To most of us, at least at a first glance, maps appear to describe reality. They show states, borders, capitals, and frontiers with the reassuring precision of geography. We learn them at school, consult them in newspapers, and rarely question the assumptions they contain. A mountain either exists or it does not, and a river follows its course. A border appears equally factual.

But maps don’t simply record the world “as it is”—they record political settlements. Every border reflects decisions made by people under particular historical circumstances, typically through wars, negotiations, or revolutions. Unlike mountains and rivers, they are neither inevitable nor permanent. They are products of history. Yet something curious happens with time. Political settlements gradually lose their appearance of contingency. What began as one solution to one historical problem or circumstance comes to be treated as reality itself, and the map appears to describe the natural order of the world. 

This is not an argument against borders. Almost every political community requires them. Nor is it an argument that every territorial claim deserves recognition—most do not. The question I pose today is a different and more skeptical one: Can political settlements become so familiar that we stop asking whether they still describe political reality?

Look at a modern map of the Middle East and you will find, among many, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. But you will not find a state called Kurdistan. The Kurds are commonly described as one of the world’s largest stateless peoples. Estimates vary because the states in which Kurds live do not all collect ethnicity data in comparable ways. Roughly 30 to 35 million Kurds live primarily across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, with a large diaspora in Europe and elsewhere. They speak several closely related varieties of Kurdish, principally Kurmanji and Sorani, and have maintained a distinct cultural and historical identity for centuries. Modern Kurdish nationalism developed mainly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

Today Kurdish political life ranges from constitutional self-government in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, with its own parliament, presidency, government, universities, courts, and security institutions, to autonomous or party-led structures elsewhere. Kurdish armed forces are equally diverse: the Peshmerga serve the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, while Kurdish-led forces such as the YPG, YPJ, and later the Syrian Democratic Forces emerged during the Syrian civil war. The expression “the Kurds,” therefore, describes not a single political organization but a dispersed people living under very different political systems. 

Borders and Spectrums 

Long before diplomats drew the borders of the modern Middle East, Kurdish communities inhabited the mountainous region stretching across what are today southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, western Iran, and northern Syria. They spoke related languages, cultivated rich literary and oral traditions, developed local institutions, and sustained a historical memory tied to a recognizable homeland. For centuries, Kurdish communities lived within the Ottoman and Persian empires. These empires exercised authority unevenly, often governing through local rulers, tribal confederations, religious leaders, and hereditary principalities, rather than through a single centralized administration. Imperial rule could be harsh, arbitrary, and violent, but it often left substantial room for local institutions to manage everyday life. 

As the great empires gave way to modern nation-states, governments increasingly sought a different kind of authority: one language, one educational system, one army, one bureaucracy, one national history, and one political identity. Diversity that imperial systems had often accommodated imperfectly now appeared increasingly as a problem to be solved. The Kurdish question emerged within this transformation, created by the encounter between an older political community and a newer model of statehood that increasingly struggled to accommodate communities whose identities did not fit neatly within its national framework. 

The First World War shattered the political order that had governed much of the Middle East for centuries. As the Ottoman Empire collapsed, its territories became the subject of negotiation among the victorious powers. Across the region, peoples who had long lived under imperial rule suddenly found themselves confronting a new political language: national self-determination. 

Once the new borders gained international recognition, they acquired legal authority and, consequently, a presumption of permanence.

For the Kurds, this appeared to offer an unprecedented opportunity. Kurdish representatives argued that they constituted a distinct people with their own historical homeland and therefore deserved political recognition within the emerging international order. They were not alone in making such claims. Armenians, Arabs, Zionists, Persians, and other communities and governments were also advancing claims about sovereignty, mandates, borders, national government, or self-determination as the Ottoman order was dismantled. 

But Kurds faced a particular disadvantage. Unlike several neighboring national movements, they possessed neither a unified government nor a single diplomatic leadership capable of speaking for all Kurdish regions. Their political reality exceeded their level of political organization. Among the most prominent Kurdish advocates was Şerif Pasha, a former Ottoman diplomat who presented a memorandum on Kurdish claims to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Acting as a leading Kurdish representative in Paris, he argued for recognition of a Kurdish political homeland in the post-Ottoman settlement, and submitted maps and territorial claims intended to give the Kurdish case diplomatic form. His position did not represent every Kurdish leader or region, but it was one of the clearest attempts to place Kurdish self-determination before the victorious powers in formal international diplomacy. 

In 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres recognized, at least in principle, the possibility of Kurdish autonomy and, under certain conditions, eventual independence in parts of the former Ottoman Empire. The treaty settled almost nothing, but it briefly established that the international order at the time acknowledged a Kurdish political future as conceivable. Barely three years later, that possibility disappeared. 

Military victories by the Turkish nationalist movement transformed the diplomatic landscape. In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne replaced Sèvres, recognized the sovereignty of the new Turkish Republic, and abandoned the earlier provisions concerning Kurdish autonomy. 

By the mid-1920s, the basic framework had been set. The Ottoman Empire was gone. The Republic of Turkey had been recognized. Iraq had been constructed under British influence with Mosul included. Syria had been placed under French mandate. Iran continued its own centralizing state project. Kurdistan was divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. The Kurds did not move. The borders moved over them. A Kurd in Turkey now faced one state, one army, one ideology, one school system, one prison system, one legal vocabulary. A Kurd in Iraq faced another. A Kurd in Iran another. A Kurd in Syria yet another. 

Once the new borders gained international recognition, they acquired legal authority and, consequently, a presumption of permanence. Questions that had recently belonged to international diplomacy were reclassified as domestic affairs. Kurdish demands for self-government were no longer debates about the political order of the Middle East. They became internal problems for the states that governed Kurdish populations. 

In Turkey, Kurdishness was long treated as a defect in the project of one Turkish nation. The republic presented itself as modern, secular, civilizing, and unified. Kurdish language, memory, and self-rule appeared as backwardness or a threat to national unity. In Iraq, Britain acknowledged Kurdish distinctiveness when useful, then subordinated Kurdish self-rule when it interfered with the Iraq it wanted to build. Later Iraqi regimes, especially the Baathist state, would take this contradiction to catastrophic extremes through Arabization, village destruction, chemical attacks, and the genocidal Anfal campaign. 

Maps don’t simply record the world “as it is”—they record political settlements. Every border reflects decisions made by people under particular historical circumstances.

In Iran, Kurdish leaders negotiated, organized, or declared self-rule in moments of state fragility, only to face execution or repression once Tehran regained strength. Iranian state forms changed—Qajar, Pahlavi, Islamic Republic—but Kurdish self-rule was repeatedly treated as a threat to central authority. In Syria, denial often worked more quietly. It operated through language restrictions, Arabization, and administrative erasure. Many Kurds in Syria were rendered stateless after the 1962 census. Kurdish identity was made faint in public life, not always through spectacular massacre, but through the slow violence of non-recognition. 

This shift profoundly altered the burden of justification. Now, those seeking to change the (newly) established borders had to explain and advocate why they should be changed. The question was no longer What political arrangement best reflects the peoples of the region? but rather How can political aspirations be accommodated without disturbing the existing map?

If the Kurdish question were simply the story of a people denied a state, its history would read like a sequence of unrelated defeats and occasional victories. One rebellion follows another. One uprising succeeds briefly before being crushed. One generation places its hopes in diplomacy, another in armed struggle, another in constitutional politics. Look more closely, however, and you’ll notice that Kurdish self-government has often advanced when central governments were weak or when outside powers provided protection, only to become vulnerable when the regional balance of power changed. 

Brief Experiments in Kurdish Statehood 

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire created several opportunities for Kurdish self-government, although none produced a durable state. One of the first arose around Sulaymaniyah, in what is now the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. After the First World War, British authorities appointed Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji, an influential religious and tribal leader, as governor of the area. He soon sought greater independence from British control and led an uprising in 1919. 

After a period of imprisonment and exile, he returned to Sulaymaniyah and in 1922 assumed the title King of Kurdistan. His authority extended over a relatively small territory and depended heavily on religious standing, tribal alliances, and personal loyalty. British and Iraqi forces eventually ended the experiment. It was a limited and politically fragile precursor to modern Kurdish nationalism, but it established an early precedent for Kurdish attempts to turn the collapse of Ottoman rule into political sovereignty. 

A more developed experiment appeared in northwestern Iran after the Second World War. The Republic of Mahabad was proclaimed in January 1946 under Qazi Muhammad, leader of the newly established Kurdish Democratic Party. The republic established a government and promoted Kurdish-language education, publishing, and political organization. Its emergence was closely connected to the Soviet occupation of northern Iran, however, and Soviet military and economic support was important to its survival. When Soviet forces withdrew in 1946, the republic lost its principal external protection. Iranian forces reoccupied Mahabad in December, and Qazi Muhammad was executed in March 1947. 

The most durable Kurdish political project began in Kurdistan after the 1991 Iraq Gulf War. Kurds rebelled against Saddam Hussein’s government, and the regime’s counteroffensive produced a mass exodus toward Turkey and Iran. The international response included Operation Provide Comfort, a security zone in northern Iraq, and restrictions on Iraqi military aircraft. These measures helped create an area beyond Baghdad’s effective control in which Kurdish political institutions could develop. 

Kurdish identity was made faint in public life, not always through spectacular massacre, but through the slow violence of non-recognition.

In May 1992, Kurds in Iraq held parliamentary elections and established a regional legislature and government. The political system was imperfect from the beginning. The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) dominated political life, and their rivalry developed into armed conflict in the mid-1990s. The two parties effectively governed separate zones until a U.S.-brokered agreement in 1998 helped end the fighting. Nevertheless, the Kurdish administration survived and gradually developed into a durable regional government. 

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 strengthened its legal position. Iraq’s 2005 Constitution formally recognized the Kurdistan Region and its existing authorities as a federal region. Kurdish self-government was therefore incorporated into the constitutional structure of the new Iraqi state rather than existing solely through foreign protection or Baghdad’s weakness. Over more than three decades of substantially autonomous Kurdish government in Kurdistan in Iraq, the Kurds have demonstrated the ability to administer territory, maintain public institutions, conduct elections, provide security, and negotiate with foreign governments over an extended period. 

Another Kurdish-led political system emerged during the Syrian civil war. Beginning in 2012, as Syrian government forces withdrew from much of the north, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed forces, the YPG and YPJ, established control over several predominantly Kurdish areas. These territories later developed into a broader autonomous administration encompassing Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, and other communities. The governing project, commonly associated with the Kurdish name Rojava, placed unusual emphasis on decentralized administration, political participation of women, and multiethnic representation. 

The rise of the Islamic State in 2014 gave Kurdish forces a much larger military role. ISIS captured Mosul, conquered large areas of Iraq and Syria, and carried out a genocidal campaign against the Yazidis of Sinjar. The Kurdish response was not uniform. Peshmerga units, the armed forces of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region, withdrew from much of Sinjar as ISIS advanced in August 2014, leaving Yazidi communities exposed to mass killing, enslavement, and forced displacement. Syrian Kurdish YPG fighters and forces associated with the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) subsequently helped establish an escape route from Mount Sinjar. Kurdish forces in both Iraq and Syria then became increasingly important in the wider campaign against ISIS. 

In Syria, the YPG and YPJ played a central role in the defense of Kobani, and the later Syrian Democratic Forces became the principal local partner of the U.S.-led coalition in much of the campaign against ISIS. In Iraq, Peshmerga forces fought alongside Iraqi and coalition forces across a long front. The war demonstrated that Kurdish institutions were capable of fielding organized military forces and cooperating extensively with Western governments even in the absence of an independent Kurdish state. 

That experience contributed to the Kurdistan Regional Government’s decision to hold an independence referendum on September 25, 2017. The ballot covered the recognized Kurdistan Region as well as disputed territories then under Kurdish control, including Kirkuk. According to the regional electoral commission, 92.73 percent of participating voters supported independence, with turnout above 70 percent. The size of the majority provided unusually clear evidence of support for statehood among those who voted, although the inclusion of disputed territories made the referendum more contentious. 

The referendum had little international backing. Iraq rejected it as unconstitutional. Turkey and Iran, both of which have large Kurdish populations of their own, strongly opposed it. The United States also opposed holding the vote at that time, arguing that it could destabilize Iraq and complicate the final stages of the war against ISIS. The United Nations likewise warned against a unilateral referendum. 

The stronger contemporary case rests on self-determination and demonstrated political capacity.

The consequences came quickly. In October 2017, Iraqi federal forces moved into Kirkuk and other disputed territories that Kurdish forces had controlled since the collapse of the Iraqi army in 2014. Divisions between the two main Iraqi Kurdish political parties, the KDP and PUK, contributed to the rapid Kurdish withdrawal. The referendum therefore produced an unusual result: an overwhelming vote for independence followed almost immediately by a reduction in Kurdish territorial and political leverage. 

These episodes form an important part of the modern case for Kurdish statehood. They show repeated attempts to establish political institutions across several parts of the Kurdish-populated Middle East, as well as sustained popular support for self-government. 

Kurdish-majority territory remains divided among four existing countries; many of the areas claimed by Kurdish nationalists contain substantial Arab, Turkmen, Assyrian, Armenian, Yazidi, and other populations. 

Institutions and Governing Capacity 

Past persecution supplies only part of the argument for Kurdish statehood. The stronger contemporary case rests on self-determination and demonstrated political capacity. The Kurdistan Region in Iraq in particular has functioned as a largely self-governing political entity since 1991 and as a constitutionally recognized federal region since 2005. Its institutions have serious deficiencies, but they have also endured for more than three decades. The 2017 referendum showed that independence has broad support among its electorate. Whether those facts justify changing Iraq’s borders is ultimately a political and moral judgment. 

The Kurds have repeatedly shown they can establish institutions when the geopolitical space allows. Sheikh Mahmud’s short-lived government around Sulaymaniyah combined personal, religious, tribal, and administrative authority, but remained narrow and fragile. The Republic of Mahabad went further, creating a government, political administration, Kurdish-language education, publishing, and organized national institutions before Iranian forces reoccupied the area. 

After 1991, the Kurdistan Region in Iraq developed the most durable example: parliamentary elections in 1992 produced an elected legislature, a regional government, and a judicial council; after 2005 these institutions, as well as universities, gained formal recognition within Iraq’s federal constitution. In Rojava (Syria), Kurdish-led authorities developed local councils, civilian administrations, security forces, and other institutions we commonly associate with modern governance, including gender parity and multiethnic participation. 

These relatively recent experiments with Kurdish statehood in Iraq and Syria do not prove that a future Kurdistan would necessarily be democratic, but they do show that Kurdish political life has already produced institutional experiments that can be evaluated, criticized, and improved rather than dismissed as purely hypothetical.

Humans love patterns. Trying to find patterns even where they don’t exist is our way of making sense of the world. Place a million parallel lines before a human observer and they shall immediately know it if one of them is askew. Likewise, that random act of violence must be a conspiracy, those two presidents must have some ontological connection to each other to explain so many coincidences (Lincoln and Kennedy), and that random array of bushes and shrubs must be a human.

Pareidolia is the phenomenon of noticing familiar shapes, patterns, and especially human faces where they don’t exist, the result of a busy human brain trying to make sense of an often-chaotic world, and especially in the case of seeing faces, to recognize signs of friendship or enmity in the external world. Bushes, shrubs, or even car headlights—these are all things we are indifferent to. But a fellow human? Their presence could save a life, or end it. Pareidolia is fascinating as it emerges from an evolutionary instinct that comes to us part and parcel of being social creatures. Our eyes see what the mind wants them to, and what it wants, or fears, is often another human being.

Pareidolia also has a higher chance of occurring when individuals are isolated, and thus under high amounts of stress.

Pareidolia also has a higher chance of occurring when individuals are isolated, and thus under high amounts of stress. Deprivation, whether of food, or oxygen, or even shelter, can exacerbate symptoms, as we are forced to look around more for external support, or to fear that which we cannot see. Interestingly, pareidolia is affected by cultural contexts. If one sees a monkey-like creature for example, whether it is naked or clothed, whether it can speak or not, whether it is malevolent or benevolent, is decided by the social-cultural environment in which the brain has been conditioned.

Another aspect to keep in mind is that instances of pareidolia are self-reinforcing. Once a creature gets spotted, the reports of its sighting get implanted in the minds of other observers, who may thus end up seeing the creature themselves, even if they didn’t believe in the initial reporting and dismissed it as a hoax. The mere implantation of an idea is incredibly impactful upon an impressionable, desperate, and lonesome individual, and has led to multiple cases of mass hysteria, or more technically, Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI). Pareidolia is one of the most fascinating cases of our minds misconstruing things because we always see creatures that are almost human enough, but lie right in the uncanny valley of uncomfortable recognition. Isolated from society, we wish to see figures similar to ours, but something always feels awry.

Bigfoot

This is why stories of the Yeti and Abominable Snowman, more commonly known in the west as Bigfoot, are so prevalent. The first sightings of these creatures always occur at the interstice of nature and civilization, as humans encroach more and more into Mother Earth’s domain, and in that case of isolation, imagine themselves to be not the only human-like thing around. In the case of Bigfoot, loggers in Northern California spotted a large ape-like creature in 1958 near a construction site, and to them it appeared similar to “man-in-the-wild” creatures sighted earlier in the 19th century. The Yeti has no single defining sighting, for it finds its origin in the mythos of glacier beings, or in the Gods of the Hunt in the pre-Buddhist Bön religion, which later got carried over to the Buddhist religion followed by the locals of the frigid, lonely high-altitude regions of Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. It is noteworthy that Yetis are spotted by mountaineers and explorers who are almost invariably either hungry, thirsty, lost, alone, or oxygen deprived.

We always see creatures that are almost human enough, but lie right in the uncanny valley of uncomfortable recognition.

Reinhold Messner, arguably the greatest mountaineer of all time (he summited Mt. Everest twice), is best known for attempting high altitude climbs in the Death Zone (above 8000 meters) without the use of supplementary oxygen. Famously, when he claimed to have seen a Yeti in 1986, or at least a creature that had hitherto remained undiscovered, many believed that oxygen deprivation had finally got to him, and had made him see things that didn’t exist. After 12 years of investigation Reinhold (with a clearer mind!) finally closed the case himself when he concluded that he had seen a bear.

Monkey-Man

This brings us to the 2001 “Monkey-Man” case of Delhi, which is particularly fascinating not only that it took place in an environment where humans existed in close proximity to monkeys—thus being close to actual human-like entities, unlike in California or Tibet—but also in close proximity to other humans. If isolation and deprivation add to the pareidolia process, and in combination with other factors, lead to cases of MPIs, what we observe in the Monkey-Man case isn’t a geographical or an environmental isolation, but one of a socioeconomic origin.

A majority of the sightings were reported by people from low-income households—people affected by shortages of food, electricity, and water. Not only this, but many victims were slum dwellers, whose very housings were not only cramped, but technically illegal. These factors played a huge role in deciding who Monkey-Man appeared to. Additionally, in an environment where monkeys are ubiquitous, and humans had to negotiate with them by feeding them, threatening them with violence, or simply ignoring them; in a system where Monkey deities had a powerful hold over the imagination, it is no wonder that the instances of a few actual monkey attacks played the role on the popular imagination that they did.

Poverty, heat, and darkness came together as sources of stress to cause the outbreak.

I recently sat down with sociologist and skeptic Benjamin Radford, who has nearly three decades of experience investigating unexplained mysteries, paranormal activities, and mass hysteria cases, as we revisited the Monkey-Man case more than two decades later. The following contains extracts from the interview interjected with my commentary:

The Monkey-Man Interview with Banjamin Radford

Singh: What fascinates me about this case is… were people seeing a creature with monkey-like features because they already saw actual monkeys around them?

Radford: It certainly makes sense that the embodiment, the characterization of the Monkey Man would be informed by the culture, right? The public image of it was informed by sensationalized media reporting. It happened in New Delhi, India. What might a figure that scares people and then is able to leap big distances look like? A monkey, right? 

There are monkeys everywhere. You have Hanuman, you’ve got monkeys around, you have all these cultural aspects to it. So, it makes sense. If it wasn’t the “Monkey-Man,” would it be the “Elephant Man”? No! Elephants are big, bulky, and they don’t jump, right? So, if you’re living in New Delhi at the time, and you’re trying to imagine what this barely visible attacker that sort of leaps out of from nowhere and is never actually caught, might look like, the obvious answer would be, it might look like a monkey. The sightings were always ambiguous, (in) low light, where the human eye fills in the details.

It seems that in this case, pareidolia worked in tandem with logical reasoning to shape the Monkey-Man’s image. The victims saw the figure they did as that would be the only explanation for the abilities it displayed. Most of these attributes might have been assigned by the victims retroactively, as they would be questioned about the Monkey-Man by the authorities. Close proximity with monkeys provided the basis for a gap in logical explanation that the victims’ minds worked to eliminate.

Singh: Most of the people who saw these were men, the primary breadwinners of families which were in the lower income spectrum of society.

Radford: So, you have the city, it’s a poor city, you have rolling blackouts, right? You have sweltering heat. People are sleeping on rooftops because they don’t have any air conditioning. The context is important here. So, you’re right. The Monkey-Man was not reported by Bollywood stars. The Monkey-Man was not reported by well-to-do people. 

This was an attacker or a predator that was seen to be stalking the working man, the working class, everyday people. And because of that, that’s who you would expect to have reported seeing it, right? That’s who’s interacting with or feeling threatened by it.

Different types of stress played a big role in the cases of hysteria that were observed in the Monkey-Man incidents. According to a study conducted by Satish K. Verma and D.K. Srivastava, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Sciences in 2003, most of the attacks happened in the early hours of the morning, between 12:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., when visibility was low. Only two out of 18 people had a family income of more than 50,000 rupees ($550) per annum. The majority of the cases had male victims, most of whom had to sleep outside houses in terraces due to a combination of the factors of excessive heat and limited space in the houses. It can also be assumed that as the primary breadwinners in a majority of the cases, the males of the household faced an additional financial pressure. Thus, poverty, heat, and darkness came together as sources of stress to cause the outbreak.

What is haunting about the Monkey-Man incident is the loneliness that the victims felt. Many of these victims, faced with the figure of the Monkey-Man, instead of fleeing, tried to grab it. Initially, I had hypothesised that the desire to grab Monkey-Man stemmed from the profound isolation that had defined the lives of the victims, i.e., to attempt to grab Monkey-Man was to attempt to make contact with it—contact with a human-like figure in an attempt to alleviate isolation. I had thought similarly of the injuries that some victims had inflicted upon themselves.

My theory, influenced by an article titled “The Monkeyman of Delhi” by reporter Aman Sethi, published in The Guernica in 2012, had been that the injuries had almost been a form of stress-relief for the victims, some of whom had injured themselves in their sleep. Radford describes the case perhaps more realistically:

Radford: (There were) people who were hoaxing and pranking. Now, the motivations for that are interesting. One of them is attention. Keep in mind that if you’re going to make up a Monkey-Man attack and going to say that you hurt your back or your elbow or your leg or you broke your foot, it’s more interesting and brave to say, “I fought. I tried to grab it,” right? “I was going to grab it and hold it down and tie it up and call the authorities,” because it makes them the hero of the story. You don’t want to say, “Yeah, something scared me and I ran and I hit the door and fell down the stairs.” You’re not the hero of that story then—you’re an idiot. There’s a motivation for people to build themselves up and say, “I was the hero. I tried to capture this evil, scary thing. And I didn’t get it, but boy, I was injured in the process.” So, I think that’s part of what was going on.

