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— Michael Shermer

In his March 25, 1965, speech on the steps of the Montgomery, Alabama, capitol building, after a five-day march for civil rights, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously proclaimed: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”¹ Most students of morality have focused on the latter part of that statement—the arc bends. But how do we influence that bending and why does it seem to bend so slowly?

This article provides three possible reasons along with examples: (1) disagreements among scientists and philosophers over facts and values; (2) the multitude of individuals who reject some or all of the results of scientific research; and (3) differences in individuals having differing perceptions of reality. Several suggestions are presented to mitigate these issues so the moral arc can bend more rapidly.

Disagreements About Morality

That there is much disagreement among scholars studying morality should not surprise anyone. Here is how the political scientist and philosopher George Bragues describes the problem (in a review of Science and the Good by James Hunter and Paul Nedelisky):

[D]isagreement still prevails on even the most basic moral questions, despite two and half millennia of reflective effort by Western philosophers. No knock-down argument, no decisive piece of evidence, has yet been produced to firmly establish a theory of ethics.²

Many disagreements separate scientists and philosophers. A major difference centers on these questions: can science and reason serve as the foundation of morality and, more specifically, should science even be involved in questions regarding morality? Can moral questions be tested by the scientific method?

A new breed of scientist—called the new moral scientists—are attempting to revitalize previous efforts to construct a long-sought science of morality.³ These new moral scientists are interested in how innate characteristics interact with cultural and educational factors to influence moral thinking and behavior. They employ the most advanced technology and research methods. They study babies, psychopaths, serial killers, Nazis, and chimpanzees, and they use fMRI scanners, internet surveys, agent-based modeling, and ultimatum games.⁴ Much of their work is focused on the evolutionary origins of instincts, intuitions, predispositions, and neural correlates of morality. Jonathan Haidt has called this “the ‘golden age’ and ‘a new synthesis in ethics…an age of consilience’ among social psychologists, cognitive neuroscientist, primatologists, developmental psychologists, experimental philosophers and economists.”⁵

In Science and the Good, Hunter and Nedelisky disagree with these new moral scientists, as evident in the book’s subtitle: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality.⁶ They argue that the empirically-derived moral concepts being put forth by the new moral scientists leave out too much of what true morality is about. They believe that moral concepts that capture real morality derived from history, literature, poetry, philosophy, sociology, and religion are not empirically detectable. They believe that the new moral scientists have produced only a descriptive science of thought and behavior that really says nothing prescriptive about how we should act.

The sociologist Gabriel Abend argues that the modern technology and research methods used by some neuroscientists and psychologists have restricted their research to ideas of what he terms thin morality, such as social norms, rather than what he calls thick morality—concepts such as dignity, integrity, cruelty, and exploitation.⁷ He believes that studying such things as innate and universal moral concepts is easier than studying thick concepts.

The psychologist Marc Hauser also rejects the idea that scientific reasoning can lead to a science of morality, because humans have an evolutionary-based instinct that determines moral judgments independent of experience, gender, education, culture, or religion.⁸ The philosopher and bioethicist Brian Earp contends that science, whose role it is to describe nature and develop laws about the workings of nature, cannot inform us about right and wrong, because questions about how we should live fall outside the domain of objective science.⁹ The philosopher of mind Jan Slaby takes a similar view in his review of books by the new moral scientists, concluding that he could find little factual grounding to support many of the value judgments these authors presented.¹⁰

Michael Shermer especially has been bombarded with criticism for his views expressed in his book, The Moral Arc.¹¹ Shermer defines morality as “how we think and act toward other moral agents in terms of whether our thoughts and actions are right or wrong with regard to their survival and flourishing.” (Italics in the original.) He states that his aim is to show that the moral arc bends toward justice, and that it can be traced through empirical data from many lines of inquiry. He contends that people are more moral than ever, and that most moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular forces, the most important of which have been science and reason. Shermer believes that there is an empirical basis of morality by saying that most people would rather live and flourish than to suffer and die. He claims that these preferences are universal and part of human nature and, therefore, are open to empirical study. Science and reason can not only play a major role in determining moral values, but they can also provide provisional moral principles that serve as a foundation for a more peaceful and civilized society. Examples of the types of disagreements philosophers and writers have with Shermer’s views include the following.

Marc Hauser agrees with Shermer that the moral arc might be guided by reason, but he is opposed to the idea that the moral arc has been and will continue to be guided by scientific evidence.¹² In her review of The Moral Arc, Sally Satel argues that science can’t determine values, but can only find better ways to achieve outcomes.¹³ By doing so, however, science cannot determine which outcomes people will desire, however. Satel takes Shermer to task for presenting definitions and concepts that depend on philosophical issues rather than empirical data.

Massimo Pigliucci argues that science can study evolutionary-based instincts to see where they come from, and that science can determine how our brain functions when making moral decisions, but that only moral philosophers can determine when moral reasoning is logically sound.¹⁴

Shermer has replied to these criticisms on a number of occasions,^15,16,17,18 and in a forthcoming book he presents his most comprehensive and empirically-based rejoinder to his critics.¹⁹ Here are several examples of his arguments. He explains how there can be moral facts without reference to divine commands, and he defends the position that the survival and flourishing of individual sentient beings can be the foundation for establishing values and morals. Shermer has been particularly criticized for using philosophical premises as his starting point for scientific arguments, thus violating the Is/Ought Naturalistic Fallacy. He answers this criticism by utilizing what he calls “a public health model of moral science” as an analogy for moral reasoning. Science has made outstanding progress in public health over the past two centuries so that more people in more places are now healthier and long-lived. Therefore, the way something is (diseases cause suffering and death) means that we ought to prevent them using all the medical technologies at our disposal. Analogously, Shermer argues that the way nature is (individuals struggling to survive and flourish in a multi-faceted environment) guides us to the way it ought to be (given a choice, it is more moral to act in a way that enhances the survival and flourishing of other sentient individuals).

Sam Harris has also garnered abundant criticism. In his book The Moral Landscape,²⁰ Harris provides a definition of morality similar to, but not as specific as, Shermer’s. He believes that the only way to understand morality is to find the degree to which actions increase or decrease the “well-being of conscious creatures.” Harris’s concept of well-being includes health, happiness, relationships, and anything else we might value. He argues that questions about moral values can be understood as facts that can be scientifically studied. He goes so far as to say that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.

As with Shermer, Harris is soundly criticized by a number of scientists and philosophers. The cosmologist Sean Carroll, for example, gives three reasons why morality cannot be part of science, and provides three arguments to make his point: (1) there is no single definition of well-being; (2) well-being is not the proper goal of morality; and (3) there's no easy way to combine well-being over different individuals all over the world.²¹ The philosopher Massimo Pigliucci contends that while science has a tangential role, ethical questions are essentially philosophical in nature, not scientific.²² He asserts that Harris’s disregard for this distinction is a disservice to both science and philosophy. Pigliucci particularly upbraids Harris for saying that moral judgments are a kind of fact, and, thus, amenable to scientific inquiry, which he says is a clear violation of Hume’s Is/Ought Problem. Bioethicist Brian D. Earp argues that science cannot tell us what is right or wrong, or how we should live, because these are value judgments that fall outside of the domain of science.²³

Harris has responded to these criticisms.^24,25 Against the criticisms that science has nothing to offer the study of morality, Harris states that morality and values are dependent on conscious minds; that conscious minds and their functions are natural phenomena that can be studied like any other natural phenomena; thus, the study of morality and values falls within the domain of science in its broadest sense. In his response to other major criticisms, Harris explains his arguments against the restrictions imposed upon scientific study of morality by the Is/Ought Problem, and he reiterates his belief that morality can only be understood by determining the extent to which actions increase or decrease the well-being of conscious creatures.

Taken together, these criticisms and retorts, along with debates on related issues, highlight just how much essential disagreement remains among moral scientists and philosophers.

Rejecting Science

A second reason why I believe that the arc bends slowly (and science has trouble making it bend faster) is the extent to which many individuals reject the findings of scientific research. Philosopher Lee McIntyre believes that such rejection poses a lingering problem everywhere.²⁶ For example, in a survey across 23 countries concerning COVID-19 vaccinations, Jeffrey V. Lazarus and his colleagues found that only 75% of respondents were accepting of vaccines.²⁷ The remaining 25% were skeptical of vaccines, stating that they were unsafe, not effective, posed a risk, and/or were being promoted by untrustworthy governments and health officials. Two separate polls showed that between 34% and 44% of Americans believe that no significant global warming had occurred over the last 100 years.²⁸

When a Gallop poll conducted in May 2024 asked respondents about their belief concerning evolution” 71% believed that God played a part, 37% said that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, while 34% believed that humans evolved but that God guided the process. Only 24% said they believe that humans evolved and that God was not involved.²⁹ McIntyre’s book on rejecting science,³⁰ and Shermer’s book on conspiracy theories,³¹ provide additional evidence of scientific findings that many individuals refuse to accept.

The Individual

In The Moral Arc, Michael Shermer insists that the individual is the moral agent, not the community. I want to describe some ideas about the individual harvested from the field of life-span human development that might provide some insight into why the moral arc bends so slowly and why science and reason advocates struggle to speed moral progress. I derived the following definition of development from the findings of a variety of theorists, researchers, and practitioners—behavioral, cognitive, humanistic-perceptual, developmental, neurological, and others:

Development represents the changes over time in the biopsychological structures and functions of the human organism as a result of genetic forces interacting with environmental influences as the individual attempts to adapt to the environment in an effort to survive.

Individual human existence is unitary, so we should view human characteristics as existing along dimensions rather than as dichotomous categories. Humans are biopsychological creatures. I define biological as the physical, hormonal, neuronal aspects of the body that don’t require thought, or even consciousness to function, and are, therefore, not very amenable to learning. I define psychological as those mental processes, both conscious and unconscious (including thought, memories, sense of self, and so forth), that are more susceptible to cultural and educational effects. It is difficult, and, in some cases, impossible, to determine where biological functioning ends and psychological functioning begins. For humans are concerned, there is no psychological without the biological, while from an individual perspective, biological without psychological is meaningless.

The Environment

I use the term environment in this context as anything outside or inside of us with the potential to affect our actions. I divide the environment into four parts, because we interact differently with these features: natural environment (all things not made by people); cultural environment (anything people have created or devised); social environment (people and animals); personal environment (feelings, thoughts, memories, bodily sensations, etc.). Throughout the remainder of this article, I will include to these four divisions as simply parts of the environment.

Survival

Given a unique, developing individual interacting with a varied and constantly-changing environment, the underlying motivational energy of the human individual derives from its built-in, genetically-programmed struggle to survive. For Michael Shermer, survival and flourishing are the cornerstones of his definition of morality. I agree with Shermer about his emphasis on survival, but I want to add another component to his concept. I contend that we should view survival along the biopsychological continuum. It is true that the individual strives to prolong biological existence. It is also true that the individual struggles to protect and preserve a psychological sense of self as well. Psychologists Arthur Combs and Donald Snygg believed that the most basic need of humans is the preservation and development of an adequate “self.”³² The concept of self is as controversial today as it was when Combs and Snygg advocated for it.^33,34 However, there is something happening in our brains that makes us seem to have sense of self or self-consciousness. Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene contends that self-consciousness is part of the higher-order neuronal activity we call consciousness, and that it is bound closely with what he calls “language of thought.”³⁵ Whatever this “self” is, it allows us to talk and think about ourselves and about others.

According to Lee McIntyre, this ability allows us to posit a special identity to ourselves.³⁶ He believes that individuals can find an identity in a political party, a church, a school, their family, their job, or with any other group or institution. Each of us has a physical body that while similar to all others in species-specific ways, is, nonetheless, distinct. Just so, each of us has a unique set of psychological characteristics called the “self” that is just as much a part of us as our physical body.

Adaptation

Biopsychological survival is achieved through adaptation, the dynamic interaction whereby the individual changes the environment and is changed by it. My concept of adaptation is partially derived from Jean Piaget’s concepts of equilibrium, assimilation, and accommodation.³⁷ As newborns are bombarded with environmental information, they begin to construct ideas, categories, beliefs, values, etc., about the world. As they are confronted with new information, they can adjust what they know, or they can transform the new information so it fits into what they already know without making significant change. Because of heritable personality traits, some people tend to develop an experimental approach to environmental information, keeping a portion of their beliefs open to change. Others tend to solidify their beliefs early, making them less likely to adapt to new information and to change their view of the world. Regardless of how we respond to environmental information, we are constantly trying to change the environment to produce biopsychological comfort, safety, and security. This moment-by-moment interaction continues throughout life.

Meaning and Values

As we interact with the environment we are inundated with a myriad of external and internal information. We not only attempt to identify this information; we want to know what it means to us. We determine meaning through an affective valuing process. I contend that we are born with a “stimulus evaluation system” that allows us to determine the degree to which something is enhancing or threating to our biopsychological survival (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: A stimulus is anything in the environment or inside an individual (including thoughts) that impinges upon the individual. Each person judges (places a value on) stimuli as to the degree to which they are enhancing or threatening to his or her biological or psychological survival. Once this judgment is made, the person attempts to move away from threatening things and toward enhancing ones. Valuing is a process. A value is the belief that something is either threatening or enhancing and the individual’s decision about what to do about it. It must be remembered that the degree to which something enhancing or threatening is a function of individual perception.

Dehaene describes it as a specialized process of evolved neural networks that constantly monitor incoming stimuli and assign positive and negative values to them.³⁸ As we grow, mature, and have experiences with the environment, we come to develop a storehouse of affects and information based on personal experiences and what we have been told about things that are threatening or enhancing. Richard Firth-Godbehere, a psychologist who studies emotions, states that these affects “aren’t emotions, but, rather, judgments of value that create pleasant or unpleasant sensations in the body, either making us excited or calming us down.”³⁹

Affective meaning, then, is the worth or value something has for our biopsychological survival. Objects, events, situations, and conscious thoughts are not inherently valuable to us; we must assign value to them. I propose that what we commonly call a value is a belief about whether something is enhancing or threatening to our biological or psychological survival. (Of course, for some biological threats and enhancements, the body acts automatically to deal with them.) Furthermore, a moral value is a belief about what is right or wrong, good or bad. Although humans are born with certain predispositions to develop beliefs we call moral, most moral beliefs are learned like any other type of belief.

Perceived Reality

As we interact over time with our environment, we slowly develop a personal view about what we think the world is like. The philosopher and consciousness researcher Anil Seth calls reality “controlled hallucination,” and that what we perceive is not a true account of reality.⁴⁰ Our brain actively constructs our inner version of what reality is like. According to Seth, “We don't just passively perceive the world. We actively generate it.^”41 The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside out as from the outside in.” Also, because each of us has a slightly different brain and our experiences differ, so our brain-based construction is different.

Neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins calls this our “model of the world,”⁴² while Snygg and Combs label it the “phenomenal field”—our subjective reality and the world of which we are aware.⁴³ I call it “perceived reality.” I would add that perceived reality includes what we believe about ourselves and our relationships to the environment. According to neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, on a moment-to-moment basis, we compare our perceived reality with new information to reshape our world view as well as update our sense of self.⁴⁴

Perceived reality is extremely important for understanding individual behavior, why we value things differently, and why we have varying beliefs about moral behavior. Individual perception of the world affects behavior, and, thus, how well we adapt. Also, it doesn’t matter whether or not something is actually enhancing or threatening to an individual, it’s the person's perception of things that is important. Furthermore, although survival is the basic motivating force in human behavior, individuals may differ as to what constitutes survival. They may have similar goals in mind, (freedom, rights, justice), but differ greatly in how to define them as well as what actions they should use to achieve those goals.

Differences in perceived realities among individuals, and thus groups, can cause conflicts, because what people believe is not just a matter of content, but also a matter of the affect connected to that content—that is, the feelings, emotions, and values bound to objects, events, thoughts, people, ideas. I propose that most conflicts between individuals and groups are, in fact, conflicts between value-laden perceived realities.

I suggest that the moral arc bends slowly, and that science and reason may not be able to make it bend more rapidly, because: (1) differences among scientists and philosophers about what morality is, how to study it, and how it develops; (2) the swarms of science deniers; and (3) differences among perceived realities of individuals about what is enhancing or threatening and about what survival means, how to attain it, and how to preserve and protect it. Taken together, these differences combine to keep the moral arc bending more slowly than any of us would like.

Is there a solution to this conundrum?

Disagreement Among Philosophers and Scientists

Massimo Pigliucci contends that, in spite of the significant differences between science and philosophy, a combination of the two is the best approach for “a more rational and compassionate humanity.”⁴⁵ John Rawls believes that we can teach people to be fair by having them pretend to sit behind a “veil of ignorance” that allows them to ignore who they are and their own personal circumstances.⁴⁶ If scientists and philosophers employ this approach, maybe they could decide to compromise and come up with some agreed-upon definitions in the study of morality. Instead of pressing for a science of morality, would it be possible for scientists to work together with philosophers to develop a “theory of morality” that would include the best of philosophy and science? And, given the findings from empirical studies in neurology, psychology, and child development concerning the evolutionary predispositions toward moral behavior, is it possible that insistence on Hume’s Is/Ought Problem is actually a stumbling block to collaboration?

Shermer makes a very important point related to the concept of morality, namely, we are social creatures and morality has to do with social interactions.⁴⁷ In dealing morally where others are concerned, we must be able to see things from their perspective if we are to foster cooperative and reciprocal behavior. Shermer emphasizes Steven Pinker’s principle of interchangeable perspectives as one avenue to accomplish the goal. This is similar to the Golden Rule, but it’s a fifty-fifty proposition. I like to think of it as the Golden Rule Plus—a sixty-forty perspective, with me taking forty and you taking forty, with both sides being willing to give up more than they receive. This approach might allow scientists and philosophers to more readily cooperate rather than compete in order to achieve more mutually-beneficial outcomes. There are many questions and issues that scientists and philosophers must cooperatively consider if progress is to be made in bending the moral arc.

Dealing with Science Deniers

Lee McIntyre believes that science and reason are important in studying morality, but that science denial is a lingering problem everywhere.⁴⁸ However, he contends that people can be convinced to change their minds based on facts if we understand that emotions are important in people’s decision-making. McIntyre observed that the reason many people distrust science is because science doesn’t make them feel the way their own beliefs do. Research by psychologist Liane Young suggests that at least some moral judgments are driven by emotions.⁴⁹ To change the beliefs of those who deny science, it may be necessary to appeal on an emotional level as well as a cognitive one. Evidence from research by Michael Spezio, Ralph Adolphs, and their colleagues suggest that both information and emotions are required for the formation and modification of beliefs.⁵⁰

This is important, because research suggests that education alone is not sufficient to change some beliefs. Psychologist Vladimir Hedrih reports research indicating that education and cognitive abilities are not related to social intolerance.⁵¹ Low social intolerance is found more often in people who are inflexible and insistent and, thus, are more likely to be prejudiced against others with different political, religious, sexual, and ethnic attitudes and life styles. Social intolerance is associated with cognitive styles, so it might be beneficial to pay attention to how an individual processes knowledge.

It is also possible that science deniers believe that science is threatening to their core beliefs, including their moral convictions (note how the theory of anthropogenic global warming became politicized after Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, thereafter bundled with the Democratic Party as a “liberal” belief). Holding onto and protecting those beliefs is enhancing to them, however unscientific, inaccurate, or absurd. Personal beliefs become a basic part of an individual’s identity. Their beliefs, including their values and morals are, to a significant degree, a deep part of their identity. Therefore, for someone to give up something by which they define themselves, for something quite different, can feel like losing an arm or leg.

David Dunning tends to agree with my assessment when he says that deep-seated misbeliefs may not arise from errors in thinking or intuition, but from the values and philosophies that define who individuals believe they are.⁵² When we tell them that their beliefs are wrong, they might not take it as a correction, but as an attack on their identity. When trying to change people’s beliefs and values, we must convince them that the change is more enhancing than threatening.

McIntyre thinks that when we try to change people’s beliefs, we should talk and listen.⁵³ He recommends engagement on a one-to-one basis with trust and respect. He says we don’t have to agree with others, but we should treat them with compassion.

The Effect of Perceived Reality

Finally, individuals’ different perceived realities make it difficult to find common ground on what goals and actions are best for a safe and secure life, but researchers see a silver lining behind the clouds of doubt. Taking a tack from Charles Darwin, suggests that we teach generosity and altruism to our children at all levels of schooling, as well as try to convince adults that these character traits are worth the trouble.⁵⁴ In other words, make acts of giving and caring enhancing to everyone. Anil Seth has conducted experiments that lead him to believe that people can learn to change their emotional responses and reactions to things they unconsciously perceive in the environment.⁵⁵ So, although we might disagree with others, understanding that every human has a sense of morality, a cherished sense of self, and a set of values should help us as we try to convince them to cooperate to bend the moral arc toward justice—and to do so more rapidly. In the end, moral progress may come down to two simple acts: kindness⁵⁶ and cooperation.⁵⁷

References

1. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “How Long? Not Long” (March 25, 1965), Voices Of Democracy. https://t.ly/CNkhD

2. Bragues, G. (2020). [Review of the book Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality by J. D. Hunter and P. Nedelisky]. The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, Volume 25(1), p. 1. https://t.ly/GYeWE

3. Hunter, J.D. and Nedelisky, P. (2018). Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality. Yale University Press.

4. “The New Science of Morality” [Seminar]. Edge, July 20, 2010. https://t.ly/WLBu7

5. Haidt, J. (2010, September 17). A New Science of Morality, Part 1. Edge. https://t.ly/dY6Qo See also: Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon.

6. Hunter and Nedelisky (2018), op cit.

7. Abend, G. (2011). Thick concepts and the moral brain. European Journal of Sociology, 52(01), 143-172. https://t.ly/7RJKW

8. Hauser, M. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.

9. Earp, B. D. (2011, November 17). Sam Harris is wrong about science and morality. Practical Ethics. https://t.ly/YvyPj

10. Slaby, Jan (2013). The new science of morality: A bibliographic review. Jan Slaby.com MoralityHedgehohReview. https://t.ly/7rXD0

11. Shermer, M. (2015). The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. St. Martin’s Griffin.

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20 Harris, S (2010), The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. Free Press.

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23. Earp, Brian. (2013), op cit.

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25. Harris, S. (2024). Facts & Values: Clarifying the Moral Landscape. Podcast transcript. https://t.ly/3ynPj

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36. McIntyre, (2021), op cit.

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38. Dehaene, (2014), op cit.

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46. Veil of Ignorance. Ethics Unwrapped. University of Texas, Austin, (n.d.). https://t.ly/MkG4E

47. Shermer, M. (2026), op cit.

48. McIntyre, (2021), op cit.

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50 Spezio, M. Adolphs, R., (2010). Emotion, cognition, and belief findings from cognitive neuroscience. CalTechAUTHORS. https://t.ly/9kYPk

51. Hedrih, V. (2023, February 9). Contrary to popular opinion, people with higher education level and cognitive ability are not more tolerant. Psypost. https://t.ly/Ctl_z

52. Nichols, T. (2017, March 2). How does the public view of science go so wrong? Scientific American, https://t.ly/IjiKg

53. McIntyre, (2021), op cit.

54. McCullough, M. E. (2020). The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code. Basic Books.

55. Mediavilla, D. (2023, May 7). Anil Seth, neuroscientist: ‘The notion of the soul may already have outlived its usefulness’. El Pais English. https://t.ly/4TKHE

56. Kumar, A. (2022, December 12). Kindness can have unexpectedly positive consequences. Scientific American. https://t.ly/YLXLo

57. Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., and Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-as-cooperation in 60 societies. The University of Chicago Press Journals. https://t.ly/I0m5B

Bayard’s class met on Tuesday nights from 7:00 to 10:00 pm, during which I discovered that the evidence for evolution is undeniable and rich, and the arguments for creationism that I had been reading were duplicitous and hallow. I recall sitting there thinking “oh my God…this evolution stuff is true!” After Bayard exhausted himself with a three-hour display of erudition and entertainment, the class adjourned to the 301 Club in downtown Fullerton, a nightclub where students hung out to discuss The Big Questions, aided by adult beverages. Bayard held court there (not unlike Christopher Hitchens would do decades later when I shared conversation and libations with him at many a conference hotel bar). It was there that my mind was blown by Bayard’s expansive intellectual interests and laser-like focus on the most important questions in science and society. Much of my attention to such questions in my own research and writings today can be traced back to those Tuesday nights, like a phylogenetic tree of knowledge.

Several memories of Bayard come to mind. The Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, which we were to visit, is “Closed on Mondays!” (Presumably past students made the long drive on those closed days, turning this into a oft-repeated reminder.) Then there was Bayard’s insistence that we memorize Ernst Mayr’s definition of a species, which is still imprinted in my brain: “A species of a group of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations reproductively isolated from other such populations.” And how do species evolve? “Mutants are not monsters!” Bayard pounded into our mushy brains. His point was that notable mutations one might encounter at the county fair—two-headed cows and the like—are not the sort of mutations evolutionists are invoking. Most mutations are tiny genetic or chromosomal changes that have small effects. Some of these modest effects may provide benefits to organisms in ever-changing environments.

More still was Bayard’s insatiable curiosity and infectious enthusiasm for learning about anything and everything. (One possible exception was sports—during the baseball World Series that year I recall Bayard telling us that he thought the series was rigged to go seven games in order to sell more tickets and television commercials!) He opened my mind to an infinite world of knowledge and wonder, and for that I shall be forever in his debt.

RIP Bayard Brattstrom, a life well lived.

Bayard Holmes Brattstrom (1929–2024)

The following obituary was originally published in the Sonoran Herpetologist, Vol. 38, No. 1, 2025. Reprinted with permission from the authors.

Erika M. Nowak, Marina M. Gerson, and Mary E. Shipman

(Nowak is at the Center for Adaptable Western Landscapes, Northern Arizona University, 1395 S. Knoles Dr., Flagstaff, Arizona, USA 86011; Gerson is in the Department of Biological Sciences, California State University, Stanislaus, Turlock, CA, USA 95382. Shipman is at Casa Torcida, P.O. Box 971, Wikieup, Arizona, USA 85360. Corresponding author. E-mail: Erika.Nowak@nau.edu)

Bayard Holmes Brattstrom, Professor Emeritus of California State University, Fullerton, passed away on 13 April 2024 in Kingman, Arizona. At almost 95 years old, he was notably still living independently and publishing in an off-the-grid straw bale home on the Horned Lizard Ranch in Wikieup, Arizona (Figure 1). Here we too-briefly profile his life, based on a forthcoming extended obituary in Herpetological Review (Nowak et al. in press), a biography by Gerson (2022), and recollections of the many entertaining stories he told us.

Figure 1. Bayard Brattstrom working in his office at Horned Lizard Ranch, Wikieup, Arizona. Image by Mary Shipman.

From Chicago to Hollywood

Bayard Brattstrom was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1929 and lived there with his parents and two younger sisters, Barbara and Susan, until he was a young teenager. While Bayard’s memories had him traveling solo on streetcars at the age of six to visit Chicago’s natural history and science museums, his sister Susan Bush (pers. comm.) thinks he was likely a bit older when he had these formative adventures. In 1942, the family moved to Hollywood, California, and his mother took in boarders, including those in the movie industry, to help make ends meet. As a result of this and his high school caddy job at the Bel Air Country Club, Bayard often met famous people, including one of the Rothschilds, Phil Harris, and Bob Hope.

