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You can use the stories to develop a clearer understanding of this element of TOK, see how TOK concepts manifest in the real world, and gather examples to support arguments in the essay and exhibition.

We've arranged these stories in a way that relates to our 5 Big Question framework for TOK, which is our favoured way of structuring the course. There are other ways to structure TOK, such as the Classic structure.

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A Big Think article, pointing out that saying something is ‘just a theory’ is to misunderstand what a theory represents in science.

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A Big Think article, pointing out that saying something is ‘just a theory’ is to misunderstand what a theory represents in science.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What other expressions does the writer say we generally equate ‘theories’ with? Why do so many scientific ideas never acquire the status of ‘theory’? What is the three-step formula that every successful scientific revolution has followed? How does the term ‘theory’ differ in mathematics to science? To wrap up: Why should we never tell a scientist something is “just a theory”? Give examples to support your answer.

KEY TERMS Informal definition, Fundamentally dishonest, Hypothesis, Predictive power, Scientifically testable, Evidence, Best of the best

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Mathematics

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Never tell a scientist it’s “just a theory”

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When the average person has a “theory,” they’re just guessing. But for a scientist, a theory is the pinnacle of what we can achieve.

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A New Humanist article, looking at why science ‘needs’ intuition. 

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A New Humanist article, looking at why science ‘needs’ intuition. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How do the cultural and societal belief systems we belong to, and our own nuanced experiences, shape the way we apply intuition? What does Carlo Rovelli mean when he says, science is “the simultaneous triumph of intuition and the active limiting of intuition”? How does Sara Walker say intuition differs from ‘common sense’? To wrap up: “Intuition is what humanises science, and what separates great scientists from the rest.” What does Conor Feehy mean, and what examples would you offer to support what he says?

KEY TERMS Trusting our gut, Truth, Mysterious, Cultural and societal belief systems, Common sense, Epistemological frailty

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences

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A Smithsonian article, looking at the attempts by a team of international scientists to stop the naming of organisms after human beings. 

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A Smithsonian article, looking at the attempts by a team of international scientists to stop the naming of organisms after human beings. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE In what way was the naming of species related to the colonization programmes of European powers from the 18th - 20th centuries, and why has this come under scrutiny? Why is an international group of researchers arguing that it’s time to move away from ‘eponyms’? Why are many scientists unconvinced by their efforts? To wrap up: “Naming and language have power. The way that you use language tells people whether they belong or not” (Earyn McGee). Should we factor this in when we are classifying and communicating scientific knowledge?

KEY TERMS Eponyms, Colonization programs, Power, Justify, Contentious, Culturally offensive, Political considerations

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Language, Human sciences

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George Washington's palm tree. Thomas Jefferson's sloth. Edward Harris's hawk. Quite a few species come with a person's name attached to them. Sometimes these names-formally known as eponyms-memorialize the original collector. Sometimes it's a scientist's family member, a benefactor or government leader, a colleague or even a celebrity. According to one official estimate, eponyms make up around 20 percent of all animal names in use.

Many species got their eponyms during the early days of scientific collecting, which was partially fueled by the broader colonization programs of European powers throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Over the past few years, however, that history has come under increased scrutiny. In 2020, for instance, amid the protests over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the push to remove Confederate monuments, some ornithologists began questioning whether birds named for Confederates and slaveholders should be retitled.

Now, an international group of researchers argues that it's time to move away from eponyms entirely. "In short, we believe that naming species in honour of real people is unnecessary and objectively difficult to justify," the authors wrote in a recent paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. "The Earth's biodiversity is part of a global heritage that should not be trivialized by association with any single human individual, whatever their perceived worth."

The authors of the paper are wading into an ongoing and contentious debate-and the scientific institutions responsible for approving new species names aren't budging.

The goal of naming species-or nomenclature-is to make sure scientific names are uniform across different fields and research labs, said Luis Ceríaco, a commissioner with the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which controls the naming of animal species. "It's a space to promote stability and promote universality on the use of names," Ceríaco added. "What we want is to have a set of rules that allow people to really know what they are talking about when referring to species."

For this reason, the ICZN and its partner organization, The International Association of Plant Taxonomy, follow established codes that prioritize older names, and only alter them for reasons of science and stability.

Proposals to rename species due to social or political concerns have attracted both criticism and support. In February 2023, a group of ICZN commissioners-including Ceríaco- put out a paper against renaming species on ethical grounds. Deciding which eponyms should be replaced due to "perceived offensiveness" isn't in the code's remit, they wrote. "Owing to the inherently subjective nature of making such assessments, it would be inappropriate for the Commission to assert judgments on such matters of morality, because there are no specific parameters to determine thresholds for offensiveness of a scientific name to a given community or individual, either in the present day or in the future."

Other scientists, however, have been happy to step into the gap.

The push to reassess problematic species names isn't new. Consider the case of Anophthalmus hitleri, a cave beetle named after Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, the eponym of which-in addition to honoring a historical genocidaire-has made the insect a target for some collectors. Yet despite calls to drop the eponym, the species has not been renamed by the ICZN. "The logic to date in preserving 'hitleri' is that the name per se is not offensive," entomologist May Berenbaum noted in a 2010 issue of American Entomologist. "Frankly, though, a scientific name that sentences a species to extinction at the hands of fanatical Fascist memorabilia collectors causes considerable offense, at least to me."

More recently, in 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement-a reference to Cecil Rhodes, the former prime minister of British colonial South Africa-launched discussions in the botanical sciences about replacing "culturally offensive and inappropriate names," which grew alongside similar debates in ornithology around the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

For some people, the stakes of such decisions can feel high. "Naming and language have power. The way that you use language tells people whether they belong or not," Earyn McGee, a conservation biologist and organizer of Black Birders Week, told Undark in 2020. The refusal to change species names, she said, "tells Black people and other people of color that they don't matter, that they're not important."

Such movements have, in turn, led some taxonomists to argue that renaming species injects political considerations into taxonomy, opening up thorny questions. After all, where should scientists draw lines between good actors and bad ones? (Should species named after Queen Victoria be replaced? What about plant names commemorating American slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?)

"We have a code of ethics," Ceríaco said, "and the ethics part says that no one should erect a new name knowingly that's going to cause offense." However, he added, the ICZN emphasizes the freedom of authors to name species as they see fit, so they also don't revise names that break their ethics code. "It's always on the responsibility of the author. We strongly suggest for people to be sure that what they're going to erect is not going to cause offense to anyone."

The alternative, Ceríaco said, would be for the ICZN to have to adjudicate which names are acceptable, opening "a pandora's box." Allowing such revisions at all would affect the work of global researchers, conservationists, and others who depend on a stable taxonomic framework. "We're not being dismissive toward the arguments that the names are offensive," he said. But, he added, the consequences of changing the names would be trickier than keeping them.

Not all researchers were convinced by the ICZN's argument. Some of them, like Patrícia Guedes-a biologist with the CIBIO Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources-banded together to in March 2023, pointing out that eponyms were effectively more trouble than they were worth. Part of the issue with eponyms, they noted, was that the practice is inextricably bound up with science's colonial history: Many past researchers came from colonizing European nations, and as a result many species ended up named after White, male, upper-class Europeans. In Africa alone, the researchers found, 1,565 species of birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals-a quarter of the continent's native vertebrates-are eponyms, the majority of which honored "colonizers or people of colonial descent."

