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Use the Exploring TOK Padlets to research the natural sciences (and the other elements of the course) in a real-world context, via a huge range of articles, videos, and podcasts from media sources all over the world.

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

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We have arranged the media sources by 'Big Question' (one of our ways of structuring TOK - see this page of the site for more details). You can also apply them easily to the knowledge framework: Section 1 links to nature and scope; Section 2 links to ethics; Section 3, 5, 6 links to methods & tools; Section 4 links to perspectives.

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The 12 key terms are highlighted - and feature in separate Padlet here.

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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 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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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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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

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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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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, 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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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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Cookies on FT Sites

We use cookies and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to analyse how our Sites are used.

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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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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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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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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 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 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 Vox article, exploring where the line is between climate pessimism and complacent optimism when it comes to the state of the environment. 

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A Vox article, exploring where the line is between climate pessimism and complacent optimism when it comes to the state of the environment. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does she give that support optimism about the future? How does Hannah RItchie’s conceptual framework assess the future, and what characterizes each quadrant? In what ways can we become more optimistic about the future? Overall, how does our mindset determine the reality of the effects of climate change? How can we ensure that our outlook supports rather than undermines effective climate action?

KEY TERMS Doomer culture, Accurate vs. useful, Truth, Paralyzing anxiety, Progress, Complacency trap

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences

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We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. There's nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf.

With leading activists like Roger Hallam, co-founder of the popular climate protest movement Extinction Rebellion, telling young people that they "face annihilation," it's no surprise so many of them feel terrified. In a large recent international survey on youth attitudes toward climate change, more than half said that "humanity is doomed" and three-quarters said the future is frightening. Young people have good reasons to worry about our ability to tackle climate change, but this level of despair should be alarming to anyone who cares about the well-being of future generations - which is, after all, what the climate movement is all about.

As the lead researcher for Our World in Data, an organization that aims to make data on the world's biggest problems accessible and understandable, I've written extensively on the reasons to be optimistic about the future. The prices of solar and wind power, as well as of batteries for storing low-carbon energy, have all plunged. Global deforestation peaked decades ago and has been slowly declining. Sales of new gas and diesel cars are now falling. Coal is starting to die in many countries. Government commitments are getting closer to limiting global warming to 2°C. Deaths from natural disasters - despite what news about climate change-related fires and hurricanes might appear to suggest - are a fraction of what they used to be. The list goes on.

But here, I don't want to talk about whether pessimism is accurate. I want to focus on whether it's useful. People might defend doomsday scenarios as the wake-up call that society needs. If they're exaggerated, so what? They might be the crucial catalyst that gets us to act on climate change.

Setting aside the moral problem of stretching the truth, this claim is wrong. Scaring people into action doesn't work. That's true not just for climate change, air pollution, and biodiversity loss, but for almost any issue we can think of. We need optimism to make progress - yet that alone isn't enough. To contend with environmental crises and make life better for everyone, we need the right kind of optimists: those who recognize that the world will only improve if we fight for it.

A framework for bringing about societal change

To understand what sort of thinking does drive positive change, we can imagine a framework for how people conceptualize the future and their ability to shape it.

Credit where it's due: I first saw a version of this concept in the venture capitalist Peter Thiel's book . He presented it in the context of entrepreneurship, but it tied perfectly with my experiences in the environmental space. I've adapted it.

My framework has two axes. On one axis, we have "level of optimism," spanning from optimistic to pessimistic. People who think the future will be much better are on one end, and those who think it will be much worse are on the other.

On the other axis, we have "changeability." This reflects how much people think the future can be shaped by the decisions we make today. People who think the world is changeable believe they have an agency to mold it, while those who think it's unchangeable believe we're on a predetermined path and that trying to shape the future is futile.

This gives us four quadrants - but only one really matters for our purposes. The "optimistic and changeable" box is where people who move the world forward fall. We need more people in there. None of the other quadrants are effective. By exploring the characteristics of each person, we'll see why.

Pessimists doom most of humanity to a terrible future

Pessimists in the lower right-hand quadrant, those who think the future is not changeable, are the true doomers. Their position is that we're screwed and there's nothing we can do about it.

I used to be one. After completing several degrees in environmental science and following the climate movement closely for years, I became submerged by helplessness at the scale of the environmental problems we face. Despite it being my lifelong passion, I was ready to turn my back on the field and work on something else. The idea that I could do anything had been slowly beaten out of me.

Unchangeable pessimists have given up on agitating for change, and experience high levels of anxiety and despondency. But it's important to realize that not all levels of anxiety are equal, or equally arresting. Research shows that some anxiety can be a strong predictor of positive, constructive action. It can be a signal that we're unhappy with how things are and give us an initial trigger to act. But it's useless unless combined with hope that things really can get better.

What unchangeable pessimists feel is paralyzing anxiety. That's a horrible place to be in emotionally, but it's also an ineffective one. It prevents people from actually going out and doing things to mitigate climate change.