Probably the most important career consequence of his living in Hollywood was that the property was large enough to contain both a garage and several sheds. One of the sheds was converted to hold breeding homing pigeons, which generated income for his various hobbies, including keeping herps. After Bayard’s live snakes and lizards were banished from the garage and house following one too many eventful escapes, another shed was renovated to hold his collection. Bayard detailed these formative events and other adventures in several self-published books (e.g., Lizard Tales: People and Events in the Life of a Naturalist, Brattstrom 2018a; and Flying Fish, Pizza, Religion, and Sex: A Naturalist’s View of Life, Brattstrom 2018b).

Bayard graduated from Hollywood High School in 1947. He completed his undergraduate degree in Biology at San Diego State University (SDSU) and graduated in 1951 with honors. As he had in high school, he worked multiple odd jobs to support himself through college, including as an elevator operator, where he met Laurence M. Klauber (1883–1968). This relationship was instrumental in Bayard’s securing part-time work at the San Diego Museum of Natural History, where he eventually became the Director of Education and Assistant Curator to the Curator of Herpetology. This started his life-long passion for working with extant and paleontological museum collections. While at SDSU, Brattstrom became a member of the Herpetologists’ League and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH); he maintained these and many other memberships in professional organizations throughout his life. He also developed a knack for cultivating friendships and collaborations with colleagues across many disciplines and institutions, which resulted in his publishing in fields outside of herpetology. Bayard’s first publication was a natural history note about Clark’s Nutcrackers, Nucifraga columbiana (Brattstrom and Sams 1951); some later contributions were in archaeology (e.g., Brattstrom 1998a).

Academia and Service

In 1952, Bayard both started his graduate research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and married SDSU alumna Cecile (Ce) Funk. Bayard and Ce had two sons: Theodore (Ted; 1953–2021) and David (born 1957); they divorced in 1974. While Brattstrom was a graduate teaching assistant at UCLA, he worked at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACM) as an Assistant in Paleontology, paving the way for his graduate research projects and future collaborations. Bayard was granted honorary LACM Research Associate status in Herpetology (1961–2024) and in Vertebrate Paleontology (1962–1980). For his M.A. thesis, Bayard inventoried the fossil herpetofauna in the La Brea tar pits (Brattstrom 1952). His Ph.D. research was under the supervision of Raymond B. Cowles (1896–1975), a renowned desert ecologist and conservationist who focused on reptile thermoregulation and instilled in Bayard a lifelong passion for thermoregulation research and desert studies. Bayard’s dissertation was a seminal phylogeny of the pitvipers based on measurements of osteological characters (Brattstrom 1964), enabled by being hired as a Research Fellow in Paleoecology by the Geology Department at the California Institute of Technology. Bayard became instrumental in the field of herpetological paleontology and taxonomy; by his count over the course of his career he named at least 12 fossil snakes, turtles, lizards, and one toad. One of these, a fossil tortoise from the Miocene of California, Gopherus depressus (Brattstrom 1961) was renamed G. brattstromi in his honor by Auffenberg (1974).

Before finishing his dissertation, Bayard was hired to his first teaching position, as a lecturer in Biology at Adelphi College (now Adelphi University) in Garden City, Long Island, New York. Stories from this time in his life involve attending lectures and conducting research in the collections at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Here Bayard developed a love of teaching and embarked on some of his first wild adventures (collecting trips) with undergraduate students to pick up oversized, smelly specimens for lab study and museum collections (Brattstrom 2018a).

In 1960, Bayard became one of the first tenure-track assistant professors at the Orange County State College in Fullerton, California (now California State University, Fullerton). As inaugural faculty members at the new college, Bayard and his cohort were personally invested in developing all aspects of the university’s growth and direction. Bayard served on at least 31 Fullerton faculty and personnel committees, taught at least 20 different classes and seminars, and regularly participated in philosophical and creative salons with colleagues from many departments. One of the more improbable stories from the early 1960s involves Bayard becoming faculty advisor for the student-organized Elephant Racing Club, and then collecting and publishing the first temperature readings taken from living elephants (Brattstrom 1963). He became a full Professor of Zoology in 1966 and spent most of his academic career at Fullerton, retiring in 1994 after 34 years.

While at Fullerton, Bayard became an extraordinary mentor and teacher. He served as major advisor on the M.S. thesis and Ph.D. dissertation committees of 96 students (Figure 2) and continued mentoring graduate students until his passing.

Figure 2. Bayard Brattstrom and graduate student Hank Harlow, circa 1970s. Photographer unknown.

He was well-known for creative lectures and mentoring of non-majors in introductory biology classes, as well as immersive field biology classes teaching research skills in natural history observation and ecosystem function (e.g., Figure 3).

Figure 3. Bayard Brattstrom’s instructions to students for ecological study of creosotebush (Larrea tridentata) and other desert shrubs, from his field ecology class at California State University, Fullerton. These pages were formatted for easy inclusion into 5 ¾ X 9-inch field journal notebooks.

In the early 1970s he helped to create and teach for “The Peoples' University,” which consisted of free courses on topics requested by students. From his early teaching days into his retirement Bayard devoted much of his considerable energy to advocating for and lecturing on improvements to teaching pedagogies and grading systems. His advocacy was shared by his second wife: fellow SDSU graduate, polio survivor, and junior high school science teacher Martha Isaacs (1929-2009). They married in 1982, and co-published several books and articles, including two books on teaching and research practices (Brattstrom and Brattstrom 2008, Brattstrom et al. 2016). In 2010, the inaugural Dr. Bayard H. Brattstrom Lecture Series at Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, California was dedicated in his honor in to commemorate his influence and support of numerous students and colleagues (Figure 4); this lecture series was active until the COVID-19 pandemic.

Figure 4. Bayard Brattstrom with former student Tony Huntley and a fossil dolphin skull (Orange County, California) at Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, California, 2010. Image courtesy Michael Shermer.

Bayard was an exceptional field scientist, keenly interested in many different taxa, fields of study, and geographical areas. In addition to conducting research and hosting field classes at the Malheur Environmental Field Station, Burns, Oregon, and at a University of Montana Field Station (likely Flathead Lake), he traveled abroad extensively. He collected and researched herpetofauna in Mexico and in central American countries and was a visiting researcher at the Universidad de Costa Rica in 1965. Following an opportunistic volcanic eruption on the island of San Benedicto in the Pacific Ocean, he conducted field research between 1953 and at least 1981, resulting in a 60-year study of the recovery of vegetation and fauna. When this work was published (Brattstrom 2015), Bayard was awarded the Journal of Pacific Conservation Biology’s Ivor Beatty Award. After initially receiving a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship in 1966 at the Department of Zoology and Comparative Physiology in Monash University, Victoria, Bayard began long-term research on Australian desert and rainforest herpetofauna. During subsequent sabbaticals and leaves of absence between 1978 and 1993, he was hosted at the University of Sydney, the University of Queensland (St. Lucia, Brisbane), and at James Cook University in 1993. Bayard was a keen observer of social behavior in humans (he trained to become a licensed marriage and family therapist) as well as in lizards and other species (e.g., Brattstrom 1974). Building on his love of the desert fauna of two continents, he and his graduate students created some of the only behavioral ethograms for North American and Australian desert lizards (e.g., Brattstrom 1971). These ethograms were developed after countless hours spent observing overcrowded lizard behaviors in laboratory terraria, in outdoor enclosures constructed in his local backyards, and sometimes in the wild.

Bayard was also a keen observer of natural history and phenology. He maintained formal field journals and informal daily field notes throughout his life, tracking the phenology of plants and animals around him. In retirement at the Horned Lizard Ranch he recorded, among other phenomena, arrival dates of resident and migratory birds and numbers of their offspring, and percent of blooming and subsequent fruiting of saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea) and Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia). He collected local desert tortoise (now Gopherus morafkai) sightings and reported these annually to the Arizona Game and Fish Department. He also documented at least 45 individual Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox) around his house through drawing their unique tail patterns (with no apparent repeat visitors). After being recognized for his lifetime contributions to desert reptile ecology during the 2019 Biology of the Pitvipers III conference in Rodeo, New Mexico, Bayard gave a memorable lecture in which he encouraged researchers to lie down in a place frequented by their animals so as to consider life from the snakes’ viewpoint. In 2021, Brattstrom received the Southwestern Association of Naturalists’ Frank Blair Eminent Naturalist Award in recognition of his life-long dedication to improving knowledge of natural history.

Bayard was a publishing machine. He authored or co-authored at least 300 scientific papers. He published 13 scientific and popular books, and contributed chapters, dichotomous keys, and/or figures for at least 19 books and conference proceedings. In addition to fossil species, he named two extant snake species (Geophis bartholomewi and Neoparea tricolor; Brattstrom and Howell 1954), and three subspecies of Sceloporus magister (S. m. tranversus, S. m. bimaculosus, and S. m. uniformis; Phelan and Brattstrom 1955). Still working on publications in the month before his passing, he submitted his last major scientific contribution. This will be a compilation of the unpublished ethogram-based master’s theses of his students entitled “Social Behavior of Southwestern Desert Lizards,” set to be published posthumously (Brattstrom 2025 in press).

In addition to academic pursuits, Bayard became a serious and well-respected consultant, delivering at least 752 consulting reports and providing expertise to zoos and over 40 private companies, state and local governments, tribal nations, and federal agencies. He conducted surveys of biological and paleontological resources and wrote environmental impact statements, focusing on desert and chaparral habitats. Herpetological focal species included Flat-tailed Horned Lizard (Phrynosoma mcallii), San Diego Horned Lizard (now known as P. blainvillii), Orange-throated Whiptail (Aspidoscelis hyperythrus), Coachella Valley Fringe-toed Lizard (Uma inornata), Western Pond Turtles (Actinemys spp.), Desert Tortoise (Gopherus spp.), and San Joaquin Valley Racer (Masticophis flagellum ruddocki, named by Brattstrom and Warren 1953). He often employed graduate students who conducted their M.S. thesis research based around the consulting jobs (e.g., Brattstrom and Bondello 1983). Some of Bayard’s favorite consulting gigs were as a herpetological expert witness during trials, for which he researched the feasibility of attempted murder by rattlesnake bite (Brattstrom 1998b) and conducted forensic herpetology with tortoise remains (in Brattstrom 2018a,b).

As a member of the “Greatest Generation,” Bayard lived a life of service outside of academic and consulting work. He was active in local and regional herpetological clubs, conservation and zoological advisory commissions, species advisory committees, and traditional civic service societies such as neighborhood associations, and the Rotary, Kiwanis, and Elks Clubs. Tellingly, in his 25-page CV (not including publications), he lists service on the Board of Governors of the Southern California Academy of Sciences, the Board of Directors of the Fullerton Youth Museum (1962–1966; President, 1962–1964), and the Board of Directors of the Orange County Zoological Society (1962–1965) under “Honors.” He promoted science outreach and education throughout his life, judging science fairs and serving on student scholarship committees while at Fullerton. In retirement he continued to be an advocate for science and education, even identifying lizards for his nurses during his last days in a Kingman, Arizona hospital.

Bayard was especially passionate about membership in professional societies, eventually becoming a member of at least 19 professional societies. Between 1962 and 1983, he served the ASIH with stints on the Board of Governors, the Gaige and Stoye Award Committees, as an editorial board member, and as Western Vice President; he was on the editorial board of the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles during 1979–1981. He was a Member of the Council for the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) starting in 1965, and later represented ASIH as its voting member on the AAAS Science Council until 1990. He enjoyed organizing conferences and educational workshops in addition to presenting research, including testing the limits with unorthodox ideas, and strongly encouraged his and others’ students to attend and present at regional and national meetings. He also strongly encouraged societies to keep costs low to encourage student participation. As anyone who visited his library at the Horned Lizard Ranch or had the misfortune to be editor of a journal that moved to an online format can attest, Bayard was an avid reader and vociferous supporter of print journals. It was not pleasurable for him to read articles on a screen, and as technology became more complicated it became increasingly difficult to even access online versions.

Retirement and the Horned Lizard Ranch

Bayard’s interests in teaching, mentoring, research, publishing continued to shine during his retirement. In the early 2000s, he and Martha purchased the property in Wikieup, Arizona that became known as the Horned Lizard Ranch (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Bayard Brattstrom outside the Horned Lizard Ranch house, November 2015. Image by Harvey Lillywhite.

They had an off-grid straw bale house built on top of a hill with beautiful 360-degree desert vistas, and Bayard became an advocate for straw bale houses and solar-based off-grid living. Not one to slow down, he kept 28 filing cabinets of research and teaching materials, data, and student papers in his office. His library contained at least 25 journal series and over 12,240 science literature, field guides, and popular books covering topics such as travel, science fiction, history, native American culture, psychology, and religion (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Bayard Brattstrom sharing his library at Horned Lizard Ranch, Wikieup, Arizona, 2014. Image by David Barker.

Bayard and Martha developed bird, mammal, and herpetofauna species checklists for the Big Sandy River area near their home (e.g., Brattstrom and Brattstrom 2007). Especially after Martha’s passing in 2009, Bayard also enjoyed visiting with former students and colleagues, neighbors, Nowak’s Herpetology classes from Northern Arizona University (Figure 7), and even strangers who’d heard about his place from neighbors, or just happened to wander by. He maintained a dizzying level of intellectual curiosity, soliciting information at conferences and through personal correspondence on theories he had, both for his own edification and for articles or books he was writing. Bayard sought out and shared information with researchers and novelists with interests in organismal, natural, and human history; paleontology; philosophy; and art.

Figure 7. Northern Arizona University Herpetology class students on a field trip to Horned Lizard Ranch, Wikieup, Arizona, 2011. Image by Erika Nowak.

Both during his academic career and in retirement, Bayard had boundless energy for working on fun and creative pursuits outside of his academic, consulting, and civic interests. He published two books of poetry, and was skilled in drawing, watercolor painting, photography (scientific and abstract), cooking, and gardening. He deeply appreciated art and collected Native American and herpetological-themed indigenous art from around the world. In his later years, he also enjoyed finding antique treasures at auctions and in thrift stores, and extensively researched the more unusual finds such as a “baby cooker” from China, designed to contain small children and keep them warm while parents were busy. As a result of his interest in art, the Horned Lizard Ranch became known for its road-side sculptures. Metal and ceramic herds of turtles, frogs, crocodylians, lizards, snakes, and African wildlife crisscrossed the road to the house, joined by nesting dinosaurs, a moose (thoughtfully preceded by a “moose crossing” sign), and a ca. 9 m long horned lizard and a bright pink and black gila monster. Bayard’s serious sense of fun and social commentary were also expressed in many roadside vignettes. The vignettes were typically made from materials found at auctions, and some told stories based on real but reimagined events. One particularly creative exhibit interpreted racial desegregation at the Augusta National Golf Club (home to the Masters Tournament) in 1990 using different colored golf clubs; another immortalized the life of Ed Ricketts, the famous marine biologist friend of John Steinbeck. Others were more ironic in tone, including a display of outsized drill bits interspersed with parts from a Model A Ford (Figure 8) and a wooden rowboat labelled “Just in Case” (Figure 9) parked uphill of the normally dry “Calli Wash” (i.e., Gerson’s Callisaurus draconoides study site).

Figure 8. “Bits and Pieces” road-side vignette at the Horned Lizard Ranch, Wikieup, Arizona, in 2020. Image by Mary Shipman.

Figure 9. “Just in Case” road-side vignette at the Horned Lizard Ranch, Wikieup, Arizona, in 2020. Image by Mary Shipman.

Bayard Holmes Brattstrom leaves behind an astounding legacy of creativity and scores of colleagues, students, and mentees who continue to be inspired by him. He is survived by his ex-wife Cecile Funk, his son David and daughter-in-law Dawne, his sisters Barbara and Susan and their families, and his assistant and dear friend Mary Shipman.

References

Auffenberg, W. 1974. Checklist of Fossil Land Tortoises (Testudinidae). Bulletin of the Florida Museum of Natural History 18:121–251.

Brattstrom, B. H. 1952. The Amphibians and Reptiles from Rancho La Brea. M.A. Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, CA.

Brattstrom, B. H. 1961. Some new fossil tortoises from western North America with remarks on the zoogeography and paleoecology of tortoises. Journal of Paleontology 35:543–560.

Brattstrom, B. H. 1963. Body temperature of living elephants. Journal of Mammalogy 44:282.

Brattstrom, B. H. 1964. Evolution of the pit vipers. Transactions of the San Diego Society of Natural History 13:185–268.

Brattstrom, B. H. 1971. Social and thermoregulatory behavior of the bearded dragon, Amphibolurus barbatus. Copeia 3:484–497.

Brattstrom, B. H. 1974. The evolution of reptilian social behavior. American Zoologist 14: 35–49.

Brattstrom, B. H. 1998a. The circular Aesculepian temple (Tholos) at Epidauros, Greece: an early snake pit? Herpetological Review 29:79–80.

Brattstrom, B. H. 1998b. Forensic herpetology I: the rattlesnake in the mailbox attempted murder case. Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society 33:205–211.

Brattstrom, B. H. 2015. Bárcena Volcano, 1952: A 60-year report on the repopulation of San Benedicto Island, Mexico, with a review of the ecological impacts of disastrous effects. Pacific Conservation Biology 21:38–59.

Brattstrom, B. H. 2018a. Flying Fish, Pizza, Religion, and Sex: a Naturalist’s View of Life. Outskirts Press, Inc., Parker, CO.

Brattstrom, B. H. 2018b. Lizard Tales: People and Events in the Life of a Naturalist. Outskirts Press, Inc., Parker, CO.

Brattstrom, B. H. In press. Social Behavior of Southwestern Desert Lizards. Eco Press, Rodeo, NM.

Brattstrom, B. H., and M. C. Bondello. 1983. The effects of off-road vehicle sounds on desert vertebrates. Pp. 167–207 in R. H. Webb and H. G. Wilshire (Eds.), Environmental Impacts of Off-Road Vehicles: Impacts and Management in Arid Regions. Springer Verlag, New York, NY.

Brattstrom, B. H., and T. R. Howell. 1954. Notes on some collections of reptiles and amphibians from Nicaragua. Herpetologica 10:114–123.

Brattstrom, B. H., and J. R. Sams. 1951. The Clark Nutcracker in San Diego County, California. Condor 53:204–205.

Brattstrom, B. H., and J. W. Warren. 1953. A new subspecies of Racer, Masticophis flagellum, from the San Joaquin Valley of California. Herpetologica 9:177–179.

Brattstrom, B. H., and M. A. Brattstrom. 2007. Amphibians and reptiles of the Big Sandy River Drainage, Mohave County, Arizona (from Upper Trout Creek Junction to Alamo Lake). Sonoran Herpetologist 20:116-117.

Brattstrom, B. H., and M. A. Brattstrom. 2008. Scratch the Chalk on the Board… It Keeps the Students Awake: A Field Guide to Poor Teaching. Horned Lizard Press, Wikieup, AZ.

Brattstrom, B. H., M. A. Brattstrom, and M. E. Shipman. 2016. How to Study Rhinos. Outskirts Press, USA.

Gerson, M. M. 2022. Historical Perspectives: Bayard Holmes Brattstrom. Ichthyology & Herpetology 110:413–17.

Nowak, E. M., M. M. Gerson, and M. E. Shipman. In press. An extraordinary mentor: remembering Bayard Holmes Brattstrom (1929–2024). Herpetological Review.

Phelan, R. L., and B. H. Brattstrom. 1955. Geographic variation in Sceloporus magister. Herpetologica 11:1–14.

In this edition of the column, guest columnist Deacon David E. Pierce, Ph.D., makes the case that treating religious relics as scientific evidence is a mistake because that is not what faith is about and, intriguingly, suggests who he thinks might have created the hoax in the first place—none other than Leonardo da Vinci.

David E. Pierce, Ph.D. has been a Catholic deacon since 2007 after converting to Catholicism in 1994 when he concluded that science and religion can mix, provided both camps are tolerant of each other and respect each other’s different outlook and understanding of life, and death. David is a former Director of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries dealing with all facets of marine fisheries management and science. He retired in 2019 after 48 years of service to the Commonwealth. He received his B.S. (1971) and M.S. (1981) in Marine Biology from UMass Dartmouth and his Ph.D. (1996) in Environmental Science from UMass Boston. He taught a graduate course on Marine Policy for 10 years at the UMass Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology.

The Shroud of Turin and the Meaning of Faith

As a Catholic deacon for 18 years, I suspect that for many Christians faith just isn’t enough anymore, and many are Doubting Thomas’s who insist on seeing the evidence for themselves. They no longer seem to subscribe to the biblical and useful concept of Christians walking by faith alone, as in 2 Corinthians 5:7: “For we live by faith, not by sight.” In this sense, the Shroud of Turin is the sought-after way many Christians need to deal with their doubts. They cannot put their fingers into the cut in Jesus’ side, or feel the nail holes in his hands and feet, but when they see the Shroud, they see Jesus after his crucifixion and burial in a tomb, then his resurrection.

In this article I would like to make two points. First, the Shroud of Turin should not be a substitute for Christian faith in things not seen and used as evidence of Jesus’ Resurrection. Secondly, and admittedly an untestable hypothesis, the argument that the ingenious scientist/artist Leonardo da Vinci crafted the Shroud is compelling and intriguing.

Faith and Evidence

Why the need for more emphasis on the Shroud being hoped-for, direct evidence of Jesus’ Resurrection? Christianity continues to suffer a dramatic downturn. Former pastor Brian McLaren, in his 2021 book Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to do About It, notes that 65 million adults in the United States have dropped out of active Church attendance, with about 2.7 million exiting the pews every year. McLaren proposed a model of faith development in which “questions and doubt are not the enemy of faith, but rather a portal to a more mature and fruitful kind of faith.” Unfortunately, many Christians have met the enemy, and it is them.

Quite surprisingly and to my amazement and disappointment, very influential and renowned Bishop Robert Barron, who I admire, of the evangelizing Word On Fire Institute and ministry, passionately and reverently declared in his 2024 Easter on-line homily that the Shroud was “the most famous relic in Christendom—the cloth that covered the body of Christ in the tomb—the same cloth we can see and bring us to belief: the moment of the Resurrection through the power of the Holy Spirit.” In 2023, Bishop Barron had over 3.1 million Facebook fans; 1.86 million YouTube subscribers; 530,000+ Instagram followers; and 324,000+ X followers.

Even though I am a deacon, I’m not a believer in the Shroud of Turin being literal, historical evidence of Jesus’ resurrection. I simply rely on my faith. I would never use the Shroud as the way to defend and prove my faith in Jesus and his resurrection. Even though we never will know conclusively how and when the Shroud image was created, religious faith should not demand or expect proof. Do we Catholics demand such proof for what is placed in the Church tabernacle or what happens when priests say the Eucharistic prayers (consecration)? Needing proof undercuts Catholic faith in things not seen.

Leonardo da Vinci and the Shroud of Turin

So, how was the Shroud created? I am intrigued and swayed by the hypothesis that the Shroud was created in the medieval period by none other than Leonardo da Vinci, at the behest of his wealthy patrons as an “instrument”, a money maker and prestige builder for the Savoy family. In 1453, the House of Savoy, an Italian royal family, apparently acquired a shroud and moved it to a chapel in Chambery (now part of France), but a better and far more believable shroud was required by the family. Allegedly, the shroud they had purchased proved to be a bad fraud.

It has been surmised that the brilliant Leonardo faked the current Shroud in 1492 at the Savoy’s request. In the late 1480s or early 1490’s Leonardo was in Savoy. The Shroud finally was returned to public viewing in 1494. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 so he would have been about 40 years old in 1492. The figure below is a display of the Shroud in the chapel of the Dukes of Savoy (miniature from the Prayer Book donated in 1559 by Cristoforo Duc of Moncalieri to Margaret of Valois. Turin, Royal Library, Varia 84, f. 3v. Courtesy of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, Regional Directorate for Cultural and Landscape Heritage of Piedmont. The image was provided by Andrea Nicolotti and featured in his article).

Notably, Leonardo wasn’t a fan of the Church. He would not live by strict Church rules. He dabbled in alchemy. He was a man of science, not religion. A documentary—Did Leonardo Da Vinci Create the Mysterious Shroud of Turin?—shows how the Shroud could have been created by Leonardo using a camera obscura. In 1490, Leonardo fully fleshed out this camera obscura in his 1,286-page Codex Atlanticus.

The argument made is that the Shroud image could have been created by Leonardo through prolonged sunlight exposure of a silver sulfate-soaked shroud (making it light sensitive, like photographic film) held in a dark box (camera obscura) with a sun-lighted human model outside the box projected through a pin hole to strike the soaked shroud (like a pin hole camera). This approach, highlighted in the aforementioned documentary, is described by Nicholas Allen in his 2017 book: Turin Shroud: Testament to a Lost Technology. Here are some screen shots from the documentary, demonstrating how it could have been produced, followed by the finished product:

Here is a Leonardo quote from one of his “Da Vinci Notebooks” I find relevant to the Shroud: “Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles deceiving the stupid multitudes.”

I wish the Shroud would be further examined to test such hypotheses. The Church will not allow further examination for good reasons, although I sometimes wonder if the Church fears a scientific explanation that the Shroud is indisputably not the burial cloth of Jesus. I’d especially like to know if traces of silver would be found throughout the fabric, especially on the image, or perhaps some other photosensitive chemical.

Some might wonder why I should care about Shroud enthusiasts and their efforts to evangelize Christianity with this “direct evidence” of Jesus’ Resurrection. What’s the harm in this belief? Much of Christian faith requires a suspension of disbelief, meaning sometimes we must suspend our critical thinking and logic in order to enjoy a story, and there are many rewarding, compelling, and enlightening faith stories to enjoy that appeal to and enlarge the heart, mind, and soul. However, faith leaders pushing and “selling” the shroud as direct evidence compel me to no longer take their insistence seriously that we must have faith in things not seen. Fortunately, I’m pulled back from this spiritual dark abyss by Pope Francis, who in his written message to viewers of a new display of the Shroud in 2013, said the Shroud is an icon, not a relic, i.e., not miraculous, and he offered:

This image … speaks to our heart and moves us to climb the hill of Calvary, to look upon the wood of the Cross, and to immerse ourselves in the eloquent silence of love...the merciful love of God who has taken upon himself all the evil of the world to free us from its power. This disfigured face resembles all those faces of men and women marred by a life which does not respect their dignity, by war and violence which afflict the weakest.

I conclude with a repeat caution—one provided by Nicolotti and highlighted by Shermer. It is especially relevant to Skeptic and its readers as it pertains to C-14 dating. I’m especially drawn to Nicolotti’s concern about creationism and fundamentalism and the rejection of science in favor of what I term religious fantasizing, e.g., the denial of evolution and believing that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time. As Nicolotti wrote:

Others [Shroud believers] preferred to deny the validity of the method of radiocarbon dating as such. Sindonology had by now assumed the character of pseudoscience, and it is not surprising that it drew not only on the ruminations of the traditionalists but also on the war chest of creationist and fundamentalist literature. The method of radiocarbon dating is in fact used to date objects up to 50,000 years old, which stands in contradiction to the idea of those who believe that the world and the life in it were created only a few thousand years ago. What follows from such creationist convictions is the wholesale rejection of radiocarbon measurements, as well as the rejection of more popular scientific explanations of the origins of the universe, the existence of the dinosaurs, human evolution, and so on. Creationists and fundamentalist Christians had already prepared a whole list of alleged errors in the method of C-14 dating, which was promptly copied in the books of sindonology (my emphasis). The alleged errors generally concern cases of objects of a known age that—so they claim—once dated, would yield a result that was off the mark by several hundred or even a thousand years.

