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It's nearly impossible to overstate the effect supermassive black holes have on their host galaxies. When actively accreting matter, they release colossal amounts of energy as winds, jets, and radiation that shape their surroundings. But stellar mass black holes also shape their surroundings with energetic jets.

During her sojourns among the Inuit throughout the 1960s and 70s, pioneering anthropologist Jean Briggs observed some peculiar parenting practices. In a chapter she contributed to The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence, a collection of essays from 1994, Briggs describes various methods the Inuit used to reduce the risk of physical conflict among community members. Foremost among them was the deliberate cultivation of modesty and equanimity, along with a penchant for reframing disputes or annoyances as jokes. “An immodest person or one who liked attention,” Briggs writes, “was thought silly or childish.” Meanwhile, a critical distinction held sway between seriousness and playfulness. “To be ‘serious’ had connotations of tension, anxiety, hostility, brooding,” she explains. “On the other hand, it was highest praise to say of someone: ‘He never takes anything seriously’.”1 The ideal then was to be happy, jocular, and even-tempered.

This distaste for displays of anger applied in the realm of parenting as well. No matter how unruly children’s behavior, adults would refrain from yelling at them. So, it came as a surprise to Briggs that Inuit adults would often purposely instigate conflicts among the children in their charge. One exchange Briggs witnessed involved an aunt taking her three-year-old niece’s hand and putting it in another child’s hair while telling her to pull it. When the girl refused, the aunt gave it a tug herself. The other child, naturally enough, turned around and hit the one she thought had pulled her hair. A fight ensued, eliciting laughter and cheers from the other adults, who intervened before anyone was hurt. None of the other adults who witnessed this incident seemed to think the aunt had done anything wrong.

“Why Don’t You Kill Your Baby Brother?” The provocations didn’t always involve rough treatment or incitements to conflict but often took the form of outrageous lines of questioning.

On another occasion, Briggs witnessed a mother picking up a friend’s baby and saying to her own nursling, “Shall I nurse him instead of you?” The other mother played along, offering her breast to the first woman’s baby, saying, “Do you want to nurse from me? Shall I be your mother?”2 The nursling shrieked in protest, and both mothers burst into laughter. Briggs witnessed countless more of what she calls “playful dramas” over the course of her research. Westerners might characterize what the adults were doing in these cases as immature, often cruel pranks, even criminal acts of child abuse. What Briggs came to understand, however, was that the dramas served an important function in the context of Inuit culture. Tellingly, the provocations didn’t always involve rough treatment or incitements to conflict but often took the form of outrageous or disturbing lines of questioning. This approach is reflected in the title of Briggs’s chapter, “‘Why Don’t You Kill Your Baby Brother?’ The Dynamics of Peace in Canadian Inuit Camps.” However, even these gentler sessions were more interrogation than thought experiment, the clear goal being to arouse intense emotions in the children. 

The parents were training the children, using simulated and age-calibrated dilemmas, to develop exactly the kind of equanimity and joking attitude they would need to mature into successful adults.

From interviews with adults in the communities hosting her, Briggs gleaned that the purpose of these dramas was to force children to learn how to handle difficult social situations. The term they used is isumaqsayuq, meaning “to cause thought,” which Briggs notes is a “central idea of Inuit socialization.” “More than that,” she goes on, “and as an integral part of thought, the dramas stimulate emotion.” The capacity for clear thinking in tense situations—and for not taking the tension too seriously—would help the children avoid potentially dangerous confrontations. Briggs writes: 

The games were, themselves, models of conflict management through play. And when children learned to recognize the playful in particular dramas, people stopped playing those games with them. They stopped tormenting them. The children had learned to keep their own relationships smoother—to keep out of trouble, so to speak— and in doing so, they had learned to do their part in smoothing the relationships of others.3

The parents, in other words, were training the children, using simulated and age-calibrated dilemmas, to develop exactly the kind of equanimity and joking attitude they would need to mature into successful adults capable of maintaining a mostly peaceful society. They were prodding at the kids’ known sensitivities to teach them not to take themselves too seriously, because taking yourself too seriously makes you apt to take offense, and offense can often lead to violence. 

Are censors justified in their efforts at protecting children from the wrong types of lessons? 

The Inuit’s aversion to being at the center of any drama and their penchant for playfulness in potentially tense encounters are far removed from our own culture. Rather their approach to socialization relies on an insight that applies universally, one that’s frequently paid lip service in the West but even more frequently lost sight of. Anthropologist Margaret Mead captures the idea in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa, writing, “The children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”4 People fond of spouting this truism today usually intend to communicate something diametrically opposite to its actual meaning, with the suggestion being that anyone who accepts rival conclusions must have been duped by unscrupulous teachers. However, the crux of the insight is that education should not focus on conclusions at all. Thinking is not about memorizing and being able to recite facts and propositions. Thinking is a process. It relies on knowledge to be sure, but knowledge alone isn’t sufficient. It also requires skills.

Inuit Children. Photo by UC Berkeley, Department of Geography.

Cognitive psychologists label knowing that and knowing how as declarative and procedural knowledge, respectively.5 Declarative knowledge can be imparted by the more knowledgeable to the less knowledgeable—the earth orbits the sun—but to develop procedural knowledge or skills you need practice. No matter how precisely you explain to someone what goes into riding a bike, for instance, that person has no chance of developing the requisite skills without at some point climbing on and pedaling. Skills require training, which to be effective must incorporate repetition and feedback. 

It’s good to be honest, but should you lie to protect a friend?