There is a second flavor of pessimism: those in the lower left-hand quadrant of our framework, who are resigned to a doomed future but think that rather than do nothing, we must prepare for the inevitable.

This group is just as anxious as the unchangeable pessimists. But rather than being despondent, they become self-serving and indignant. They do all they can to protect themselves and whatever morsels of a livable planet are left.

Changeable pessimists promote extreme and divisive environmental solutions that are unrealistic and would leave many far worse off. Extinction Rebellion, for example, has called for the UK to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. It's undeniable that the UK has to reduce its emissions rapidly, but many scientists agree that a 2025 deadline would be unworkable and damaging because we don't have replacements ready to fill the energy gap.

An immediate boycott of fossil fuels would result in a humanitarian disaster because the world still overwhelmingly relies on them to meet everyday energy needs. This way of thinking doesn't rationally weigh the costs and benefits of trying to radically reduce our resource use overnight. It represents a kind of self-preservation for people in affluent countries: Rather than looking outward to build international cooperation, it pushes countries and communities to look inward.

At its extreme, changeable pessimism is susceptible to the sort of ideas advanced by biologist Paul Ehrlich, who has been predicting environmental collapse due to human overpopulation for over half a century. It's an approach that assumes - against our past experience - that it's impossible for humans to overcome perceived environmental limits, and that we have to impose devastating austerity instead. It would sacrifice the well-being of some of the poorest people on the planet, who need both growth and energy. This is no way to solve global challenges. But it's an inevitable outcome of a scarcity mindset.

Optimism is the only thing that works - but only if we don't assume that progress is inevitable

Now we turn to the optimists.

The "unchangeable optimists," those in the upper right-hand corner of our chart, are a dangerous group. They assume the world will continue to get better regardless of how hard we work to change it. They look at historical progress and believe it'll just continue.

Complacency can get us into trouble. We should never think that our rapid progress in health care, energy, technology, and education over the past two centuries was natural or preordained. It has been an unprecedented boom, and it's required deliberate action from people who were not happy with the status quo.

And today, we need to adapt and push in different directions than we have in the past. Yes, we've made amazing strides in human well-being, but we now have very large, very novel problems to tackle: environmental ones. Sticking with what got us here won't solve those.

Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas-Not Less, is a classic unchangeable optimist. He rightly argues that fossil fuels have transformed the lives of billions, and says we should, for now, continue to exploit them to improve more lives. But this fails to acknowledge the problems with fossil fuels - not only for the climate but for the millions of people who die from air pollution linked to fossil fuels every year. Epstein's argument may have made sense in the past, when we did not have affordable, scalable alternative energy sources, but not now.

Fossil fuel boosters demonstrate perfectly why unchangeable optimists are so wrongheaded: They want to maintain a status quo that doesn't serve us anymore. Their complacency only serves to slow the accelerated action needed to change our trajectory.

As a self-identified optimist, I'm always in danger of being boxed into this category. I fight hard to stop the label from sticking. I believe that if the arc of history bends toward justice, it's because we've made a concerted effort to change its trajectory. The path we're heading on is not okay - we need to redirect it.

This brings me to the changeable optimists. This is the group that thinks the future can be better but knows that a better future won't happen on its own. The world has lots of optimist changemakers, even if they don't identify as such. People engineering new solar panels, batteries, and electric cars are changeable optimists. So are scientists at organizations like the Good Food Institute experimenting with ways to make plant-based and cellular meats; entrepreneurs like Boyan Slat, whose organization the Ocean Cleanup is trying to pull plastic waste out of the ocean; and policymakers pushing for sustainable policies.

These people might not always put high odds on a better future - they may, in fact, think there's only a slim chance of success. But the act of trying creates possibilities that no one knew about before, which build a concrete case for optimism. Several years ago, for example, most wouldn't have predicted that renewable energy prices would drop so quickly and dramatically.

Changeable optimists don't shy away from criticism of the status quo. In fact, they're often its fiercest critics. People often mistake pessimism for critical thought and optimism for pollyannaism. In reality, progress is built by those who can look critically at a suite of solutions, discard the bad ones, and find and sharpen the gems that remain. Pessimists use criticism as a wall, while optimists use it as a guiding door.

How we can become more optimistic

Pessimism is hard to overcome precisely because it's often served humans well. History rewarded those who could detect threats early and fixate on them. But while pessimism might be good for survival - and survival was virtually all humanity had on its mind for most of its history - it's not good for the flourishing we could achieve in the future. At its best, pessimism helps us stay where we are. It doesn't give us the agency and determination to build something better.

The world would be a much better place if we had more optimistic changemakers. But there are key habits of mind I've found that can engender precisely the brand of optimism we need.