Being a deacon with a science education and profession, I often struggle with Catholics believing that Adam and Eve were real or that there really was a Noah’s Ark with all those animals two by two. Too many adult Catholics rely on their grade school Catholic education and children’s Bible stories. Thus, many Catholics are fodder for naive beliefs fitting their immature mindsets not advanced or corrected by knowing priests and/or deacons. C-14 dating—and truth—are two casualties. As Leonardo da Vinci declared in one of his “Da Vinci Notebooks:”

There is no doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects.

Indeed.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters, to be published in 2026.

Gathered here were over 2,000 people in a standing-room only theater to witness the debate with myself and Adam Carolla vs. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ross Douthat on the title question “Does the West Need a Religious Revival?” It was one of the most professionally produced events I’ve experienced in my more than 30 years of doing public talks and debates, including an opening video montage introducing the topic, the debaters, followed by a thoughtful neutral commentary by Bari Weiss of The Free Press, which sponsored the debate along with FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It was an Oxford style debate in which the audience was polled on their position (yes or no) on the debate proposition, before and after, and whoever moved the most people over to their side at the end was declared the winner.

You can watch the entire debate here (or click on the screen shot below).

Spoiler alert: “Shermer and Carolla were able to convince 12 percent of the audience to switch to their side—that religion is not the answer—changing more minds than their opponents, and winning the night.”

I am now 4-0 in Oxford style debates. Here are the others if you are interested:

1. Intelligence Squared: Science Refutes God:

2. Intelligence Squared: The More We Evolve the Less We Need God:

3. Oxford Union: God Does Not Exist:

I began the Austin debate by thanking the organizers and audience, and noting that we were not there to debate if anyone personally needs a religious revival, or whether or not religion is good for individual people. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. Nor were we there to debate whether or not the NON-Western world needs religion—or more precisely, whether or not it needs Christianity to replace Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, or any of thousands of folk and pagan religions. And, finally, I clarified that thought we could all agree that by the West we mean the Western Industrialized democracies, the vast majority of which have for centuries been primarily Christian—or Judeo-Christian. With those caveats, I addressed 4 points often made in the name of Christianity as being the foundation (the “operating system” in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s descriptor) of Western civilization.

1. Christianity is responsible for most of the Western cultural values we cherish: art, architecture, music, literature, science, tech, engineering…

In response I use the comparative method and counterfactual causality reasoning:

Were Homer and Sappho Christians? Were the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World inspired by Christ’s great gift of salvation? Clearly we do know what geniuses in the past have done without Christianity, in the great ancient pre-Christian civilizations of Sumeria, Babylonia, Akkadia, Assyria, Egypt, and Greece in the West; the ancient civilizations that arose in the Indus Valley in modern day Pakistan and India; in the Yellow River and Yangtze River valleys in modern day China; and in many others besides. Every one of these peoples produced magnificent works of art and architecture, music and literature, science and technology—though it should be noted that both Christians and Muslims often did their best to annihilate all evidence of these achievements with innumerable acts of cultural vandalism, pillaging, and censorship.

2. Christianity is responsible for Western democratic and economic values:

If true, then societies in which Christianity is or was the dominant religion should show Western-like forms of democracy and capitalism. They don’t. The Byzantine Empire, for example, was predominantly Eastern Orthodox Christian from the early A.D. 300s, and for seven centuries produced nothing remotely like democracy and capitalism as practiced in modern America. Even early America wasn’t like it is today when, a mere two centuries ago women couldn’t vote, slavery was legal and widely practiced, and capitalism’s wealth was vouchsafed to only a tiny minority of land holders or factory owners. Throughout the late Middle Ages and well into the Early Modern Period, all the nation states, city states, and various political conglomerates of Western and Central Europe were not only Christian but Western Christian, and yet as late as the 19^th century the only quasi-democratic republics in Europe were England, Holland, and Switzerland.

3. Christianity is the basis of our commitment to Equal Rights.

This claim is usually tied to the biblical passage from Galatians 3:28, in which the apostle Paul proclaimed: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Here I added an aside that Paul was probably not channeling woke progressive trans activists in the clause about there being neither males nor females.) Christians imagine that this Bible verse is the foundation of the famous line in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence—“All men are created equal.”

I’m afraid not. Paul is saying that you can carry on as you are. If you’re Greek, there’s no need to become a Jew—a significant dispensation, given that a man converting to Judaism often had to submit to adult circumcision, which is just the kind of thing that puts a guy off the whole idea. Paul was saying that if you’re a slave, you must keep on being a slave; if you’re a wife, must continue being regarded as property; no matter who you are, you can still worship Jesus Christ and be abused by your culture in whatever manner is customary for someone of your breeding and station.

In any case, in Christian countries around the world, slaves remained slaves for 18 more centuries, and women remained little more than property for 19 more centuries. Clearly, even if Paul’s message were interpreted to mean that we’re all equal, absolutely no one took it seriously.

4. Christianity makes societies healthier and more moral

I ran out of time in my opening statement to properly credit my response to this assertion, namely Gregory S. Paul’s study of 17 first-world prosperous democracies (Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United States), in which he quantified the religiosity of each of the 17 countries by measuring to what extent the citizens in each (1) believe in God, (2) are biblical literalists, (3) attend religious services at least several times a month, (4) pray at least several times a week, (5) believe in an afterlife, and (6) believe in heaven and hell, ranking them on 1-10 scale.

Paul then recorded 25 different indicators of social health and well being, such as: homicides, suicides, incarceration rates, life expectancy, STDs, abortions, teen births, fertility, marriage, divorce, alcohol consumption, life satisfaction, corruption indices, adjusted per capita income, income inequality, poverty, employment levels, and others, on a 1-9 scale from dysfunction to healthy.

The results were striking…and disturbing. Far and away—without having a close second—the United States is not only the most religious of the 17 nations, but also the most dysfunctional, with the highest rates of homicides, suicides, illicit drug use, drug overdoses, deaths of despair, crime rates, incarcerations, STD infections, teen pregnancies, abortion rates, divorce rates, and juvenile and natal mortality.

If religion is such a powerful force for societal health, then why is America—the most religious nation in the Western world—also the unhealthiest in the great majority of social measures? Even inside the country the same patterns hold true—the most religious states are among the poorest and with the highest rates of homicides, suicides, abortion rates, and the like? Here is how Greg Paul clarified his study in an email response to my query about any updates or follow-ups he had to his original study:

The more atheistic the advanced nations are, the more socioeconomically prosperous the citizens tend to be, with the low theism Nordic nations prone to be doing the best in these factors. Additional data shows broadly similar patterns in the world at large. Conversely, Gallup results on religiosity and well-being in each of the 50 states shows a correlation between less of the first and more of the latter within the United States—it has long been known that the Bible Belt has high rates of murder, premature death in general, and poverty. All of a number of studies on the matter have produced similar results. This is true of the late Ronald Inglehart’s recent book Religion’s Sudden Decline, which shows that theism is in demographic trouble across the world.

The reasons why mass religion does not produce good results are well understood. Theism is based on ideological opinions rather than pragmatic secular policies that are proven to work. Just as importantly, it is well documented that as socioeconomic conditions, educational levels, etc get better religion persistently decreases in popularity, there being no known major exceptions. That means religion cannot thrive in successful societies. That in turn simply means religious societies can never be successful since the success degrades popular theism.

Paul’s final comment to me is the one I made in the debate to my opponents, and have for years been asking believers to produce:

For those who still think religion makes societies better, you need to at long last produce large scale statistical studies that show that is true, which has never been done because it very likely cannot be done. Like in science in general, cherry picking a few trends here and there while waving away the majority of the data will of course produce inaccurate results.

I did acknowledge—in response to Bari’s question to me in the first round of the debate—that once moral progress in a particular area is underway, most religions eventually get on board, as in the abolition of slavery in the 19^th century, women’s rights in the 20^th century, and gay rights in the 21^st century. But this often happens after a shamefully protracted lag time.

Additional topics in my notes that time did not permit me to address, included these, taken from my 2015 book The Moral Arc, from Chapter 4 on why religion is not the driver of moral progress:

Religion has also promoted, or justified, such catastrophic moral blunders as:

• Crusades (the People’s Crusade, the Northern Crusade, the Albigensian Crusade, and Crusades One through Nine);

• Inquisitions (Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman);

• Witch hunts (a product, in part, of the Inquisitions that ran from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period and executed tens of thousands of people, mostly women);

• Christian conquistadors who exterminated native peoples by the millions through their guns, germs, and steel;

• Endless European Wars of Religion—the Nine Years War, the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War, the French Wars of Religion, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the English Civil War;

• American Civil War, in which Northern Christians and Southern Christians slaughtered one another over the issue of slavery and states’ rights;

• First World War, in which German Christians fought French, British, and American Christians, all of whom believed that God was on their side. (German soldiers had Gott mit uns—God with us—embossed in the metal of their belt buckles.)

All of these events have political, economic, and social causes, but the underlying justification they share is religion, specifically Christianity. There are three reasons for the sclerotic nature of religion:

1. The foundation of the belief in an absolute morality is the belief in an absolute religion grounded in the One True God. This inexorably leads to the conclusion that anyone who believes differently has departed from this truth and thus is unprotected by our moral obligations.

2. Unlike science, religion has no systematic process and no empirical method to employ to determine the verisimilitude of its claims and beliefs, much less right and wrong.

3. The morality of holy books—most notably the Bible—is not the morality any of us would wish to live by, and thus it is not possible for the religious doctrines derived from holy books to be the catalyst for moral evolution.

Today, as the death penalty fades into history, in the Old Testament Yahweh offers this list of actions punishable by death:

• Blaspheming or cursing or the Lord: “And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.” (Leviticus 24:13-16)

• Worshiping another god: “He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the Lord only, he shall be utterly destroyed.” (Exodus 22:20)

• Witchcraft and wizardry: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (Exodus 22:18) “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:27)

• Female loss of virginity before marriage: “If any man take a wife [and find] her not a maid … Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.” (Deuteronomy 22:13-21)

• Homosexuality: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (Leviticus 20:13)

• Working on the Sabbath: “Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the Lord: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death.” (Exodus 35:2)

The book considered by over two billion people to be the greatest moral guide ever produced—inspired as it was by an all-knowing, totally benevolent deity—recommends the death penalty for saying the Lord’s name at the wrong moment or in the wrong context, for imaginary crimes like witchcraft, for commonplace sexual relations (adultery, fornication, homosexuality), and for the especially heinous crime of not resting on the Sabbath. How many of today’s two billion Christians agree with their own holy book on the application of capital punishment?

Let me end this overview with a perhaps less pugnacious perspective on religion, from the opening paragraphs of the chapter on religion in The Moral Arc:

On the good side of the moral scale, it was Jesus who said to help the poor, to turn the other cheek, to love thine enemies, to judge not lest ye be judged, to forgive sinners, and to give people a second chance. In the name of their religion, people have helped the poor and needy in developed nations around the world, and in America they are the leading supporters of food banks for the hungry and post-disaster relief. Many Christian theologians, along with Christian churches and preachers, advocated the abolition of the slave trade, and continued to press for justice in modern times. Some civil rights leaders were motivated by their religion, most notably the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose speeches were filled with passionate religious tropes and quotes. I have deeply religious friends who are highly driven to do good and, though they may have a complex variety of motives, they often act in the name of their particular religion.

So religion can and does motivate people to do good works, and we should always acknowledge any person or institution that pushes humanity further along the path of progress, expands the moral sphere, or even just makes the life of one other person a little easier. To that end we would do well to emulate the ecumenicalism of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who appealed to all religious faiths to join scientists in working to preserve the environment and to end the nuclear arms race. He did so because, he said, we are all in this together; our problems are “transnational, transgenerational and transideological. So are all conceivable solutions. To escape these traps requires a perspective that embraces the peoples of the planet and all the generations yet to come.” That stirring rhetoric urges all of us—secularists and believers—to work together toward the common goal of making the world a better place.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters, to be published in 2026.

Spies, Lies and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence by Amy Zegart

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton

Reviewed by Michelle E. Ainsworth

Michelle E. Ainsworth holds an MA in history and has been a regular contributor to Skeptic for many years. She enjoys learning about intellectual history, and is currently researching the cultural history of stage magic in the United States. She is a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. She blogs at humanistchick.blogspot.com

“Intelligence failures result from “the natural variations in the predictability of human events and the limitations of human cognition.” —Amy Zegart, Spies Lies and Algorithms

“Western powers can be in a cold war …before they realize it.” —Calder Walton, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West

How is the history of espionage relevant to the present? How does recent document declassification change our understanding of the Cold War? Amy Zegart’s Spies Lies and Algorithms broadly and concisely surveys the whys and hows of the US intelligence community from multiple perspectives. Calder Walton’s Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West deeply surveys a century of espionage by Russia against the US and Britain. Both books offer new information and conclude with sharp warnings for the present.

When I was in graduate school, the professor of a class on the history of the Cold War commented that a book that he had initially assigned had already been rewritten with a new title due to information declassified just after the first one had gone to press. I recalled this often as I read Calder Walton’s Spies, noting that his sources were documents which had only been accessible or declassified as recently as 2022. As such, Walton’s book rewrites history, from Lenin to Putin. Dr. Walton’s thesis is that Russian espionage against the US and Britain was as aggressive before and after the Cold War as it was during it.

Some of the book’s new or strengthened conclusions will please partisans of either side in US debates. Conservatives might take grim validation in the relentlessness and depth of Soviet (and then Russian) espionage. For example, Russian archives have not only proven the guilt of President Franklin Roosevelt’s advisers Laughlin Currie and Treasury Secretary Harry Dexter White (among many others of the Cold War era), but also reveal compelling new evidence of Russian assistance to liberal politician Henry Wallace, as well as to later left-wing intellectuals and the multi-country anti-nuclear movement, and that the Soviet Union used détente (and later the Soviet Union’s collapse) to increase its espionage. Liberals, on the other hand, may be pleased by new evidence that US Cold War policy did not consider Soviet perception of NATO, and that the founding US Cold War document’s “domino theory” was based on a false premise (Kremlin documents now show that Soviets did not initiate wars in the Third World).

Newly released material also suggests that from Lenin to Putin, Russian leaders’ refusal to tolerate criticism and alternative points of view severely damaged the Soviet Union (and then Russia) internally and externally. In contrast, the openness of the US and Britain made it smart for Russia to focus its efforts on human spies. Walton points out, for an example perhaps of particular interest to Skeptic readers, that Russian spies in the US were remarkably successful in their technological espionage, not just in accelerating the Russian development of the atomic bomb, but also of stealing military technology more recently, so that “US science and technology effectively drove both sides of the Cold War.”

One revelation that startled me was new evidence that Truman was never briefed on Korea prior to the outbreak of war, and that throughout the Cold War and since, in Russia and the US most spies who were caught was due to the opposing side’s defectors (and that both sides blundered in promoting people who committed treason). By contrast, Walton argues that, in most other areas, even intelligence historians continue to over emphasize the role of human spies and underestimate the role of communications interception (“signals intelligence”, or SIGINT).

One reason for the overemphasis on human spies highlighted by Professor Amy Zegart in Spies Lies and Algorithms is the explosion in popularity of spy entertainment in recent decades (which she dubs “spytainment”), where individuals save the world. The ticking time bomb scenario is a staple of fiction, but has vanishingly few analogs in real life where, according to Zegart, real intelligence work involves multiple sources weighed against each other.

Walton’s most dramatic example of how both human and technological methods complement one another is new evidence of how and why President Kennedy was able to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis. But this is not how it is portrayed in fiction. In a point familiar to skeptics in other contexts, Zegart acknowledges how terrific it would be if fantasy were reality, and cites alarming evidence that the general public confuses the two. Her even more damning indictment is that entertainment has been mistaken for fact by senior policy makers in the 21^st century, including by a US Supreme Court Justice and in a confirmation hearing for a CIA director.

With both public ignorance of intelligence matters, and in the later chapter on Congressional oversight, Zegart diagnoses the root of the problem as the necessity of secrecy: most current intelligence documents are illegal for political scientists to examine, while older declassified documents sought by historians can arrive years after their request, and even then be heavily redacted. Thus, Zegart finds it unsurprising that there are remarkably few articles about intelligence in academic journals, and incredibly few college courses on the history or politics of espionage. Zegart sees a similar dynamic at work with Congressional oversight, where elected representatives can’t talk about secret material and there is no voting constituency clamoring for information about non-classified intelligence and espionage matters.

As background, Zegart discusses the history of US intelligence, including an additional chapter on highly placed traitors. The heart of the book is a chapter-by-chapter discussion of issues in the world of espionage. Her discussion of what real life intelligence work is (mostly mundane), and what its results can and cannot do, is nuanced and sobering. Skeptic readers will not be surprised by the challenge of overcoming confirmation bias, human frailty at estimating size and probability. Evidence, she suggests, is that such cognitive shortcomings are best overcome by outsider “devil’s advocate type counter-scenario planning,” just one of many stresses of working in intelligence sympathetically told. The paradox of the Presidential use of covert action explains why Presidents of opposing parties, in different times and facing different challenges, all criticize secret, morally questionable “active measures”, but end up using it anyway.

The severity of government sanctioned hacking (such as by Russia against the US) has been in the headlines, so I won’t dwell on her chapter on it here, though she of course gives it scholarly depth, concluding that it poses a greater threat than terrorism.

Walton and Zegart agree that governments are losing their monopoly on intelligence gathering, essentially due to new technology. Zegart sees Google Earth, smart phones, and other public technology as having broken the monopoly that governments (and news media) once had on the discovery of nuclear weapons sites and other military matters, and she discusses the potential dangers premature revelation of that information, even if it is true, poses. Here and elsewhere, she emphasizes that the analysis of images and other data is highly specialized among intelligence professionals, with many traps that even well-meaning amateurs can fall into. Where Zegart focuses on private citizens, Walton sees the future of intelligence as being in multinational private companies, selling satellite access or high-end encryption programs to whatever government or business will pay their prices, and with no chance of government oversight.

Both books cite FBI statistics to show that China is by far the greatest threat to the US via government and business allied intelligence agencies sending a seemingly endless number of highly trained agents to steal military and technological secrets from the US. Both authors also discuss the difficulty and urgency of reorienting an intelligence bureaucracy to new realities. More on point, both authors agree that history and current practice both indicate that intelligence is most effective when multiple techniques—human spying, satellite imagery, and much more—are used in combination, and both authors agree that cuts to intelligence budgets end up costing more than they save.

I should also note that both authors mention the relationship between intelligence and conspiracy theories. First, both mention a few conspiracy theories that were real, including the recent revelation of a Cold War deal with a leading manufacturer of government encoding machines. But people too often see conspiracies where none exist. Part of Walton’s data comes from England, and he suggests that “Those who tend to see…conspiracy overestimate the competency of those in Whitehall.” Zegart quips that from her analysis of the impact of “spytainment” and her survey of Ivy League courses, students are more likely to hear a professor discuss U2 the rock band than U2 the spy plane, one point of which is that ignorance of espionage history and practice is a great breeding ground for conspiracy theories. While Stalin’s paranoia is well known, Walton provides evidence of Lenin’s as well, while concluding that Putin is “a naturally inclined conspiracist.” From the Russian Revolution to World War II and Putin’s attacking Ukraine, Walton concludes that the West doesn’t have a “Putin problem”, it has a Russia problem.

As outstanding as both books are, no texts of such depth can be perfect. The most serious problem with Walton’s Spies is that the bibliography is solely online, and the entries on it do not always include dates and publisher information. Worse, the website has often been inaccessible (though thankfully the book does contain extensive endnotes). In the book itself, if part of Walton’s thesis is that the Cold War started in 1917, shouldn’t he have offered more than one example of early espionage? A subtitle of “Russia and the West” would have been more accurate than its actual subtitle of “East and West.” Recent scholarship in most areas is thorough (based on his endnotes), but at least two books are missing, including G-Man by Beverly Gage (for its new data about FBI work abroad, which I reviewed in Skeptic). Though Walton and Zegart are both good writers, and I don’t usually mind typos or occasional inelegant sentences, each book also has a few substantive sentences the meaning of which are unclear, which should have been caught by a copy editor.

Most of Walton’s 548 pages of main text are well used, but some ancillary material (such as recently declassified World War II British intelligence work unrelated to Russia) might have been edited for length, however fascinating and new it is. I also wonder if, in a work of history, it is best practice for an author to explicitly discuss implications for the present, which he does, with several opening pages on Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and a closing chapter on the relevance of the book’s conclusions to 21^st century Chinese espionage. That said, in two sentences this is telling or at least amusing: for this book, it was discovered that a World War II Russian operative in Ukraine was named Nikita Khrushchev, who might not have become future Soviet leader if he had tried to warn Stalin of German troops massing on the border of Russia prior to the Nazi invasion on June 22, 1941 (Operation Barbarossa). Another likely case of the futility of speaking truth to power in the Soviet Union is the anecdote about a lone high-placed Czech who tried to warn the public about Soviet tyranny but who soon died from falling out a window. Sound familiar?

Elements of the German 3rd Panzer Army on the road near Pruzhany, June 1941.

More to the point, Walton offers two examples of recent or new evidence that the world came closer to nuclear war than previously known, not only during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but, perhaps, also in a 1980’s military exercise that may have been mistaken for the real thing (the 1983 NATO war game exercise called Able Archer 83, that simulated a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union.

A Soviet SS-20 IRBM, on display near the Great Patriotic War Museum

Both resulted in increased dialog between the US and Russia.

President Ronald Reagan’s July 21, 1987 meeting with MI 6 asset double agent Oleg Gordievsky. Wikimedia commons.

It is too early into the Trump administration to know how US-Russian relations will play out, but no doubt that spies, lies, and intelligence will continue to influence international relations.

The enneagram of personality (EoP) is a huge and growing global phenomenon,¹ and recently “interest in the enneagram is exploding.”² “The enneagram” has been taught at top universities, major corporations, and government intelligence agencies such as the FBI and CIA.³ It purports to provide deep insight into human nature, and its nine type profiles resonate strongly with millions of people. It is increasingly used by mental health professionals with their patients and clients.

The consensus among academic and scientific communities, however, is to reject the EoP as pseudoscience because it lacks validation and is partly based in symbology and numerology.⁴ Summarily dismissing the EoP, however, ignores its proven benefits and the value many gain through better understanding themselves and others. Over the last half century, as the EoP became immensely popular, a conundrum developed: how can the enneagram of personality, considered by many to be a deeply insightful model of human nature, and used by therapists, legal profilers, and intelligence analysts, stand on such a questionable foundation of mysticism?

Unlike typologies with some academic acceptance—such as the Big Five (Five-Factor Model of Personality) or the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)—the EoP is not a personality test. It is a set of personality profiles associated with a geometric figure (see Figure 1). Although EoP tests exist, they arrived decades after the EoP. Even the leading EoP tests—the RHETI (Riso-Hudson Enneagram Type Indicator) and the WEPSS (Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales) are relatively ineffective at identifying personality types.⁵ One best learns one’s type through reflection and insight requiring much time, study and effort. Many people report, however, that the process of discovering their enneatype was the most valuable part of their enneagram expience as they peeled back layers masking the deeper self.

Ichazo’s Blunder

In the 1950s, the EoP was first devised by the Bolivian mystic Oscar Ichazo when he identified nine ego-types, each of which emphasizes a particular emotion: the seven deadly sins of anger, pride, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust and sloth, plus deceit and fear.

Oscar Ichazo. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Each type has a “chief feature”, which the Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff had previously described as “an axis round which everything turns.”¹⁶ Ichazo identified these chief features as the ego-fixations of resentment, flattery, vanity, melancholy, stinginess, cowardice, planning, vengefulness, and indolence.¹⁷

George Gurdjieff. Source: Wikimedia commons.

In the 1970s, the Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo M.D. mapped these nine ego-types to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), used by mental health professionals as a diagnostic tool,¹⁸ and expanded Ichazo’s brief type descriptions into the modern psychological type profiles of the EoP that today resonate strongly with so many people. If this was the whole story, those nine ego-types might now have been validated and scientifically accepted.

Claudio Naranjo M.D. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Unfortunately, Ichazo was very much enamored with Gurdjieff’s beloved enneagram symbol. Gurdjieff endowed the enneagram symbol with great significance, proclaiming: “What a man cannot put into the enneagram, he does not understand."⁹ The folly of Ichazo and Naranjo was in associating the ego-types with the enneagram symbol. There is no connection between them and no support for placing the types on the diagram. The consequences of this have been profound and have limited the utility and credibility of the EoP typology.

Strong Face Validity

The EoP’s popularity, and the passion it generates, is largely due to its high degree of apparent face validity (the extent to which an assessment tool appears to measure what it says it measures), in this case the way in which its insights resonate with people. That personal EoP experience is powerful, and for many, it is intoxicating. As people learn about the nine types, they recognize aspects of themselves, family members, and friends in a series of realizations prompting moments of profound understanding, empathy, and acceptance.

Some of these people had spent decades trying to understand themselves: their automatic thoughts, emotional patterns, and unwanted behaviors. Some had an inch-thick file of self-observations, personality test results, and personal writings, and in some cases decades spent in therapy. The nine profiles of the EoP depict personality structures that join up our islands of self-knowledge into an integrated self-concept. Spiritual teachers such as Gurdjieff spoke about the disparate “selves” or “I’s” inside each of us.⁹ The EoP shows how to fit together these apparently diverse aspects of self, revealing the attentional focus of one’s ego.

The Conundrum of the Enneagram

Many thousands of psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists now use the EoP with their patients and clients because among its proven benefits reviewed by Hook, et al.,⁵ the EoP can “(a) promote the therapeutic alliance; (b) identify relational themes; (c) identify client strengths;¹⁰ (d) improve communication among couples and families;¹¹ (e) provide a map of the therapeutic process; (f) help normalize clients' emotional pain; and (g) encourage clients to take ownership over their healing process.”¹² Hook, et al. conclude, however, that medical authorities and professional certification bodies view clinical EoP use as a science-practice gap because of the EoP’s questionable predictive validity (the extent to which an assessment tool predicts future outcomes) and reliability (the extent to which an assessment tool consistently measures dimensions of a person over time), especially when compared to validated personality tests like the Big Five.⁵

This science-practice gap of the EoP has far-reaching implications. Lacking proven validity and reliability, should the EoP be used by therapists and law enforcement profilers? How does something resembling an astrological chart deliver genuine insights with predictive value? Why, after fifty years, are we no closer to resolving the paradox of the EoP’s apparent face validity versus the mysticism of its symbology and numerology?

This paper resolves the enneagram conundrum by examining the following questions:

• Which aspects of EoP theory are supported by research and which are not?

• Why have investigators failed to evaluate the EoP’s fundamental assumptions?

• How can mental health professionals avoid the EoP science-practice gap?

• How can this typology move past its pseudoscience and gain academic acceptance?