"A name that is considered innocuous by some may be perceived as offensive by others, and names that were once considered inoffensive are not necessarily viewed in the same way in a post-colonial world," the authors wrote. Overturning all prior eponyms would be ethically sound but practically unfeasible, they conceded. Still, the authors argued that the ICZN could put taxonomists of the species' native region in charge of renaming proposals.

Guedes told Undark that it would be neater-and easier-to tighten the ICZN code's rules to restrict eponyms going forward. As long as organisms are named after people, she said, such arguments about which names are appropriate will continue: "I'm sure there are other ways of honoring people who've contributed to science that's not attaching their name to another living being."

Guedes and her colleagues face an uphill battle: Many taxonomists like eponyms. "I think it's positive in many, many cases," Ceríaco said. He himself has described around 40 species, some of them eponyms, including a species of viper named after James Hetfield from Metallica. (This is a bit of tradition in taxonomy: Consider Taylor Swift's millipede, or Leonardo DiCaprio's snake.) Such names are a chance to get communities that generally don't pay attention to such discoveries involved, he said. Eponyms also give researchers the chance to name species after scientists from the countries in which they were found, he added, such as an Angolan gecko that honors local scientist Francisco M. P. Gonçalves.

"There are certainly unfortunate eponyms out there," Stephen Heard, an ecologist and author of Charles Darwin's Barnacle and David Bowie's Spider, a book about eponyms, wrote to Undark in a Twitter message. "There are also wonderful ones that bring attention to underrecognized figures in science, including Indigenous people, women, and more."

It's an honor for a researcher to have a species named after them, said Brian Sidlauskas, an ichthyologist at Oregon State University. (He would know: There's an Amazonian fish with his name on it.) But while he's not interested in barring their use, he does think the ICZN could create a process for ditching problematic names-perhaps through a panel of experts tasked with weighing in on proposed name changes. "There really are some names in history that genuinely are really offensive, so having some mechanism for changing those is a good idea," he said-a position other researchers have staked out as well.

In addition, the ICZN's stance against making changes for ethical reasons is a "classic slippery slope argument," Sidlauskas said. "It's clear that they don't want to the responsibility for doing so. But if not them, then who has the responsibility and ability?"

Others argue that naming practices should change on a community level, regardless of what the ICZN does. "Going forward I think that White Europeans should not be naming species from countries that are not their own after other White Europeans," said Laura Jennings, a botanist at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. While she doesn't feel it's for her to tell colleagues how to name species in their own country, she'd decline her own eponym. "My preference is to name species after a characteristic of the plant, a place name or a name in a local language," she added. "Something that links the plant to its native habitat."

The broader community discussion isn't going anywhere. The ICZN is currently working on the 5th edition of its formal code, Ceríaco said, which will be delivered for comment and debate by the community before it's ratified in the next year or two. That's part of the reason he and his colleagues made their position clear earlier this year, he said-to foster debate.

It's a goal that Guedes' team shares. "I don't think the real change is going to happen anytime soon. But what we wanted to do was create a space for discussion," she said.

"And I think we're achieving that," she added.
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Why Some Scientists Want to Stop Naming Organisms After People

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An international team of researchers wants to stop using eponyms. But the naming authorities won't budge.

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A New Yorker article, looking at how the lack of visual evidence of UFOs hasn’t stopped people from continuing their search for them. 

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A New Yorker article, looking at how the lack of visual evidence of UFOs hasn’t stopped people from continuing their search for them. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why has interest in UFOs intensified recently? What constitutes strong and weak visual evidence for a UFOlogist - and does this match up to your parameters? Why does the UFO researcher Mark Pilkington say that the whole UFO story can be understood via the concept of “seeing what you want to see” - and can we extend this beyond this topic? Students can use this article as a way exploring this phenomenon, and try to ascertain the appeal of UFO mythology. Can it be applied to other types of belief? To wrap up: How can we find the balance between absolute skepticism, and the acceptance of any knowledge claim? In which area of knowledge is this most difficult?

KEY TERMS Proof, Truth, Debunking, Evidence, Skeptics, Seeing what you want to see

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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Among U.F.O. hunters, the lack of visual evidence has always been a vexing problem. That hasn't stopped them from looking.

In the corner of the social-media universe that calls itself #ufotwitter, there's always some new piece of visual evidence to discuss. Did a police body cam catch an otherworldly craft crash-landing in Vegas this week? And that kid nearby who called 911 to report an eight-foot-tall alien in his back yard-is he for real? What about this video of a saucer losing its tractor-beam grip on a cow and sending it winging over the treetops? Is this connected to the recent spate of cattle mutilations? What do you make of this blurry splotch? Does this light look weird?

Of course, it's hard to believe anything we see nowadays, and forecasts of an A.I.-fuelled disinformation apocalypse suggest that's only going to get worse. But, in the world of U.F.O. hunters, the lack of high-quality photographic proof has always been a vexing problem. "Considering the notorious camera-mindedness of Americans," Carl Jung wrote presciently in his 1958 book " Flying Saucers," "it is surprising how few 'authentic' photographs of UFOs seem to exist, especially as many of them are said to have been observed for several hours at relatively close quarters." Now with high-definition photographic tools held perpetually in the palms of billions of people across the globe, this problem should give us even more pause. Does this relative shortage of visuals amount to evidence that the U.F.O. phenomenon is pure bunkum, as many skeptics would have us believe? Or is it, as Jung himself famously supposed, because "UFOs are somehow not photogenic"? Or perhaps the truth is already out there, squirrelled away in some Pentagon vault or floating around the Internet, camouflaged amid the dross?

In any case, laughing off U.F.O.s with cracks about tinfoil hats or "little green men" is not as easy as it used to be. In recent years, there has been a welter of developments in the U.F.O. world that has brought the subject out of the realm of science fiction and supermarket tabloids, and into the halls of Congress and the pages of newspapers of record. In 2017, a watershed piece in the New York Times by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean exposed a secret Pentagon program created to investigate U.F.O.s, and included a pair of flight recordings taken by naval F/A-18F Super Hornets, showing spectral craft performing seemingly impossible maneuvers. (These videos have been the subject of muscular debunking efforts, most prominently by the professional skeptic and ufology bête noire Mick West. Recently, a pair of researchers put forward a detailed thirty-page analysis that attempts to debunk his debunkings.) The piece piqued the interest of both lawmakers and defense officials, who began to take the U.F.O. issue more seriously, creating an investigative body tasked with looking into "unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects."

The most remarkable-or, depending on your perspective, the most unbelievable-recent development came in June, when Kean and Blumenthal released a report in the Debrief, an online news site. It centered on the claims of David Grusch, a former high-level intelligence official who purports to have both knowledge and evidence of U.S.-government U.F.O.-crash-retrieval programs. Last week, in testimony before the House Oversight Committee's national-security subcommittee, Grusch alleged that the government, in cahoots with unnamed private contractors, has acquired craft of "nonhuman origin" that it has been attempting to reverse engineer for "decades," and nonhuman "biologics," a.k.a. the remains of dead aliens. But Grusch has publicly provided no evidence, visual or otherwise, to back up his claims, and he has admitted that all his knowledge of secret U.F.O. programs has come to him secondhand. The problem, as always, is the gap between what we're told exists and what we can actually see.

So what kind of visual record does the U.F.O. community point to? I made some calls recently, and I got an earful. I was told that the U.S. has a secret space program. I was told about the C.E.O. of an unnamed corporation who saw a gigantic, shape-shifting, probably interdimensional craft fly over Washington, D.C., and then wink miraculously out of existence. I was told about deep underground bases, where U.F.O. reverse-engineering projects have long been operating. I was told that aliens are already walking among us. I was notably not told much about what I was looking for, namely, photographs of the phenomenon that had a stamp of legitimacy. I was assured that such photos exist-in 4K resolution, no less-but that they remain hidden behind a scrim of secrecy. No one seemed to know when the photos might be released. I got the sinking feeling that the answer will always be "soon."

