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.

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.

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.

In this conversation with Timur Sevincer and Nikil Mukerji, Steve Stewart-Williams, author of the new book A Billion Years of Sex Differences, discusses what evolutionary psychology actually claims, how the field can deepen our understanding of human nature, where the field has gone wrong, why the charge of pseudoscience misses the target, and how skeptics should respond when real science becomes politically unwelcome.

Common Misunderstandings About Evolutionary Psychology 

Timur Sevincer: As skeptics, we care about pseudoscience, but also about exaggerated, distorted, or plainly false scientific claims. Which claims about sex differences or evolutionary psychology are most often misrepresented? 

Steve Stewart-Williams: The list is long!¹ A common view is that evolutionary psychology is a way to justify existing social roles, especially traditional sex roles. Another is that it’s a way to excuse misbehavior, especially male misbehavior. Both claims are false. Explaining a behavior is not the same as morally justifying it. To think otherwise is to commit the naturalistic fallacy—the mistaken assumption that what’s natural is therefore morally right. We have to decide for ourselves what’s right and wrong. We shouldn’t let natural selection dictate our ethics. Evolution can explain behavior without excusing it.

Another common claim is that evolutionary hypotheses are unfalsifiable.² Evolutionary hypotheses are falsifiable, and plenty have been falsified. More of my own hypotheses have been falsified than I’d care to admit. I’ve come up with a hypothesis and done the research, then reality has said: “No, you’re wrong about that.”

Most human sex differences are statistical differences with large overlap.

A further misunderstanding is that evolutionary psychologists think men and women are virtually different species: women are monogamous, men are promiscuous; women are choosy, men will sleep with anything that moves; men care only about a woman’s looks, women only about a man’s resources. None of this is what evolutionary psychologists claim. Most human sex differences are statistical differences with large overlap. Both sexes can form committed relationships and both can be interested in casual sex. Both sexes are choosy about long-term partners and both care about looks. 

Finally, many people assume that if a trait has an evolutionary component, it must therefore be fixed or biologically predetermined. That’s not the claim. Genes may push development in certain directions, but they’re not the only influences. Learning, culture, incentives, and institutions also matter. 

Timur Sevincer: I teach open-minded, curious, and intelligent students. However, some of these misunderstandings seem to be very common before they engage with evolutionary psychology in more depth. In rare cases, some course evaluation comments continue to portray evolutionary psychology as pseudoscience even after extensive discussion of overwhelming empirical evidence. Those ideas must come from somewhere. 

Explaining a behavior is not the same as morally justifying it … Evolution can explain behavior without excusing it.

Steve Stewart-Williams: I’ve encountered that too, though less in Malaysia, where I now teach, than in the UK. Some people appear to associate evolutionary psychology with outdated or harmful ideas before they’ve really looked at the evidence. They’ve picked up widespread but mistaken views about the field. I think there’s been a successful misinformation campaign against it. 

Is evolutionary psychology pseudoscience? 

Nikil Mukerji: Pseudoscience is not simply unfalsifiability. Some pseudosciences, such as homeopathy, are eminently falsifiable and have been falsified. The core issue is that they fake doing science. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt, for example, has famously defined bullshit as indifference to truth.³ Science, by contrast, is governed by truth-directed norms: heeding evidence, testing claims, trying to find out what is the case. Pseudoscience fakes participation in that truth-seeking practice. That is why the pseudoscience charge cannot be a mere insult. One has to say what exactly is wrong with the claim or field. Does it avoid falsification? Does it ignore counterevidence? Does it only imitate the surface of science?

Steve Stewart-Williams: Exactly. Anyone can say, “You’re a pseudoscientist!” It’s like that Spider-Man meme where the two Spider-Men point accusingly at each other. The label alone doesn’t settle anything. You have to say what, specifically, is wrong with each claim. 

Claims in evolutionary psychology aren’t all equally strong. Some are weak, some have been falsified, but some are excellent. The right approach is to avoid thinking “evolutionary psychology is all good” or “evolutionary psychology is all bad,” and instead to evaluate each hypothesis or theory on its merits. 

A Field That Can Be Wrong 

Timur Sevincer: Could you give examples of how evolutionary hypotheses can be falsified? 

Steve Stewart-Williams: A famous example is the kin-selection explanation of same-sex sexual orientation, associated with E.O. Wilson. Same-sex sexual orientation is puzzling in evolutionary terms. Wilson suggested that it might be a form of kin altruism: instead of having children of one’s own, someone might help siblings or other relatives to have children, thereby passing on their genes indirectly through them.⁴ But people did the research, and the verdict is that this explanation is probably false.⁵

Timur Sevincer: Another example might be the dual-mating or ovulatory-shift idea: the idea that women might seek investment from one kind of man and “good genes” from another, with preferences shifting around ovulation. There were T-shirt smell studies and other work that initially attracted considerable attention,^6, 7 though the literature has since become more contested.

Steve Stewart-Williams: I’m very skeptical of the ovulatory-shift hypothesis. To be fair, the debate isn’t over—there are still people on both sides of the issue. But I’m much more persuaded by the people who say that the evidence hasn’t borne it out. 

Timur Sevincer: How does evolutionary psychology fare after the replication crisis? 

Steve Stewart-Williams: It hasn’t emerged unscathed, but I think it fares fairly well. It does better than social psychology, though not as well as behavior genetics. The most robust claims in the field are those grounded in well-established theories from evolutionary biology: sexual selection theory, parental investment theory, parent-offspring conflict theory, kin selection theory. These aren’t just free-floating speculations. They’re grounded in principles that have been demonstrated across many species. This is especially true for many sex differences. 

Another reason the field has done well in certain areas is that it was seen as controversial from the outset. To persuade people, evolutionary psychologists have often had to clear a higher evidential bar. David Buss’s work on mate preferences, which found that men and women differ on average in how strongly they prioritize certain traits in long-term partners, used extensive cross-cultural evidence.^8, 9 Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s work on homicide and step-parenthood, the so-called “Cinderella effect,” that children are at greater risk of abuse and violence from stepparents than from biological parents, drew on large archival datasets.¹⁰ The sex difference in interest in casual sex has multiple converging lines of evidence: cross-cultural evidence, real-world dating data, cross-species patterns, and links to prenatal hormonal exposure.¹¹ This convergence increases our confidence in the hypothesis. 

Nikil Mukerji: There is an interesting complication here. A low replication rate can be a warning sign. But in some pseudoscientific or ideological literatures, one finds suspiciously high positive-result rates: everything seems to confirm the preferred story. So a perfect replication rate can be suspicious as well. 

Steve Stewart-Williams: Yes. To do replication properly, you need open science practices, preregistration, methods that could falsify the hypothesis, and ideally multiple research groups, including people with different prior commitments. Even if a claim is falsifiable in principle, one isn’t really doing science unless one uses methods that could in principle falsify it.

The sexes do differ on average, and I think there’s an evolutionary contribution to some of those differences. We can’t just lie about that. The right response is to tell the truth carefully and responsibly.

Social psychology deserves credit here. The fact that we know about its replication problems shows that many in the field are testing their claims and trying to improve. A low replication rate isn’t fatal if researchers are actively checking their findings and weeding out false positives. The problem is that, until recently, they often weren’t. 

The Ethical Trap 

Nikil Mukerji: Some findings in evolutionary psychology are bound to annoy people, especially in certain political milieus. Are you concerned that this kind of science might play into the wrong hands? How do you deal with the ethics of communicating sex differences? 

Steve Stewart-Williams: Claims about sex differences can certainly be misused if people exaggerate the size of the differences, or if people infer that, because a difference has an evolutionary basis, it’s therefore good or should be preserved. That can do harm. If we exaggerate differences, we may lower our expectations for one sex in certain domains. 

But I have two responses. First, the sexes do differ on average, and I think there’s an evolutionary contribution to some of those differences. We can’t just lie about that. The right response is to tell the truth carefully and responsibly. 

That means emphasizing that most human sex differences aren’t huge.^12, 13 There’s a lot of overlap between the sexes. Everyone should get a fair chance. And the fact that something is natural, genetic, or partly shaped by evolution has no direct moral implications. 

Second, denial can also do harm. It’s not the case that exaggerating sex differences is dangerous while minimizing them is harmless. We can get this wrong in both directions. 

Nikil Mukerji: So denial is wrong in principle, and one can also make a consequentialist case against it. 

Steve Stewart-Williams: Exactly. 

Timur Sevincer: This is also a communication problem. Many people hear “sex differences” and immediately think one is defending misogyny or fixed social roles. In my own teaching, I often begin by saying: there is usually substantial overlap between the sexes, most differences are small, evolutionary influences don’t make differences fixed or unmalleable, and aa trait’s evolutionary origins don’t make it morally good. 

Nikil Mukerji: And acknowledging average differences doesn’t necessarily make people conform to them. In some cases, it could even have the opposite effect: if people are aware of an average tendency, they may consciously decide not to follow it. Recognizing statistical differences and encouraging individuality are not incompatible. 

Steve Stewart-Williams: I think that’s right. It’s also important to take people’s concerns seriously. Some people worry that evolved sex differences will be used to revive old claims about male superiority or fixed gender roles. Given our history of anti-female sexism, that worry is understandable. But the right response isn’t to shut down the discussion. The right response is to discuss the evidence carefully. 

Socialization, Stereotypes, Patriarchy 

Timur Sevincer: When people think about sex differences, they often default to three explanations: socialization, stereotypes, and patriarchy. Boys and girls are raised differently; stereotypes become self-fulfilling; women are forced into roles by structures created by men. You deal with these explanations in A Billion Years of Sex Differences. Where do they fall short? 

Steve Stewart-Williams: Well, let me start by saying that I think “fall short” is the right phrase. It’s not that they have no merit. It’s impossible to believe that socialization has no impact on behavior. Stereotypes have an impact. Cultural factors matter. But they’re not enough on their own. 

Take parental treatment. It’s often invoked as an explanation for sex differences. But there’s research suggesting that, at least in the West, parents don’t treat sons and daughters particularly differently in many important ways.¹⁴ Behavior genetics also suggests that, within the normal range, the shared family home doesn’t have a massive impact on how people turn out.¹⁵ This doesn’t mean genes explain everything. The environment matters too. But the simple parental-socialization story is weaker than many people assume.¹⁶

On patriarchy, the gender-equality paradox is a serious problem for simple versions of the story. For many traits, sex differences are larger, not smaller, in wealthier, more individualistic, more gender-equal nations.^17, 18 That’s the opposite of what one would expect if the differences were due to strict sex roles or patriarchy. I’m not saying that every difference follows this pattern, or that culture is irrelevant—in fact, the gender-equality paradox is itself a cultural effect. What I am saying, though, is that it challenges certain traditional sociocultural explanations for differences between the sexes. 

On stereotypes, the work of Lee Jussim has been a major influence on me. Stereotypes can be self-fulfilling to some extent, but the main causal direction is usually from social reality to stereotype, not from stereotype to social reality.¹⁹ In the case of sex differences, stereotypes are partly shaped by actual average differences that people perceive in the world, and they correspond reasonably well to the actual sex differences.²⁰ In some cases, those stereotypes might then amplify or galvanize the differences. But they don’t create them out of nothing. 

Nikil Mukerji: There is a habit of reasoning that often gets in the way here. Instead of asking whether a claim is true, one asks: “What makes you say that?” and “Who does this help?” Truth recedes into the background. 

Steve Stewart-Williams: That can become a form of conspiracy theorizing. If someone says, “You only believe that because you’re a man,” or “You only believe that because you’re defending your group,” that’s a claim about motive. But even if the motive attribution were true, it wouldn’t show that the claim is false. It’s essentially just an ad hominem argument. 

What Denial Costs 

Timur Sevincer: Many people understand that exaggerating sex differences can do harm. What is less obvious to many is that downplaying differences can also do harm. Can you give examples? 

Steve Stewart-Williams: One is that, if we minimize sex differences in psychological disorders, we may fail to spot them in the less affected sex. ADHD often presents differently in girls than in boys, and the standard description fits boys better. That means girls with ADHD may be overlooked. Autism may also be overlooked in girls because it presents differently than in boys—for example, it tends to involve fewer repetitive behaviors. Conversely, depression in men more often involves substance use and aggression than in women, so male depression may be missed. 

It’s not the case that exaggerating sex differences is dangerous while minimizing them is harmless. We can get this wrong in both directions.

There are social and occupational examples as well. If we ignore average differences in occupational interests, we may assume that every gender gap in a field is due entirely to bias. Bias exists, but sex differences in interests also matter. Men are, on average, more interested in things and things-related jobs; women are, on average, more interested in people and helping professions.²¹ If we ignore that, we may misdiagnose the cause of gaps and pour resources into interventions that don’t address the real causes. 

It can also lead to coercive policies. If one reserves positions for one sex, or chooses a less qualified candidate to achieve numerical parity, one may reverse bias rather than remove it. On top of that, it can cast doubt on the competence of the supposedly benefited group. Even beneficiaries themselves may wonder whether they really deserved the position. And portraying STEM as saturated with sexism may deter some girls and women who would otherwise enjoy those fields. 

Discrimination exists. But exaggerating it, and ignoring the progress that has been made, can backfire.²² And we shouldn’t overlook the fact that there’s also evidence of discrimination against men in some hiring contexts.^23, 24

The Slippery Word “Gender” 

Nikil Mukerji: In A Billion Years of Sex Differences you are quite critical of the concept of gender. Why? 

Steve Stewart-Williams: I don’t think it’s a very useful concept, partly because it’s not just one concept. Sometimes “gender” is just a synonym for sex. Sometimes it refers to masculinity and femininity. Sometimes it refers to sex differences supposedly due to nurture rather than nature. Sometimes it refers to social roles, stereotypes, gender identity, or clusters of personality traits. 

The nurture-based definition is especially problematic. It often assumes what should be demonstrated: namely, that nurture is the sole cause of the difference. Many recurring male-female differences involve both nature and nurture. If one defines gender as the nurture part and sex as the nature part, most female-male differences become partly sex differences and partly gender differences. That’s an awkward way to frame things. 

Other definitions have other problems. If “gender” means personality profiles, for instance, then the claim that there are many different genders collapses into the trivial observation that every person has a unique personality profile. At that point, we’re talking about personality, not something clearly linked to sex. 

We should be able to say: Yes, some past claims were wrong and sexist; no, that doesn’t mean every claim about sex differences is wrong or sexist.

For these and other reasons, I prefer to talk about sex rather than gender. In biology, sex is defined by gametes: females are organized around the production of eggs; males around the production of sperm. Sex-linked traits such as chromosomes, genitals, hormones, masculinity, femininity, sex-typical behavior, and personality traits don’t define sex. Instead, they’re among the many traits that evolved to facilitate reproduction via either eggs or sperm. 

Why This Topic Can Set Rooms on Fire 

Timur Sevincer: Why do sex differences, sexual behavior, and evolution sometimes provoke such strong emotions? In principle, one could discuss them scientifically. 

Steve Stewart-Williams: The topic is inherently combustible. A big part of the reason is our history of sexism against women. Early scientists made false and sexist claims about women’s intellectual abilities, so it’s understandable that people worry. If we open the door to evolved sex differences, are we going to slide back into Victorian ideas about male superiority and fixed roles? 

But the science of sex differences actually refutes those early sexist claims. Shutting down the discussion is the wrong reaction. We should be able to say: Yes, some past claims were wrong and sexist; no, that doesn’t mean every claim about sex differences is wrong or sexist. 

Unfortunately, a modern trend on campus and elsewhere is to fight unwelcome ideas not with arguments and evidence, but with accusations, complaints to authorities, protests, occupations of classrooms, and so on. These are intimidation tactics as much as anything else. It’s anti-intellectual. In principle, anyone with any view can use intimidation tactics. Thus, intimidation can’t sort out who’s right and who’s wrong. 

I had my own taste of this. A paper I wrote on sex differences in STEM²⁵ caused an online controversy and led to calls for retraction. The issue reached the diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) office at the University of Nottingham’s UK campus. They did not like the paper! To their credit, though, they defended my academic freedom, and I was promoted to full professor despite listing the paper as one of my main pieces of work. But the experience was still worrying. I didn’t seriously think I’d lose my job, but I did wonder whether expressing perfectly reasonable views about sex differences might make it difficult for me to get another academic job. 

Some people worry that evolved sex differences will be used to revive old claims about male superiority or fixed gender roles … That worry is understandable. But the right response isn’t to shut down the discussion. The right response is to discuss the evidence carefully.

That was part of why I started my Substack, The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter. I wanted a fallback. If the worst came to the worst, I wanted another way to make a living. And it’s worked out well: I’m no longer financially dependent on my academic job. It’s a great position to be in. I’ve always tried to write honestly and openly about the topics I cover, even when knowing it might not be popular. But now I do so with a lot less trepidation. 

Can persuasion still work? 

Nikil Mukerji: Some of these controversies are not only about evolutionary psychology itself, but also about deeper disagreements concerning evidence, reasoning, and the interpretation of scientific claims. How does one talk to people who have been taught that logic is a tool of oppression? They often fail to separate the truth of a claim from alleged motives for making it. 

Steve Stewart-Williams: Even people who officially reject reason and evidence may still be moved by logical arguments. They might not change their minds immediately, but they may eventually. Social psychologists call that a sleeper effect, and it’s a well-documented phenomenon. 

Nikil Mukerji: My suspicion is that another causal factor is needed. Some people change their minds after reality punches them in the face. Then they remember that someone had explained the matter differently. 

Steve Stewart-Williams: That could well be right. But persuasion is still worth attempting. It won’t work on everyone. Nothing will work on everyone. But across history, humanity has moved away from superstition toward more scientific ways of thinking. That suggests that slow persuasion is possible. 

Can evolutionary science inform moral reasoning? 

Nikil Mukerji: In A Billion Years of Sex Differences, you reject the inference from “natural” to “good,” but David Sloan Wilson and colleagues²⁶ argue that evolutionary psychologists often overcorrect here: Hume’s famous point about the is-ought distinction is simply that an ought cannot be derived exclusively from an is, not that natural facts have no ethical relevance. So when you say that the science of sex differences cannot answer policy questions because those are ultimately about values, how do you avoid turning a valid warning against “natural = good” into a stronger and false separation between facts and ethics? More concretely: should evolved sex differences alter our moral and political reasoning about fairness, coercion, individual freedom, and the costs of eliminating gender gaps—and if so, exactly how? 

Steve Stewart-Williams: I don’t think anyone argues that evolved facts have no ethical relevance. They just argue that the fact that something has an evolutionary origin doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, bad, or anywhere in between. 

Example: It might be the case that, if a given sex difference has an evolutionary origin, it would be hard to eliminate, and that doing so would do more harm than good. As a result, we might decide that we shouldn’t try to eliminate it. But the reason for that decision wouldn’t be that the sex difference is natural; it would be that trying to eliminate it would do more harm than good. In other words, we’d be dealing with a consequentialist argument, not an argument from nature. 

Importantly, this cuts both ways. If eliminating a socially constructed sex difference would do more harm than good, then we shouldn’t do that either, even though the difference isn’t “natural.” And if eliminating a natural difference would boost general well-being, we should do it despite its natural origins. In itself, the nature-nurture question is irrelevant to the ethical question. 

We can turn the tables here as well: Why should we exclude certain facts from our ethical reasoning just because they happen to have an evolutionary origin? To do so is to risk falling prey to an anti-naturalistic fallacy!

Three-year-old Yu, from the southwestern Japanese island of Kyushu, worried his mother, Kimi. He suffered from nightmares and anxiously searched everywhere for smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. One day he told Kimi that he remembered himself on the hundredth floor of a skyscraper, beside another skyscraper that looked similar. “I spoke English and worked with a computer,” the toddler continued. “Then something terrible happened in the neighboring building. The firefighters arrived, but too late. I also tried to escape, but—boom! There was a tremendous collision, and I died.”

Today Yu is 12 years old. In a shared video call with him and his mother, he appears as a sweet boy wearing a buttoned shirt and large glasses. He is happy to speak English. “I always preferred this language,” he says, adding that he still remembers the two towers, and how he tried to escape and go down the stairs, but it was impossible. “I was shocked—it was all so strange,” Kimi says of hearing the story for the first time. “I couldn’t tell whether he was inventing it, and the story itself was horrifying, but he was so serious.” 

Two years ago, Yu and Kimi flew to New York, accompanied by Professor Masayuki Ohkado, a researcher of past-life memories from Chubu University in Japan. “The surroundings there felt more familiar to me than the neighborhood where I live today,” Yu says about New York. 

The three visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum, where Yu claimed he recognized the person he once was. Later they met that person’s sister. Yu has an unusual fondness for classical music and also collects toy Volkswagen Beetles. It turned out that the “previous personality” listened to classical music and drove a Beetle. He, too, wore large glasses. “I was very moved to discover who I had been,” Yu says. “It calmed some part of my soul that had been restless. I had a strong feeling that everything was finally settled.” 