The Religion of the Enneagram

The EoP’s validity conundrum has resisted resolution for more than fifty years because there exists: (1) a multitude of layered and interrelated EoP theories that complicate study and analysis; (2) a lack of rigorous, objective analysis to separately evaluate individual aspects of EoP theory and its fundamental assumptions; and (3) as review papers state: only two of the more than 100 published EoP papers are based on formal studies.⁵

Most traditional enneagram teaching is common across authors and teachers. It is repeated in more than a thousand published books, in professional enneagram trainings, and in public classes, claiming that the enneagram system of personality has ancient roots (incorrect: only the geometric figure itself is old), and that it is timeless wisdom originating from the Sufis, mystical Christianity, or the Kabbalah¹³ (incorrect: the personality model was developed in the 1950s through the 1970s by Oscar Ichazo and then Claudio Naranjo).

The leading EoP authorities say, often in reverential tones, that the enneagram symbol itself is sacred (incorrect: it is inherently no more sacred than a parallelogram) and that the position of each personality type on the symbol is pre-ordained by numerology from the Law of Three and the Law of Seven’s cyclic decimal 142857¹⁴ (incorrect: the numbers were deliberately arranged that way on the diagram about sixty years ago by Ichazo because he believed in numerology).

Enneagram teachers explain that the numbers adjacent to each type are their “wings” (see Figure 2). Some say personalities are influenced by one or both wings, and others¹⁵ state every person has one wing but not the other, so, in fact, there are not nine types, but eighteen (incorrect: there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of wings, which depend entirely on the mistaken association of the ego-types with the enneagram symbol).

Enneagram authors and teachers¹⁵ claim that the lines connecting the types (see Figure 3) can be seen as arrows (of integration/disintegration) showing characteristics each type displays when at their best and worst (incorrect: according to his student Mel Risman, Naranjo first sketched the arrows “as a doodle” and was shocked others then taught this). It is also standard teaching¹⁵ that the position of the types on the symbol indicates whether each type is in the gut (8, 9, 1) heart (2, 3, 4) or head (5, 6, 7) triad (incorrect: there is no scientific support for the triad conjecture).

Enneagram Mythmaking

The preceding information is standard EoP teaching. It has been widely published and taught to millions of people. Not one word of it is correct. In court records,¹⁶ Ichazo said he received the enneagram of personality from the Jewish archangel Metatron in “a vision of 108 enneagons.” By claiming he did not invent the enneagram of personality, but discovered it through this mystical vision, Ichazo undermined his intellectual property claims and, worse, he implied the enneagram of personality had an ancient, mystical backstory, which it doesn’t.

Later, Ichazo changed his mind, saying “I did not receive this material from any archangel or entity whatsoever ... it was the fruit of a long, careful, and dedicated study of the human psyche and the main problems of philosophy and theology.”¹⁷ Naranjo elucidated: “Lately Ichazo has been claiming more authorship of the enneagram than he did,” explaining this was an appropriate reaction to how his teaching was distorted and popularized against his wishes by those who attended his early groups.¹⁴

The widely taught enneagram of personality endorsed by the International Enneagram Association (IEA) bears the hallmarks of a fringe religion. It is based on a mystic’s vision, involves otherworldly beings, requires unsubstantiated belief, uses numerology and symbology, and continues to accrete increasingly bizarre theories. As with many such belief systems, it has a large number of devout adherents.

Research suggests the EoP’s nine ego-types have at least some validity, but their inter-relationship and all secondary and tertiary aspects of enneagram theory are invalid.⁵ In other words, the problem with the enneagram of personality is the enneagram symbol itself. Removing the symbol and everything associated with it resolves the EoP conundrum and demystifies the typology. This is as easy to write as it is difficult for the EoP community to accept.

The Entrenchment of the Enneagram Industry

When discussing such demystification with people in the enneagram community—such as EoP authors and teachers, members of the IEA (International Enneagram Association), or those who make much of their income from EoP-related activity—one is met with wide-eyed stares and incredulity. Perhaps they perceive such objective assessment of the EoP as an existential threat to their livelihood, belief system, or self-esteem. Most will not even engage in such a discussion.

Instead, they argue that it does not matter whether there is evidence to support its numerology and symbology, because the enneagram “works”, and because people “find value” in the elegance of the symbol along with its triads, wings, arrows and other ancillary theories. But, according to the results of EoP research,⁵ it is only the core nine ego-types that might actually “work”. Tertiary theories such as TriTypes, Dyads, and Harmonic Types can therefore be summarily dismissed because they are constructed on the unsupported secondary conjectures.

The scientific skeptic Robert Todd Carroll included the Enneagram in The Skeptic’s Dictionary, a book of pseudoscientific theories that "can't be tested because they are so vague and malleable that anything relevant can be shoehorned to fit the theory."¹⁸ Those “pseudoscientific theories” are the folly associated with, or constructed upon, the symbology and numerology of the enneagram of personality. When they are removed, we are left with a testable typology of nine ego-types.

Wings and Arrows

As with astrological charts and horoscopes, many people see aspects of themselves in the enneagram’s wings and arrows. This is exactly what one would expect from the Barnum Effect and confirmation bias.¹⁹ The enneagram industry protests: “But what is the harm if some people find value in wings and arrows?” The harm is very great. Without a validated, reliable test instrument, it is a difficult exercise for most people to correctly type themselves, an exercise made vastly more difficult by the misinformation of wings and arrows. A woman thinks to herself:

I care a lot about my appearance. I’m high energy and when I get on a roll I can really perform. This seems like the Type 3. But once in a while, I get depressed, which isn’t like a 3. Of course, that must be my 4 wing expressing itself, 4s get depressed. Okay, I’ve got it—I’m a 3w4: a 3 with a 4 wing. The thing is though; this doesn’t explain why I sometimes feel edgy and need to go through future scenarios, over-planning things in my head. Ah, I get it now: that’s when my 3 goes to 6 along the arrow.

The trouble with all this convoluted reasoning is that this poor woman is actually a 7, which better explains these self-observations. Without the wings and arrows that she has introduced to justify her mistyping as a 3, it would be much easier for her to see her correct type.

Theories of Childhood Origin

Enneagram authors posit varying theories about how enneatype develops and why someone is a particular enneagram number. Most of these theories relate how childhood experiences shape a person’s ego as a means of coping with life, such as Helen Palmer’s “1s report being heavily criticized or punished when they were young then became obsessed with trying to be good,”²⁰ Don Riso and Russ Hudson’s “Everyone’s basic personality type is the result of having had a primary orientation to his or her nurturing-figure,”²¹ and Michael Goldman’s “Unlike Ones and Eights who were punished as children....”²²

These theories of “childhood origin” assume a baby is born as a blank slate with few, if any, personality predispositions, but those theories are not supported by scientific research. Beyond the obvious errors in these writings, is the untold damage done to those who believe them and consequently view their personality as pathology, and blame their childhood caregivers for perceived issues. What these authors have failed to understand is that what is remembered from one’s childhood is not the cause of ego-type; it is the result of ego-type. The experiences we encode as memories, according to the arousal theory of memory formation, are those we felt strong emotion around, and we recall what we were most sensitive about.²³

Type 1s are not 1s because they were criticized by their parents; Type 1s recall being criticized by their parents because they are Type 1s. When Type 1s are interviewed, those moments of childhood criticism are what they recall because of the selectivity of memory, both in terms of which memories were originally formed and what is later recalled. In fact, those recalled incidents did not cause the Type 1 fixation; they are recalled because the Type 1 fixation was already operating at that time, and the child was therefore sensitive to such events. And that is why such experiences were more deeply and frequently encoded as memory engrams.

So what does cause someone to be a type 1? The late Professor David Daniels, Head of Stanford University’s psychiatry department, wrote about a study conducted on newborn infants by Thomas and Chess.²⁴ It discerned nine distinct behavior patterns in the babies that map directly to the nine ego-types of the EoP:

• Rhythmicity/Regularity 1 - Perfectionist

• Approach 2 - Helper

• Activity Level 3 - Performer

• Quality of Mood 4 - Individualist

• Threshold of Response 5 - Observer

• Attention Span 6 - Defender

• Adaptability 7 - Enthusiast

• Intensity of Response 8 - Asserter

• Distractability 9 - Mediator

The researchers had no knowledge of the EoP or its ego-types. This study suggests that our ego-type, as defined by the nine attentional styles of the EoP, is not something formed during childhood, but something innate. David Daniels explained it this way:

Studies repeatedly demonstrate that temperament is largely the result of heredity and what is called “the non-shared family environment.” … I believe that what the behavioral geneticists and developmental psychologists call inherited temperament traits are the result of inborn propensities to develop an attentional style or habit of attention. These styles are the lenses with which we view or perceive the world, literally from birth.²⁵

These analyses suggest that our attentional ego-type—far from being determined by childhood caregivers—was likely already set by the time we are born, and probably determined by genetic predispositions shaped by environmental factors, substantially in vitro.

Conclusion

The enneagram community wants reconciliation between the EoP and science, but that cannot happen because the enneagram is inherently mystical in nature. Such scientific acceptance can only be achieved by removing the enneagram symbol along with the numerology and all associated secondary and tertiary aspects of EoP theory. Although what remains may not make a pretty diagram with mass-market appeal, it is a more powerful typology that might be properly validated and integrated with existing research.

The science-practice gap of mental health professionals using the EoP with patients can be resolved by focusing on only the core nine ego-types, ignoring the enneagram symbol along with secondary aspects such as wings, arrows, and triads, and rejecting theories of childhood type origin. By doing so, we might, as Sam Harris wrote, “pluck the diamond from the dunghill of esoteric religion.”²⁶

References

1. Alexander, M & Schnipke, B. (2020). The Enneagram: A Primer for Psychiatry Residents. The American Journal of Psychiatry Residents’ Journal, March.

2. Gerber, M. (2020). The Enneagram is having a moment. You can thank millennials. Los Angeles Times. April 22.

3. Seligman, J. & Joseph, N. (1994). To Find Self, Take a Number. Newsweek, September 12.

4. Thyer, B. A. & Pignotti, M. (2015). Pseudoscience in Clinical Assessment. Science and Pseudoscience in Social Work Practice. Springer Publishing.

5. Hook JN, Hall TW, Davis DE, Van Tongeren DR, Conner M. (2020). The Enneagram: A systematic review of the literature and directions for future research. Journal of Clinical Psychology. 2020; 1–19.

6. Ouspensky, P. D. (1957). The Fourth Way. Routledge and Kegan Paul.

7. Naranjo, C. (1990). Ennea-type Structures: Self-Analysis for the Seeker. Gateways/IDHHB Inc.

8. Naranjo, C. (1994). Character and Neurosis – An Integrative View. Gateways/IDHHB Inc.

9. Ouspensky, P. D. (1949). In Search of the Miraculous. Harvest/HBJ Book.

10. Tapp, K., & Engebretson, K. (2010). Using the Enneagram for client insight and transformation: A type eight illustration. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health, 5(1), 65–72.

11. Matise, M. (2018). The enneagram: An enhancement to family therapy. Contemporary Family Therapy: An International Journal. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10591-018-9471-0

12. Choucroun, P. M. (2012). An exploratory analysis of the enneagram typology in couple counseling: A qualitative analysis (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Texas at San Antonio, TX.

13. Palmer, H. (1991). The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others In Your Life. HarperOne.

14. Naranjo, C. (1996). The Distorted Enneagram (interview). Gnosis Magazine. Fall.

15. Enneagram Institute, The. (2024). How the enneagram system works. February 28. https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/how-the-enneagram-system-works/

16. Arica Institute, Inc. v. Palmer, 761 F., Supp. 1056 (S.D.N.Y. 1991), April 9. https://shorturl.at/axCmF

17. Ichazo, O. (n.d.) https://www.skepdic.com/enneagr.html

18. Carroll, R. T. (2011). The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions. John Wiley & Sons.

19. Fayard, J. (2019). When Personality Test Results Are Wrong, But Feel So Right. Psychology Today. Sept. 29. https://shorturl.at/3U0wd

20. Palmer, H. (1991). The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others In Your Life. HarperOne.

21. Riso, D. & Hudson, R. (1996). Personality Types — Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. Houghton Mifflin.

22. Goldberg, M. (1999). The 9 Ways of Working. Da Capo Lifelong Books.

23. Tambini, A., Rimmele, U., Phelps, E. A. & Davachi, L. (2017). Emotional brain states carry over and enhance future memory formation. Nature Neuroscience, 20, pp. 271–278

24. Thomas, A., Chess, S. and Birch, H. G. (1970). The Origin of Personality, Scientific American, August, pp 102-109.

25. Daniels, D. (2001). Ch. 14: Nature and Nurture: On Acquiring a Type. Enneagram Applications. Metamorphous Press.

26. Harris, S. (2015). Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Simon & Schuster.

“While we got out safely, our house and everything in it was consumed in the fire. We've lost everything we couldn't carry out at a moment's notice: all our books, our record and tape collection, all our artwork, everything. As yet, we've not been allowed back into our neighborhood to be able to sift through the ashes.”

Ten days later Tim wrote me again to tell me that their daughter Arwen had taken her own life, in part due to the fires that were the final straw after years of intermittent bouts of depression. Tim closed that email with this thought:

“Bon and I reflected that evening on the condolence of atheism. Not only do some religions, particularly Christianity, stigmatize suicide, but as well many of the religious wrack themselves over why a loving God did this to them or what they did wrong to incur God's wrath, etc. Accepting the absence of supernatural agency, we don't have to deal with all that emotional noise.”

Moved by this reflection, I invited Tim to expand on it for this special guest edition of the Skeptic column.

Tim Callahan is Skeptic magazine’s religion editor and author of the books Bible Prophecy and The Secret Origins of the Bible, and co-author with Donald Prothero of UFOs, Chemtrails, and Aliens: What Science Says.

An Atheist Grief Observed

On the evening of January 7, 2025, my wife Bonnie and I lost our home and nearly all our possessions in the Eaton Canyon Fire that swept through Altadena. On the night of January 21, our daughter, Arwen, committed suicide. She had been living with us for many years and, while she had suffered from clinical depression and substance abuse issues, had recently been making great strides in dealing with these problems. However, the disruption of our lives in the wake of the fire proved too much for her to deal with. Following this double tragedy we have been the grateful recipients of compassion and generosity from so many friends and family members. This outpouring of compassion has greatly softened the impact of our refugee status.

While devastated by the loss of our daughter, Bon and I found a degree of consolation in our atheism. This may, at first, seem counterintuitive, in that one would think that a belief in the immortality of the soul and an all-powerful, compassionate God should instill a sense of peace and acceptance in the hearts of the bereaved, while the finality of death experienced by atheists would make their loss all the more devastating. However, unexpected bereavement can result in a crisis of faith among believers. They either wonder how a loving, compassionate God could allow such a thing to happen, or they may blame themselves and become wracked with guilt, wondering what they might have done to incur God's wrath. Since we don't see supernatural agency in either the abnormally high winds that spread both the Eaton Canyon and Pacific Palisades fires, or the ravages of clinical depression, we neither rage against a seemingly uncaring God, nor blame our own sinfulness for the disasters that befell us. Nor do we see sin as a factor in our daughter's suicide.

Our acceptance of our daughter's death stands in stark contrast what the great twentieth century Christian apologist C. S. Lewis experienced at the death of his wife, Joy Davidman Lewis. In his self-examination of his response to her death, A Grief Observed, Lewis reflected:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?

Lewis even doubted the consolation of the assurance of the immorality of his wife's soul:

After the death of a friend, years ago, I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about [Joy]. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. “Them as asks don’t get.” I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came, I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.

These doubts, finally, led Lewis to doubt God was the loving, merciful being he had believed in before his wife's death:

Sooner or later, I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, “good”? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?

Eventually, Lewis was able to rationalize his bereavement and God's seeming callous indifference to his wife's death, to some degree seeing this as a test of his faith:

He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.

Lewis rationalized God's seeming silence not as evidence that God didn't exist, rather putting the cause of this silence on his own human frailty:

When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace, child; you don’t understand.” Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask—half our great theological and metaphysical problems—are like that.

As atheists, invoking Occam's Razor, Bon and I don't have to rationalize God's silence with such convoluted arguments. The simplest, most direct explanation for God's silence is that it's strong evidence of his nonexistence.

It could, of course, be argued that, regardless of the experience of C. S. Lewis regarding bereavement, religion does offer compassion and consolation, not only to the bereaved but to those suffering in general. Unfortunately for those who would make such an argument, the record of religion on this issue is checkered. This is particularly true with respect to suicide. Traditionally, had we sought a Christian burial for our daughter we might well have been rebuffed by church authorities who considered suicide the one unforgivable sin. There is neither compassion nor consolation in such an attitude. Fortunately, this traditional view has been softened over time, as church authorities have come to understand the role mental illness plays in the despair of the suicidal.

As to C. S. Lewis's feelings of bitterness and despair, it would be dishonest to characterize his experience as necessarily typical among the religious. We have friends—staunch Roman Catholics—who have experienced bereavement and found strong consolation in their religious faith. Thus, we cannot use Lewis's bitterness to stereotype Christians in general. Just so, believers would do well to abandon a stereotype commonly applied to atheists by believers, that of someone bitter and joyless who, like Jadis, the White Witch and villain in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—the first of the Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis—wanted it to always be winter and never Christmas. Admittedly, there are atheists whose atheism resulted from experiencing abuse of one form or another at the hands of religious authorities. The late Skeptic magazine co-founder and Art Director Pat Linse used to refer to them as experiencing what she called "Angry Atheist Syndrome".

In my case, the journey from belief to unbelief did not involve either abuse or bitterness. My religious experience during childhood can best be characterized as benign neglect. My parents had, for a time, before I was born, been active members of a local Methodist congregation, but had drifted away from it. From time to time, they would bestir themselves to return to active church attendance, in the process making me go to Sunday school. Their zeal, however, would soon flag. For a time after they had stopped attending church, they would send me to Sunday school. However, they would soon abandon even in this concession to religious propriety. This changed when I was in middle school. They made friends with new neighbors who were dedicated churchgoers and were led into active membership in the local Presbyterian congregation. My family became regular churchgoers, and I not only attended Sunday school regularly but became active in a Presbyterian youth group.

Thus, in high school, I was quite active in the Westminster Fellowship at the First Presbyterian Church in Garden Grove, California. This involvement ended abruptly when, after graduating from high school in 1961, I joined the United States Navy in response to the demands of the military draft. After boot camp, while I attended Sunday church services for a time, I soon fell away from any active participation in religion. Once I was out of the service, I made a few half-hearted attempts to rekindle religious observance while in college, but soon gave these up. Nevertheless, I still held on to a sort of deist belief in God until I realized I really didn't believe anymore. When I finally confronted the dreaded "A-word" I realized I already was an atheist.

Bon's journey from belief to unbelief was a bit rockier. As the daughter of a non-practicing Protestant father and a lapsed Catholic mother, who experienced guilt at having left the church, she was forced, as the only one in her family, to attend mass and to experience Catholic indoctrination. While she still bears some scars left by the imposition of Catholic guilt, she did develop a more wholesome religious belief in her first marriage to the founder of the Mythopoeic Society, a literary group dedicated to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. Thus, her eventual journey from belief to unbelief was, like mine, a gradual and gentle drift.

While we know of some who find comfort from religious belief in a time of loss, there are also those who, like C. S Lewis, found the devastation of unexpected bereavement only deepened by their belief in God. In the end, the comforts of religion in a time of grief would seem rather dubious and dependent on variations in temperament and the specific details or their loss.

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” —James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51

We are about to establish settlements on the Earth’s moon and on Mars in the next few years or decades. Given that future solar system settlers will have similar biological natures as our Paleolithic colonists had when they undertook their exploration and settlement of Earth out of Africa, it would be prudent to start thinking about how best to govern an extraterrestrial civilization, starting with what we have learned already from the scientific study of governance on our planet.

I started thinking about this issue when Elon Musk announced his intention to set up a Martian colony before the end of the 2020s, explaining his motivation to a 2018 South by Southwest (SXSW) conference audience thusly: “If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilization somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” adding that the endeavor will be “difficult, dangerous, a good chance you’ll die.” Curious to know his thoughts on the subject of extraterrestrial governance, on June 16, 2018 I whimsically tweeted at the SpaceX CEO:

Minutes later I received this reply from Musk:

Given that Twitter may not be the ideal platform for fleshing out complex thoughts like establishing a new governing system on another planet, I thought Musk’s additional comments to the SXSW attendees were revealing:

Most likely, the form of government on Mars would be somewhat of a direct democracy where people vote directly on issues instead of going through representative government. When the United States was formed representative government was the only thing that was logistically feasible. There was no way for people to communicate instantly. A lot of people didn’t have access to mailboxes, the post office was primitive. A lot of people couldn’t write. So you had to have some form of representative democracy or things just wouldn’t work at all. On Mars, everyone votes on every issue and that’s how it goes. There are a few things I’d recommend, which is keep laws short. Long laws...that’s like something suspicious going on if there’s long laws.

That certainly sounds reasonable. Who wouldn’t prefer fewer laws and more freedom? Unfortunately, most people on both the political left and the political right appear to want more laws, inasmuch as both parties have all reliably grown the size the government in their charge. And it is why libertarian sentiments, so succinctly expressed in the title of Matt Kibbe’s libertarian manifesto Don’t Hurt Other People and Don’t Take Their Stuff, are embraced by so few people (the Libertarian party is lucky to get even one percent of the vote in national elections).

The reason is to be found in the nature of human interaction and conflict resolution, which grow exponentially as small bands and tribes coalesce into larger chiefdoms and states. Musk’s direct democracy could be effective with a few dozen inhabitants, which is roughly the size of hunter-gatherer bands. But look what happens as population numbers increase through both fecundity and immigration—both of which are likely in an initial extraterrestrial founding colony—as worked out by the UCLA geographer Jared Diamond from his studies of the hunter-gatherer peoples of Papua New Guinea: a small band of 20 people generates 190 possible dyads, or two-person interactions (20 x 19 ÷ 2), small enough for informal conflict resolution. But increase that 20 to 2,000 and you’re facing 1,999,000 possible dyads (2000 x 1999 ÷ 2). Here a 100-fold population increase produces a 10,000-fold dyadic rise. Scale that up to cities of 200,000 or 2,000,000 and the potential for conflict multiplies beyond comprehension, along with it laws and regulations needed to insure relative harmony and efficiency. As Diamond explains in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel:

Once the threshold of “several hundred,” below which everyone can know everyone else, has been crossed, increasing numbers of dyads become pairs of unrelated strangers. Hence, a large society that continues to leave conflict resolution to all of its members is guaranteed to blow up. That factor alone would explain why societies of thousands can exist only if they develop centralized authority to monopolize force and resolve conflict.

Let’s apply this analysis to what Musk has in mind when he says that “the threshold for a self-sustaining city on Mars or a civilization would be a million people.” That number generates nearly 500 billion dyadic combinatorial possibilities (1,000,000 x 999,999 ÷ 2 = 499,999,500,000), meaning any hoped-for manual of “short laws” would soon become volumes of bureaucratic regulations and laws, which as we know from history results in complex political and legal systems of suffocating regulations, entangling restrictions, government overreach, and suppression of individual freedom and autonomy. Extraterrestrial explorers and settlers will need to figure out how to prevent a bureaucracy from expanding in response to the accelerating dyadic combinations as their population increases, which has happened in every government on Earth as if it were a law of nature.

Thus, the general challenge for Martians is the same as it has been for Earthlings for millennia: to strike the right balance between freedom and security. It would be interesting for Martian colonists to experiment with and design new systems of governance never tried on Earth, but these Martians will be Earthlings with all the inner demons that come bundled with the better angels of our nature.

To many people, the idea of humans settling down on an extraterrestrial body sounds overly optimistic, highly improbable, and even hallucinatory. “The idea of Elon Musk to have a million people settle on Mars is a dangerous delusion,” said the Astronomer Royal Lord Martin Rees. “Living on Mars is no better than living on the South Pole or the tip of Mount Everest.” Indeed, but that is surely what it must have seemed to our Paleolithic ancestors who—barely eeking out a living in the nooks and crannies of sub-Saharan Africa and Ice Age Europe in the evolutionary bottlenecks that nearly exterminated our species some tens of thousands of years ago—nevertheless over those long gone millennia spread out across all of Earth’s continents and, eventually, island hopped their way across the vast Pacific Ocean, which must have seemed as daunting to those early explorers as interstellar space appears to us today.

Given our species’ exploratory nature and its propensity to widen our horizons by branching out from our home territories to put down stakes and settle new lands, it is not completely crazy to imagine how interstellar and even galactic civilizations might develop. Founder populations on the moon and Mars could eventually spread themselves throughout the solar system, establishing communities on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and, in the fullness of time and with new propulsion technologies (we’re talking centuries, if not millennia), cross the vast distances of interstellar space and over millions of years star hop their way around the galaxy.

What might happen with our moral and political nature? Assuming that we are not going to genetically engineer out of our nature greed, avarice, competitiveness, aggression, and violence—given that these characteristics are essential to who we are as a species and all have an evolutionary logic to them—as we branch out across the galaxy there will not be one civilization, but many, not one hominin species, but multiple. Given the distances and time-scales involved, there will likely be many species of spacefaring hominins in which each colonized planet will act like a new “founder” population from which a new species evolves, reproductively isolated from other such populations—the very definition of a species. These civilizations will vary even more than nations on Earth varied before globalization, with dozens, hundreds, possibly even thousands of different civilizations in which sentient beings may flourish—a vast array of peaks on the galactic political landscape.

If this were to happen, sentience itself would become immortal, inasmuch as there is no known mechanism—short of the end of the universe itself trillions of years from now in our accelerating expanding cosmos—to cause the extinction of all planetary and solar systems with all their different sentient hominin species at once.

In the far future, civilizations may become sufficiently advanced enough to colonize entire galaxies, genetically engineer new life forms, terraform planets, and even trigger the birth of stars and new planetary solar systems through massive engineering projects. Civilizations this advanced would have so much knowledge and power as to be essentially omniscient and omnipotent. (I call this extrapolation Shermer’s Last Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.) If this also sounds delusional, recall that as long ago as 1960 the physicist Freeman Dyson showed how planets, moons, and asteroids could be torn apart and reconstructed into a giant sphere or ring surrounding the sun to capture enough solar radiation to provide limitless free energy. There are today, in fact, astronomers and organizations searching for signs of such extraterrestrial technologies in our galactic neighborhood, such as Dyson spheres or ETI probes.

Any such civilization could not achieve this level of development without also being advanced politically, economically, and morally as well.

If we do establish extraterrestrial bases, colonies, cities and eventually civilizations, how will they be governed? A number of scientists and science fiction writers, reflecting on the establishment of colonies on other worlds, have made the analogy of Europeans colonizing the Americas, but this only goes so far given the fact that those incipient settlers at least had air to breath, water to drink, and plenty of potential food on the hoof, in the ground, and in oceans, lakes, and rivers. The lack of these basic commodities generates additional problems for the political governance of Mars and other celestial bodies—there’s no air or food! As well, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that the U.S. signed prohibits anyone from “owning” Mars. What would be the incentive to colonize Mars if there’s no guarantee that the work you do to live there would result in any type of ownership? Although working the land and air to produce resources is not directly proscribed by the treaty, doing so in a manner that doesn’t lead to tyranny is another matter entirely.

