online but I can send a copy).

Coyne, J. A.  2004.  Charm schools. (Review of Evolution’s Rainbow, by Joan Roughgarden). Times Literary Supplement, London. July 30, 2004 (No. 5287), p. 5.

But regardless of the truth of Darwin’s theory, should we consult nature to determine which of our behaviours are to be considered normal or moral? Homosexuality may indeed occur in species other than our own, but so do infanticide, robbery and extra-pair copulation.  If the gay cause is somehow boosted by parallels from nature, then so are the causes of child-killers, thieves and adulterers. And given the cultural milieu in which human sexuality and gender are expressed, how closely can we compare ourselves to other species? In what sense does a fish who changes sex resemble a transgendered person? The fish presumably experiences neither distressing feelings about inhabiting the wrong body, nor ostracism by other fish. In some baboons, the only males who show homosexual behaviour are those denied access to females by more dominant males. How can this possibly be equated to human homosexuality?

The step from “natural” to “ethical” is even riskier. As the philosopher G. E. Moore argued, identifying what is good or right by using any natural property is committing the “naturalistic fallacy”: there is no valid way to deduce “ought” from “is”. If no animals showed homosexual behaviour, would discrimination against gay humans be more justified? Certainly not. Roughgarden’s philosophical strategy is as problematic as her biological one.

Now a 2022 paper in Nature Communications had the potential to demonstrate the same fallacy, but fortunately the authors went to great lengths to avoid that  The same, however, is not true of a new take on this paper in a new article in ZME Science, which gave a précis of the paper and stepped on the Fallacy’s tail.

First the Nature paper itself, which you can access by clicking on the article below, or by reading the pdf here.

It’s a good paper on the evolution and phylogeny of “same-sex sexual behavior” in mammals, which they define as “transient courtship or mating interactions between members of the same sex“.  

Note that it’s “transient,” which explicitly excludes homosexuality, most notably in humans, which is a persistent sexual attraction to members of one’s own biological sex.  This form of transient sexual interaction is surprisingly common—a conservative estimate is 4% of all animal species, and, as the authors say, [includes] “all main groups from invertebrates such as insects, spiders, echinoderms, and nematodes, to vertebrates such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.”

Now there are two ways to explain a behavior that seems on its face maladaptive. Why would you engage in sexual behavior that doesn’t involve passing on your genes? One hypothesis is that it’s just a nonadaptive byproduct of other behaviors: a general drive to mate when the appropriate mates aren’t available, or simply mistaken identity.  But the authors investigate two hypotheses that it is adaptive, and give some tentative evidence for that.

First, the results:

• The authors did a comprehensive survey of same-sex behavior (defined above) in 2546 species of mammals, and superimposed species with and without such behavior on their phylogenetic tree. The object was to see how many times the behavior evolved independently, and whether it was present in the common ancestor of a group (and thus could be passed along to its descendants). Here’s one of those phylogenies with the caption. (You needn’t worry about the details or summary, as I’ll give it below).

(from paper) Phylogenetic distribution of the presence of same-sex sexual behaviour in males and females in the subset III (see methods). The state of the mammalian ancestral nodes was assessed using maximum likelihood estimation (black: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by females; yellow: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by males; purple: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by both sexes). The silhouettes of representative mammals (downloaded from http://www.phylopic.org) illustrate the main mammalian clades. They have a Public Domain license without copyright (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).

A summary:

•  The behavior was reported in 261 mammalian species
• Same-sex sexual behavior appears to be equally common in males and females, and the behavior in both sexes tends to be correlated across groups. That is, male and female same-sex behavior is more likely to both appear in the same species than if it either were distributed randomly among groups.
• It was not possible tell, using phylogenetic analysis, whether same-sex behavior was likely to be a trait in the ancestor of all mammals, but was NOT likely to be a trait in the ancestor of all placental mammals.
• The behavior seems to have evolved independently in many lineages, so same-sex sexual behavior seems to be a case of “convergent evolution.”
• The behavior is correlated with whether or not a species is social. If it is social, there’s a significantly higher probability of same-sex sexual behavior. (Remember that this is a correlation and doesn’t imply that sociality prompts the evolution of such behavior. The behavior could simply result from iondividuals in social species being closer to other individuals than those in non-social species.)
• The common ancestor of all primates does seem to have possessed same-sex sexual behavior.