Over the phone, Kean took me through the collection of famous photographs that she had included in her 2010 book, " UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record." Among them were two impressive-seeming pictures taken during two separate U.F.O. "waves," the term used for clusters of U.F.O. sightings that occur over a protracted period. One, taken in Belgium during a wave from 1989 to 1990, shows a prototypical "black triangle" U.F.O., a lesser-known cousin of the flying saucer, with fiery blurs of radiance at its corners and a cyclopean eye of light at its center. "I would have told you that was awesome," Kean said, "but there's been some questions about it since my book came out. The shooter came forward in 2011 and said that he had hoaxed it." Another image, taken during the Hudson Valley wave of the mid-eighties, reportedly by a state trooper, shows an arc of lights in a carnivalesque array of colors, hanging in the night sky. "Nobody's been able to locate and interview the police officer who actually took it," she said. A series of pictures of an oddly grainy ship that looks like a cross between the planet Saturn and a macaron-which had been "analyzed by the Brazilian Navy" and deemed "authentic" by the president of Brazil, according to the caption accompanying them in the book-were swiftly dismissed as "controversial." "I thought it was authentic and I trusted the people who vouched for that photograph. But there are people that say that it isn't," Kean said. "I just don't know who to believe sometimes, you know?"

There were a few other photographs, which Kean deemed more promising. The first was a pair of pictures taken in 1950 in McMinnville, Oregon, by a farmer named Paul Trent. One evening that May, the story goes, Trent's wife Evelyn was out feeding their rabbits when she saw a slow-moving, disc-shaped craft. She called to her husband, who apparently had the presence of mind to snap two photos before the saucer sped off. The resulting images might be the most extensively analyzed U.F.O. photographs in history, even coming under the scrutiny of the U.S. Air Force, which funded a study, known as the Condon Report. It stated that the witness accounts were credible but that it would be "exaggerating to say that we have positively ruled out a fabrication," and suggested that the craft could have been a "model" suspended from overhead wires visible at the top of the photos. Debates rage to this day.

Kean suggested that I talk to the filmmaker James Fox, who has made several successful documentaries about U.F.O.s. "The one thing that I'm told from all the analysis-folks on the government inside say that, if you see a photograph of an object with clearly defined edges, it's probably a fake," he said. "There's something to do with the propulsion of these objects that blurs the edges of them." I pointed out that the object in the Trent photograph had rather sharp edges. "Zoom right in," he replied "Sharpish. Yes. Sharpish. I think if you zoomed right in, you'd find it a little less so." I was not encouraged.

Kean also directed me to what she called "the best UFO photo ever," which was taken during an aerial survey of Costa Rica in 1971 and still resides in archives of the country's National Geographic Institute. The photo has recently circulated online, thanks to the U.F.O. enthusiast Esteban Carranza, who retrieved a copy of the eight-by-ten-inch negative and was able to make a high-resolution drum scan, which provides a stunning level of detail. In the image, what appears to be a disc-shaped object hovers over northern Costa Rica's Lake Cote, adjacent to a pastoral landscape so richly articulated that you can see individual houses ten thousand feet below. The image is certainly a doozy: government-produced, highly detailed, strange. But is the disc really a craft from another world?

According to the U.F.O. researcher Mark Pilkington, the answer is no. Pilkington is the author of an excellent 2010 book about U.S. government disinformation operations inside the U.F.O. community, " Mirage Men," which should be required reading for anyone interested in U.F.O.s. When I asked him about the Costa Rica photo, he sent me a long message-board thread, in which a group of skeptics engage in a Herculean debunking effort, complete with detailed technical analysis of the original camera equipment, heavily annotated dissections of the image's light, shadow, and grain structure, various internecine squabbles, and talk of pressure marks and chipped glass. Could the shape have been an artifact produced by the camera equipment? Damage to the negative? Maybe. As should be expected, there is an equally detailed set of documents, produced by the U.F.O. researchers Jacques Vallée and Richard Haines, that suggest the image is of a real craft of unknown origin. Neither side's argument seemed conclusive, but the back-and-forth was enough to at least temper my enthusiasm. "I love the Costa Rica image," Pilkington wrote to me, "but I think it's a classic example of seeing what you want to see-which is the key to the whole U.F.O. story, if you ask me."

This is reportedly the case with the recently released bombshell U.F.O. photograph, which has been dubbed "the Calvine photo," after the hamlet in Scotland where it was taken, in 1990. For a long time, the picture was the stuff of mere legend: the U.F.O. researcher Nick Pope, a former British Ministry of Defense employee, claimed to have seen a blown-up copy in government offices, but the image remained unseen by the public. That changed last year when the researcher David Clarke discovered a print in the possession of a retired Royal Air Force press officer and published it in the Daily Mail. In the center of the frame, seemingly hovering, is a massive diamond-shaped object, which is being buzzed by what one analyst suggests is a Harrier jet. But Clarke later claimed that he was told by an anonymous U.K. Defence Intelligence officer that the object in question was not an alien craft at all but a highly classified U.S. aircraft flown out of the nearby Machrihanish airbase. Whether this is true or not-compelling analysis by the U.F.O. researcher Wim van Utrecht suggests that the "craft" is merely a Christmas ornament hung sideways from a tree branch-there is a well-documented history, expounded on in "Mirage Men" and elsewhere, of governments using U.F.O.s as a kind of smoke screen to cover up top-secret projects.

Pilkington told me, "From my long experience, almost all U.F.O. cases crumble to dust under heavy analysis." (He has doubts, for instance, about Grusch's account of a U.F.O. that supposedly crashed in Italy during the Second World War; according to Pilkington, within Italian U.F.O. circles that incident is considered a "well-known" hoax.) He added, "Ultimately, it's a matter of taste-whether you want to let the mystery ring or be absorbed by the dull thud of the mundane." His comment made me think of arguably the most famous U.F.O. photographer of all, the prolific and eccentric hoaxer Eduard (Billy) Meier. Meier took many pictures that he said were of U.F.O.s-he claimed that he was in frequent, intimate contact with an ancient Pleiadian race-but the one that most people would know was featured on a poster in the basement office of the embattled F.B.I. agent Fox Mulder in the sci-fi TV series " The X-Files." The photograph features a startlingly clear, archetypical saucer suspended in the air above a stand of trees in a bucolic swath of Swiss countryside. In the poster, a cropped closeup of the saucer is accompanied by a phrase in white block letters-which became a kind of mantra for the viewers of the show, myself among them. It reads: "I want to believe."

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The Enticing Mysteries of U.F.O. Photography

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Among U.F.O. hunters, the lack of visual evidence has always been a vexing problem. That hasn't stopped them from looking.

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A Conversation article, looking at news that the ‘Doomsday Clock’ has just been moved to 90 second to midnight - the closest it has ever been. 

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A Conversation article, looking at news that the ‘Doomsday Clock’ has just been moved to 90 second to midnight - the closest it has ever been. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What announcement was made about the Doomsday Clock on 24th January 2023? How does this compare to previous periods of history? Why is the Doomsday Clock used to represent catastrophic threats to the world? Overall, are ‘graphic depictions’ such as the Doomsday Clock needed to communicate critical ideas? What does this indicate about our reluctance to respond to unsustainable situations?