These and related problems were addressed by the University of Edinburgh astrophysicist Charles S. Cockell in a series of meetings with scientists and scholars from varied fields in two conference proceedings titled Human Governance Beyond Earth and The Meaning of Liberty Beyond Earth. To learn more about what to do when the most basic necessities of life—oxygen, water, and food—are under the control of one company (SpaceX?) or one government (the U.S. of Mars?), I spoke with Dr. Cockell on my podcast, starting with the observation that Earthlings colonizing Mars will be nothing like Europeans colonizing North America. “Space is an inherently tyranny-prone environment,” Cockell told me. “You are living in an environment where the oxygen you breathe is being produced by a machine.” On Earth, he notes, governments can rob their people of food and water, “but they can’t take away your air, so you can run off into a forest and plan revolution, and you can get your friends together and you can try to overthrow a government.”

In habitats on the moon or Mars where oxygen production is controlled by a single entity, there must be some guarantee that the air supply cannot be cut off to citizens. It would seem, then, that common ownership of the air and the machines that produce it through a single entity would follow, and I suggested as much to Cockell. To my surprise he responded, “I would go in completely the opposite direction. I would fragment as much as possible. I would try to create plurality in the means of production and great competition and have many people able to produce oxygen. So what you’re trying to do is decentralize,” he and his team concluded after studying Earth-bound systems, because “centrally planned governments generally end up as not very good experiments.”

What about corporations that capture a majority market share and become so dominant that they can monopolize the market and turn tyrannical, I inquire? “Well, these things happen on the Earth,” Cockell historicized, noting that documents like the Bill of Rights are designed to keep tyranny in check. True, but not without violence, revolutions, and wars, I rejoin. “It’s hard work to get people to believe in freedom and to fight for it,” Cockell admitted, “and I think in space it’s going to be even more hard work. So you’ve got to give people freedom of movement, freedom of information—it’s really no different from the Earth, it’s just more expanded and more vigorous of what we need to do on the Earth to maintain freedom.”

If he were to recommend to the first Martians what documents they should take with them to help design their new society, Cockell unhesitatingly offered “The U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence,” adding that the latter “is not just about independence; it’s also about the ideals of free governance.” Here the analogue is fitting, given that on a planet in which nearly every square foot of land (and much of the sea) is already under some form of governmental legislation, there are few opportunities to start anew, so the U.S. experiment in governance is one well worth emulating. “One of the moments of genius of the founding fathers…was they recognized that human beings can never be made perfect. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. You can’t make people perfect. You must take a cynical view and assume they are very imperfect and create the checks and balances to hold those slightly more negative aspects of humans in check.” Among the new ideas Cockell and his colleagues came up with is modularity, literally incorporating liberty into architecture:

You could modularize a settlement so that there’s lots of oxygen production machines, lots of food production machines, such that the failure of any one of them does not threaten the whole settlement. [Decentralization] allows people to do their own thing. The disasters happen when you try to artificially construct societies that are wholly controlled from the center or where there’s no organization and you create an anarchic society. The best forms of society have always been ones that are flexible, and modify themselves over time as fashions and ideas change, and that’s why, I think, Western democracies are reasonably successful at keeping people happy to the maximum extent you can try and do that. And I think in space there is going to be nothing different there.

Robert Zubrin, aerospace engineer, President of the Mars Society, author of The Case for Mars, The Case for Space, and Entering Space, told me when I queried him on this matter, began “I’m not going to specify a government for Mars. There will be groups of people that go to Mars and they’ll have different ideas on what the best government should be and what form of government will maximize human potential and opportunity. In fact, I think this will be a major driver for the colonization of Mars—there will be groups of people who have novel ideas in these respects and will not be popular and they’ll need a place to go where they can give these ideas a spin.”

Invoking Darwin’s idea of natural selection, Zubin went on to suggest that those with governance ideas that work will succeed and those that don’t, won’t. This, he suggests, is not unlike what happened with the founding of the United States. The liberal ideas from the Enlightenment that the founders evoked were not unknown in Europe, but the long-established power structures prevented them from flourishing there. “Mars won’t be utopia,” Zubrin added, invoking instead the U.S. founders description of America as a grand experiment in governance. “It will be a lab. It will be a place where experiments are done.” But what if a Martian tyrant turns off the air of the people in order to control them, I inquire? “Specialization leads to empowerment,” Zubrin countered, explaining that autocrats could control peasants in medieval Europe because they were living in such a simple society that tyrants could do away with them if they didn’t obey. On Mars, everyone will be critical to everyone else’s survival, so “extraterrestrial tyranny is impossible.”

There are, as well, a variety of social experiments in setting up new societies here on Earth that differ from nations and states from which we may glean insights into extraterrestrial governance. These natural experiments in living are deeply explored by the evolutionary sociologist Nicholas Christakis in his 2019 book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. Let’s look at a few examples and see what light might be shown on what the first space-faring civilizational founders should do, starting with Christakis’s list of eight social characteristics that are at the core of all good societies:

1. The capacity to have and recognize individual identity.

2. Love for partners and offspring.

3. Friendship.

4. Social networks.

5. Cooperation.

6. Preference for one’s own group (“in-group bias”).

7. Mild hierarchy (relative egalitarianism).

8. Social learning and teaching.

Whatever the right balance of these characteristics will be for the first space colonists remains to be seen, but the overall balance to be sought is between individualism and group living—individual autonomy balanced with commitment to the community.

These rules apply to intentional communities, but Christakis considers natural experiments in the form of unintentional communities, a type of “forbidden experiment” that would never get the approval of a research IRB (Institutional Review Board). Being stranded in a remote place is one such natural experiment, and Christakis accesses a database published in an 1813 work, Remarkable Shipwrecks: A Collection of Interesting Accounts of Naval Disasters with Many Particulars of the Extraordinary Adventures and Sufferings of the Crews of Vessels Wrecked at Sea, and of Their Treatment on Distant Shores. Christakis includes a table of 24 such small-scale shipwreck societies over a 400-year span from 1500 to 1900, with initial survival colony populations ranging from 4 to 500, with a mean of 119 (2,870/24 = 119.5), but with much smaller numbers of rescued survivors, ranging from 3 to 289, with a mean of 59 (1,422/24 = 59.25), reflecting their success or failure at striking the right balance. The duration of these unplanned societies ranged from 2 months to 15 years, with a mean of 20 months (461.5/23 = 20.06; one group was rescued after 13 days so I didn’t count them).

Some of the survivors killed and ate each other (murder and cannibalism), while others survived and flourished and were eventually rescued. What made the difference? “The groups that typically fared best were those that had good leadership in the form of mild hierarchy (without any brutality), friendships among the survivors, and evidence of cooperation and altruism,” Christakis concludes. The successful shipwreck societies shared food equitably, took care of the sick and injured survivors, and worked together digging wells, burying the dead, building fires, and building escape boats. There was little hierarchy—for example, while on board their ships officers and enlisted men were separated, but on land successful castaways integrated everyone in a cooperative, egalitarian, and more horizontal structure, putting aside prior hierarchical class differences in the interest of survival. Camaraderie emerged and friendships across such barriers were formed.

The closest thing to a control experiment in this category was when two ships (the Invercauld and the Grafton) wrecked on the same island (Auckland) at the same time in 1864. The island is 26-miles long and 16-miles wide and lies 290 miles south of New Zealand (see map below), truly isolated. The two surviving groups were unaware of one another, and their outcomes were starkly different. For the Invercauld, 19 out of 25 crew members made it to the island but only 3 survived when rescued a year later, whereas all five of the Grafton crew made it to land and all 5 were rescued two years later.

As Christakis explains:

The differential survival of the two groups may be ascribed to differences in initial salvage and differences in leadership, but it was also due to differences in social arrangements. Among the Invercauld crews, there was an “every man for himself” attitude, whereas the men of the Grafton were cooperators. They shared food equitably, worked together toward common goals (like repairing the dinghy), voted democratically for a leader who could be replaced by a new vote, dedicated themselves to their mutual survival, and treated one another as equals.

Take note future space colonists.

Illustration of the Loss of the Grafton on Auckland Island, 1863 (left).The last of the Grafton castaways are rescued (right). Source: Wrecked on a Reef, Raynal, 1874.

The long-term historical trend in moral progress that I document in The Moral Arc points to the fact that some form of governance is absolutely necessary to attenuate our inner demons and to accentuate our better angels. But let’s not restrict ourselves by the categorical thinking such labels as nation-state or city-state impose, as these are just ways of describing a linear process of governing groups of people of varying sizes. Such systems have taken many forms over the centuries, but in time they have narrowed their scope to include most of the following characteristics that the majority of Western peoples enjoy today (call them the Justice and Freedom Dozen):

1. A liberal democracy in which the franchise is granted to all adult citizens.

2. The rule of law defined by a constitution that is subject to change only under extraordinary circumstances and by judicial proceedings.

3. A viable legislative system for establishing fair and just laws that apply equally and fairly to all citizens regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

4. An effective judicial system for the equitable enforcement of those fair and just laws that employs both retributive and restorative justice.

5. Protection of civil rights and civil liberties for all citizens regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.

6. A potent police for protection from attacks by other people within the state.

7. A robust military for protection of our liberties from attacks by other states.

8. Property rights and the freedom to trade with other citizens and companies both domestic and foreign.

9. Economic stability through a secure and trustworthy banking and monetary system.

10. A reliable infrastructure and the freedom to travel and move.

11. Freedom of speech, the press, and association.

12. Mass education, critical thinking, scientific reasoning, and knowledge available and accessible for all.

Martian political, economic, and legal institutions will likely vary from Earthly ones according to the most basic needs of the first colonists, but any such variation will be necessarily bounded by human nature. Perhaps SpaceX or NASA will create a division of Social Engineers—a team of legal scholars, political scientists, economists, social psychologists, and conflict resolution scholars—and they’ll come up with a wholly different system of governance. Who knows what these space seeds might sprout in the coming centuries and millennia? Whatever we do, we better get it right, because as the political commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote in his aptly titled book Things that Matter:

Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025. Order The Institutions of Extraterrestrial Liberty by clicking on the link or image below.

Underlying the political policy of equal outcomes is the blank slate model of human nature, which holds that since people are inherently equal any inequalities in education, health, wealth, income, housing, home ownership, employment, and the like, can only be the result of societal, political, and economic discrimination, rather than inequalities in cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, creativity, drive and ambition, personal responsibility and volitional choices, and of course luck, good and bad. Once such discriminatory policies are eliminated, woke blank slaters believe, then such outcome inequalities should disappear.

This erroneous vision has led to mistaken social policies related to race and gender, suppressed free speech in academia, led to cancel culture and general censoriousness for ideas contrary to the woke agenda, and wasted billions of dollars and countless hours in academic and corporate training programs in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—meant to erase every last trace of discrimination purported to exist as an explanation for the still unequal outcomes observed in society. Part II of this series below looks at how wokeness poisons science.

Image by Grok prompt “create an image of how wokeness poisons science”

The infiltration of wokeness into the sciences is now well documented, from the hiring practices of academic science departments based on a bingo-card of intersecting identities (race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.) to granting agencies demanding statements explaining how the proposed research project will be supportive of or sensitive to oppressed minorities—even for scientific fields that have nothing to do with the woke focus on politics, economics, and social policies, such as astrophysics. Case in point: the German physicist Sabine Hössenfelder went out to her Twitter/X followers in 2022 to inquire what woke formulaic language she should plug into her grant proposal for studying black holes:

I wrote a research proposal about inflation (in the early universe, not in your supermarket) and it bounced back because I didn’t explain its relevance to “sex, gender, and diversity.” I need to add a paragraph on this. Anyone has an idea what to write?

The pushback she experienced in the comments section of the post led her to delete the tweet, as apparently even asking the question challenged the woke agenda, which must never be allowed.1 Another physicist and cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, has carefully documented the extensive politicization of the sciences, for example a Physical Review Physics Education Research paper titled “Observing Whiteness in Introductory Physics: A Case Study,” that includes an objection to the use of “whiteboards” in classrooms because:

Though whiteboards have been shown to have a number of affordances when they are used as a collaborative tool that all members have access to, in this episode, they also play a role in reconstituting whiteness as social organization. In particular, whiteboards display written information for public consumption; they draw attention to themselves and in this case support the centering of an abstract representation and the person standing next to it, presenting. They collaborate with white organizational culture, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.2

One wonders what the authors make of “blackboards”.

America’s largest funder of science, the Energy Department’s Office of Science, now requires all grant proposals to include a PIER plan (Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research) to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.” Upon reading this new requirement, Krauss wondered what his last grant proposal involving the exploration of gravitational waves, the early universe, neutrino cosmology, dark-matter detection, and black-hole physics has to do with diversity and inclusion, concluding “nothing.”3

Understandably, most astronomers unversed in woke literature have no idea what sort of quagmire they are wading into with such terms as black holes, white holes, dark energy, and dark matter, but the astronomy department at Cornell University can help them sort it out in their course Astro 2034: Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos, in which students are introduced “to the fundamentals of astronomy concepts through readings in Black Studies.” Astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri “use astronomy concepts like ‘black holes’ and ‘event horizons’ to interpret the history of race in creative ways, while artists and musicians conjure blackness through cosmological themes and images.” Lest you think I’m trying to pull off a literary hoax pace Alan Sokal or Pete Boghossian, here is a screen shot of the course:

Perhaps a 2025 update to the course might include a discussion of the Big Bang as a reference to Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s parties.

Examples of such woke corruption of science are now legion. The Russian-born chemist Anna Krylov, the USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California in the field of theoretical and computational quantum chemistry, explained the problem in a keynote address—“Merit-Based Science is Effective and Fair: How Such a Banal Idea Has Become Controversial”—at a retreat of her department in November of 2024.4 Critical Social Justice, she summarizes, insists that…

everything (including science) is racist, sexist, colonial. Existing social inequalities and unequal representation are due to systemic racism and sexism. Everything (including academia) is about power struggle between the oppressors and oppressed. Everything (including science and education) needs to be dismantled and rebuilt to ensure Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. “Those who are not with us are against us” and must be punished.

Examples of how wokeness poisons science could be ripped from the headlines of The Onion or BabylonBee:

• A collection of 67 papers published in the Journal of Chemical Education include “Decolonizing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum.” “Chemistry and Racism.” “Integrating Antiracism, Social Justice and Equity Themes in a Biochemistry Class.”

• A module in a chemistry class at East Carolina University explores “the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism.”

• An American Chemical Society Inclusivity Style Guide advises scientists to replace phrases such as “obesity is a public health crisis” with “antifat bias and discrimination are public health crises”; replace “cast a dark cloud over the meeting” with “created a tense atmosphere at the meeting”; replace “boring and lame” with “boring and uninteresting”; and so forth.

• Rice University now offers a course on “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter.”

BLM. Get it?

As Krylov joked amidst this litany of examples of the woke corruption of science, "If you climb to the top of the chemistry building and jump off, gravity will take you down to the well-defined outcome, regardless of your pronouns."

The biologists Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja co-authored a stunning revelatory article on “The Ideological Subversion of Biology”5 in which they warned:

Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press.

Coyne and Maroja document six cases of misrepresentation of facts in evolutionary and organismal biology, including:

1. Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum.

2. All behavioral and psychological differences between human males and females are due to socialization.

3. Evolutionary psychology, the study of the evolutionary roots of human behavior, is a bogus field based on false assumptions.

4. We should avoid studying genetic differences in behavior between individuals.

5. Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.

6. Indigenous “ways of knowing” are equivalent to modern science and should be respected and taught as such.

The final recommendation comes straight out of the new anthropology wars over science and indigenous peoples, most notably in New Zealand, Australia, and North America. The experiences of the San Jose State University (SJSU) archaeologist Elizabeth Weiss are emblematic of the problem, when she was defamed as a “racist” and locked out of her fossil collection for simply opposing the teaching as science Native American creationism myths (that there was no migration of peoples from Asia to the Americas—they were always here) and the repatriation movement that argues Paleo-Indian fossil remains from many thousands of years ago, with little to no genealogical linkage to current Native American tribes, be reburied by whomever claims them—lost to science forever.6

In 2021, for example, Weiss delivered a talk for the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) conference titled “Has Creationism Crept Back into Archaeology?”, in which she “compared creation myths of Native Americans to other creation myths, while pointing out that the SAA has previously taken a stand against the teaching and use of biblical interpretations, such as intelligent design, to understand the past.” Many of the 7,000 members of the SAA objected to the talk even being delivered, and after it was, “the comment box quickly filled up with name-calling and accusations of racism.” Weiss’s talk was promptly removed from the SAA website.

Subsequently, Weiss was told by SJSU Provost Vincent Del Casino that a photograph of her holding the skull of an ancient Native American with the caption “so happy to be back with some old friends” (after the Covid-19 shut down of her campus and absence from her research collection) “has evoked shock and disgust from our Native and Indigenous community on campus and from many people within and outside of SJSU.” This was followed by SJSU President Mary Papazian ordering that she be locked out of the collection (“They literally changed the locks!” she said). Papazian “also stated that no photos were allowed of the Native American collection or even of the boxes that held the bones. One cultural anthropologist asked whether I had written permission from these individuals to take the photos, knowing full well that they had been dead for centuries!”

Left: the image that Provost Del Casino said did “not align with the values of SJSU” and “evoked shock and disgust from our Native and Indigenous community on campus and from many people within and outside of SJSU.” Right: the image that the University used for multiple websites and promotional material. This image was removed from the University website in July 2023. Courtesy of Elizabeth Weiss.

If all this were not enough to convince people to forego joining a Fair Play for Archeological Wokeness committee, Weiss presented a protocol draft that would determine access to archaeological collections that “included a menstruation taboo,” for which the authors, she explained, “couldn’t bring themselves to state that women who are menstruating are not allowed in the curation facility or to handle remains and artifacts; thus, they used the term ‘menstruating personnel,’ to avoid the implication that only females menstruate! Seriously?” Menstruating personnel…if only we had a word for such people.

How did we get into a situation, Weiss wondered…

…in which opposing the reburial of human remains is automatically deemed racist and can derail an anthropologist’s career? It’s about turning anthropology into an ideological battleground weighted in favor of victimhood and (often disproven by evidence) tribal identity—both political and social—rather than a scientific endeavor aimed at better understanding the past for the benefit of all humankind. It doesn’t matter who is correct, it matters who gets to tell the story, with Native American narratives now considered expert testimony that cannot and must not be questioned.

Unquestioned narratives were on full display in my final essays at Scientific American, where I was a monthly columnist for nearly 18 years. I have documented elsewhere how political ideology crept into the magazine,7 culminating in the departure of the deeply-woke Editor-in-Chief, Laura Helmuth, shortly after the 2024 Presidential election when she had a paroxysm over Trump’s victory. Helmuth began by apologizing “to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists,” then upbraided her high-school classmates for celebrating Trump’s win—“fuck them to the moon and back”—and described her home state of Indiana as “racist and sexist.” Shortly after, she resigned “to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).” Birdwatching? This is not unlike embattled politicians caught in a scandal who announce they want to spend more time with their family. The pretext fools no one, but is plausible enough that the proclaimer hopes readers will believe that other people believe it.

The president of Scientific American, Kimberly Lau, released a statement thanking Helmuth for her leadership and wishing “her well for the future.” In my final analysis of this sad state of affairs documenting the decline of a once storied institution,8 I proposed a counterfactual test that this corruption of the magazine really is due to wokeness:

Imagine what would have happened if the editor-in-chief of Scientific American had spoken about or published articles on the average difference in IQ test scores between white and black Americans and argued that the gap might be partially due to genetics—or, alternatively, if she had correctly stated that, on average, women score higher than men in trait Neuroticism on the Big 5 personality scale and suggested that that is why there are fewer female than male Fortune 500 CEOs. She would surely have been summarily fired and publicly denounced and we would have been told that such comments or articles “do not reflect the positions or policies of Scientific American or its governing board or staff; we apologize to all who have been harmed by them.” She would almost certainly not have been thanked for her years of loyal service and offered good wishes for her future.

Actual examples from the pages of Scientific American make my point of how wokeness poisons science:

• There was Allison Hopper’s July 2021 “Denial of Evolution is a Form of White Supremacy” that denied creationists their religious motivation for their beliefs and instead labeled them with the “racist” calumny.

• An August 2021 article, “Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past,” contrary to all available evidence, accused an entire profession of both misogyny and racism while simultaneously ignoring all the other fields in which women outnumber men in graduate degrees, such as health and medical sciences (71%), social and behavioral sciences (61%), and biological sciences (51.4%).9 Do patriarchy and misogyny exist only in fields in which men outnumber women?

• A December 2021 article, “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson” accused the renowned evolutionary biologist of racism, a charge so incendiary that it caused a cavalcade of Wilson’s colleagues, post-docs, students, friends, and supporters to come to his defense.10

• Peak wokeness was reached in the September 2021 issue when it was explained “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ is Problematic for Describing Programs that Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” examples of which included Star Wars characters who were too white, toxically masculine, religious, ableist, eugenicist, and worst of all resolved their conflicts through “duels with phallic lightsabers.” Phallic lightsabers? What do these woke authors have on their minds?

• Then there was the November 2023 article “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather is Wrong,” concluding from this (mis)reading of the scientific literature that “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” This is pure blank slate pablum that if true would put an end to all women’s sports.

• As if all this were not problematic enough for a magazine with the word “scientific” in its title, the editors threw their weight behind the youth gender medicine and trans lobby, claiming that gender-affirming care for trans kids is good health care (it isn’t), that “rapid onset gender dysphoria” is not a thing (it most certainly is), and that biological sex is on a spectrum (it is binary). Numerous scientists published rebuttals of these dubious claims, including the acclaimed evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins11 and the evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, who has tracked this subject for years.12

Does anyone actually believe such claptrap? Obviously some do, and the fervor of their woke faith only makes them all the more able to convince themselves (and others of parallel ideological stripes) of the truth of claims that nearly everyone else can see have little-to-no contact with reality. It is also possible that the majority of people do not believe any of this woke ideology, but out of fear of cancel culture and being accused of bigotry and transphobia keep their mouths shut, leading to pluralistic ignorance, in which each individual is under the illusion that everyone else believes it, even though most people do not. That calls forth the importance of speaking truth to power.

The infiltration of woke ideology into the sciences is only the thin end of the wedge splitting academia into warring factions, the topic of Part III of this series on why I am no longer woke.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.

References

Many millennia ago, the Esselen Indians of the California coast frequented a natural hot springs just south of what later Spanish explorers would name Monterey Bay. The near-boiling waters of the hot springs cascaded out of the cliffs and into the crashing waves of the Pacific Ocean. The Esselen found the sulfur rich waters relaxing, the morning mist and afternoon sun rejuvenating, and the spectacular views of mountains and beaches breathtaking. It was a spiritual center, a place to go to renew one’s soul.

In 1910, Dr. Henry Murphy purchased the land and constructed tubs to capture the hot springs for the restoration of his patients’ health. In 1962, Dr. Murphy’s grandson, Michael Murphy (below left), and an associate named Richard Price (below right), transformed the site into a center for the nascent human potential movement, calling it the Esalen Institute, in honor of the original residents.

Michael Murphy and Richard Price circa 1981.

Today, Esalen is a cluster of meeting rooms, lodging facilities, and architecturally elegant hot baths and massage amenities, all nestled into the stunning craggy outcrop along a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway.

Over the decades Esalen has hosted a veritable Who’s Who of savants and gurus, including Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Paul Tillich, Arnold Toynbee, Stanislav Grof, B.F. Skinner, Ida Rolf, Carl Rogers, Linus Pauling, Buckminster Fuller, Rollo May, Joseph Campbell, Susan Sontag, Ken Kesey, Gregory Bateson, John C. Lilly, Carlos Castaneda, Fritjof Capra, Ansel Adams, John Cage, Joan Baez, Robert Anton Wilson, Deepak Chopra, and Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash (pictured below).

I had long wanted to visit Esalen after I read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, in which the Nobel laureate Caltech physicist Richard Feynman recounted his experiences in the natural hot spring baths there. In one particularly amusing tale, a woman was getting a massage from a man she just met:

“He starts to rub her big toe. ‘I think I feel it,’ he says. ‘I feel a kind of dent—is that the pituitary?’ I blurt out, ‘You’re a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!’ They looked at me horrified and said, ‘It’s reflexology!’ I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.”

With this background to the Mecca of the New Age movement, I was delighted to receive an invitation to speak at a conference on evolutionary theory that featured a rather eclectic mix of participants: an anthropologist, a philosopher of religion, a Buddhist monk, a biophysicist, a philosopher of mind, an evolutionary biologist, a psychologist, a complexity theorist, a business entrepreneur, and a skeptic. My talk on the evolutionary origins of morality led to an invitation to teach a weekend seminar on science and spirituality the following summer.

The workshop was enriching for all of us, but it was in the extra-curricular conversations—during healthy home-grown farm-to-table meals served cafeteria style in informal group seatings, and while soaking in the hot tubs—that I gleaned a sense of what people believe and why. One woman explained the theory behind “bodywork”—a combination of massage and “energy work” that involves adjusting the body’s seven energy centers called chakras. I signed up for a massage, which was wonderful, but when the massage therapist told me about how she cured a woman’s migraine headache by directing a light beam through her head, I decided that practice and theory are best kept separate. Another woman warned about the epidemic of Satanic cults throughout Europe and America. “But there’s no evidence of such cults,” I countered. “Of course not,” she explained. “They erase all memories and evidence of their nefarious activities.” Of course.

One gentleman recounted a lengthy tantric sexual encounter with his lover that lasted for many hours, at the culmination of which a lightning bolt shot through her left eye followed by a blue light-being child entering her womb, insuring conception. Nine months later, friends and gurus joined the couple in a hot house, sweating their way through their own “rebirthing” process (to cleanse the pain of one’s own childbirth so that it is not passed on to the child) before the mother gave birth to a baby boy. Right then and there the father told this infant that he would need to become an athlete in order to get into college; two decades later, the father explained to me that this young man became a professional baseball player. “How do you explain that?” he queried. I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

There are many ways to be spiritual, and science is one in its awe-inspiring account about who we are and where we came from, as the late astronomer Carl Sagan waxed poetic in the opening scene of Cosmos, filmed just down coast from Esalen:

“The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. Our contemplations of the cosmos stir us. There’s a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation as if a distant memory of falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the grandest of mysteries.” (Watch the clip by clicking on the image below.)

Referring to the stellar origins of the chemical elements of life, which are cooked in the interiors of stars then released in supernova explosions into interstellar space where they condense into a new solar system with planets, some of which have life that is composed of this star stuff, Sagan continued:

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We’ve begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

That is spiritual gold, and Carl Sagan was one of the most spiritual scientists of our epoch.

How can we find spiritual meaning in a scientific worldview? Spirituality is a way of being in the world, a sense of one’s place in the cosmos, a relationship to that which extends beyond ourselves. There are many sources of spirituality, and anything that generates a sense of awe may be a source of it. Science does this in spades. I am deeply moved, for example, when I observe through my Meade 10-inch reflecting telescope in my backyard the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 2.5 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids roaming the planes of Africa.

I am doubly stirred because it was not until 1923 that the astronomer Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson just above the foothills of Pasadena, California, discovered that this “nebula” was actually an extragalactic stellar system of immense size and distance. Hubble subsequently discovered that the light from most galaxies is shifted toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning that the universe is expanding away from an explosive creation. It was the first empirical evidence indicating that our universe had a beginning. What could be more awe-inspiring—more numinous, magical, spiritual—than this cosmic visage?