On the strange injuries caused by blunt objects, marked by unusual lacerations, with scratch marks also being found on the dorsal aspect of the forearm, while given the orientation of the two bodies with the Monkey-Man being grabbed by the victims, they should have been found on the ventral aspect:

Radford: It’s more likely, in my opinion, that people who faked their injuries were doing so for attention or sympathy or for notoriety. You’re being interviewed on the TV news that night, or whatever else, or you’re quoted in the newspaper. So, I think, most people who saw the Monkey-Man were perfectly normal. I think the motivation was attention and sympathy and, being part of a national story—an international story. So, if you’re a day labourer, you work in a factory, you sell, you know, trinkets on the sidewalk, whatever it is you do. Or you work in the fields and all of a sudden there’s this national story that everyone’s talking about. And you’re like, “Hey, I was, I’m part of this story.”

So, I don’t think most of them were relieving stress. This actually gets into other injuries that have no clear origin. There are people who say that aliens abducted them, they took them up in a spaceship, and they did experiments on them. So, they would have like an injury, or a scar somewhere, and they’d say, “I don’t know why I got this.” In our everyday lives, people can hurt themselves. Without noticing it, you step on something, you brush against something, you get a little wound, just something small. It could happen at night if you’re sleepwalking, in bed, whatever else. And so, it’s not uncommon for people to have small, unnoticed injuries that they later attribute to something extraordinary, such as an alien or a phantom attacker or Monkey-Man.

Fittingly enough, the conclusions the victims made about the injuries converge with what this report began with; the tendency for humans to find patterns where chaos exists. The Monkey-Man’s nocturnality coupled with the stress of daily life for these people led to them believing that injuries which might have occurred accidentally, were in fact deliberately caused by an external and malevolent source. The motivations for the encounters with Monkey-Man are, as Radford describes, still due to societal neglect and isolation, just not in the manner I had earlier conceived.

The Monkey-Man case highlights intractable human isolation, even while being contained within a crowded, concrete jungle.

The conscious need for attention, to be the hero of a story, to be the centre of attention is not only more probable than the unconscious, it is almost a masochistic desire to touch Monkey-Man and cause injuries to the self; perhaps it is an even sharper manifestation of the socioeconomic conditions and isolation implicit here. Hundreds of people, neglected by the society around them, suffering in the horrible summer heat of Delhi, living in “jhuggi-jhopris” at a constant threat of getting demolished, and working despite perjury being an actual condition of life, saw the Monkey-Man incident as an opportunity to finally be heard, to be part of something bigger than the misery of their lives.

The Monkey-Man case highlights intractable human isolation, even while being contained within a crowded, concrete jungle—paradoxically, an isolation that emerges from being trapped within such an environment. The cases of the manifestation of the Monkey-Man are not to be romanticized, instead they should be studied as what they are—consequences of the failure of a society to provide safety nets for the people belonging to its lowest strata; the yearning of an isolated, neglected section of the populace to feel some sort of comfort in social interaction.

Conclusion

I had initially planned on getting interviews from people who had actually seen Monkey-Man. Though overly optimistic, I still set out one dusty evening to Krishna Nagar in East Delhi, which had been the location for a many of the reports. I’m not sure what conception I had had in my mind regarding the neighbourhood, but I was quite surprised by it. Shops lined the streets, there were parks full of trees and other green areas. It looked like any other neighbourhood in Delhi! I couldn’t even find many monkeys near the crowded roads.

Further, to my disappointment, not only did I not find any people with first-hand accounts of the case, but I did not find anyone who had even heard of Monkey-Man. The case was almost a quarter of a century old. With time, it seems people have moved on. MPI cases often fade as such. As Benjamin Radford recounted about his investigation of the Chupacabra in Puerto Rico:

Radford: I go into a store in San Juan, the capital, and there’s all these t-shirts. And I asked this guy behind the counter, I was like, “Hey, do you have anything with the Chupacabra?” And I realized this kid’s like 20, and was like two when the chupacabra was a thing.

I now understand, having spoken to Mr. Radford, that the fact that people don’t even remember Monkey-Man is welcome evidence of the argument I’ve been making throughout this essay, namely that it is evidence of the isolation that tormented the victims having been greatly allayed.

Krishna Nagar, along with East Delhi as a whole, has seen significant economic development since 2001. People don’t remember Monkey-Man because their reality isn’t the same as it was. Socioeconomic isolation isn’t nearly as rampant, people now feel that there are more people around them, and there are no monkeys around in Krishna Nagar anymore—real or imaginary.

This is a response to Klaus Ziegler’s critique of my moral case for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I want to thank Klaus Ziegler for taking the time to read and respond to my essay, “The Moral Case for Dropping the Atomic Bombs.” He challenges my three propositions that (1) the atomic bombings contributed to Japan’s surrender, (2) without them substantially more people would likely have died, (3) therefore, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally justified.

Despite Klaus’s thoughtful critique that reveals the many challenging issues involved in the U.S. government’s decision to drop the two atomic bombs on Japan, I stand by these propositions. In fact, since writing that analysis I have read James M. Scott’s fabulous new book, Empire of Ashes: Truman, Hirohito, and the Descent Into Total War, which not only reinforces my conclusions but makes it abundantly clear that President Truman’s decision to use this new weapon to end the war was absolutely the right one. Through 400 pages of gripping narrative grounded in nearly 400 references to primary and secondary sources, Scott concludes, and I agree, with Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s assessment in Harper’s Magazine in 1947 that this was “the least abhorrent choice” among those on the table considered by the administration:

The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids, and the strangling blockade. It ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies.

Japan’s Navy Minister Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai agreed:

The atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, gifts from the gods.

Of course, Stimson’s “least abhorrent choice” must always be remembered for what it was by comparison, as Scott concludes his great work:

For the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic attacks were anything but a gift. The horror that befell those cities was unimaginable. Equally so was the devastating impact the attacks had on hundreds of thousands of lives, not only those killed but the survivors who battled everything from radiation sickness and painful keloids to the loss of loved ones and homes.

Why didn’t Japan end the carnage earlier, say in 1944 when it was unambiguously obvious they were going to lose the war, or even in 1943 after suffering major battle losses that made it clear the Americans were not going to let Japan have all that it had captured in the way of territories in Indonesia and the Pacific that would fuel their militarism (which is what the nation’s militarists in power hoped would happen after the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor)?

So committed were they to leading Japan into a final Götterdämmerung of death and destruction that they threatened to assassinate anyone who stood in their way…

As Scott reveals in excruciating detail down to the minutes and hours, the six men who ran the country (over which Emperor Hirohito had next to no control), were in unison that the army and the navy would fight to the bitter end, especially after the Potsdam Declaration President Truman signed insisting on unconditional surrender. So committed were they to leading Japan into a final Götterdämmerung of death and destruction that they threatened to assassinate anyone who stood in their way—including Pearl Harbor mastermind Isoroku Yamamoto, fellow generals who slept with pistols under their pillows, and even the Emperor himself.

After turning-point American victories such as at Midway, and especially after the many blood-soaked island-hopping battles in the Solomon Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Mariana Islands, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, all won by America’s ever-growing military production capacity, one would think even military-hardened veterans in Japan would have finally given up, especially when they could see all around them their starving citizens who, as one recalled after the 1945 Tokyo bombing, lived like stray dogs in what remained of Japan’s bombed-out cities.

But no! Even after Curtis LeMay’s B-29 bombers reduced Tokyo to rubble and killed over 100,000 Japanese citizens in one night, the Truman administration didn’t hear a peep from the Japanese government, and so America marched on to complete the Manhattan Project, test the bomb at Trinity in New Mexico on July 16, and ship two bombs to Tinian and prepare them for launch. And still not a word of surrender emerged.

August 6. Hiroshima. 90,000–166,000 dead. Silence.
August 7. Nothing.
August 8. The Soviet Union declaration of war against Japan. Dial tone.
August 9. Nagasaki. 60,000–80,000 dead. All quiet on the Western Front.

Finally, the Big Six Japanese leaders who held the fate of the entire nation in their hands, met the afternoon of August 9 to discuss what to do next. “The ensuing discussion revealed that the six leaders all agreed that Japan’s imperial structure must be preserved,” Scott writes, adding “but opinions beyond that proved sharply divided.”

Three favored accepting the Potsdam Declaration of unconditional surrender as long as they could retain the monarchy in the form of Emperor Hirohito (Foreign Minister Togo, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, and Navy Minister Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai), whereas the other three “all imbued with the samurai ethos, wanted to add three additional conditions,” which included “limiting the occupation of the homelands, allowing officers to demobilize their own troops, and permitting Japan to oversee the trials of any suspected war criminals” (War Minister General Korechika Anami, Army Chief of Staff General Yoshijro Umezu, and Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Soemu Toyoda). 

When Togo told the three holdouts that this was never going to happen, Umezu boasted that Japan was not defeated because the main islands had not been invaded, adding: 

If we are lucky, we will be able to repulse the invaders before they land. At any rate, I can say with assurance that we will be able to destroy the major part of an invading army, that is, we will be able to inflict extremely heavy damage on the enemy.

Although Yonai growled “the war is lost,” Anami countered that it was “far too early to say that the war is lost,” adding “we must fight the war through to the end no matter how great the odds against us!” Umezu, expressing the sunk-cost fallacy (reluctance to abandon a heavily-invested in strategy), opined that “unconditional surrender now would only dishonor the heroic war dead.”

Instead of focusing on what America did to end the war, perhaps more attention should be paid to considering why Japan let it go on for so long…

Finally, at 2:20 a.m. the next morning, the Big Six turned to Emperor Hirohito to break the 3-3 split, who at long last found his spine and moral compass to override the military holdouts, rose to his feet and declared:

I have given serious thought to the situation prevailing at home and abroad and have concluded that continuing the war can only mean destruction for the nation and a prolongation of bloodshed and cruelty in the world. I cannot bear to see my innocent people suffer any longer. Ending the war is the only way to restore world peace and to relieve the nation from the terrible distress with which it is burdened.

On August 15, 1945, Hirohito delivered his “Jewel Voice Broadcast” to the citizens of Japan, and while never using the word “surrender” made it clear what led to his decision:

The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are we to save the millions of our subjects or to atone ourselves before the hallowed spirits of our imperial ancestors? This is the reason why we have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.

A final point (and counterfactual): there are between 250,000 and one million American families who did not receive letters from their government explaining that their sons had died in the final battle for Japan. Imagine how those families would have responded to President Truman if they learned that we had a weapon that could end the war overnight?

The historical record is now clear: both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end the killing. It sounds absurd—kill some now to prevent even more being killed later—but this is not a social psychologist’s laboratory in moral reasoning but a tragic ending to an even more tragic war begun by the Japanese, who could have surrendered unconditionally any time before August and saved hundreds of thousands or even more of their citizens. Instead of focusing on what America did to end the war, perhaps more attention should be paid to considering why Japan let it go on for so long in the teeth of overwhelming evidence that they could only lose.

This is a critique of Michael Shermer’s moral case for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Michael Shermer has spent much of his career teaching others how not to fool themselves. As the founder and editor-in-chief of Skeptic, he has made a profession of demanding evidence, distinguishing what is known from what is inferred, warning against confirmation bias, and urging people to apply the same standards to their own beliefs as to others’ beliefs.

There is, however, one superstition before which even professional skeptics can be tempted to kneel: the moral innocence of their own country. In his recent essay, “The Moral Case for Dropping the Atomic Bombs,” Shermer revives one of the most consoling tenets of the American civic catechism: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, dreadful as they were, saved “very probably millions of lives, both Japanese and American,” because the alternative was an invasion of Japan.

It is an efficient doctrine. It explains horror, absolves those responsible, and turns victims into instruments of a higher providence. The civilians who died are weighed against the soldiers and civilians who might otherwise have perished. History is considerably less elegant. 

Three propositions must be distinguished. First, the atomic bombings contributed to Japan’s surrender. Second, without them, substantially more people would likely have died. Third, therefore, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally justified. 

These propositions are not equivalent: Causal efficacy is not counterfactual necessity, and neither alone establishes moral permissibility. 

The Arithmetic of the Unborn Dead 

Shermer writes that Truman’s advisers estimated that an invasion could cost between 250,000 and 1,000,000 American lives. The historical record, however, is far less settled. 

At the White House meeting on June 18, 1945, the Joint Chiefs explicitly stated that the Pacific experience was too diverse to justify a numerical estimate for the Kyushu invasion. The memorandum nevertheless provided comparisons: Luzon had cost about 31,000 American casualties—killed, wounded, and missing—and it stated that the first thirty days on Kyushu might not exceed that price. Admiral King suggested that a realistic figure would fall between those for Luzon and Okinawa. The same meeting also recorded General Marshall’s view that Soviet entry might prove decisive in pushing Japan toward capitulation.¹

Hypothetical deaths do not have the evidentiary status of observed deaths. 

But casualties are not deaths, and wounded and missing soldiers cannot be quietly counted as “lives lost” and then compared with the dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More fundamentally, nobody knows how many people would have died in an invasion that never happened. That does not make counterfactual reasoning illegitimate; every serious evaluation of wartime decisions requires it. But hypothetical deaths do not have the evidentiary status of observed deaths. 

Shermer is entitled to argue that an invasion was probable and would have been catastrophic. What he cannot do without further argument is treat a disputed projection of an unrealized future as though its victims had already been counted. 

Arithmetic is not morality. 

Even if the casualty estimates were certain, a separate moral difficulty would remain. Imagine a terrorist group holding fifty children hostage in a kindergarten. Unless stopped, the terrorists will detonate a device inside a military installation, killing one thousand soldiers. The government cannot locate the device, but it can destroy the school before the signal is sent. The attack will certainly kill the fifty children but save the thousand soldiers. 

Would we therefore say that bombing the kindergarten is justified because the arithmetic saves 950 lives? The arithmetic is impeccable, but the moral conclusion does not follow. 

The analogy is deliberately schematic. Hiroshima was not a kindergarten, and wartime cities contain military, industrial, and civilian functions simultaneously. The thought experiment isolates a narrower question: whether the deliberate destruction of civilians can become morally permissible merely because it is expected to reduce a larger number of deaths elsewhere. 

The point is not that every soldier voluntarily accepts the risks of war; many are conscripts. The deeper distinction is normative. Combatants and civilians occupy distinct roles in armed conflict. If civilian destruction becomes a means of coercion rather than an incidental consequence of an attack on a military objective, arithmetic alone cannot settle its permissibility. Even perfect arithmetic would not settle whether a state may intentionally destroy an inhabited city in order to reduce expected military losses. 

Shermer broadens the argument by claiming that the bombings probably saved Japanese lives as well. That makes the calculus less nationalist but not philosophically simpler. It now depends on a demanding consequentialist principle: deliberately exposing a smaller civilian population to destruction may be permissible whenever doing so is expected to prevent a larger number of deaths later. 

A consequentialist may defend that principle, but it must be defended as a moral principle. It cannot be smuggled into the argument as though it were merely arithmetic. 

The counterfactual must work both ways. 

There is also an epistemic asymmetry in the standard defense. The preferred counterfactual runs like this: without the bombs, the United States would have invaded Japan; the invasion would have been catastrophic; therefore, the bombs saved enormous numbers of lives. 

But why must the next event in the unrealized history be an American invasion? 

At the aforementioned June 18 meeting, Marshall described Soviet entry as potentially decisive. On August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and launched an offensive against Japanese forces in Manchuria, destroying Japan’s remaining hope that Moscow might mediate an end to the war. 

If a moral principle is genuine, the nationality of the actor cannot alter it. 

So, consider another possible history: Hiroshima is bombed on August 6, but Nagasaki is not destroyed three days later. Washington waits while Tokyo confronts Hiroshima’s atomic destruction and the Soviet entry into the war, almost simultaneously. Perhaps Japan still refuses to surrender. An invasion may eventually become necessary. But perhaps it does not. 

Shermer cannot dismiss that possibility merely because it is speculative. His million saved lives are speculative too. Once counterfactual history is admitted, competing counterfactuals must be admitted as well. Alternatives were not guaranteed to work; nothing in war is certain. But the real question is whether their expected consequences were sufficiently worse, and the evidence sufficiently strong, to justify the destruction of inhabited cities. 

Hiroshima is not Nagasaki. 

Nagasaki makes this problem particularly difficult. Hiroshima was destroyed on August 6. The Soviet Union entered the war against Japan on August 8. Nagasaki was destroyed on August 9. Japan had scarcely begun to absorb the first catastrophe when the strategic situation shifted again. 

The atomic attack order issued in late July authorized the first attack to be conducted after August 3. It also provided that additional bombs were to be used against the listed targets as they became available.² Thus, Nagasaki was not preceded by a wholly new presidential decision following an extended assessment of Hiroshima’s effects. This is worth noting because Hiroshima and Nagasaki need not stand or fall together morally.

Even if one granted, solely for the sake of argument, that Hiroshima was necessary, Nagasaki would still require its own justification. Only one day after the Soviet entry and three days after Hiroshima, was it already necessary to destroy another inhabited city? 

Remove the flag. 

A cleaner test is available: Remove the American flag. Suppose Stalin’s scientists had developed a weapon capable of burning a city in a single attack during the final campaign against Germany. Soviet generals estimate that destroying two German cities would kill 200,000 civilians but save 500,000 Soviet soldiers and perhaps another million Germans who would otherwise die in a prolonged conquest. 

Skepticism that stops at the border of national innocence has ceased, at precisely the moment it is most needed in order to be skepticism.

According to the arithmetic of the bargain, Stalin has not killed 200,000 civilians. He has saved 1.3 million lives. Would we accept the calculation? Would we regard the deaths of German children as a necessary sacrifice if it meant saving more lives? Would we approve choosing an inhabited city over an empty demonstration site because civilian destruction would exert greater pressure on Berlin? 

Changing the perpetrator is a test of universality. If a moral principle is genuine, the nationality of the actor cannot alter it. 

Civilians and Psychological Effect 

At the May 31 meeting of the American Interim Committee, participants sought the “greatest psychological effect.” They described the most desirable target as a vital war plant employing many workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.³ A separate group of Manhattan Project scientists, in the Franck Report, urged a demonstration of the bomb in a desert or barren area rather than a surprise attack on Japan.⁴

While this does not prove that American policymakers desired civilian deaths as an end in themselves, the destruction of an inhabited city was considered to hold strategic value, in part because of the psychological effect it was expected to have. 

Civilian suffering was therefore not wholly incidental to the coercive mechanism if the devastation of a city was valuable partly because it shocked a government and its population into surrender. In that case, civilians were no longer merely accidental bystanders to the strategy, instead, they had become part of the strategy. 

Shermer also argues that without atomic bombing, Curtis LeMay’s B-29s might have continued destroying Japanese cities, with equal or greater loss of life. Perhaps so. But if the alternatives had become “kill civilians this way” or “kill more civilians another way,” that tells us something horrifying about the range of methods already normalized. It does not by itself confer moral legitimacy on either. 

More Than Two Variables 

American officials were considering more possible courses of action: blockade and conventional bombing, Soviet entry, possible modification of surrender terms regarding the Emperor, and a demonstration of the atomic weapon. The Franck Report is direct evidence that the demonstration option was proposed. These alternatives may have failed. Their existence nevertheless demonstrates that the retrospective perceived binary of choice was artificial. 

Geopolitics also played a role. Before Trinity, American leaders sought Soviet assistance against Japan; the minutes taken on June 18 make that explicit. After the successful test, Stimson’s diary records discussions about whether Soviet entry was still necessary and notes Truman’s increased confidence after receiving the detailed report from Trinity.⁵ After Japan’s surrender, Stalin sought a Soviet role in the surrender and occupation of northern Hokkaido; Truman rejected the proposal.⁶

None of this proves the crude thesis that Hiroshima was bombed to frighten Stalin. The evidence does not justify that certainty. It establishes something more modest and more defensible: American decision-making was based on much more than only the two variables of Japanese deaths and American deaths. Soviet power, occupation, territory, and the emerging postwar balance also belonged to the strategic environment. 

Once that is admitted, the immaculate retrospective equation—destroy two cities now or sacrifice vastly more soldiers later—begins to look less like history than moral simplification. 

Victory and Moral Vocabulary 

Shermer is probably right that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not usefully described as genocide. Truman did not seek the extermination of the Japanese people. But not every atrocity is genocide, and rejecting that category does not settle the larger moral question. 

The harder issue is whether a state may intentionally destroy an inhabited city, knowing that enormous numbers of civilians will die, when the destruction is expected to coerce an enemy government into changing its behavior. 

Power changes moral vocabulary more easily than it changes moral character. 

Saint Augustine understood the privilege of power long ago. In The City of God, a pirate tells Alexander the Great that they do essentially the same thing; the difference is that one commands a small vessel and is called a robber, while the other commands a great fleet and is called an emperor.⁷ Power changes moral vocabulary more easily than it changes moral character. 

Robert McNamara made a related point in Errol Morris’s film The Fog of War. Recalling Curtis LeMay’s remark that they might have been prosecuted as war criminals had the United States lost, McNamara agreed and asked, what makes an act immoral if one loses but not immoral if one wins?⁸

Victory may confer immunity. It may determine who conducts the trials, issues the communiqués, builds the monuments, and writes the schoolbooks. It cannot alter the moral character of an act. 

The Skeptic’s Test 

And this brings us back to skepticism. 

Shermer’s argument uses counterfactuals. He should. He also weighs consequences, and consequences matter. American leaders faced an appalling decision after years of extraordinary brutality and with incomplete information. 

The problem with Shermer’s argument is the asymmetry. Actual civilians are weighed against hypothetical victims drawn from a disputed future. One counterfactual—catastrophic invasion—is granted enormous evidentiary weight, while competing alternatives are dismissed as speculation. A moral conclusion is allowed to emerge from aggregate numbers before the independent problem of civilian immunity has been resolved. And a strategic world involving Soviet entry, surrender terms, blockade, demonstration, occupation, and geopolitics is compressed into a binary: bomb now or lose vastly more lives later. 

That is a great deal of certainty to extract from an uncertain history and there is something almost theological about the structure: Terrible suffering occurred, yet it served a higher purpose. Innocent people died, but a greater evil was averted. The victims did not die in vain, and out of evil came a greater good. 

Lourdes is easy. Astrology is easy. Ghosts, creationism, telepathy, and alien abductions are easy. The serious test of skepticism begins when the same discipline threatens a belief tied to one’s nation, political tribe, or sense of historical innocence. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are one such test. Skepticism that stops at the border of national innocence has ceased, at precisely the moment it is most needed in order to be skepticism.

Read Michael Shermer’s response to this article.

Through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA),¹ the U.S. Department of the Interior’ National Park Service at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado plans to repatriate bags of human feces to tribes for reburial.

NAGPRA was passed in 1990 to assist federally recognized modern tribes in claiming affiliated human remains, funerary objects, sacred entities, and materials of cultural patrimony from federally funded institutes, such as museums, national parks, and universities. Human remains and these specific types of artifacts insufficiently linked to a modern tribe through a preponderance of evidence, which included historic documents, biological evidence like DNA, archaeological data, geographic links, and oral histories, were to remain at the institutes for further research and exhibition. 

Artifacts and other materials found at sites that were not funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony, regardless of the links to modern tribes, were to remain in institutions for research and exhibition. The definitions for these categories are clear. Funerary objects are “objects that, as a part of the death rite or ceremony of a culture, are reasonably believed to have been placed with individual human remains either at the time of death or later.”² Thus, for an item to be a funerary object, the object had to be placed in the grave intentionally, for an individual deceased person. 