In four apartments inside a residential building in Charlottesville, Virginia, research is underway that may be unparalleled in its significance for human existence—and equally unmatched in the criticism and ridicule it provokes. The rooms house a research group with a rather dry name: the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS). Although the division is part of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, its offices are located several kilometers from the main campus. Once you hear what the department’s dozen or so members actually do, it becomes easier to understand why: they search for empirical evidence of extraordinary human experiences and abilities. And they mean extraordinary. Among the phenomena they investigate are near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and abilities such as telepathy or precognition. Not exactly the sort of thing mainstream science tends to focus on.

The centerpiece is the line of research pursued by the division’s founder, established in 1967. Professor Ian Stevenson was a renowned psychiatrist who, at a certain point, decided to devote his career to investigating children’s “memories” of “past lives.” 

Nearly sixty years later, DOPS remains more or less unique in the academic world. Surprisingly, the division is thriving. Psychologist Professor Philip Cozzolino continues Stevenson’s pioneering work there. “It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come,” he says in a video interview with Haaretz magazine. “We have the largest team we’ve ever had, a biography of Stevenson has just been published, HBO is making a documentary about us. And all of this started with one person. You would expect the opposite to happen—that people would only mock us. Of course that exists, but we’ve grown, and we continue to attract attention, for all the right reasons.” 

DOPS is a fully academic research group. When Cozzolino speaks of “the right reasons,” he does not mean that it is difficult to imagine anything more fascinating, bizarre, and emotionally stirring than the thousands of stories of children claiming to remember past lives, all cataloged in the division’s library. Rather, as he puts it, those “right reasons” are that “we continue to investigate as scientists without an agenda, taking the subject seriously.” 

It turns out that the study of reincarnation has itself been reborn. Stevenson focused on locating as many children as possible who spoke about what sounded like previous lives, mentioning details such as names, places of residence, professions, and causes of death. If the information was detailed enough, he tried to determine whether it matched a person who had actually lived, while also ruling out natural explanations for the child’s knowledge, such as having heard the story from a relative. Today the researchers are no longer focused on collecting additional stories, but rather on examining the phenomenon in the laboratory. “We accumulated this body of evidence, and now we are trying to move beyond it, to understand the process,” says Cozzolino’s research partner, Professor Marieta Pehlivanova. 

Previous studies have shown that the brain functions differently when remembering and when imagining. Among other things, the researchers want to examine the brain activity of children who claim to remember past lives in three situations: when recalling something experienced in their present lives, when recalling something “experienced” in a past life, and when imagining something—to determine whether the brain activity associated with past-life memories resembles that of memory or imagination. In addition, the researchers compare these findings to brain scans of children without past-life memories, with similar demographic backgrounds, who were asked to remember something they had experienced, imagine something, and imagine having experienced something in another life. 

Reincarnation! There is perhaps no subject in which the danger of deception—and self-deception—is greater.

Another line of research focuses on trauma. “Many children remember lives that ended violently or in some kind of accident,” Pehlivanova explains. “That is a central feature of past-life memories.” Using imaging devices, the researchers examine whether these children show evidence of trauma exposure even in the absence of trauma in their current lives. 

Psychiatrist Professor Bruce Greyson, who succeeded Stevenson as director of DOPS in 2002 and served in the role for twelve years, says that most of the cases studied by his predecessor involved children from cultures that already believed in reincarnation, which weakened their evidential force. “It was difficult to find cases in the West at that time,” the researcher explains. Today, thanks to the internet and social media, DOPS receives an average of about 125 inquiries a year, almost all from American parents. 

One particularly interesting case investigated by the division, Greyson says, involved a four-year-old boy named Ryan Hammons from Oklahoma. One night Ryan told his mother, Cindy, “I think I used to be someone else.” He told her that he remembered himself dancing, that he had wanted to become an actor in Hollywood but failed and instead became an agent. Not exactly the typical story. 

Ryan would not let the matter go, and Cindy began researching the subject online and tried to calm the distressed boy with books about Hollywood. One day, while flipping through a book about 1930s cinema, Ryan pointed to a figure standing behind the leading actor. “That’s me, Mom,” he said. “I found myself!” The mother contacted DOPS, and the division’s director at the time, Professor Jim Tucker, tracked down the actor’s name in a film archive. It turned out that the man had been a Broadway dancer who dreamed of becoming an actor but received only minor roles before eventually becoming a successful agent. 

Cozzolino notes that one of the most intriguing details in the story is that Ryan repeatedly said he had died at the age of 61, even though the medical file listed the man’s age at death as 59, which was also what his family believed. Tucker’s investigation uncovered a document showing that he had in fact been 61 when he died. 

“This is not proof of reincarnation,” Greyson emphasizes. “First of all, this is not part of an experiment. Beyond that, we don’t know where the child got the information. Maybe there are fields around us from which information can be accessed, rather than from a previous incarnation? But he had information he should not have had access to, so it can’t simply be dismissed as fraud. And there are many such cases.” 

“I don’t feel any need to change people’s minds,” says Cozzolino. “I want to ask questions that can be examined scientifically and report the answers. The people who mock us usually have no idea what we actually do. Precisely because of its nature, our field is more difficult and rigorous than many other areas of research.” 

Writing about this field is also more difficult than usual. Reincarnation! There is perhaps no subject in which the danger of deception—and self-deception—is greater. But there is also no subject with greater potential to transform the way we understand our lives and our deaths. Almost bizarrely, although there is probably no culture in human history that has not engaged with the subject, no one thought to investigate it systematically and scientifically—until Ian Stevenson arrived. 

Perhaps consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon of existence and of the universe, rather than merely a by-product of brain activity.

Lekh Pal Jatav, the sixth of eight children in a family from the village of Nagla Devi in northern India, was born without fingers on his right hand. X-rays revealed that there were no bones there at all. Such a condition, in which all the fingers are absent from one hand, is extraordinarily rare and had been documented only once before in the medical literature—more than a hundred years before Lekh Pal’s birth. But that was nothing compared to what happened when the toddler finally began to speak (only at the age of four). He told his older sister that he had been with “Chacha” when his fingers were caught in a machine and cut off, and asked her to go home to “Tal” to visit his real mother. Several months later, a guest from the village of Nagla Tal, about ten kilometers away, arrived at a wedding in Nagla Devi. She told Lekh Pal’s mother that, strangely enough, there had been a boy in her village named Hukum Singh whose fingers had been severed at the age of three when he tried to help his father while he was operating a fodder cutter. Hukum died about a year after the accident, only a few months before Lekh Pal was born. When Lekh Pal was five years old, he visited Hukum’s family and, according to those present, recognized the family members, including the father—Chacha. 

This astonishing story, alongside an astonishing photograph of Lekh Pal’s hand itself, appears in one of the dullest, most unreadable, and most subversive books in the history of science—Reincarnation and Biology. Spanning 2,226 pages, the book painstakingly documents hundreds of cases of children born with birthmarks, scars, moles, and various physical deformities who, at a young age, claimed to remember previous lives that included events capable of explaining these physical anomalies. 

The book is Stevenson’s magnum opus, and he is widely regarded as the most prominent researcher ever to investigate the possibility of life after death through reincarnation. Stevenson did not fit the common image of a paranormal investigator. He was quiet and introverted, an outstanding physician who published dozens of studies in the most prestigious scientific journals. For many years he chaired the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, which during his tenure (and still today) was ranked among the ten best public universities in the United States. 

Alongside his respectable identity as a psychiatrist and academic, Stevenson possessed an immense curiosity about the greatest mystery of all: what happens to us after death? Some would say science answered that question long ago: nothing. We die, and then there is no one left for anything to “happen” to. Stevenson believed that given the possibility—however remote—that this might not be the case, the subject deserved serious investigation. He devoted roughly fifty years of his life to this research and secured substantial funding for it. 

By the time of his death in 2007, Stevenson had documented around 2,500 cases of children who claimed to remember previous lives. A new biography by Jesse Bering now presents, in unprecedented detail, both the man and his research, reviving once again the question: could it be that death is not the absolute end? 

Ironically, Stevenson was born on Halloween, October 31, 1918. His father, John, was a well-known political journalist. His mother, Ruth, was interested in the occult. He studied at the medical school of McGill University and graduated at the top of his class. He specialized in psychiatry and later trained as a psychoanalyst. 

Stevenson published numerous articles as well as an influential book on the medical interview. “The psychiatrist should notice changes in the pitch and timbre of the patient’s voice as he talks,” he noted. “[W]atch for the play of emotion in the patient’s face, in the posture of his body, and in his movements and gestures.” In the not-so-distant future, his skills as an interviewer would prove critical in assessing the credibility of stories told by children and families about memories of past lives. 

Although Stevenson never claimed to have proven that reincarnation actually exists, he pointed out what he saw as a problem with the materialist position—namely, the idea that consciousness and mind are merely products of the brain.

In the 1950s Stevenson conducted some of the earliest studies on psychedelic drugs. He also experimented on himself with substances such as LSD and mescaline on five different occasions. During one of these experiences, he later recounted, he had a powerful sensation of remembering an event from another life. In later years Stevenson was criticized because his personal beliefs may have influenced his research. He replied that such beliefs had no relevance whatsoever to the evaluation of the evidence he uncovered.

At the age of 39, Stevenson was appointed department chair. Alongside his intense work as an administrator, researcher, and therapist, he began collecting newspaper reports about memories of previous lives. He also traveled to India, where he investigated several cases himself. 

Stevenson’s wife, Octavia, did not approve of the direction he was taking. “Everything is going great for you, and you’re just ruining a promising career,” she reproached him. But Stevenson was unwilling to let go of the potentially revolutionary task. “This research may bring about a conceptual revolution that will make the Copernican revolution seem trivial in comparison,” he wrote early in his career as a reincarnation researcher. 

Stevenson’s early studies attracted the attention of Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox machine—one of the richest men in the world, who also had an interest in parapsychology. Over the years, Carlson showered Stevenson with grants worth tens of millions of dollars. These funds enabled him to devote himself exclusively to the study of rebirth and even persuaded the administrators of the University of Virginia to approve the creation of a department dedicated to researching paranormal phenomena. This led to the publication of his first collection of cases in 1966, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. The use of the word “suggestive” was important. Stevenson never claimed to have proven the idea of reincarnation. Keep that in mind as we continue the narrative. 

After some time, Stevenson refrained from publishing cases that included physiological manifestations in the child’s body corresponding to an injury or other biological feature in the body of the “previous personality.” This was his strongest card. Even the most impressive case, in which a child remembers numerous specific details (such as the case of Ryan Hammons, where researchers claimed that 55 specific statements about his previous life were verified), could theoretically be explained by information somehow obtained from family members—or even telepathically, a possibility impressive enough from a parapsychological perspective, but far less dramatic than the claim of rebirth. But how does one explain missing fingers? 

Stevenson spent 30 years working on Reincarnation and Biology. The book’s two volumes contain hundreds of rather mundane cases discussing at length insignificant pigment marks. But they also include highly intriguing cases, such as a girl born without the lower part of her right leg who spoke about the life of a girl killed by a train; or a boy with a braided-rope pattern on his deformed wrists who said he had been tied up and thrown into a well in a previous life; or a girl born with dozens of large birthmarks covering her body who remembered many details from the life of a 30-year-old woman who burned to death in an accident. Eighteen children remembered lives ending in gunfire and bore two distinct birthmarks corresponding to the bullet’s entrance and exit wounds. 

In sixty of the cases, Stevenson managed to obtain documentation from the previous life—hospital records, police reports, and sometimes even postmortem photographs. This allowed him to compare the remembered events with the current bodily marks. 

Most of the cases Stevenson investigated came from countries such as India or Burma. According to him, this was because parents in those countries tended to take their children’s memories seriously. Nevertheless, the last book he published, five years before his death, included a collection of cases from Western families. 

One such case involved sisters Joanna (11) and Jacqueline (6) Pollock from northern England, who were killed by a car. About a year later, their mother gave birth to identical twin girls—Gillian and Jennifer. The twins did not possess explicit memories of previous lives, yet their personalities and behavior resembled those of Joanna and Jacqueline. Such similarity could be explained by parental suggestion, but there were also several unexplained physical phenomena. Despite their identical genetic makeup, only one of the twins had two distinct birthmarks—in precisely the same locations where Jacqueline had had a scar and a birthmark. 

Rare cases like these—involving identical twins raised in the same environment yet displaying striking differences in specific respects—offered some support for Stevenson’s hypothesis that, alongside genes and environment, there exists a “third factor” in the development of personality and bodily structure. “Heredity may account for resemblances between members of the same family,” he argued. “Reincarnation may account for some of the differences.” 

In addition to reincarnation, Stevenson researched other areas of parapsychology. Among other things, he wrote a book about emotional and sensory telepathy—situations in which a person inexplicably experiences another person’s emotions or pain (for example, a woman suddenly feeling pain in her palm at the exact moment her daughter burned her hand in a chemistry-class accident at school). An article in which he documented how a well-known medium succeeded in guessing the images on face-down cards at rates exceeding statistical expectation, despite strict supervision, was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. 

Nevertheless, Stevenson was highly skeptical of the very field to which he belonged. “You can get all the legitimate researchers in this field in a phone booth,” he once wrote. He was especially critical of studies of reincarnation based on hypnosis, arguing that when people are hypnotized and asked to “return” to previous lives, the process tends to evoke fictional material rather than genuine memories. 

Although Stevenson never claimed to have proven that reincarnation actually exists, he pointed out what he saw as a problem with the materialist position—namely, the idea that consciousness and mind are merely products of the brain. “Certainly,” he wrote, “the mind expresses itself through the brain, and disturbances of the brain disturb the functions of the mind. Anyone can prove this to himself with an ounce or two of whisky.” But this fact, he argued, does not prove that consciousness is identical to brain activity. A common analogy for the idea is that of a radio receiver: if a radio breaks, the radio waves themselves remain unaffected. 

Professor Emily Kelly of DOPS worked alongside Stevenson for 30 years, from 1978 until his death. “The great questions he tried to shed light on were ‘Who are we as human beings?’ and ‘Why are we who we are?’” she tells Haaretz magazine. 

Professor Jesse Bering, a psychologist at the University of Otago, began his academic career working with chimpanzees in an attempt to understand what distinguishes them from us. He concluded that the ability to understand the psychological states of others—theory of mind—was uniquely human. Only humans, he argues, can think in a complicated way about what another person thinks or feels. Some animals possess an excellent sense of smell; others can fly. Human beings are the “psychologists” of the animal kingdom. “We are constantly thinking about how others think and feel.” 

But theory of mind is rooted in us so deeply that even after someone dies, we continue imagining how that person thinks and feels. For twenty years, Bering has studied this universal cognitive bias—the belief that consciousness continues after death. That is how he came across Stevenson. He began immersing himself in Stevenson’s writings, initially hoping to show that even the man regarded as the most serious researcher in the field had fallen prey to the same biases. “Contemporary research in social cognition shows how easily people detect meaning where none exists,” he says. “I thought that through these modern lenses I would be able to debunk Stevenson’s evidence, as one can do with most parapsychological research.” 

Instead, Bering encountered an unexpected difficulty. “My theoretical framework cannot explain how a two-year-old child knows things about a dead person he never met,” he says. “That simply is not social cognition. My work focuses on how people think about dead minds, whereas Stevenson focused on how dead minds think.” 

What about the argument that the brain is like a radio receiver that is needed to decode radio waves, but is not itself the waves? 

Bering found himself drawn into Stevenson’s world. After nearly a decade of work, he published the first biography of Stevenson: The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson. “I approached the subject completely certain that there is no such thing as reincarnation,” he says. “Even now I would not describe myself as a believer, but I am no longer quite as certain.” In an interview, I asked Bering what caused this shift. “Mainly the fact that Stevenson was an extraordinarily knowledgeable and rigorous researcher who was fully aware of all the counterarguments and still found evidence that could not be explained.” He added: “Everything I say is true only if one accepts Stevenson’s word. I do accept it. After all these years of work, I feel that I know him better than many people I encounter in everyday life. He was an honest man who was not motivated by money or fame—quite the opposite, in fact. But he was genuinely obsessed with the subject, like an artist devoted to his craft. I came away convinced that he was ‘the real thing.’” 

Rabih Abu Diab was born into a Druze family in Lebanon. He said that in a previous life he had been a famous soccer player and a successful pop star. One would have to be especially naïve to attribute any credibility to such memories. After all, many children dream of becoming soccer players or successful singers. Yet investigators later discovered that there really had been a man in Lebanon with golden feet and the voice of a nightingale named Saad Halawi, who died during the civil war. Yet, when the research team questioned Rabih about his memories, he was unable to recount anything that was not already widely known in Lebanon. 

Rabih had already met some members of his “previous” family before the research team arrived, but he still had a half-sister he had never encountered. The team, led by Professor Christopher French, arranged such a meeting and documented it. “All that was missing was for the sister to write her name on her forehead,” French recalled the meeting. “She couldn’t have given him more hints—and he still didn’t recognize her.” French, who heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and who specializes in naturalistic explanations for experiences that appear paranormal, was not surprised. He noted that “The typical story goes like this. A toddler starts talking and says things that are open to interpretation. In the West, some of these statements are sometimes interpreted as descriptions of an ‘imaginary friend,’ while in cultures such as the Druze one they may be interpreted as descriptions of previous lives.” 

According to French, even if a child knows details about a deceased person, this does not necessarily point to any hidden meaning. “Even Stevenson admitted that it is impossible to completely rule out every possible way in which the child might have acquired the information,” says French. “Parents, for example, may ask leading questions that unintentionally convey a great deal of information, resulting in the creation of false memories. We know that false memories are easy to implant and extremely common.” 

What about cases involving marks on the body? Or cases in which the child remembers details for which no possible source of learning could be identified? “I assume they are not genuine, much as happens with charlatans or magicians who convincingly appear to possess powers they do not actually have,” French continued. “Even if there was no deliberate attempt to deceive, I suspect these memories are not real. It is simply a natural human tendency to believe in rebirth. I was not persuaded by Stevenson’s studies, and the most promising explanation in my view is that these are false memories.” 

Another prominent skeptic is Professor Susan Blackmore of the University of Plymouth, who originally began as a parapsychology researcher following a dramatic out-of-body experience. “I was out of my body for two hours,” she told Haaretz. “It was more vivid and real than ordinary life, and I wanted to understand how that could be. I was completely convinced of the existence of astral worlds and life after death.” 

After twenty years of research that yielded no findings, Blackmore became convinced she had been mistaken. “If you look at near-death experiences, for example, once we have neurological studies, the entire phenomenon is fully explained by heightened activity in certain areas of the brain.” 

When I asked Blackmore how she explained cases like that of Lekh Pal Jatav, I was in for a surprise. The well-known researcher raised her hand to the camera and showed that she too suffers from a congenital defect that caused shortened fingers on one hand. “Is it rare?” she asked. “I don’t know, but probably not extremely. A doctor told me the umbilical cord likely wrapped around the fingers. Are there photographs of the man from the previous life whose fingers were cut off? That would have been more impressive.” 

Blackmore pointed out that Stevenson traveled to India and relied on interpreters. “That’s unavoidable, but think about their motivation—to help, to produce good stories. And there is also the motivation of the children, who wanted to tell stories that would make them famous. There is a widespread cultural belief in reincarnation, so is it really surprising that there are so many such stories?” 

One of Blackmore’s more surprising arguments actually comes from Buddhism. The researcher, who has practiced Zen for 45 years, recalls the Buddha’s teaching that the “self” is not a continuous entity. “In terms of modern science, I think he meant that the self is a sensation that appears and disappears, a product of a neural network. This allows rebirth to be understood differently. There is constant life and death—in our everyday experience. But there is no reincarnation of souls, because there is nothing there to reincarnate. It simply makes no sense.” 

The historian of science Dr. Michael Shermer is perhaps the world’s most prominent skeptic today. In 1992 he founded the Skeptics Society, which he still directs, and the long-running Skeptic magazine. “There is no such thing as reincarnation,” he says bluntly. Research into past lives is riddled with problems, Shermer notes, such as the tendency to focus on unexplained anomalies. “What about all the children who have dreams and fantasies that never connect to anything? If you count only the ‘hits’ and ignore the ‘misses,’ that’s a statistical error. And when you examine, for example, birthmarks on children’s bodies—how similar do they have to be to the mark or wound on the previous person?” 

Shermer invokes the “law of truly large numbers,” which states that given a sufficiently large number of events, even highly improbable occurrences are bound to happen. “When there are billions of people, of course there will also be very strange anomalies,” he says. “The whole thing is complete nonsense. There is no such thing as a soul, no separate consciousness—there is only brain activity.” 

What about the argument that the brain is like a radio receiver that is needed to decode radio waves, but is not itself the waves? “I have a radio here” (he points to the cabinet behind him). “When it receives radio signals that are present in this room, I can go to the station and see where they are being produced. But where am I supposed to go when it comes to consciousness? Where was my consciousness before I was born? The answer is ‘nowhere.’ It did not exist.” 