Since I live in Southern California, I have had many occasions to make the climb to Mt. Wilson, a twenty-five-mile trek from the bedroom community of La Canada up a twisting mountain road whose terminus is a cluster of telescopes, interferometers, and communications towers. In the 1990s, I took several scientists there, including Richard Dawkins. As we were standing beneath the dome housing the 100-inch telescope, and reflecting on how marvelous, even miraculous, this scientistic vision of the cosmos and our place in it all seemed, Dawkins turned to me and said, “All of this makes me so proud of our species that I am almost moved to tears.”

As pattern-seeking, storytelling primates, to most of us the pattern of life and the universe indicates design. For countless millennia we have taken these patterns and constructed stories about how life and the cosmos were designed specifically for us from above. For the past few centuries, however, science has presented us with a viable alternative in which the design comes from below through the direction of built-in self-organizing principles of emergence and complexity. Perhaps this natural process, like the other natural forces of which we are all comfortable accepting as non-threatening to religion, was God’s way of creating life. Maybe God is the laws of nature—or even nature itself—but this is a theological supposition, not a scientific one.

What science tells us is that we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved over the course of three and a half billion years on one tiny planet among many orbiting an ordinary star, itself one of possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars, itself located in a cluster of galaxies not so different from millions of other galaxy clusters, themselves whirling away from one another in an accelerating expanding cosmic bubble universe that very possibly is only one among a near infinite number of bubble universes. Is it really possible that this entire cosmological multiverse was designed and exists for one tiny subgroup of a single species on one planet in a lone galaxy in that solitary bubble universe? It seems unlikely.

Herein lies the spiritual side of science—sciencuality, if you will pardon an awkward neologism but one that echoes the sensuality of discovery. If religion and spirituality are suppose to generate awe and humility in the face of the creator, what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists, and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionists?

Darwin matters because evolution matters; evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

Come join us on this journey at the Esalen Institute, April 18-20, 2025. Sign up here.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.

Guest faculty Ralph Lewis is a Psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada, and an associate professor at the University of Toronto. In his work, Ralph helps people seek meaning in the face of severe and tragic adversity. In addition to having extensive clinical experience with complex and subtle psychiatric and psychological conditions, Ralph is a regular columnist for Psychology Today and is the author of Finding Purpose in a Godless World: Why We Should Care Even if the Universe Doesn’t.

To my eyes, this is another classic case of patternicity: the tendency to see meaningful patterns in meaningful and meaningless noise. Here the fact that photographs and videos of the objects are almost all taken at night, are grainy and blurry, makes the phenomena ripe for people filling in whatever their imagination conjurs. As one is wont to do on social media, I posted a cheeky comment on X about the matter, given that so many of the “mysterious drones” are obviously planes, but to be fair, a number of them are not obviously planes, so what are they, and what is it that people are seeing? In the fullness of time we will hopefully find out, but in the meantime Dr. Bartholomew offers some insights in his analysis below. —MS

Dr. Robert Bartholomew is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has written numerous books on the margins of science covering UFOs, haunted houses, Bigfoot, lake monsters—all from a perspective of mainstream science. He has lived with the Malay people in Malaysia, and Aborigines in Central Australia. He is the co-author of two seminal books: Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior with Hilary Evans (Anomalist Books, 2009), Havana Syndrome with Robert W. Baloh (Copernicus Books, 2020), and Social Panics & Phantom Attackers: A Study of Imaginary Assailants (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2024).

The Great Drone Panic of 2024…and 1914

By Robert E. Bartholomew

Mysterious lights—seemingly under intelligent control—are spotted hovering in the skies over New Jersey and across the northeastern United States, sparking fear and anxiety. Sometimes they are reported above military installations, prompting concern that they may be the work of a hostile foreign government engaged in spying or worse.

The current drone scare?

No, this is a description of the great drone panic over eastern seaboard of the United States over a century ago. A series of similar scares back then coincided with the fear of Germans and the began shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914.[1] Based on an analysis of the reported times and sky locations of the sightings, most corresponded with the appearance of celestial objects such as Venus.[2] Others were later determined to have been prompted by tissue balloons which resembled modern-day Chinese lanterns.[3] They were powered by candles attached to the base and made buoyant by the generation of heat.

One of the more far-fetched explanations for the current scare is that a Chinese or Iranian vessel is stationed off the east coast and is launching the drones to spy on our military bases, or even launch a terrorist attack with explosives. A knowledge of history and psychology can help to illuminate this affair.

First, some witnesses report that the drones are the size of a small car or even an SUV. While this is theoretically possible, based on an analysis of online footage, Department of Homeland Security officials believe that some “drones” are actually small aircraft (some images show a cylindrical tube with two large wings up front and two small wings in the back and lights blinking in a pattern resembling that of planes).[4] Other reports could be of small drones because as psychologists, police, and trial lawyers know all too well, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. (Many people have been convicted of crimes and either executed or sent to prison for decades using visual evidence alone, only to be later exonerated by DNA.) Size estimates are also notorious for their unreliability, and likely account for modern day sightings of Thunderbirds with alleged 20-foot wing-spans across north America.

Social panics are triggered by fear and uncertainty. It is the job of the researcher to examine the background and identify the anxieties that are driving it. In this instance, current geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia, China, and Iran, appear to have contributed to a sense of distrust and vulnerability. Another factor may be a distrust of our own government, levels of which are at all time highs. Humans also tend to project their beliefs and fears onto ambiguous stimuli. As a result, the sky becomes a Rorschach Ink Blot Test where people often see what they expect to see.

The Ghosts of Panics Past

The current drone scare reflects two moral panics that are currently rife in America—the exaggerated fear over the danger posed by undocumented migrants, and concerns about new technologies. The drone panic is an example of history repeating itself. In early 1915, amid rumors that German Americans sympathetic to Berlin were about to launch an aeroplane raid on Ottawa from a secret base in northern New York State, residents living on the American side of the border near Brockville, began to scan the skies, and on the night of February 14^th thought they saw hostile planes on their way to bomb the capital in Ottawa.

The Canadian Government immediately declared a state of emergency and posted sentries and aeroplane spotters on buildings in and around Parliament. Like today, the media stoked the scare as evidenced by the following banner headline in the Toronto Globe the morning after the scare: “Ottawa in Darkness Awaits Aeroplane Raid. Several Aeroplanes Make a Raid into the Dominion of Canada. Entire City of Ottawa in Darkness, Fearing Bomb-Droppers.” The scare quickly died down when it became evident that there were no planes and no attack had taken place.

In Parliament, Prime Minister Robert Borden, when questioned about the “attack,” referred further questions to his Chief of Police. The Toronto Globe, embarrassed by their rash headline, blamed the affair on “hysterical” residents in Brockville, where by now the charred remains of two large toy balloons had been found. Brockville residents, in turn, pinned the blame on young boys from a nearby town for lighting tissue balloons that had been mistaken for aeroplanes.[5]

History Repeating

Just as mysterious lights over New Jersey and surrounding states were once attributed to German spies in aeroplanes, today's sightings are shaped by similar fears of espionage and new technologies. These panics may have occurred over one hundred years apart, but they are rooted in the same anxieties and driven by mass communications. Once the news media and social media sound the alarm as to the presence of mysterious, menacing lights in the night sky, people are motivated to scan the heavens for confirming evidence. Drones have been a part of American life for many years now. Ordinarily, people don’t pay much attention to their presence, but with more people staring at the sky for longer periods, they are more likely to notice objects they previously hadn’t noticed or paid attention to.

Historically, waves of UFOs tend to spread over weeks or months before they eventually subside. Given the immense publicity that surrounds the current panic, it would not be surprising to see reports appear on a wider geographical scale in a sporadic fashion for several more months.

There is one aspect of the drone scare that is refreshing: for once we are dealing with a UFO wave that is being attributed to a foreign power instead of aliens. This is reminiscent of the “flying saucer” wave over the U.S. during the summer of 1947 that was triggered by Kenneth Arnold’s sighting on June 24^th. Within two months, a Gallup Poll about the “flying discs” revealed that less than one percent considered the likelihood that they were extraterrestrial in origin, which wasn’t even one of the choices given, but was instead listed under “Other.” In contrast, 16 percent attributed them to an American or Russian secret weapon.[6]

History repeats itself once again.

References

[1]. Bartholomew, Robert E., and Weatherhead, Paul (2024). Social Panics and Phantom Attackers: A study of Imaginary Assailants. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

[2]. Bartholomew, Robert E., and Howard, George S. (1998). UFOs & Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Pp. 138-162.

[3]. Bartholomew, Robert E. (1998). “Phantom German Air Raids on Canada: War Hysteria in Quebec and Ontario during World War I.” Canadian Military History 7(4):29-36 (Autumn 1998)

[4]. Duffy, Clare (2024). “Mysterious aircraft are flying over New Jersey. Here’s what big drones are made for.” CNN News, December 13.

[5]. "Were toy balloons and not aeroplanes! Brockville's latest on Sunday night's scare ..... Toronto Globe, February 16, 1915, p. 1; "Air raid from the states improbable … "Toronto Globe, February 16, 1915, p. 7.

[6]. Gallup, George (1947). “Nine out of Ten Heard of Flying Saucers.” Public Opinion News Service, Princeton, N.J., August 15, 1947.

What Mangione meant by that is anyone’s guess, but at least he didn’t protest, pace Lee Harvey Oswald, “I’m just a patsy,” which would have put the cat among the conspiracy pigeons. By Tuesday reports emerged of a 261-word “manifesto” penned by Mangione, which at the length of a typical paragraph would not seem to rise to the gravitas of the descriptor (seemingly only used these days to describe the writings of killers and mass murderers), which has references to “parasites” who “had it coming” because the US has the "most expensive healthcare system in the world" but "ranks #42 in life expectancy.” His ego bolstered by his violent acts, he wrote that while other people in the past had exposed such corporations' "corruption and greed", he was "the first to face it with such brutal honesty." Here it is in full (published on the journalist Ken Klippenstein’s substack):

“To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

Such sentiments are also reflected in Mangione’s many social media postings, one of which included an interest in the writings of Ted Kaczynski, AKA the Unabomber. Specifically, Mangione left a four-star review of Kaczynski’s manifesto— Industrial Society and Its Future—about which Mangione went on to note in his review that “It’s easy to quickly and thoughtlessly write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies.” While admitting that Kaczynski “was a violent individual — rightfully imprisoned — who maimed innocent people,” Mangione qualified his condemnation thusly: “While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.” Extreme, indeed, and now it is being reported that Mangione had himself considered planting a bomb in Manhattan, but was concerned about killing innocent people, so instead opted “to kill the CEO at his own bean counting conference.”

In his review of Kaczynski’s manifesto, Mangione added that “it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.” He also shared thoughts someone else had written about Kaczynski in a Reddit thread, quoting a commenter who had described his acts as “war and revolution,” saying that Kaczynski “had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere” and that “‘Violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”

Let’s look at Kaczynski’s manifesto a little closer, in the context of trying to understand what types of beliefs lead people to conclude that murder is, in fact, justified killing, a type of “just war”, with a single individual as the lone combatant.

Recall that the Harvard-educated mathematical prodigy turned domestic terrorist, between 1978 and 1995 the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski targeted individuals for death with bombs delivered through the mail, killing three and leaving 23 others maimed. In his rambling 50-page manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, originally published in The New York Times and elsewhere in hopes that some reader would recognize the degenerationist rhetoric of the author (Kaczynski’s brother did, which is how he was caught), Kaczynski opined:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

Modern Americans, Kaczynski griped, are “decadent leisured aristocrats” who are “bored, hedonistic, and demoralized,” nothing more than “domesticated animals.” Speaking in the first person plural “we” (or occasionally “FC”—Freedom Club), like many revolutionary Marxists before him, Kaczynski advocated revolution:

We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a political revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.

This, Kaczynski continued, is to be followed by the introduction of a new ideology “that opposes technology and the industrial society…so that when and if the system collapses, the remnants will be smashed beyond repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted.”

In a 2010 postscript to the manifesto, penned in prison, Kaczynski reflected on the many commentaries he had read about his writings, some of which accused him of unoriginality and compared him to radical environmentalists (handwritten draft pictured below):

If there is anything new in my approach, it is that I’ve taken revolution seriously as a practical proposition. Many radical environmentalists and “green” anarchists talk of revolution, but as far as I am aware none of them have shown any understanding of how real revolutions come about, nor do they seem to grasp the fact that the exclusive target of revolution must be technology itself, not racism, sexism, or homophobia.

The cover of Kaczynski’s book (above) captures the bleak perspective such dystopian pessimism evokes. Unfortunately, although his declinism was driven, in part, by mental illness, his views are shared by a great many people, Mangione apparently being one of them. There are many others. In fact, compare the sentiments of Kaczynski and Mangione to those of environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who famously scolded the audience at the 2019 U.N. Climate Action Summit:

People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

In a speech at the UN Climate Change COP24 Conference in 2018 Thunberg admonished attendees:

Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.

And at the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, 2019 Thunberg warned:

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

Let’s hope Thunberg remains non-violent in her actions in response to such extreme beliefs about the evils of capitalism, corporatism, and profit incentives.

Then there are the prognostications of Eliezer Yudkowsky in his widely quoted Time magazine AI doomsday screed:

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”

How obvious is our coming collapse? Yudkowsky punctuates the point:

If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.

What actions might be justified by someone who truly believes that someone or something could lead to the extinction of all life on earth? You do the math.

And let’s not forget Christopher Ryan’s conclusion in his 2019 book Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, that “civilization is ultimately a tragic mistake.” Why? “It’s heartbreaking to think about all the suffering that’s been caused over the millennia, and just how misguided a pursuit this has been.” The decline began with agriculture, Ryan avers, because it brought with it hierarchy, oppression, violence, pollution, overpopulation, communicable diseases and pandemics, and ultimately depression, suicide, and deaths of despair.

I could go on and on with such examples because for at least a century and a half public intellectuals and academic scholars have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization, even as the ideals and institutions that insure its success have grown: science and technology, reason and Enlightenment humanism, democracy and universal franchise, property rights and the rule of law, free enterprise and free trade, and the rights of individuals expanded to include all humans and even members of other sentient species. You would think academics and intellectuals—the very people who promote such values—would be singing their own praises for such progress; but no, they’re gloomier than ever.

An Amazon book scan of the word string “The Coming Crisis” produces titles like The Coming Financial Crisis (2015), The Global Water Crisis (2008), The Coming Bond Market Collapse (2013), Get Prepared Now!: Why a Great Crisis is Coming and How You Can Survive It (2015), ISIS, Iran and Israel: What You Need to Know about the Current Mideast Crisis and the Coming Mideast War (2016), Code Red: How to Protect Your Savings from the Coming Crisis (2013), The Coming Oil Crisis (2012), The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System (2014), Coming Climate Crisis? (2012), The Coming Economic Armageddon (2010), The Coming Inflation Crisis (2014), The Coming Famine (2011), Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis (2012), and 55 more pages of titles in a similar vein.

Is it any wonder that an intelligent and well-educated young man like Luigi Mangione (he attended an all-boys private school in Baltimore for which he was valedictorian of his class, then earned two degrees in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania) would turn to violence as a solution to this perceived—however misguided—threat to the welfare of citizens, if not the existence of civilization itself?

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of The Michael Shermer Show, and the author of many bestselling books, including Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, forthcoming in the Fall of 2025.

Image produced by Grok: “Create an image of a blank slate model of human nature.”

What is Woke, Anyway?

Although the descriptor “woke” is today hurled by those on the political right as an invective against various leftist and progressive social activists and the movements they represent,2 its etymological origin was an African-American synonym for being awake to the numerous social, economic, and political injustices primarily experienced by that community throughout much of the twentieth century and before.3 By mid-twentieth century and the rise of the civil rights movement, the phrase “stay woke”4 denoted one’s awareness of such inequities, along with a commitment to collective consciousness raising through political activism.

By the third decade of the twenty-first century, however, a major linguistic transformation of the word led the linguist John McWhorter to replace “the woke” with “the elect” because, he explained, “They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—empathic leaning, life experience, maybe even intelligence. But they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not. ‘The Elect’ is also good in implying a certain smugness, which, sadly, is an accurate depiction.”5 “Woke,” McWhorter explains, “migrated from Black vernacular to mainstream use” and that the expression “stay woke,” and “went from being insider progressive-speak to a term of derision for a progressive agenda.” At its worst, McWhorter concludes, the word “allowed many progressives, supposedly attuned to injustice, to signal their commitment to combating it without actually demonstrating an understanding of its causes or remedies.” (This is something like what the social theorist Thomas Sowell had in mind with his descriptor “the anointed” in The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.6)

The Woke Vision of Human Nature

This metamorphosis of “woke” from awareness of societal inequalities of opportunities to insistence on equality of outcomes was elevated to national prominence during the 2024 Presidential election campaign when Kamala Harris released an animated video story of two alpinists ascending a mountain in which one of them had a head-start over the other:

Not everybody’s starting out from the same place. So if we’re all getting the same amount, but you started out back there and I started out over here, we could get the same amount, but you’re still going to be that far back behind me. … So there’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.7

Underlying the political policy of equal outcomes is the blank slate model of human nature, which holds that since people are inherently equal any inequalities in education, health, wealth, income, housing, home ownership, employment, crime, imprisonment, and the like, can only be the result of societal, political, and economic discrimination, rather than inequalities in intelligence, creativity, drive and ambition, personal responsibility, history, and of course luck, good and bad. Once such discriminatory policies are eliminated, blank slaters believe, such outcome inequalities should disappear.

So, the deepest problem with wokeness is that it based on a flawed theory of human nature, a point made by Thomas Sowell in his 1987 book A Conflict of Visions, in which he argued that the vision one holds about human nature—either as constrained (conservative) or unconstrained (liberal)—determines if one emphasizes equal opportunities or equal outcomes. “If human options are not inherently constrained, then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomena [inequalities] virtually cries out for explanation—and for solutions. But if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena, then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized.” Which of these natures you believe is true will largely shape which solutions to social ills will be most effective. “In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.” In fact, as Sowell generalized the underlying principles, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”8

In his 2002 magisterial analysis of human nature, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker re-labels Sowell’s constrained and unconstrained visions of human nature as the Tragic Vision (conservative) and the Utopian Vision (liberal).9 The distinct Left-Right divide consistently cleaves the (respectively) Utopian Vision and Tragic Vision along numerous specific contests, such as the size of the government (big versus small), the amount of taxation (high versus low), trade (fair versus free), healthcare (universal versus individual), environment (protect it versus leave it alone), crime (caused by social injustice versus caused by criminal minds), the constitution (judicial activism for social justice versus strict constructionism for original intent), and many others.

Pinker’s “utopian” descriptor for Sowell’s “unconstrained” vision is apt, since in the original Greek utopia literally means “no place.” An unconstrained utopian vision of human nature holds that custom, law, and traditional institutions are sources of inequality and injustice and should therefore be heavily regulated and constantly modified from the top down; it holds that society can be engineered through government programs to release the natural unselfishness and altruism within people; it deems physical and intellectual differences largely to be the result of unjust and unfair social systems that can be re-engineered through social planning, and therefore people can be shuffled across socioeconomic classes that were artificially created through unfair and unjust political, economic, and social systems inherited from history. Such a vision exists in literally No Place.

Although some liberals embrace just such an unconstrained vision of human nature, most understand that human behavior is at least partially constrained—especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences who are aware of the research in behavior genetics—so the debate between left-of-center liberals and right-of-center conservatives turns on degrees of constraint. By contrast, woke illiberals—as I shall call liberals who moved so far to the authoritarian left that they are nearly indistinguishable from the authoritarian right—are full-on blank slaters, unconstrained visionaries, and utopian dreamers with no purchase on the reality of human nature, or what, in my book The Believing Brain,10 I called a Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of our nature. In keeping with the research from behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, let’s put a number on that constraint at 40 to 50 percent. In the Realistic Vision, human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures—our better angels and our inner demons, in Pinker’s description.11

A Realistic Vision rejects the blank slate model that people are so malleable and responsive to social programs that governments can engineer their lives into a Great Society of its design, and instead believes that family, custom, law, and traditional institutions are the best sources for social harmony. A Realistic Vision recognizes the need for strict moral education through parents, family, friends, and community because people have a dual nature of being selfish and selfless, competitive and cooperative, greedy and generous, and so we need rules and guidelines and encouragement to do the right thing. A Realistic Vision acknowledges that people vary widely both physically and intellectually—in large part because of natural inherited differences—and therefore will rise (or fall) to their natural levels. Therefore, governmental redistribution programs are not only unfair to those from whom the wealth is confiscated, but the redistribution of the wealth to those who did not earn it cannot and will not work to equalize these natural inequalities. As Friedrich Hayek articulated the problem in 1945: “There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means, as De Tocqueville described it, ‘a new form of servitude’.”12

I think most moderates on both the left and the right embrace a Realistic Vision of human nature. They should, as should the extremists on both ends, because the evidence from cognitive psychology, behavior genetics, physical anthropology, economics, political science, and especially evolutionary theory and its application to all of these sciences supports the Realistic Vision of human nature. There are at least a dozen lines of evidence that converge to that conclusion:13

1. The clear and quantitative physical differences among people in size, strength, speed, agility, coordination, and other physical attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are heritable.

2. The clear and quantitative intellectual differences among people in memory, problem solving ability, cognitive speed, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, and other mental attributes that translates into some being more successful than others, and that at least half of these differences are heritable.

3. The evidence from behavior genetics and twin studies indicating that 40 to 50 percent of the variance among people in temperament, personality, and many political, economic, and social preferences are accounted for by genes.

4. The failed communist and socialist experiments around the world throughout the 20^th century revealed that top-down draconian controls over economic and political systems do not work and resulted in body counts numbering in the hundreds of millions.

5. The failed communes and utopian community experiments tried at various places throughout the world over the past 150 years demonstrated that people by nature do not adhere to the Marxian principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

6. The power of family ties and the depth of connectedness between blood relatives. Communities who have tried to break up the family and have children raised by others provides counter evidence to the claim that “it takes a village” to raise a child. As well, the continued practice of nepotism further reinforces the practice that “blood is thicker than water.”

7. The principle of reciprocal altruism—I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine”—is universal; people do not by nature give generously unless they receive something in return, even if what they receive is social status or self-gratification.

8. The principle of moralistic punishment—I’ll punish you if you do not scratch my back after I have scratched yours—is universal; people do not long tolerate free riders who continually take but never give. By nature we want fairness and justice.

9. The almost universal nature of hierarchical social structures—egalitarianism only works (barely) among tiny bands of hunter-gatherers in resource-poor environments where there is next to no private property, and when precious resources (such as hunted game animals) are procured, extensive rituals and are required to insure equal sharing of the resource.

10. The almost universal nature of aggression, violence, and dominance, particularly on the part of young males seeking resources, women, and especially status, and how status-seeking in particular explains so many heretofore unexplained phenomena, such as high risk taking, costly gifts, excessive generosity beyond one’s means, and especially attention seeking.

11. The almost universal nature of within-group amity and between-group enmity, wherein the rule-of-thumb heuristic is to trust in-group members until they prove otherwise to be distrustful, and to distrust out-group members until they prove otherwise to be trustful.

12. The almost universal desire of people to trade with one another, not for the selfless benefit of others or the society, but for the selfish benefit of one’s own kin and kind; it is an unintended consequence that trade establishes trust between strangers and lowers between-group enmity, as well as produces greater wealth for both trading partners and groups.

A Realistic Vision of human nature is what James Madison was thinking of when he penned his oft-quoted dictum in Federalist Paper Number 51:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.14

The resulting structure of the United States government and its nearly 250-years of successful governance is a tribute to Madison’s (and the other founder’s) realistic vision of human nature. If you have a flawed theory of human nature, however, much follows that will also be flawed, including disastrous social policies and failed social movements that have taken hold in recent years. In Part II of this essay I will provide specific examples, some of which are so egregious as to border on parody.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.

References

The results of the 2024 Presidential election are in: Trump took 312 electoral votes vs. Harris’ 226, a clean sweep of the electoral college, and he also ran the table with the swing states and earned 3,096,959 more votes than Harris overall (75,666,494 vs. 72,569,535).

I was in Dubai the week of the election for a conference on the future, which seems apropos inasmuch as Trump is already changing the future of the country as he works tirelessly to put into place his agenda as outlined during his campaign. As I record this it remains to be seen how much change he can implement after he becomes President on January 20, 2025, but there’s a good chance it will be substantial.

In my previous commentary before the election, in which I upbraided those who threatened to leave the country if Trump wins (already many of them have changed their minds, such as Trump’s former attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, who sounded irritatingly perplexed that anyone took him seriously), I ended with two quotes, which I will repeat here with additional commentary, as they still apply. The first is from John Stuart Mill (call it Mill’s Maxim):

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

Our country needs both Republicans and Democrats, and the pendulum swings back and forth between them. As an exercise in quelling your anxiety if you are a Democrat and feeling the sting of the loss, let’s count backward from Trump’s latest victory to note how applicable is Mill’s Maxim:

Republican (Trump 2025-2028), Democrat (Biden 2021-2025), Republican (Trump 2017-2021), Democrat (Obama 2013-2017), Democrat (Obama 2009-2013), Republican (Bush 2005-2009), Republican (Bush 2001-2005), Democrat (Clinton 1997-2001), Democrat (Clinton 1993-1997), Republican (Bush 1989-1993), Republican (Reagan 1985-1989), Republican (Reagan 1981-1985), Democrat (Carter 1977-1981), Republican (Ford 1974-1977), Republican (Nixon 1969-1974), Democrat (Johnson 1963-1969), Democrat (Kennedy 1961-1963), Republican (Eisenhower 1957-1961), Republican (Eisenhower 1953-1957), Democrat (Truman 1949-1953), Democrat (Truman 1945-1949), Democrat (Roosevelt 1945-), Democrat (Roosevelt 1941-1945), Democrat (Roosevelt 1937-1941), Democrat (Roosevelt 1933-1937) and so on back into the foggy mists of history.

So, if you are a Democrat, don’t panic. There is a very good chance your party will be back in power after the 2028 election, if not the 2032 election. Look forward, not back. Don’t leave the country (Republicans will help you pack!), and for God’s (or whoever’s) sake, don’t shave off your hair or implement the “4B” protest program of no dating, no marriage, no sex, and no babies (although if you implement #3 you won’t have to worry about #4) (the b’s are Korean words from when this protest program was implemented during the #metoo movement). What are these people doing? Do you really think that Republicans are going to watch all those TikTok, Instagram and X videos of young women shaving their hair and foregoing men and think “oh dear, we better temper our plans with more liberal policies to save these women from themselves”? Hell no! It only reinforces their characterization of your party as a bunch of blue-haired, nose-ringed, tattooed, out-of-control screaming libtards who should be granted a Darwin award for taking themselves out of the gene pool before reproducing.

The second quote is from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861, when our nation really was on the brink of actual Civil War:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

We really do need to strengthen our bonds of affection for people in the other party (or, dare I say, people in the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, the Constitution Party, or the Natural Law Party, not to mention independents and those who write in Mickey Mouse on their ballot). Hopefully there are no domestic battlefields in our future (or foreign battlefields for that matter, although that’s a separate issue), but there are hearts and hearthstones aplenty across this broad land to swell the chorus of our Union, and I do firmly believe that in addition to our inner demons, nature has vouchsafed us with better angels, and now would be the time to channel them.