Since 2024, regulatory changes have required institutions to consult with tribes and to accept traditional indigenous knowledge without question, prior to displaying or researching any materials found at any archaeological site that may have been at one time occupied by indigenous peoples.³

The consultation allows tribal members to name what is a funerary object, what is a sacred object, and what is an object of cultural patrimony. With a consultation first strategy, everything at a site that cannot easily be placed into one of the other two categories (i.e., sacred object or object of cultural patrimony) is being listed as a funerary object by tribal knowledge keepers. 

Artifacts and other materials found at sites that were not funerary objects, sacred objects or objects of cultural patrimony, regardless of the links to modern tribes, were to remain in institutions for research and exhibition.

Prior to 2024, these decisions were made by archaeologists based on the archaeological record, historic documentation, and ethnographic data. Then, tribes were consulted about repatriation of the materials determined to fit into these categories. 

The consultation first system has led to a list of absurdities. The latest of which include a notice of inventory completion from Colorado that identifies “bags of human feces” as “funerary objects” and, thus, subject to repatriation.⁴ From Mesa Verde National Park, Montezuma County, Colorado: 

At site 5MV640 (Spruce Tree House) “[t]he 148 associated funerary objects are 91 human-chewed fiber quids, one bag of human feces, and 56 animal bones.”
At site 5MV650 (Square Tower House) “one bag of human feces” was listed as a funerary object.
At site 5MV1200 (Long House) “46 lots of human feces” were listed as funerary objects. 
At site 5MV1452 (Badger House) “one bag human feces” was listed as a funerary object. 

There are other sites with feces listed as funerary objects. From the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, “one lot of feces” from an unknown species of animal is listed as funerary objects.⁵ The College of Marin in Kentfield, California has listed “three pieces of feces” as funerary objects.⁶ And, since the 2024 regulatory changes, fifteen sites list “coprolites”, which is the term for fossilized feces, as funerary objects, including a swamp site in Florida that includes alligator feces as funerary objects.⁷

Most recently, two notices from California’s State Office of the Bureau of Land Management in Sacramento has listed animal feces (which is referred to as scat in the notices) as funerary objects. In Lassen County, California, associated funerary included “skat” [sic].⁸ In Washoe County, Nevada “37 lots of associated funerary belongings include lithic flakes, stone tools, charcoal fragments, faunal bone, and scat. The entire collection is considered associated funerary belongings.”⁹

Even before 2024, however, some museums, universities, and government institutes were consulting with tribes and going beyond compliance with NAGPRA rules, which resulted in the loss of materials never meant for inclusion in the repatriation process. This also likely lowered the resistance to the regulatory changes in 2024. For instance, in 2007, the Burke Museum at University of Washington in Seattle, Washington listed “2 lots of rodent feces” as funerary objects.¹⁰ From the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, a 2021 correction likely resulting from ongoing consultation with tribes, raised the number of funerary objects from “50 associated funerary objects to 83 lots of funerary objects” and within those, “one lot of coprolites” were included.¹¹

Our ability to truly understand the past–and, therefore, our shared humanity–will be buried.

One may wonder whether Native Americans really did intentionally bury their ancestors with feces. Are feces funerary objects? No archaeological evidence of this practice exists in the Americas. There are many articles on coprolites, paleofeces, and feces in the archaeological literature, but none of them point to evidence that feces were funerary objects in the Americas. 

One possibility is that the feces were collected at a different part of the site than the burials; trash heaps are often excavated. Another possibility is that human remains were treated as waste in some cultures. When human remains are commingled with trash and feces, this is actually evidence that the human bodies were also considered waste. This is often the case where cannibalism has taken place. Evidence of cannibalism and evidence of treating human remains as waste have been found in Mesa Verde National Park, where the bags of human feces mentioned above originated from. According to Katherine Brooks, in 50 events that Shaped American Indian History: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic: 

A large number of the middens [i.e., trash pits] excavated were identified at the base of the cliff where the residents of the cliff dwellings disposed of their refuse. Trash heaps offer insight into the foods that were eaten, the products that were used, the animals that were hunted and consumed, and even the disposal of the dead. Human remains were frequently intermixed with garbage in the trash pits.¹²

In a 1996 review of the materials held by National Park Service’s Western Archeological and Conservation Center, James Dildine wrote about the vast number of artifacts and other materials at sites which would not be subject to NAGPRA because they were not funerary objects, objects of cultural patrimony or sacred objects. He wrote that this should provide some comfort to archaeologists who are worried that NAGPRA would greatly hinder archaeological research. He wrote: 

Many of the items cataloged in relationship to burials are organic materials not intentionally placed there as part of the burial rites, but useful in making archeological determination. These “fill” items include rodent feces, unworked rock and unworked fiber.¹³

Dildine rhetorically asked: “are mice feces to be considered grave goods, especially considering they probably occur in burials as a result of scavenging for human remains?” Unfortunately, he was wrong; even rodent feces are being repatriated as funerary objects. 

Feces are useful research materials because they may contain evidence of parasites¹⁴ and past meals,¹⁵ can be used for radiocarbon dating,¹⁶ and can even be used to obtain DNA.¹⁷ When human remains are reburied, the hope for some archaeologists may have been to continue research using feces and other waste materials. Unfortunately, these materials are being taken away from researchers too, perhaps because of the truths they reveal about the past. 

The field will be lost to activists–if it has not already been lost. Narratives about America’s past will be controlled by those with no interest in the truth. 

The reasons given by tribal consultants for repatriation of feces, especially animal feces, are perhaps unknowable because tribal consultants need not provide a reason for defining materials as funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony. NAGPRA regulations, going back as far as 1995 and strengthened in 2024, advise officials involved in repatriation efforts that since sensitive cultural information is not excluded from freedom of information requests, “the best way to prevent sensitive information from being released is to not write it down in the first place.”¹⁸ They also recommend that tribes may wish to prohibit audio or video recording of consultations. Yet, in the past, there have been actions to deny evidence of cannibalism.¹⁹

Regardless of the reason for the increase in repatriation of feces, there’s clear evidence that feces–whether human or other species–are not funerary objects. By accepting the repatriation and reburial of feces, archaeologists are opening the door to even more absurd repatriations. The field will be lost to activists–if it has not already been lost. Narratives about America’s past will be controlled by those with no interest in the truth.

When all the collections–from human remains to feces–are reburied, our ability to truly understand the past–and, therefore, our shared humanity–will be buried too.

I was a chiropractor between 1983 and 2010. I started at Palmer College of Chiropractic-West (PCCW) just as Bill Meeker, DC, Joe Keating, PhD, and Cynthia Dutro, DC, were ready to take chiropractic research seriously. They believed rigorous evidence could validate chiropractic and secure its place in mainstream health care. I was serious enough to write PCCW’s president, John Miller, DC, before enrolling, to gauge his commitment to research. He wrote back that research was essential for the profession to “survive and thrive.”

Many believed the profession would be remade by evidence, moved at last beyond its fallacious nineteenth-century vitalism. Today their success is, at best, equivocal. The most striking thing is that more than a decade of sustained and rigorous chiropractic research across North America, Europe, and Australia has largely vanished from professional memory. Students, practitioners, and researchers may now be retracing our ground, thinking the questions were never asked or never answered. And since the answers we uncovered were not what chiropractors wanted to hear, results were tossed into the elastic biopsychosocial and “more research is needed” bins.

Until then, chiropractic research had chased biomechanics and speculative models of how chiropractic worked—before establishing that it worked at all.

My entry into chiropractic owed less to ideology than to gravity. While visiting the Kentucky farm of a lifelong friend, I fell out of a tree. A few days later I developed an acute torticollis that made turning my head a serious negotiation, and someone at work recommended their chiropractor.

Improvement after treatment is not always improvement caused by treatment, since much of it arrives with time and attention. 

For the previous few years, I had lived with chronic throat-clearing and the sensation of something lodged deep in my airway. About three months into treatment, those symptoms and much of my asthma faded. The causal inference—the adjustments had cured me—is the one I would spend a career learning to question: improvement after treatment is not always improvement caused by treatment, since much of it arrives with time and attention.

Chiropractic Research 

The first thing I discovered at Palmer West was that chiropractic was not one profession but many: true believers, entrepreneurs, technicians, philosophers, clinicians, and a small but growing number of reformers who believed its future was science. Many of us believed that we might treat conditions like back pain better and safer than drugs or surgery. The curriculum was rigorous, but beneath it a larger argument was taking shape. What, exactly, was chiropractic, and what would happen if its claims were subjected to serious scrutiny?

Despite its modest resources and small size, PCCW became one of the first major centers of chiropractic research. The timing was good because the Wilk antitrust case against the American Medical Association was still unfolding. Judge Susan Getzendanner would ultimately rule, in 1987, that organized medicine had unlawfully restrained competition by attempting to isolate chiropractic. While she did not “declare” chiropractic scientifically valid, her ruling removed the legal barriers that had prevented the profession from competing on equal footing.

The Wilk ruling opened the door to legal collaboration between chiropractors and physicians, and other openings followed over the next several years. The Office of Alternative Medicine, funded by Congress in 1991 and staffed the following year, signaled that complementary therapies had become legitimate subjects for federally funded scientific investigation. By the mid-1990s, Andrew Weil and the University of Arizona were giving academic credibility to a new field of integrative medicine. Meanwhile, chiropractic colleges and organizations such as FCER were building research programs unlike anything the profession had previously attempted.

The doors to medical acceptance were opening. Research funding was increasing. If chiropractic possessed a distinctive clinical contribution, we finally had both the opportunity—and no longer the “chiropractic as victim” excuse—to demonstrate it. For the first time, failure to answer that question could no longer be blamed on exclusion from the scientific community.

Integrative Medicine 

It is difficult now to convey how electric alternative medicine felt in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Academic medical centers were beginning to acknowledge what patients had already decided for themselves: chiropractors, acupuncturists, massage therapists, nutritionists, meditation teachers, and other unconventional practitioners had become part of American health care whether universities approved or not. 

Then David Eisenberg and colleagues published their landmark study documenting the enormous use of unconventional therapies by Americans, often without informing their physicians.¹ The paper landed like a small earthquake. Alternative medicine ceased to be a fringe curiosity and became a public-health phenomenon. The professional opportunities followed quickly. 

Shortly after I arrived, the Foundation for Chiropractic Education and Research funded what was then the largest chiropractic research grant ever awarded to our team at PCCW: a $350,000 trial comparing chiropractic care, physical therapy, and standard medical management for low back pain. I was the research statistician: I wrote the power calculations and the analysis plan. The profession would finally be judged by the same standards as the rest of health care!

As I pushed for more research, word of my interests eventually reached Gene Carragee at Stanford University. Carragee—who served in the U.S. Army as a battalion and command surgeon and forward surgical team commander, and was later editor-in-chief of The Spine Journal—invited me to lunch at Stanford’s Faculty Club. I remember realizing almost immediately that my ambition had outrun my preparation.

A literature that will not resolve after enough well-powered attempts is not unfinished. It is null.

What surprised me was the generosity. Carragee encouraged me to send manuscripts before submission so he could strengthen them, later brought me into Stanford’s spinal research group and its conferences, and introduced me to residents and faculty. I had been handed a rare view of how major clinical research programs worked. My heart wanted it; my head was still occupied with chiropractic and its future.

The Stanford connections led to others. I was assigned to provide chiropractic students with medical rotations at PCCW. At the time, there were three general approaches to intractable back pain: anesthesiologists, orthopedists, and neurologists. Today, I would add physiatry.

I brought students on clinical rounds to observe intradiscal electrothermal therapy (IDET). I placed some in a San Francisco workers’ rehabilitation clinic. Some watched the action at Stanford’s Emergency Department. I was in discussion for several months about getting chiropractors certified in emergency medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, and physiatry training at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF). The former failed for liability reasons and the latter failed for the requirement that chiropractors would become licensed as phlebotomists, which chiropractic leadership deemed a bridge too far—too medical.

I became the first chiropractor appointed to Andrew Weil’s Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. I developed and taught the program’s manual medicine curriculum; a course later delivered to physicians internationally. I also taught continuing medical education programs at El Camino Hospital, participated in research meetings at the Arizona Cancer Center, and wrote a two-part series on chiropractic for the Johns Hopkins Integrative Medicine newsletter.

In 1986 I visited Tyringham, an old English estate converted into an ambitious integrative health center backed by Sir Maurice Laing. The project brought physicians and complementary practitioners together to explore whether integrated care could improve patient outcomes. While in the UK, I proposed a program-evaluation approach to validating therapies to a group convened under the Prince of Wales’s interest in complementary medicine. I invited myself in through persistent phone calls to Mr. Colin Dove, Head of the British School of Osteopathy. As a follow-up, Mr. Dove said the committee ignored my suggestions because I was not on the agenda.

In all this, chiropractic leadership dug in their heels and showed no interest. Thus, the problem was never that chiropractic lacked opportunities. Every open door needed someone with the authority and resources to hold it open—to turn a visiting arrangement into a post, a collaboration into a program—and chiropractic’s leadership was simply not interested. It could not be done without institutional support. What unsettles me most now is how little of what happened survived as institutional memory. Today’s chiropractors know almost nothing of these attempts. That, as much as anything, is why I am writing this down.

Manipulation Works Best When Surrounded by Everything Except Manipulation 

During the 1980s and 1990s chiropractic researchers launched clinical trials, comparative-effectiveness studies, and collaborations with universities and medical centers.

Then, the larger, better-designed studies made the clinical picture go soft. Patients improved—sometimes substantially—but the improvement proved stubbornly hard to pin on manipulation. Natural history, spontaneous recovery, reassurance, exercise, attention, expectancy, and plain contextual healing kept blurring the causal thresholds.² Manipulation generally performed about as well as any other conservative care including placebo, and when superior, it closely tracked the false positive rate expected under null hypothesis significance testing.^3, 4 In fact, to this day you will see chiropractic research conclusions proudly assert that manipulation is no less effective than other treatments for low back pain, including controls—a damnation by faint self-praise.

The problem was not only scientific but psychological, cultural, and institutional, which is why supporters and critics could read the same trials as Rorschach blots and come away convinced of opposite conclusions. When one body of evidence underwrites both conclusions, the fault is rarely bias; more often the evidence was never built to answer the question asked of it.⁵ The remedy is unglamorous: decide in advance which single measure could settle the question, weigh several rival hypotheses at once,⁶ and recognize when further information can no longer move the decision.⁷ In short: name in advance the result that would change your mind. Chiropractic, though, thrived in the ambiguity. When outcomes were positive, manipulation worked; when they were negative, prejudice or incompetence was clearly afoot.

So the center of gravity in chiropractic research quietly retreated from the awkward clinical effectiveness question, towards safer, fundable territory: biomechanics, sensorimotor physiology, adverse-event surveillance, health-services research, and broad biopsychosocial models.

Does spinal manipulation itself produce large, reliable, clinically transformative effects beyond natural history and contextual healing?

I eventually tried to answer that question—at scale, assembling a meta-analysis of spinal manipulation for low back pain: a hundred and twenty randomized trials, some nineteen thousand patients, modeled against the natural history of recovery. The results did not rescue the story I had spent my youth defending. Once natural history and contextual healing were given their due, the slight effect we detected turned out to be natural history carrying manipulation for acute pain and a faint placebo carrying it for chronic pain.^8, 9 Years later, a contemporary from those reform days, chiropractor, influencer, and fellow researcher Greg Plaugher, remarked to me that “evidence-based chiropractic” was an old and abandoned paradigm.¹⁰

The strongest outcomes came not from an isolated mechanical input but from a comprehensive human encounter with many routes to recovery. 

Meanwhile the clinical literature kept telling the same story. In the modern military trials led by Christine Goertz—herself a symbol of the profession’s evolution—active-duty patients who received chiropractic care did better than those on usual medical care alone.¹¹ Pain, function, and satisfaction all improved: at first glance, exactly the evidence reformers hoped to see. 

Look closer, though, and the chiropractic “arm” was not manipulation but, in reality, the effect of repeated visits, education, exercise, reassurance, coaching, ergonomic advice, self-management support, and the whole atmosphere of attentive care. Patients improved; the contribution of manipulation itself stayed unknown. And when mechanistic studies looked for the distinctive physiological signature—balance, postural sway, neuromuscular response—the effects were weak, inconsistent, or absent.¹² The anticipated effects of chiropractic refused to show up. 

The strongest test arrived recently. In a trial published online in late 2025, a team led by Gert Bronfort reported on a thousand patients.¹³ Adults at elevated risk of chronic back pain were randomized to manipulation alone, a biopsychosocial self-management program, both, or guideline-based care. Over a year, manipulation by itself was statistically indistinguishable from ordinary medical care on pain and disability—half a century of hope for the adjustment, tested cleanly at last, returning null. A companion report the following year found that the self-management program outperformed both guideline-based medical care and manipulation alone!¹⁴

Which left an uncomfortable possibility, one that would have sounded like heresy in the reform years and gradually condensed in my mind into a single sentence: Manipulation works best when surrounded by everything except manipulation.

The strongest outcomes came not from an isolated mechanical input but from a comprehensive human encounter with many routes to recovery. 

There is another way to judge the reform movement. If research functions as intended, one would expect it to produce measurable changes in clinical practice. Yet after three decades, the average chiropractic office remains remarkably familiar. Technique systems continue to proliferate. Subluxation remains central in much of the profession. Weekend seminars still exert enormous influence. Clinical decisions are often shaped as much by tradition, philosophy, marketing, and personal experience as by systematic reviews. The profession unquestionably learned more about itself. Whether the profession itself changed very much is not so apparent.

Chiropractic research is alive and well in Denmark, New Zealand, and a handful of other centers, often more rigorous than anything the reform years produced. But the results of more research will not make spinal manipulation more acceptable. It cannot rescue a treatment this marginal; it will only measure it more precisely.

Palmer West closed its doors in 2025. And chiropractors who believe “more research is needed” continue to practice as they did a century ago, confident of eventual vindication. However, we did not leave a summary of what we found or did not find—no capstone or mile marker that said we did the work, and here is what we did or did not observe. So let this article stand as the mile marker: we did the work, and the work came back equivocal. That is harder to say than a clear finding, and easier to ignore. But a literature that will not resolve after enough well-powered attempts is not unfinished. It is null.

Our natural aptitudes enabled humans to thrive for ages, even in harsh environments. People observed regularities in their world (e.g., Inuit understood when ice was safe to travel) and manipulated nature to serve human ends (e.g., breeding corn in Mesoamerica). Several centuries ago, these natural ways of thinking evolved, and scientific methods emerged from diverse cultural foundations to build on traditional knowledge, separate fact from myth, reveal a deeper understanding of underlying mechanisms (e.g., DNA), and generate advanced technologies previously unthinkable (e.g., satellite imagery).

A scientific way of thinking about the world and its successes thrived despite repeated challenges from religious and other ethnocentric traditions. The first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions (Phil Trans), was founded in England by the multilingual German Henry Oldenburg, who ensured its transnational scope, spread a universal perspective that overcame major conflicts between nation-states, and helped create what we today call Europe. Science then spread globally to ultimately achieve an inclusive worldwide reach, leading to a “shrinking world” based on global contributions, international collaborations, and worldwide appreciation of science-based explanations and applications.¹ Indeed, unequal access to the benefits of science, including modern healthcare, is at the heart of many concerning inequities within and between nations. For example, in a study of over 400 Ethiopian women, harmful practices before and after pregnancy (e.g., food taboos, unsterile materials) were more common for poorer women with little education, in rural locations, and without trained assistants, all suggesting modern science-based medicine was wanting.²

Science has always faced efforts to undermine its universality, including academic critics such as Sandra Harding who claimed in the 1980s that the “epistemologies … of the dominant forms of science are androcentric and … also racist, classist, and culturally coercive.”³ Today, science faces diverse and more threatening proposals for culture-specific “ways of knowing,” hereafter Ethno Epistemics. In contrast to universality, Ethno Epistemics promote partisan epistemologies purported to rival or surpass science, which is wrongly relegated to just another culture-specific (i.e., Eurocentric) science. Extensive literatures on this theme exist in various corners of academia. 

Philosopher Osman Bakar argues that “modern science is just one of several major forms of science … Islamic science … is another.”⁴ As are “Vedic sciences,” which include Jyotish (astrology) and Ayurveda (healing).⁵ Traditional Chinese Medicine adopts “Epistemic hybridity,” which entails “multiple legitimate evidence bases … diverse ways of knowing.”⁶ Likewise, “African ‘ways’ of knowing” include “supernatural beings—spirits, ancestors … intuition … clairvoyance and telepathy.”⁷ Philosopher Roberto Di Ceglie promotes a Christian epistemic, “a ‘spiritual turn in epistemology’ … on the basis of firm commitment to God,”⁸ while psychotherapist Teresa Marsh and colleagues writing about decolonizing methodology in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods observe that “In most Indigenous epistemologies, knowledge is acquired through revelation, such as dreams, visions, and intuition, and … is … spiritual … from the spirit world and ancestors.”⁹

Dismissing supranatural explanations liberated natural understandings of the world and contributed not only to a universal worldview but also to innumerable societal benefits often taken for granted.

That these “other ways of knowing” are rooted in supranatural elements is especially problematic. Science offered material explanations and won hard-fought battles over the supranatural, as manifested by a diminished role for theology in universities and widespread decreases in religiosity, especially among scientists. Dismissing supranatural explanations liberated natural understandings of the world and contributed not only to a universal worldview but also to innumerable societal benefits often taken for granted and with unintended irony (e.g., computers used to disseminate anti-science critiques). 

Also concerning, Ethno Epistemics can “validate” idiosyncratic beliefs that puzzle those not sharing the relevant provincial perspective and could foster negative reactions across cultures. According to the Vedas (the oldest sacred scriptures of Hinduism), toe rings ensure a healthy pregnancy, and Maori epistemology teaches that the Kauri tree and whales are siblings. More egregiously, President Jammeh of Gambia acquired an herbal cure for AIDS in a dream from ancestors who were traditional healers; absent empirical evidence, he decreed it to replace science-based anti-viral treatment. 

In advancing a plurality of “sciences,” Ethno Epistemics generally foster antipathy towards science, besmirching it as “Colonial science” and “White epistemology.” Rutando Ngara, an African Indigenous Knowledge Systems practitioner and transdisciplinary researcher, asserts that “Western science … has … subjugated other forms of knowledge … a form of epistemic genocide or ‘epistemicide.’”¹⁰ Research methods professor Bagele Chilisa states: “that no subject area or theory, be it biology, physics … has escaped Eurocentric colonialism and modern imperialism or globalization.”¹¹ Under Ethno Epistemics, unifying peoples around the world (i.e., globalization) becomes a negative rather than a positive goal. 

Promoting Ethno Epistemics and denigrating the universality of science makes it less likely that people will adopt its benefits. For example, trust in science within and between nations is associated with support for vaccination. Nor will science-skeptics replace misguided pre-scientific practices that are inevitable given common-sense thinking is so fallible.¹² It was scientific findings and well-founded theory that ultimately led people to reject bloodletting as a cure-all for innumerable ailments.

Promoting Ethno Epistemics and denigrating the universality of science makes it less likely that people will adopt its benefits.