Toward the end of the interview, Shermer softens a bit, admitting, “It is true that there is something about human consciousness that is very strange. ‘What is consciousness?’ is a question science cannot answer. Perhaps theology, philosophy, or metaphysics will be able to do so.” 

♦ ♦ ♦

In March 2005, the person closest to me on earth died. The depth of the rupture and grief is difficult to describe. Everything fell away—a total loss of grounding. 

Three years later, in a corner of the basement floor of the Jerusalem Literary Gallery, I came across Twenty Cases. Naturally, I bought it, hoping to find some support, or at least a clue. I read the book over the course of more than a year. It is clearly not a light text, nor one intended to provide comfort. It seemed instead to offer a kind of medicine—but of an unexpected sort, mixing ingredients that are difficult to swallow because they appear so foreign and contradictory. 

In no scientific discipline can uncertainty be eliminated, but it can be reduced.

Gardner Murphy was an extraordinary figure in the history of psychology. During the 1940s and 1950s, he served both as president of the American Psychological Association and as president of the American Society for Psychical Research. Murphy wrote: “I saw, as no one but a psychologist can see, the massive ‘impossibility’ of personality without the body, of thought without cerebral cortex, of feeling without basic ganglia, of learning without the articulation of nerve cells … For all that, I saw the force of the evidence … for a genuine continuity.” That is what I felt after finishing the book. On the one hand, Stevenson operated according to the rules of the scientific world and presented astonishingly detailed evidence. On the other hand, that same evidence pointed toward something that sounds utterly absurd to anyone raised within the framework of Western scientific thinking. Reincarnation? As Blackmore put it so simply: no way. 

Yet the unease would not let go. On the one hand, throughout all of recorded human history, despite an intense desire to prove the idea of reincarnation, not a single case compelling enough to settle the debate once and for all has been found. On the other hand, is there even anything that could truly count as “proof”? One could always argue that the case involves fraud, misunderstanding, information obtained by some ordinary means, or mere coincidence. “It would seem wiser to abandon this concept [of proof], which after all is virtually unknown anyway in other branches of science,” Stevenson once remarked. In no scientific discipline can uncertainty be eliminated, but it can be reduced. To Stevenson’s credit, he accomplished that. 

The dominant approach in Western science and philosophy for several centuries has been materialism—the idea that everything in the universe is entirely material. This includes consciousness, which according to this view is nothing more than electrical activity in the brain. But materialists tend to forget two important facts. The first is that consciousness is wholly “qualitative” in nature; its essence is subjectivity. Therefore, in principle, it cannot be described in the quantitative-objective language of science, nor can it be directly observed in experiments through measuring instruments. 

The second fact is that, according to physics, what lies at the foundation of reality is not particles—that is, material entities—but rather fields and wave functions. In a lecture delivered late in life, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck said: “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: there is no matter as such.” 

If that is so, perhaps consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon of existence and of the universe, rather than merely a by-product of brain activity. And if so, perhaps it does not cease with the death of the body, as materialism dictates? “I think a rational man, if he wants, can believe in reincarnation based on the evidence I have collected,” Stevenson wrote, in a characteristic blend of modesty and self-confidence. Did he himself believe? It is not entirely clear. 

About a year before his death, Stevenson wrote an article summing up his winding career. He concluded it with the words: “Let no one think that I know the answer. I am still seeking.” Perhaps that is his legacy to humanity: that we can, with clear thinking and without embarrassment, allow ourselves to think that perhaps there is something more—and to continue seeking. 

This article is based on an article first published in Haaretz on May 28, 2026.

Before I dive in, a disclosure: I haven’t eaten meat since I was about 18 years old. That’s right, I’ve intentionally deprived myself of the joys of filet mignon and wagyu. And while most of my reasoning is centered around animal welfare (severe crowding and brutal killing processes among them), there are a number of other reasons why some are concerned about factory farmed meat. Among them are greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, pollution from animal waste, and safety issues around antibiotic resistance, genetic manipulation, and disease transmission.

That’s why I find the idea of lab-grown meat particularly fascinating.

Yet there’s something unsettling for many people when I bring it up. There’s a resistance, or what you might unscientifically refer to as the “yuck” factor. It’s mostly an emotional response. Lab-grown meat, to many people, intuitively feels unnatural, like a bad science experiment. In a recent study with 1,587 participants, 35 percent of meat-eaters and 55 percent of vegetarians weren’t even willing to taste it.

Those who are willing report that it doesn’t quite taste like the “real thing,” even though in blind experiments subjects often have trouble telling the difference. There’s also legitimate skepticism about the unknown long-term effects of consuming lab-grown protein since this is a new technology. Some health experts consider it ultra-processed food and note that while it’s similar to real meat, it’s not identical. Conventional meat contains the nine essential amino acids that our bodies cannot produce on their own, as well as vitamin B, iron, zinc, and various minerals. Cultivated meat tries to mimic that but the ratios aren’t always exact. One study, for example, found lower contents of protein and essential amino acids, but higher levels of total fat and cholesterol. But this was based on testing of a particular company only.

And then there’s the matter of cost. Although it has come down significantly over the past few years to a level approaching competitiveness with organic meat, it’s still a more expensive option than many consumers are willing to engage with. For now, it seems to be a novelty.

For companies within the cultivated meat industry, there’s been a number of technical and regulatory barriers to overcome. While lab-grown meat is sold—in a limited capacity—in countries like the United States, Singapore, Israel, and Australia, it cannot yet be sold in much of the world, including countries like Canada where it is classified as a “novel food.” Health Canada states that it requires strict pre-market safety assessment of cell-cultivated foods on a case-by-case basis. No approvals have been given to date.

Still, several companies operate within this emerging industry. Mosa Meat, which produces cultivated beef, was among the first, creating one of the first cultivated burgers in 2013, and has been at the forefront of pursuing approvals in several jurisdictions as well as raising some solid funds. Upside Foods, along with GOOD Meat, were among the first to obtain U.S. approval for cultivated chicken. 

Lab-grown meat, to many people, intuitively feels unnatural, like a bad science experiment.

Others have struggled and failed. Believer Meats, for example, despite receiving FDA and USDA clearances, ultimately could not make its finances work and ceased operations. Likewise, Meatable in Europe.

While many countries are exploring regulatory frameworks, the challenge to these companies comes from getting consumer buy-in and economics. Production costs remain high and scaling is difficult.

Recently, at Web Summit, I spoke to Dr. Uma Valeti, cardiologist, founder, and CEO of Upside Foods. His company was responsible for creating its first cultivated meatball in 2016, followed by cultivated chicken in 2017—both grown directly from animal cells.

He says that there are a lot of misconceptions about cultivated meat production. Often people imagine it being made in a lab-like environment, but it is more akin to a food production facility. “This is the cleanest food production facility you can imagine,” he says, “You can go into a brewery, a winery, yogurt maker, and this is going to be cleaner than that. It is going to be a billion times cleaner than a slaughterhouse where meat is made.”

As more people discover his product through channels like a recent Mr. Beast video, Dr. Valeti says that he encounters a lot of curiosity from people.

So, how does one grow cultivated meat? The process involves taking a cell from an animal and providing it with nutrition so that it keeps doubling, just like it would in the body of an animal, Valeti explains. “And we do it in a much cleaner setting and we also do it in a much shorter period because the only job for these animal cells that we’re making for meat is to be delicious [and nutritious].”

The process takes two to four weeks, depending on the species. “After that, we just shape it into the product people are used to seeing.” Like a chicken tender, burger, or sausage—using the same equipment that’s currently being used for processing conventional meat.

Valeti believes that cultivated meat is tastier than traditional because it can be engineered to be superior in terms of its nutritional profile, offering health benefits of having lower cholesterol, lower saturated fat, better iron content, and so on. It can also be modified in terms of making more intense or milder flavor profiles, or gaminess. It’s just a matter of picking the types of cells in the feed, not unlike grass-fed or grain-fed, according to Valeti. Indeed, the technology allows the modification of things like amino acids, fat profile, as well as vitamins and minerals. The cell culture environment can also be adjusted to make the protein more or less fatty, or combined with more water or binders to lower protein contents as it is shaped.

It’s also possible to modify its protein contents, to be higher or lower, depending on personal needs. For example, an athlete or someone looking to build muscle will want more. But someone with chronic kidney disease or those who’ve had dialysis would need to decrease their intake.

There’s also legitimate skepticism about the unknown long-term effects of consuming lab-grown protein since this is a new technology.

Valeti argues that cultivated meat could also dramatically reduce risks associated with pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella while eliminating the need for routine antibiotics. “You could have a meat production facility right next to your Starbucks,” he tells me. “You could walk around, it could be next to your community, your kids’ school, your church. It could be in the community. It doesn’t have to be segregated far away from the city or outside the state borders.”

He explains that Upside Foods’s production facility has been built with glass walls around it. It offers full transparency. The company hosts tours for middle school, high school, and undergrad students. “They’re totally blown away and they love seeing meat being made this way versus where they know it’s [currently] coming from.”

He understands the hesitation by many people. “Whenever you talk about a lab, it’s an experiment that’s being conducted, right?” And many cynics point to the lack of long-term data. But, he argues, the “biggest risk to humanity right now is the current experiment of confining billions of animals in tiny, tiny locations that set up the breeding environment for germs to spread at incredible rapidity and pace that can have uncontrollable and exponential risk of pandemics and zoonotic diseases.”

This is an experiment we conduct daily, he says. In fact, he argues, it is the largest lab-grown experiment in the world: “We add more billions of animals into the food system. And right now we have 80 to 100 billion animals.”

While we may not yet have long-term data on consumption of cultivated food, we do have a lot of data on the food that’s available in the current system. “We already know that the current supply chain causes enormous amounts of chronic diseases associated with cancers and cardiovascular issues,” he says.

Valeti no longer eats traditional meat, but he grew up eating it and loves the taste. But for the first time in history, you no longer need to raise and kill an animal to eat meat. “For the first time, we have a choice,” he says.

Meanwhile, global demand for meat has only grown, yet resources are scarce. Could this approach create an unlimited supply of meat? Valeti thinks so, but cost remains a factor. “When we started, we were a thousand times more expensive than organic meat prices,” he says. Today, it is closer to being on par.

For now, it seems to be a novelty.

Still, even if cost is brought down further, it will take some time to properly scale, establish supply chains, and then there’s also the matter of energy. These can be energy-intensive operations—energy is necessary in order to run the reactors that house the cells as they grow and power the facilities. It’s difficult to compare directly the difference between energy intake from cultivated meat and traditional chicken, or beef. Estimates put cultivated meat energy use at a range of anywhere from 25–250 MJ/kg depending on bioreactor design and production scale. Meanwhile estimates for conventional pork are at around 17–20 MJ/kg and chicken is at 15–30 MJ/kg, but that doesn’t take into account land and water use as well as methane, a significant additional environmental cost. For reference, a typical consumer HVAC system in your home uses around 20–50 kWh/day depending on how hot it is.

Another common concern I hear from those more hesitant to embrace this new technology is that it would cause certain animals to go extinct. But what kind of life is it anyway to be held in a tiny cage with restricted movement and poor conditions, only to be eventually slaughtered? The animals that have gone extinct in the last hundred years have gone extinct because of biodiversity loss, the intense amount of deforestation that has happened to feed the factory-farmed animals that live their entire lives in confinement and suffering.

Humans don’t have to give up eating meat; we can simply make the process better.

Valeti sees cultivated meat production as the cutting-edge future of farming. He notes that the current average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 60 years old, and younger people aren’t going into the traditional path. And, he says, it is a cleaner workplace with massively lower risk of occupational hazards and more transferable skills.

I bring up the visceral reactions of the people I’ve spoken to about eating lab-grown meat in preparation for our conversation. That “ick” factor I referenced earlier seems to dominate. Valeti thinks it can be overcome simply by tasting cultivated meat.

But the science and technology may be advancing faster than public trust. For all the debate over taste, ethics, sustainability, and cost, the question that keeps returning is simpler: will humans be willing to give it a try?

The choice is there.

In many domains, the old moral vocabulary remains in place even as the social pattern has reversed, or at least become far more complicated. Women now outperform men across most of education, earn the majority of advanced degrees, and have made major gains in professions once considered male strongholds.

If the feminist view of modern society were fully adequate, one would expect male advantage to be obvious across the institutions that shape everyday life. But the pattern is far messier than that. Men have lower college enrollment and graduation rates, higher suicide rates, greater incarceration, higher rates of homelessness, and are far more likely than women to be sentenced to death, even for comparably heinous crimes.¹ Those are not marginal anomalies but central social facts, and any framework that continues to describe men, in general, as the unambiguous beneficiaries of systemic privilege must somehow explain why so many of society’s worst outcomes are concentrated among them.

Education is perhaps the clearest example. Boys now underperform girls on nearly every major academic indicator. Girls do better in reading and writing, earn higher grades, and graduate from high school and college at higher rates. Women now receive the majority of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.² The National Center for Education Statistics reports that by the fall of 2022, women made up 52 percent of all faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions.³

Large-scale initiatives continue to be organized around improving outcomes for girls and women, while boys’ declining performance is treated less as a social emergency than as an awkward fact that does not fit the script. In the most recent national NCES/IPEDS completion data available, in 2023–2024 female students received about 59.4 percent of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees combined. NCES’s current projections nevertheless show the imbalance persisting: in 2024–2025, female students were projected to receive about 61.3 percent of associate’s and bachelor’s degrees combined, rising slightly to about 61.7 percent by 2031–2032.⁴ There is no equivalent national campaign to address male educational decline, no broad moral consensus that boys are being left behind, and little appetite for asking whether the institutions themselves may be serving them poorly.^5, 6, 7

The college gender gap is now wider than it was when Title IX was enacted, only now in the opposite direction.

Even mainstream commentators who are not writing from an anti-feminist perspective have begun to acknowledge the scale of the problem. In The Atlantic, for example, Derek Thompson noted that American colleges now enroll roughly six women for every four men, and that men accounted for more than 70 percent of the enrollment decline over the previous five years.⁸ Richard Reeves has likewise argued that boys and young men now lag girls on almost every measure of educational success from pre-K to postgraduate study, and he notes the striking irony that the college gender gap is now wider than it was when Title IX was enacted, only now in the opposite direction.⁹ Then it was a national crisis demanding legislative reform of the educational system; today it is barely discussed in the halls of Congress.

Even some elite technical universities appear to admit women at substantially higher rates than men despite drawing much larger male applicant pools. In a recent analysis of IPEDS data from 2001 to 2024, for example, James L. Nuzzo found that female applicants were admitted at higher rates than male applicants every year at MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon, and in most years at Georgia Tech. The average female-to-male admission ratio was reported as 2.20 at MIT, 2.23 at Caltech, 1.54 at Carnegie Mellon, and 1.31 at Georgia Tech. These findings do not by themselves prove unlawful discrimination, but they do complicate the familiar claim that women remain systematically excluded from elite technical education.¹⁰

The same asymmetry appears in health and psychological well-being. Men are less likely to seek help, more likely to die by suicide, and are often underserved by the very systems put in place to care for those experiencing vulnerability. Although men make up about half the population, they account for nearly 80 percent of U.S. suicides. The federal government maintains an Office on Women’s Health, but there is still no directly comparable HHS Office of Men’s Health, despite repeated calls for one.^11, 12 The relatively limited institutional attention paid to male-specific problems such as prostate and testicular cancer, male victimization in domestic violence, and male sexual assault reveals how easily men’s suffering is overlooked. These are not obscure issues. They are serious, measurable forms of suffering. But because they happen to men, they do not easily trigger the same public expressions of compassion or the same assumptions of structural injustice that similar patterns affecting women would almost certainly generate.^13, 14, 15

A psychologically serious framework should ask when traits are adaptive, when they are maladaptive, and under what conditions they serve human flourishing. 

What is especially telling is that concern about boys is now surfacing even from figures whose public careers were built around advancing girls. In a 2025 Time essay, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani wrote, “While we were pushing our girls forward, we were leaving our boys behind,” and went on to note that boys and men are less likely to go to college and more likely to die by suicide or overdose. Her point was not that girls no longer matter, but that a culture serious about fairness can no longer afford to treat male struggle as an afterthought. That concession matters precisely because it comes from someone who can hardly be dismissed as hostile to women’s advancement.¹⁶

Criminal justice tells a similar story, and in some ways an even harsher one. Men make up the overwhelming share of the incarcerated, the violently victimized, and deaths resulting from high-risk aggression.^17, 18 Male victimization rises sharply beginning in adolescence and peaks in the mid-twenties, when men become far more likely than women to be killed. For example, in the United States in 2023, men accounted for about 78 percent of homicide victims, compared with 22 percent for women.¹⁹ These patterns are highly relevant to any honest discussion of sex, power, and vulnerability. Yet they are rarely centered in mainstream feminist discourse, because they complicate the cleaner narrative in which men are primarily portrayed as perpetrators and women primarily as victims. A skeptical observer might conclude that male suffering is not denied outright so much as downgraded—acknowledged in passing, then quietly absorbed into a framework that still insists men are the privileged sex. 

The problem, then, is not simply that some people fail to care enough about boys and men. The problem is that the dominant interpretive model is poorly equipped to recognize male disadvantage as genuine disadvantage. When women struggle, institutions are encouraged to ask what social barriers are holding them back. When men struggle, institutions are more likely to ask what is wrong with men. The first response invites reform; the second invites diagnosis, moralizing, or indifference. That difference in framing matters because it determines which problems receive resources, research attention, and public sympathy—and which are treated as self-inflicted wounds. 

This is where the language of privilege becomes especially misleading. Of course, some men hold enormous power, just as some women do not. But it does not follow that men as a class are uniformly advantaged in the institutions most people actually inhabit: schools, clinics, family systems, low-status labor, or the criminal justice system. What we are witnessing is not universal male dominance. That blind spot persists because an ideology built to detect female oppression has difficulty recognizing that men, too, can be on the losing end of institutions, norms, and cultural assumptions.²⁰

The blind spot is not merely institutional; it is cultural as well. Even explicitly anti-male hostility is often treated as less serious than hostility directed at women. A recent peer-reviewed analysis of extremist Reddit communities found no systematic differences between misogynistic and misandric groups in their linguistic, emotional, and structural features, suggesting that gendered hate directed at men and women may be more similar than our public discourse is comfortable admitting.²¹ This does not mean online misandry is the central issue, nor does it prove broader institutional discrimination against men. But it does show that contempt for men exists in recognizable, organized form and deserves to be taken more seriously than it usually is. 

Once this becomes visible, the next question is unavoidable: What happens when institutions stop merely overlooking male disadvantage and begin actively interpreting masculinity itself as a problem? 

The Pathologizing of Masculinity 

The problem is not merely that institutions often overlook male disadvantage. In some cases, they go further by treating masculinity itself as something suspect. Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the American Psychological Association’s Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.²² The guidelines are explicitly grounded in a feminist and social constructionist framework, one that treats masculinity primarily as a culturally imposed set of expectations rather than as a complex human reality shaped by biology, development, temperament, and culture together. That theoretical choice shapes how male behavior is interpreted from the outset. Masculinity is no longer approached first as something to understand, but as something to critique. 

Masculinity is no longer approached first as something to understand, but as something to critique. 

This posture becomes most obvious in the document’s treatment of traditional male traits. The guidelines state that “traditional masculinity”—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—is, “on the whole, harmful.” They further instruct psychologists to examine the role of “power, privilege, and sexism” in the development of boys and men. The cumulative effect is unmistakable: characteristics long associated with masculinity are framed less as neutral traits with potential strengths and weaknesses than as liabilities linked to oppression and dysfunction. In this framework, masculinity is not simply a style of being; it is a clinical problem in need of correction.²³

That is a remarkable stance for a therapeutic profession to adopt, especially in fields where women are a clear majority.²⁴ A male client who enters therapy seeking help for depression, anxiety, loneliness, or failure is already vulnerable. If the institutional framework guiding his therapist encourages her to see stoicism, competitiveness, assertiveness, or traditional role commitments primarily as symptoms of power, privilege, or social harm, then therapy risks becoming something other than care. It risks becoming re-education. Instead of helping men understand themselves, the profession often begins by telling them that the very traits most central to their identity are morally suspect. A mental health framework that positions male identity as inherently problematic fails the test of neutrality and may undermine trust from the very beginning.^25, 26

The trouble here is not that masculine traits can never become destructive. Of course they can. Risk-taking can become recklessness. Stoicism can harden into emotional isolation. Dominance can become abuse. But the same is true of traits more commonly associated with women: empathy can become overaccommodation; agreeableness can become passivity; nurturance can become self-erasure. A psychologically serious framework should ask when traits are adaptive, when they are maladaptive, and under what conditions they serve human flourishing. What it should not do is begin with the assumption that one sex’s characteristic tendencies are, on balance, harmful. Yet that is precisely the impression the APA framework leaves. It offers a language of critique, but very little language of appreciation, balance, or contextual understanding.^27, 28

The consequences are not merely theoretical. Men already underuse mental health services, are less likely to seek psychological help, and are far more likely to die by suicide.^29, 30, 31 Under those conditions, a therapeutic model that implicitly tells men their identity is part of the problem is unlikely to be productive. Rather than meeting men where they are, it risks alienating them further. Rather than building trust, it may confirm their suspicion that elite institutions do not understand them and are not especially interested in trying. The guidelines may do more harm than good: by pathologizing traditional masculinity, they may repel the very population they claim to serve.^32, 33

Behind all this lies a deeper ideological issue. The APA guidelines do not simply offer clinical advice; they import a broader critical-theory view of sex and identity into therapeutic practice. Masculinity is interpreted through the lens of power, privilege, and structural domination, while alternative explanations—biological, developmental, evolutionary, or even straightforwardly temperamental—receive little serious engagement. The result is an ideological narrowing in which male psychology is no longer treated as a subject of open inquiry. It is treated as a moral field to be managed. And once a profession charged with healing begins from that premise, it should not be surprising if many men conclude that it has stopped trying to understand them and has started trying to correct them.^34, 35, 36

When women struggle, institutions are encouraged to ask what social barriers are holding them back. When men struggle, institutions are more likely to ask what is wrong with men. 