What the Inuit understood, perhaps better than most other cultures, is that morality plays out far less in the realm of knowing what than in the realm of knowing how. The adults could simply lecture the children about the evils of getting embroiled in drama, but those children would still need to learn how to manage their own aggressive and retributive impulses. And explaining that the most effective method consists of reframing slights as jokes is fine, but no child can be expected to master the trick on first attempt. So it is with any moral proposition. We tell young children it’s good to share, for instance, but how easy is it for them to overcome their greedy impulses? And what happens when one moral precept runs up against another? It’s good to share a toy sword, but should you hand it over to someone you suspect may use it to hurt another child? Adults face moral dilemmas like this all the time. It’s wrong to cheat on your spouse, but what if your spouse is controlling and threatens to take your children if you file for divorce? It’s good to be honest, but should you lie to protect a friend? There’s no simple formula that applies to the entire panoply of moral dilemmas, and even if there were, it would demand herculean discipline to implement. 

Conservatives are working to impose bans on books they deem inappropriate for school children. Left-leaning citizens are being treated to PC bowdlerizations of a growing list of classic books.

Unfortunately, Western children have a limited range of activities that provide them opportunities to develop their moral skillsets. Perhaps it’s testament to the strength of our identification with our own moral principles that few of us can abide approaches to moral education that are in any regard open-ended. Consider children’s literature. As I write, political conservatives in the U.S. are working to impose bans on books6 they deem inappropriate for school children. Meanwhile, more left-leaning citizens are being treated to PC bowdlerizations7 of a disconcertingly growing8 list of classic books. One side is worried about kids being indoctrinated with life-deranging notions about race and gender. The other is worried about wounding kids’ and older readers’ fragile psyches with words and phrases connoting the inferiority of some individual or group. What neither side appreciates is that stories can’t be reduced to a set of moral propositions, and that what children are taught is of far less consequence than what they practice.

Do children’s books really have anything in common with the playful dramas Briggs observed among the Inuit? What about the fictional stories adults in our culture enjoy? One obvious point of similarity is that stories tend to focus on conflict and feature high-stakes moral dilemmas. The main difference is that reading or watching a story entails passively witnessing the actions of others, as opposed to actively participating in the plots. Nonetheless, the principle of isumaqsayuq comes into play as we immerse ourselves in a good novel or movie. Stories, if they’re at all engaging, cause us to think. They also arouse intense emotions. But what could children and adults possibly be practicing when they read or watch stories? If audiences were simply trying to figure out how to work through the dilemmas faced by the protagonists, wouldn’t the outcome contrived by the author represent some kind of verdict, some kind of lesson? In that case, wouldn’t censors be justified in their efforts at protecting children from the wrong types of lessons? 

What could children possibly be practicing when they read stories? Wouldn’t the outcome contrived by the author represent some kind of verdict or lesson?

To answer these questions, we must consider why humans are so readily held rapt by fictional narratives in the first place. If the events we’re witnessing aren’t real, why do we care enough to devote time and mental resources to them? The most popular stories, at least in Western societies, feature characters we favor engaging in some sort of struggle against characters we dislike—good guys versus bad guys. In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, psychologist Paul Bloom describes a series of experiments9 he conducted with his colleague Karen Wynn, along with their then graduate student Kiley Hamlin. They used what he calls “morality plays” to explore the moral development of infants. In one experiment, the researchers had the babies watch a simple puppet show in which a tiger rolls a ball to one rabbit and then to another. The first rabbit rolls the ball back to the tiger and a game ensues. But the second rabbit steals away with the ball at first opportunity. When later presented with both puppets and encouraged to reach for one to play with, the babies who had witnessed the exchanges showed a strong preference for the one who had played along. What this and several related studies show is that by as early as three months of age, infants start to prefer characters who are helpful and cooperative over those who are selfish and exploitative.

Photo by Natasha Jenny / Unsplash

That such a preference would develop so early and so reliably in humans makes a good deal of sense in light of how deeply dependent each individual is on other members of society. Throughout evolutionary history, humans have had to cooperate to survive, but any proclivity toward cooperation left them vulnerable to exploitation. This gets us closer to the question of what we’re practicing when we enjoy fiction. In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, literary scholar Brian Boyd points out that animals’ play tends to focus on activities that help them develop the skills they’ll need to survive, typically involving behaviors like chasing, fleeing, and fighting. When it comes to what skills are most important for humans to acquire, Boyd explains: 

Even more than other social species, we depend on information about others’ capacities, dispositions, intentions, actions, and reactions. Such “strategic information” catches our attention so forcefully that fiction can hold our interest, unlike almost anything else, for hours at a stretch.10

Fiction, then, can be viewed as a type of imaginative play that activates many of the same evolved cognitive mechanisms as gossip, but without any real-world stakes. This means that when we’re consuming fiction, we’re not necessarily practicing to develop equanimity in stressful circumstances as do the Inuit; we’re rather honing our skills at assessing people’s proclivities and weighing their potential contributions to our group. Stories, in other words, activate our instinct, while helping us to develop the underlying skillset, for monitoring people for signals of selfish or altruistic tendencies. The result of this type of play would be an increased capacity for cooperation, including an improved ability to recognize and sanction individuals who take advantage of cooperative norms without contributing their fair share. 

Ethnographic research into this theory of storytelling is still in its infancy, but the anthropologist Daniel Smith and his colleagues have conducted an intensive study11 of the role of stories among the Agta, a hunter-gatherer population in the Philippines. They found that 70 percent of the Agta stories they collected feature characters who face some type of social dilemma or moral decision, a theme that appears roughly twice as often as interactions with nature, the next most common topic. It turned out, though, that separate groups of Agta invested varying levels of time and energy in storytelling. The researchers saw this as an opportunity to see what the impact of a greater commitment to stories might be. In line with the evolutionary account laid out by Boyd and others, the groups that valued storytelling more outperformed the other groups in economic games that demand cooperation among the players. This would mean that storytelling improves group cohesion and coordination, which would likely provide a major advantage in any competition with rival groups. A third important finding from this study is that the people in these groups knew who the best storytellers were, and they preferred to work with these talented individuals on cooperative endeavors, including marriage and childrearing. This has obvious evolutionary implications. 