Ethno Epistemics raise difficult questions about which, if any, warrant parity with science and how, if accepted uncritically, to reconcile inevitable contradictions among themselves and with established science. Incompatible epistemologies will preclude resolution about such contentious claims as that Maori ancestors discovered Antarctica or Muslims from Africa reached America long before Columbus.¹³

Instead, legitimizing these other ways of knowing will make more likely intractable positions like those held by an Indigenous archeologist, as reported way back in 1996 in The New York Times: “There’s a real feeling that we’ve been here forever … The Bering Strait theory makes logical sense, but … the traditional belief … comes first.”¹⁴ Most faith-based epistemics already entail such narratives about the origins of the universe and its peoples that contradict one another and science, a conflict that rages still today, albeit largely outside universities until now. 

Imagine the chaos in all aspects of science, including classrooms, if diverse Ethno Epistemic sources are deemed equivalent to science, and the vociferous attacks by outside political or public forces that could follow rejection of “alternative” sources they deem credible. Rather than scientific citations in student assignments, instructors could face religious and other disputable sources about the age of the earth. Such concerns are not hypothetical. In 2025, a University of Oklahoma student pleaded religious discrimination when her paper on gender for a psychology course received a grade of 0. According to the instructor, she only expressed personal opinions based on her understanding of God’s will and failed to review a scientific paper as required. A highly politicized furor resulted.¹⁵

Science has unified diverse peoples through an appreciation of its benefits and its inclusive perspective on the natural world free of cultural constraints.

Supporters of science cannot ignore such external forces, including political leaders who disparage expertise and question scientific findings that contradict their ideologies. As noted, proponents think of Ethno Epistemics as liberating peoples from the hegemony of science, but as historian of science Meera Nanda observed over 20 years ago, “reactionary political groups are redefining science to fit their agenda.”¹⁶ Claiming a culture-specific “science” promotes nationalist pride, even if unwarranted. Turkish president Recep Erdogan endorses creationism and Islamic faith-based post-secondary institutions. Politicians in India mandate university programs in astrology to further a Hindu nationalistic agenda with uncertain consequences for personal liberties, including religion. All buttressed by congenial epistemologies. 

To be clear, recent claims about culture-specific “ways of knowing” are distinct from traditional knowledge based on years and often generations of observations about the world, much of which merits respect within academia and provides a foundation on which science can build. Inspired by traditional herbal medicine and ancient literature, for example, scientist Tu Youyou was awarded a Nobel Prize for isolating the compound Artemisinin from the sweet wormwood plant. It is now used to treat Malaria, saving countless lives. And Ethno Epistemic epistemological claims likewise deserve attention in relevant disciplines, including history and philosophy of science.

Although precursors of science, however, traditional knowledge and epistemologies should not be conflated with contemporary science, a universal way to validate beliefs about nature and, notably, to reveal its underlying mechanisms. Ever since its inception from multiple cultural roots, science has unified diverse peoples through an appreciation of its benefits and its inclusive perspective on the natural world free of cultural constraints.

In 1950, a retired Marine Corps major named Donald Keyhoe published The Flying Saucers Are Real and, with it, authored the operating system that ufology still runs on three-quarters of a century later. The claim was never simply that strange things are seen in the sky; people have reported that since antiquity. Keyhoe’s contribution was the second half, the one that holds the whole story up: that the United States government knows what those things are, that the answer is extraterrestrial, and that it is being deliberately hidden.

Everything that has happened since—Roswell, the abductions, the crash-retrieval programs, the whistleblowers, the perpetually imminent “disclosure”—is an elaboration on a thesis that was floated, fully formed, before the first color television was sold. Three-quarters of a century is long enough for a real line of inquiry to settle something. Ufology has spent it restating Keyhoe. 

Myth Accretes, History Distills 

There is a simple way to tell a genuine historical claim from a folkloric one, and it has nothing to do with how strange the claim is. Watch which direction the story moves over time. 

Real history sharpens. As professionals process primary sources—documents, physical evidence, cross-checked testimony—the account gets more constrained, more settled, and often more boring. Details that don’t survive scrutiny fall away. The map of D-Day or the Cuban Missile Crisis is more precise now than it was in 1965, and it will not suddenly sprout a dramatic new chapter, because the evidentiary base is fixed and the professionals have done their work. History is a process of subtraction: you start with the rumor and noise after the first journalistic accounts, and end with a smaller, harder core of what actually happened. 

By way of example, while researching my book on the Grand Union, The First American Flag, I went into the primary sources. I found the earliest known documentary use of the phrase “United States of America”: a letter written on January 2, 1776, by Stephen Moylan, secretary to George Washington at the Continental Army’s Cambridge headquarters. The previous day, that flag flew over Prospect Hill to inaugurate the “new establishment” of the Continental Army. For two centuries the question of who first set down the nation’s name had been muddled and misattributed to Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin. A single dated manuscript narrowed it—earlier than the prior consensus, and fixed to a person, a place, and a week. Then the process did what real history does: other scholars pressure-tested the finding, contested adjacent points, forced corrections, and the account grew sharper still. That is the precise inverse of how ufology moves. History converges on a dated letter and survives peer review; myth diverges into ever-richer retellings and survives only by repetition. 

Myth runs the opposite way. It accretes. Each retelling adds characters, stakes, and detail, and the additions arrive precisely when the story needs them to stay compelling. Roswell is the textbook case, and it is worth being blunt: as an extraterrestrial event, Roswell is entirely a myth, and you can watch it being built. In July 1947, an Army airfield in New Mexico put out a careless press release about recovering a “flying disc,” which was retracted within a day, saying it was a weather balloon, and the story stayed dead for thirty years. 

There were no bodies in 1947, no multiple crash sites, no autopsies, no surviving alien, no recovered metal that “remembered” its shape. Those elements did not exist in the contemporaneous record because they were not yet invented. They were added layer by layer, starting in the late 1970s: a book in 1980, the bodies and the second and third crash sites through the 1980s, and the “alien autopsy” film in 1995, with each new author topping the last. The 1947 event is the only part anchored to primary sources, and these describe a balloon. In fact, what crashed at Roswell was a Project Mogul balloon outfitted with acoustic equipment to listen for upper atmosphere explosions of a feared Soviet atomic bomb test. 

History is a process of subtraction: you start with the rumor and noise after the first journalistic accounts, and end with a smaller, harder core of what actually happened. 

You can even watch the keystone witness being manufactured. Jesse Marcel was the Army Air Force intelligence officer who actually drove out to the ranch in 1947 and gathered the debris; his account became the single most important firsthand source on which the entire legend rests. Yet in the contemporaneous record, made while the memory was fresh and before any mythology existed to flatter it, he describes mundane wreckage: tinfoil and rubber. Nothing about a craft. Nothing of alien origin. Then the event vanished from public life for three decades. It was the ufologist Stanton Friedman who went looking for Marcel in 1978, and only then—thirty-one years on, sought out and courted by people who already believed—did Marcel’s memory acquire its extraterrestrial cast. 

Watch his on-camera interview from the 1980 In Search of… episode that Leonard Nimoy hosted, shot on location near Roswell. The most telling thing is not certainty but the absence of it. Marcel is hesitant and hedging, almost apologetic, a man reaching back across thirty-three years and visibly retrofitting significance onto an old memory, as if conceding that he hadn’t understood at the time what he now feels he must have been holding. He says that he and his commander “knew differently” than the weather-balloon line, but that knowing is a product of 1978, not 1947. Later investigators documented outright embellishments in his accounts, including false claims about his own military record and schooling, and the celebrated “alien hieroglyphics” his son remembered would turn out to match the printed tape of a New York toy company, the very material a Project Mogul balloon train was built from. The keystone of the whole edifice is a sincere old man’s reconstructed memory, shaped by the believers who came to harvest it. 

That is the fingerprint of eschatology; history leaves a different one. Consider how, within a single religious tradition, you find not one account of the end times but hundreds: competing, mutually incompatible, endlessly revised, each generation regenerating the apocalypse in its own idiom. No new evidence ever arrives, yet the literature grows richer every century, because the stories are doing emotional and communal work, not evidentiary work. Ufology behaves identically. The canon expands, but the evidence does not. 

Human systems do not keep secrets like this.

Set aside the question of whether craft are real and ask a narrower, more tractable one: Is the conspiracy structurally plausible? Because the disclosure thesis makes a specific claim about how information behaves inside human institutions, and that claim is testable against everything we know about how information actually behaves. 

The thesis requires that for roughly eighty years, across multiple presidential administrations of both parties, through the entire Cold War and after, the single most consequential fact in human history—that we are not alone, and that recovered nonhuman technology exists—has been kept secret by, on the advocates’ own telling, thousands of people—contractors, scientists, military officers, intelligence personnel, and many others. And it requires that not one of them, across eight decades, ever produced a single verifiable artifact. Not a verified internal document that survives forensic review. Not a photograph of a body that withstands examination. Nothing but testimony, and testimony almost always about what someone else allegedly saw or was told. 

Roswell is the textbook case, and it is worth being blunt: as an extraterrestrial event, Roswell is entirely a myth, and you can watch it being built.

That is not how human systems operate; in fact, they almost always leak. The Manhattan Project was penetrated by Soviet intelligence while it was still running. The Pentagon Papers came out. Abu Ghraib, the NSA’s bulk collection, the diplomatic cables: secrets involving thousands of cleared people have a half-life, and that half-life is measured in years, not lifetimes. Add the international dimension and the implausibility compounds: the disclosure narrative quietly requires the United States to hold near-monopoly control over a global phenomenon, as though physics arranges for the craft to fall only on American soil, and as though the Soviet, Russian, and Chinese services, who would have killed for a genuine technological edge, either never recovered anything or perfectly matched the silence. It would be a miracle if, for eighty years, every rival intelligence apparatus on Earth kept essentially the same secret, as if choreographed. And yet the core story, the conspiracy theory at the center of the whole enterprise, only survives on exactly that: miracles. 

I should disclose a regional bias. I write from Missouri, the Show-Me State, whose motto is usually traced to Congressman Willard Vandiver in 1899: “frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have to show me.” Fittingly for this essay, even that origin story is contested; the phrase was already in circulation before the man it made famous, which is how folklore works. But it is the right epistemology here. Eight decades of frothy eloquence about recovered craft, and no one has shown us. Even today, weeks after President Trump lifted the restrictions on NDAs signed by whistleblowers who breathlessly proclaimed that they know where the aliens and their spaceships are stored, they remain silent. 

The Inoculation of Falsifiability 

The Martian canals that competent astronomers sincerely mapped for decades died the instant a probe flew past Mars and photographed bare rock. Those belief systems remained exposed to reality, and reality, given time, closed in. 

Ufology sealed that exit. It absorbed the cover-up into the theory. The absence of an alien body, a spaceship, or a convincing document or photographs is no longer a problem for the claim; it has been redefined as confirmation of the suppression. “We have no evidence” is rewritten as “look how well they’re hiding it.” Exposed frauds are not refutations but impurities: yes, that psychic medium used cheesecloth, yes, that alien contactee was a charlatan, but the real phenomenon is untouched. Once a belief can metabolize its own exposed frauds as proof of its persecution, no possible observation can disconfirm it. At that point it has stopped being a hypothesis at all. 

What the Advocates Actually Say When You Pin Them Down 

The most telling evidence is not what the skeptics say. It is what the advocates concede. Christopher Mellon is as serious and well-placed a proponent as the movement has: a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a former staff director on the Senate Intelligence Committee, a man who oversaw special access programs, and who is now chairman of the Disclosure Foundation. And Mellon has said plainly, for years, that during his time with that access he personally saw no hard evidence of U.S. possession of nonhuman craft or bodies. His case rests on the genuinely puzzling sensor encounters, the Tic Tac and its cousins, and on his conviction that the whistleblower claims deserve investigation. Retired Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet occupies the same posture, an advocate whose argument runs on others’ encounters, sensor data, and the belief that the topic was wrongly stigmatized, not on physical proof he has personally verified. 

You did not have to read between the lines to see this. At the Disclosure Forum, the foundation convened in the Russell Senate Office Building on June 25, 2026—Mellon in the chair, Gallaudet on the program, lawmakers in the room—the moderator put to the two men the only question that ultimately matters: the smoking gun eludes us, so is there anything real behind the rumors, anything that could put this to bed today? Neither man claimed there was. 

Mellon allowed that the best classified videos he has seen would “move the needle”—better than what has been released, but nothing like definitive proof, and nothing, he conceded, likely to settle the issue short of a presidential announcement. Gallaudet was plainer: “I’ve not seen with my own eyes,” he said, “even though I know people who have.” And they said so at a podium beneath the forum’s own theme, “Humanity at the Edge of Discovery.” 

The foundation’s framing gives the game away even more plainly: by its own description the conversation “remains stuck in the era of proving existence.” That is an extraordinary admission to find at the center of a disclosure movement: the people demanding that the government reveal the proof are themselves conceding, on the record, that the proof has not been established. 

The keystone of the whole edifice is a sincere old man’s reconstructed memory, shaped by the believers who came to harvest it.

This matters enormously, and it should be said gently because these are sincere men. The strongest insiders in the field asked the simple question: Have you yourself seen the recovered craft, the bodies, the reverse-engineered material? Answer: no. The entire crash-retrieval edifice rests not on what its most credible champions have witnessed, but on what they have been told others have witnessed. That is the architecture of a rumor, however distinguished the people repeating it, and however sincerely they repeat it. 

The Tic Tac That Never Multiplies 

There is a quieter inconsistency that has become harder to ignore the longer the disclosure cycle runs. In 2021, when Rocky Swanson and I interviewed Luis Elizondo for the Intention podcast, I asked a deliberately narrow question: of the cases he had reviewed, how many possessed the kind of multi-sensor, cross-referenced data that made the 2004 Nimitz “Tic Tac” encounter so difficult to dismiss? Elizondo’s answer, at minute 48 of the episode, was categorical. The evidence was “overwhelming” and “beyond compelling”; of cases like the Tic Tac there were, he said, “many, many, many more.” That same year, Christopher Mellon told Joe Rogan that the Nimitz incident remained, in his judgment, the single most compelling case on record. 

If a large trove of equally or more robust multi-sensor events existed inside the system, the post-2017 transparency window was the moment to surface at least one of them. Instead, the Tic Tac UAP has remained the high-water mark. No subsequent release, no congressional hearing, no AARO product, and no insider disclosure has produced a second case that matches or exceeds its combination of radar, infrared, and multiple pilot testimony under controlled conditions. Mellon was right: it is still the strongest publicly documented event. Elizondo’s implication of a deeper, still-hidden archive of superior cases has not been borne out by the behavior of the very people who claim access to that archive. 

This is not a minor discrepancy. It is the same pattern the rest of the field exhibits: the claim of vast withheld evidence is repeatedly asserted, yet the evidentiary ceiling never rises. The most sophisticated sensor encounter on the public record in 2004 remains the most sophisticated sensor encounter on the public record in 2026. When the official investigative body created by Congress and given broad access, AARO—the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office—returns empty-handed on recovered technology and exotic programs, the response is not recalibration but the familiar reframing: it is a deeper cover-up; why would you trust the government anyway; it is the old intelligence trick of admitting a little truth to protect the rest. Wait for the next disclosure. 

The Jig That Was Already Up 

The real reckoning came when the believers got exactly what they had demanded for decades: an official, legally mandated investigation with full access. 

Once a belief can metabolize its own exposed frauds as proof of its persecution, no possible observation can disconfirm it.

Congress wrote it into law. The Pentagon stood up AARO and gave it unrestricted access to chase down every named program, person, company, and document. It located them. It interviewed the executives and officials the witnesses had pointed to. And in March 2024, it reported that there are no reverse-engineering programs or recovered off-world technology, that the named secret projects were either misidentified ordinary national-security programs or never existed, and that a celebrated “alien” metal sample was ordinary terrestrial material with no exceptional properties. The thing the movement had said it wanted, a real investigation with real access, happened, and it came back empty. 

The response was the one the inoculation predicts. The report was rejected out of hand. It was a cover-up, a limited hangout, a whitewash; the very thoroughness of the access was reframed as evidence of how high the conspiracy reaches. And the movement pivoted, in a single motion, to David Grusch’s congressional testimony, testimony that the Inspector General found worth investigating, but which, in substance, is an account of programs Grusch was told about, not ones he witnessed, a distinction his public account has since begun to blur. The unfalsifiable machine did what it does: it converted a disconfirmation into fuel. 

Old Fairies, New Greys 

None of this is new, and Carl Sagan named it precisely thirty years ago. In The Demon-Haunted World, he pointed out that the modern alien-abduction narrative—the paralysis, the small uncanny beings, the missing time, the abductee returned subtly changed—is structurally the same story humans have always told about being taken by the Otherworld. The incubus and succubus of the medieval night, the fairy abduction and the swapped changeling: the grammar is identical, only the costume has changed. The elves became greys. The hollow hills became the saucer. The candle Sagan was guarding against the dark was exactly this: the human appetite for a story so satisfying that the absence of evidence stops feeling like a problem. 

The entire crash-retrieval edifice rests not on what its most credible champions have witnessed, but on what they have been told others have witnessed.

So watch the field honestly, despite the Disclosure forums in Washington, despite a new Spielberg picture and a documentary stacked with retired officials, and despite the genuine cultural updraft of the moment. Strip away the production values and what remains is what was there in 1950: an eighty-year-old assertion that has never once distilled into a fixed, evidenced core, that grows more elaborate exactly as it grows more disconfirmed, whose best insiders admit they have seen nothing firsthand, and which now answers every empty investigation with the same line: trust me; the proof is one disclosure away. 

No science on the verge of a breakthrough behaves this way. Folklore does. And the real story, the one that has been true the whole time, is not in the sky. It is the oldest one we have: people, gathered in the dark, telling each other something they need to be true. The hunger underneath ufology is not foolish. Strip away the crash retrievals, the reverse-engineering programs, the withheld archives, and what remains is a longing to stand in relation to another intelligence, not to conquer it, not to be conquered by it, but to be related to it, as a member of a family we did not know we belonged to. A galactic family. It is a wish to be small in a way that welcomes rather than diminishes, and to learn that the universe has company in it.

You can’t keep a bad idea down. You fight it with all weapons at hand—science, reason, research, history, and, when they fail, yelling—until you are sure it is dead as a doornail. Then, one day while you are quietly reading the latest terrifying news, you see a revenant: the corpse reawakens. For us, that was last year’s blockbuster, Amy Griffin’s The Tell, which told readers that although she had no evidence supporting her MDMA-triggered “recovered” memory of being sexually abused in middle school, she knows it happened. No corroboration from teachers or classmates about it, no supporting evidence from the investigators she had hired, no confrontation with the alleged abuser; her recovered memory was all the evidence she needed.

Griffin’s deduction is straight out of The Courage to Heal, whose authors wrote, in 1991, “If you are unable to remember any specific instances … but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did … If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.” Griffin repeats the same incoherent reasoning. As she writes: “There was no smoking gun, no physical evidence, no tangible proof … I trusted myself. That was enough.”

But as revenants go, Griffin’s megahit pales in contrast to Bessel van der Kolk’s recent $10 million deal for his next book. Few have done more to perpetuate the belief in “repressed memories” of trauma, and its effectively indistinguishable cousin “dissociative amnesia,” than he did with The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Having lost the argument that repressed memories are stored pristinely in the brain, he moved to their being stored in the body. First published in 2014, van der Kolk’s book has been a New York Times bestseller for years and currently has over 84,000 positive ratings on Amazon. Apparently conquering half the world wasn’t sufficient, so van der Kolk is expanding his message, this time with “Score’s” sequel, Come to Your Senses, with a workbook for readers to try out his theories, and two children’s books to reach a “younger audience.” 

The two of us have fought the good fight over repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, a controversy that erupted in fury in the 1990s and was among the most contentious ever to embroil psychology and psychiatry. One of us (McNally), a clinical psychological scientist at Harvard, has been studying memory and trauma for decades, and often found himself opposing van der Kolk’s ideas in popular magazines, professional journals, and amicus briefs in trials of adults accused of sexual abuse by plaintiffs who claimed to have “recovered,” albeit uncorroborated, memories; the other (Tavris), a social psychologist, has examined this phenomenon as one of the psychological epidemics and moral panics that sweep across our nation with depressing regularity. 

Each episode seems to come out of thin air, wreaks enormous havoc, subsides and is forgotten. No doubt that 30 years after the Salem witch trials of 1692–93, parents tried to teach their children about the hysteria that led to the executions of 20 people, the imprisonment of 150 others, and accusations against another 200. “George, sit down here so I can tell you how Giles Corey was pressed to death by these crazy people,” a parent would say. “Aw, Ma,” young George probably replied, “that was so 17th century.”

We know that trying to criticize van der Kolk’s arguments is like criticizing Christmas …

Today, we both are feeling so 20th century. Most Millennials and all members of Gen Z are too young to recall the scientific, clinical, and legal controversies that characterized the Memory Wars of the 1990s, but memoirs like Griffin’s and books like van der Kolk’s are bringing them back. We know that trying to criticize van der Kolk’s arguments is like criticizing Christmas, and we will undoubtedly hear from 83,475 of those 84,000 Amazon readers, but let’s examine the evidence for two of the bedrock beliefs of van der Kolk: that memories of trauma are fragmented, disorganized, decontextualized, and stored in “somatic memory,” and healing therefore entails weaving such scattered fragments into a coherent narrative of what happened. Once a patient forms a coherent narrative, symptoms are assumed to diminish. 

Does any of this actually happen? In their comprehensive investigation of memory fragmentation, psychologist David Rubin and colleagues tested 60 adult trauma survivors, half of whom had PTSD and half had never had PTSD. The two groups did not differ demographically nor did the trauma survivors differ on types of trauma they had suffered. They all recounted their three most stressful or traumatic memories, their three most positive memories, and their three most important memories. The researchers used many measures of coherence to measure the degree of fragmentation in these memories and found that trauma memories were no less coherent than other kinds. The traumatic memories of people with PTSD were not less coherent than those of people who never had PTSD.

The clinical relevance of narrative fragmentation rests on its role in maintaining PTSD. According to van der Kolk, once the memories become integrated into a coherent narrative of the trauma, then intrusive recollections, nightmares, and flashbacks will diminish in frequency and intensity. In one of many studies designed to test this hypothesis in PTSD patients, each person furnished three narratives: one concerning the trauma, one concerning a positive experience, and one concerning a negative but nontraumatic experience. Using independent ratings, self-report ratings, and objective measures of narrative structure, the researchers assessed the fragmentation of these memories pre- and post-treatment with medication or exposure therapy. Memory fragmentation did not reliably change across the course of treatment on any measure. Further, the people who had fragmented trauma narratives also had fragmented memories of their positive and their nontraumatic negative memories, meaning that “fragmentation” was their characteristic style of recounting all autobiographical memories.

Repressed-memory clinicians rarely pause to consider how suggestion, influence, and popular beliefs help determine how those fragments are “woven” together …

And what is a “coherent” memory anyway? Repressed-memory clinicians rarely pause to consider how suggestion, influence, and popular beliefs help determine how those fragments are “woven” together, leading a patient to conclude “obviously I must have been abused.” It’s the explanation du jour, after all.

McNally and his team compared the memories of four groups: the repressed memory group believed they must have been sexually abused although they had no memories of any molestation; the recovered memory group, who had in fact been sexually abused but had not thought about it for a long time prior to recollecting it; the continuous memory group, who reported they had never forgotten having been abused in childhood. A control group that had no experience with sexual abuse. The adults reporting recovered and repressed memories of abuse  had problems with “reality monitoring,” difficulty distinguishing between memories of something they imagined (“fantasy”) from memories of something they perceived (“reality”). Anyone who has difficulty making such a distinction may be especially prone to mistakenly assume that images surfacing during recovered memory therapies, such as journaling and guided imagery, signify genuine autobiographical memories.