Boys and men are often encouraged to open up, seek help, and be vulnerable. But when they do, they enter institutions increasingly shaped by theories that view core aspects of their identity with suspicion. The message, however politely phrased, is hard to miss: it is an ideology of care that too often begins with suspicion and blame. 

Skepticism and the Need for Symmetry 

A skeptical culture should demand more than slogans, moral urgency, and politically convenient explanations. It should insist on symmetry. The same standards of evidence applied to claims of female disadvantage should also be applied to claims of male disadvantage. The same openness to structural explanations granted when women fall behind should be granted when boys and men do. And the same willingness to consider biology, temperament, incentives, development, and choice in explaining male outcomes should also be permitted when explaining female outcomes. Concepts such as patriarchy and social construction too often function as starting assumptions rather than as hypotheses subjected to serious empirical testing.^37, 38, 39

A more rigorous approach would begin by admitting that sex differences and sex disparities do not explain themselves. Some reflect injustice. Some reflect trade-offs. Some reflect evolved predispositions that interact with modern institutions. Some reflect cultural expectations that help one sex in one context and hurt it in another. Serious inquiry should sort among these possibilities rather than treating one ideological narrative as morally mandatory. Feminist scholarship has too often narrowed that inquiry by treating alternative explanatory frameworks, especially evolutionary ones, as politically suspect before they are even evaluated on their merits.^40, 41

A mental health framework that positions male identity as inherently problematic fails the test of neutrality and may undermine trust from the very beginning. 

This is why the issue is larger than feminism alone. It is about whether our institutions still believe in the basic norms of intellectual fairness. A skeptical institution should not decide in advance who counts as oppressed and who counts as privileged, then interpret every new fact through that template. It should be willing to discover that women are disadvantaged in some places, men in others, and that both realities can be true at once. It should be willing to ask whether schools serve boys poorly, whether therapy alienates men, whether current diversity programs are aimed at yesterday’s inequities rather than today’s realities, and whether moral prestige has become detached from empirical evidence. 

If skepticism means anything, it means resisting explanations that flatter our politics while ignoring contrary evidence. It means asking, with equal seriousness, what harms women and what harms men. Until that symmetry is restored, our gender debates will remain less a search for truth than a competition among moral narratives.

A review of: The Spy Archive: Hidden Lives, Secret Missions, and the History of Espionage by Dexter Ingram (IN Network, 2025) and The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB by Gordon Corera (Pegasus Books, 2026).

Has espionage changed over time? And what inspires people to betray their country? Two new books tackle these questions and more from different perspectives. The Spy Archive by Dexter Ingram is a history of espionage, from ancient times to the early 21st century. The similarly titled book The Spy in The Archive tells the story of one man’s journey from KGB officer to defector.

I initially worried that Ingram’s The Spy Archive was so short that it might be little more than an extended encyclopedia article. My fear was first challenged by its back cover praise by prestigious intelligence professionals and by Ingram’s own experience in the field, which the text confirms gives his advice and critiques a value that a historian could not provide. As I read The Spy Archive, I also grew to appreciate Ingram’s choice to focus on technique over politics. Of course, his historical survey hits most of the expected highlights, in Europe and the U.S., including the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, The American Revolution, two World Wars, the Cold War, and modern issues such as drone strikes and internet based attacks. 

Along the way Ingram comments that the most effective and long-standing multi-nation intelligence sharing alliance in history is known as Five Eyes, which leading news outlets have reported since publication that at least one member country has expressed concern over continuing to share intelligence with the U.S. 

Skeptics will appreciate that Ingram directly mentions critical thinking, though some may be disappointed that he includes discussion of Biblical espionage in the chapter on ancient espionage. I applaud Ingram though for giving a disproportionately large amount of space to such topics as what has and hasn’t changed in spying technology (such as comparing an ancient false bottomed earthen jar to a Cold War era hollow coin), and discussing how female and African American spies have sometimes been more effective due to sexism and racism. He even gives full chapters to the history and influence of spying within Asia, spying in fiction, and to ethical issues, including the toll that life or death decisions  can have on intelligence agents who work in offices. 

One of his odd inclusions: Ingram says that World War II Nazi leader Klaus Barbie was saved from a war crimes trial by doing work for U.S. military intelligence, which is not mentioned in the indexes of the survey texts The Secret World by leading intelligence historian Christopher Andrew, A Century of Spies by the late Jeffrey T.  Richelson of The National Security Archive, nor in the second edition of the reference book Spy Book by U.S. government Norman Polmar and writer Thomas G. Allen.

Ingram’s doubts about the efficacy of “enhanced interrogation” surprised me, as did his ambivalence about the mass U.S. spying revealed by Edward Snowden. However, Dexter Ingram’s experience as a U.S. Navy pilot and State Department counterterrorism expert made it impossible for me to dismiss his opinions as liberal virtue signaling. 

It’s always a challenge what to include in a short text, but I was shocked that he barely mentions Soviet espionage against the U.S. atomic bomb, and that in an entire chapter on ethics there is no extended discussion of the dilemma that information gained by a broken code or active spy is sometimes not acted upon because it would stop the flow of information.  Less seriously, Ingram also got at least one name wrong (U.S. Navy traitor John Walker’s daughter was actually named Laura). In a side note, Walker’s contemporary, Aldrich Ames, the treasonous ex-CIA agent who is also mentioned, died in prison in January of 2026 after the book’s publication. 

Of more concern than inconsistent inclusions is that Ingram’s statements sometimes seem contradictory. One example is the question of the valuable intelligence technique of multisource validation. How can Ingram credit it to the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu in one chapter, later comment that the technique was used in the Middle Ages, in a subsequent chapter credit the famous Renaissance author and spy Machiavelli as pioneering the technique, and then call Napoleon’s use of multisource validation “revolutionary?” The most concise contradiction is Ingram’s incoherent comment that whistleblowers can help the system correct itself. 

The contrast to Gordon Corera’s The Spy in The Archive could not be wider, a multi-topic, multi-chronology history written so smoothly it could serve as a model for clear writing, while also being almost as suspenseful as spy fiction.

The most serious problem with the book is organizational. I like foreshadowing and  “reflections” about the material discussed, but here it almost seems random, such as having introductory material in the center of a chapter and substantive material only in the introductory or reflection sections, as well as material in one chapter that would fit better in another chapter. There are too many examples of material being discussed twice, sometimes at length and usually without acknowledgement or good reason. At worst, the material is so disordered that it is hard to follow (especially in the last two chapters) despite the sentences themselves not being badly written.  

The contrast to Gordon Corera’s The Spy in The Archive could not be wider, a multi-topic, multi-chronology history written so smoothly it could serve as a model for clear writing, while also being almost as suspenseful as spy fiction. Like Ingram, Corera breaks the story into small parts, but in Ingram this creates disorder, while in Corera it makes for a faster read.

The true story is extraordinary: an archivist for the KGB became disillusioned by the lies and brutality revealed in the archives that were the Soviet Union’s most well kept secrets. So over the course of many years he took a massive amount of notes and smuggled them out of the archive each day hidden in his shoes, and finally escaped Russia with the help of British Secret Service agents, who were armed with automatic weapons for good reason. The trove that the archivist, Vasili Mitokhin, so dramatically made available to the West, revealed the identities of as many as a thousand Soviet agents in 36 countries. 

There have already been books about these revelations, most prominently The Sword and the Shield, co-authored by Mitrokhin and historian Christopher Andrew. In contrast, The Spy in the Archive is about Mitrokhin’s personal evolution from enthusiastic KGB agent to archivist to defector. Along the way Corera skillfully interweaves key moments in the history of the Soviet Union and also made me feel the culture of fear enforced by Soviet security forces which is the underpinning of both the Soviet story and the evolution of Mitrokhin’s disillusionment. (I imagined echoes of this culture of neighbor turning on neighbor with recent news of possible bounties for women leaving Texas to seek abortions). Worst of all, the top secret KGB archives revealed that it was common for brutal punishment to be insisted upon even when the prosecutors knew the charges to be completely false, even when based solely on personal malice or gain. 

Mitrokhin’s struggle to get his material published is suspenseful beyond his fear of being caught. A risky approach to the Americans was dismissed without consideration, and British diplomats were understandably slow in believing that Mitrokhin was telling the truth. Then, the agents struggled to convince the English government to fund the exfiltration of Mitrokhin and his family, as the Cold War ended and intelligence service budgets were slashed. But the dramatic escape happened, Mitrokhin was given a new life in England, and his notes were turned into books that forced the rewriting of Cold War history. 

Stress remained: Mitrokhin was enraged that the first published book based on his notes (the aforementioned Sword and the Shield) ignored the evils within the Soviet Union. It also saddened Mitrokhin to realize, sooner than his new British government friends did, that  Putin was lying about his openness to democracy (post-Cold War Russian spying is fully documented in Calder Walton’s recent book Spies, which I reviewed in Skeptic v30n1). Perhaps it is better that Mitrokhin did not live to see Russia’s January 2026 launch of a nuclear capable missile into Ukraine. 

The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB is nearly a perfect book, from its apt subtitle to the emotions rendered so vividly throughout the text.

It’s a gripping and historically important story told extremely well. There are only a few details that I wish had been mentioned, such as the difficulty (or not) of exfiltrating Mitrokhin’s notes, and more directly and extensively discussing how they were determined to be genuine.  Corera should also have mentioned the comparable exfiltrated notebooks of defector Alexander Vassiliev, and how many books were published based on Mitrokhin’s material during his lifetime. 

But these are quibbles: The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB is nearly a perfect book, from its apt subtitle to the emotions rendered so vividly throughout the text. Ingram’s The Spy Archive could have been a very nice book if it had had a good content editor or coauthor to rewrite it from Ingram’s rough draft, which is what large portions of the published book read like, obscuring its strengths. 

One link between the two books is betrayal: Ingram notes that most recent U.S. traitors were partly motivated by money but also as by feeling underappreciated by their intelligence agency employers, and Corera concludes that Mitrokhin’s motivations had more aspects of this than he wanted to admit, perhaps even to himself.  

For generations, the mystery of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) has been viewed through a narrow lens of mechanical engineering, split between fears of foreign espionage and fantasies of extraterrestrial invasion. By viewing these anomalies strictly as hardware, we ignore a far more grounded explanation: biology. This article explores the “Atmospheric Life” hypothesis, proposing that UAPs are not manufactured machines, but undiscovered, highly adapted biological entities native to Earth’s upper atmosphere. By examining their non-mechanical flight patterns, organic physical structures, sensor misinterpretations, and total lack of military retaliation, we can reframe a modern security panic as a groundbreaking frontier of natural science.

A Mystery Solved

For decades, the conversation around Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) has been dominated by two main theories: secret military technology or visitors from distant galaxies. However, a compelling alternative hypothesis looks downward instead of upward. What if these anomalous objects are actually undiscovered, highly adapted biological entities native to Earth’s atmosphere?

When we strip away the sci-fi assumptions, the erratic flight patterns, shapes, and behaviors of many documented UAPs look far more like organic wildlife than mechanical craft.

Avian and Insectoid Flight Mechanics

The most common piece of evidence cited for the technological nature of UAPs is their radical flight behavior. Witnesses and radar tracking often describe sudden changes in direction, instant acceleration, and erratic hovering.

While these movements may baffle aerospace engineers, they are entirely familiar to biologists. Watch a common housefly, a dragonfly, or a starling murmuration. These animals dart, pivot, change velocity instantly, and hover in ways that defy standard human aviation. The erratic “ping-pong” flight patterns often reported in UAP sightings strongly mirror the hunting and mating flights of insects or the chaotic, synchronized movements of birds. 

Real-world animal behaviors perfectly mirror what we see in famous UAP footage. Rather than breaking the laws of physics with advanced technology, these objects may simply possess biological flight mechanisms that we do not yet understand.

Atmospheric Leviathans: The Cigar-Shaped Ocean Paradox

Beyond small, nimble UAPs, there are frequent reports of massive, cylindrical, or “cigar-shaped” objects hovering silently in the upper atmosphere. In a technological context, a craft of this size represents a massive logistical footprint or a looming mothership. In a biological context, it represents a giant apex predator or filter feeder.

Think of Earth’s oceans. Massive creatures like blue whales, whale sharks, and deep-sea siphonophores float effortlessly through a dense fluid medium. Earth’s atmosphere is also a fluid medium, just a less dense one. A large, slow-moving, cigar-shaped UAP behaves remarkably like a whale or a shark cruising through the deep ocean.

Concluding that UAPs are hostile or extra-planetary requires a massive leap of imagination.

These entities could be low-density, gas-filled biological organisms that spend their entire lifecycles drifting through the stratosphere, entirely indifferent to the human world below. Historical cryptozoology theories have long proposed the existence of such “atmospheric jellyfish” and sky-dwelling organisms.

The Misinterpretation of Biological Tissue

A major roadblock to the biological theory is our reliance on technology to detect these entities. Modern defense networks use radar, infrared camera arrays, and thermal sensors to scan the skies. When these systems register an object, we automatically assume it is made of metal, carbon fiber, or titanium.

However, radar and thermal sensors can easily misinterpret biological tissue. Dense flocks of birds and swarms of insects routinely create massive, solid-looking anomalies on radar screens. Furthermore, a creature with a highly reflective outer membrane, or one that generates its own bioluminescent heat signature, could trick infrared sensors into displaying a sharp, mechanical outline. We might be looking at skin, blubber, and organic defense mechanisms, but viewing them through sensors calibrated only to find hardware.

The Absence of Military Aggression

The prevailing geopolitical narrative frames UAPs as national security threats. This fear-based perspective assumes that anything unknown in our airspace must be a foreign adversary or an invading force. However, real-world data contradicts this assumption.

In recent years, modern militaries have actively tracked, engaged, and even shot down several unidentified objects. If these entities were part of a technologically superior, militarily organized foreign power or alien civilization, standard military doctrine dictating a counter-attack would apply. Yet, no such retaliation has ever occurred.

When a wasp nest is disturbed, or a bear is cornered, it defends itself violently. But when a deep-sea creature or a migrating bird is harmed by humans, the species as a whole does not organize a strategic military counter-offensive. The total lack of coordinated tactical retaliation from UAPs strongly suggests they lack military organization, strategic intent, or a concept of warfare. They react like wildlife—either fleeing or remaining entirely indifferent to human aggression.

Reclaiming the Phenomenon from Sci-Fi

Concluding that UAPs are hostile or extra-planetary requires a massive leap of imagination. It forces us to invent complex interstellar civilizations, vast government conspiracies, or foreign technologies centuries ahead of everyone else on Earth. These are all unlikely compared to the biological hypothesis, which provides a much more grounded and parsimonious explanation. Earth’s biosphere is incredibly resilient and adaptable. 

Just as we are still discovering bizarre new lifeforms in the deepest trenches of our oceans, it is entirely possible that our upper atmosphere harbors its own unique ecosystem. By viewing UAPs through the lens of biology rather than warfare, we can strip away the unneeded fear and recognize these phenomena for what they likely are: just another undiscovered wonder of our natural world.

Most debates about the origins of Christianity fall into a culturally entrenched groove: the apologist marshals evidence for a physical resurrection of Jesus; the skeptic counters with naturalistic explanations against it. Both sides, however, share a fundamental error—they assume that “Resurrection” meant “Resuscitation” to the first Christians, treating the walking, talking, fish-eating corpse as the primary historical datum to be either defended or dismantled.

By examining the earliest recoverable evidence—specifically the letters of Paul—we discover that the real question is not “Did the physical resurrection of Jesus literally happen?” but “Did the original disciples even claim that it did?” When we shift the axis from metaphysical debate to source criticism, the traditional question doesn’t get answered—it dissolves.

The “Resurrection” began as a spiritual vision interpreted through an apocalyptic lens, and only later crystallized into a physical narrative to serve the institutional needs of a growing church. Understanding this evolution allows us to explain the rise of Christianity without recourse to the supernatural, relying instead on the well-documented mechanisms of human psychology, sociology, and history.

What follows is a chronological reconstruction: first, the historically probable circumstances of the crucifixion and burial; second, the acute psychological crisis this created for the disciples; and third—critically—an analysis of Paul’s earliest epistles to demonstrate that the original apostolic claim was entirely visionary in nature, before tracing how and why that spiritual claim was retroactively physicalized by later Gospel writers into the familiar empty-tomb narratives.

The Crucifixion: What We Can Be Confident About

Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under the reign of Pontius Pilate around 30 CE. This is one of the most historically secure facts about him, attested not only by Christian sources but by non-Christian historians: Tacitus, writing c. 115–117 CE, mentions that “Christus” was executed under Pilate; Josephus, writing around 93 CE, references the same event. Though scholars recognize that Christian scribes interpolated portions of the Josephus passage, the core reference to his execution under Pilate remains widely accepted. The crucifixion is simply not in historical doubt—nor is the death itself. The swoon theory—suggesting that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross but fell into a comatose-like state and later appeared to his disciples—is rejected by virtually every serious scholar, including deeply skeptical ones. Roman executioners were professionals whose lives depended on their thoroughness.

What is less often appreciated is the specific theological catastrophe the crucifixion represented for the disciples. A crucified messiah was not a martyred hero awaiting vindication. Deuteronomy 21:23 was explicit: anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. The cross was, within the only theological framework these people possessed, formal proof that God had rejected Jesus. And the Messiah, in their tradition, had a specific job description: defeat the Romans, rebuild the Temple, and establish world peace. Jesus had done none of these things. He died the death of a failed revolutionary, leaving Israel still under occupation. This is why Jews do not accept Jesus as the Messiah. They were expecting a conquering warrior and witnessed only an executed preacher, crucified in between two common (one repentant, one unrepentant) thieves.

Thus, the Jewish disciples of Jesus were in freefall, searching desperately for any shred of meaning. The later Gospel claims that Jesus repeatedly predicted his resurrection are exposed as a literary invention by the simple fact of the disciples’ behavior. Had he foretold rising on the third day, his followers would not have hidden in terror, nor would the women have brought spices to anoint a permanent corpse. The disciples were not waiting for a promised victory. They were in a nosedive, searching desperately for any shred of meaning.

This silence is historically significant. Because Jesus apparently never framed his death as purposeful—as atonement, as apocalyptic necessity, as anything—his followers were forced into reactive, improvised theology after the fact. The varying theological emphases visible across the New Testament are the scars of a movement that spent its earliest years trying to retroactively make sense of a catastrophe their leader never prepared them for.

The Burial and the Empty Tomb

The earliest Christian writer, Paul, writing decades after the fact, never mentions an empty tomb, and his silence is telling. In 1 Corinthians 15, mounting a desperate evidential defense against resurrection skeptics, he lists every proof available: visionary appearances to Peter, the Twelve, five hundred people, James, all the apostles, himself, and finally to scripture. No tomb. No women. No burial site discovery. Even Paul’s mention of the resurrection of Jesus was described in 1 Corinthians (15:44) as a spiritual event rather than a literal one: 

It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

More than silence, Paul actively describes the resurrection in terms that exclude a resuscitated corpse: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” His seed analogy is explicit—the physical body remains in the ground while something entirely new emerges from it. This is not the language of a man who believed a corpse had walked out of a grave.

Even the now-famous “empty tomb” doesn’t appear in our written sources until Mark’s Gospel, composed around 70 CE, forty years after the events therein described. What the evidence does reliably establish is this: women went to find Jesus’s body Sunday morning and could not locate it—a detail that passes the criterion of embarrassment on multiple grounds. Women’s testimony was legally invalid in first-century Jewish culture; no one fabricating an apologetic story would make them its sole witnesses. Mark preserves their reaction with brutal honesty: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled … They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). This is not the response you invent for a resurrection proof.