Remarkably, the same dynamics at play in so many Agta tales are also prominent in classic Western literature. When literary scholar Joseph Carroll and his team surveyed thousands of readers’ responses to characters in 200 novels from authors like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, they found that people see in them the basic dichotomy between altruists and selfish actors. They write: 

Antagonists virtually personify Social Dominance—the self-interested pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. In these novels, those ambitions are sharply segregated from prosocial and culturally acquisitive dispositions. Antagonists are not only selfish and unfriendly but also undisciplined, emotionally unstable, and intellectually dull. Protagonists, in contrast, display motive dispositions and personality traits that exemplify strong personal development and healthy social adjustment. They are agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open to experience.12

Interestingly, openness to experience may be only loosely connected to cooperativeness and altruism, just as humor is only tangentially related to peacefulness among the Inuit. However, being curious and open-minded ought to open the door to the appreciation of myriad forms of art, including different types of literature, leading to a virtuous cycle. So, the evolutionary theory, while focusing on cooperation, leaves ample room for other themes, depending on the cultural values of the storytellers.

Photo by João Rafael / Unsplash

In a narrow sense then, cooperation is what many, perhaps most, stories are about, and our interest in them depends to some degree on our attraction to more cooperative, less selfish, individuals. We obsessively track the behavior of our fellow humans because our choices of who to trust and who to team up with are some of the most consequential in our lives. This monitoring compulsion is so powerful that it can be triggered by opportunities to observe key elements of people’s behavior—what they do when they don’t know they’re being watched—even when those people don’t exist in the real world. But what keeps us reading or watching once we’ve made our choices of which characters to root for? And, if one of the functions of stories is to help us improve our social abilities, what mechanism provides the feedback necessary for such training to be effective? 

Fiction can be viewed as a type of imaginative play that activates many of the same evolved cognitive mechanisms as gossip, but without any real-world stakes.

In Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, literary scholar William Flesch theorizes that our moment-by-moment absorption in fictional plots can be attributed to our desire to see cooperators rewarded and exploiters punished. Citing experiments that showed participants were willing to punish people they had observed cheating other participants—even when the punishment came at a cost13 to the punishers— Flesch argues that stories offer us opportunities to demonstrate our own impulse to enforce norms of fair play. Within groups, individual members will naturally return tit for tat when they’ve been mistreated. For a norm of mutual trust to take hold, however, uninvolved third parties must also be willing to step in to sanction violators. Flesch calls these third-party players “strong reciprocators” because they respond to actions that aren’t directed at them personally. He explains that 

the strong reciprocator punishes or rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator.14

His insight here is that we don’t merely attend to people’s behavior in search of clues to their disposition. We also watch to make sure good and bad alike get their just deserts. And the fact that we can’t interfere in the unfolding of a fictional plot doesn’t prevent us from feeling that we should. Sitting on the edge of your seat, according to this theory, is evidence of your readiness to step in.

It doesn’t matter that a story is fictional if a central reason for liking it is to signal to others that we’re the type of person who likes the type of person portrayed in that story.

Another key insight emerging from Flesch’s work is that humans don’t merely monitor each other’s behavior. Rather, since they know others are constantly monitoring them, they also make a point of signaling that they possess desired traits, including a disposition toward enforcing cooperative norms. Here we have another clue to why we care about fictional characters and their fates. It doesn’t matter that a story is fictional if a central reason for liking it is to signal to others that we’re the type of person who likes the type of person portrayed in that story. Reading tends to be a solitary endeavor, but the meaning of a given story paradoxically depends in large part on the social context in which it’s discussed. We can develop one-on-one relationships with fictional characters for sure, but part of the enjoyment we get from these relationships comes from sharing our enthusiasm and admiration with nonfictional others. 

Children who read Harry Potter discuss which House the Sorting Hat would place them in, but you don’t hear many of them enthusiastically talking about Voldemort murdering Muggles.

This brings us back to the question of where feedback comes into the social training we get from fiction. One feedback mechanism relies on the comprehensibility and plausibility of the plot. If a character’s behavior strikes us as arbitrary or counter to their personality as we’ve assessed it, then we’re forced to think back and reassess our initial impressions—or else dismiss the story as poorly conceived. A character’s personality offers us a chance to make predictions, and the plot either confirms or disproves them. However, Flesch’s work points to another type of feedback that’s just as important. The children at the center of Inuit playful dramas receive feedback from the adults in the form of laughter and mockery. They learn that if they take the dramas too seriously and thus get agitated, then they can expect to be ridiculed. Likewise, when we read or watch fiction, we gauge other audience members’ reactions, including their reactions to our own reactions, to see if those responses correspond with the image of ourselves we want to project. In other words, we can try on traits and aspects of an identity by expressing our passion for fictional characters who embody them. The outcome of such experimentation isn’t determined solely by how well the identity suits the individual fan, but also by how well that identity fits within the wider social group. 

We obsessively track the behavior of our fellow humans because our choices of who to trust and who to team up with are some of the most consequential in our lives.

Parents worried that their children’s minds are being hijacked by ideologues will hardly be comforted by the suggestion that teachers and peers mitigate the impact of any book they read. Nor will those worried that their children are being inculcated with more or less subtle forms of bigotry find much reassurance in the idea that we’re given to modeling15 our own behavior on that of the fictional characters we admire. Consider, however, the feedback children receive from parents who respond to the mere presence of a book in a school library with outrage. What do children learn from parents’ concern that single words may harm or corrupt them? 