The association of same-sex sexual behavior with sociality leads the authors to conclude that the behavior evolved by natural selection as a way to enforce inter-individual harmony required by sociality. They mention two such advantages:

1.) Same-sex sexual behavior is a way of creating and maintaining social bonds between individuals in a group; it’s a bonding mechanism.
2.) The behavior could also help prevent or resolve conflicts between members of a group, allowing a hierarchy to develop without injury of death to group members.

The authors mention that these effects have been demonstrated in some species like bottlenose dolphins and American bison, but I’m not familiar with this work, and such conclusions seem to me to be extraordinarily difficult to arrive at. However, I’ll take the authors’ word for it.

The authors are, to be sure, careful in their conclusions. First, they note that nonadaptive hypotheses, like “mistaken identity” could also contribute to the behavior.

Second, and the big one, they note that the behavior they studied is not the same as homosexual behavior like we find in humans.  They do add, however, that it humans do show same-sex sexual behavior in humans (I presume they’re referring to “bisexual” people who have sex with both males and females). From the paper:

However, same-sex sexual behaviour is operationally defined here as any temporary sexual contact between members of the same sex2. This behaviour should be distinguished from homosexuality as a more permanent same sex preference, as found in humans. For this reason, our findings cannot be used to infer the evolution of sexual orientation, identity, and preference or the prevalence of homosexuality as categories of sexual beings Nevertheless, even taking into account this cautionary note, by using phylogenetic inference, our study may provide a potential explanation on the evolutionary history of the occurrence of same-sex sexual behaviour in humans.

They may be right, but I think they should have added that even if same-sex sexual behavior was rare or nonexistent in mammals, its existence in humans is not made “ethical” or “natural” in our species. That would be an example of the naturalistic fallacy, and I emphasize that they do not commit it.  I’d would also emphasize, as I did above, that any sexual behavior between consenting human adults is not for us to judge, regardless of whether or not other species show it, and that such behaviors are fine so long as they’re legal. We don’t need to justify same-sex sexual behavior in humans by seeing it elsewhere in nature. But perhaps this stuff doesn’t belong in a scientific paper. But I want to emphasize it here, as I did in my review of Roughgarden’s book.

As I said, the authors don’t commit the naturalistic fallacy, but the new ZME Science paper below comes close to it. Click headline to read:

Up until the end, this article is okay, but then it can’t resist diving into our own species (bolding is mine).

However, the researchers distinguish between SSSB and sexual orientation. While SSSB involves occasional same-sex interactions, sexual orientation encompasses consistent patterns of attraction and identity, particularly prominent in humans.

While SSSB in animals supports the naturalness of such behaviors, human experiences of sexuality include layers of identity, culture, and personal meaning that go beyond biological explanations. Homosexuality in humans often involves stable sexual orientations and relationships, distinct from the transient or context-dependent SSSB observed in some animal species.

Ultimately, the widespread occurrence of SSSB in mammals, especially primates, strongly suggests that such behaviors are natural and adaptive. Normalizing same-sex behavior as a part of this spectrum aligns with both biological evidence and a broader understanding of human social and emotional complexity.

The last paragraph explicitly says that the results show that homosexuality (one of “such behaviors”) is “natural and adaptive”, as are all “same-sex behaviors” in humans.  The Nature paper says nothing of the sort.  The authors of the Nature paper explicitly exclude homosexuality as not a behavior they studied, but ZME Science lumps it in with other same-sex sexual behaviors, dwspite homosexuality being very different from SSSB.

Again, you do NOT need to justify same-sex sexual behavior, whether it be transient or permanent, by finding examples in the natural world. If we didn’t find any other species with homosexual behavior, would that make it wrong or bad in humans? Of course not! “Is” does not equal “ought,” and I’ll add the corollary that “not is” does not equal “not ought”. The Nature paper is valuable it looking at the evolution of a behavior and testing hypotheses about its adaptiveness, but of course adaptiveness or evolution has nothing to do with the ethics of behaviors between consenting human adults.