Most tellingly, Mary Magdalene’s first assumption was naturalistic: “They have taken the Lord, and we do not know where they have laid him” (John 20:2). The primary witness assumed relocation or theft, not miracle. Even enemy attestation confirms this: Matthew 28:13–15 preserves a Jewish counter-claim of body theft—significant not because it’s true, but because it confirms the body’s absence was not in dispute, only the explanation for its absence.

The most historically probable explanation for the empty tomb follows directly from Jewish law. Under Deuteronomy 21:22–23, executed criminals had to be buried before sundown to prevent ritual pollution. The Mishnah explicitly barred criminals from honorable family tombs, mandating designated unmarked graves instead (Sanhedrin 6:5). Jesus, crucified and explicitly cursed under Jewish law, was in all likelihood disposed of accordingly—hastily, without ceremony, in an unmarked criminal’s grave. 

Crucially, even in the latest, most physically-oriented Gospel accounts, nobody actually touches Jesus. Luke has Jesus invite verification—“touch me and see”—but the text never records the disciples doing so. John constructs the entire Thomas scene to combat Docetism (the belief that Jesus’s physical body and early sufferings were an illusion), yet never narrates Thomas touching the wounds—only a confession of faith. What is entirely absent across all four Gospels is spontaneous physical affection: no one embraces Jesus, kisses him, or clings to him in tearful relief—the involuntary human response to reunion with someone beloved and lost. What we get instead are controlled, almost clinical encounters: invitations to touch wounds, prohibitions against holding, failures to recognize a familiar face. This is precisely what we would expect from visionary experiences of a spiritual presence. It is entirely inconsistent with physical reunions involving a tangible human body.

Reading the sources chronologically makes the tradition’s development unmistakable. Paul in the 50s CE: no tomb, only visions, explicitly spiritual resurrection language. Mark at 70 CE: women go to a burial site, but no identification of whose tomb, no appearance narratives, ending abruptly in terror and silence—the promise of a Galilean appearance made but never narrated. Matthew and Luke in the 80s CE: the tomb is now explicitly Joseph’s, guards and earthquakes appear, physical appearance narratives proliferate. John in the 90s CE: maximum specificity—a garden tomb, Thomas invited to probe wounds, the secret disciple motif fully developed.

The empty tomb was not the source of the resurrection claim. It was a later frame built around it—an ambiguous memory retroactively recruited as apologetic proof once the tradition had developed far enough to need it.

Across six decades the story moves from vague to specific, from confusion to certainty, from spiritual to physical.

The mechanism is straightforward. Once resurrection belief had formed through visionary experience in Galilee, the earlier memory of the women’s confusion was retrospectively read through that new framework. What had originally meant “we couldn’t find the body—we don’t know where they laid him” was recast as “we found the tomb empty, confirming physical resurrection.” The empty tomb was not the source of the resurrection claim. It was a later frame built around it—an ambiguous memory retroactively recruited as apologetic proof once the tradition had developed far enough to need it.

The Visions: The Psychological Heart of the Matter

Here the reconstruction reaches its most important point: where and how the resurrection belief actually originated.
 
After the crucifixion, the disciples fled Jerusalem—they were targets at risk of arrest—and retreated to Galilee, which created what we might call a verification vacuum. By the time the disciples had processed their grief and eventually returned to Jerusalem to preach the resurrection, weeks or months had elapsed. In the Judean climate, decomposition is rapid. Even if the authorities had cared enough to excavate a common criminal’s trench to refute a sect of Galilean fishermen, the body would have been unrecognizable. But this forensic reality is largely beside the point—because the original claim was not that a resuscitated corpse had vacated a tomb. It was that the exalted Lord had appeared in visions. No decomposing body could disprove a spiritual experience.
 
In Galilee, weeks after the crucifixion, Peter experienced a powerful event that the earliest texts describe purely as a vision or appearance (ōphthē). While we cannot psychoanalyze Peter across two millennia, the textual record is clear: he genuinely experienced something he could only interpret as Jesus being present and alive.

Let’s assume that Peter was not lying, not performing, and not part of a conspiracy, and that he genuinely experienced something he could only interpret as Jesus having returned to life. He had no concept of grief hallucination. He was an apocalyptic Jew who knew the women had gone looking for the body and found nothing. His worldview provided exactly one category for what he had experienced: resurrection. God had raised Jesus from the dead—vindicating him after the apparent curse of crucifixion, confirming him as the Messiah, and inaugurating the End Times resurrection that Jewish theology had long predicted and that Peter already believed was coming. When Peter experienced this powerful spiritual vision, his Jewish apocalyptic background provided exactly one category for what he had experienced: resurrection. 

What “Resurrection” Originally Meant (and How It Changed)

This is one of the most important insights in understanding Christian origins, because it fundamentally reframes what we’re trying to explain.

Paul’s letters are the earliest Christian documents we have, written in the 50s CE—before any of the Gospels. When Paul describes the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, the language is strikingly different from what the later Gospels would say. He speaks of a “spiritual body” (soma pneumatikon) and explicitly says “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” While many scholars rightly note that “flesh and blood” is a Hebrew idiom for mortal, corruptible human nature rather than a strict denial of all physicality, Paul’s choice to repeatedly emphasize spiritual transformation over fleshly continuity is revealing. 

He applies the same word—ōphthē, meaning “appeared to”—uniformly to all resurrection witnesses: Peter, the Twelve, the five hundred, James, and himself. He draws no distinction between their experiences and his own Damascus Road encounter, which he describes elsewhere not as a physical meeting but as apokalypsis—revelation: in Galatians 1:12 and 1:16, Paul says God “revealed his Son in me,” the language of vision, not of encountering a body. Had the earlier appearances been physical while his was visionary, he would have been forced to explain why his experience constituted equally valid evidence. He conspicuously does not feel that need.

The standard objection inverts this inference: rather than Paul’s visionary experience pulling the others toward visionary status, the physical appearances pull his toward physical status—with Acts providing the dramatic corroboration. This objection, however, runs directly against the methodological principle this essay has consistently applied. Acts was written decades after Paul’s letters by someone other than Paul, and its physicalization of the Damascus Road contradicts Paul’s own account. Paul’s self-description governs.

Paul’s theology does not merely transform the physical body—it renders the physical remains entirely irrelevant to the resurrection claim. The husk stays in the soil because the original claim never concerned the husk.

His seed analogy (1 Cor 15:37) makes the structural case explicit. You bury a seed, it dies, and a different plant rises—the casing decomposes; it does not stand back up. This is not rhetorical accommodation to a Greek audience repulsed by resuscitation, though Paul was certainly writing to such an audience. The argument is structural: if Paul believed the physical husk itself had vacated the tomb, the analogy would be fundamentally broken. He reaches for precisely this metaphor because it describes what he understood the resurrection to be—not resuscitation, but the emergence of something qualitatively new from what was left behind. Paul’s theology does not merely transform the physical body—it renders the physical remains entirely irrelevant to the resurrection claim. The husk stays in the soil because the original claim never concerned the husk.

The exaltation claim—that God raised Jesus and seated him at the right hand of divine authority—fully satisfied everything the original crisis demanded. A resuscitated corpse answers a question the crisis never asked: not “has God vindicated Jesus?” but “what happened to the body?” The physicalization therefore cannot be explained as the natural outgrowth of the original experience. It requires its own explanation—one that lies, as we will see, in the later institutional pressures of a movement needing to anchor itself against both Docetism and the chaos of ongoing visionary claims.

This reading is reinforced by an ontological statement in the same chapter. In 1 Corinthians 15:45, Paul declares that “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (pneuma zōopoioun). This is not metaphor, and it is not accommodation to Greek sensibility—it is a direct claim about what the risen state is. A writer operating within a tradition of physical resuscitation does not describe the risen state of that body as spirit. That Paul does so, without qualification or apology, is the single most direct Pauline support for the exaltation reading and remains significantly underexploited in the literature.

There is a further argument embedded in Paul’s background. As a Pharisee, his starting point was the cultural belief in a physical resurrection. This makes his consistent silence on fleshly encounter historically significant. If the Jerusalem disciples had touched wounds or eaten fish with the risen Jesus, Paul would have been intimately aware of it through his direct consultations with Peter and James (Galatians 1:18). To a Pharisee, such evidence would have been the most persuasive argument available—direct confirmation of Jewish resurrection dogma. He would not have buried it in seed metaphors. Instead, he avoids the language of flesh entirely—and if his concern were purely rhetorical, he could easily have found Greek-compatible framing for a physical claim, as he demonstrably could reframe Jewish concepts for Gentile audiences throughout his letters.

Critically, this framework predates Paul. Philippians 2:6-11 is accepted across the theological spectrum as a pre-Pauline hymn—some of the earliest recoverable Christology. Its movement is from pre-existence through humiliation through death to a single culminating event: exaltation—“God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name above every name.” There is no physical resuscitation language anywhere in it; the resurrection is absorbed entirely into the exaltation. Since this predates Paul, the exaltation-without-physicalization framework was not his theological invention but the tradition he received—which corroborates precisely what he claims in 1 Corinthians 15:3. Romans 1:3-4 and Philippians 3:20-21 run in the same direction, describing the resurrection as cosmic appointment and transformation into soma tēs doxēs—body of glory—the vocabulary of theophany rather than resuscitation.

Moreover, Paul is not inventing this theology in a vacuum. In 1 Corinthians 15:3, he explicitly states he is passing on a creed he “received”—technical language for a formal oral tradition transmitted to him by the original disciples during his Jerusalem visit around 35 CE. Scholars widely date this creed to within a few years of the crucifixion. The fact that the tradition was formalized so early and remained entirely visionary demonstrates that the spiritual interpretation preceded intergenerational oral drift by decades. Paul did not invent the “spiritual body” concept; he inherited it. The later shift to a physical corpse in the Gospels was therefore not merely a departure from Paul—it was a departure from Peter and James as well.

The physical resurrection narrative, in other words, has no apostolic anchor. This challenges the idea that Paul and the Jerusalem apostles were divided on the nature of the resurrection. It also directly dismantles the common apologetic claim that Paul preached idiosyncratic spiritual theology while the Jerusalem church independently preserved a tradition of physical resurrection. The creed he received from them suggests otherwise.

Finally, Paul never mentions Jesus eating food, nor anyone touching him. In 1 Corinthians 15, arguing strenuously against resurrection skeptics and marshaling every piece of evidence available, he fails to cite the single most powerful physical proof imaginable. His silence is deafening.

Therefore, the original claim was not “Jesus walked out of the tomb with a physical body, ate breakfast with us, and we touched his wounds.” It was “God raised Jesus from death—we encountered him as spiritually alive through powerful visionary experiences.” Resurrection, in its earliest documented form, then, was a spiritual and visionary claim, not a physical resuscitation claim. The physical resuscitation narrative came later.

Sincere Belief vs. Theological Construction

There is an apparent tension in this reconstruction that must be addressed: how can the original disciples be completely sincere while later Gospel writers invented physical narratives? The answer lies in the evolution of the movement and in ancient literary standards. The first generation experienced genuine, sincerely believed visionary encounters. Decades later, anonymous Gospel authors operating under Greco-Roman biographical conventions engaged in deliberate theological construction—shaping narratives, inventing dialogue, and dramatizing encounters to combat heresies like Docetism. In the ancient world, this was standard literary practice, not malicious fraud. They were writing theology, not modern history.

Reading the Gospels in the order they were written rather than the order they appear in our bibles, we can watch the resurrection tradition become progressively more physical across six decades. Mark, the earliest Gospel (c. 70 CE), provides the critical clue. Though the original manuscript ends abruptly at 16:8 without narrating an appearance, it contains a specific promise: the young man tells the women that Jesus “is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him” (Mark 16:7). This confirms that the earliest tradition located the experiences in Galilee—precisely matching our reconstruction of the disciples returning home in defeat—rather than in Jerusalem. 

But Mark offers no physical proofs whatsoever: no eating of fish, no touching of wounds, no tangible body. More tellingly, having announced a meeting in Galilee, he refuses to narrate it. If the disciples had encountered a resuscitated Jesus in the flesh, it is inconceivable that the earliest Gospel would gesture toward that meeting and then fall silent. Mark’s silence suggests that in 70 CE the tradition was still understood as a visionary encounter in Galilee—distinct from the physical legends Matthew, Luke, and John would later construct to prove he was not a ghost.

The Paradox of Physical Contact

Perhaps the most revealing pattern in the resurrection accounts operates through absence rather than presence. When we examine what these texts actually narrate about physical contact with the risen Jesus, we discover a systematic gap the Gospel writers themselves seem unable to resolve—and it constitutes powerful evidence that the original experiences were visionary rather than physical.

Even in the latest, most physically-oriented accounts, nobody actually touches Jesus. In Luke 24, Jesus explicitly invites verification—“touch me and see”—but the text never records the disciples doing so. In John 20, Mary Magdalene is told “do not hold on to me,” preventing contact before it occurs. Most significantly, in the Doubting Thomas scene, Jesus invites Thomas to put his hand into the wounds—but the text never narrates Thomas doing it. He simply responds with a confession of faith.

This omission is extraordinary. John wrote his Gospel in the 90s CE specifically to combat Docetism—the heresy claiming Jesus was a pure spirit. If any text needed explicit physical verification, this was it. Had Thomas actually plunged his hand into the wound, John would have narrated it in vivid detail: perhaps the most powerful proof of physical resurrection imaginable. The invitation is extended; the act remains unconfirmed. This suggests the author was constrained not merely by theological agenda, but by what the collective memory of his community actually preserved. 

If the encounters had genuinely been physical, the tradition would have preserved either the touching itself or a consistent explanation for why it never occurred. It preserves neither—a double absence that exposes the fundamental tension John faced: despite overwhelming apologetic pressure to prove physicality, he could not narrate the one event that would have settled the matter, because the collective memory shaping his sources knew such contact had never happened.

This brings us to the deeper function of John’s “do not hold on to me” command. By the 90s CE, a glaring problem existed in the tradition: across all the reported appearances, no one had actually touched the risen Jesus, despite this being the most obvious and powerful form of verification. John’s solution is elegant—have Jesus himself prohibit contact, thereby transforming absence into explained prohibition.

The prohibition inadvertently confirms what it tries to conceal: the original experiences were visionary encounters without physical contact.

This is narrative damage control, a classic example of ancient theological construction. If touching had actually occurred, there would be no need to explain why it didn’t happen. The prohibition inadvertently confirms what it tries to conceal: the original experiences were visionary encounters without physical contact. John cannot narrate what the tradition doesn’t preserve, so instead he narrates why it didn’t happen, creating theological cover—“I have not yet ascended”—for a historical gap.

The Missing Human Response

This textual gap becomes even more devastating when we consider the human reality of what the later Gospels claim occurred. People who loved Jesus deeply—who had spent three years eating, traveling, and living with him—are suddenly reunited with him after watching him die in agony. The involuntary human response to such a reunion requires no theology, no instruction: you rush to embrace the person, weep, hold their hands, cling to them. It is what you might expect humans do when someone they love returns from the dead.

But this never happens in a single resurrection account across all four Gospels. Nobody embraces Jesus. Nobody kisses him or clings to him in tearful relief. Matthew’s isolated “clasped feet” is, as established, a liturgical gesture rather than a preserved human memory. What we get instead are controlled, almost clinical encounters—an invitation to touch wounds, a prohibition against holding, disciples failing to recognize the person standing in front of them. In John 21, the disciples who allegedly eat breakfast with Jesus on the beach sit in reverent silence, “none of them daring to ask ‘who are you?’”—a reaction that makes perfect psychological sense for a visionary encounter with an awe-inspiring spiritual presence, and no human sense whatsoever if their old friend was physically sitting among them passing grilled fish.

The reverent distance, the withheld recognition, the complete absence of spontaneous physical affection: all of this is precisely what we would expect from people encountering something they cannot quite process or fully comprehend. It is entirely inconsistent with people reunited with the physical body of someone they love.

The Complete Picture

Let us bring these elements together. Jesus was executed and buried hastily in an unmarked criminal grave before sundown Friday, as the law mandated. Women went Sunday morning to complete the burial rites but could not locate the body in the unmarked criminal burial area; genuinely confused and frightened, their disorientation preserved in the criterion-of-embarrassment details. Weeks or months later, in Galilee, Peter had a powerful visionary experience which, interpreted through his apocalyptic Jewish framework, became the source of resurrection belief. That belief spread through group psychology and additional visionary experiences. 

This reconstruction requires no conspiracy, no fraud, no deliberate deception. Everyone involved was completely sincere.

Decades later, the authentic memory of the women’s confusion was retroactively reinterpreted as the discovery of physical proof. The empty tomb story developed from vague to specific across sixty years—Joseph’s new tomb, the physical details, the appearance narratives—each addition serving the evolving theological needs of a decentralized movement confronting philosophical heresies like Docetism, until anonymous Gospel writers, operating under accepted ancient literary conventions, had materialized the original spiritual visions into the flesh-and-bones narratives we read today.

This reconstruction requires no conspiracy, no fraud, no deliberate deception. Everyone involved was completely sincere. It requires only documented human phenomena: routine burial practices; grief hallucinations; well-documented group religious psychology; oral tradition evolving over six decades as it does in every culture. Every element is a known, documented aspect of human psychology, sociology, history, or medicine. Nothing unprecedented is required. 

Is this reconstruction certain? No—history rarely offers certainty about events so long ago, preserved in limited sources. But it is coherent, it accounts for all the available evidence, and it requires no violations of natural law. It shows how a world-changing religious movement could arise from the intersection of human psychology, cultural context, and the natural evolution of tradition—all operating according to patterns we can fully observe and understand.

In the early 1990s, the human brain began to glow. Not literally, of course. But for the first time, scientists could watch living brains change while a person was still alive, still thinking, still themselves. People crawled into a doughnut-shaped machine, formally known as a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, and waited as the computer translated tiny shifts in blood oxygen levels into ember-flecked images on a screen.¹ The colors were not thoughts. They were proxies: The scanner translated changes in blood oxygenation and blood flow—indirect consequences of neural activity—into colored statistical maps.

Still, it was hard to look away. For the first time, thoughts seemed to leave footprints. 

It felt like a breakthrough in the most visceral sense of the word. Something that used to be entirely private, the quiet fact of having a mind, was now casting a measurable shadow. When you see a footprint, you know something passed through. The question is whether such a footprint could also describe exactly how it feels for the individual to walk. 

Consciousness is difficult to wrap our heads around, and it would be dishonest to pretend this isn’t the reality. 

First, we need to pin down exactly what we mean by “consciousness,” because the word has become an amalgamation of colloquialisms and jargon that leads people to talk right past each other. 

In ordinary conversation, consciousness often means being awake. It means not asleep, not fainted, not under anesthesia. But when philosophers and neuroscientists argue about consciousness, they usually mean something more intimate: subjective experience. Not just that the brain processes information, but that it feels like something to be the one doing the processing. There is something it is like to see a stop sign’s reflection against gray dusk. There is something it is like to feel a sharp white heat shoot up your arm as your hand recoils from brushing the rim of a pan. There is something it is like to be you, even if you cannot quite describe that “you” without sounding vague. 

This is sometimes called phenomenal consciousness. It is the “what-it-is-like-ness” of experience, the texture of being inside your own life. It is not merely that you can detect red, but that red has a particular quality when it appears in your mind. It is not merely that a nerve signal travels, but that pain hurts, and how that pain feels for you, specifically. You can measure what the eye detects and what the nerve transmits, but the felt part, the interior part, is the elusive thing that refuses to sit still. 

Philosopher Thomas Nagel illustrated this difficulty with a famous thought experiment: What is it like to be a bat?²

Bats navigate the world through echolocation, emitting high-frequency calls and constructing a mental map from the echoes that bounce back.³ Neuroscientists can study their auditory cortex, measure the timing of sonar pulses, and map the neural circuits that process those signals. 

Yet even with all that information, something remains missing. Knowing everything about how echolocation works does not tell you what it feels like to experience the world that way. The bat’s perspective remains locked inside the bat. 

The simplest version of the problem looks like this: 

The brain is physical. Neurons are physical. Electrical and chemical signals are physical. Blood oxygen is physical. All of this belongs to the world of things you can weigh, scan, slice, stain, or label. 

Experience does not obviously belong to that world. Experience is private. You can describe your fear to me, but I cannot access your fear the way I can access a video of you getting jump scared at a sleepover. Your consciousness is the one thing you can never physically step outside of to observe directly, because stepping outside of it would still be an experience. Even if you are to reflect on your conscious experiences, this is still inherently a conscious experience. 

This gap between physical mechanisms and subjective experience is what people mean by the “hard problem” of consciousness.⁴ The “easy” problems—easy only by comparison—are questions like how the brain integrates information, how attention works, how memory is stored, and how perception becomes behavior. These are hard in the ordinary sense: they require clever experiments, careful measurement, and decades of work. But they are the kinds of questions that at least yield to investigation. The hard problem is different in kind, not just in degree. It is why any of that processing is accompanied by a felt perspective at all. Why is there an inner movie rather than only circuitry? 