Kids are graduating high school with historically unprecedented rates of depression and anxiety.

Today, against a backdrop of increasing vigilance and protectiveness among parents, kids are graduating high school and moving on to college or the workforce with historically unprecedented rates of depression16 and anxiety,17 having had far fewer risky but rewarding experiences18 such as dating, drinking alcohol, getting a driver’s license, and working for pay. It’s almost as though the parents who should be helping kids learn to work through difficult situations by adopting a playful attitude have themselves become so paranoid and humorless that the only lesson they manage to impart is that the world is a dangerous place, one young adults with their fragile psyches can’t be trusted to navigate on their own.

Even pre-verbal infants are able to pick out the good guys from the bad.

Parents should, however, take some comfort from the discovery that even pre-verbal infants are able to pick out the good guys from the bad. As much as young Harry Potter fans discuss which Hogwarts House the Sorting Hat would place them in, you don’t hear19 many of them talking enthusiastically about how cool it was when Voldemort killed all those filthy Muggles. The other thing to keep in mind is that while some students may embrace the themes of a book just because the teacher assigned it, others will reject them for the same reason. It depends on the temperament of the child and the social group they hope to achieve status in.

Should parents let their kids read just anything? We must acknowledge that books, like playful dramas, need to be calibrated to the maturity levels of the readers. However, banning books deemed dangerous deprives children not only of a new perspective. It deprives them of an opportunity to train themselves for the difficulties they’ll face in the upcoming stages of their lives. If you’re worried your child might take the wrong message from a story, you can make sure you’re around to provide some of your own feedback on their responses. Maybe you could even introduce other books to them with themes you find more congenial. Should we censor words or images—or cease publication of entire books—that denigrate individuals or groups? Only if we believe children will grow up in a world without denigration. Do you want your children’s first encounter with life’s ugliness to occur in the wild, as it were, or as they sit next to you with a book spread over your laps? 

What should we do with great works by authors guilty of terrible acts? What about mostly good characters who sometimes behave badly? What happens when the bad guy starts to seem a little too cool? These are all great prompts for causing thought and arousing emotions. Why would we want to take these training opportunities away from our kids? It’s undeniable that books and teachers and fellow students and, yes, even parents themselves really do influence children to some degree. That influence, however, may not always be in the intended direction. Parents who devote more time and attention to their children’s socialization can probably improve their chances of achieving desirable ends. However, it’s also true that the most predictable result of any effort at exerting complete control over children’s moral education is that their social development will be stunted.

On February 6 of this year, the Presidents of three evolution/ecology societies (the Society for the Study of Evolution [SSE], the American Society of Naturalists [ASN], and the Society of Systematic Biologists [SSB]) put a letter on the SSE website. It was a reaction to a Trump executive order about the definition of sex, and the “tri-societies” statement asserted that sex is not binary (in ANY species), but was a multidimensional multifactoral “biological construct”.  I archived the letter here because I had a feeling that it would cause trouble.

It did. But first, read it below.  It was written, of course, as a kind of virtue-flaunting exercise to placate those who don’t feel that they are either “male” or “female” (“nonbinary” people). But in so doing, the three Societies promulgated a gross distortion of what many (I won’t say “most”, since I don’t know) biologists conceive of as the definition of sex, which is based on gamete size and is close to being binary as it comes. I’ve bolded bits of it below, bits that conflate sex and gender, throw in “lived experience” to add to the confusion, and claim that the nonbimodality of sex “is a hallmark of biological species,” implying that in all animals and plants the definition of sex is far more than bimodal.

Note that the members of these three societies were not polled about the so-called “scientific consensus” they assert; this is a diktat from the Presidents. Voilà: the original “tri-societies” letter:

President Donald J Trump
Washington, DC Members of the US Congress Washington, DC February 5, 2025

RE: Scientific Understanding of Sex and GenderDear President Trump and Members of the US Congress,

As scientists, we write to express our concerns about the Executive Order “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”. That Order states first, that “there are two sexes…[which] are not changeable”. The Order goes on to state that sex is determined at conception and is based on the size of the gamete that the resulting individual will produce. These statements are contradicted by extensive scientific evidence.

Scientific consensus defines sex in humans as a biological construct that relies on a combination of chromosomes, hormonal balances, and the resulting expression of gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. There is variation in all these biological attributes that make up sex. Accordingly, sex (and gendered expression) is not a binary trait. While some aspects of sex are bimodal, variation along the continuum of male to female is well documented in humans through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genetic composition at conception does not define one’s identity. Rather, sex and gender result from the interplay of genetics and environment. Such diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans.

We note that you state that “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale and trust in the government itself”. We agree with this statement. However, the claim that the definition of sex and the exclusion of gender identity is based on the best available science is false. Our three scientific societies represent over 3500 scientists, many of whom are experts on the variability that is found in sexual expression throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. More information explaining why sex lies along a continuum can be found here. If you wish to speak to one of our scientists, please contact any of the societies listed below.

Carol Boggs, PhD
President
Society for the Study of Evolution
president@evolutionsociety.org

Daniel Bolnick, PhD
President
American Society of Naturalists

Jessica Ware, PhD
President
Society of Systematic Biologists
president@systematicbiologists.org

You can see all my posts about the resulting kerfuffle here.  In short, intiially about twenty of us wrote to the three societies objecting to the letter’s scientific contentions. Eventually 125 people connected with evolution appended their names to the letter and were willing to make their objections public (see here). Richard Dawkins also got into the fray, and both he and I discovered independently that the three Presidents who signed the letter actually act as if sex were binary in their own published research. Further, two former Presidents of the SSE also publicly disagreed with the characterization of biological sex given above.