In 1952, the British psychiatrist Lionel Penrose provided an explanation for the rise, fall, and possible return of the concept of repressed memories of trauma. Penrose borrowed concepts from the epidemiology of the infectious disease in mathematically modeling fluctuations in ideas, fads, and “crazes” in society from the benign (e.g., the hula hoop fad in the early 1960s) to the deadly (e.g., the witchcraft panic in Salem). He likened such concepts to a virus lurking in society that spreads slowly and then increases exponentially before peaking and then declining as acquired immunity grows, reducing the number of vulnerable hosts. But the virus does not disappear; it remains dormant until conditions ripen for the next epidemic. 

The “virus” of claims about repressed and recovered memories of trauma has now found a new generation of “host” humans, multiplied by the internet. Like the victims of the deadly anti-vaccine movement, they live in silos insulated from science, hoping their bodies, if not their brains, will yield answers to their suffering. In the meantime, a powerful antidote is psychiatrist Michael Scheeringa’s book The Body Does Not Keep the Score: How Popular Beliefs About Trauma Are Wrong, which not only demolishes van der Kolk’s claims but shows that van der Kolk appears to have misunderstood the very studies he cites in support of his theory. It’s a sad sign of the times that it only has 24 Amazon reviews. 

Somewhere in America this week, a depressed Christian will sit down across from a counselor who believes that her fundamental problem is not a disorder but a sin. In another office, a different Christian will see a licensed psychologist who prays with her, assigns scripture alongside cognitive-behavioral homework, and bills her insurance. In a third, an Orthodox priest will tell a struggling parishioner that the church has been treating diseases of the soul for two thousand years and that the secular clinic is a Johnny-come-lately. All three practitioners call what they do Christian counseling. They regard each other, in many cases, as dangerous.

To speak of “Christian counseling” as though it named a single thing would be to confuse a battlefield with a parish. What the phrase actually denotes is a century-long quarrel among Christians over a question that sounds technical but is theological to its root: what authority should the church grant to a science of the mind produced largely by unbelievers? One side answers that truth is truth, and that to refuse the findings of psychology is stubbornness. The other answers that the Bible, self-sufficient, already supplies its own diagnoses and remedies for the cure of souls. Put another way: some Christians borrow psychology as a tool; some insist on rewriting it on a biblical basis. Between those poles lie a dozen mediating positions, several rival institutional empires, and a literature of mutual accusation.

The deeper irony is that the church was in the therapy business first.

The dispute is not one of niche interest. Millions of Americans get their first, and often only, mental health care through religious channels, and pastors remain among the most consulted helpers for psychological distress. A certified “biblical counseling” movement operates largely outside state licensure, while an accredited evangelical psychology establishment trains clinicians by the thousand. Whether the person in the pew gets steered toward or away from evidence-based treatment depends on which faction his church belongs to. The claims that adding faith to therapy makes therapy work better, or that scripture alone suffices for conditions like depression, are, unlike most theological claims, empirically testable. We will get to the evidence; but the evidence makes no sense without the story.

The Church Was in the Therapy Business First

The standard picture has psychology arriving from outside—an alien science knocking at the church’s door. The deeper irony is that the church was in the therapy business first. When Jesus was asked why he kept company with sinners, he answered in the language of medicine: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” The early church fathers took the image with utter seriousness. Ignatius of Antioch called Christ the "one physician, of flesh and of spirit." Augustine described all humanity as a great patient corrupted by sin, and Christ as remedy and healer in one. The Greek fathers spoke habitually of the church as a hospital. For most of Western history, the guidance of troubled souls—what church historians call the cura animarum, the cure of souls—was simply part of what clergy did.

The premodern church, whatever its other liabilities, possessed something its modern heirs decline: recognition of both categories. Consider the strange career of acedia. Fourth-century monks catalogued the demonic “thoughts” that assailed them in the desert, and the worst was the noonday demon—a listless despondency that elongated the hours and made the monastic cell unbearable. It is recognizably what a modern clinician would call depression, and yet for the monks it was a temptation to be resisted, a disorder of love with a spiritual remedy. Folded eventually into the deadly sin of sloth, it stood for a thousand years for despondency interpreted as a moral fact. 

Sin or sickness? Is the sufferer an agent answerable for her condition or a patient stricken by it?

But the tradition could run the other way. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) treated melancholy as bodily disease and spiritual affliction at once, without embarrassment at the conjunction. The Puritan pastor Richard Baxter, counseling the religiously despairing of seventeenth-century England, recognized that some despair was physical illness beyond the reach of argument, and sent the afflicted to look after diet, exercise, company, and the physician before submitting their souls to further interrogation.

Sin or sickness? Is the sufferer an agent answerable for her condition or a patient stricken by it? The premodern church held both categories in the same frame and practiced an art of telling which was which. Modernity split them into rival jurisdictions—pulpit and clinic, trained in separate campuses, armed with mutually unintelligible vocabularies. Nearly every controversy in this story is, at root, a border dispute between them.

The Vacated Chair

Academic psychology in America was not born in opposition to the churches, but in the space they left behind. Through most of the nineteenth century, the capstone of the American college curriculum was a course in moral philosophy typically taught by the college president, who was typically a clergyman; it covered the soul, the will, the passions, and the conscience. Then, over a few decades, the German research-university ideal, Darwinian prestige, and critical biblical scholarship secularized American higher education—the historian George Marsden's term for the endpoint is “established nonbelief”—and the new laboratory science of psychology moved into precisely the old clergyman’s subject matter: the soul was renamed the mind. By about 1920, conservative Protestantism had effectively vanished from the leading universities. Psychology didn’t storm the church's citadel; it was handed the keys by a university that no longer felt the church held title.

This genealogy explains an otherwise puzzling fact. The first Protestants to encounter the new psychology felt almost none of the threat that would later convulse evangelicalism. The liberal mainline had presided over the handover themselves. The sense of siege belongs to fundamentalism and its heirs, for whom the secular university was enemy territory. For now, the church had to decide what the new science actually was. The science offered two answers, as different as their authors.

James's Bargain and Freud's Takeover

William James—founder of American psychology, son of a mystical theologian, lifelong sufferer of religious melancholy—offered the first. His 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience opens by demolishing what James called “medical materialism,” the reductive habit of explaining religious experience away by its organic causes—Saint Paul's vision as epileptic discharge, Saint Teresa's raptures as hysteria. James conceded the premise: no state of mind, high or low, is independent of bodily processes. But precisely for that reason, he argued, the inference is worthless, because it discredits everything equally—the scientist's theories and the atheist's disbelief have organic conditions, too. Beliefs and experiences must be judged not by their origins but by their fruits. Here was a psychology that would study religion without presuming to replace it, and it is no accident that the church's first alliances with the new science grew up in James's Boston.

Psychology didn’t storm the church's citadel; it was handed the keys by a university that no longer felt the church held title.

Freud's settlement looked more like a succession. Across four decades he held one line without softening: religion is a “universal obsessional neurosis”; God is “at bottom nothing but an exalted father”; faith is an illusion in the technical sense—a belief held because we want it to be true—projected from the helpless child's longing for protection. Where James blocked the reductive inference, Freud built his whole account on it. And he was not coy about the institutional implication. Defending the right of non-physicians to practice analysis, he reached for a surprising phrase: the analyst is best understood as a “secular pastoral worker.” Psychoanalysis, in its founder's own words, was a secular cure of souls. The couch filed its claim to the confessional's estate.

Yet—the irony is crisp—the first working alliance between psychoanalysis and Christianity was forged by Freud himself, with a pastor he loved. Oskar Pfister, a Swiss Reformed minister, took up analysis as an instrument of pastoral care and remained Freud's devoted friend for thirty years. “How comes it,” Freud wrote to him in 1918, “that none of the godly ever devised psychoanalysis and that one had to wait for a completely godless Jew?” Pfister replied that Freud was no godless man, “for he who lives the truth lives in God.” Freud had told him that psychoanalysis itself was “neither religious nor non-religious, but an impartial tool which both priest and layman can use in the service of the sufferer.” That single friendship contains the future quarrel in miniature: is the new psychology a rival gospel, as Freud's theory proclaimed, or a neutral instrument, as his generosity to Pfister conceded? 

One more figure completes the triptych. It was Jung, not Freud, whom the liberal clergy actually embraced: Carl Jung—a Swiss pastor's son who broke with Freud partly over religion—offered the churches something Freud never would: a psychology in which religion was cast not as illness but cure. His claim that every patient over thirty-five fell ill “because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers” was quoted from a thousand mainline pulpits. Jungianism became the house psychology of liberal Protestantism—which is its own cautionary tale, since Jung dissolves doctrine into archetype as efficiently as Freud dissolves it into neurosis, only more flatteringly.

From Enthusiasm to Peale

Mainline churches did not wait for psychology to come to them. As early as 1906, an Episcopal parish in Boston whose rector held a doctorate from Wilhelm Wundt's Leipzig laboratory, the birthplace of experimental psychology, was running what can only be called a church-based psychotherapy clinic for nervous disorders, in partnership with Harvard physicians. The clinic’s lay therapist, a reformed drinker, became America's first paid alcoholism counselor, and through that channel the experiment flows quietly into the prehistory of Alcoholics Anonymous. Christian engagement with psychotherapy began as enthusiasm, not defense.

The enthusiasm was institutionalized by a Congregationalist minister named Anton Boisen, who suffered repeated psychotic breaks and, instead of hiding, converted them into a calling. As a mental hospital chaplain, he brought seminarians in to study “living human documents” of mental illness. In 1930, he launched a clinical training movement that made hospital experience rather than classroom dogmatics central to the formation of mainline clergy. 

The couch filed its claim to the confessional’s estate.

Boisen’s successors built the modern pastoral counseling movement, drawing heavily on Freud and, decisively, on Carl Rogers's nonjudgmental therapy. The achievement was authentic—a clergy newly capable of sitting with the dying and despairing without retreating into pious formulae. But so was the cost. As one former enthusiast put it after recanting, the therapeutic relationship quietly supplanted the “Word” it was meant to serve. Once experience became the court of final appeal, scripture was one resource among others, and Christianity risked being absorbed into psychology.

The absorption’s monument was Norman Vincent Peale, whose 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking—a direct descendant of the “mind-cure” enthusiasm James had studied a half-century earlier—sold in the tens of millions and dissolved sin, grace and tragedy into religiously tinted autosuggestion. Serious theologians were appalled; the best quip held that Paul was appealing and Peale appalling. Even Peale’s own psychiatrist collaborator declined to put his name on the book. Peale endures as every later faction’s cautionary tale: the figure in whom Christianity became indistinguishable from self-help.

The Integrationists

Conservative evangelicals entered the field in force in the 1960s with a program designed to avoid Peale’s fate. They sought the integration of orthodox theology with credible psychology, not the liberal annexation of the former. The watershed came with Fuller Theological Seminary’s opening of a graduate school of psychology accredited by the American Psychological Association in 1974, establishing that evangelicals could enter the mainstream without surrendering their confession. An ecology of accredited evangelical doctoral programs, journals and associations appeared, and it trains a visible share of the country’s therapists today.

The movement’s slogan is “all truth is God's truth,” underwritten by the Reformed doctrine of common grace: God scatters genuine knowledge across creation, so that even an unbelieving researcher can discover real truths about humanity. The difficulty is specifying which secular findings import an anthropology at odds with the faith. Where does common grace end and “the wisdom of this world” begin? If Freud was right about what psychoanalysis is—a successor faith, the secular cure of souls—to integrate it means integrating an alien god.

That is exactly what the next generation concluded.

The Revolt: Scripture is Enough

In 1970, a professor named Jay Adams published Competent to Counsel, and the book reset conservative Protestantism. Adams found a pastoral counseling literature so saturated with secular assumptions that it had to be abandoned. The counselee's fundamental problem, he taught, is not mental illness but sin, and his answer was a return to biblical texts. Scripture was to furnish both the diagnostic categories and remedies.

Skeptics may find the intellectual pedigree of the movement illuminating, because its influences were secular psychology's own dissidents. Adams spent a formative summer with O. Hobart Mowrer—a former president of the American Psychological Association—whose 1961 The Crisis in Psychiatry and Religion said that much of what passed for mental illness was unconfessed wrongdoing, a flight from responsibility rather than a disease. He drew too on Thomas Szasz’s 1961 The Myth of Mental Illness, which offered a similar argument that mental illnesses are metaphorical—moral problems miscategorized as medical ones. Later Christian polemicists leaned on Szasz, and Szasz endorsed their work. 

There, a category error costs not academic embarrassment but potentially a life. 

Jay Adams's heirs softened his polemic, reframing the person in the counseling room as "sinner and sufferer." In 2013 the certifying body renamed itself from "nouthetic" (admonishing) to merely "biblical" counseling. But in its hardest forms, the movement still denies any legitimate role for psychology at all. Its institutions certify thousands of counselors and operate through local churches, largely outside state licensure.

For them, everything rests on one tenet: scriptural sufficiency. The most expansive reading of that doctrine is a twentieth-century American artifact, forged in the fundamentalist wars over biblical inerrancy and applied to counseling by Adams. But even the movement's own insider historian, David Powlison, recognized critics’ core objection: Adams treated the Bible as a comprehensive counseling textbook when the Bible itself never claimed to be such.

Where the Model Breaks

Such disagreement would be an academic squabble, if the stakes were only academic. The movement has been historically suspicious of psychiatric medication and of the disease construal of depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Its leadership now insists that counselors are not trained to remove people from medication and that prescribing is the job of physicians. But the tension is structural, and the hardest cases—florid psychosis, severe bipolar illness, a suicidal counselee—are where the model strains. There, a category error costs not academic embarrassment but potentially a life. 

The most painful reckoning has come around abuse—to the movement's credit, largely from inside. A considerable body of testimony documents biblical counselors mishandling domestic abuse. They have directed victims to examine their own contributory sin, win the abuser over by submission, or preserve marriages at the cost of safety; sometimes subjecting those who fled to church discipline. A sin-and-repentance framework, applied without any understanding of trauma or coercive control, can re-victimize the abused and shelter the abuser under a theology of reconciliation. 

The movement’s own leaders have increasingly conceded the failure. The head of the certifying association (ACBC) has published an open acknowledgment cataloguing complaints and asking forgiveness, and reformers within it are now assimilating the categories the movement was founded to refuse: trauma, complex PTSD, coercive control. The sufficiency of the Word has had to be supplemented by modern conceptions of what abuse does to a human being. 

Does Any of It Work?

Behind the theology lies a question disputants too rarely refer to empirical testing: does religious therapy help the people it claims to help? Here skeptics may be surprised in both directions.

The best evidence concerns religiously accommodated psychotherapy—standard evidence-based treatment tailored to a religious client’s faith, prayer, scripture, or theological framing. Meta-analyses, including a comprehensive 2018 synthesis by Laura Captari and colleagues of nearly a hundred studies, converge on a consistent picture. Religiously integrated treatment outperforms no treatment, as nearly any plausible therapy does. Compared with secular treatment, it performs about equally well on psychological outcomes, with a genuine advantage confined mostly to spiritual outcomes. Clients feel better about their faith. 

The honest reading deflates everyone’s favorite claim. For religious clients, faith-adapted evidence-based therapy delivers spiritual benefits. The secular worry that religious therapy is inherently inferior finds no support, at least where the underlying treatment is evidence-based. But neither is there warrant for the claim that adding God to therapy makes the therapy itself more powerful. The strong biblical-counseling thesis, that scripture alone suffices for conditions usually referred to clinical treatment, receives no empirical vindication. 

Its partisans typically reply that their aim is faithfulness rather than symptom relief, which is a coherent position, but one that should not imply promises about healing. If the claim is for relief of suffering, the evidence is bounded. The test of a method, as James said, is its fruits—a criterion he borrowed from the church.

Both Agent and Patient

If you step back, the century’s quarrel resolves into two questions that were already old when the laboratory was young. The first—what does the church owe to outside truth?—took its modern form twice over: when psychology was born, in the chair the clergyman-presidents vacated, and when James and Freud offered the church two possible futures. James wanted a science that studied the soul without presuming to save it, Freud a secular cure of souls meant to inherit the whole estate. 

The map of the mind was torn in half in 1900, and each side has spent a hundred years discovering that it is holding only half the picture.

The mainline took James’s bargain and slid by degrees toward Freud, until therapy displaced the theology it was meant to serve. The fundamentalists, taking Freud’s succession claim seriously, fortified the Bible into a comprehensive counseling textbook it never claimed to be, and made suffering ‘deserved’ where it was really diseased—at a human cost their leaders have begun to admit. Integrationists, whatever their vulnerabilities, were broadly borne out. Truths about human beings are truths whoever discovers them, and the modest empirical evidence falls on their side.

The second question—is the sufferer a sinner or victim, answerable or afflicted?—resists final answer. The sane answer has always been ‘both’, and premodern wisdom lay in refusing the disjunction modernity has codified. Our own moment is rediscovering the point from the secular side: psychiatry's most thoughtful critics worry that a purely medical model strips suffering of meaning and sufferers of agency, which is the mirror image of the counseling movement’s error. 

An approach that can hold both frames in mind at once would be more sophisticated than either modern heir. That may be the real lesson of the century-long quarrel: the map of the mind was torn in half in 1900, and each side has spent a hundred years discovering that it is holding only half the picture.

New Zealand is known for its enthusiastic embrace of its indigenous cultural heritage. However, this has recently crossed into the uncritical promotion of pseudoscientific ideas. In Skeptic (April 30, 2025), I documented how the government sponsors websites that promote an array of unfounded ideas about the country’s original Māori inhabitants. Foremost is the influence of their lunar calendar.¹

These sites continue to thrive in 2026 and include claims that the moon’s phases affect everything from energy levels and mental health to crop yields.² None of this is supported by controlled studies or established principles of physics. These claims continue to flourish in part because politicians and mainstream media editors appear reluctant to challenge them for fear of being labeled as culturally insensitive or racist. The result has been a proliferation of unsupported claims presented as scientific fact.

Public funding has flowed freely for a series of questionable projects. Recently, the government spent NZ$1.2 million to study the possible effects of lunar phases on health,³ and NZ$400,000 on how the lunar calendar may influence birthing outcomes.⁴ These projects form part of a broader pattern of government agencies funding attempts to test or validate claims rooted in Māori knowledge that either lack plausible biological mechanisms or have yet to produce convincing empirical support. This marks a pattern where the scientific bar is quietly lowered when cultural sentiment is involved.

Playing Whale Songs to Trees

In recent years the government has funded other indigenous studies of questionable scientific value. In one project researchers set out to heal the country’s iconic kauri trees that have been ravaged by dieback disease. Their novel solution included playing audio recordings of whale songs to affected trees, along with karakias (ritual prayers) and indigenous music. The study cost NZ$521,000.⁵ The rationale? In Māori lore, the paraoa (or sperm whale) and the kauri tree were ancestral siblings, and whale products have traditionally been used for their healing properties.⁶

To justify this, researchers pointed to a study that showed that playing healthy coral reef sounds near degraded coral ecosystems attracted fish and sped up recovery.⁷ Applying this concept to land-dwelling plants is a false equivalence.⁸ The kauri tree researchers drew on the Māori notion of ihirangaranga: “ancestral energies” and sound vibrations that are believed to promote healing.⁹ However, land-bound kauri trees lack the physiological mechanisms to process and respond to sound waves in the same manner.

The Curious Chemistry of Whale Balm 

Equally problematic was a parallel NZ$1.1 million study which used a topical balm that included pulverized whale bones and oil and a blend of secret ingredients. When the final report failed to show measurable success, researchers pivoted away from quantitative data to subjective, observational anecdotes. Reports of “bark regrowth” and “reduced trunk leakage” are common in tree-healing trials including those using inert (chemically inactive) treatments, as trees can naturally wall off an infection over time. A more scientifically robust assessment would have required setting up a control group consisting of untreated, diseased kauri trees that would be monitored under identical conditions to determine the rate of natural recovery. Their failure to list the ingredients in the balm, and in a spray that was applied to roots, meant that other researchers could not replicate the study—undercutting a foundation of modern science. Even if the treatment had proved effective, implementation on a meaningful scale was always going to be impractical as it relied on a steady stream of whale carcasses!

The result has been a proliferation of unsupported claims presented as scientific fact. 

In defending the “whale potion” study, the CEO of the agency overseeing the experiment suggested that sperm whales historically used to bounce their sonar off coastal kauri trees to avoid stranding, and that whales might still communicate “through the sea floor to shoreline kauri roots.”¹⁰ This is a textbook example of motivated reasoning cloaked in scientific language.¹¹ When viewed individually, each project could be dismissed as an isolated lapse in scientific judgment. But collectively they reveal a pattern: public funding is being increasingly directed toward testing propositions whose principal justification is cultural rather than empirical.

The Polynesian “Discovery” of Antarctica 

New Zealand holds the distinction of being the first country to establish a national public holiday based on an Indigenous astronomical calendar. Matariki (“eyes of the chief or god”) celebrates the annual pre-dawn rising of the Pleiades star cluster as seen from New Zealand, which marks the start of the Māori New Year. In Western astronomy, it is known as the Pleiades. To commemorate this year’s holiday on July 10th, a government-funded documentary was released, which follows two Māori scholars on their journey to Antarctica. The documentary received NZ$400,000 in public funding.¹²

A promotional blurb put out by government-funded agency, Antarctica New Zealand, which hosted the pair on their trip, identifies them as “astronomers” (neither holds formal credentials in the field) and states that their genealogies “can be traced directly to Polynesian Antarctic explorers Tamarereti and Hui te Rangiora.”¹³ The public premiere of the film mentioned the belief that Māori ancestors once reached Antarctica.¹⁴

The appearance of this claim revived public discussion as to whether Polynesian ancestors reached the frozen continent in the 7th century, which has been the subject of public controversy in recent years. Despite detailed scholarly rebuttals that address the historical, archaeological, linguistic, and navigational evidence, the Ministry of Education continues to promote the claim as an open question.¹⁵

It has even published a story of the possible journey in its influential School Journal, which is used to support the curriculum.¹⁶ While principal objections have been addressed repeatedly in the scholarly literature, educational resources continue to portray the issue as though the evidence were evenly balanced.

On Thin Ice 

On June 6, 2021, the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand published an article that made the dramatic claim that Polynesians likely visited Antarctica in the seventh century, over a thousand years before Europeans.¹⁷ It caused a global sensation and was quickly picked up by news outlets around the world, from The Guardian to The New York Times.¹⁸ The New Zealand Herald proclaimed: “Polynesians First to Discover Antarctica Not News to Māori,”¹⁹ while the headline in The Press of Christchurch read: “Antarctica: The Maori Connection.”²⁰

In reporting on the story, a writer for Smithsonian magazine noted that the research drew “on oral histories and other traditional records often ignored by Western scholars.” It quotes lead author Priscilla Wehi, who said: “When you put it together, it’s really clear, there’s a very long history of connection to Antarctica.”²¹ She told Radio New Zealand that an exciting part of the research was that “it shows how oral tradition can really be considered as a reliable source of evidence.”²² The difficulty is that her claims were based on oral narratives that scholars, including Māori researchers, have warned should not be interpreted literally as historical voyage records.