Okay, let’s do a quick postmortem on the election itself. Here was my initial reaction that I posted on X the day after, and to which I still hold:

In coming days, everyone doing a postmortem to explain why Harris lost, what she did wrong, etc., keep in mind that Trump ran a winning campaign. I.e., it’s not so much that Harris lost than that Trump won. Analogy: The New York Yankees made some notable errors in the World Series, but the Dodgers clearly outplayed them. The better candidate/team won. And avoid deep-root-causism: Trump won because Americans are racists; Harris lost because voters are misogynists. Those are losing-side rationalizations. Also watch out for single causes: crime, abortion, immigration, inflation, wokeness, etc., are all factors, but no one of them can explain the outcome. On the other hand, be careful of overdetermined causal theories: not all factors matter, or matter equally, and most pundits are just talking out of their hats without even bothering to provide evidence or test hypotheses in counterfactual reasoning about causality.

Already we’ve been hearing: "if Harris had picked Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz she would have won" or "Harris alienated Hispanics by calling them 'Latinx'" (polls consistently show that Latinos and Latinas do not like, nor do they use, the activists’ virtue-signaling neologism “Latinx”), or "if only Harris had gone on Rogan," etc. Maybe cumulatively these factors mattered to a certain extent, but overall Trump was just a vastly superior candidate and campaigner, seemingly preternaturally so. (I remain to this day utterly astonished at how an overweight, out-of-shape, fast-food eating, CocaCola-drinking, senior citizen can seemingly run circles around other candidates—I’ve never seen anything like it.)

Again, a baseball analogy: Yankee super star Aaron Judge says his error in Game 5 of the World Series "will stay with me until I die." Really? This is unnecessary guilt. If it was Game 7 between perfectly matched teams, and the error was in the 9th inning that cost them the game, ok; but that was not the case. The Dodgers vastly outplayed the Yankees. Likewise, Kamala Harris made some errors, yes, but Trump was a supremely superior candidate. Don't blame Harris so much as recognizing Trump's extraordinary campaigning abilities.

That said, Trump’s positive candidate and campaigning qualities were, in part, a result of Biden’s, Harris’s, and the Democrats’ positions on a number of key issues for which they could have done much better. I.e., here are some of the errors on the Democrat’s part on which Trump and the Republicans capitalized, from minor to major:

1. Podcasts. Harris should have gone on Rogan, especially after her disastrous town-hall meeting with Anderson Cooper on CNN, in which she babbled incoherently about the errors she made in life that she could not seem to remember, or on The View in which when asked how she differs from Biden could only sputter “nothing comes to mind,” which was quickly turned into a social media meme with her picture. Think about the power of that image: a picture of Kamala Harris with the words over her face “nothing comes to mind.” I watched all three hours of Trump on Rogan, and then of JD Vance on the same show. They both came off as much more likeable than they are on the campaign trail endlessly repeating political slogans and talking points. You can’t do that for three hours (well, maybe Trump could, but he didn’t on Rogan).

I had read JD Vance’s bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy when it was published, and I loved it. But after he shifted ever rightward when he ran for (and won) a Senate seat for Ohio, I began to dismiss him as a kook, an extremist, a woman-hating pro-life anti-abortionist, etc. But three hours on Rogan made me realize that he’s a really decent guy with whom I happen to disagree on a number of issues, but nevertheless a reasonable person with whom I could have a beer and talk politics. On abortion, for example, Joe is pro-choice and pushed JD on his pro-life stance, and Vance immediately acknowledged that the “autonomy” argument that women should have control over their bodies was totally understandable—even reasonable—even though in his case Vance places the life of the fetus over that of the mother.

I’ve been on Joe’s show seven times (for example, here, here, and here). He’s a stand-up guy who just likes to talk to people, get to know them, learn something from them, and have stimulating conversations, and he’s a master at it. If you queue up one of his episodes thinking this will be like a CBS 60-Minutes investigation with teams of researchers outlining key talking points and penetrating questions, that is not what this show is about, short of Joe’s producer, Jaime, pulling up articles and videos from the Internet in real time as the conversation unfolds—which is absolutely riveting when it doesn’t go the way the guest thought it would. When my Conspiracy book was published Joe and I got into a discussion about the JFK assassination and whether or not the so-called “magic” bullet was damaged enough to have gone through tissue and bone, and Jaime pulled up images of it so we could settle the issue right there. But don’t expect from the Joe Rogan Experience months of research on each guest. So, all that in mind, perhaps Harris’ character would not have been enhanced by tens of millions of people listening or watching her chat with Joe for three hours, but I suspect otherwise. Is it possible that inside that seemingly hollow shell of a candidate is a genuinely reasonable person with some good ideas on how to improve the country? We’ll never know now.

2. Trans Matters. Harris should have distanced herself from the radical trans activists by taking the position that every medical establishment in Europe and the UK, and some medical associations in some U.S. states have already adopted: no hormone treatments or surgeries for minors, watchful waiting for troubled teens suffering from a variety of issues like anxiety, depression, cutting, and suicidal ideation (for which they’re wrongly told that if they transition to the other sex those negative thoughts and emotions will magically disappear), and, to be blunt about it, she should have publicly stated that as a life-long Democrat, feminist, and defender of women’s rights, as President she would protect women’s privacy, women’s spaces, women’s prisons, women’s rape centers, and women’s sports from the men violating them by pretending to be women. Trans women are not women. They are men. Men cannot get pregnant, unless by “men” you mean “women”, and such distortion of language is so egregious that it only alienates potential voters. And Harris should have renounced her idiotic stance on the government funding sex change operations for imprisoned illegal aliens. How many of these are there? Next to none. And yet because she could not renounce this barking-mad trans ideology, it hurt her in the election. (See the special issue of Skeptic on Trans Matters that covers all this in detail.)

Related to this, our Skeptic Research Center data that we collected over the summer (3,000 people, randomly selected, and surveyed by a professional data-collection company called Qualtrics and that cost us nearly $20,000)—special thanks to Anondah Saide and Kevin McCaffree who run the Center and analyze the data (both are former graduate students of mine)—found very strong opinions by nearly everyone, including Democrats, against supporting the trans movement, especially transitioning minors and biological males competing in women’s sports. For example, while we found that just over 1 in 5 “very liberal” women say it is “true” that “men can get pregnant,” outside of the “very liberal” cohort, roughly 90% of Americans across the political spectrum agree that men cannot, in fact, get pregnant. (Duh!) When undecided voters hear that, their indecision goes away. Harris’ campaign should have paid attention to our data.

3. Economics. Harris should have countered Trump’s insistence that economically the United States is in a hell-hole and about to collapse. Nothing could be further from the truth, and all she had to do is repeat over and over and over again all the positive stats, such as the stock market being at an all-time high…nearly every week for the past year!, or the rate of inflation collapsing over the past year, or unemployment numbers at near-record lows, or how strong the dollar remains around the world. And more. And she could have lied—like Trump and every president before him going back to the Eisenhower administration—and said she planned to lower the deficit by cutting expenses and government waste. None of them (save Clinton) do it. Every party grows the government, and along with it the deficit, but she could have at least nodded to the problem of the run-away debt, or perhaps even invoked the trendy economy theory called Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that the government can print all the money it wants because it is not like an individual or a business. Yes, many economists think this is pure voodoo economics, but not all of them do, so Harris could have at least sounded like she did some research on the problem.

4. Immigration. I don’t need to say anything about this beyond what every one of her critics has said since she became the candidate: why didn’t she do anything about it when she was the border czar? Did she ever give us a cogent answer? I don’t think so.

5. Crime. Again, I don’t think Harris countered strongly enough Trump’s claim that crime is at an all-time high. That isn’t even remotely close to being true. Crime rates in general, and homicide rates in particular, peaked in 1993 and have been declining ever since…until Covid and the pandemic, when there was an uptick in 2021 and 2022, after when it started to come back down to the record lows it was pre-Covid. Maybe Harris didn’t want to come off as a wonky data nerd, but a couple of data graphs showing the declining sawtooth curve with the tiny uptick that went back down, might have helped. Humans are very visual primates, and research shows that people are more likely to change their minds about controversial issues if you show them the evidence in the form of visual graphs. Even Trump understands this, as when he was pointing to his favorite graph (on illegal immigration) when the assassin’s bullet grazed his ear, a graph he then used over and over to great effect.

6. Academia. I find editorial cartoons often convey messages even more effectively than Opinion Editorials, and this one shows a couple of student-age distraught liberals in a college cafeteria bemoaning the election loss, with the caption:

“I can’t believe that a year of us screaming at Zionists, taking over buildings, destroying college property, and burning American flags didn’t defeat Trump.”

These people are not liberals. They are illiberals, and liberals should call them out on their bullshit.

So…what do the next four years hold for our future? No one knows for sure (because the future is largely unpredictable), but at the very least we will see again what Trump did in his first four years, but maybe on steroids now that he has both the House (very probably—the count is still ongoing) and the Senate (along with the Supreme Court), but I remain optimistic that many of the changes will be a good course correction from the Democrats taking the country too far left (remember Mill’s Maxim). If you disagree and remain worried, here is something to think about: the 2028 election! Who will the Democrats run? And against who? Trump can’t run again (and, no, he’s not going to get a Constitutional amendment to overturn the current one that restricts anyone from serving more than two terms—implemented after the Democrat FDR reigned for 15 years), so maybe JD Vance? Or Tulsi Gabbard? Or Marco Rubio? Or maybe even Elon Musk? (Ok, that last one was just for fun—Elon can be President of Mars.) Focusing on the future and what could go right, rather than brooding over the past and rehashing all the things that went wrong, is a proven technique of Cognitive Behavior Therapy to improve one’s emotional state.

Finally, allow me to put a couple of items into perspective for the new Trump administration, prefaced by a reminder of how many times on this show I have criticized Donald Trump’s character, honesty, and integrity.

1. How bad can it be to bring the Ukraine war to an end by cutting a deal with Putin that ends the destruction of that country’s cities and the deaths of countless innocent civilians, while saving American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars?

2. How bad can it be to negotiate a deal with Israel that brings the war against the Hamas terrorists in Gaza to an end and stops the massive killing of innocent Gazans who are presently collateral damage for the IDF, while saving American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars?

3. What’s wrong with talking to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un or China’s President Xi Jinping? It is harder to go to war with people you are talking to, so why not see if Trump can do what no President before him has accomplished? Maybe he’ll fail, but maybe he’ll succeed. Who knows? Neither Obama or Biden has made much headway, so why not support the effort? In any case, like it or not, we’re going to find out.

4. How bad can it be, really, that Trump plans to purge governmental bloat, and now we have Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of DOGE: Department of Government Efficiency. Elon just tweeted that there are 428 government agencies and he thinks it can be reduced to 99. Does anyone know what they all are, much less what they do, short of the Government Accounting Office (hopefully they keep that one as it’s the agency that is suppose to monitor the government checkbook). With our deficit at over $31 trillion dollars, maybe it’s not such a bad thing to try to do something about it.

5. And then there are taxes and tax deductions. What’s wrong with allowing parents to deduct from their reported income the money they spend on their children’s education if they opt for private school or home schooling? I have paid private school tuition for both of my kids, and I pay my fair share of taxes to support public school education. Is it unreasonable for me to get a little break, in the same way that I am allowed to deduct the mortgage interest on my home loan, deduct the donations I make to charities each year, and the tax breaks I get for being married and having a dependent child?

Let me end this election postmortem with an observation from the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer, from his 2013 book Things that Matter:

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.”

Let’s work together to get our politics right.             

I was a freshman in college in 1972, enrolled in a Political Science 101 course in which our primary readings were daily newspaper articles. Our professor emphasized over and over that this was the most important election of our lifetime. That didn’t mean much to me then, inasmuch as the voting age of 18 had just become a Constitutional Amendment (number 26) the year before. I was mostly interested in girls and sports, and getting my mind blown by my astronomy and philosophy professors who introduced me to the wonders of science and reason.

Between the Vietnam War and, then, the Watergate scandal, the strongest impression I have from that period was that our country had never been so divided politically. Since most of my time in those years were spent as an undergraduate student, then a graduate student, then a community college lecturer, then a university professor, almost everyone I knew and hung-out with were liberals, so you can imagine the memories I have of what people thought of Nixon; and if “Tricky Dick” were not bad enough, for heaven’s sake Ronald Reagan was president for eight years in the 1980s! So throughout that time I was deluged from the people around me with rhetoric about how the country was on the verge of utter ruin, in the process of being destroyed by these quasi fascists. I recall a number of people telling me that if Reagan wins (and wins again) that they were going to leave the country. None of them did, of course.

Then came the 1990s and the Clinton years, when it was time for the Republicans to lose their collective minds over how one of the most pro-free market Democratic presidents in U.S. history was going to turn the country into a socialist hell-hole (helped along, of course, by that communist wife of his, Hillary). As such, conservatives, led by Speaker of the House Newt Gingerich—energized by his newly found power and “Contract with America”—perfected the art of blocking nearly everything Clinton wanted to do, which amounted to mostly centrist policies endorsed by majorities of Americans. But I will give Republicans credit for one thing during these years—at least they didn’t threaten to leave the country.

Illustration by Jeff Drew, from the cover of Skeptic magazine 27.4 (2022)

And who can forget the George W. Bush years, when so many Democrats threatened to leave the country that for a time it looked like the population of the United States might decline for the first time in history. But, of course, that never happened, and a good thing too because these same liberals then voted into office the first black president in the nation’s history, which the Republicans spent eight years griping about how he—even more than Clinton apparently—was going to turn the country into the People’s Republic of America. Interestingly, under Obama’s administration, the economy not only recovered from the Great Recession, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rebounded from 7,949 to 19,827. That’s a 149% increase! It reminds me of what Winston Churchill said when he heard that France’s governing Cabinet, after being defeated by the Nazis in May of 1940, declared in 1941 that “in three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken”—Churchill griped: “Some chicken. Some neck.”

By the way, in case you’re wondering, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed yesterday (October 30) at 41,141, close to its all time high of 43,275 (on October 18). Some of that increase happened during Trump’s administration (56%), but if you’re inclined to think that the Biden/Harris administration was also going to drive us to socialism, think again. For the record, the Dow’s annualized 11.8% return on investment under Trump was below that of 12.1% for Obama and 15.8% for Clinton. We will know in two months the figures for the Biden administration, but it’s likely to be in this range because, in reality, presidents and their policies have little to do with the stock market’s ups and downs, a point I heard Clinton make when he gave a speech at Caltech in January 2000, a startling admission from a politician; but then, he was at the end of his presidency.

Then there’s Trump. As much as the Dems despised George W. Bush, in the eyes of many liberals, compared to Trump Bush looks practically statesman like, even recalling the times when the self-declared “decider” asked “is our children learning?”, or when he declared that “you teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test,” when he mixed his metaphors in suggesting that “we ought to make the pie higher,” and my favorite, “fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.” (Cue The Who.) (There are so many Bushisms that there’s a list of the top 25 here.)

I won’t bother recounting the effectively countless lies and indiscretions, along with the crimes and misdemeanors of the 45^th President of the United States, as we all know them by heart by now. And I’ve gripped enough on my podcast about Trump’s character shortcomings and my bafflement that conservatives—the self-proclaimed people of character and honesty, faith and fidelity—can support him; but in three straight election cycles he has legitimately won his party’s nomination, so here we are.

In my lecture on the psychology of political beliefs, I open with a two-post Twitter thread from a woman named Laci Green just before and after the November 8, 2016 election. Compare what Green wrote when she thought Hillary was going to win, with her sentiments four hours later when Trump was declared the winner:

That was 8 years ago!

By all metrics, things are more divided and polarized now than then, and it was pretty bad then. Remember the January 21, 2017 Women’s March, the day after the inauguration of Trump as US President? At the time it was the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, dwarfed only by the “mostly peaceful” riots following the murder of George Floyd that resulted in considerable property damage (see Minneapolis burning below).

Then there was January 6, 2021, and the violence at the nation’s Capitol building by Trump supporters (below) who believed what the President told them that the election—and by extension the country—was being stolen from them. People act on their beliefs, and if they think something as important as their country is being stolen then we shouldn’t be surprised if some act violently.

So neither party is excluded from expressing their political beliefs and ideologies violently.

And now we’re hearing from liberals and progressives that if Trump wins again in 2024 that they are going to leave the country. I have heard this from a number of my liberal friends, along with prominent public figures on the Left, such as Hollywood celebrities who said they would move to Canada (Lena Dunham, Snoop Dogg), Africa (Samuel L. Jackson), Spain (Amy Schumer), and Italy (Omari Hardwick). Cher said she would move to Jupiter if Trump becomes President again. Maybe Elon Musk would supply the rocket for her. George Lopez said that if Trump wins we “won’t have to worry about immigration. We’ll all go back.” Yeah, sure you will. And remember a few months ago (March 8) when Robert Di Nero told Bill Maher that if Trump wins “you won’t be on this show any more.” Really? How is that going to happen? Is Trump going to buy HBO just so he can fire Bill Maher? He’s done some crazy things, but this one seems unlikely.

Of course, liberals don’t have a monopoly on such hyperbole. Witness Elon Musk’s recent proclamations to his 200 million followers on X that “if Kamala Harris wins I’ll be thrown in prison”, that he’ll never get his rockets to Mars because of the Democrat’s bureaucratic red tape, that “Kamala wants to destroy your right to free speech,” and that a Harris presidency would “doom humanity.” Not just the country, but all of humanity! And who can forget Musk’s Tweet after the assassination attempts on Trump’s life, inquiring why no one is targeting Harris for assassination. He deleted the Tweet, but then repeated the sentiment at a town-hall-style event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania: “Nobody even bothers to try to kill Kamala. It's pointless. Why? They'll just get another puppet.”

Okay, it’s time for a reality check. None of this is going to happen. Whoever wins, you’re not going to leave the country…and I can prove it. I’m a fan of prediction markets (or betting markets). They work because when people have skin in the game—in this case by placing actual financial bets—they’re less inclined to say and do stupid things and more inclined to think and act rationally. I’ll put up $1000 of my own money right now to anyone who says that they will leave the country if Trump wins, if they’ll also put up $1000 of their money, which I get to collect if they don’t move. (I haven’t heard any Republicans say that they’ll move if Harris wins, but if you’re out there this challenge goes for you too.)

Anyone?

It won’t happen. I know because I’ve offered $1000 to any of the UFO/UAP believers who proclaim that disclosure of alien contact is coming any day now. That was over two years ago. If you really believe we’ve been visited by aliens and that we’re going to find out about it soon, why not grab a free thousand bucks? The answer is that they don’t really believe it. It’s just rhetorical flourish to emphasize emotional desire, not rational belief. So, by extension, people who say they’re going to leave the country—or for that matter, that the country will cease to exist and collapse into a ruinous heap like ancient Rome—I’ve got the money if you’ve got the conviction.

Anyone?

Regardless of what happens next week, we’re going to be fine. If Harris wins, her administration will mostly try to continue the policies of the Biden administration, and the Republicans will try to block them at every step. To what extent they can will depend on who controls the House and the Senate, which also remains to be seen until the election results are in. If Trump wins, the Democrats are not going to just roll over and let the Project 2025 authors take over the country and order Trump to initiate a theocratic state, which he is unlikely to do in any case given what he has said about that project—along with his propensity to go his own way, which can change by the whims of the day and what he’s been watching on television or who he last spoke to—so the usual checks and balances as initiated by all parties to keep in line the current party in the White House will be implemented.

If Trump loses and declares that he really won—which most people think he will do, including me—he does not command the military, nor the Supreme Court, nor the National Guard, nor state militias, nor city police departments. It’s true that his Second Amendment supporting, gun totting, MAGA-hat wearing fanatics could cause violence along the lines of what we witnessed on January 6, 2021, but note what happened after that fateful day when Trump was in the White House watching it all unfold on his television set—there was a peaceful transfer of power, as has happened every election since the nation’s founding nearly 250 years ago.

Could there be other pockets of civil unrest and violence in this scenario? Sure, just like there was after George Floyd was murdered and BLM riots broke out in cities that resulted in massive property damage and even deaths. But here we are, still, a nation intact, with a viable Constitution that almost everyone respects and obeys, with state Supreme Courts and a United States Supreme Court to enforce the laws, with a rock solid economy and robust financial system that mostly flourishes no matter who is living in the White House, and with an electorate that, after all the hoopla and emotions that will be released next week, will go back to work and school and life as usual, because what else is there to do?

People talk about a second Civil War. That also is not going to happen. Sure, there are a handful of doomsday preppers, militia members, MAGA cult followers, white supremacists, skinheads, proud boys, and the like who could raise hell for a few weeks and lead to pockets of violence here and there, but could any of these knuckleheads and wingnuts organize themselves into massive armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands and line up in Gettysburg to face who? Hundreds of thousands of blue-haired, mask-wearing, hooded Antifa members armed with spray cans, frozen water bottles, and socks filled with rocks? This is not 1861.

Of course, I could be wrong. This really could be the election that destroys the country, in which America devolves into a socialist state while the Republicans sit back and watch it all unfold without a fight, or the United States becomes a Handmaid’s Tale of patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic Republic of Gilead while Democrats pack their U-Hauls and move to Canada.

But I doubt it.

So…tone down the rhetoric, cast your vote, chill out, and go back to work and play and life as we’ve known it for nearly two and a half centuries with the confidence that, given our history, will very likely continue for another two and a half centuries, regardless of who wins or loses this election, or the one to come in 2028. And when you think about people in the other party voting for their candidate that you can’t stand, remember the wise words of John Stuart Mill:

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Over the past year I have heard a number of people on both sides describe people in the other party as “enemies” (not just the candidate, but everyone who votes that party). They are not our enemies. They are our fellow Americans. We may disagree with them, but thinking of them as enemies to be destroyed is not conducive to a peaceful and prosperous future. So I will close this commentary with the poetic call for amity by Abraham Lincoln in this first inaugural address in 1861, when our nation really was on the brink of actual Civil War:

Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.

As regular readers of my books and essays dating back to the 1990s know, I have long been interested not just why people believe weird things, but especially why smart people believe weird things. My short answer is that being smart and educated makes one better at rationalizing beliefs one holds for non-smart reasons. That is, many of our beliefs in the realms of religion, politics, economics, ideology and the many culture-war issues that fall out of these ideas bins, are held for personal, emotional, and especially non-rational reasons; but as critical thinkers steeped in the rationality-community known as skepticism, such beliefs must be justified through reason and evidence, even when none are available. This is what happened when the German skeptics organization GWUP (Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften) went woke. An esteemed member of that group—the philosopher Nikil Mukerji—explains here what happened when pseudo-skepticism in the form of woke ideology swept through the organization when its members’ brains were infected by the idea pathogen of far left politics.

Nikil Mukerji is a philosopher based in Munich, Germany. He serves as the scientific director of the German skeptic organization Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP) and is also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). His research areas include the science/pseudoscience distinction, fake news, and the emerging field of "bullshitology." He is co-author (with Edzard Ernst) of Why Homoeopathy Is Pseudoscience and the author of Experimental Philosophy: A Critical Study.

Skeptics fight “idea pathogens“ to prevent them from infecting people’s minds. These idea pathogens adapt over time to evade skeptical scrutiny. From the perspective of the rationality community in general and the skeptical movement in particular, the most dangerous adaptation is the Trojan Horse Strategy of Pseudo-Skepticism, in which pseudoscience sympathizers disguise themselves as skeptics. This disguise—pseudo-skepticism—can be viewed as a Trojan Horse through which skeptical organizations are infiltrated and sabotaged from within. This is not just a theoretical threat—it has already happened and I was there to witness it first-hand when the German skeptic organization GWUP went woke. This article explains the strategy and how skeptical organizations can protect themselves against it.

The Immune System Analogy

Just as our body has an immune system that detects and neutralizes biological pathogens, our society has an “epistemic immune system” to combat what the behavioral psychologist Gad Saad, in his 2020 book The Parasitic Mind, calls “idea pathogens”—harmful ideas that can be dangerous if acted upon (such as anti-vaccination beliefs or HIV denialism), costly (like psychic readings and alternative medicine), and even counter-productive (as in the case of ideological opposition to nuclear energy).

Scientific skepticism functions as part of society’s adaptive epistemic immune system. Its first task is epistemic vigilance: like B cells—the body’s frontline detectives—skeptics search for emerging idea pathogens. Upon finding one, they proceed to knowledge creation to combat it.

During knowledge creation, skeptics produce epistemic antibodies in the form of arguments. Just as B cells generate diverse antibodies to bind various antigens, skeptics from diverse fields—science, technology, philosophy, medicine, psychology, and the like—address a wide range of pseudoscientific claims. Medical experts may debunk homeopathy, while psychologists tackle precognition. Open debate among skeptics is crucial to refining arguments, ensuring these epistemic antibodies effectively neutralize idea pathogens.

The next step is knowledge dissemination, akin to clonal expansion. B cells multiply upon encountering a pathogen; similarly, skeptics share their knowledge within the community, enabling others to replicate arguments against the idea pathogen. Externally, these epistemic antibodies are shared with the public through media publications.

Finally, skeptics engage in targeted responses, like killer T cells removing infected cells. When skeptics share findings through presentations and publications, some of them may take more decisive actions, such as legal measures or petitions.

How Idea Pathogens Adapt

As biological pathogens adapt to the immune system, idea pathogens adjust to skeptical activities over time. One strategy is latency: a virus lies dormant and reemerges when the immune system is preoccupied. Similarly, during the COVID-19 crisis, old superstitions, esoteric doctrines, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience—dormant in people’s minds—resurfaced and spread rapidly.

Viruses may also change surface proteins to evade detection, rendering existing antibodies ineffective. Likewise, idea pathogens may change to avoid criticism. For example, creationism evolved into “intelligent design” (ID) theory through a few superficial changes in language (Shermer, 1997). Skeptics’ epistemic antibodies could not “bind” as well to the mutated concepts of ID theory, possibly allowing it to infect more minds.

Idea Pathogens Going on the Offensive

Beyond reactive strategies, idea pathogens can aggressively sabotage the immune system’s function. Homeopathy proponents, for instance, try to interfere with knowledge dissemination by spreading conspiracy theories. They accuse skeptics of being paid shills, asserting that “behind them, like some eminence gris [sic], is the financial reach of the globalized pharmaceutical industry” (Milgrom, 2008, p. 590). The aim is to discredit skeptics so the public rejects their arguments.

While this strategy seeks to attack skepticism, it remains reactive and doesn’t interfere with skeptics’ research, internal debates, or external communication. A more aggressive method targets these activities directly. Recently, pseudoscience sympathizers, disguising themselves as skeptics, have done just that. They infiltrated a skeptical organization—GWUP—through a metaphorical Trojan Horse and seized control.

The Trojan Horse Strategy

In a surprisingly candid piece, two Women’s Studies researchers, Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger (2016), describe a blueprint for this strategy. They propose viewing Women’s Studies as a virus that “attaches to the ‘host’ bodies of other disciplines and disrupts and infects them” and “directs it to a new purpose” (p. 945). This is the Trojan Horse Strategy in a nutshell.

This strategy succeeds where deception meets trust, as the Odyssean myth illustrates. The Greeks presented their wooden horse as a gift, pretending it was an offering to Athena, signaling the end of the war. Trusting this, the Trojans brought the horse into their city. Greek soldiers emerged at night, opened the gates, and allowed their army to enter.