KEY TERMS Symbolic, Unprecedented, Wake-up call, Unsustainable, Existential anxiety, Unwitting subjects

LINKS TO Natural sciences, History, Human sciences, Language

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The Doomsday Clock is now at 90 seconds to midnight — the closest we have ever been to global catastrophe

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In 1945, nuclear scientists established the Doomsday Clock to warn against human-made threats. This week, the clock’s display has brought us the closest we have ever been to global disaster.

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A CNN article, looking at why there are different interpretations of science related to whether or not masks reduced the spread of Covid-19.

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A CNN article, looking at why there are different interpretations of science related to whether or not masks reduced the spread of Covid-19.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is meta-analysis, and how has it been used to ascertain whether mask-wearing was effective in controlling the spread of Covid-19? Why has there been disagreement about the results of this meta-analysis? Why does the author, Kent Sepkowitz say that he doubts that anyone will change their mind about this issue? Why does he say, “Everyone who is focused on the politics or media hype… at the expense of the actual science… should kindly shut up”? Overall is it possible to make decisions about public health issues that are based purely on science?

KEY TERMS Interpretation, Retrospective questioning, Conflicting evidence, Meta-analysis, Uncertainty, Political ax to grind

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Politics

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Editor's Note: Kent Sepkowitz is a physician and infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Three years after the Covid-19 pandemic changed the lives of all Americans, we are witnessing a retrospective questioning of whether masks-and mask mandates-decrease the risk of Covid-19 spread.

To try to clarify the issue, the venerable Cochrane Library led a meta-analysis of available data. Meta-analysis often is used to try to help reconcile conflicting evidence, though the approach has its doubters.

The premise is that, using a strict approach to determine which previous studies are clear enough for inclusion, experts can cobble together the results from years of work done by different investigators and published in different journals. Then, using the bigger statistical punch provided by the many, they can find a significant conclusion not evident in the few.

Cochrane's study-of-studies, combined with its prestige, has re-animated the pens of a troupe of anti-mask-mandaters including current New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and former New York Times reporter John Tierney.

The "money quote" comes from an interview that esteemed data scientist Dr. Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane study, gave in an interview: "There is just no evidence that (masks) make any difference, full stop." If his statement were an accurate reflection of what the article found, the launching of a thousand op-eds would be understandable.

But this emphatically is not the conclusion of the twelve authors, of which Jefferson was just one voice. The actual Cochrane article concludes something directly at odds with Jefferson's statement: "The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions... The low to moderate certainty of evidence (in favor of masks) means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect," the article notes.

In plain English, this, at least to me as a veteran reader of these types of reviews, translates to: The primary studies are not strong enough for us to say much of anything except that we may be wrong no matter what we say.

A lead author such as Jefferson is of course free to speak his mind but, at least in the interview, he apparently did not distinguish his personal view from the consensus view of the authors. There may be a back-story to this: A professor at Oxford University, Jefferson seems to long have had his doubts about masks, writing articles in The Spectator and other journals to air out his sometimes curmudgeonly views.

Given their awareness of his strong personal opinions on the topic, the Cochrane Library, in the section of the recent meta-analysis called " Authors' Declarations of Interest" writes the following: "TJ (Tom Jefferson): reports declaring an opinion on the topic of the review in articles for popular media. TJ is an Editor at the Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections group but was not involved in the editorial process for this review. See full statement here: https://restoringtrials.org/competing-interests-tom-jefferson/."

Though half of the 12 authors were "not involved in the editorial process," for this particular article, the additional characterization by Cochrane of Jefferson, the opinionated citizen ("declaring an opinion on the topic ... for popular media"), is quite unusual for the medical literature.

Furthermore, several meticulous experts active on social media have unpacked every square inch of the article to reveal many possible flaws in the analysis itself that may have blunted evidence of mask efficacy. This sort of back and forth adopts the tone of "my expert is bigger than your expert" and never leads to any resolution of differences.

Personalities and spokespeople aside, there may be an even larger issue at play here. I have long found the meta-analyses of public health studies such as masking to be uniquely challenging. Meta-analysis seems better suited to randomized placebo-controlled trials comparing this drug to that. The uncertainties in public health studies seem too great for the bigger data of a meta-analysis to overcome.

For example, for masking trials, those randomized to wearing a mask or not wearing a mask cannot be blinded: A person in the unmasked arm may have snuck a mask on here and there or conversely, the masked group may have spent a day or two, or ten, unmasked. This introduces enormous and irreducible uncertainty regarding just what is happening.

Plus, focus on this particular meta-analysis-and it alone-is misguided. Other meta-analyses by experts found a " significant protective effect " from masks.

And perhaps most important of all, we have witnessed masks at work over the last three years. Yes, this is anathema to the purists who require evidence, not observation, but how else can we explain the unprecedented low (almost zero) rates of influenza in the 2020-2021 respiratory season other than by close adherence by the many to the protective measures taken to prevent disease transmission.

Despite all the current kerfuffle, I doubt anyone will change their mind about the issue. Maskers like me will continue to believe and the anti-maskers, though perhaps walking a little taller for a moment, will continue to blame masks for everything from childhood development delays to crashing economies to a dulling of the public sensitivity to the ever-encroaching State that will, when completed, supposedly deprive everyone of all freedoms.

More alarming than the mask debate is to note that this seems to be the latest in a disturbing trend of those with a political ax to grind revisiting the three-year history of the pandemic in a way that needlessly casts doubt or misdirects attention.

Already this year, we have heard that one US agency finds weak evidence that the viral strain that overwhelmed the world was released from a lab in China; we hear ever more about how vaccines are causing a global increase in deaths albeit from a discredited source and we see more focus on the profit motive as an explanation for how the pandemic played out.

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Opinion: Were masks useless? The deceptive interpretation of what science tells us | CNN

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Editor's Note: Kent Sepkowitz is a physician and infectious disease expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN. Three years after the Covid-19 pandemic changed the lives of all Americans, we are witnessing a retrospective questioning of whether masks-and mask mandates-decrease the risk of Covid-19 spread.

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A Sapiens magazine, arguing that the processing required to make sense of the JWST images tell us as much about humans as the universe.

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A Sapiens magazine, arguing that the processing required to make sense of the JWST images tell us as much about humans as the universe.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why are photographs not the “objective” representations that we think they are? What determines the way we process the images provided by cameras and telescopes? What other ways of knowing other than sight are there that we could apply to the universe (see this video about how we explore the universe via sonification)? Overall, give students this quote: “visualizing space is inexorably linked with the desire to make sense of humanity and our own planet’s place in the universe”. What does Gideon Lasco mean? Do students agree?

KEY TERMS Image processing, Objective representations, Post-processing, Direct representations, Sense of beauty, Auditory representations

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences, Knowledge & the knower, The arts

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It would seem, indeed, that the JWST is a telescope fit for today's Instagram generation -a generation that demands ever more powerful visual technologies, from high-megapixel phone cameras to high-definition television screens.

What does this preoccupation with capturing the most high-definition images of outer space say about us? By turning the telescope lens back to Earth, so to speak, we can learn a lot about ourselves and our societies-how we create knowledge about the universe and what we might be missing in the process.

Though many of us tend to think of photographs as "objective" representations of the world, all photographic images are framed, processed, and distributed to some extent by people.