Reader Debra Coplan made a trip to Baja, and today sends us photos. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

I had the opportunity to visit the Baja Peninsula this past weekend, and would like to share some of the wonderful vegetation I saw from the that area. We went as far south as the Sonora Desert region to Catavina, east of the Pacific Ocean. Catavina is about 300 miles south of the border.

We had to drive from the north which had Mediterranean desert foliage to the Sonora Desert which had little rain. The Mediterranean desert gets hurricanes which dump water to an area in that more northern part of the desert.

The Mediterranean desert is north of Sonora desert, but they abut next to each other. Sometimes we saw Mediterranean desert on one side of the road and Sonora-type vegetation on the other . A clearer transition between the 2 areas became evident as we went south into drier region: one side being lush with taller plants and the other side dry with low plants.

I am not a biologist, so hopefully I’ve identified the plants correctly.

Boojum Tree – Cirio Idria columnaris

This is an plant endemic to this Catavina area of the desert. It is the signature plant of the region, and can get to 70 feet tall. The flame of leaves on the top are golden like a flame at the top of a candle. See top photo.

The second Boojum had a stalk that was in an area of more water so it looks more lush.  The name Boojum is in reference to Lewis Carroll’s poem, “The Hunting of the Snark”. It is looks a bit like an upside down carrot with a whitish stalk.

On the road on the way out of Catavina we were stopped by the military police checking to make sure we did not steal a Boojum tree to transplant up north. Cardon.  Pachycereus pringleiL

This particular cardon had a genetic mutation so instead of growing up, it grew sideways. The man is about 6’ tall.  I was fascinated by the one limb that wasn’t affected by the mutation.

California penstemon; Penstemon californicus:

I am including this penstemon flower because it was my favorite story. I loved how it gets pollinated. Unfortunately, the plant was down below a steep creek so I did not get a photo.

Various species of bees in the region are guided into the flower by the purple lines pointing the way to the back of the flower. It reminds me of an airplane coming in for a landing.

As the bees go in, the pollen rubs from the antlers (male part) off onto the bee.  You can see the long anthers but unfortunately there was no pollen in this one. The bees then fly off to another penstemon where the pollen interacts with the stigma (female part) deeper in the flower to pollinate.

Nightshade Mariola, Solanum hindsianum

Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of a flower on this plant either,  but was amazed by the pollination story.  This plant had very tiny opening at the end of the yellow anthers. It’s very hard for bees to get into the tiny opening to get the pollen so they use buzz pollination.  The bees grab hold of the yellow anthers and vibrate their bodies, which forces the pollen out and onto their bodies, where it gets distributed.

Hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus:

 

In Catavina, inland from the Pacific Ocean, we visited a cave of the Cochimis, the indigenous inhabitants of this area.

 

A steep 10-minute hike up huge boulders of the Sonora desert reveals a cave with some paintings that were about 4,000 years old.   I have no idea what dyes they used, but heard they were not from plants of this area.

There is the head of a hummingbird in the painting below:

In my previous post I wrote about how we think about and talk about autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and how RFK Jr misunderstands and exploits this complexity to weave his anti-vaccine crank narrative. There is also another challenge in the conversation about autism, which exists for many diagnoses – how do we talk about it in a way that is scientifically accurate, useful, and yet not needlessly stigmatizing or negative? A recent NYT op-ed by a parent of a child with profound autism had this to say:

“Many advocacy groups focus so much on acceptance, inclusion and celebrating neurodiversity that it can feel as if they are avoiding uncomfortable truths about children like mine. Parents are encouraged not to use words like “severe,” “profound” or even “Level 3” to describe our child’s autism; we’re told those terms are stigmatizing and we should instead speak of “high support needs.” A Harvard-affiliated research center halted a panel on autism awareness in 2022 after students claimed that the panel’s language about treating autism was “toxic.” A student petition circulated on Change.org said that autism ‘is not an illness or disease and, most importantly, it is not inherently negative.'”