Finally, our letter signed by 125 people asked for an answer, and although we got one from the societies, we were also told we couldn’t make it public. So be it, but I did characterize the answer here, and the societies largely conceded our points. As I wrote:

. . . . this time we asked for a response and got one, signed by all three Presidents.  I can’t reprint it because we didn’t ask for permission [we later did but were refused], but some of its gist is in the response below from Luana [Maroja]. I will say that they admitted that they think they’re in close agreement with us (I am not so sure!), that their letter wasn’t properly phrased, that some of our differences come from different semantic interpretations of words like “binary” and “continuum”(nope), and that they didn’t send the letter anyway because a federal judge changed the Executive Order on sex (this didn’t affect our criticisms). At any rate, the tri-societies letter is on hold because the organizations are now concerned with more serious threats from the Trump Administration, like science funding.

It’s still on hold, but now they’ve taken it down (see below).

I closed my post this way:

I end by saying that scientific societies need not be “institutionally neutral” when they are dealing with issues that affect the mission of the societies, as the definition of sex surely does. But what’s not okay is for the societies to distort “scientific consensus” in the interest of ideology. I have no idea if the Presidents of these societies really believe what they said (as Dawkins has pointed out, all three Presidents use a binary notion of sex in their own biological work), but something is deeply wrong when you use one notion of sex in your own science and yet deny that notion when you’re telling politicians what scientists “really believe.”

It’s just wrong when three evolution societies give the public a distorted view of how biologists define “sex”, and even more wrong when they do so because they are motivated not by the search for truth but to cater to a certain ideology.

As this sad drama draws to an end, I was just informed that, after several months, the three societies have taken down their misguided diktat.  Go to this SSE website and you’ll see this note:

As they say, “a revised version is in progress and will be posted shortly.”  I look forward to the revised definition of sex!  I also note that, as far as I know, no members of the three Societies have been informed that the letter was removed (they were told that the letter was posted, but only several weeks after it went up).

I’m posting this simply as a public service, to inform members of the Societies, and others following kerfuffles about the definition of sex, that the letter was finally taken down and will be replaced. The silver lining is that although I found the original letter embarrassing to science–and just another reason for people not to trust science–the Societies are rethinking what they say about sex.  However, I doubt that the replacement letter is going to emphasize the bimodality of sex as it is defined by many biologists.  After all, the Societies have to be ideologically correct, don’t they?

h/t: Luana Maroja (who did nearly all the heavy lifting of writing responses, gathering signatures, and so on.

Neutrinos have always been hard to explain – and now the detection of one so energetic it shouldn't exist may help illuminate the strangest corners of the cosmos

Nothing wows new observers like seeing Saturn for the first time. I always check out the ringed planet if it's visible, and telescopes down the line at any star party will invariably be pointed Saturn-ward to a chorus of ‘oh’s’ and ‘ah’s’…. but 2025 gives you another reason to gaze at Saturn, as its largest moon Titan completes a series of rare shadow transits.

Laboratory measurements of crushed quartz suggest earthquakes generate huge volumes of hydrogen underground, a potential source of energy for life below the surface – and people above it

Early humans had almost no hope of surviving severe burns, so evolution may have prioritised the selection of genes that heal mild ones, which could be affecting modern medicine

Men who were embodying female avatars via virtual reality felt anger and disgust when catcalled, which could change the behaviour of some perpetrators

The UK government's Redbox AI chatbot is being used by thousands of civil servants, but a lack of transparency about exactly how they are using it has experts concerned

RFK Jr.’s recent speech about autism has sparked a lot of deserved anger. But like many things in life, it’s even more complicated than you think it is, and this is a good opportunity to explore some of the issues surrounding this diagnosis.

While the definition has shifted over the years (like most medical diagnoses) autism is currently considered a fairly broad spectrum sharing some underlying neurological features. At the most “severe” end of the spectrum (and to show you how fraught this issue is, even the use of the term “severe” is controversial) people with autism (or autism spectrum disorder, ASD) can be non-verbal or minimally verbal, have an IQ <50, and require full support to meet their basic daily needs. At the other end of the spectrum are extremely high-functioning individuals who are simply considered to be not “neurotypical” because they have a different set of strengths and challenges than more neurotypical people. One of the primary challenges is to talk about the full spectrum of ASD under one label. The one thing it is safe to say is that RFK Jr. completely failed this challenge.

What our Health and Human Services Secretary said was that normal children:

“regressed … into autism when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”

This is classic RFK Jr. – he uses scientific data like the proverbial drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination. Others have correctly pointed out that he begins with his narrative and works backward (like a lawyer, because that is what he is).  That narrative is solidly in the sweet-spot of the anti-vaccine narrative on autism, which David Gorski spells out in great detail here. RFK said:

“So I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether you call it an epidemic, a tsunami, or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don’t understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environmental or risk factors. “

In RFK’s world, autism is a horrible disease that destroys children and families and is surging in such a way that there must be an “environmental” cause (wink, wink – we know he means vaccines). But of course RFK gets the facts predictable wrong, or at least exaggerated and distorted precisely to suit his narrative. It’s a great example of how to support a desired narrative by cherry picking and then misrepresenting facts. To use another metaphor, it’s like making one of those mosaic pictures out of other pictures. He may be choosing published facts but he arranges them into a false and illusory picture. RFK cited a recent study that showed that about 25% of children with autism were in the “profound” category. (That is another term recently suggested to refer to autistic children who are minimally verbal or have an IQ < 50. This is similar to “level 3” autism or “severe” autism, but with slightly different operational cutoffs.)