Beyond magnifying the universe, contemporary telescopic imagery in particular requires extensive post-processing that puts most efforts at Photoshop to shame. The anthropologist Götz Hoeppe interviewed an astronomer at an observatory in Chile who described contemporary telescopic images as "reconstructions of digitized information." In other words, the images are not direct representations of what a person would see with their own eyes.

The images require so much digital manipulation in part because humans can only see light that lies within our "visible spectrum"-that is, electromagnetic waves with wavelengths from 380 to 700 nanometers. Other animals have their own visible spectrum, which means that the night sky can look quite different to them. Biologists hypothesize, for instance, that the Milky Way appears very prominently to dung beetles, who use the celestial formation to navigate at night.

To create images of the universe that humans, as opposed to dung beetles, can see, the JWST's specialized cameras capture infrared light that is invisible to humans. The black-and-white images that JWST beams back to Earth are then filtered, processed, and stitched together with other data to form the impressive " composite images " that finally find their way to magazines and social media platforms.

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Picturing the Deep Universe Is Deeply Human

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It would seem, indeed, that the JWST is a telescope fit for today's Instagram generation -a generation that demands ever more powerful visual technologies, from high-megapixel phone cameras to high-definition television screens. What does this preoccupation with capturing the most high-definition images of outer space say about us?

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An FT article, which explores whether we have become too fixated on the numbers attached to the climate crisis.

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An FT article, which explores whether we have become too fixated on the numbers attached to the climate crisis.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why can conveying the dangers of climate change via ‘magic numbers’ lead to problems? How has the Covid pandemic influenced the way climate messaging is carried out? Why are some scientists arguing that you have to link climate change to ‘everyday experiences’? Overall, how do we ensure that big ideas in science are communicated with resonance?

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Magic numbers, Exactitude, Cut-offs, Awareness vs. fear, Deadline-ism

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Mathematics, Language, Knowledge & the knower

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A Conversation article, considering why astronomy is a ‘proper’ science, and astrology is a ‘pseudoscience’. 

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A Conversation article, considering why astronomy is a ‘proper’ science, and astrology is a ‘pseudoscience’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How does it define the two fields - and how close was your definition? In what ways do the two fields share a similar history - and what are the implications of this? What are the key differences between these two fields? Overall, how do we distinguish between science and pseudoscience, and what are the implications of failing to do so?

KEY TERMS Predictions, True, Factual claims, Guesswork, Evidence, Being false vs. being Unscientific, Meaning and interpretation

LINKS TO Natural sciences

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Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you'd like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.
Why is astronomy a science, but not astrology? - Katelyn, age 11, Arlington, Texas

Are you sure astrology isn't a science?

Both astrology and astronomy are in the business of making predictions. The theories of astrology claim that the positions of the planets and the stars influence who you are and what happens to you: your job, your personality and your romantic partner. Astrologers make these predictions based on the positions of the planets at the time of your birth.

Astronomy, in contrast, makes predictions about such phenomena as the movements of planets and the expansion of galaxies. Astronomers explain their predictions with such properties as masses, distances and gravitational forces.

As a philosopher and an anthropologist who study what science means to society, we think it is important to separate the question of whether something is a science from the question of whether it is true or false.

Astrology makes scientific claims

Science, in essence, involves making and testing factual claims about the world. Factual claims are true or false descriptions of the world (Joe is 1 meter tall) as opposed to descriptions of how we define things (1 meter is 1,000 milimeters). In this sense, astrologers, like astronomers, make factual claims about the world. To us, that makes astrology sound a lot like a set of scientific beliefs.

For a very long time, until the 17th or 18th century, astronomy and astrology were practiced side by side. After all, knowing where the planets were relative to the stars was necessary to make accurate predictions about how their locations influenced human affairs. That's why astronomers and astrologers populated medical schools and governments, advising people on what the heavens signaled was to come on Earth.

Even famed astronomers Galileo and Kepler practiced astrology. Any rule that says they are scientists only if they make one set of factual claims but not when they make another set of factual claims divides these thinkers into two halves that aren't meant to be contradictory. In both cases, they wanted to know how things worked so they could predict how things would go in the future.

Being false vs. being unscientific

But here's the rub: When researchers test the predictions astrology makes about people's lives, those predictions turn out to be no better than guesswork.

There is currently no broadly accepted evidence that galactic forces are capable of influencing the choices people make. The truck parked on the street exerts more gravitational pull on you than Mars does, and the radio waves from your local station far outpower those from Jupiter, for instance.

There is an important difference between being false and being unscientific. Currently, astrological theories are false precisely because they make scientific claims about the world, and those claims turn out to be wrong. Although the predictions astrology makes are false, they are nonetheless a matter of science. That's how we know they are wrong, after all.

Some people believe they find support for astrological predictions in their own personal experience. They read their horoscope and it seems just right: They did "meet someone interesting" or "benefit from listening to a close friend's advice." But the predictions are vague enough that they would often be true even if astrology were utterly bogus. That's why it can be difficult to figure out how to assess an astrologer's predictions with precision.

Theories of astronomy, on the other hand, have evolved over the years with advances in technology. They are routinely corrected in response to increasingly precise measurements. For example, Einstein's theory of general relativity got a boost over Newton's because it predicted the precise migration of Mercury's closest point to the Sun year after year. If astrology had the same ability to make correct predictions with such precision, it might still be a major focus of scientific attention.

Why is astrology still popular?

But then why do so many people find astrology so useful if its predictions are not well founded? Why are astrological signs and horoscopes so popular?

It seems that looking to the sky to make some sense of what's going on right now and what's going to happen in the future has appealed to a lot of different people at different times in history all over the world.

When it comes to what's commonly known as Western astrology, many people find their astrological sign to be a source of meaning in their lives. In fact, nearly 30% of Americans believe in astrology. It's one of many tools we have for telling stories about ourselves to make sense of who we are, why we are that way and why experiences that otherwise would feel meaningless and confusing seem to happen to us all the time. In this sense, astrology's success might be less about prediction and more about what it offers in terms of meaning and interpretation.

Among other things, astrology can be a useful prompt for self-reflection. It asks us whether we have traits typical of our astrological sign, and whether those we love have traits the theory suggests they ought to have. Thinking about our traits and relationships with the people around us is generally a good tool for understanding who we are, what we want to be and the meaning of our lives. Perhaps astrology is helpful in this way, independently of whether those traits are fixed by the stars.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you'd like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live. And since curiosity has no age limit - adults, let us know what you're wondering, too. We won't be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

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Why is astronomy a science but astrology is not?

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Astrology and astronomy were once practiced side by side by scientists like Galileo and Kepler. And they're more similar than you might think.

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A DW article and accompanying videos, considering the ethical questions thrown up by the ‘era of genetics’. 

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A DW article and accompanying videos, considering the ethical questions thrown up by the ‘era of genetics’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What are the ethical and philosophical questions prompted by the rise of gene editing - and how do (/can) we reach consensus on them?

KEY TERMS Visions, True, Ethical and philosophical questions, Bias

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences

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Life and ethics in an ‘era of genetics’ – DW – 07/27/2022

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The promise of genetics is huge: From recreating extinct animals to securing our very own human survival on Earth. But what of the ethics in the science?

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An FT article, which questions whether adding carbon food labels would change the way people shop.

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An FT article, which questions whether adding carbon food labels would change the way people shop.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is ‘transparent labelling’ on food, and what impact is this designed to have? From the information in the article, do their food habits have a negative impact on the environment? How important is it to base transparent labelling on reliable data - and how easy is it to gather this? Overall, how prepared do they think people will be to change their behaviour when presented with evidence that it is damaging the environment?