The claims of Antarctic exploration draw on Rarotongan oral traditions, which hold cultural value but need to be interpreted carefully when used as historical evidence. Rarotonga is the largest and most populated island in the Cook Island chain in the South Pacific. The story was translated by ethnographer Stephenson Smith (1840–1922). In 1954, the manuscript was rebuked by revered Māori anthropologist Sir Peter Buck, who characterized Smith’s approach as naïve, and noted that the manuscript was so laden with colonial influences that its meaning had been distorted and could not be taken as a literal historical record.²³

When viewed individually, each project could be dismissed as an isolated lapse in scientific judgment.

According to the story, the Polynesian voyager Hui Te Rangiora and his crew ventured into Antarctic waters during the seventh century and “were likely the first humans to set eyes on Antarctic waters and perhaps the continent.”²⁴ Here is the passage in question:

… the rocks that grow out of the sea, in the space beyond Rapa; the monstrous seas; the female that dwells in those mountainous waves, whose tresses wave about in the water and on the surface of the sea; and the frozen sea of pia, with the deceitful animal of the sea who dives to great depths—a foggy, misty, and dark place not seen by the sun. Other things are like rocks, whose summits pierce the skies, they are completely bare and without vegetation on them.²⁵

The key words from the text are “tai-uka-a-pia” with “tai-uka” meaning frozen sea and “pia”—a reference to the white flesh of the arrowroot. The literal translation then is “frozen sea of white.” Wehi and her team interpreted this as a reference to Antarctic ice.

An Old Claim Suddenly Grows Wings 

Three months after Wehi’s publication, a team of researchers, including Māori scholars, challenged the claims of Antarctic contact in a rebuttal published in the same Royal Society journal. Led by distinguished archaeologist Atholl Anderson, they noted Buck’s longstanding rejection of this translation.²⁶ They pointed out that frothy white caps are a common sight in the ocean south of New Zealand, but well north of Antarctica, and metaphorical descriptions of the white-capped ocean are common in Polynesian voyaging traditions and clearly do not refer to ice or snow.²⁷

Anderson and his team give several reasons why such a voyage or voyages—5,000 km (3,100 miles) one-way just to reach the Antarctic Circle from Rarotonga—were beyond the Polynesian capabilities. The southernmost archaeological evidence of prehistoric Polynesian landfall is Enderby Island. At 51 degrees south latitude, it is 2,000 km (1,240 miles) from Antarctica. Any voyagers travelling below this boundary would have faced insurmountable challenges, including high winds, large waves, and freezing temperatures. The circumpolar westerly winds (the “Roaring Forties” and “Furious Fifties”) would have wreaked havoc as their sails were woven from pandanus leaves and “notoriously fragile.” They write that voyaging through the circumpolar westerlies would have been perilous and placed them at great risk a of a “breaking up, swamping or overturning.”²⁸ There was also a lack of wood and plant fibre for the necessary boat repairs.²⁹

Prior to the 1820s, Māori sailing vessels “had no windward capacity” and were “vulnerable to catastrophic failure in strong winds.”³⁰ A 2025 study led by Dr. Thomas Leppard of the International Archaeological Research Institute reached the same conclusion, noting that any such trips would have been “foolhardy” and “suicidal.”³¹ The physical constraints alone make the claim untenable. 

Treating the Legend Literally 

Wehi and her team also engage in selective omission to give the myth more credence than it deserves. They left out fantastical elements of the story in their report, for according to the narrative, “the whole of the canoe [used by Hui Te Rangiora] was built of men’s bones.” This information was later downplayed by Smith and is absent from most subsequent retellings. Referring to a canoe made of bones suggests a mythic or legendary origin story rather than a historical voyage.³²

Māori scholar Tipene O’Regan has expressed concern over the need to conduct serious research into indigenous history in New Zealand, which sometimes involves fantasy and mysticism, being funded by the government. He notes that the “Māori ancestors discovered Antarctica” saga involved “those who, without any real historical analysis or content, have managed to give new birth to the idea that Māori discovered Antarctica.”³³

When Evidence and Politics Collide 

Following the sensational headlines about Māori ancestors discovering the frozen continent, the rebuttal that appeared three months later received only a fraction of the media attention. Even today, the original article has received over 21,000 views online, while the rebuttal has had less than 7 percent of the viewership (1,364).³⁴ Three of the rebuttal authors would later write that their attempt to challenge the claims of Wehi was initially met with resistance by the Royal Society itself, which struck them as being inconsistent with “the principle of open debate, and the society’s stated aim of advancing and promoting the pursuit of knowledge.” They wrote that “only our dogged determination … led to the eventual publication.”³⁵

This marks a pattern where the scientific bar is quietly lowered when cultural sentiment is involved. 

The original article by Wehi was essentially a rehashing of an old story and not a newly uncovered revelation, yet just two months after the rebuttal, the Royal Society rewarded Wehi and Otago University with a $660,000 grant to examine Antarctic narratives in relation to Māori knowledge titled: “Kaitiakitanga [Guardianship] and Antarctic narratives.”³⁶ In response, Anderson and his colleagues asked: “What can we conclude from this? Above all else, that … the state continues to invest significant amounts of taxpayer money into Māori-themed scholarship of questionable quality.”³⁷ This remains true today.

Claims of pre-European Antarctic discovery by Polynesians has also appeared in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, which included a timeline of the supposed Polynesian discovery of the frozen continent. “Circa 650 AD Hui Te Rangiora voyages south from Rarotonga in the waka Te Ivi o Ateaand encounters a vast ice landscape, naming it Te tai-ukaa-pia.”³⁸ This led American biologist Jerry Coyne to ask: “Doesn’t this journal do fact-checking, or do they accept all dubious claims from a group if it’s ‘minoritized’? They at least should say ‘claimed timeline.’”³⁹

Coyne’s criticism illustrates a broader concern: whether claims associated with indigenous knowledge are sometimes subjected to less critical scrutiny than comparable historical or scientific claims. His question captures the core issue: the danger of identity politics overriding basic evidential standards in peer review. It is a phenomenon skeptics know well: the suspension critical scrutiny in the face of cultural deference.

The debate over the Polynesian discovery of Antarctica raises a broader question: should cultural traditions be allowed to influence the standards by which historical and scientific claims are evaluated? When this occurs, it risks weakening public trust in both science, and the institutions charged with defending it. It is essential that evidence should be assessed using unwavering standards regardless of the cultural, political, or ideological origin.

The Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 2 in 2025 providing $1 billion in funding to create the Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA) program, giving parents greater freedom and flexibility in choosing educational environments for their children. Parents who choose to enroll their children outside the public school system—including a private religious school or homeschool—and are accepted into the program can use their child’s TEFA funds to pay for approved education-related expenses through the program marketplace.¹

The TEFA program would give participating families state funds to cover tuition, textbooks, and other education-related costs through education savings accounts. The program is universal and available to all Texas families with K-12 students.²

Families that enroll their child in an accredited private school will receive a scholarship worth $10,474, while homeschooling families will receive $2,000 in funding. Students with disabilities can receive up to $30,000 in funding. There is a multi-tiered priority system to determine which students are awarded scholarships under the funding cap.³

In theory, such programs would give children an educational opportunity they would not otherwise have. Materially, students already in private or home school are most likely to benefit. The Texas law is written to benefit families who know how to navigate complicated education systems.⁴ Most of Texas’s school voucher applications have come from white families and children who previously attended a private school or home-school.⁵

School-choice enthusiasts have tried and failed for more than sixty years to create a voucher program in Texas. Texas’s first foray with vouchers came in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools. Following that ruling, segregationist legislators explored ways to keep Hispanic and Black kids from attending schools with non-Hispanic white students. One unsuccessful idea was for the state to subsidize tuition at private schools for parents who did not want their children to attend an integrated school.⁶

Voucher proponents have since amended their case. They now argue school-choice is a way to empower poor and minority families to get their kids out of underperforming public schools and into charters and private schools that are presumed to deliver better education.⁷

Teachers and administrators cite considerable evidence showing that vouchers—far from empowering poor families—subsidize wealthy parents who can already afford to pay private school tuition. Poor parents, meanwhile, still cannot send their kids to private schools because tuition often far exceeds the voucher subsidy.⁸

Of the nearly 275,000 TEFA applicants statewide, barely a quarter were currently enrolled in public schools. Experts largely attributed the disparity to the reality that $10,500 is generally not enough to pay for private school. Although lower-income families comprise a majority of TEFA awardees, they were the least likely to apply to the program. The more economically disadvantaged a school district was, the fewer families from that district applied. Rural districts made up only 11 percent of applications; more than half the applicants came from large cities and suburbs. This effect among lower-income and rural communities is common in other states with voucher programs. School voucher programs are often the least accessible to the people policy-makers say most they intended to serve.⁹

Texas is a spearhead of a national campaign to end the separation of church and state.

Texas would be redirecting public funds into private education at an unprecedented scale.¹⁰ Parents may spend their child’s voucher funds in the TEFA marketplace to hire private tutors and special education and therapy service providers. They may purchase textbooks and faith-based curriculum materials. They may use the funds to pay for Bible studies and extracurricular activities such as horseback riding and Christian summer camps. They may use state tax dollars to pay for online courses taught by artificial intelligence.¹¹

Texas is a spearhead of a national campaign to end the separation of church and state.¹² Some Texas Republicans and evangelical Christian fundamentalists have been exhorting Bible study to be mandatory in public schools, which, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, violates the separation of church and state outlined in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.¹³ The lieutenant governor declared the phrase “separation of church and state” has “no constitutional basis” and should no longer be used by public officials.¹⁴

According to journalist Alec MacGillis, the current voucher movement began in the 1990s in Ohio as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools, later expanded to a wider effort.¹⁵ What occurred in Ohio is an illustration of a development that would otherwise be unnoticed. The Ohio campaign—organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, a leading advocate for vouchers—provides a lesson and model that voucher advocates have deployed in other states: Characterize school choice as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools, a civil rights cause. Thus, one must ask: 

1. Is the current Texas Education Freedom Accounts program a concealed effort to finance parochial schools? And if so,
2. Is it ultimately a result of White Christian nationalists (WCN) exerting influence on Texas’s public education policy-making processes?

Adherents to WCN ideologies are increasingly exerting influence on public education policy-making processes at both state and local levels and are having an increasing effect on public education in the U.S.^16, 17

WCN can be understood as a “cultural framework—a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems—that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.”¹⁸ White people are its primary proponents, seeking to connect a mythic Christian past with a political vision for America’s future, and often embracing authoritarian means of social control to maintain a White-Christian-dominant social hierarchy.¹⁹ Surveys in 2022 and 2024 found that 30 percent of Americans qualified as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers.²⁰ White Christian nationalists believe the “American government should unapologetically privilege Christianity.”²¹

Burke and colleagues outlined four assumptions of White Christian nationalism. These assumptions lead to a vision of public schooling holding that because education is a powerful social system that shapes national identity and ideologies, it should actively promote Christianity and/or Christian values.²²

Many conservative Christians have been emboldened and have embraced the ideology of Christian nationalism.²³ The White Christian nationalist movement has galvanized parent, community, and larger-scale political groups whose guiding ethos challenges teacher professional roles in shaping literacy curriculum and instruction.²⁴

The Seven Mountains, which would extend Christian dominion over the nation, calls on Christians to establish the physical Kingdom of God on earth.²⁵ It argues that for a Christian theocracy to become the theology and law of the land, Christians must seize control of the seven spheres or “mountains,” which include: religion, family, government, media, arts, entertaining, and education.²⁶ Thus, White Christian nationalists’ political organizing frequently targets public school curriculum, instruction, and policies regarded as “unbiblical” or “unconstitutional.”²⁷

Legislative actions exemplify how lawmakers have advocated reshaping public education into a tool to advance White Christian nationalist ideology. By mandating religious instruction, restricting inclusive curricula, empowering religious ideology to overlap with public education, and targeting already marginalized students, these policies aim to shape public schools in ways that teach an exclusionary cultural vision of America and Americans.²⁸

Behind the Texas Christian nationalist campaign are two West Texas oil billionaires who have spent $45 million reshaping state government to their theological vision.

Burke and Hadley trace the increasing influence of White Christian nationalism to the U.S. Supreme Court’s reorientation under Chief Justice Roberts, which is reinforced by executive branch policies in President Trump’s second term.^29, 30 Trump has capitalized on growing skepticism of public schools, who called Texas GOP lawmakers himself to urge them to pass this part of his education agenda.³¹ For many Republican-controlled state governments, Trump’s presidency and recent Supreme Court rulings have had an emboldening effect regarding enacting White Christian nationalist’s educational policies.³²

Behind the Texas Christian nationalist campaign are two West Texas oil billionaires who have spent $45 million since 2000 reshaping state government to their theological vision: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. Nearly every Republican in the Texas legislature depends on their financial support. Wilks’s and Dunn’s ground-level strategy befalls school board meetings across Texas, causing as much disruption and chaos as possible to undermine public confidence in existing institutions to make space for Christian alternatives.³³

Are the TEFA program and other recent State educational policies manifestations of WCN ideologies exerting influence on Texas’s public education policy-making processes? Consider Texas’s educational policies.

Senate Bill 763 allows Texas schools to use safety funds to pay unlicensed chaplains to work in mental health roles. Volunteer chaplains will also be allowed in schools.³⁴

Little Patriots—launched publicly in 2021—developed a supplemental curriculum for elementary school students that was said to compensate for a lack of emphasis on “the good things of our nation.” The initial curriculum contained an emphasis on Christianity in U.S. history, including the erroneous assertion that the founding fathers were all Christians. An early version of the curriculum was heavily criticized for what many called an oversized emphasis on Christianity. This curriculum eventually became Bluebonnet Learning. In addition to the Christian influence, critics say the materials “whitewash” negative events consequential to the early history of the U.S., including the brutal treatment of Native Americans and the foundational role played by slavery.³⁵

The Texas education board voted to allow Bluebonnet Learning Bible-infused teachings in elementary schools under an optional curriculum using materials created by the Texas Education Agency following instructions from the state Legislature.^36, 37 Supporters of Bluebonnet Learning say the Bible is a fundamental part of U.S. history. They argue that children’s literacy skills would suffer without a robust understanding of Bible references because Christian themes are pervasive in American culture.³⁸

A Texas law provides public school teachers with immunity from prosecution if they violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which bars government sponsorship of or favoritism toward any religion over another.³⁹

Conservative Christian activist David Barton would serve as one of several expert content advisers for the social studies standards revamp. Barton views church-state separation as a myth and the Ten Commandments as foundational to American education.⁴⁰ A draft of new social studies standards approved by the State Board of Education in April 2026 requires that references to Islamic contributions to algebra and astronomy be removed.⁴¹

Barton is the founder of WallBuilders, a Christian advocacy group that believes the U.S.’s biblical foundation is under constant attack and that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation.⁴² Farris Wilks, the West Texas oil billionaire, has funneled over $3 million into Barton’s WallBuilders organization, which functions as a bill mill, drafting Christian nationalist legislation designed for replication nationwide.⁴³

Texas’s law requiring classroom display of the Ten Commandments wound its way through the courts. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery found that Texas Senate Bill 10 “impermissibly takes sides on theological questions and officially favors Christian denominations over others.” He ordered a preliminary injunction to block some school districts in Texas from implementing the law.⁴⁴ In his ruling, Biery wrote that children’s exposure to a state-approved Christian version of the biblical document was coercive.⁴⁵

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in April 2026 reversed the lower court’s decision. Dissenting judges warned that the ruling trampled on the First Amendment and decades of Supreme Court precedent.⁴⁶

Senate Bill 11 requires school boards to decide whether to provide a daily devotional period that students could attend during non-instructional hours to pray and/or read the Bible or other religious texts. The bill is part of a slate of bills approved in recent legislative sessions that aim to promote a conservative brand of Christianity in public education and test the legal limits of church-state separation.⁴⁷

A 2023 state law required the Texas Education Agency to create a list of reading materials for the Texas State Board of Education’s consideration, with schools required to teach the materials beginning in the 2030-31 school year.⁴⁸ The proposed list includes religious excerpts with a Christian focus.⁴⁹ A total of 11 passages from the Christian Bible would become required reading if the list is approved.⁵⁰

Texas is the first state to require Biblical reading for all public school students.

On June 26, 2026, the Texas State Board of Education voted 9-4 vote along party lines to require Bible stories in public schools; the Board also approved a mandatory reading list and a rewrite of K-8 social studies lessons that minimize racial, geographic, and cultural diversity. The statewide reading list requires that schools teach Bible material to children as young as 6-years-old up to young-adults preparing to receive their diplomas. The list includes Christian stories about Adam and Eve, the eight Beatitudes, and the Parable of the Prodigal Son.⁵¹

Texas is the first state to require Biblical reading for all public school students. State Board of Education member Brandon Hall celebrated the inclusion of Bible passages in Texas’s public school curriculum, attributing the decision to divine guidance.⁵²

The new standards favor Christianity and certain Christian denominations over others.⁵³ Texas rabbis and Jewish scholars argue the curriculum’s framing is inaccurate; nearly all Hebrew Bible selections use Protestant translations and present Judaism through a Christian lens. Only one reading uses a Jewish translation. Critics say no Jewish leaders were consulted and the actual selections risk promoting one religious viewpoint over others.⁵⁴ According to historians, there are at least 900 English translations of the Christian Bible. Thus making it unlikely that a selection exists that would satisfy the wide array of Christian and Jewish denominations.⁵⁵

In summary and conclusion, Texas is a spearhead of a national campaign to end the separation of church and state. Assumptions of White Christian nationalism lead to a vision of public schooling holding that because education is a powerful social system, it should actively promote Christianity and/or Christian values. The school voucher movement began as a concealed effort to finance parochial schools by characterizing school choice as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools. 

Materially, students already in private or home school are most likely to benefit.

The Texas Legislature created the TEFA program; parents may enroll their children in private religious schools. Most voucher applications have come from white families and children who previously attended a private school. School voucher programs are often the least accessible to the people policy-makers say they most aim to serve.

A robotaxi stops awkwardly in traffic. A Waymo gets confused near a construction zone. A child runs into the street and is struck. A fleet of empty autonomous cars circles a residential neighborhood. A self-driving vehicle passes a stopped school bus. The incident becomes a headline, then a symbol, then a warning: See? The robots are dangerous. But this is exactly where skepticism is needed. What if, despite the headlines, driverless cars actually make fewer mistakes, and less deadly mistakes, than human drivers?

Human driving is not a gold standard but more of a mass-casualty system we have normalized. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported 39,254 traffic deaths in the United States in 2024, with a fatality rate of 1.19 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Its early estimate for 2025 was 36,640 deaths, still a staggering number. Distracted driving alone killed 3,208 people and injured an estimated 315,167 in 2024. ^1, 2

Those numbers are so large that they are hard to fathom. A human driver drifts across the centerline, runs a red light, texts through an intersection, falls asleep, or drives home drunk—tragic but familiar. A robotaxi makes a mistake, and it becomes a referendum on the future of the technology. 

So, the question isn’t really whether driverless cars are perfect, but whether they are safer than us. The human driver is the control group. 

The Failures 

In January 2026, a Waymo vehicle struck a child near a school in Southern California. According to reporting on the NHTSA investigation, the child ran into the street from behind a parked vehicle, and the Waymo braked from about 17 mph to under 6 mph before impact. The child reportedly suffered minor injuries. Waymo has said its simulation suggested a human driver would likely have hit the child at a higher speed, but federal investigators opened a preliminary evaluation to examine the event and related safety questions.³

Human driving is not a gold standard but more of a mass-casualty system we have normalized.

This is the kind of incident that frightens people the most. Children near schools are exactly the kind of vulnerable road users any autonomous system must handle with extreme caution. But it is also exactly the kind of incident that must be compared honestly. Children sometimes dart into roads from behind obstructions. Human drivers often do not see them in time. If an autonomous vehicle slows dramatically before impact, and if a human driver would likely have hit at greater speed, the incident is a test of whether the technology is reducing harm in the real world more so than a simple indictment of the failure of the technology to prevent the accident. 

Waymo has also faced serious scrutiny for passing stopped school buses. Reuters reported in 2026 that U.S. auto safety regulators were investigating Waymo after its robotaxis passed stopped school buses in Austin and Atlanta. The company reportedly identified a software problem that could cause vehicles to slow or stop, then proceed when school-bus stop arms were deployed. Waymo issued a voluntary recall to address the issue, though Austin officials later reported additional incidents after the earlier software update.⁴

Stopped school buses are among the clearest cases where the law deliberately prioritizes child safety over traffic flow. If autonomous vehicles fail there, the software needs correction, regulators need data, and deployment conditions may need to be tightened. But again, the key question is comparative and corrective: how often does this occur, how quickly is it fixed, and how does the rate compare with human drivers, who illegally pass stopped school buses by the thousands? 

There have been other embarrassing failures. In 2026, Waymo recalled 3,871 vehicles after reports that some entered closed freeway construction zones; 13 incidents were described, though no crashes or injuries. In Atlanta, residents complained that riderless Waymos were repeatedly circling a Buckhead neighborhood cul-de-sac, apparently using it as a holding area while waiting for ride requests.^5, 6

The human driver is the control group.

These incidents show that autonomous vehicles have distinctive failure modes. They may not get drunk, but they can misinterpret school-bus rules, construction zones, or fleet-routing logic. Second, they show why transparent reporting and regulators are necessary. Third, they show something critics often ignore: software problems can be corrected across an entire fleet. A human driver who passes a school bus may or may not learn. A software update, properly validated, can change the behavior of thousands of vehicles at once. 

That is a central feature of this technology: the errors are real, but they are also data that can correct the mistake. 

What “Self-driving” Actually Means 

The debate is often confused because “self-driving” is used casually to describe very different systems. The standard classification comes from SAE International and is used by regulators such as NHTSA. It defines six levels of driving automation, from Level 0 to Level 5.⁷

Level 0 means no driving automation. The human does all the driving, though the car may provide warnings or momentary assistance. 

Level 1 means driver assistance. The system may help with steering or speed, but not both as a sustained automated driving task. Adaptive cruise control is a common example. 

Level 2 means partial driving automation. The system may control steering and speed at the same time, but the human driver must continuously supervise and remain responsible. Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Supervised fall into this broad category, despite the marketing confusion created by names such as “Full Self-Driving.” 

Level 3 means conditional driving automation. The vehicle can perform the driving task under certain conditions, but the human must be ready to take over when the system requests it. This is one of the most psychologically difficult levels because it expects a human to stop paying active attention, but then suddenly resume control when something unusual happens. 

Level 4 means high driving automation. The vehicle can perform the entire driving task within a defined operational design domain—for example, certain cities, roads, speeds, and weather conditions—without needing a human driver. Waymo robotaxis are the leading real-world example. 

Level 5 means full driving automation everywhere a human could drive. This is the science-fiction version: any road, any weather, any condition. No deployed consumer system has reached Level 5. 

This distinction is essential. A crash involving a Tesla driver using a Level 2 driver-assistance system is not the same category of evidence as a crash involving a Level 4 Waymo robotaxi with no driver. In Level 2, the human is still part of the safety system. In Level 4, the automated system is the driver within its operating domain. NHTSA’s crash-reporting framework reflects this distinction by separating automated driving systems from Level 2 advanced driver-assistance systems.⁸

Collapsing these systems into one category—as is often done in mainstream media discourse—is not unlike judging commercial aviation by including toy drones, hang gliders, and fighter jets in your assessment. It creates more heat than light! 