This is not a new question. For centuries, the greatest minds noticed the strangeness of mental life and reached for an explanation that matched its feeling. 

What we consider our thoughts and emotions mystified early philosophers. On the surface, these facets of cognition seem distinct from the physical objects we can interact with since they are only accessible to us, separate from the material world. It would not have been illogical to suspect that mind and matter were different kinds of things. 

René Descartes is the name most people associate with that suspicion. In the seventeenth century, he formalized it into dualism, the idea that the mind and body are fundamentally different substances. The body is physical, extended in space. The mind is not. Descartes famously used his method of doubt to conclude that he could doubt the existence of his body or even his reality, but not his thoughts. This provided the basis of his cogito, ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. 

This argument works because it begins with something rooted in intuition and thus feels unshakable. Whatever else might be uncertain, experience itself seems real. The problem is that dualism, once you try to stretch its bounds to conform to the real world, runs into a question that sounds almost childish until you realize you cannot answer it. 

Your consciousness is the one thing you can never physically step outside of to observe directly, because stepping outside of it would still be an experience. 

If the mind is immaterial, how can it work to control all of our movements—from running a marathon to the spasms of muscle twitches that follow? 

Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia asked Descartes exactly that in their correspondence. Her critique was mechanistic, almost clinical. If the soul lacks physical size and does not take up space, how can it give rise to voluntary movement? How does an immaterial thing push a material one? Descartes never offered a mechanism that fully satisfied his critics. The interaction problem lingered, a loose thread that philosophy could not tie off neatly. 

That thread tugged thinkers toward another possibility: maybe mind and body are not two different media interacting awkwardly. Maybe the mind is not separate from matter. Maybe the mind is what matter does when it is arranged in a particular way. 

Enter monism, a family of views that collapses mind and body into one underlying reality. For a long time, that conversation remained largely philosophical—until science entered the picture. The story changed, not because science answered the question immediately, but because it offered something the old debates lacked: leverage. 

Science is good at taking mysteries and turning them into mechanisms. It is how we got from alchemy to chemistry, from vague “vapors” to electricity, and from superstition to medicine. And the brain, once it came into view as an organ that could be mapped, studied, and—like other organs—injured, began to behave like the kind of thing science could understand. 

When seemingly nonphysical aspects of our lives go awry, such as personality or memory, we now often search for a bodily explanation. That instinct has become so normal that we barely notice it. Someone becomes depressed, and we talk about serotonin. Someone has a stroke, and we talk about damaged tissue. Someone’s behavior changes, and we talk about trauma, hormones, tumors, neurotransmitters, and sleep deprivation. We are, without always realizing it, treating the mind as a biological process. 

The clearest early evidence came not from a laboratory, but from an accident. Phineas Gage was a railway worker in the 1800s.⁵ An iron rod shot through his skull, destroying part of his frontal lobe. Miraculously, he survived. But those around him reported striking changes in his temperament.⁶ From this, a core idea emerged: a physical injury to the brain appeared to alter aspects of personality and self-control. Suddenly, personality did not look immaterial or immutable. It looked vulnerable. The historical record is thinner and more contested than textbook retellings suggest, but Gage remains an important case because his severe frontal injury was followed by reported changes in social conduct, planning, and temperament. 

And once you accept that, you begin to notice this pattern everywhere. Speech can disappear from lesions or cuts to the brain. Moods can shift with chemical intervention. Memory can dissolve as tissue degenerates. The brain is not simply correlated with mental life. It is necessarily entangled with it. The most parsimonious scientific conclusion is that human consciousness depends on brain activity. 

But here is the moment where the story has to slow down, because it is easy to mistake a powerful conclusion for a final one: The brain is necessary for consciousness. That does not yet tell us what consciousness is or how it emerges. 

If you smash a radio, the music stops. If you replace a component, the music changes. From that, you can learn that the radio matters for the music. But if you want to understand music, you cannot stop at the claim that “music comes from the radio.” You would need to understand signals, decoding, speakers, and, in a deeper sense, you would need to explain why certain patterns of sound evoke feelings of sadness or nostalgia in a listener. 

The brain is not a radio, and consciousness is not simply a broadcast, but the structure of the reasoning is similar. Brain injury demonstrates this dependence. It does not yet explain experience. 

So, what does? 

The next move in neuroscience was to stop treating the brain as a black box and start watching it work. That is where we pick back up from the fMRI and its glowing scans. An fMRI does not record neurons firing directly. It measures changes in blood oxygen, signifying neural activity. When an area is more active, neurons consume more oxygen for energy, the rate of blood flow changes, and the scanner can detect that. This is why those early fMRI images felt so revolutionary. They made mental life visible in a new way. Not visible as a thought bubble floating above a head, but visible as a physical pattern inside tissue. 

It is hard to overstate how alluring that visibility can be. If you can see the brain change when a person thinks, then maybe consciousness is simply the sum of these patterns. Maybe the “problem of consciousness” is actually one of measurement, and once we create the right tools, the mystery will dissolve into nothingness. 

There was a particular moment that made this belief in brain imaging flare. A patient diagnosed as being in a vegetative state was asked to imagine two different things: playing tennis and walking through a city they’re familiar with.⁷ These mental tasks reliably produce different patterns of brain activity in regions of the brain that are far separated, making it easy for researchers to discern which task is being conceived in the scans. 

The patient’s brain produced distinct patterns aligned with the instructions, allowing researchers to interpret one pattern as one answer and the other as another answer. A person who could not speak could still communicate by thinking. That study was a powerful reminder that the absence of a voice is not the absence of a mind. It also suggested something with much wider implications: that mental content could be decoded. 

Decoding is no longer a faraway concept confined to science fiction. It has become a tangible research goal, and the technology pushing it forward is not only the scanner but also artificial intelligence. Before we get there, we need one more piece of groundwork: the idea that the brain does not passively record the world; it actively constructs our perceptual experience of it. 

The brain takes input from the senses and builds a model of the world. What you experience is not raw data. It is nothing more than an inference, stitched together so seamlessly that you never notice the seams. 

Take your eyes. You might assume your visual field is uniformly detailed and colored, like a high-resolution screen. But color-sensitive cells are concentrated in the small central region where you are directly looking. Color-sensitive cones are densest in the fovea, and color discrimination declines sharply toward the periphery. Yet our experience of a richly colored world is more uniform than the retinal input itself. That coherence is not in your eyes; rather, it is manufactured in your brain. 

Or take this: tihs snetecne is hradly lgeible at frist glnace, and yte yuor bainr qciukly rsetores it wouthit mcuh eorfft. Your perception is not simply receiving. It is repairing, filling, and predicting. 

This is the hinge between Phineas Gage and decoding. Gage showed that damaging the brain can change the mind. Decoding asks a more audacious question: if the mind leaves patterns in the brain, can we read those patterns in the other direction? Can we start with the footprint and infer the walker? 

Here is what a typical decoding experiment looks like today: 

A volunteer lies in an fMRI scanner and looks at a sequence of images. Faces. Animals. Landscapes. Street scenes. Text. The scanner records patterns of activity in visual areas of the brain while each image is seen. That creates a dataset: image in, brain pattern out. 

Then the researchers train an AI model. The model’s job is to learn associations between patterns of neural activity and visual features.⁸ It does not “understand” an image the way you do. It does not have a childhood memory attached to a beach or a fear attached to a dark alley. It is doing something closer to statistical analysis. Given a particular neural pattern, what visual features are likely present? 

What we experience as the moment of choice may be less a cause than a caption. 

After training, the researchers test the model. They show the volunteer a new image, one that the model has never seen. The scanner records the volunteer’s brain activity. The model receives the neural pattern and generates a reconstruction, an image that approximates what the volunteer is looking at. Often, it is blurry. Often, details are wrong. But sometimes—in a way that makes your stomach drop—the reconstruction is recognizable. You can tell it is a face. You can tell it is a street. You can tell it is a dog. Sometimes the model can even approximate images the volunteer is imagining, not currently seeing. 

That last part is where the idea of a private mind starts to wobble. 

While it’s tempting to call this mind reading, it’s also important not to overstate it. What the model is doing is not pulling a full-color movie from the brain as if the brain contains a hidden screen. The model is trained to infer content from correlates, making sophisticated guesses, trained on many examples. Still, the fact that the guess can be accurate at all is astonishing. This suggests that subjective content has enough regularity and enough physical signature that an external system can learn to predict it. 

In other words, experience leaves footprints, and now we can sometimes sketch what made them. If we can reconstruct what someone is seeing from a scanner, what stops us from reconstructing the rest of their conscious experience? 

It is one thing to say the brain is responsible for mental life. It is another thing to watch that claim take shape on a screen. A face becomes a face again, not because the person described it, but because an algorithm matched a pattern of oxygen shifts to a visual template it has learned. The boundary between inside and outside, between private and observable, begins to feel less like a law of nature and more like a temporary limitation of tools. 

This is why decoding feels like the pinnacle of science. It is not only impressive, but it shifts the story we have told ourselves about our own minds. For most of human history, your inner life was the last place no one could reach. People could misread you. People could manipulate you. People could punish you for what you said. But your raw experience, the stream itself, belonged to you by default. Decoding makes that default feel negotiable. 

At first, that negotiation sounds straightforward, even hopeful. If a person cannot speak, perhaps decoding can help them communicate. If someone is trapped in paralysis, perhaps we can build an interface that translates intention into action. The same technology that unsettles can also restore. 

But then the implications widen. Consider what John-Dylan Haynes and colleagues found when they used brain imaging to predict which of two choices a subject would make,⁹ several seconds before the subject reported becoming consciously aware of deciding. The neural groundwork for the decision had already been laid. The conscious experience of choosing came after. These studies suggest that neural activity can bias or partly predict some choices before people report conscious awareness of deciding. They do not show that all deliberation is post hoc, nor do they settle the question of agency, but if that finding holds, the story we tell ourselves about deliberation—that we weigh options, then decide, then act—may be a narrative the brain constructs after the fact. What we experience as the moment of choice may be less a cause than a caption. 

That is why these tools demand more than scientific attention. If decoding can reach not only what you perceive but what you were about to decide before you knew it yourself, then the question of consciousness stops being academic. It becomes a question about what we mean by agency and who we hold responsible for what. 

Is this reading thoughts, or is it closer to reading smoke and inferring fire? Is this accessing someone’s experience, or is it building a model that predicts what experience is likely happening? That distinction might sound like mere semantics until you remember what we defined consciousness as in the first place. 

Phenomenal consciousness is not simply the presence of information. It is the felt quality of information. It is not just the data of how red a stop sign is, but the redness of red as it appears in your mind. 

Decoding, in its current form, is extraordinarily good at tracking content. It can often tell that the brain is seeing a face, a street, an animal, a shape, or an object. It can sometimes approximate the image itself. But content is not the whole mystery. The mystery is that content comes with an experience. 

This is where it helps to picture two different achievements side by side. 

One achievement is like translating a language. If I give you a sentence in Spanish and you translate it into English, you have preserved the meaning, at least approximately, even though the words are different. Decoding is doing something like that. It takes a physical pattern and translates it into a guess about meaning: face, street, dog, tennis, home. 

The other achievement is explaining why language is accompanied by understanding at all. You can build a machine that translates sentences without ever “knowing” what it is like to mean them. Translation and experience are separable. 

That is the uncomfortable possibility lurking underneath decoding. Dr. Janel Le Belle, a neuroscientist at UCLA who studies the intersection of brain biology and conscious experience, puts it plainly: 

The decoding studies don’t explain any mechanism that turns neural activity into subjective awareness, so they don’t resolve the deeper questions about the nature or origin of consciousness itself.¹⁰

The decoding experiments are an impressive feat of science. But impressive and complete are not the same thing. The hard problem does not dissolve just because the footprints have become easier to read. 

A grain of sand’s worth of tissue requires petabytes to describe—and the human brain contains roughly one million times that volume. 

This is where many physicalists say, fine, then let’s go deeper. Physicalists hold that consciousness is entirely a product of brain matter, and if decoding is a translation problem, perhaps what we need is a complete dictionary of the brain. Not just broad regions lighting up, not just proxies for activity, but the wiring itself. The full architecture. The connectome. 

The ambition behind connectomics is truly grand: to map the brain the way you might map a city, down to its streets and intersections, except the streets are axons and the intersections are synapses, and there are enough of them to make your head hurt. 

For years, the sheer scale of the task made the idea seem nearly impossible. Even a speck of brain tissue contains staggering complexity. A cubic millimeter of cortex contains roughly fifty to sixty thousand neurons and hundreds of millions of synapses woven into a dense electrical web.¹¹ Capturing this detail requires images at nanometer resolution, which means that reconstructing even that tiny volume produces an avalanche of data. 

A recent example shows just how large that avalanche can become. In 2025, the MICrONS consortium—led by teams at the Allen Institute, Baylor College of Medicine, and Princeton University—released one of the most detailed wiring diagrams and functional maps of mammalian cortex yet assembled. The project reconstructed a cubic millimeter of mouse visual cortex and surrounding visual areas, capturing more than 200,000 cells and roughly 523 million synapses. Crucially, it did not only map structure. It also linked that wiring diagram to recordings of neural activity from tens of thousands of neurons while the mouse viewed visual stimuli. 

The result is less a finished map of the mind than a proof of scale. Even a grain-of-sand-sized fragment of cortex contains an almost absurd density of structure and activity. Mapping it required advanced microscopy, machine-learning reconstruction, and enormous data infrastructure. If this is what one cubic millimeter demands, the prospect of mapping an entire human brain—or individual brains—at comparable resolution remains, at present, far beyond our reach.¹²

A separate Harvard-Google project made the scale problem feel even more concrete by reconstructing a cubic millimeter of human cortical tissue at nanoscale resolution. That tiny sample contained roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses, generating about 1.4 petabytes of data. The fact that so much information is required to describe so little brain tissue is precisely what makes whole-brain connectomics both tantalizing and overwhelming. 

The result is less a finished map than a starting point. If a cubic millimeter requires petabytes of data to chart, mapping the entire human brain would require datasets so large that today’s data storage systems struggle even to imagine them. 

That number is worth sitting with, not just because it is impressive, but because it reveals something about the very nature of the problem. The brain is not only mysterious in principle. It is daunting in practice. A grain of sand’s worth of tissue requires petabytes to describe—and the human brain contains roughly one million times that volume.¹³

Still, you can feel the temptation. If we could map the connectome, the logic goes, then the mystery would have nowhere to hide. The elusive consciousness would be pinned down by its circuitry. The brain would be explainable in the way a computer is explainable. 

But the twist is that even a perfect map might not do what we want it to do. 

A wiring diagram is not the current running through it. A map of Los Angeles is not the feeling of driving through it at night with the windows down. 

A complete inventory of the brain’s connections might tell us how information can move, where integration is likely to happen, what pathways support attention, memory, vision, language, and emotion. It might tell us why certain injuries abolish speech or change personality. It might even help us predict what a person is seeing with frightening accuracy. 

As Le Belle puts it, the connectome “may be more helpful in understanding neurodiversity and perhaps the structural changes in certain brain disorders,” but falls short of capturing the dynamic cognitive processes that produce consciousness. 

What connectomics is missing is why any of those processes should be accompanied by experience. And this is where the hard problem returns, not as casual philosophy trivia, but as a real limit on what any of these tools can claim. To see why, imagine a theater. 

The brain is not simply correlated with mental life. It is necessarily entangled with it. 

Neuroscience is getting better and better at cataloging the backstage machinery—the pulleys, the lights, the wiring, the stage directions. Decoding can sometimes infer what scene is playing from the patterns of activity alone. Connectomics promises the most detailed blueprint of the building we have ever had. But the hard problem is not a question about the machinery. It is a question about why there is an audience at all. Why is there a point of view in the seat? A blueprint of every beam and wire cannot answer that. It can tell you everything about how the theater was built and nothing about what it feels like to watch the play. 

That is why decoding can feel like it is approaching consciousness, and still not settle it. The distance between brain activity and mental content narrows. The idea of total mental privacy slowly erodes. The very prospect of decoding makes the mind look measurable in a way it never has before. But all of that measurability—the narrowing distance, the eroding privacy—still leaves the deepest question untouched. 

In the early 1990s, the brain began to glow, and it felt like the beginning of an answer. Three decades later, with decoders, models, and reconstructions, the glow has become clearer, sharper, and more interpretable. What we have gained is extraordinary: we can follow the footprints further than we ever have. What we have not yet gained is the feeling of walking. 

And maybe that is the real story. Science is not failing. It is doing exactly what it does, mapping the physical world with increasing precision. The question is whether consciousness, the interior fact of experience, is the kind of thing that becomes fully visible when the map is complete, or whether it remains, in some stubborn way, the one part of reality that can be described from the outside but never fully captured there.

As a member of the government-appointed UAP Science Advisory Council headed by the Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, itself on the heels of my being a member for five years of Dr. Loeb’s Galileo Project searching for hard evidence of what these objects could be, I was intrigued by a preprint paper posted by Dr. Loeb on his Medium column, with a link to the paper by the highly respected atmospheric chemist John Birks, of the University of Colorado, Boulder, titled: “UAP Orbs: Magnetically Confined Dusty Plasmoids Produced by Meteors.” The abstract briefly explains the proposed hypothesis:

Analysis of 508 orb sightings reported to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) indicates that these silent, floating luminous objects often exhibit plasma-like behavior and emit visible light of varying colors for durations of up to an hour or more. In this work, citizen-science reports of orb observations are shown to be significantly correlated (~3σ) with reports of meteor fireballs, suggesting a meteoritic origin. We propose that some orbs may represent a previously unrecognized type of weakly ionized dusty plasma formed by stabilization of meteoric dust in the lower atmosphere.

The keywords here are suggesting, propose, and may. No one—not Birks, not Loeb, not me—are suggesting that all UAP orbs are explained by luminous meteoric dust. It’s possible Birks’ model explains none of them. The point of science is to find natural explanations for assumed natural phenomena. Before we say something is out of this world, let’s first make sure that it is not in this world.

UAPs as Illuminous Meteor Dust

With these caveats in mind, here are a number of excerpts from Dr. Birks’s paper. After reading these, continue to the reports by World War II pilots of foo fighters below and note the similarities (and differences) between them, in the context of considering this as a possible explanation for at least some of the foo fighter orbs:

The most often reported orb is a bright white or bluish white sphere, observed to be as bright or brighter than Venus and larger by a factor of several diameters. Many are a yellowish white, while others are orange or even bright red. A few are blue or green. Many observers report that orbs flicker or sparkle in one or more colours, including all colours of the rainbow, and many report that the orb is surrounded by a corona. 

Estimated sizes range from that of a basketball to that of a house or even larger, but often there is no estimate of size because of a lack of a reference point against the dark sky. The median reported size is approximately in the range of 1-3 m. Orbs occur singly, but about as often with one or more additional orbs of varying sizes, brightnesses and sometimes colours. Observers often report that orbs continuously change shape but on average are spherical.

these silent, floating luminous objects often exhibit plasma-like behavior and emit visible light of varying colors for durations of up to an hour or more.

reports of orb observations are shown to be significantly correlated (~3σ) with reports of meteor fireballs, suggesting a meteoritic origin. 

We propose that some orbs may represent a previously unrecognized type of weakly ionized dusty plasma formed by stabilization of meteoric dust in the lower atmosphere.

luminous orbs represent a rare but physically real atmospheric phenomenon 

the strong correlation between orb observations and meteor activity reported here provides a solid physical starting point. Although novel in several respects, the proposed framework is based on established physical principles, and its components are testable through laboratory experiments, targeted atmospheric measurements, and more detailed theoretical modelling. It may even be possible to generate orbs in the laboratory from magnetic nanoparticles of iron.

Here are the figures from Birks’ paper showing what these orbs look like. Compare these to the photographs of foo fighters from World War II below.

Critique of the Meteor Model

In response to this model, Avi Loeb invited John Birks to a video conference call with the UAP Science Advisory Council on July 7, where council members had the opportunity to ask him questions and challenge his hypothesis. Here is Avi’s summary of the council’s response to Dr. Birks’s model:

The questions raised at the meeting shed doubt on his model being able to explain UAP, especially those which are accelerating well beyond the level expected for dust clouds drifting in the wind. In particular, it is unclear how dust clouds could condense out of the debris from meteors or space trash, since the debris tail gets diluted and smeared by the Earth’s atmosphere across a much larger scale than the observed orb sizes.

The social media response to this paper, along with Avi’s and my own posting of it online, was uniformly negative among proponents of UAP, denouncing our attempt to find a natural explanation for the unexplained phenomena (assuming any of them even read the paper). Avi explained that, “This is exactly how science works. One has to take seriously a model and examine whether it stands up to the constraints of the data, assuming standard physics.” Indeed, the next day the George Mason University economist, futurist, and author Robin Hansen asked an AI program to assess Dr. Birks’s paper, concluding in a long and technical reply:

Birks never requires the dust to accompany the meteor down — he just asserts that what is left of an ablated meteor that terminates in the lower troposphere is a trail or cloud of dust and then spends all his effort on keeping an already-formed compact cloud together (magnetic dendrites, few-kT dipole bonds). The step from "trail" to "1-m ball" is simply skipped, and that step looks dynamically prohibited, not merely rare.