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Transparent labelling, Reliable data

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Language, Knowledge & the knower

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An FT article, considering the difficulties of linking extreme weather to climate change, in the wake of the fires and floods that have recently affected countries around the world. 

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An FT article, considering the difficulties of linking extreme weather to climate change, in the wake of the fires and floods that have recently affected countries around the world. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a fabulous article for TOK, which covers multiple key concepts, could be used to support the exploration of various exhibition prompts, and, of course, is very much in the news today. Get students to begin by thinking about why many knowers would intuitively link the recent natural disasters around the world with climate change. Then think about why this is insufficient for scientists (and politicians), and their need for more certainty. Why is it so hard to establish a direct causal link? How is technology being used to try to do so? Why is there a difference of opinion about attribution science? Loads to unpack and explore!

We're proud to work in partnership with the FT, to promote their free FT for Schools programme. Follow this link to sign up your school, and access this and other articles.

KEY TERMS Direct causal link, Attribution science, Predictions, Truth, Models, Certainty, Evidence

LINKS TO Natural sciences,Technology, Mathematics, Politics, Knowledge & the knower

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The flurry of natural disasters has focused attention on the complex work towards establishing a direct link to global warming

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Two articles - from the Guardian and the Conversation - look at what we can learn about climate denial from the movie Don’t Look Up.

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Two articles - from the Guardian and the Conversation - look at what we can learn about climate denial from the movie Don’t Look Up.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE (Also check out The Conversation article) Don’t Look Up - whilst proving unpopular with the critics - is resonating with many climate scientists, such as Peter Kalmus, who wrote the Guardian article. Students will gain a lot from watching the movie, as it deals with many TOK-friendly ideas. Why does Kalmus believe the film “captures the madness I see every day” - and what is this madness? How can movies such as this one help climate scientists to do their job, despite being fictional? Looking at the second article, what are the “five myths that fuel the rejection of climate science”?

KEY TERMS Accurate, Gaslighted, 100% certain, Public communication

LINKS TO Natural sciences, The arts

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he movie Don't Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it's also the most accurate film about society's terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I've seen.

The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet - a "planet killer" - that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.

The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Dibiasky, on national TV, screams "Are we not being clear? We're all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!" I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.

The two astronomers are given a 20-minute audience with the president (Meryl Streep), who is glad to hear that impact isn't technically 100% certain. Weighing election strategy above the fate of the planet, she decides to "sit tight and assess". Desperate, the scientists then go on a national morning show, but the TV hosts make light of their warning (which is also overshadowed by a celebrity breakup story).

By now, the imminent collision with comet Dibiasky is confirmed by scientists around the world. After political winds shift, the president initiates a mission to divert the comet, but changes her mind at the last moment when urged to do so by a billionaire donor (Mark Rylance) with his own plan to guide it to a safe landing, using unproven technology, in order to claim its precious metals. A sports magazine's cover asks, "The end is near. Will there be a Super Bowl?"

But this isn't a film about how humanity would respond to a planet-killing comet; it's a film about how humanity is responding to planet-killing climate breakdown. We live in a society in which, despite extraordinarily clear, present, and worsening climate danger, more than half of Republican members of Congress still say climate change is a hoax and many more wish to block action, and in which the official Democratic party platform still enshrines massive subsidies to the fossil fuel industry; in which the current president ran on a promise that "nothing will fundamentally change", and the speaker of the House dismissed even a modest climate plan as "the green dream or whatever"; in which the largest delegation to Cop26 was the fossil fuel industry, and the White House sold drilling rights to a huge tract of the Gulf of Mexico after the summit; in which world leaders say that climate is an "existential threat to humanity" while simultaneously expanding fossil fuel production; in which major newspapers still run fossil fuel ads, and climate news is routinely overshadowed by sports; in which entrepreneurs push incredibly risky tech solutions and billionaires sell the absurdist fantasy that humanity can just move to Mars.

World leaders underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize

After 15 years of working to raise climate urgency, I've concluded that the public in general, and world leaders in particular, underestimate how rapid, serious and permanent climate and ecological breakdown will be if humanity fails to mobilize. There may only be five years left before humanity expends the remaining "carbon budget" to stay under 1.5C of global heating at today's emissions rates - a level of heating I am not confident will be compatible with civilization as we know it. And there may only be five years before the Amazon rainforest and a large Antarctic ice sheet pass irreversible tipping points.

The Earth system is breaking down now with breathtaking speed. And climate scientists have faced an even more insurmountable public communication task than the astronomers in Don't Look Up, since climate destruction unfolds over decades - lightning fast as far as the planet is concerned, but glacially slow as far as the news cycle is concerned - and isn't as immediate and visible as a comet in the sky.

Given all this, dismissing Don't Look Up as too obvious might say more about the critic than the film. It's funny and terrifying because it conveys a certain cold truth that climate scientists and others who understand the full depth of the climate emergency are living every day. I hope that this movie, which comically depicts how hard it is to break through prevailing norms, actually helps break through those norms in real life.

We need stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from knowing what's coming while failing to act

I also hope Hollywood is learning how to tell climate stories that matter. Instead of stories that create comforting distance from the grave danger we are in via unrealistic techno fixes for unrealistic disaster scenarios, humanity needs stories that highlight the many absurdities that arise from collectively knowing what's coming while collectively failing to act.

We also need stories that show humanity responding rationally to the crisis. A lack of technology isn't what's blocking action. Instead, humanity needs to confront the fossil fuel industry head on, accept that we need to consume less energy, and switch into full-on emergency mode. The sense of solidarity and relief we'd feel once this happens - if it happens - would be gamechanging for our species. More and better facts will not catalyze this sociocultural tipping point, but more and better stories might.

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I'm a climate scientist. Don't Look Up captures the madness I see every day | Peter Kalmus

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he movie Don't Look Up is satire. But speaking as a climate scientist doing everything I can to wake people up and avoid planetary destruction, it's also the most accurate film about society's terrifying non-response to climate breakdown I've seen.

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A Conversation article, looking at the ethics behind lab-grown embryos. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the ethics behind lab-grown embryos. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is one of the most divisive areas of scientific research, which for some equates to scientists ‘playing God’. How does the writer approach the issue (note the literary reference in the article)? Why do we feel ‘uncomfortable’ about certain ethical issues - and is this a good guide to moral judgement? Should we arrive at our conclusions purely by weighing up benefits versus risks? Should we draw on other affiliations we belong to - such as religion, politics, and so on? Should we have a public discussion about the issue, or should we leave the decision-making to the scientists?

KEY TERMS Benefits vs. risks, Public discussion, Regulation, Uncomfortable

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Technology, Religion

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Lab-grown embryos and human-monkey hybrids: Medical marvels or ethical missteps?

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Researchers have grown the first human-monkey hybrid embryos as well as mouse embryos in artificial wombs late into development. These biomedical breakthroughs raise different ethical quandaries.

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A Conversation article, exploring how ‘magical thinking’ was once at the heart of science and religion, and why it could help the world today. 

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A Conversation article, exploring how ‘magical thinking’ was once at the heart of science and religion, and why it could help the world today. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE It may seem counterintuitive or contradictory that we need more ‘magical thinking’, but get students first to understand what Chris Gosden means by this term, then why he says it could help us to help the world. Do we need to be more connected to the cosmos, and develop a deeper kinship with nature? Is modern science leading to an estrangement from the universe?