I’m afraid there is no clean answer here, there are just tradeoffs. Let’s look at this question (essentially, how do we label ASD) from two basic perspectives – scientific and cultural. You may think that a purely scientific approach would be easier and result in a clear answer, but that is not the case. While science strives to be objective, the universe is really complex, and our attempts at making it understandable and manageable through categorization involve subjective choices and tradeoffs. As a physician I have had to become comfortable with this reality. Diagnoses are often squirrelly things.

When the profession creates or modifies a diagnosis, this is really a type of categorization. There are different criteria that we could potentially use to define a diagnostic label or category. We could use clinical criteria – what are the signs, symptoms, demographics, and natural history of the diagnosis in question? This is often where diagnoses begin their lives, as a pure description of what is being seen in the clinic. Clinical entities almost always present as a range of characteristics, because people are different and even specific diseases will manifest differently. The question then becomes – are we looking at one disease, multiple diseases, variations on a theme, or completely different processes that just overlap in the signs and symptoms they cause. This leads to the infamous “lumper vs splitter” debate – do we tend to lump similar entities together in big categories or split everything up into very specific entities, based on even tiny differences?

The more we learn about these burgeoning diagnoses the more the diagnostic criteria might shift away from a purely clinical descriptive one. Perhaps we find some laboratory marker (such as a result on a blood test, or finding on an MRI scan of the brain). What if that marker has an 80% correlation to the clinical syndrome? How do we use that as a diagnostic criterion? The more we learn about pathophysiology, the more these specific biological factors become part of the diagnosis. Sometimes this leads to discrete diagnoses – such as when it is discovered that a specific genetic mutation causes a specific disease. The mutation becomes the diagnosis. But that is often not the case. The game changes again when treatments become available, then diagnostic criteria tends to shift toward those that predict response to treatment.

One question, therefore, when determining the best way to establish a specific diagnostic label is – what is your purpose? You might need a meaningful label that helps guide and discuss basic science research into underlying phenomena. You may need a diagnosis that helps predict natural history (prognosis), or that guides treatment, or you may need a box to check on the billing form for insurance, or you may need a diagnosis as a regulatory entity (for FDA approval for a drug, say).

ASD has many of these issues. Researchers like the spectrum approach because they see ASD as different manifestations of one type of underlying neurological phenomenon. There are many genes involved, and changes to the pattern of connectivity among brain cells. Clinicians may find this lumper approach a double-edged sword. It may help if there is a single diagnostic approach – scoring on standardized tests of cognitive, motor, language and social functioning, for example. But it also causes confusion because one label can mean such dramatically different things clinically. The diagnosis is also now often attached to services, so there is a very practical aspect to it (and one major reason why the diagnosis has increased in recent years – it gets you services that a less specific diagnosis might not).

Now let’s go to the social approach to the ASD diagnosis. The purely scientific approach is not clean because “science” can refer to basic science or clinical science, and the clinical side can have multiple different approaches. This means science cannot currently solve all the disputes over how the ASD diagnosis is made and used in our society. It’s ambiguous. One aspect of the debate is whether or not ASD should be considered a disease, a disorder, or just a spectrum of natural variation within the human species. Anti-vaxxers want to see is as a disease, something to be prevented and cured. This approach also tends to align better with the more disabled end of the spectrum. At the high functioning end of the spectrum, the preference is to look at ASD as simply atypical, and not inherently inferior or worse than neurotypicals. The increased challenges of being autistic are really artificially created by a society dominated by neurotypicals. There are also in fact advantages to being neuroatypical in certain areas, such as jobs like coding and engineering. Highly sociable people have their challenges as well.

Here’s the thing – I think both of these approaches can be meaningful and useful at the same time. First, I don’t think we should shy away from terms like “profound” or “severe”. This is how neuroscience generally works. Everyone does and should have some level of anxiety, for example. Anxiety is adaptive. But some people have “severe” anxiety – anxiety that takes on a life of its own, or transitions from being adaptive to maladaptive. I don’t want to minimize the language debate. Words matter. Sometimes we just don’t have the words that mean exactly what we need them to mean, without unwanted connotations. We need a word that can express the spectrum without unwanted assumptions or judgement. How about “extreme”? Extreme does not imply bad. You can be extremely athletic, and no one would think that is a negative thing. Even if autism is just atypical, being extremely autistic implies you are at one end of the spectrum.