Google, Waymo, and Tesla 

Waymo began as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009. The project logged autonomous miles, developed custom sensors and software, and eventually became Waymo in 2016 as part of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Waymo’s own timeline notes that the Google project began in 2009, completed a fully autonomous ride on public roads in 2015, and became Waymo in 2016.⁹

The long history is significant because the public often treats driverless cars as a sudden, recent tech fad. They are not. They are the product of more than a decade of engineering, mapping, simulation, sensor development, regulatory fights, and road testing. Waymo’s current system is not just “a car without a driver.” It is a fleet-based, heavily mapped, geofenced autonomous driving service built on a long development history. 

Tesla is pursuing a different path. Rather than relying on the same type of lidar-heavy, geofenced robotaxi model, Tesla has emphasized camera-based systems and scale through consumer vehicles. In June 2025, Tesla launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, with select users and safety monitors in the passenger seat. Tesla’s ambitions are enormous, but its safety evidence should be evaluated separately from Waymo’s. Tesla’s Level 2 supervised systems and emerging robotaxi program should not be treated as if they have already proven what Waymo has begun to demonstrate over tens of millions of fully driverless miles.¹⁰

If an article criticizes “self-driving cars” using Tesla Autopilot incidents, then uses that criticism to restrict Waymo robotaxis, it is mixing categories. The same is true when news reporting slams Tesla after a Waymo drives aimlessly in a loop. A skeptic should reject that kind of sloppy reasoning.

The Safety Studies 

For many years, the strongest argument against driverless cars was simple: we did not yet have enough real-world driverless miles to know whether they were safer. That objection was reasonable. It is becoming less so. 

The strongest safety evidence currently comes from Waymo’s Level 4 robotaxi service. A 2024 paper in Traffic Injury Prevention analyzed 7.14 million Waymo rider-only miles in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It found that Waymo’s any-injury-reported crash rate was 0.6 per million miles, compared with 2.80 per million miles for the human benchmark—an estimated 80 percent reduction. Police-reported crash rates were also lower: 2.1 per million miles for Waymo versus 4.68 for the human benchmark.¹¹

A human weakness (in the context of driving) is often permanent, while a software weakness is often solvable through more research.

A larger 2025 analysis examined 56.7 million Waymo rider-only miles through January 2025. It found statistically significant reductions in any-injury-reported crashes, airbag-deployment crashes, and suspected-serious-injury-or-worse crashes. In vehicle-to-vehicle intersection crashes, the study found a 96 percent reduction in any-injury-reported events and a 91 percent reduction in airbag-deployment events. The authors reported no statistically significant safety disbenefit in any of the 11 crash-type groups examined.¹²

That is not proof that all autonomous vehicles are safer everywhere, but it does show that one mature Level 4 system, operating in defined environments, is performing much better than comparable human drivers on important crash measures. 

Insurance evidence points in the same direction. A Swiss Re and Waymo analysis compared Waymo’s fully autonomous driving with human-driven liability claims. Across 25.3 million fully autonomous miles, Waymo vehicles had an 88 percent reduction in property-damage claims and a 92 percent reduction in bodily-injury claims compared with human-driver baselines. The benchmark was based on Swiss Re data from more than 500,000 claims and more than 200 billion miles of exposure.¹³

This is rather important because insurance companies are not paid to be impressed by technology. They are paid to price risk. If autonomous vehicles generate fewer crashes and fewer injury claims, the economic consequences will be enormous. 

Fully independent research is somewhat more mixed, but still promising. A 2024 Nature Communications matched case-control study compared 2,100 crashes involving vehicles equipped with advanced driving systems or advanced driver-assistance systems with 35,113 human-driven vehicle crashes. The study found that vehicles with advanced systems generally had lower accident risk than human-driven vehicles in most comparable scenarios. But it also found specific weaknesses: advanced systems showed higher accident odds in dawn/dusk conditions and in turning scenarios.¹⁴

That finding should not be hidden. The evidence shows that autonomous vehicles have different strengths and weaknesses from humans. They do not get drunk, tired, or distracted, but they may struggle in edge cases involving lighting, unusual road geometry, construction, emergency scenes, or unpredictable pedestrians. 

A serious policy would ask: where are they safer, where are they weaker, and how do we improve the weak spots? 

Driving at Dawn and Dusk 

The dawn/dusk problem is a good example of how technological systems improve. A human weakness (in the context of driving) is often permanent, while a software weakness is often solvable through more research. 

Why? Humans have biological limits. We suffer glare, fatigue, alcohol impairment, distraction, anger, overconfidence, and boredom. We may improve with training, but the human nervous system is not updated over the air. A fleet of autonomous vehicles can be. If dawn and dusk are difficult because of sensor contrast, glare, shadows, or object classification, engineers can gather data, retrain models, improve sensor fusion, adjust operating limits, and deploy software updates. Every failure, near miss, and edge case can be used to improve the system for all vehicles.¹⁵

This is why early mishaps should not be treated as permanent indictments. The Wright brothers did not prove aviation unsafe because early airplanes crashed. Early elevators, trains, automobiles, and medical devices all had failure modes that later engineering reduced. The rational question is whether the technology has a path to becoming better than the status quo, and the answer is that driverless cars do. 

Human Monitoring 

One popular political compromise is to require a human safety operator inside autonomous vehicles. This sounds cautious, but often it is disingenuous. 

Humans are not good at supervising automation that works most of the time but may suddenly fail. This is a well-known human-factors problem. When automation handles a task reliably for long periods, human vigilance declines. People become bored, distracted, or mentally detached. Then, when the system suddenly needs help, the human may not understand the situation quickly enough to intervene safely. 

That is one reason Level 3 automation is conceptually dangerous: it asks the person to be out of the loop until the very moment the system cannot handle the situation. A 2015 analysis in Science Robotics and related human-factors research have warned that expecting humans to monitor increasingly capable automated systems can be unsafe because it leaves humans responsible for rare, sudden, high-stakes interventions after long periods of inactivity.¹⁶

If the human is actually driving, then the autonomous vehicle has effectively been banned.

Google learned this lesson early. In 2013, before Waymo was spun out as an Alphabet company, Google developed a semi-autonomous highway system called AutoPilot. Employees testing it were told to keep their eyes on the road, and Google reportedly used cameras inside the cars to check whether they complied. But the system worked well enough that some testers became too comfortable; after one employee fell asleep while the car was traveling about 55 mph, Google shut down the project and turned away from driver-assistance toward fully autonomous driving. The lesson was exactly the opposite of what some politicians now propose. If the vehicle is doing nearly all the driving, the human becomes less attentive, not more.¹⁷

Early Google testing data also showed why relying on occasional human rescue is not a long-term solution. In Google’s 2015 California disengagement report, there were 69 events over 424,331 autonomous miles in which safe operation required the human driver to take over; Google’s simulator estimated that 13 of those would have resulted in contact with another object if the driver had not intervened. But those events were also fed back into the software-development process, and improved the entire fleet.¹⁸

So, when politicians say every autonomous car or truck should contain a human driver, the question is: doing what? If the human is actually driving, then the autonomous vehicle has effectively been banned. If the human is merely monitoring, then the law may be creating a false sense of safety. The person may be bored, inattentive, and unprepared precisely because the machine is doing nearly all the work. 

Why Anecdotes Dominate the Debate 

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for integrating psychological research into economics, spent much of his career studying judgment under uncertainty. With Amos Tversky, he helped develop the idea of the availability heuristic: people judge the frequency or importance of events partly by how easily examples come to mind. Vivid events feel common. Dramatic events feel representative. Familiar statistical carnage fades into the background.^19, 20

Kahneman discussed examples such as fear during periods of suicide bombings on buses in Israel. The events were rare in statistical terms, but the images were so vivid and emotionally available that people changed their behavior around them.²¹

Driverless cars trigger the same psychology. A human-caused crash is ordinary. A robot-caused crash is memorable. An autonomous vehicle hitting a child, even at low speed, becomes an emblem of technological danger. A human driver killing someone while drunk becomes one more tragic entry in a familiar category. 

Journalists have incentives to amplify the availability bias. “Human driver rear-ends car” is not a story. “Robotaxi hits child” is. That does not, of course, mean that journalists should ignore robotaxi incidents. Rather, it means responsible reporting should include denominators: miles driven, crash rates, injury severity, comparison with human benchmarks, road type, time of day, weather, and whether the failure has been corrected. Anecdotes don’t accurately represent risk. 

The New Luddites 

The original Luddites were skilled textile workers in early nineteenth-century Britain who destroyed machinery they believed threatened their livelihoods. They were not simply ignorant enemies of technology—they were responding to real economic disruption, wage pressure, and loss of control over their trades.²² The modern advancements in automation are similar. Self-driving vehicles will threaten jobs. Taxi drivers, truck drivers, delivery drivers, and ride-share drivers are real people. They have families, mortgages, and skills tied to a labor market that may change faster than they can. 

Some politicians respond with, I submit, misguided policy. For example, New York State Sen. Luis Sepúlveda’s “Take the Wheel Act” would require a driver to be present in all for-hire motor vehicles, physically seated behind the wheel and engaged in driving. The bill’s justification explicitly says it is intended to “preserve livelihoods,” protect taxi and for-hire drivers, and prevent self-driving cars from delivering a “fatal blow” to the industry.²³ And that is the key admission: The law is not just about safety of autonomous vehicles but more so about artificially protecting jobs. 

Sen. Josh Hawley has made a similar argument nationally. In 2025, Business Insider reported that Hawley wanted to ban autonomous vehicles and that draft legislation would require human safety operators in autonomous vehicles on public roads. Hawley connected the issue directly to workers such as truck drivers, taxi drivers, Uber drivers, and unionized transportation workers.²⁴

California has seen the same fight over autonomous trucks. Assembly Bill 316 would have required human drivers onboard autonomous trucks over 10,000 pounds. Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill in 2023, saying it would ban driverless testing and operation of heavy-duty autonomous vehicles and that existing regulatory authorities were sufficient. Unions supported the bill as a way to protect truck-driving jobs.²⁵

The Teamsters have also backed Nevada legislation requiring human safety operators in commercial vehicles over 26,000 pounds, explicitly describing the effort as a way to protect good middle-class jobs.²⁶

There is nothing wrong with caring about workers. But there is something wrong with calling a job-protection law a safety law if the evidence shows the machine may be safer than the mandated human. If the law requires a driverless car to have a driver, it has not regulated driverless cars. It has, effectively, banned them. 

The Consumer and Taxpayer Side of the Ledger 

Labor unions often speak as if the only moral issue is protecting workers whose jobs are threatened. But consumers and taxpayers matter too. 

Driving labor is expensive. The American Transportation Research Institute reported that in 2024 the average marginal cost of trucking was about $2.26 per mile, while driver wages alone were about 79.8 cents per mile. Driver benefits added roughly another 19.7 cents per mile. Together, wages and benefits approached $1.00 per mile, making driver compensation one of the largest components of trucking cost.²⁷ That cost is not absorbed by corporations—it is passed through supply chains into the price of food, clothing, appliances, building materials, and nearly everything else moved by truck. 

Analyses of autonomous trucking have estimated large potential savings. A McKinsey analysis summarized by NAIOP estimated that full autonomy could reduce trucking operating costs by about 45 percent, with possible savings of $85 billion to $125 billion annually.²⁸

Even if those estimates prove too optimistic, the direction is obvious. Removing or reducing driver labor in long-haul trucking would reduce freight costs. Lower freight costs would reduce consumer prices, especially for goods that move long distances. This matters most to ordinary consumers, including lower-income households for whom transportation and goods prices consume a larger share of income. 

Insurance is another consumer benefit. If autonomous vehicles reduce crashes, they should eventually reduce liability costs and insurance premiums. While today’s autonomous vehicles may be expensive to repair because of sensors, cameras, and specialized parts, over time, fewer crashes and fewer injury claims should reduce the risk component of insurance pricing. 

A government that depends on human error, speeding, and traffic violations for revenue has a perverse incentive.

This is not speculation in the abstract. The Swiss Re-Waymo study found large reductions in property-damage and bodily-injury claims for Waymo compared with human-driver baselines. KPMG has estimated that widespread vehicle automation could sharply reduce accident frequency and auto-insurance loss costs over time, even as the insurance industry changes because liability may shift from individual drivers toward manufacturers, fleet operators, and software providers.^29, 30

For the average family, the implications are enormous. Auto insurance is a major household expense. Recent consumer insurance estimates put average full-coverage auto insurance at several thousand dollars per year in the United States, though prices vary widely by state, driver, vehicle, and coverage. A future with fewer crashes, fewer injuries, and lower liability losses should eventually mean lower consumer costs, even if the transition is uneven.³¹

This is the part labor-protection politics often omits. Protecting driving jobs by law does not come free. Consumers pay through higher freight costs, higher ride costs, higher insurance costs, and higher taxes for crash response, congestion, policing, and road trauma. 

There is one form of public “loss” that may actually reveal the upside of driverless cars: fewer traffic tickets. The Mineta Transportation Institute estimates that traffic violations generate about $6 billion annually for states and municipalities, and that widespread autonomous-vehicle use could sharply reduce those revenues because AVs are designed to obey speed limits, traffic signals, following-distance rules, and other laws. That may create a budget problem for some jurisdictions, but it is a strange objection to safer roads. A government that depends on human error, speeding, and traffic violations for revenue has a perverse incentive. The public should not preserve dangerous driving because municipalities have grown accustomed to taxing it!³²

Help Workers, Don’t Preserve Danger 

The humane response to automation is transition support. Truck drivers, taxi drivers, and ride-share drivers did not create the economic forces threatening their jobs. Many have worked hard for decades. Some are older. Some have limited formal education. Some live in regions where alternative jobs are not easy to find. A decent society should not casually tell them to “learn to code.” The solution is wage insurance, retraining, relocation support, retirement bridges for older workers, transition funds, and new employment pathways in fleet maintenance, remote assistance, logistics, vehicle cleaning, charging infrastructure, mapping, dispatch, and safety operations. If autonomous vehicles save consumers, insurers, and logistics firms billions of dollars, then part of those gains can be used to help workers adjust. 

That is very different from forcing every autonomous truck or taxi to carry an unnecessary human driver forever. That policy preserves a job title by preserving inefficiency. If the vehicle is safer without the human, it may also preserve danger. The moral line, I submit, is clear: help workers directly; do not protect jobs by banning safer technology. 

The Future 

The current debate is mostly about mixed traffic: autonomous vehicles sharing roads with human drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, delivery trucks, emergency vehicles, and confused tourists. That is the hardest world for driverless systems because human behavior is unpredictable. The future may look very different. 

If most or all vehicles become autonomous, the road system becomes a network rather than a contest among individual drivers. Vehicles could communicate with each other and with infrastructure, coordinate merging, spacing, routing, speed, and intersection timing. Reviews of connected and automated vehicles have found that vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication can improve traffic flow, routing, congestion management, and energy efficiency, though the benefits depend heavily on deployment and governance.³³

The driverless-car debate is a test of whether we can think statistically about safety, honestly about economics, and humanely about labor disruption.

This could reduce not only crashes but wasted time. Traffic jams are not just annoying. They waste fuel, increase emissions, delay deliveries, raise freight costs, and reduce productivity. Coordinated autonomous vehicles could smooth traffic waves, reduce stop-and-go driving, improve routing, and reduce costly delays. 

The climate benefits are plausible but not automatic. Autonomous vehicles could reduce emissions through smoother driving, optimized routing, platooning, and better energy management. Truck platooning studies have found fuel or emissions reductions that can range from a few percent to double-digit savings, depending on spacing and position in the platoon. But autonomous vehicles could also increase total miles traveled if they make travel cheaper and easier. The climate outcome will depend on whether the fleet is electric, shared, efficiently routed, and integrated with public transportation rather than simply adding more empty vehicle miles. The National Academies has warned that the environmental effects of vehicle automation could be positive or negative depending on deployment.^34, 35

There are also implications for crime and policing. In a mature autonomous system, high-speed police chases could become rarer because vehicles could be designed to refuse reckless commands, obey speed constraints, or coordinate with law enforcement under clear legal protocols. Stolen-car getaways could become harder if vehicles require authenticated users and cannot be easily commandeered. Highway patrol might eventually spend less time on speeding, drunk driving, reckless driving, and crash response, though resources would likely shift toward cybersecurity, traffic-system oversight, privacy protection, and emergency management. 

This future raises civil-liberties questions. A vehicle that can refuse to flee police might also be a vehicle that can be tracked or controlled. Those concerns deserve attention, and are important reasons to build legal safeguards into the system. 

Regulation 

A skeptical policy would, naturally, reject extremes. It would reject Silicon Valley hype. Companies have incentives to exaggerate safety, understate failures, and deploy quickly. Regulators should demand data, not slogans. But it would also reject political panic: fear of a new technology is not evidence, just as a viral clip isn’t a crash-rate study or a union press release isn’t a safety analysis. 

RAND warned years ago that proving autonomous vehicle safety by road testing alone is statistically difficult because fatal crashes are rare events per mile. Fully autonomous vehicles might need hundreds of millions or even billions of miles to demonstrate safety with conventional statistical confidence, meaning regulators need adaptive approaches rather than waiting for impossible certainty.³⁶

That means we need transparent reporting of miles driven, crashes, injuries, disengagements where relevant, operating domains, weather conditions, road types, software versions, and corrective actions. We need independent audits, first-responder protocols, cybersecurity standards, liability rules, and public data sufficient for outside researchers to evaluate safety claims. 

NHTSA’s Standing General Order is a step in this direction because it requires identified manufacturers and operators to report certain crashes involving automated driving systems and Level 2 driver-assistance systems.³⁷

Good regulation asks: where is the system safe enough to operate, under what conditions, and with what monitoring? Bad regulation says: even if the machine is safer, put a human behind the wheel forever. 

Driverless cars are not yet a universal solution. Waymo’s data do not prove that every company, every vehicle, every city, and every road is ready for full autonomy. Tesla’s robotaxi ambitions should be evaluated on Tesla’s evidence, not Waymo’s. Dawn and dusk remain technical challenges. School-bus violations and construction-zone errors require serious correction. Regulators must insist on transparency. 

But the evidence is now strong enough that critics must answer the nuanced, and much harder question: safer than whom? 

If autonomous vehicles are currently safer in some domains but not others, permit them in the domains where they are safer and restrict them where they are not. That is the rational approach. 

The driverless-car debate is a test of whether we can think statistically about safety, honestly about economics, and humanely about labor disruption. We can help workers without preserving dangerous work. We can regulate technology without banning it. We can investigate robotaxi failures without pretending human drivers are safe.

On this, the 81st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), it is altogether fitting to revisit the moral question of their development and use.

Operating under the best intelligence that indicated the Nazis were working on their own bomb project, it was clearly rational for the U.S. to undertake its own bomb project, initially instigated by Albert Einstein (aided by Leo Szilard) in the now-famous 1939 letter to President Roosevelt that “a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium” could lead “to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

Through numerous twists and turns, it came down to Leslie R. Groves—the military administrator and driving force behind the U.S. atomic bomb program—finding the right scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, to orchestrate a pantheon of independent thinkers and focus them on building the bomb before the enemy did.

But what if this ultimate weapon also ushers in a new world in which its development results in an arms race in which each side believes that the most rational strategy is to arm to the teeth … just in case the other side does? This is called the Hobbesian Trap (after Thomas Hobbes who first articulated the problem), or the security dilemma (after game theory analysis) or the other-guy problem—“I don’t want nukes but the other guy does, so….”

Thus, the approach-avoidance conflict that confronted Oppenheimer during and after Los Alamos. “We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life,” he analogized.

♦ ♦ ♦

On July 16, 1945, the Trinity plutonium bomb was detonated at the newly established White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, marking the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in history. Modern radiochemical analyses estimate its yield at approximately 25 kilotons of TNT. The blast sent a mushroom cloud roughly 38,000 feet (11.6 kilometers) into the atmosphere and left a broad, shallow crater at ground zero, where the intense heat fused desert sand into a radioactive greenish glass known as trinitite. The flash, sound, and shock wave were detected across a wide area of the Southwest; the explosion was visible as far away as El Paso, Texas, roughly 150 miles away.

On August 6, 1945, the Little Boy gun-type uranium-235 bomb exploded with an energy equivalent of 16–18 kilotons of TNT, flattening 69 percent of Hiroshima’s buildings and killing an estimated 80,000 people and injuring another 70,000.

Three days later the Fat Man plutonium implosion-type bomb with the energy equivalence of 19-23 kilotons of TNT leveled around 44 percent of Nagasaki, killing an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 people and severely wounding another 60,000.¹

As documented in the memo below dated August 10, 1945, if the Japanese had not surrendered Major General Groves had another Fat Man-type plutonium implosion bomb ready to go after August 24 that would have likely killed another 50,000 to 100,000 people.

Had the Japanese military hardliners had their way to continue the war into the fall, Groves had three more bombs readied for September and another three for October. Here he instructs his Chief of Staff that the next bomb will be ready to drop on after August 24. Emperor Hirohito capitulated on August 15, thereby saving millions of lives of his citizens. U.S. President Harry Truman was not exaggerating when he threatened Japan with “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this Earth.”

Like Oppenheimer, Truman agonized about dropping more nukes on Japan, troubled as he was by the thought of more innocents and noncombatants being killed. He wrestled that decision away from the military. (Note Groves’ handwritten addendum to his memo above that “It is not to be released on Japan without express authority from the President.” U.S. presidents have had sole authority to use nuclear weapons ever since.)

However, further bombings proved unnecessary. On August 15 Emperor Hirohito, against the wishes of many of Japan’s military leaders, who were plotting to kidnap him and force the nation to fight until the bitter end (they had five million soldiers and many millions of civilians prepared to resist invasion to the point of death), announced on the radio that Japan would capitulate. On September 2 they signed the surrender documents in Tokyo Bay, ending the Second World War.

Was the Atomic Bomb project necessary? Since 1945 a cadre of critics have proffered the claim that atomic bombs were unnecessary to bring about the end of World War II (or, at least, the Fat Man Nagasaki bomb was superfluous), and thus this act was immoral, illegal, or even a crime against humanity. Robert Oppenheimer and other physicists like Leo Szilard who worked on the Manhattan Project expressed reservations. “The physicists have known sin,” Oppenheimer opined. He went to Truman and confessed “Mr. President. I feel I have blood on my hands,” to which the President recalled “I told him the blood was on my hands—to let me worry about that.” Truman promptly dismissed Oppenheimer and told Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.”⁴

In 1946 the Federal Council of Churches issued a statement declaring, “As American Christians, we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb. We are agreed that, whatever be one’s judgment of the war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible.”⁵ In 1967 the linguist and longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy Noam Chomsky called the two bombings “the most unspeakable crimes in history.”⁶

More recently, in his history of genocide titled Worse Than War, the historian Daniel Goldhagen opens his analysis by calling the U.S. President Harry Truman “a mass murderer” because in ordering the use of atomic weapons he “chose to snuff out the lives of approximately 300,000 men, women, and children.” Goldhagen opines that “it is hard to understand how any right-thinking person could fail to call slaughtering unthreatening Japanese mass murder.”⁷ Goldhagen defines “genocide” broadly enough to equate it with “mass murder” (without ever defining what, exactly, that means). In morally equating Harry Truman with Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot, Goldhagen allows himself to be constrained by the categorical thinking that prevents one from discerning the different kinds, levels, and motives for large scale military aggression. By this reasoning, nearly every act that kills a large number of people could be considered genocidal because there are only two categories—mass murder and non-mass murder.