KEY TERMS Connections to the cosmos, Kinship, Responsibility

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Religion, Knowledge & the knower

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On April 16 1872, a group of men sat drinking in the Barley Mow pub near Wellington in Somerset in the UK's south-west. A gust of wind in the chimney dislodged four onions with paper attached to them with pins. On each piece of paper, a name was written. This turned out to be an instance of 19th-century magic. The onions were placed there by a "wizard", who hoped that as the vegetables shrivelled in the smoke, the people whose names were attached to them would also diminish and suffer harm.

One onion has ended up in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. The person named on it is Joseph Hoyland Fox, a local temperance campaigner who had been trying to close the Barley Mow in 1871 to combat the evils of alcohol. The landlord, Samuel Porter, had a local reputation as a "wizard" and none doubted he was engaged in a magical campaign against those trying to damage his business.

E.B. Tylor, who wrote Primitive Culture, a foundational work of 19th-century anthropology, lived in Wellington. The onion came to him and thence to the Pitt Rivers Museum of which he was curator from 1883. Tylor was shocked by the onions, which he himself saw as magical. Tylor's intellectual history regarded human development as moving from magic to religion to science, each more rational and institutionally based than its predecessor. To find evidence of magic on his doorstep in the supposedly rational, scientific Britain of the late 19th century ran totally counter to such an idea.

Rumours of the death of magic have frequently been exaggerated. For tens of thousands of years - in all parts of the inhabited world - magic has been practised and has coexisted with religion and science, sometimes happily, at other times uneasily. Magic, religion and science form a triple helix running through human culture. While the histories of science and religion have been consistently explored, that of magic has not. Any element of human life so pervasive and long-lasting must have an important role to play, requiring more thought and research than it has often received.

What is magic?

A crucial question is, "What is magic?" My definition emphasises human participation in the universe. To be human is to be connected, and the universe is also open to influence from human actions and will. Science encourages us to stand back from the universe, understanding it in a detached, objective and abstract manner, while religion sees human connections to the cosmos through a single god or many gods who direct the universe.

Magic, religion and science have their own strengths and weaknesses. It is not a question of choosing between them - science allows us to understand the world in order to influence and change it. Religion, meanwhile, derives from a sense of transcendence and wonder. Magic sees us as immersed in forces and flows of energy influencing our psychological states and well-being, just as we can influence these flows and forces.

Magic is embedded in local cultures and modes of being - there is no one magic, but a vast variety, as can be seen in the briefest survey (for more detail see my recent book). Tales of shamanism on the Eurasian steppe, for example, involve people transforming into animals or travelling to the spirit world to counteract disease, death and dispossession.

In many places, ancestors influence the living - including in many African and Chinese cultures. A Bronze Age tomb in China reveals complex forms of divination with the dead answering the living. Fu Hao, buried in the tomb shown below, asked her ancestors about success in war and the outcomes of pregnancies, but then was questioned by her descendants about their future after death.

Influential mages

British royalty employed magicians: Queen Elizabeth I asked Dr John Dee, a well-known "conjuror" - and probable model for Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest - to find the most propitious date for her coronation and supported his attempts at alchemy.

In the following century, Isaac Newton spent considerable effort on alchemy and Biblical prophecy. He was described by the economist John Maynard Keynes as not the first of the Age of Reason, but the last of the magicians. In the mind of Newton - and in his work - magic, science and religion were entangled, each being a tool for examining the deepest secrets of the universe.

Many across the world still believe in magic, which does not make it "true" in some scientific sense, but indicates its continuing power. We are entering an age of change and crisis, brought about by the depredations of the ecology of the planet, human inequality and suffering. We need all the intellectual and cultural tools at our disposal.

Magic encourages a sense of kinship with the universe. With kinship comes care and responsibility, raising the possibility that understanding magic, one of the oldest of human practices, can give us new and urgent insights today.

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Magic was once seen as equal to science and religion - a bit of magical thinking could help the world now

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On April 16 1872, a group of men sat drinking in the Barley Mow pub near Wellington in Somerset in the UK's south-west. A gust of wind in the chimney dislodged four onions with paper attached to them with pins. On each piece of paper, a name was written.

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A Guardian article, considering how the pandemic is affecting our susceptibility to rumour and superstition, and whether ‘evidence-based’ belief is making a come-back. 

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A Guardian article, considering how the pandemic is affecting our susceptibility to rumour and superstition, and whether ‘evidence-based’ belief is making a come-back. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The article is arguing that ‘evidence-based’ belief is being embraced again. What evidence do they provide for this? Is the premise of the article accurate, though - that it had been abandoned? And what does this phrase at the heart of the article mean: “All pandemics trail a ready market in superstition, quackery and prejudice – a sense of powerlessness generates in some the need for catch-all theories, however deranged”?

KEY TERMS Misinformation, Evidence-based reality, Powerlessness

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences, Technology, Language

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here have not been too many encouraging graph lines in recent weeks. One that does offer a breath of optimism, however, is the slight downward curve that implies one of the most toxic trends of our times - the anti-vaxx movement - might just be in retreat. The shift is incremental, but in a UK-wide survey in mid-March, 7% of people insisted they would refuse to have a coronavirus vaccine if one were available. By early April, with hospital wards and mortuaries filling up, that number had dropped to 5%. Perhaps vaccine conspiracy cannot bear too much pandemic reality.

As with the strategies against the virus itself, however, the response to any likely "cure" seems likely to vary from country to country. A similar survey in France, also conducted by the London-based Vaccine Confidence Project, suggested 18% of people would refuse a vaccine, while in a poll in New York, the city worst affected by the pandemic, 29% insisted they would not consent, a number that may render any programme ineffective.

The depth of misplaced fear about vaccination - which remains one of the unambiguous triumphs of global public health - has been further illustrated in widely shared remarks from lockdown. Novak Djokovic last week volunteered that he would have to think seriously about whether he could even carry on playing tennis if a vaccine were to become mandatory to travel. The rapper MIA went further in informing her 650,000 Twitter followers melodramatically, that "if I have to choose the vaccine or a [location-tracking] chip, I'm gonna choose death".

The most prominent American anti-vaxxer, Robert Kennedy Jr, meanwhile, amplified an unhinged conspiracy that believes Bill Gates is using the virus as part of a supposed plot to control the world's population through immunisation.

All pandemics trail a ready market in superstition, quackery and prejudice - a sense of powerlessness generates in some the need for catch-all theories, however deranged. At the time of the great plague in London, the spread of miracle cures and scapegoating prophecy was almost harder to contain than the infection itself. As part of its strategy the government was moved, Daniel Defoe reported in his A Journal of the Plague Year, to "suppress the printing of such Books and Pamphlets as terrify the People". The efforts to prevent the spread of damaging conspiracies across our own media have shared a similar profile - and often a similar success rate - to the efforts to curb the disease.

In this respect, the pandemic is something of a test case for the social media monopolies of Silicon Valley to deliver on their widely trumpeted commitment to slow the spread of dangerously false information. After being confronted with the evidence of manipulation in the elections of 2016, and the spread of such vile conspiracies as that which argued that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, Facebook and Google and the rest have been forced to step up efforts to monitor and block extreme misinformation campaigns on their various platforms. Arguably, that effort is finally starting to show some effect.

Counterintuitively, some evidence for that might be found in the response to the most pernicious of the current conspiracies which has, entirely without scientific foundation, sought to link the spread of coronavirus with the rollout of the 5G data network. The real-world effects have been the acts of vandalism and arson against mobile phone masts in the past weeks. Up to 50 such attacks have been reported, mostly on Merseyside and in the West Midlands, including the burning of the 5G mast adjacent to the new Nightingale hospital outside Birmingham.