Similarly, pseudoscientists and their sympathizers can infiltrate skeptical organizations by disguising themselves as skeptics. Homeopaths haven’t managed this because their beliefs are too overtly unscientific to avoid detection. However, with a crucial adaptation, other pseudoscientists can employ the Trojan Horse Strategy.

Pseudo-Skepticism as a Trojan Horse

Pseudo-skepticism is that adaptation. Just as some viruses use molecular mimicry to evade the immune system, pseudoscientific ideas and their proponents can present themselves as skeptical and scientific, thus avoiding detection.

A skeptic strives to rigorously apply critical thinking methods for “baloney detection” (Sagan, 1987) and follows rational arguments wherever they lead. However, it may be hard to ascertain if someone genuinely possesses this “skeptical DNA.” A quick way is to check if they reject pseudoscientific nonsense like astrology or homeopathy, because genuine skeptics reliably oppose these ideas (because of their lack of evidence and not out of ideology or bias).

However, skeptical views can be parroted without genuine critical thinking. Pseudo-skeptics try to walk and talk like skeptics by adopting standard skeptical views. This allows them to enter skeptics’ organizations unnoticed. Once they have the numbers, they can occupy positions of power and redirect the organization, as Fahs and Karger put it, “to a new purpose.”

How Pseudo-Skeptics Seized Control of GWUP

The Trojan Horse Strategy is not just theoretical. In 2023, pseudo-skeptics used it to gain temporary control of the German skeptical organization Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften (GWUP).

Over a few years, they infiltrated GWUP. Although they rejected the rigorous and impartial application of critical thinking—embracing woke ideology instead—they disguised themselves as skeptics. They adopted skeptical views on topics like astrology and homeopathy, participated in debunking pseudoscientific claims, expressed support for scientific inquiry, and made friends in the community, thus avoiding detection.

Like the Greek soldiers stealthily hiding in the Trojan horse, they “opened the gates,” recruiting more ideologically aligned pseudo-skeptics as GWUP members. In May 2023, they eventually gained control of the board and redirected GWUP “to a new purpose.” Using tactics of cancel culture (see Rauch, 2021; Lukianoff & Schlott, 2023), they systematically sabotaged skepticism’s epistemic immune response from within, as Zeller (2024) has documented.

They declared gender studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, and similar fields “off-topic,” aiming to shut down GWUP’s epistemic vigilance regarding these areas. They interfered with the knowledge creation process by disrupting internal debate through ad hominem attacks on anyone who discussed forbidden topics (“misogynist!” “homophobe!” “transphobe!” “colonialist!”).

Physicist Holm Hümmler, chairman at the pleasure of the pseudo-skeptic board majority, declared topics like biological sex and Indigenous knowledge (Mātauranga Māori) no-go areas for skeptics. He also accused GWUP members interested in discussing wokeness of pandering to the alt-right (Hümmler, 2023).

Pseudo-skeptics also impaired knowledge dissemination by canceling and denouncing speakers with politically incorrect views and restricting access to GWUP’s communication channels for specific members.

Furthermore, they tried to sabotage targeted responses, defaming GWUP members for founding Skeptische Gesellschaft, a think tank discussing woke idea pathogens and other informational threats to society. They also threatened to take legal measures against one member of GWUP’s scientific counsel who had tried to resist cancelation by communicating with GWUP members through an external website.

In short, then, pseudo-skeptics at GWUP sought to shut down all skeptical activities regarding woke ideology.

Pseudo-Skepticism Is Deadly

As Fahs and Karger (2016) clarify, they “do not advocate the killing of the host” (p. 935). However, death is always an unintended consequence of a pathogen’s interference with vital processes. In the case of woke pseudo-skepticism, death would have been the inevitable outcome for GWUP.

Arguing that skeptics could still do important work in other areas, even if wokeness were off the table, ignores that wokeness invades all discourses, including the sciences (Coyne & Maroja, 2023). If skeptics cannot discuss wokeness, they are effectively shut out of these debates.

Moreover, pseudoscientists can immunize themselves against critique by linking their ideas to woke themes, as seen with queer astrology (Bedell, 2019) or postcolonial astrology (Kat, 2021). If skeptics could not criticize these because this is forbidden for ideological reasons, public trust would erode, and skepticism would de facto die.

How Skeptical Organizations Can Protect Themselves Against Trojan Horses

The Trojan Horse Strategy poses a real threat to skeptical organizations, as the infiltration of GWUP demonstrates. To safeguard against such internal sabotage, skeptics worldwide should take proactive steps to preserve the integrity and mission of their organizations. Here are some suggestions:

1. Clearly Define and Uphold Core Principles

Be explicit about your organization’s principles and values, and make new members declare their support for them. Signal, credibly, that you will enforce them if need be. At GWUP, we have introduced behavioral guidelines prohibiting actions like calling for cancellations based on ideological grounds, engaging in ad hominem attacks, or using bullying tactics. By clearly communicating these standards and requiring members to commit to them, you ensure everyone is aligned with the organization’s mission from the outset. You also ensure that those who do not accept the rules are discouraged from joining.

2. Strengthen Epistemic Vigilance

Encourage other skeptics to identify pseudo-skepticism early. They can do this by consistently using critical thinking across all topics, particularly when it comes to politically charged debates. This will make it easier to recognize thinking patterns that merely mimic skepticism but lack a genuine commitment to impartial inquiry when this conflicts with ideology.

3. Foster a Culture of Open and Honest Debate

Rationality is a collaborative enterprise in which reasoners try to spot each other’s mistakes (Pinker, 2021). So, make sure everybody gets to speak openly and honestly without fear of personal attacks. Don’t declare any topics off-limits, and prevent suppression of discussions through censorship.

4. Implement Transparent, Fair, and Rigorous Procedures

Like the Greek soldiers, pseudo-skeptics like to operate in the dark. They use bullying tactics and moral pressure behind closed doors and avoid transparent, fair, and equal voting mechanisms as well as rigorous decision-making processes. Make sure you have those firmly in place (Pincourt, 2021).

5. Protect Knowledge Dissemination Processes

Ensure communication channels remain open and accessible. Share findings widely within the community and with the public. Resist efforts to restrict access or cancel speakers due to ideological disagreements. Transparency allows for collective vigilance.

6. Encourage Diversity of Thought and Viewpoint

Cultivate an environment where a variety of perspectives is valued. Diversity in backgrounds and viewpoints enhances the organization’s ability to detect and challenge idea pathogens, reducing the risk of groupthink.

7. Raise Awareness About Infiltration Tactics to Protect Skepticism Worldwide

Inform fellow skeptics about the Trojan Horse and other strategies (see Pincourt, 2021) so they can recognize early signs of infiltration. Encourage critical evaluation of ideas and behaviors that may indicate hidden agendas contrary to the organization’s mission. Also, share knowledge across borders and support international skeptics. They may encounter similar issues in their organizations and benefit from advice.

8. Stay Alert to Emerging Threats

Remain vigilant for new forms of infiltration and ideological influence. The recent challenges posed by specific ideological movements are just one example; similar attacks could soon come from different parts of the political spectrum or entirely new ideologies. Recognize that any rigid ideology—whether from the left, right, or elsewhere—that suppresses open inquiry and critical thinking can undermine skepticism.

Vigilant Skepticism

By implementing these measures, skeptical organizations can fortify themselves against internal threats. As the immune system relies on multiple defenses, skepticism must employ various strategies to protect its role in society’s epistemic immune system. Clearly defining principles and requiring members to uphold them ensures everyone is committed to the organization’s ethos. Vigilance, open inquiry, and unwavering dedication to critical thinking are the best safeguards against Trojan Horses seeking to undermine the skeptical movement from within.

References

Bedell, C. (2019). Queer Cosmos – The Astrology of Queer Identities & Relationships. Jersey City: Cleis Press.

Blancke, S.; Boudry, M.; Pigliucci, M. (2017). Why Do Irrational Beliefs Mimic Science? The Cultural Evolution of Pseudoscience. Theoria 83(1), pp. 78-97.

Coyne, J. & Maroja, L. S. (2023). The Ideological Subversion of Biology. Skeptical Inquirer 47(4), pp. 34-47.

Fahs,B., & Karger, M. (2016). Women’s Studies as Virus: Institutional Feminism and the Projection of Danger. Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies 5(1), pp. 929-957.

Kat, A. S. (2021). Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets Through Capital, Power, and Labor. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Lukianoff, G. & Schlott, R. (2023). The Cancelling of The American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Hümmler, H. G. (2023). Tweet Thread (30 October 2023). Available at: https://x.com/hummler/status/1719114920250265733.

Milgrom, S. (2008). Homeopathy and the New Fundamentalism: A Critique of the Critics. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 14(5), pp. 589–594.

Pincourt, C. (2021). Counter Wokecraft. Orlando: New Discourses.

Pinker, S. (2021). Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. New York: Viking.

Rauch, J. (2021). The Constitution of Knowledge. Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Saad, G. (2020). The Parasitic Mind – How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Regnery Publishing.

Sagan, C. (1987). The Burden of Skepticism. Skeptical Inquirer 12(1), pp. 38–46.

Shermer, M. (1997). Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time. New York: Holt & Co.

Zeller, J. (2024). The German Dilemma Continues: Skepticism in the Face of Ideological Conflict. Skeptical Inquirer Online (Special Articles). Available at: https://shorturl.at/VoDub

In 1997 I appeared on the late G. Gordon Liddy’s radio talk show while on a media tour for my first book, Why People Believe Weird Things. Liddy asked me if I thought conspiracy theories are weird beliefs and if we should be skeptical of them. It was a set-up question that he himself answered after I demurred to the man behind the Watergate conspiracy. Most conspiracy theories are false, Liddy told me, for two reasons: (1) the competency problem and (2) the leakage problem. Most conspiracists, Liddy explained from his considerable experience working with them, are bumbling fumbling nincompoops who can’t keep their mouths shut—”three people can keep a secret,” he added, echoing Benjamin Franklin, “if two of them are dead.”

Let’s begin by distinguishing between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. 

A conspiracy is two or more people or a group plotting or acting in secret to gain an advantage or harm others immorally or illegally.

A conspiracy theory is a structured belief about a conspiracy, whether it is real or not.

Since, as I demonstrate in my book, some conspiracy theories are true, we cannot just dismiss them all out of hand (as in “oh that’s just a crazy conspiracy theory”). One of the key messages of my book is that it is not always irrational to believe that some conspiracy theories are true. So how can we tell the difference between a true and a false conspiracy theory? What metric, algorithm, or rule of thumb can we apply to a conspiracy theory to determine whether it is likely true, probably false, or undecidable? Think of this as a signal detection problem in a 2x2 matrix illustrated in the figure below.

Signal Detection Theory aims to assess if a signal, or information, represents a true or false signal, and our decision as to whether or not the signal is true or false affords us to diagram a 2x2 choice matrix as illustrated here. The upper left cell represents conspiracy theories that are true and that you correctly identify as such. That’s called a hit. The upper right cell represents conspiracy theories that are true but that you incorrectly identify as false. That’s called a miss, or a False Negative, or a Type II Error. The lower left cell represents conspiracy theories that are false and you correctly identify them as such, and that is called a correct rejection, another type of hit. The lower right cell represents conspiracy theories that are false but that you incorrectly identify as true, that is, you think the theory represents a true conspiracy but it doesn’t. That’s called a False Positive, or a Type I Error.

Keep in mind that because conspiracy theories are so varied, there is no set of criteria that can accurately assess the verisimilitude of every conspiracy theory. So think of this 2x2 matrix as a heuristic, a rule of thumb, a way to come at the problem of assessing the truth about a claim that is not full-proof, but neither is it a random guess, starting with the fact that conspiracy theories fall along a spectrum of plausibility.

What follows is a 10-point list for a Conspiracy Detection Kit. The more that a conspiracy theory manifests the following characteristics, the less likely it is to be a real conspiracy.

1. Patternicity. Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy (as in “a lot of people are saying”), or when the evidence fits equally well to other patterns—or to randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely false.

2. Agenticity. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need nearly superhuman power to pull it off. Most of the time in most circumstances, people, agencies, and corporations are not nearly so powerful and competent as we think they are. If the conspiracy theory involves super-powerful agents it is likely false.

3. Complexity. The conspiracy theory is complex and its successful completion demands a large number of elements coming together at just the right moment and in the proper sequence. The more elements involved and the more delicate the timing of the sequence in which they must come together, the less likely the conspiracy theory is to be true.

4. People. The more people involved in the conspiracy theory the less likely it is to be true. Conspiracies involving large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets typically fail. People are incompetent and emotional. They screw up, chicken out, change their minds, have moral scruples. Conspiracy theories often treat people as automata or Manchurian candidates operating like programmed robots carrying out their commands. That is unrealistic.

5. Grandiosity. If the conspiracy theory encompasses some grandiose ambition for control over a nation, economy, or political system, and especially if it aims for world domination, it is almost certainly false. The bigger the conspiracy the more likely it is to fail for the above reasons of complexity and people.

6. Scale. When the conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger events that have much lower probabilities of being true, it is very likely false. Most real conspiracies involve very specific events and targets, such as insider trading on Wall Street, price fixing in an industry, tax evasion by a corporation or individual, government aid to a political ally in one country, and, yes, the assassination of a political leader, but always for a narrow goal of grabbing power or ending tyranny.

7. Significance. If the conspiracy theory assigns portentous and sinister meanings and interpretations to what are most likely innocuous or insignificant events, it is most likely false. Again, most conspiracies are narrowly focused and significant only to those who will benefit or be hurt. Most real conspiracies do not change the world, although there are exceptions, as in the conspiracy that launched the First World War.

8. Accuracy. If the conspiracy theory commingles facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality for the components of its claim, it is likely to be false. Conspiracists are notorious for sprinkling in a handful of verifiable facts amidst a vast array of conjectures and suppositions, which blur reality and confuse listeners into thinking there is more to the theory than there actually is.

9. Paranoia. The conspiracy theorist is extremely and indiscriminately suspicious of any and all government agencies or private corporations, which suggests a lack of nuance in understanding how the world works. Yes, sometimes “they” really are out to get you, but usually not. When you combine the above elements in a conspiracy theory, almost always what looks like a portentous conspiracy is, in fact, either randomness or has a far more prosaic explanation.

10. Falsifiability. Conspiracy theorists typically refuse to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence for the theory, and blatantly seeking only confirming evidence to support what has a priori been determined as the truth. If a conspiracy theory cannot be falsified, it is probably false.

To these factors we should add one more: the type of country or society in which the conspiracy is alleged to unfold. Open, transparent, and free liberal democracies make it more difficult to pull off a conspiracy because of the apparatus in place to prevent illegal or immoral cabals from forming to cheat the system (think of all the checks and balances designed by the founders of the United States—it was various forms of political conspiracies they were concerned about), whereas closed, autocratic societies protect and even enable conspiratorial shenanigans, and in some cases the government itself is the most dangerous conspiracy citizens face. And researchers have found that conspiracy theories about the government are especially rampant in autocratic societies, albeit unexpressed out of fear of reprisals.

As we approach the 2024 election keep this heuristic in mind as election deniers continue to claim that conspiracies are afoot unless their party wins. We could witness another January 6, 2021 insurrection event if too many of us accept a false conspiracy theory as true.

Finally, to learn more about conspiracies, conspiracy theories, and conspiracists, read my book, now available in for 50% off in signed first-edition hardbacks here. Here is the Table of Contents:

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.

I am not Jewish. I have no personal stake in defending Jews or Israel. But I am an historian (and a rational empathetic human being), and I wrote a book on Holocaust denial—Denying History—which took me deep into the 3000-year history of anti-Semitism, pogroms and genocides, and especially into the Nazi attempt to complete what so many before had so passionately desired, namely the complete and utter extermination of the Jewish people. While I recognize the value and validity of criticisms of the Israeli government and its policies over the past 75 years—no different in principle from criticisms of any sovereign nation—monitoring social media over the past year I am sickened by the unmistakable fact that it isn’t just fringe neo-Nazi skinheads and oleaginous Jew haters who, while denying the Holocaust, wish Hitler had “finished the job”. Today, millions of mainstream liberals and leftists cannot seem to discriminate between murderous terrorists and innocent civilians.

(If your propensity is to flip the script and accuse Israel of failing to discriminate between Hamas terrorists and innocent Palestinians, keep in mind that Hamas invaded Israel, and that is the consequence of starting a war. If you don’t want to face the consequences, don’t start a war. Would anyone in their right mind accuse the allies of failing to discriminate Nazi soldiers from German citizens after Hitler invaded Poland and declared war on France, Britain, the US and the USSR? Or, if a more domestic example would help to make the point, if Mexican forces crossed the border into San Diego and murdered 1200 American citizens, would anyone object to or quibble with the U.S. military responding with full force to defeat the invaders?)

That’s where we are in 2024, a state of society I never imagined could arise again. How naive I was. There is little doubt in my mind that there are now tens, hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of millions of people around the world who, while recognizing the principle of national sovereignty and the universal application of rights to all people that include—as outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—the right to life, liberty, and personal security, freedom from discrimination, slavery, torture, and degrading treatment, freedom from arbitrary arrest and exile, and freedom from interference with privacy, family, and home (to name just a few of those rights violated by Hamas against innocent Jewish lives one year ago today) would deny those to the Jews and the sovereign nation of Israel.

The phrase “never again” was first used by liberated prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of the Second World War, and it was popularized by the Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane in his 1971 book Never Again! A Program for Survival.

Today, in so many words, “Never Again” means (or at least should mean):

If you rape, torture, hold hostage, murder, and otherwise try to exterminate the Jewish people again, we are going to so utterly destroy you that you will wish you never even thought of harassing us. We will turn the full power of our state—as would any sovereign nation so unjustly attacked—to assure that this will never happen again. You have been warned. Take heed. If you try to eliminate us, we will end you.

But, really, how unusual is such a declaration anyway? Recall the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his address to Congress and the American people on December 8, 1941:

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Here is what Winston Churchill told the British people on June 4, 1940:

We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France and on the seas and oceans; we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on beaches, landing grounds, in fields, in streets and on the hills. We shall never surrender and even if, which I do not for the moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, will carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.

Never Again.

If words are not enough to convey the message, let your eyes scan through these photographs from October 7, 2023, and from the Nazi genocide against the Jews, and ask yourself, “would this be enough to motivate me to say ‘Never Again’…and mean it?”

Although Edmund Burke never said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” the sentiment is a poignant one, even as what he did say (in his 1770 “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents”) conveys the same message:

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

And so I close with one final image, this from the liberation of the concentration camp at Ohrdruf, April, 1945, showing General Dwight Eisenhower and a party of high-ranking U.S. Army officers, including Generals Bradley, Patton, and Eddy, as they view the charred remains of prisoners that were burned upon a section of railroad track during the evacuation of the camp. After his visit, Eisenhower cabled General George C. Marshall, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington:

The things I saw beggar description. … The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda.”

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc,, Heavens on Earth, and Giving the Devil His Due. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.

Anondah Saide is an assistant professor at the University of North Texas in the Department of Educational Psychology. She has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology and leads the Worldview Foundations Research Team. 

Amanda Neuwirth is a high school art teacher and Ph.D. student in educational psychology at the University of North Texas. Her research interests include the developmental impacts of childhood trauma and investigating the disproportionate impacts of exclusionary discipline in K-12 schools. 

Rising temperatures, biodiversity loss, drought, mass migration, the spread of misinformation, inflation, infertility—these are just some of the major challenges facing societies around the globe. Generating innovative solutions to such challenges require expanding our understanding of what’s currently possible. But how do we cultivate the necessary imagination? By debunking counterproductive myths about imagination, Occidental College cognitive developmental scientist Andrew Shtulman might just provide us with a proper starting point. “Unstructured imagination succumbs to expectation,” he writes, “but imagination structured by knowledge and reflection allows for innovation.”

Imagination Myths

In Learning to Imagine: The Science of Discovering New Possibilities, Shtulman debunks the highly intuitive, yet obstructive myth that great imagination stems from a place of ignorance. Through the sharing of everyday examples and detailed experimental studies, Shtulman effectively tackles the pervasive deficit view of imagination—that it’s something we engage in a great deal during childhood and sadly lose as we get older.

On the contrary, Shtulman demonstrates that children’s imagination, relative to adults’, is constrained by what they think is physically plausible, statistically probable, and socially and morally acceptable. While some early philosophers and social scientists considered children to be stupid and their minds to be a blank slate, a contemporary pendulum swing has led to a confusing romanticization of children as “little scientists” capable of unacknowledged insight. A more rational and informed view recognizes that though children’s minds are not blank slates, they do often conflate what they’ve personally experienced with what “could be.” Children’s inability to imagine a possibility is thought of as evidence of its impossibility.

Shtulman notes how young children often deny the existence of uncommon but entirely possible events, such as finding an alligator under a bed, catching a fly with chopsticks, and a man growing a beard down to his toes. Children find these situations as impossible as eating lighting for dinner. Yes, children often engage in pretend play, but it often mimics mundane aspects of real life, such as cooking or construction. Children also often believe in magic and fantastical beings such as Santa Claus, but such myths were not spontaneously created by children, they were first endorsed by adults they trust. Children rarely generate novel solutions to problems as they tend to fixate on the rules and norms familiar to them, often correcting others when they have deviated from what is expected and sometimes become offended by “rule” violations.

Most importantly, Learning to Imagine is not only about children’s cognition; it is fundamentally a book about human reasoning and contains insights that are applicable to all of us. Shtulman sheds light on the many important ways in which adults continue to constrain their own imagination through self-interest, habit, fear, and a fixation on conforming to one’s social group. For example, we may constrain ourselves with resistance to adopting new technologies like artificial intelligence because they reduce the need for our skillset or simply engender fear of the unknown. We may resist something that requires us to change our habits (e.g., carry reusable bags), to something that forces us to take risks (e.g., trust a quickly developed vaccine), or to deviate from our in-group (e.g., advocate for a new theory or openly share an unpopular opinion).

What is Imagination, Anyway?

So, what is “imagination” anyway? Shtulman argues that it’s the ability to abstract from the here and the now to contemplate what could be and what could have been. Imagination is an evolved cognitive skill that is used for the purpose of everyday planning, predicting, and problem-solving. We imagine what we would buy at the store, how a meeting at work might go, how if we had only said something a different way, then we could have avoided that fight with our spouse, and so on. Simply put, imagination is about considering the “what’s possible?” question. Imagination can be engaged in for our own personal-subjective experiences (e.g., imagining how life would have been different if path B was chosen instead of path A), and for what might be more objectively relevant to others (e.g., works of art, new policies, or technologies). Shtulman’s book offers a discussion on expanding imagination that is objectively relevant to others—the kind that leads to collective rather than personally relevant innovation.

Even though Shtulman’s case for imagination is grounded in this “what’s possible” definition, how it is intertwined with closely related constructs such as “creativity” and “innovation” is somewhat less clear. What can be discerned from his book is that while imagination can be collaborative in the sense that we draw on human knowledge to ask, “what if,” it is largely a personal endeavor. Creativity, on the other hand, is the product of imagination that can be shared with others. Building upon imagination and creativity, innovation is the product of extraordinary imagination and can be developed and refined.

Mechanisms for Expanding What’s Possible

What are the proposed means by which we expand our knowledge, thereby improving the likelihood that we shift our imagination from the ordinary to the extraordinary? The nine middle chapters of Shtulman’s book outline three processes: learning through (1) examples, (2) principles, and (3) models.

The first mechanism, examples, involves learning about new possibilities via other people’s testimony, demonstrations, empirical discoveries, and technological creations. Through education, others’ knowledge becomes our knowledge. However, expanding our imagination through examples is the easiest but also the most limited means by which to expand our own. On one hand, new possibilities are added to our database of what could be, but in doing so, we are potentially limited by overly fixating on the suboptimal (yet adequate) solution we have learned; as Shtulman notes, we “privilege [our] expectation over observation.” For example, we tend to copy the necessary and unnecessary actions of others when trying to achieve the same goal—we fixate on the solution we are familiar with rather than engage in the little effort required to abstract a more efficient solution. Children are even more susceptible to such a process. For example, imagine you see a toy with a handle that is stuck at the bottom of a long tube, and you are provided with a straight pipe cleaner. How might you reach and retrieve the toy? You likely imagine bending the pipe cleaner, yet most preschoolers tasked to reach the toy in this scenario are unable to imagine how the pipe cleaner can be used as a sufficient tool.

The second mechanism, principles, refers to generating a new collection of possibilities by learning about abstract schema; in other words, theories about “how” and “why” things operate. These include learning about scientific/cause-and-effect, mathematical, and ethical principles. As a means for expanding imagination, principles are more valuable than examples because they can help us extrapolate possibilities from one situation and apply it across different domains. In one illustrative example, Shtulman discusses the physicist Ernest Rutherford, who won a Nobel prize in chemistry. Rutherford hypothesized (correctly) that electrons, like planets orbiting a sun, may orbit a nucleus. By using the principle of gravity and applying it in a different context, Rutherford generalized an insight from physics to innovate in the field of chemistry. Engaging with principles allows us to practice applying our knowledge and better understand novel relationships. While most of us are not scientists striving to win a Nobel prize, we can still learn new principles that expand our imagination. However, principles can be overgeneralized, and Shtulman argues that new applications should still be tested and replicated to confirm the connection. 

The third mechanism, models, might be the most exciting as it concerns expanding our ideas about what is possible by immersing ourselves in simulated versions of reality that can be manipulated with little to no consequences. These simulations allow for personal reflection through the process of mental time travel. This includes expanding our imagination through pretense (i.e., pretend play), fiction, and religion. Pretense allows us to expand our symbolic imagination by toying with alternative possibilities somewhat rooted in reality because the real-world elements of pretend play help to make it meaningful. For example, when children and many adults are asked to draw an animal that doesn’t exist, the product is usually an amalgamation of existing animal parts rather than a completely unique creature. Such mental play supports the development of logical reasoning. Through different mediums such as books and film, fiction expands our imagination by allowing us to experience the social world through the eyes and thoughts of others. We see how others react to situations we haven’t experienced and contemplate how we might respond if we were in their shoes.

Religion is rooted less in the here and now but may enable us to expand metaphysical ideas and explore moral reasoning by directing thoughts and behavior according to the core values of a specific religion. Ultimately, models allow us to experience the lessons of working out various problems without the risks associated with acting on them in real life. On the other hand, sometimes models may communicate false information that we mark as true. Though models may sometimes lead us astray, Shtulman argues that they “provide the raw materials.... You have to represent reality before you can tinker with it, to know the facts before you can entertain counterfactuals” (p. 12).

The numerous examples that Shtulman provides for how examples, principles, and models expand imagination generate a convincing case for the central thesis of his book—that, unlike the current conventional wisdom, children’s lack of knowledge, experience, and reflection make them less imaginative than adults. However, attempts to distinguish many overlapping concepts within in the book (e.g., religious models vs. fictional models; social imagination vs. moral imagination) is sometimes disorientating. But this is not a self-help book. Instead, you’ll spend hours on an engaging (and, dare we say, nourishing) tour of the limitations and achievements of human imagination. By the end, you’ll know a lot more about how the human mind develops and reasons, and about the cognitive mechanisms that impede and enhance innovation across eras, societies, and an individual lifetime. Through your newfound knowledge, you may begin to imagine solutions you hadn’t considered before to both personal and global challenges.