First, there are a range of estimates as to what percentage of autistic people would fit into the profound category, and he is choosing the high end. Also most of the people in that category don’t have the limitations that RFK listed. A 2024 study, for example, which relied upon surveys of parents of children with autism found that only 10% fell into the “severe” category. Even within this category, only 67% had difficulty with dressing and bathing, or about 7% of children with autism. I am not trying to minimize the impact of the challenges and limitations of those at the severe end of the spectrum, just putting the data into context. What RFK was doing, which is what antivaxxers have been doing for decades, is trying to scare parents with a very specific narrative – perfect young children will get vaccinated and then regress into horrible autism that will destroy their lives and your families.

What is regression? It is a loss of previous milestones or abilities. The exact rate in severe autism is unclear, ranging from 20-40%, but the 20% figure is considered more reliable. In any case, RFK misrepresents this as well. Regression does not mean that a 2 year old child without autism develops severe autism – it means that a child with autism loses some function. Much of the time regression refers to social skills, with autistic children finding it more difficult to engage socially as they age (which can simply be adaptive and not require neurological regression). Language regression occurs but is less common.  Again we see that he uses a piece of the picture, exaggerates it, and then uses it to imply a reality that does not exist.

He then does it again with the “surge” of autism. Yes, autism diagnoses have been increasing for decades. At first (during the 1990s) you could make a correlation between increasing vaccines in the childhood schedule and increasing autism diagnostic rates. This was always just a spurious correlation (my favorite example is that organic food sales track better with autism diagnoses than does vaccination). But after about 2000, when thimerosal was removed from the childhood vaccine schedule in the US, autism rates continued to increase. The correlation completely broke down. Antivaxxers desperately tried to explain away this breakdown in the correlation, with increasingly ridiculous special pleading, and now it seems they just ignore this fact.

RFK is just ignoring this fact, and just making the more general observation that autism rates are increasing, which they are. But this increase does not fit his scary narrative for at least two reasons. First, as I and others have pointed out, there is copious evidence in the literature that much of this apparent increase is due to changing diagnostic patterns. At the severe end of the spectrum there is some diagnostic substitution – in past decades children who are now diagnosed with autism would have been diagnosed with mental retardation or something else less specific or just different. At the high functioning end of the spectrum children with autism likely would not have been diagnosed with anything at all. I have explored this issue at length before – the more carefully you look (applying the same diagnostic criteria across different age cohorts), the less autism is increasing. It is also true that autism is dominantly a genetic disorder, and that there are very early signs of autism, even in  six month olds, and perhaps even at the fetal stage.

But also the dramatic increase in autism diagnoses is mostly at the mild end of the spectrum. There is only a small increase of profound autism. So again, RFK’s narrative breaks down when you look at the actual scientific facts. He says normal children regress into profound autism and this is surging. But that is wrong. He is exploiting the fact that we use the same term, autism, to refer to profound autism and what was previously called “aspergers syndrome” but is now just considered part of ASD.

All of this is sufficient evidence to conclude that RFK is incompetent to serve as HHS secretary, he does not understand medical science and rather makes a lawyer’s case for extreme conspiracy theories designed to scare the public into making bad medical choices.

But there is another side to this story (that has nothing to do with RFK). In our effort not to pathologize people who are simply atypical, are we overlooking people who actually have a severe disability, or at least making them and their parents feel that way? I’ll explore this side of the question in my next post.

The post How Should We Talk About Autism first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A study published last week suggests that, if vaccine uptake continues to decline, measles will soon be endemic again in the US. It's just part of how RFK Jr. is making America sicker again.

The post Hello measles, my old friend: The return of previously vanquished vaccine-preventable diseases first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

NASA's Psyche mission launched in 2023 and has now successfully demonstrated that laser technology can transmit high-bandwidth data across millions of kilometres in space, making it promising for communications from Mars. However, researchers simulating Martian conditions found that while this optical communication works well under normal circumstances, performance degrades during dustier periods and fails completely during global dust storms.

Yep, it’s time for this feature again. (I have been lax in accumulating words and phrases). Note that I am not trying to change the English language here—only saying what irritates me, and why. Here are four examples, some of which I may have kvetched about before:

Advancement.  NO! NO! NO!  “Advances” has always been sufficient before, so why this gussying-up of a good word? I think the “-ment” suffix is intended to make the speaker sound more erudite, though perhaps people aren’t aware that “advances” is a perfectly good word.

Dudebro.  This word simply means “males I don’t like”, either referring to all males or a specified group. Either way, it is offensive and wouldn’t be tolerated if there was a similar word for women (there probably are, but I’m not going to suggest any.)

“It is what it is.”  This seems to me, on the surface, a redundancy. Things are what they are. Yes, of course! I suppose it could be construed as meaning, “These things can’t be changed,” but why not use that phrase instead of one that’s either ambiguous or redundant.  It also implies that what is cannot be changed, which stifles progress.

“That is so niche.”  This clearly means “this is too specific” in some sense. But “niche” is a noun, not an adjective.  I’m sure it’s too late to stop this one, just as it’s impossible to stop “genius” being used as an adjective instead of a noun, as in “here are ten genius hacks for your closet”.

Ever since the City of Chicago dropped the charges against 26 pro-Palestinian students and two faculty arrested on our campus for trespassing, I’ve wondered whether mayor Brandon Johnson, elected in 2023, has some sympathies for Palestine contrasted with some opprobrium for Israel.  (The city also refused to send Chicago cops to take down our encampment, so it had to be done by University police, who in the end did a great job.)