By contrast, continuous thinking allows us to distinguish the differences between types of mass killings (some scholars define genocide as one-sided killing by armed people of unarmed people), their context (during a state war, civil war, ethnic cleansing), motivations (termination of hostilities or extermination of a people), and quantities (hundreds to millions) along a sliding scale. In 1946 the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin created the term genocide and defined it as “a conspiracy to exterminate national, religious, or racial groups.”⁸ That same year the U.N. General Assembly defined genocide as “a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.”⁹ More recently, in 1994 the highly respected philosopher Steven Katz defined genocide as “the actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in its totality any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender, or economic group.”¹⁰

By these definitions, the dropping of Fat Man and Little Boy were not acts of genocide. The difference between Truman and the others is in the context and motivation of the act. In their genocidal actions against targeted people, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot had as their objective the total elimination of a group. The killing would only stop when every last pursued person was exterminated (or if the perpetrators were stopped or defeated). Truman’s goal in dropping the bombs was to end the war with Japan (which it did), not to eliminate the Japanese people (which it didn’t). That the U.S. provided considerable financial, personnel, and material support to help rebuild Japan into a world economic power puts the lie to the eliminationist accusation.¹¹

More broadly morally, if we ground morality in the survival and flourishing of sentient beings,¹² by that measure, then not only did Fat Man and Little Boy end the war and stop the killing, the bombs saved lives—very probably millions of lives, both Japanese and American. My father, Richard Shermer, was possibly one such survivor.

During the Second World War he served aboard the USS Wren (DD-568), a Fletcher-class destroyer assigned to protect aircraft carriers and other large capital ships from Japanese submarines and from Kamikaze planes on what was called antiaircraft radar picket watch. His ship was so attacked several times but sustained no major damage. The Wren was part of the larger fleet that was working its way toward Japan, escorting the carriers whose planes were bombarding the Japanese homeland in preparation for the planned invasion. My father told me that everyone onboard dreaded that day because they had heard of the horrific carnage resulting from the invasion of just two tiny Japanese islands—Iwo Jima and Okinawa. If that was any indication of what was to come with a full-scale invasion, the contemplation of it was almost too much to bear.¹³

During the invasion of Iwo Jima there were approximately 26,000 American casualties that included 6,821 dead in the 36-day battle. How fiercely did the Japanese defend that little volcanic rock 700 miles from Japan? Of the 22,060 Japanese soldiers assigned to fight to the bitter end, only 216 survived.¹⁴ The subsequent battle for Okinawa, 340 miles from the Japanese mainland, was fought even more ferociously, resulting in a staggering body count of 240,931 dead, including 77,166 Japanese soldiers, 14,009 American soldiers, plus an additional 149,193 Japanese civilians living on the island who either died fighting or committed suicide rather than let themselves be captured.¹⁵ With an estimated five million Japanese soldiers and 28 million Japanese civilian militia prepared to defend their nation to the death,¹⁶ it was clear to all what an invasion of the Japanese mainland would entail.

It is from these cold hard facts that Truman’s advisors estimated that between 250,000 and one million American lives would be lost in an invasion of Japan.¹⁷ General Douglas MacArthur estimated that there could be a 22:1 ratio of Japanese to American deaths, which translates to a minimum death toll of 5.5 million Japanese.¹⁸ By comparison, cold though it may sound, the body count from both atomic bombs—about 200,000–300,000 total (Hiroshima: 90,000–166,000 deaths, Nagasaki: 60,000–80,000 deaths¹⁹)—was a bargain.

In any case, if Truman hadn’t ordered the bombs dropped, General Curtis LeMay and his fleet of B-29 bombers would have continued pummeling Tokyo and other Japanese cities into rubble. When asked to predict when the war would end based on his bombing program, LeMay said September 1, because that was when there would be nothing left of Japan to bomb. The death toll from conventional bombing would have been just as high as that produced by the two atomic bombs, if not higher. Previous mass bombing raids had produced Hiroshima-level death rates, and it is likely that more than just two cities would have been destroyed before the Japanese surrendered.

Compare, for example, Little Boy’s energy equivalent of 16,000–19,000 tons of TNT to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimate that this was the equivalent of 220 B-29s carrying 1,200 tons of incendiary bombs, 400 tons of high-explosive bombs, and 500 tons of anti-personnel fragmentation bombs, with an equivalent number of casualties. In fact, on the night of March 9-10, 1945, 279 B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of bombs on Tokyo, leveling 15.8 square miles of the city, killing 88,000 people, injuring another 41,000, and leaving another million homeless.²⁰

These facts also help refute the claim that the alternative scenario of dropping an atomic bomb on an uninhabited island or bay to demonstrate its destructive force would have worked to convince the Japanese to surrender. Given that Japan refused to capitulate even after numerous cities were obliterated by conventional bombs and Hiroshima was erased from the map by an atomic bomb, it seems unlikely this more benign strategy would have worked.²¹ And as noted earlier, even after the two atomic bombs were dropped, Japan’s military leaders were still determined to drive the country into total Götterdämmerung.

On balance, then, dropping the atomic bombs was the least destructive of the options on the table. Although we wouldn’t want to call it a moral act, it was in the context of the time the least immoral act by the criteria of lives saved. That said, we should also recognize that the several hundred thousand killed is still a colossal loss of life. The fact that the invisible killer of radiation continued its effects long after the bombings should dissuade us from ever using such weapons again.

Along that sliding scale of evil, in the context of one of the worst wars in human history that included the singularly destructive Holocaust of six million murdered, it was not, pace Chomsky, the most unspeakable crime in history—not even close—but it was an event in the annals of humanity never to be forgotten and, hopefully, never to be repeated.

Read Klaus Ziegler’s critique of this article, followed by my response.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously stated that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”¹

The mystery of subjective experience, also known as the “hard problem of consciousness,” concerns how and why we have such experiences at all. The subjective, first-person experiences of sensory and mental phenomena, such as the striking redness of a rose or the tang of a lemon on the tongue, are referred to as “qualia.” The ultimate quest of neuroscience is to explain how qualia are produced by the brain and to explain how it is that our brain produces a distinct sense of self—an entity experiencing those qualia, possessing also agency, a coherent sense of stability and continuity, and a personal narrative. 

Across history, most people have found it extremely difficult to conceive of conscious experience as the product of physical processes, often viewing the mind or soul as distinct from the body—humans are natural-born dualists.² People naturally hope—indeed are often convinced—that their consciousness is not extinguished by the death of the brain. Furthermore, we find our own subjective perceptions arrestingly compelling, failing to understand or accept how unreliable our minds are in many situations. Taken together, these natural human tendencies account for the widespread human belief in spirits, afterlives, and other forms of postmortem existence. The practice of burying the dead with tools, ornaments, and other goods among early Homo sapiens and possibly Neanderthals suggests that such ideas may have very deep roots. 

We are also strongly biased to see purpose everywhere, including in the universe itself. We long to feel that we are here for a special, intended reason.³ It is therefore unsurprising that theories portraying consciousness as fundamental to reality and pervading the universe have gained renewed attention and popularity in recent years. 

Despite these deep intuitive pulls, most scientifically credible theories of consciousness today are materialist (physicalist)—and for good reason: every other phenomenon once thought to require something beyond physical explanation has eventually yielded to one. Within that materialist frame, there are a number of competing theories at this still early stage in the science of consciousness. 

Leading Theories and Other Strong Contenders 

In a five-part series that I wrote for Psychology Today on the leading theories of consciousness,⁴ I described the specifics of the major candidate theories, drawing from an influential 2022 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper by Anil Seth and Timothy Bayne, outlining the four leading theories selected by the authors: 

1. Higher-Order Theories 
2. Global Workspace Theories and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory 
3. Integrated Information Theory 
4. Re-entry and Predictive Processing Theories 

These are indeed all strong contenders—perhaps more or less equally—but all four have weaknesses. For one thing, there is an insufficient emphasis on evolution.⁵ And, these theories variably—and often insufficiently—integrate attention, learning, and affect. There are other strong contenders that, I think, more satisfactorily address these elements, which I address in this article. 

Theories of consciousness must be firmly rooted in evolutionary biology.

It has been famously said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,⁶ yet consciousness seems so different from other biological functions—thoughts and feelings seem ethereal and untethered from anything physical. Self-awareness seems like a phenomenon utterly divorced from anything that could possibly be produced by cells comprised of physical particles. 

As soon as the first cell evolved there was an inside and an outside, and therefore the beginnings of a subjective-objective divide between the body and the outside world.

People used to think of life itself that way, too. Living things were believed to possess some sort of animating essence—élan vital—that accounted for their difference from inanimate matter. People could not imagine how the same material particles that comprise inanimate matter could be arranged in such a way as to make something alive without adding a special, mysterious nonmaterial essence. No one worries about that now because we know how biological processes give rise to living tissue and organisms. 

Likewise, we have long known from clinical neurology and from my own field, clinical psychiatry, that disruption, disassembly, or enhancement of brain circuitry—subtle or major—can radically alter any aspect of the mind. And yet the mystery of how exactly the brain produces consciousness remains unexplained. How does this emerge from an approximately three-pound organ with the consistency of tofu?⁷ How can a purely physical thing feel like something? The answer is to be found in an evolutionary process of emergence. 

In the Beginning 

Let’s go back nearly four billion years, long before animals had brains or even a nervous system, back to simple single-celled organisms like bacteria. This is not to suggest that simple unicellular organisms possessed consciousness, but they possessed its building blocks: behavior and the precursors of sensing, learning, and memory. 

Properly understood, behavior, detection (sensing), learning, and memory do not require a nervous system. Nervous systems evolved later, followed by central nervous systems, enabling greater coordination and behavioral flexibility. At the most basic level, responses to stimuli can be characterized as either approach (e.g., to a nutrient) or withdrawal (from something noxious or dangerous). Behaviors in more complex organisms are basically just more elaborate versions of this. In fact, some of the genes involved in learning are the same in complex animals as in protozoa, which are very primitive single-celled organisms lacking a nervous system and which evolved at least 1.5 billion years ago.⁸ Nervous systems, and especially more complex brains, ultimately enabled organisms to regulate their behavioral responses and internal physiological states through such capacities as: 

prediction, planning, delaying or inhibiting, remembering (storing patterns of information from past encounters), learning (modifying behavior through conditioning, or through remembering previous outcomes, or in higher animals through imitation), and weighing different behavioral responses (comparing), and evaluating outcomes of behavior. 

Consciousness probably evolved to enable nonreflexive behavior. By allowing organisms to maintain and manipulate internally generated representations detached from the immediate sensory environment, consciousness supports delayed responses, planning, mental simulation, and flexible action.⁹ And even in humans, most behavior is carried out by nonconscious processes. Here are some of the milestones in the evolution of cell signaling, nervous systems, and consciousness: 

• Primitive cell signaling began 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago in the first single-celled organisms (prokaryotes—bacteria and archaea—which reproduce asexually by simple cell division); followed around two billion years ago by larger, relatively more complex single-celled organisms (eukaryotes, such as protozoa; eukaryotes contain a nucleus and organelles and reproduce sexually, which introduces more genetic diversity). 
• Neurons formed diffuse (noncentralized) nerve nets in multicellular organisms (in hydra and jellyfish-like creatures) around 600–700 million years ago. 
• Precursors of centralized nervous systems in small, primitive worm-like creatures in the Cambrian period, began almost 550 million years ago. 
• More richly interconnected central nervous systems in more complex invertebrates and vertebrates appeared from the Cambrian period onward. 
• Progressively more sophisticated capacities of brains emerged in larger animals (fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and cephalopods) in the last few hundred million years, enabling them to form internal representations of their environment and of themselves (i.e., maps or models of their external environment and of their own body and actions), with correspondingly more flexible behaviors. 
• Many mammals and some birds developed a more advanced form of cognition, involving the capacity to form and manipulate complex internal models. Higher mammals may have developed a basic sense of self. Primates, especially humans, developed the ability to internally represent their own thinking patterns more reflectively. Probably only humans developed the ability to be aware of being aware, reflecting on their own existence as a conscious being. 

It’s worth noting that subjectivity is built into the very nature of life: as soon as the first cell evolved, there was an inside and an outside, and therefore the beginnings of a subjective-objective divide between the body and the outside world. Subjective experience is inaccessible to external observers. 

The Origins of Purpose and Meaning 

Purpose emerged with life itself, long before consciousness evolved. Living organisms act in ways that promote survival and reproduction, whether or not they possess consciousness. Consciousness evolved later as an adaptation that allowed more flexible control of behavior in pursuit of those biological aims. 

The mind is a kind of map.

Although a simple bacterium has no consciousness, it can nevertheless detect glucose in its environment, move toward it, and ingest it to convert it into energy. In a minimal biological sense, a bacterium behaves as an intentional agent, and it makes an “effort” to achieve its purpose or aim. An intentional agent can interpret patterns as being about something of value in its environment—glucose, for instance, signifies or means energy to the bacterium.¹⁰ An agent forms an internal representation of things in its environment (in this case, glucose) so as to recognize, respond to, and process that thing. These processes are entirely mechanistic, analogous to a lock-and-key interaction. The internal representation has meaning and value to the organism, in the sense that it represents something good or bad for the organism—promoting or impeding its survival and propagation. 

Thought and Information 

A thought is a representation of something, a likeness, a thing that depicts another thing by having characteristics that correspond to it. A picture, image, imprint, or mold of an object is a representation of that object, as is a map. The mind is a kind of map. The brain—and its functional product, the mind—evolved as a map of the body’s relation to its external environment. Our thoughts are maps representing things that our brains have either perceived with our senses, felt with our emotions, or formed as an action plan. 

Information requires a physical medium. Whether encoded in ink on paper, electronic states in a computer, or patterns of neural activity in a brain, information cannot exist independently of a physical representation. Thoughts, memories, and mental representations are therefore inseparable from their underlying neural substrate.¹¹ Information acquires meaning from its correspondence to actual things in the world and to other information. 

Internal representations are models of the body and the world, physically encoded in neural activity and connectivity. They have a relational nature to the reality they map; they are direct correlations to physical things. They arise when sensory systems transform physical signals—light (photons), sound (air vibrations), touch (mechanical stimuli), smell (chemicals), and signals from the body itself—into patterns of neural information. 

Thus, the brain forms models of the world and of itself in relation to the world. Through learning and experience, these networks become organized into increasingly sophisticated models that guide perception, memory, prediction, and behavior. The ability to form internal representations is a key ingredient of consciousness.¹²

Memory, Learning, and Emotion 

Brains evolved the ability to store salient representations, retrieve them later, integrate them with new information, and update them through experience. 

Memories and concepts are encoded in distributed networks spanning many brain regions. Just as no single pixel contains an image, no single neuron contains a memory or concept. Furthermore, individual neurons participate in numerous overlapping representations, allowing memories to be interconnected and associated with one another. This also helps explain how the brain can store vast amounts of information while flexibly integrating new experiences with old ones. 

In neuroscience, an “engram” refers to the physical trace of a memory. When part of the network is reactivated by a cue or reminder, the broader pattern can be reconstructed, allowing the memory to be recalled. 

Because the brain’s model of awareness lacks access to its own billions of neurons, synapses, and electrochemical processes, awareness appears to the brain itself to be a nonphysical essence rather than a biological process.

Learning is based on establishing correlations between things. Behavioral conditioning occurs through rewards and consequences reinforcing or weakening those associations. 

According to an elegant theory by Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, learning may actually be the fundamental driver of the evolution of consciousness:¹³ “The evolution of learning and the evolution of consciousness are intimately linked, even entangled.”¹⁴ Their theory proposes that a form of associative learning or conditioning that they call “unlimited associative learning” (UAL) is an evolutionary marker of simple consciousness.^15, 16 Before the evolution of UAL, organisms tended to respond to stimuli reflexively. After UAL, they can evaluate alternative responses before acting. This transforms the adaptive landscape. 

Complex animals possess an inherent drive to learn, driven by curiosity and what neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp termed the “SEEKING” system—one of several basic emotional circuits he identified as evolutionarily ancient and shared across mammals.¹⁷

Positive and negative reinforcement obtained through associative learning gives experiences positive or negative valence, laying the foundation for affect. Thus, brains assign value to stimuli—goodness or badness. This forms the basis for the evolution of feeling and emotion, and the fuel for motivation and goal-directedness.¹⁸ Underlying all of this is homeostasis: the maintenance of physiological stability is central to affect. 

In mammals, the evaluative aspect of meaning is supported by interactions between distributed cortical representations and subcortical systems involved in affect and action, which assign significance to patterns based on their relevance for the organism’s needs and goals. 

Understanding emotions, then, may be fundamental to understanding subjective experience. As the neuropsychologist Mark Solms notes, unlike other forms of information processing, you can’t have a feeling without feeling it.¹⁹

Predictions and Expectations 

Many neuroscientists view the brain as a prediction machine. Rather than passively receiving sensory information, it continually generates expectations about the world and updates them in response to incoming evidence. Mental representations are central to this process. 

Anil Seth’s predictive-processing account describes conscious experiences as “controlled hallucinations” generated by the brain’s attempts to predict and regulate both the external world and the body’s internal state. According to Seth, conscious experience is closely tied to these predictive processes, particularly those involved in maintaining the body’s physiological stability through anticipatory regulation.²⁰

It’s worth noting that subjectivity is built into the very nature of life: as soon as the first cell evolved there was an inside and an outside.

Related ideas are captured by Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle, which proposes that organisms continually act to reduce uncertainty by improving their predictions and bringing sensory inputs into alignment with those predictions. Through this process, brains become increasingly effective at navigating their environments.²¹

Cognition, Intelligence, and Consciousness 

Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring, processing, storing, and using information; intelligence is how effectively those processes are deployed. Consciousness, by contrast, concerns subjective experience. 

Joseph LeDoux defines cognition as the ability to form internal representations and use them to guide behavior. Even relatively simple animals can act on stored representations of food, danger, or other biologically significant stimuli, rather than merely responding reflexively to what is immediately present. Mammals and some birds appear capable of a more advanced form of cognition, using internal models to simulate or imagine potential outcomes, evaluate alternatives, and guide flexible, goal-directed behavior. This capacity for prediction and planning greatly expands behavioral control and adaptability. 

Where does this happen in the brain? There is a longstanding debate over whether consciousness arises primarily from cortical or subcortical brain systems. Most current theories emphasize the cerebral cortex, whereas others argue that the foundations of consciousness lie in evolutionarily older brainstem and subcortical circuits involved in arousal, emotion, and motivation. 

It feels like something to have a thought and to be a self because we are that information. The sense of self is built from self-representations.

A growing middle-ground view holds that subcortical systems generate arousal, motivation, valence, and perhaps rudimentary feelings, while cortical systems elaborate these states into richer perceptual, cognitive, and self-reflective forms of conscious experience. The debate has important implications for animal consciousness, influencing whether consciousness is viewed as largely restricted to animals with complex forebrains, such as mammals and birds, or as extending more broadly across vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates. 

Nonconscious Cognitive Processes 

Joseph LeDoux emphasizes the “cognitive unconscious”—the nonconscious cognitive processes that allow us to control complex behaviors without having to call upon consciousness. Most of our routine behavior, and even quite complex behavior, is carried out by nonconscious cognitive processes—everyday movements, much of language processing, tasks like driving a car for an experienced driver, and so on. Many actions can be “delegated” to nonconscious cognitive processes, which reduces the cognitive load on conscious information processing. But conscious information processing enables greater behavioral control and more flexible responses to stimuli than do nonconscious cognitive processes. 

Although many nonconscious processes depend on evolutionarily older subcortical systems, nonconscious cognition occurs throughout the brain. Indeed, most of the brain’s cognitive work—including much of its cortical processing—takes place outside conscious awareness. 

Complex, Abstract Representations 

Whether conscious or not, all of this cognitive work depends on internal representations. At a basic level, these are simply sensory images. But what about abstract thought? Complex brains form representations of representations—hierarchies or ladders of representations built upon one another. Abstract mental concepts are constructed as higher-order representations from symbolic, analogous correspondences to physical things; they are still assembled, at bottom, from the building blocks of sensory perceptions and movements, upon which all other thoughts are built. 

Abstract thoughts are, in essence, still maps corresponding to the external environment and the individual’s position in it. Like maps (and all representations), they preserve relationships that correspond to features of the world. One thing reminds us of another because of some similar feature. Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander argue that making analogies is a fundamental mechanism of thought. Our brains continually map similarities between new and familiar situations, allowing past experience to guide present understanding. Language reflects this process: we routinely describe abstract concepts in physical terms, speaking of “bright” ideas, “deep” problems, or “bitter” remarks. On this view, abstract thinking is built from increasingly sophisticated representations ultimately grounded in sensory experience.²²

Self-Representations and Self-Awareness 

Antonio Damasio proposes a model for how the self emerges in gradations, in organisms of increasing evolutionary complexity—a simple organism develops a rudimentary form of “self-awareness” by forming a map of its body and its position in the physical space it occupies. Damasio calls the most basic representation of self the protoself—a nonconscious precursor to self-awareness that may exist even in relatively simple organisms. 

It’s a very basic level of awareness: neural patterns mapping the body’s physical structure.²³ These self-representations combine with affect (feeling) to provide a sense of ownership of the body and of perception, a feeling of presence and agency—the sense of being an entity that is doing the experiencing. A feedback loop of the brain’s modeling, predicting, and controlling of the body’s internal state and actions reinforces the sense of self.²⁴

This is not unlike Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of self-reference and formal rules,²⁵ in which the sense of self emerges from recursive self-representations—what he calls a “strange loop”:²⁶ the brain forming models of its own modeling processes.²⁷

We are the sum of all our complex, dynamically interconnected brain networks.

Thus, it feels like something to have a thought and to be a self because we are that information. The sense of self is built from self-representations. We are the sum of all our complex, dynamically interconnected brain networks. We are composed of a lifetime of remembered experiences, knowledge, learned behaviors, and habits. We are all of that information, physically embodied in patterns of neural connectivity. 

Along these lines, Michael Graziano proposes that the brain evolved a simplified internal model—or schema—of its own attentional processes, much as it maintains a model of the body. This schema is a simplified “cartoonish” representation that depicts an internal capacity for awareness without representing the underlying neural mechanisms that generate it.²⁸

Because the brain’s model of awareness lacks access to its own billions of neurons, synapses, and electrochemical processes, awareness appears to the brain itself to be a nonphysical essence rather than a biological process. According to Graziano, this helps explain why people so naturally experience consciousness as something immaterial.²⁹

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Consciousness remains one of the deepest mysteries in science. We still do not know precisely how neural activity gives rise to subjective experience, nor why there is “something it is like” to be a conscious organism. 

Yet the mystery no longer appears quite as impenetrable as it once did. Modern neuroscience increasingly points toward a gradual evolutionary story. The building blocks of consciousness can be seen to emerge step by step: sensing, learning, memory, internal representations, prediction, valuation, feeling, self-modeling, and, in humans, language and reflective self-awareness. 

Living organisms have an inside and an outside. Central nervous systems evolved to model, predict, and control both as fully as possible. As brains became more complex, animals developed increasingly sophisticated representations and models of themselves and their environment. Conscious experience is inextricably rooted in how the self and the world are represented from the internal perspective of a living creature—a perspective that is simply inaccessible to, and can only be inferred by, an external observer.