This Morning received more than 400 complaints after presenter Eamonn Holmes gave credence to Covid-19 5G conspiracy theories. Photograph: ITV This Morning

A report from the independent verification charity Full Fact last week revealed how this copycat campaign was only the most dramatic expression of a conspiracy theory with different strains, which include "that all the symptoms [of the virus] are actually caused by 5G... [and] that there is no disease at all, and the outbreak is a gigantic hoax to enable the government to install 5G under the cover of lockdown". It should go without saying that there is no possible connection between the 5G radio waves and the spread of a virus. Even so, the government was forced to address the fears, calling them "dangerous nonsense".

Thinking about contagious ideas now, I recall interviewing Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of evolution, back in 2006, just before the launch of Twitter. Dennett was talking excitedly of a word that he and Richard Dawkins had coined to describe how Darwinist idea-germs could be sent into battle against the politicised viruses of creationism. He called these idea-germs "memes". Nah, I thought at the time; it will never catch on.

In the 14 years since, it has become second nature to trace the originators of particularly incendiary memes. A story in magazine located the origin of the 5G conspiracy in an interview of 22 January in a Belgian newspaper with Kris Van Kerckhoven, a general practitioner from Putte, near Antwerp. He was quoted as saying that "5G is life-threatening", but then added a speculative comment ("I have not done a fact-check") that linked that falsehood to the virus then confined to China. The "link" became an ill-advised clickbait headline. (The piece, in Het Laatste Nieuws, was subsequently withdrawn.)

If these words marked the moment when the 5G conspiracy established its RNA, however, the "wet market" for those ideas to jump species and spread human to human was a conference given on 11 March at the Health and Human Rights Summit, in Tucson, Arizona. The headline act was the original anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield, the discredited English doctor, who was struck off by the GMC after being shown to have deliberately falsified evidence to make bogus claims of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Wakefield was in this case upstaged by a Californian, Thomas Cowan, author of Cancer and the New Biology of Water, who is serving a five-year suspension from medical practice for prescribing unlicensed drugs to cancer patients. Cowan claimed, entirely falsely, that Covid-19 was caused by electromagnetic waves and, also incorrectly, that Wuhan, where it originated, had been the guinea-pig city for 5G.

Videos of this talk were viewed 1.8 million times on YouTube and widely shared on Facebook before the sites moved to take the posts down.

In their book A Lot of People Are Saying, their study of conspiracism in the Trump era, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum classify people such as Cowan as "conspiracy entrepreneurs". Once he had seeded his conspiracy virus, multiple other wilder mutations followed, some linking it to an Illuminati plot, others to the "blood sacrifice" of Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash.

In Britain, some of those contagious fantasies found a population in which they could move as easily as coronavirus among Cheltenham Festival racegoers. Their combination with media attention around the decision to allow Huawei to supply some of the UK's 5G infrastructure, and the fact that telecoms engineers were designated key workers, appears to have ignited dangerous lockdown fears. Challenges were laid down in Facebook groups and Reddit threads for "firestarters" to "take the 5G out".

Social media platforms, fearing sanction, took long overdue action. Facebook has accepted a responsibility to remove false claims that 5G technology causes Covid-19, while promising a modification that will direct people who look for such content toward accurate information from the NHS and the WHO.

Some of the belated efforts to police "alt-right" conspiracy content in the past couple of years are also helping to contain the spread of the madness. There has been no more virulent "conspiracy entrepreneur" than Alex Jones and his web channel, InfoWars. Jones has predictably loud-hailered the 5G and anti-vaxx lines: "This is the plan, folks," he grunted at his viewers. "They plan - if they've fluoridated you and vaccinated you and stunned you and mesmerized you with the TV and put you in a trance - on killing you." Meanwhile, "they" were determined "to make sure you don't learn about the known antivirals". Prominent among these, apparently, were Jones's own "wellness" products: SuperSilver Whitening Toothpaste and ABL Nano Silver Gargle which, he claimed, "kills the sars-corona family at point-blank range". (The only scientifically proven effect of the active ingredient in these products, colloidal silver, is that it turns your skin blue.)

Up until last year Jones's vicious untruths would have been spread by millions of followers on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. However, with trials pending involving the bereaved Sandy Hook parents he repeatedly called "actors", his platforms were finally shut down for "hate speech".

The actor Woody Harrelson is another celebrity 'super-spreader' of the 5G conspiracy theory. Photograph: Adam S Davis/EPA

Having curtailed some of the spread of the most noxious threads, social media platforms apparently hope to rely, at least a little, on herd immunity to contain the conspiracy. When celebrity "super-spreaders" of the 5G claims have emerged in recent weeks - including the actor Woody Harrelson, the boxer Amir Khan and the breakfast show host Eamonn Holmes - they have the experienced the chill of immediate social media isolation and distancing.

It is still early days in this ongoing battle between fact and fantasy, but perhaps the general global compliance with lockdown measures, and the increasing appetite for verifiable facts and figures, indicates that rational voices might yet be in the ascendancy.

Even those on the frontline of protest against distancing measures in the southern American states have looked conspicuously conflicted. Several have marched under "coronahoax" banners while wearing face masks, hedging bets. Perhaps they have listened to the snake-oil "hunches" and tantrums of their president while the bodies pile up, and wondered. Perhaps they fear, privately, the tragic irony in the story of John McDaniel, 60, of Ohio, who spent March posting conspiracy - "Does Anybody Have The Guts to Say This Covid-19 is a Political Ploy? Asking For A Friend. Prove Me Wrong" - before, last week, becoming the first person in his county to die from the disease.

History shows that pandemics change things in surprising ways. Much has been made of the superstition that has attended other epidemics, but they have also generated great advances in public health, including vaccination; even the wildest conspiracy entrepreneur probably knows deep down that the only way out of the current tragedy is careful application of the scientific method.

In the past few weeks we have been exposed to a reality that all human generations before ours - and many millions in our own times in less advantaged parts of the planet - have known as a fact of life: that we exist in a precarious world of rapidly transmitted infectious diseases without an obvious cure. Though the sight of mass graves being dug and economies floundering has caused some to double-down on their pet grievances, to set fire to phone masts and indulge their fantasies about the Illuminati, it may yet cause more to think about getting back in touch with reality.

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5G, coronavirus and contagious superstition

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The attacks on phone masts and the spreading of anti-vaxx conspiracies are all part of the same strain of misinformation. But is evidence-based reality going to make a comeback?

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Recent stories in the press have given the impression that it’s possible plants are ‘conscious’ organisms. This Massive article examines where this concept was ‘lost in translation’ from the original research, to its appearance in the news.

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Recent stories in the press have given the impression that it’s possible plants are ‘conscious’ organisms. This Massive article examines where this concept was ‘lost in translation’ from the original research, to its appearance in the news.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The story considers the dangers of taking complex scientific concepts, and repackaging them for a non-expert audience. First, students can think about the specifics of this case – what was ‘lost in translation’ from the original study, to the representation of that study in the New York Times? Then they can grapple with the question – how should scientific knowledge be represented in the regular press? In other words, how should you balance the need to publicise important scientific ideas with the problems associated with simplifying those ideas? How can simplifying scientific knowledge mislead us?

KEY TERMS Translating science, Anthropomorphizing, Over-interpretation

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Language, Human sciences

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Plants are not conscious, whether you can ‘sedate’ them or not

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A New York Times story is a case study in what can go wrong in translating science