The Instagram post below was put up by CAIR Chicago (the Council for American-Islamic Relations), showing the mayor donning a keffiyeh to celebrate Arab Heritage Month (this month of April),  Now keffiyehs of various types been used by Arabs for centuries, mostly as headdresses but sometimes as shawls. However, this particular black-and-white garment is Palestinian, and, as CAIR surely knows —and Brandon Johnson should have known—is associated with Palestinian resistance, beginning with Yasser Arafat’s frequent wearing of it, including while appearing in front of the United Nations (see the history of the garment and its symbolism at this Guardian article).  As Wikipedia says:

The black and white keffiyeh’s prominence increased during the 1960s with the beginning of the Palestinian resistance movement and its adoption by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by CAIR-Chicago (@cairchicago)

Johnson, who is not a popular mayor (see below) has been accused before of “disrespecting” Chicago’s Jewish community, though I didn’t know about that. But the actions of the City of Chicago with respect to illegal activities of Palestinian protestors, and the city’s refusal to act, combined with the photo above, makes me wonder about Johnson’s feelings about Israel. (One instance: when pro-Pals blocked Lake Shore Drive, our main artery along the Lake, the city did nothing.)

To be fair, I did find this picture of Johnson accepting a yarmulka from Jews before he was elected, but of course the article says that he was “courting the Jewish vote”.  I don’t think he put it on, though!

I don’t think I need worry much longer about a possible anti-Semite being mayor, though, for, as I said, Johnson is not at all well liked by Chicagoans of all stripes. As Wikipedia notes:

Johnson is considered to be a political progressive. His term as mayor has been marked with low approval ratings, with only 6.6% of Chicago voters expressing favorable views of him in a February 2025 poll.

As for CAIR, well, it’s been accused of touting antisemitism many times before; I’ll give just three links: here, here, and here (h/t Malgorzata). A few quotes, one from each source (in order):

. . . . key CAIR leaders often traffic in openly antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric. Some of CAIR’s leaders, such as Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, were previously involved in a now-defunct organization that openly supported Hamas and, according to the U.S. government, functioned as its “propaganda apparatus.”

and

The White House strongly condemned recent comments from the leader of a top American-Islamic group who said he was “happy to see” Gazans invading Israel on October 7.

The comments came from Council on American-Islamic Relations Director Nihad Awad at a conference two weeks ago, when – according to a video posted on X, by DC-based Middle East Media Research Institute – he said, “I was happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land and walk free into their land, which they were not allowed to walk in.”

“We condemn these shocking, Antisemitic statements in the strongest terms,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement shared with CNN.

Bates echoed President Joe Biden in calling the October 7 attacks “abhorrent” and “unadulterated evil,” noting that October 7 “was the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust.”

and

Two years in the making, this new book is the product of extensive meticulous research into the most dangerous Islamist political group in the U.S. today—CAIR. It is dangerous because it was created as a front group for Hamas in 1993—in a secret meeting of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas leaders, including CAIR’s current leader Nihad Awad, held in a downtown Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia in 1993, a meeting the FBI wiretapped.

Since its corporate inception in 1994, CAIR has been the number one promoter of incendiary vile antisemitic tropes and conspiracies in the U.S. by any “mainstream” Islamist group. I use the word mainstream in quotations because CAIR has successfully duped virtually the entire media establishment—many of whom have willingly collaborated—into portraying this Hamas front group as a “Muslim civil rights organization.” CAIR is soaked with antisemitism, yet we hear NOT a word about this reality from the gatekeepers.

Yes, the news is thin today, and I will let other people rail about Trump, as I’ve done my share in the last week or so. Instead, how about a happier topic: books?  I have just finished two books and, as I’ve said, I’m reading another.  I am glad to say I can recommend them all for your consdieration.

The first one was Walter Isaacson’s 2004 biography of Benjamin Franklin, which you can find on Amazon, with the long (586 pp.) paperback now only $6.66 (Satan’s number). Click cover to go to the site:

I don’t know how Isaacson manages to pump out these long biographies, which are packed with research and scholarship (though written very well), so quickly. But he does. I’ve read two of his before: his biographies of Steve Jobs (2011) and of Leonardo da Vinci (2018).  Both were good, but the biography of Leonardo I think is a world-class piece of writing. If you must read one of these, start with that. Isaacson clearly has a penchant for very smart men, preferably polymaths like Franklin and Leonardo. But I note that he’s also written a biography of Albert Einstein (2008); I haven’t read that one because I’ve read about three other biographies of the man.

You can get all four as a set of “The Genius Biographies” for $51, and that’s over 2000 pages of enjoyment and education.

Like Leonardo, Franklin was also a polymath: he “discovered” and worked out the properties of electricity, helped write both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, invented bifocals, set up the American postal system, and founded the University of Pennsylvania. As a superb diplomat, he helped bring an end to the Revolutionary War on favorable term for America, and also served as what then constituted the governorship of Pennsylvania. Moving back and forth between the U.S. and France, as well as throughout America, his travels equipped him well to contribute to founding documents that all our colonies were able to sign.

Further, Franklin was a humble man, dressed in ordinary garb, not foisting himself on others, largely free from arrogance, and trying to live by his famous 13 “necessary virtues” he compiled when  young.  He largely succeeded in living up to those standards, though he was a bit wobbly on “temperance”, winding up with gout as well as kidney stones. Yet despite his ill health in later life, he was the prime mover in the Treaty of Paris (1783), requiring delicate skills at negotiating simultaneously with France, the nascent U.S., and Britain. The only palpable flaw that I could detect in him was his gross neglect of his wife, whom he left for 14 of the last 17 years of his life, and was not there when she died. Franklin himself had a long life, expiring at 84.

I’d recommend this highly, especially if you know little of Franklin. You’ll be impressed at his scientific skills: though he wasn’t a theoretician, he was great at thinking up hypothesis and good at testing them. Its length makes it a good book to take on a trip, but if you haven’t read his biography of Leonardo, start with that one.