And within a day Dr. Birks replied to Hansen/AI:

After reading the Claude response you sent earlier, I concur that it would still be a big problem to accumulate enough mass in a long column. I concede that I hadn't given enough thought to the initial formation of the dust cloud. Keep in mind that it is not necessary to form the orb at ground level, although my original idea was that they were formed along a meteor dust trail extending into the troposphere. They are perhaps more likely formed high in the atmosphere, even in the stratosphere where explosive ablation can occur and deposit a large fraction of its mass along a very short path. That could result in a much higher local concentration and in a region where diffusion of particles is much faster. Once formed into a loosely connected mass, it will sink to the lower atmosphere until it reaches a level where its heat generation makes it buoyant.

What a paradigmatic and praiseworthy example of science at its best: adversarial collaboration, open-peer debate, and Karl Popper’s “conjecture and refutation” process to get closer to the truth.

Foo Fighters

Let’s see how Dr. Birks’s model holds up in the context of one of the earliest reports of UFOs in the modern age—those logged by both allied and Nazi pilots reporting luminous orbs in the atmosphere near their planes over Europe, along with American pilots who recorded similar reports in the Pacific, all of which came to be called foo fighters. (The name derives from a popular comic strip called Smokey Stover, which featured a firefighter who referred to fire as foo, and to himself as a foo fighter.)

In the European Theater, an August 1940 report from the British Royal Air Force recorded a number of observations made by pilots and crewmen, who initially thought perhaps the Nazis were experimenting with new technologies, which they were wont to do. 

In September of 1942, the Operational Research Section of the British Air Ministry produced a report noting that balls of fire appeared to drip fragments of multiple colors that lasted around 30 seconds before burning out, and another observation of colored balls of light at an altitude of around 6,000 or 7,000 feet, suggesting that perhaps the Nazis were firing mortars into the air, or on rockets, although they noted that none of the phenomena had impacted or damaged any planes. 

On November 28, 1942, an RAF bomber crew saw what seemed to be a solid object with four evenly-spaced pairs of red lights attached, which the crew estimated it to be around 200 to 300 feet long and traveling around 500 miles per hour. 

Another report from May of 1943 quoted crewmen who said they saw a reddish-orange meteor outside of Duisburg, Germany, which they reported as flying from north to south and falling as it moved. Strangely, the object appeared to emit a green burst at least three times.

An RAF report from January 1, 1944, noted that a British Mosquito pilot had seen two rockets between Halberstadt and Hanover that appeared to change course and overtake his plane, but then just as suddenly disappearing. Another pilot said he saw a fiery head and blazing stern when the object passed within a couple of hundred meters from his plane.

Reports from January 28 and 29, and on February 3, 1944, reported pilots seeing an elusive red light that left a trail of flames and black smoke. On February 4, during a raid over Frankfurt, crewmen said they saw a stationary silver ball about 10 miles away that seemed to hover. On February 19, two different crews reported seeing a silver cigar-shaped object like an airship in the distance, one of whom added that the airship appeared to have a line of windows along the bottom. 

The most famous foo fighter report is that from a flight in November, 1944, when pilots Donald Myers and Ed Schlueter of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron, flying along the Rhine north of Strasbourg, reported seeing “8 to 10 bright orange lights off the left wing…flying through the air at high speed. Later they appeared farther away. The display continued for several minutes and then disappeared.” The phenomena got its name when a rattled Myers brought to the pilots’ post-mission meeting a copy of the Smokey Stover comic strip and after slamming it down on the table announced “It was another one of those fuckin' foo fighters!” A few nights later, another crew saw a huge red light flying over their plane at what they estimated to be 200 mph, and among the pilots of the 415th squadron, “Fuckin' foo fighters” became the term of choice with the press, who dutifully redacted the expletive.

In the Pacific Theater, a report from May 14, 1944 notes that a B-29 crew was followed by a red or flame-colored ball of fire that appeared immediately after they released the plane’s bombs. A report from August 1944 noted several sightings over Sumatra, including a crew that said they saw reddish-orange balls of light and groups of light appear out of nowhere on their right side, after which it exploded into four or five fragments each.

On January 10th, 1945, an American crew off the coast of Iwo Jima saw an amber light overtake them on their right before it disappeared into the clouds ahead. In March, 1945, a crew reported seeing a few lights that appeared to be anchored to an object that then followed them as they made evasive turns before pulling away. On June 18th, 1945, a flight crew said they were tailed for over 40 minutes by a light that alternated between a bright red and dusky orange. 

Suggested Causes for Foo Fighters

Ball Lightning. These rare, glowing, floating spheres of light often associated with electrical storms are among the most popular explanations of foo fighters, but only some resemble these pilot descriptions.

St. Elmo’s Fire. Some commentators have suggested this as an explanation, but these glowing electrical discharges are rare, short-lived, and usually anchored to a ship’s mast, mountain top, plane’s wing, etc., not floating about on its own like most foo fighters.

Reflections, Optical illusions, and Hallucinations. These may explain some foo fighters, as pilots have long noted that sunlight or glare reflecting off ice crystals in the atmosphere can produce an image that looks like an orb; as well, pilots reported seeing afterimages from bright flak explosions that were not orbs in the air; finally, high-altitude night flying, along with combat stress, can play havoc with one’s visual system. Hallucinations also seem unlikely, given the number of incidents, the number of different pilots and observers, and the sheer volume of reports available to U.S. intelligence services by the end of the war.

Electromagnetic Phenomena. These are broader plasma-like effects related to atmospheric electricity that could create glowing orbs without a solid object (which may explain why they don’t appear on radar). This is what the postwar Robertson Panel (a 1953 CIA-linked scientific review of UFO reports), suggested as an explanation for the foo fighters.

Soviet spy planes. A less popular explanation involves Russian technology, although in a counterfactual, if the USSR had such orb weaponry wouldn’t they have used it more directly on the battlefield, rather than playfully buzzing allied pilots?

Nazi secret weapon “Feuerball” (Fireball). After their stunning success with jets and rockets (albeit too late to turn the tide of the war), speculation about else the Nazis had developed include flying saucers, jet-propelled flak mines, and drones with glowing effects from spinning gas jets. But post-war analysis did not turn up any evidence that the Nazis had such secret weapons.

V-2 Rockets misidentified. This is a viable explanation, but pilots and ground observers correctly identified them in most circumstances, so it seems that, at most, this would explain only a few foo fighters.

Misdirection and disinformation. Governments are believed to discredit UFO witnesses and stigmatize UFO research, but that idea is mostly applied to the 1950s and 1960s, not the 1940s.

Extraterrestrial or Unknown Origins. Ufologists suggest that aliens (or whoever) were monitoring the war via these orbs. We know Nazis existed, and we know about their technology and have back engineered it (turning the V-2 rocket into the Apollo mission!) But unless and until we can see the aliens and their spaceships for ourselves, skepticism is the null hypothesis to which we should default.

♦ ♦ ♦

Could some foo fighters be luminous meteoric dust? Maybe. Much more needs to be done to test this hypothesis. But this is how progress is made in explaining UAPs.

I say this because social media critics who are quick to dismiss this and other attempted natural explanations, when asked what they think explains UAPs, promptly jump to far less likely explanations for which there is no evidence whatsoever, including extraterrestrial beings, alien-human hybrids, interdimensional beings, ultraterrestrial beings, cryptoterrestrials, or even far-future human time-travelers who have returned to our time.

Most of these hypotheses violate known science, or would require significantly new physics and biology that contradicts much of what we know about the universe and the laws of nature. And as Avi regularly reminds the members of the UAP Science Advisory Council and the Galileo Project, CERN just spent $10 billion in particle-colliding experiments and found no new physics. So let’s stick with what we know about the world, before we speculate about what we don’t know.

I know, science has been wrong about a lot of things, but as I wrote in the final chapter of my book Truth:

Think of science as an expanding sphere of knowledge. As the sphere of the known expands into the aether of the unknown, the proportion of ignorance seems to grow—the more you know, the more you know how much you don’t know. But in this mathematical metaphor note what happens when the radius of a sphere increases: the expansion of the surface area is squared while the increase in the volume is cubed. So as the sphere of scientific knowledge expands the volume of the known increases by a ratio of 3:2 over the surface area of the unknown—the more you know the more of the unknown becomes known. It is at this boundary where we can stake a claim of true progress in the search for truth.

Nearly half a decade ago, I wrote an overview¹ for this magazine of the debates—and, let’s face it, vicious culture wars—around what’s become known as “gender-affirming care” for youth—psychological and medical interventions based on an internal “gender identity.”

Since then, many revelations about both the research and history of youth gender medicine, and a series of shocking scandals, have emerged. Thus, I assumed that by 2026, many more people, from parents to politicians, would have a deeper understanding of these issues, and that, instead of fighting, we’d be discussing the best, safest, and fairest approach to treating gender dysphoric youth. 

Well, you know what they say about assuming. We’re still fighting, and still looking at gender-affirming care through a political lens—rather than through one of ethics and science. 

I’m going to recap that original piece here, then go through the significant changes that have taken place since 2022 to explain where we are now—and where we still need to go. 

A Brief History 

Youth gender medicine—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sometimes surgeries like double mastectomies or orchiectomy (removal of testicles)—began in the late 1980s in the Netherlands. Doctors found that adults who’d medically transitioned had increased rates of psychological problems—and even completed suicide—after the procedures.² They surmised that the problem was an inability to “pass” as the opposite sex, especially for natal males. The effects of male puberty, like Adam’s apples and broad brows, were difficult to overcome. Treating children before puberty with what was then called “gender identity disorder,” Dutch clinicians wrote, would lead to “higher percentages of individuals who would more easily pass into the cross sex role” before “the development of secondary characteristics.”³

Youth gender medicine started not because treatment had been successful for adults, but because it hadn’t been. The goal was to pass as the opposite sex, thus alleviating distress about the sexed body. Two Dutch studies, published in the 2010s, suggested that early intervention accomplished these goals.⁴ The Dutch only treated patients with early-onset gender identity disorder, who lived in supportive families, and whose other mental health problems were attended to. They cautioned against socially transitioning prepubescent kids.

Though some American doctors provided sporadic access to these interventions, they officially arrived here only in 2007, when the first youth gender clinic opened at Boston Children’s Hospital. They were unable to replicate the Dutch approach, for many reasons: lack of socialized medicine, not enough trained psychologists, and an increasingly politicized atmosphere, which derided clinicians evaluating patients, and determining whether or not they could transition, as “gatekeeping.” 

American clinicians developed an alternative approach known as “affirmation,” which involved not questioning the young person’s gender identity, and viewed transition as a human right, rather than a psychological and medical intervention. Meanwhile, dozens of new gender identities emerged, from nonbinary to neutrois to bigender. The Obama and Biden administrations both focused heavily on institutionalizing gender identity, prohibiting discrimination based on it, which ultimately led to trans girls and women—that is, natal males—in girls’ and women’s sports and spaces.⁵ Schools were required to teach about or protect gender identity, in order to retain federal funding—even for school lunches⁶—and young people with novel gender identities found each other through social media. The number of young people identifying as trans exploded, from 0.6 percent of adults to three times as many youth.⁷ In Oregon alone, one in 250 girls took testosterone between 2016 and 2023; the state saw a 10-fold increase in girls and 14-fold in boys.⁸ It was one of the swiftest and most all-encompassing rights movements—and accompanying medical fields—the world has ever seen.

But much of the movement’s rise depended on hiding basic facts—and censoring dissent. 

Gender and Sexuality: Birds of a Feather 

Despite many advocacy groups asserting that gender and sexuality are separate,⁹ they’re actually often linked. Many children who suffered from what was, until 2013, called “Gender Identity Disorder” desisted; they stopped feeling dysphoric or wanting to transition, and many grew up to be same-sex attracted.¹⁰ That is, there’s a large crossover between early-onset gender dysphoria and later homosexuality. 

The claim that transition mitigated suicide risk wasn’t based in fact or science, but was often wielded by advocates to silence critics.

Males who are not feminine and same-sex attracted, and who often experience distress at their sexed bodies or social category later in life, are thought to be “autogynephilic”: attracted to the idea of themselves as women.¹¹ Their distress was also rooted in sexuality, albeit one many people will not admit. 

The former category were kids like Jazz Jennings. The latter: adults like Caitlyn Jenner. The ever-widening umbrella of trans flattened them into the same cohort, assuming they needed the same treatment. 

Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria 

In the 2010s, a third cohort of adolescent-onset cases emerged, which a public health doctor and researcher named Lisa Littman described as “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.”¹² Unlike with early-onset gender dysphoria—often a precursor to homosexuality—or autogynephilia, ROGD came on suddenly and mostly in girls, many of them suffering from other mental health problems and after sustained social media use; there were also more boys, perhaps 30 percent of the adolescent patients, and whose parents thought they were ROGD, too.¹³ Littman theorized it was a form of “social contagion”—a term that, while technically neutral—offended those fighting for trans rights and increased acceptance. The term was quickly politicized and attacked by most liberal institutions and supporters of gender-affirming care—rather than studied, as it should have been. A new cohort, and new clusters of patients, shouldn’t necessarily access the same treatment as other cohorts, even if they share a diagnosis or a social category like trans. 

The Suicide Myth 

Proponents of youth gender medicine asserted that it was life-saving. By that, they meant that people under the trans umbrella tend to have higher rates of suicidality than the average population and that social and medical transition would decrease those rates. 

Unfortunately, no good evidence supports that claim. Suicidality is generally the result of multiple factors, and even in one of the few follow-up studies conducted in this country in recent years, some patients felt better after transition, while two out of 314 committed suicide after social and medical transition.¹⁴ The claim that transition mitigated suicide risk wasn’t based in fact or science, but was often wielded by advocates to silence critics. Even ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio, a trans man, admitted before the Supreme Court that completed suicide “thankfully and admittedly, is rare.”¹⁵

Detransitioners 

Much of the culture war has centered around detransitioners—those who medically transition and then try to reverse course as much as their bodies can, living as their natal sex. Proponents of youth gender medicine insist detransitioners are rare, and that most detransition for “external” reasons, like stigma, access, or cost.¹⁶

The truth is, the rate of detransition is unknown,¹⁷ and many people clearly detransition for internal reasons; regret; the realization that gender identity was not the source of their troubles; or internalized homophobia, to name a few. 

As there are no billing codes or guidelines for detransition—and Democrats have repeatedly blocked any bills requiring health care for them—detransitioners have enormous trouble getting their medical and psychological needs met.¹⁸ We don’t know what percentage detransition, and we also don’t know how to help those that do. 

Systematic Reviews and European Retreats 

American advocacy groups like GLAAD declared that, about gender-affirming care, “the science is settled.”¹⁹ Former Assistant Secretary of Health, Admiral Rachel Levine, called it “suicide prevention” and “well-established medical practice.” Yet by 2022, we knew that neither of those statements was accurate.²⁰

Several European countries had already shifted their approaches toward caution and away from medical intervention. England,²¹ Finland,²² and Sweden²³ had all commissioned systematic evidence reviews (as had the state medical board in Florida)—comprehensive analyses of all available research studies on the topic. They all came to the same conclusion as Sweden’s health board did, that “existing scientific evidence is insufficient for assessing the effects of puberty suppressing and gender-affirming hormone therapy on gender dysphoria, psychosocial health, and quality of life of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”²⁴ That is: the evidence base was so weak that no one could determine if transition carried benefits, while many risks were relatively clear. This applied even to the original Dutch studies, the basis for all youth transition; they actually couldn’t prove any benefit of medical intervention. Thus, per Sweden, pediatric gender treatments were actually “experimental.” In the face of weak evidence, these countries advocated for the least invasive treatment: psychological support. 

In response, a Dutch paper questioned why gender-affirming care was required to show benefit at all, dismissing “the expectation that transition should lead to improvement,” as a “normative assumption.”²⁵

Sanctuaries and Bans 

In America, there aren’t nonpartisan medical groups. Major U.S. medical organizations—such as the American Medical Association (AMA), American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), Endocrine Society, and similar groups—are professional associations that engage in advocacy, lobbying, and policy promotion, rather than purely neutral, nonpartisan scientific bodies. In other words, we have advocacy groups that represent the interests of their clinician members. Initially, none of those medical associations shifted, even based on these consistent findings from some of the most liberal countries, with the best health care, in the world. They saw transition more as a human right than a medical issue. 

Activists in America and Canada pushed for counseling to understand the source of one’s gender dysphoria to be labeled “conversion therapy.”²⁶ They conflated talking about the source of one’s distress with electroshocking gay people, putting clinicians in the very uncomfortable position of having to protest conversion therapy bans. In 2025, the Supreme Court upheld the right to practice such therapy, but Colorado effectively banned it anyway.²⁷

Furthermore, the U.S. lacks universal healthcare, which makes the government fiscally responsible to its citizens, who would not want their taxes covering treatments with uncertain benefits and certain harms. 

So, in the absence of any mechanisms to debate or reform, the issue was subsumed by politics. Beginning in 2021, some Republican-majority states banned gender-affirming care for minors. Beginning in 2022, some Democratic-majority states created “sanctuaries,” which allowed minors from states where interventions were banned to access treatments, in some cases without parental consent.²⁸ We have essentially created a patchwork quilt, mirroring abortion, in which gender-affirming care is banned in some states and legal in others. 

WPATH Scandal 

In 2022, an advocacy group made up of clinicians and activists, known as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) released its long-awaited eighth “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People.”²⁹ For the first time, it included a separate chapter on treatment for adolescents, distinct from treating prepubescent children. Though a draft of the document had included an ethics chapter, it was removed from the final version, and a new chapter on “eunuch gender identity” was added. 

Despite the completion of several systematic reviews, mentioned above, SOC-8 claimed that a “systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.” Instead, authors summarized selective studies with positive findings, declaring only that “the data show early medical intervention … can be effective and helpful for many transgender adolescents seeking these treatments.” WPATH claimed they’d crafted the document “based on the best available science and expert professional consensus.”

When the new standards first appeared online, they included recommended age minimums for interventions: blockers at whatever age puberty began; 14 for cross-sex hormones; 15 for mastectomy (breast removal); 16 for breast augmentation (creation of breasts); 17 for vaginoplasty (creation of a neo-vagina), metoidioplasty (lengthening of clitoris to resemble a small penis), and orchidectomy (removal of testicles); and 18 for phalloplasty (creation of a phallus). See table above.

The federal government, medical associations, and advocacy groups had conspired to advance their political goal over science.

By the end of the day WPATH published its report, the age limits had disappeared from the document, which WPATH chalked up to a publishing error. 

But when advocacy groups like the ACLU sued the states that had banned pediatric gender medicine, amicus briefs and evidence made their way to the Supreme Court.³⁰ We learned what really happened. 

WPATH had contracted Johns Hopkins’s Evidence-Based Practice Center to conduct systematic evidence reviews. When they found the same low-quality evidence as the systematic reviews described earlier in this article, WPATH suppressed their publication, allowing only the sharing of data that would be “for the benefit of advancing transgender health in a positive manner.”³¹ Fearful that age minimums would add fuel to the bans’ fire, the American Academy of Pediatrics and Dr. Rachel Levine, a trans woman who was then the Assistant Secretary of Health, pressured WPATH to remove all age limits for surgeries. The federal government, medical associations, and advocacy groups had conspired to advance their political goal over science. 

This enormous scandal warranted little coverage in the press, and didn’t impact the gender medicine industry. 

The Cass Review and the American Response—or Lack Thereof 

In 2022, England announced the closure of its only national youth gender clinic, Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) following evidence reviews and investigations into the clinics.³² It didn’t officially shutter until 2024, the year that esteemed British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass released an “Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people.”³³ The four-year investigation found pediatric gender medicine to be “an area of remarkably weak evidence.” Cass advised that there were many pathways to gender dysphoria, and many pathways out of it; called for an end to specialty gender services; and urged caution for socially transitioning minors, among many other recommendations for reform. 

The Cass Review was the most comprehensive work ever crafted on the subject of pediatric gender medicine, but many activist and advocacy groups opposed it, insisting it was politically motivated or methodologically flawed. Initially, the British Medical Association sided with the activists,³⁴ but after conducting its own review³⁵ (yes, it was a review of a review of a review), the BMA largely endorsed Cass’s findings.³⁶

In America, most liberal media outlets and supporters³⁷ of gender-affirming care either ignored the Cass Review or impugned it, rather than wrestling with its findings. 

If no benefit could be proven, and harms were known, was gender-affirming care for youth ethical?