Also, as with anxiety, optimal function is often a mean between two extremes. No anxiety means you take unnecessary risks. Too much anxiety can be crippling. Having mildly autistic features may just represent a different set of neurological tradeoffs, with some advantages and some challenges, and because it is atypical some accommodation in a society not optimized for this type. But as the features get more extreme, the downsides become increasingly challenging until you have a severe disability.

This reminds me also of paranoia. A little bit of paranoia can be seen as typical, healthy, and adaptive. A complete absence of any suspiciousness might make someone naive and vulnerable. People with above average paranoia might not even warrant a diagnosis – that is just a personality type, with strengths and weaknesses. But the more extreme you get, the more maladaptive it becomes. At the extreme end it is a criterion for schizophrenia.

Or perhaps this is all just too complex for the public-facing side of this diagnosis (regulation, public education, etc). Perhaps we need to become splitters, and break ASD up into three or more different labels. Researchers can still have and use a technical category name that recognizes an underlying neurological commonality, but that does not need to be inflicted on the public and cause confusion. Again – there is no objective right or wrong here, just different choices. As I think I amply demonstrated in my prior post, using one label (autism) causes a great deal of confusion and can be exploited by cranks. What often happens, though, is that different groups make up the labels for their own purposes. When researchers make the labels, they favor technical basic-science criteria. When clinicians do, they favor clinical criteria. When regulators do, they want nice clean categories.

Sometimes all these levels play nicely together. With ASD I feels as if they are in conflict, with the more research-based labels holding sway and causing confusion for everyone else.

At the same time there is a conflict between not imposing inaccurate and unnecessary judgement on a label like autism, while at the same time recognizing that can come with its own challenges that need just awareness at the mildest end of the spectrum, accommodation for those who experience challenges and have needs, and then actual treatment (if possible) at the more extreme end. These do not need to be mutually exclusive.

I do think we are evolving in a good direction, with more thoughtful diagnostic labels that explicitly serve a purpose without unnecessary assumptions or judgement. We may not be entirely there yet, but it’s a great conversation to have.

The post The Other End of the Autism Spectrum first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Super mushrooms are claimed by some to provide vague health benefits beyond their known nutritional values.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Our current Medical Establishment doesn't seem to grasp that they are no longer just Fox News and Twitter celebrities who can comment from the sidelines as if they were passive observers.

The post Goodbye to the Novavax Vaccine? Our Flailing Medical Establishment Rejects Medical Freedom and Refuses to Fund Gold-Standard Science. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Astrophysicists have discovered a potentially star-forming cloud that is one of the largest single structures in the sky and among the closest to the sun and Earth ever to be detected. The scientists have named the molecular hydrogen cloud 'Eos,' after the Greek goddess of mythology who is the personification of dawn.

Researchers have created a light-powered soft robot that can carry loads through the air along established tracks, similar to cable cars or aerial trams. The soft robot operates autonomously, can climb slopes at angles of up to 80 degrees, and can carry loads up to 12 times its weight.

Scientists aren't comedians, but it turns out a joke or two can go a long way. That's according to a new study that found when researchers use humor in their communication -- particularly online -- audiences are more likely to find them trustworthy and credible.

A technique to cool the planet, in which particles are added to the atmosphere to reflect sunlight, would not require developing special aircraft but could be achieved using existing large planes, according to a new modelling study.

With more than 181.5 billion tons of wood produced globally each year, a new method could revolutionize how we build sustainably. By infusing red oak with ferrihydrite using a simple, low-cost process, researchers strengthened the wood at the cellular level without adding weight or altering flexibility -- offering a durable, eco-friendly alternative to steel and concrete. The treated wood retains its natural behavior but gains internal durability -- paving the way for greener alternatives in construction, furniture and flooring.