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I’ve read quite a few books on the Holocaust, but this one, byJózsef Debreczeni, may be the best, outstripping even the famous books of Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel (Night and If This Is a Man) . Up until recently, however, it was obscure, and, though written in 1950, it was available only in Hungarian, and wasn’t translated into other languages, including English, until 2023. I believe a reader suggested it in an earlier “books” post on this site. Click below to find it at Amazon:

What makes this book different from those of Wiesel and Levi is, curiously, its lack of analysis and of philosophizing.  Night is also semi-fictional, so you can’t tell which episodes were made up, though it’s largely true.  In contrast, Cold Crematorium merely describes what happened to Debreczeni in the Lager: what life was like as inmate in three different concentration camps, including Auschwitz.  He was in the camps for only about a year, but that was nearly enough to do him in. From Wikipedia:

The winter of 1944–1945 was harsh, with heavy snows and extreme temperatures. [Dobreczeni] contracted diarrhea, and by January 20 he weighed 35 kg (77 lb). Thanks to a friend who brought him extra food, he survived. He subsequently contracted typhus but survived with the help of a camp doctor. Soviet forces liberated the camp in May 1945, and he recovered at a Soviet hospital.

I cannot begin to describe how grim the life in the camps was, especially at Auschwitz, but he doesn’t spare the reader the gory details. One of them: everyone constantly had diarrhea because of the diet of soup made with polluted water and almost no contents, and because the “toilet man” with the bucket didn’t come around fast enough, everything was covered with shit, which eventually piled up on the floor above the ankles. The intricate way prisoners developed a black market in food and tobacco to survive is amazing.

I like this book because, more than the other books, it’s just a graphic and un-fictional presentation of day-to-day life in a concentration camp. This shows you how horrible the Holocaust really was, and how inhumane were the people who engineered and implemented it.  It doesn’t discuss whether all of us have the potential to become Nazis, and doesn’t go into depth about how the Holocaust affected the author after he was liberated. The book simply ends with the liberation.  One trigger warning: it is very graphic and disturbing, but also the only book I know that makes you see what it was like to be an inmate.

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Finally, I am 110 pages into the book below, which I mentioned a few days ago (click cover to go to Amazon site).  I recommend it, at least what I’ve read of it so far. It’s an analysis of cancel culture by two employees of FIRE (Schlott is also a journalist). As I said the other day,

This extremism and demonization is in fact the subject of a good book I’m reading now: Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind , which takes up Great Untruth #3 of Haidt and Lukianoff’s earlier bestseller The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Let me remind you of all three of those Untruths whose embrace by the young is, Haidt and Lukianoff argued, responsible for a lot of turmoil, divisiveness, and rancor on and off campus:

1.) What doesn’t kill you make you weaker

2.) Always trust your feelings

3.) Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

It’s a lot like Lukianoff’s talk that I heard in Los Angeles a couple of months ago, recounting horrific tales of cancellation coming from both the Right and the Left. Right now I’m reading about those instances, and haven’t yet encountered the authors’ solutions, which come at the end of the book. We all recognize divisive nature of politics (and life!) in America, as well as the fact that for many, the validity of social/political arguments now seems to rest largely on whether the person who makes them is on your side (“good”) or not (“bad”).  I’ll give an overall assessment when I’m done.

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you’re reading or what you’ve read lately, preferably dwelling on books you’d recommend. I’ve found many good books by following readers’ suggestions, and so I hope to make this a regular feature. Put your readings in the comments!

It’s Sunday, which is John Avise photo day. John’s new series takes us through the dragonflies and damselflies of North America. His notes and captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Dragonflies in North America, Part 2 

This week I continue a series of posts on Dragonflies and Damselflies (taxonomic Order Odonata) that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m going down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Also shown is the state where I took each photo.

Brown Spiketail, Cordulegaster bilineata, female (Georgia):

Brown Spiketail, female sideview (Georgia):

Calico Pennant, Celithemis elisa, mature male (Michigan):

Calico Pennant, young male (Michigan):

Cardinal Meadowhawk, Sympetrum illotum, adult male (British Columbia, Canada):

Cardinal Meadowhawk, mating pair (British Columbia, Canada):

Carolina Saddlebags, Tramea carolina (Florida):

Common Green Darner, Anax junius, male (California):

Common Green Darner, flying (California):

Common Green Darner, pair mating (California):

Common Whitetail, Plathemis lydia, female (Georgia):

Dragonhunter, Hagenius brevistylus (Wisconsin):

I want to remind readers again to avoid over-commenting on threads for reasons I’ve discussed before.  The Roolz on this issue (see here) are often blatantly ignored. Now I don’t enforce them strictly, but I see some folkz commenting over and over again on the same thread, and often making the same point.

If you haven’t yet read the posting guidelines, please do so here or on the left sidebar.  (“Da Roolz”).  At issue:

Thank you.

What kind of spacecraft can be used to explore and study the subsurface lunar environment? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) hopes to address as an international team of researchers discussed the benefits of a mission concept called LunarLeaper, which will be designed to traverse and analyze the various aspects of the lunar subsurface environment, including moon pits and lava tubes.

Since the invention of the telescope, astronomers have been hunting for objects in our Solar System in particular and more recently, for the theorised 9th planet. Observations of Kuiper Belt objects suggest a large object might be lurking in the depths of the Solar System but to date, it hasn’t been directly observed. A team of researchers have analysed infrared sky surveys and found 13 objects that matched the estimated flux and motion of Planet Nine! Further analysis ruled out 12 leaving a single object. Is this Planet Nine?

A few years ago, astronomers discovered an exoplanet orbiting the white dwarf 1856+534 b. Now they've used the mighty JWST to do follow-up observations and made some exciting discoveries. It's definitely a planet and not a brown dwarf, with a temperature of 186 K (-87°C/-125°F) and about 6 times the mass of Jupiter. This makes it the coldest exoplanet ever detected, and it's orbiting in the "forbidden zone," which should have been engulfed during the red giant phase.