WPATH responded that they were “deeply concerned about the facts regarding the Cass Review’s process and content, as well as its consequences for the provision of care for trans and gender diverse youth.”³⁸ They argued that Dr. Cass had no experience working with trans children, when it was her objectivity that qualified her. They asserted that the Review contained no research, but that was the point: to evaluate the research that had been used to justify youth gender medicine, and which, it turned out, didn’t do so. They politicized and denied the science, critiquing the methodology, or asserting that personal experience with trans patients was what mattered. A group of clinicians from Yale, UCSF, and elsewhere, calling themselves “The Integrity Project,” claimed the Cass Review was based on “profound misunderstandings of the evidence base,”³⁹ accusing the Cass Review of repeating “spurious, debunked claims about transgender identity and gender dysphoria.” In particular, they objected to engaging with Littman’s theory of a social contagion and a new cohort of trans youth—not because the demographic changes weren’t clear, but because they found the theory of demographic change offensive. They attacked the studies showing high rates of desistance as outdated, even though the age of the research matters much less than the quality. They argued that puberty blockers should not improve rates of gender dysphoria alone, so that if studies showed they didn’t have benefits, that was fine. In other words, rather than engage with the Cass Review’s recommendations of reinventing gender services for youth so they are more holistic, they argued against there being any problems at all. 

The Trump Doctrine 

This was the state of youth gender medicine—hopelessly politicized, with supporters unwilling to budge, and Republicans steaming ahead—when, in November 2024, Donald Trump won reelection. His win was partly attributed to his political ads with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”⁴⁰ He was capitalizing on the average American’s antipathy toward identity politics, and Democrats’ prizing the needs of a small minority over the majority. Indeed, none of the aforementioned revelations had inspired a shift in rhetoric or policy from the left side of the aisle. 

Gender identity is a belief, not a truth—and medicating according to it is a contested intervention, one that seems to make some people feel better, and others feel irrevocably harmed.

From the moment he took office, Trump set about rolling back laws and policies that privileged gender identity above sex. He released executive orders that defined male and female based on body types, not identity. He restored Title IX to refer to sex, not gender identity, undoing both President Obama’s and Biden’s changes. His cabinet removed public funding for gender-affirming care. 

To many Democrats and liberals, as well as people beneath the trans umbrella, the changes felt hateful and harsh—a step backward from a world in which gender identity was a legitimate category and way of dividing society. Some of the policy decisions of the Trump administration may have been overreach, such as banning all trans people from the military. Bans are blunt instruments, not nuanced policy tools, which I personally believe should be used minimally and carefully. But other changes, such as those relating to medical treatments, what was being taught in school, or policies built on gender identity were responding to the available evidence.⁴¹

The HHS Review 

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) also commissioned a review of the existing evidence, which resulted in an American version of the Cass Review. “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” written by a politically diverse group of critics of youth gender medicine, included what we’d learned about the evidence base, as well as an important addition—one WPATH had subtracted: a chapter on medical ethics.⁴²

The Review asked if youth gender medical practices were “consistent with widely accepted principles of medical ethics”—especially beneficence (improvement in the patient) and nonmaleficence (avoiding harm). If no benefit could be proven, and harms were known, was gender-affirming care for youth ethical? If doctors were overstating benefits, such as reducing suicidality, and underselling risks, could anyone truly give informed consent? 

These were important questions. But because the document had been ordered by the Trump administration, it, too, was perceived as political and dismissed by most of the media and medical associations. 

ASPS Statement 

Despite the systematic evidence reviews, the rising voices of detransitioners, and the retreat in many European countries, most American medical associations refused to budge. 

The one exception was the 11,000-member American Society for Plastic Surgeons. After the Cass Review’s 2024 release, the ASPS released a statement that “there is considerable uncertainty as to the long-term efficacy for the use of chest and genital surgical interventions for the treatment of adolescents with gender dysphoria.”⁴³ In 2026, after the HHS Review, ASPS released an official position statement noting that due to the low-quality evidence, ethical considerations, and known harms, “there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.” They recommended that no one under 19 transition: 

Consistent with ASPS’s August 2024 statement that the overall evidence base for gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions is low certainty, and in light of recent publications reporting very low/low certainty of evidence regarding mental health outcomes, along with emerging concerns about potential long-term harms and the irreversible nature of surgical interventions in a developmentally vulnerable population, ASPS concludes there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents. ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.⁴⁴

Rethinking Gender Identity 

Among the most important issues with pediatric gender medicine is what is being treated. If originally transition was to alleviate distress, and make it easier to pass, those goals have largely been discarded in the face of a revolutionary approach to gender identity—not just male and female, but dozens of neo-identities and pronouns like xi and xir to match. 

Few proponents have stopped to ask what gender identity is, and to question whether everyone has one. In fact, there are several theories of gender identity.⁴⁵ One is that it’s simply an awareness of one’s sex—and one would need such an awareness in order to be distressed about it. Another is that it’s a cognitive phase, when toddlers become aware that there are two sex categories, and that they belong to one or the other. They base their sense of what category they belong to on their adherence to gender norms. By around age six or seven, that phase cedes to another: gender constancy, when kids realize their category is based on bodies, not stereotypes. 

The third theory is that gender identity is a sense of oneself as man, woman, both, neither, or some other category, completely independent of the body. This theory has prevailed, and remained largely unquestioned—but it needs to be. That is a subjective belief—one anyone is entitled to. But it is not an objective fact, as biological sex is. Still, many young people, including those who’ve gone to medical school, were reared with this version of gender identity as an indisputable reality, and do not understand that it is a political category, not a biological one. 

Clinicians, teachers, parents, and patients should be informed of these various competing theories, and not simply taught one of them as a fact. 

What Now? 

Halfway through 2026, very little has been resolved. Many pediatric gender clinics shuttered in the face of President Trump’s executive orders, but others have sued to stay open or are actively fighting to. In Democratic-majority states, sports and spaces remain divided by gender identity—in Republican-majority states, by sex. Amid chaos and instability in the U.S., it’s hard to have a nuanced conversation about anything, let alone one of the most profoundly divisive issues of this century. Accusations of bigotry are often used against those who argue for a more cautious approach. 

In order to come to any kind of resolution, we need to distinguish between subjective and objective truths—as Skeptic founder Michael Shermer puts it, “what is actually true, not just what we want to believe is true.” He writes that “a scientific truth is a claim for which the evidence is so substantial it is rational to offer one’s provisional assent.”⁴⁶ There is no substantial evidence about gender-affirming care, and its proponents have given unequivocal, not provisional, assent. Gender identity is a belief, not a truth—and medicating according to it is a contested intervention, one that seems to make some people feel better, and others feel irrevocably harmed. 

What we can do is continue to calmly state the facts that do exist, and help people understand the complexity of gender-affirming care, outside of politics. Those for it, and those against, almost always have the same goal in mind: the well-being of children.

I was having lunch with a friend, a respected internist, and asked him whether his trans patients posed any particular medical concerns. I asked because I had received an email from a Canadian physician who, I thought, perfectly summarized his position. “I love my few transgender males,” he wrote. “They all have other mental health issues. Lovingly I explain to them that I will always treat them with respect, but that I would not be intellectually honest or medically compassionate if I also did not treat them medically as someone who has every cell in their body female.”

The letter made me think of the recent research on the long-term, potentially harmful effects of administering estrogen to transgender women who have every cell in their body male—effects such as increased risks of cardiovascular and cognitive problems.¹ I also wondered what such information portended for doctors who are treating young transgender people who, in the manner of all young people, are not thinking about their future health. 

My friend agreed with the Canadian’s position on treatment, musing about the origins of his patients’ determination to transition—given, he said, how much they had endured, psychologically, socially, and medically, to do so. “Why would anyone put themselves through all that, even take on possible medical risks down the line, if there wasn’t some deep-seated need or yearning?” he said. Then he added, “Of course, I am speaking from only a few anecdotes.” 

Anecdotes are powerful. Humans think in anecdotes, tell stories of anecdotes, draw conclusions from anecdotes, and make social policies based on anecdotes. In this case, they led my friend to infer that most, if not all, trans people must have an inborn identity as being the other sex and will suffer any misery required to feel right in their own bodies. What might disconfirm that understandable inference? One thing would be the existence of “detransitioners” who put themselves through hormonal and surgical procedures and later changed their minds. After all, if transgender people are impressive because of all they are prepared to undergo in order to live as the other sex, consider how impressive it is for detransitioners to admit they had made a devastating mistake. 

The vast majority of people who invest time, money, surgery, and commitment into any activity will justify it rather than admit that it wasn’t worth it—let alone that it was harmful. Most people will pile on new costs to the “sunk costs” of the lost investment, rather than tolerate embarrassment, shame, and a massive plummet of self-esteem, and that’s just if they buy the wrong overpriced car or still think vaccines cause autism. What if that investment was a mastectomy at age 13 or loss of your reproductive ability at age 15? What if you became estranged from your parents in a fury because they tried to caution you? What if you lost your beautiful soprano voice, never to be regained? 

Consider how impressive it is for detransitioners to admit they had made a devastating mistake.

Let’s stipulate that these questions are enormously complex to study empirically. The vast majority of transgender people report initial satisfaction, even exhilaration, and say they have no complaints or regrets. Indeed, “postsurgical euphoria” is common, though short-lived. Further, it is difficult to determine how many detransitioners there are (as a percentage of those who undergo extensive hormonal or surgical interventions), partly because some get off the medical train but retain the new gender identity, and partly because large numbers stop seeing their original specialists and thereby drop from view. (This is a widespread problem in assessment of all medical procedures because unhappy patients—“that laminectomy did not end my back pain as you promised”—tend to abandon their physicians rather than return and complain. Thus the doctor can cheerfully, if mistakenly, conclude that all went well.) Indeed, one study of 100 detransitioners found that 76 failed to inform their clinicians that they had detransitioned.² No wonder endocrinologist Michael S. Irwig titled his paper “Detransition Among Transgender and Gender-Diverse People—An Increasing and Increasingly Complex Phenomenon.”³

And an increasingly important one, because the trans phenomenon primarily affects young people, whose adolescent identities—and brains—are still works in progress. UCLA’s Williams Institute School of Law reported in August 2025 that while only about one percent of Americans aged 13 and older (2.8 million) identify as transgender, three fourths are under 35 and one fourth are between ages 13 and 17. If even a few percent of that one percent are changing their minds, that’s tens of thousands of young people, and their experiences offer crucial information for practitioners and policy makers. Detransitioners are speaking up at conferences, online, and in lawsuits against their medical practitioners who permanently altered their bodies, but like whistleblowers everywhere, their bravery is often dismissed, and they pay a high social price for deviating from transgender orthodoxy. Most lament how many members of the LGB and trans communities that once welcomed and celebrated them now shun and vilify them. 

To better understand the factors that lead young people to identify as transgender and then to detransition, data analyst M. Lal and psychiatrist Stephen B. Levine analyzed the stories told by 37 detransitioners—25 biological females and 12 biological males—on publicly available video testimony.⁴ Their scholarly goal was to identify the main factors (they call “pathways”) into transition and those that eventually led them to change course. Of course this group is not representative of all detransitioners, as if such a sample could ever be created, but their stories corroborate much of what is already known about the young people who find themselves caught in the gender-affirming world and later struggle to get out. Most of the group had originally transitioned in their mid-teens and detransitioned in their twenties, with some not detransitioning until their late thirties.

To know how and why these women and men abandoned their trans identities, we need to know how they adopted them to begin with. Consistent with almost all other studies, Lal and Levine found a high prevalence of concurrent conditions long known to accompany gender dysphoria in young people: psychological disorders (notably autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, eating disorders); sexual abuse; childhood neglect and a history of abusive relationships; and, sadly, homophobia. When young people take a deep dive into the internet to find explanations of their symptoms and suffering, they encounter communities that actively persuade adolescents who are uncomfortable with their bodies, or who have emotional disorders, that they are “really” trans and their problems would vanish with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Many of Lal and Levine’s participants explicitly described the message they heard over and over: “If you are uncomfortable in your body, you are transgender.” 

Well, no, you probably aren’t. There are many reasons adolescents (or anyone else) might feel uncomfortable with their bodies. Shall I count the ways? But the normal discomforts, pleasures, and surprises of puberty are magnified for young people on the autism spectrum, who, Lal and Levine found, misattributed the concrete thinking styles, sensory processing difficulties, and social deficits typical of autism to having gender dysphoria. One explained how having a transgender identity provided “a structured, rule-based community” that alleviated his social isolation. Another said that the dysphoria label “perfectly fit” his “severe OCD, undiagnosed autism, and a general sense of alienation.” Participants with ADHD spoke of how transitioning provided a focused goal for their hyperfixations, soothing their unflagging restlessness. 

A second route to transitioning, for nearly half of this cohort, was the motive not to become the opposite sex but rather to escape the sex they were. Many had been sexually abused: One young woman’s distress over her developing breasts “was just from sexual abuse,” she said, yet when she told that to her physician, she was given puberty blockers immediately. Another described his transition as “surgical self-harm” to destroy the “boy whose presence was only worthy of contempt” from his father. 

In a gloomy reflection of the state of male-female relations today, a significant number of the participants wanted to transition as a way of opting out of the heterosexual dating market. “[My] eating disorder and dysphoria came from the same place,” said one young woman. “If I had less fat, I would look less female.” Several of these women wanted to create a nonsexual, androgynous body rather than a masculine one, to escape the feeling that their body “was on display—like it was somehow ‘there for boys’ or ‘there for men.’” 

For their part, several biological males described transition as a “flight from manhood” and a way to suppress what they felt was an overactive libido. (Note to boys: That’s normal, guys—you’re teenagers.) One said he wanted a “sexual lobotomy” to destroy the “brainwashing” that male sexuality was inherently evil. Some wanted to distance themselves from cultural claims of “toxic” masculinity and the “predatory” male; one associated a “caricature of maleness” with being “brutish” and concluded that “I can’t possibly be that.” Another said he had absorbed “a lot of rhetoric about how much men suck.” 

Finally, a third route to transitioning was homophobia, another factor that turns up repeatedly in studies of adolescents in gender clinics. Eleven biological males transitioned primarily to escape the stigma associated with being gay; one said that he “100%” wanted to avoid the shame of homosexuality. Several biological females felt that living as a trans man was preferable to living as a masculine lesbian; one transitioned in an effort to bypass the complexities and stigma she associated with being lesbian. 

The vast majority of people who invest time, money, surgery, and commitment into any activity will justify it rather than admit that it wasn’t worth it—let alone that it was harmful.

The bottom line? Not one of the participants in this study said “I always knew I was born in the wrong body.” On the contrary, Lal and Levine give us a picture of 37 teenagers, hitting puberty while suffering from serious mental issues and troubled family dynamics, confused about their bodies and about their sexuality, some scared of men (if female) and others scared of women (if male), some scared of having heterosexual desires and others scared of having homosexual desires, all going online to seek answers and reassurance. Fully 28 of the 37 participants said that their willingness to transition was driven by peers online, with one likening the spread of transgender ideology to a “mimetic virus.” Another said his identity “metastasized” after going on the online message board Reddit, and one noted that she “didn’t even know what transgender was” until she went on the internet. 

And while the internet is brimming with transgender activists making the direct case to vulnerable teens that they are “trans,” it is also full of strange byways that can seduce young people indirectly. Some of the straight females said their wish to transition stemmed from an intense immersion in the “Boys’ Love” subculture, “a genre of Japanese fiction,” write Lal and Levine, “typically created by women for a female audience (distinguished from homoerotic media created by and for gay men). Identifying as a gay man allowed them to experience romance and sexuality while bypassing the vulnerability and objectification they associated with their female bodies.” What began as a mildly kinky game solidified into an identity when online communities validated this fascination as evidence of a “hidden trans identity.” 

Once the transition process began, participants felt “validation euphoria,” joy and relief caused by having discovered what appeared at first to be the key to their distress. This relief was heavily reinforced by what some participants called “love-bombing” from online communities and gender-affirming peer groups. Sometimes the love-bombing came at the price of parent-hating, often fostered by adults online and in person to protect the transitioner’s new identity from parental scrutiny and doubt. Sometimes the animosity was already present: One participant admitted to engineering a “test” of her parents’ commitment to her trans identity in order to justify cutting ties with them, which she had long wanted to do. Another transitioned as a way to rebel against her mother’s demands that she conform to narrow notions of femininity, including the mother’s micromanagement of her daughter’s hair and makeup. 

A solution to my symptoms, plus freedom from my parents? A teen dream. The ensuing exhilaration suppressed any lingering doubts … for a while. 

Although most practitioners and supporters of gender-affirming treatment regard validation euphoria as evidence that justifies medical interventions (“my daughter/son is so happy now, it must have been the right decision”), they are assuming that what is true at first will last indefinitely. But research across many kinds of medical treatments should give us pause. For example, in the pre-Viagra years, when insertion of a penile prosthesis was a leading treatment of erectile dysfunction, the men in one study initially reported “renewed masculine self-esteem” and relief from the humiliation and marital guilt they had felt; no surprise that most said they would have the surgery again. And yet, in follow-ups ranging from one to four years after the procedure, the men “tended to be negative or disappointed about postoperative pain, penis size, postoperative sexual frequency, and prosthesis malfunctions.” And the longer the postoperative period, the more hesitations the men reported about whether they would undergo the operation again.⁵

What, then, does it take to refuse to sink under the weight of such sunk costs? To say “this was a bad decision,” let alone to detransition? At first, participants said, the psychological cost of acknowledging error was prohibitively high and too painful to bear, given the irreversible sacrifices they had already made, including estrangement from their families, loss of healthy tissue, and continuing medical complications, medications, and treatments. One woman described feeling “like a zombie” and “numb” while on testosterone, yet said she stayed on it because of the psychological and physical investments she had already made in her new identity. 

But over time, the burden became too great. A young man said that his peer-generated animosity toward his parents caused a “Luciferian destruction” of his life that he yearned to put back together. For 15 participants, severe or life-threatening medical complications, including pulmonary embolisms, demanded immediate reevaluation. One came to feel that her new male identity was a parasitic “AI in a human female body” that was “ruining” her life. Many reported that cross-sex hormones were exacerbating their distress rather than alleviating it; indeed, one participant had a psychotic breakdown, which he attributed to an extreme physiological reaction to cross-sex hormones. One said that her “body almost felt like it was just going into complete shutdown” after starting puberty blockers. Some were horrified by seeing their medically altered bodies: the sight “really screw[ed] with my head,” said one, and another described “reverse dysphoria,” feeling like a “man trapped in a woman look-alike body” as a result of estrogen and surgery. Two described their distress upon realizing that their altered bodies were attracting partners seeking sex with preteens or specifically with transgender partners. 

A major instigator of detransitioning was finally having to face the long-term physical costs of transition. For biological males, this often meant accepting the permanent loss of sexual function. One described the sensation in his postsurgical genitals as a “really cruel deep pain.” Another reflected that his search for his “true self and … a better life” had instead resulted in his having “done nothing but self-isolate and hate myself,” with the lasting consequences being “chronic pain, a lack of an endocrine system, and fertility taken away.” Biological females mourned the irreversible loss of fertility and the potential to breastfeed. One said she had dismissed the importance of having breasts at age 13 but felt the tragedy of their loss acutely as an adult. Four biological women had had backgrounds in vocal performance, and the permanent voice deepening caused by testosterone was a major source of grief. One said she felt like “The Little Mermaid,” the fairy-tale character who sacrifices her voice in exchange for human legs. Another called the drop from soprano to tenor the “most radical side effect” of her transition. A third said she had become “pretty much tone deaf.” For so many, the physical desexualization they actively sought as overwhelmed adolescents—going through gender transition to suppress libido and reproductive potential—became a primary source of grief as maturing adults. 

As the physical and emotional costs of transitioning piled up for these young people, regret and rage followed: anger over the rapid initiation of hormones and surgery, inadequate psychiatric evaluations, and abandonment by their doctors when they expressed doubts and concerns about their care. Over and over the detransitioners repeated the wish that their doctors had provided more clinical “pushback” in diagnosis instead of routinely and immediately pressing them to begin puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and eventually surgical interventions. 

Unhappy patients tend to abandon their physicians rather than return and complain.

Yet once out of immersion in the transgender world, realizing that their lived experience did not align with the gender-affirming ideology of their online and social peers, most of the participants in this study said they have been able to rebuild their social and sexual lives. For many, stopping hormonal treatment restored libido or altered their arousal patterns; gay men and lesbians felt sexual and relational clarity. And as the participants matured, they were better able to separate their preexisting psychological disorders and emotional problems from the transgender explanation for them. Having realized that transitioning did not resolve those problems, these participants were able to seek proper treatment. 

Despite the medical and social hardships of detransitioning, most of the participants in Lal and Levine’s study described the profound relief of doing so. They spoke often of the process of “radical acceptance”—abandoning the pursuit of an idealized body and living with the reality of their biological sex. This resolution, many said, brought them peace with their bodies at last. One participant said that she started healing the moment she stopped taking the testosterone. “For the first time,” she added, “I’m actually happy with my life.”