Most importantly, optimists take a long-term view of human progress. Many people forget how bad the human past was. Until the last century, poverty was the default. Half of children died before puberty. Health care and education were nonexistent for virtually everyone. Even with respect to environmental health, our preindustrial history was not as rosy as one might assume. The air our ancestors breathed was polluted from burning wood and charcoal; evidence of damaged lung tissue has been found in Egyptian mummies and in the remains of 400,000-year-old hunter-gatherers. The only reason our aggregate planetary impact was low is that high child mortality kept the human population small. We hunted many of the largest mammals into extinction. To think that the world today is dismal is to ignore the misery of our past.

Even if you accept that we've made enormous progress from the past, you might look at the scale of the threats we face in the future and lose hope that progress will continue. But in thinking about today's challenges, it's crucial to look at change over time, not just snapshots in time. During any transition, changes can look small at first; it's the pace of change that's important. Renewable energy right now makes up just 29 percent of global electricity production, but this is changing quickly. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that almost all of the growth in electricity use in the next few years will come from renewables. Electric vehicles made up just under 10 percent of new car sales globally in 2021, but in 2020 it was 4 percent, and the year before that, it was 2.5. It won't be long until EVs dominate the car market.

Focusing on change over time doesn't make us optimistic by default. The early days of Covid-19 are a case in point: Many people underestimated the scale of the pandemic because they were looking at snapshots of reported cases and deaths. In early 2020, these were tiny. What they should have been focusing on was the rate at which these numbers were climbing, which told a much more worrying story. Looking at change over time doesn't always paint a rosy picture, but it does help us see the world more clearly and understand what future we might be heading toward - and, in most respects, seeing the world more clearly means seeing it more positively.

Similarly, we need to look at the complete picture, not isolated individual metrics, to understand complex problems. Global carbon emissions are still rising, which is bad. But many of the underlying factors that determine emissions - like the growth of low-carbon energy and the emissions of wealthy countries - are changing quickly. We need to look at the inputs into the system, not just the output. We'll soon reach a tipping point when these inputs cause emissions to peak and decline, according to the IEA.

Finally, we should probably stop constantly reading the news. I used to read the news obsessively, thinking this was how to be knowledgeable about the world. Every day I was hit with stories about the latest hurricane, flood, drought, or wildfire. The problem is that I didn't actually know whether the impacts of these events were increasing or decreasing. I thought more people were dying from disasters than ever, but only because I mistook an increase in reporting and my own interest for an increase in the numbers.

When I looked at the long-term statistics, I realized my perception was upside-down. The news isn't a reliable barometer for the overall state of the world. I've found that pessimists look at the news, while optimists look at the data.

We must avoid complacent optimism

I often worry that people confuse changeable optimism with its counterproductive, unchangeable counterpart. That's just as ineffective as pessimism. To avoid falling into the complacency trap, we need to hold on to an edge of dissatisfaction. Yes, many trends have been moving in the right direction, but we shouldn't pretend that this was the best we could do.

As my colleague Max Roser has put it: "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." All three statements are true. We can acknowledge the progress that we've made but remain dissatisfied that we haven't made more. We've reduced global child mortality to below 4 percent, but 5 million children under age 5 still die every year, most of them from preventable conditions like malaria, measles, and diarrheal diseases.

We can learn from this long-term decline in childhood mortality to understand what does and doesn't work. But we then need to turn those lessons into action in places where child mortality remains high, which won't happen on its own.

We also need to be honest about the areas where things haven't been going well. Human progress has come at the cost of the environment and the lives of tens of billions of non-human animals that we slaughter for food. That may have been a price worth paying in the past, but we shouldn't - and don't have to - accept it anymore. Technological progress can build sustainability that works for people, the planet, and the species we share it with.
Hannah Ritchie is deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data, and a researcher at the University of Oxford.
This is a totally different trajectory from the past, and a track that complacent, unchangeable optimism won't get us on. Optimistic but dissatisfied is the road to progress. Let's make sure this coalition is as large and diverse as possible.

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We need the right kind of climate optimism

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Vox's home for ambitious stories that explain our world. We environmentalists spend our lives thinking about ways the world will end. There's nowhere that I see doomer culture more vocal than on my home turf.

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An FT article*, exploring the rise of  ‘functional’ drinks, that promise to boost your mood, brain power, and energy.

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An FT article*, exploring the rise of  ‘functional’ drinks, that promise to boost your mood, brain power, and energy.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does the article give of ‘functional’ drinks brands, and what claims do the manufacturers make for their products? How accurate did the writer of the article seem to find these claims? What advice does Professor Michael Heinrich from the UCL School of Pharmacy offer in assessing the effectiveness of these drinks? Students can apply his advice by researching the drinks brands mentioned in the article. What findings do they reach? Overall, how can thinking critically ensure that we become intelligent consumers, and are not misled by pseudoscientific claims of manufacturers?

KEY TERMS “Functional” drinks, Benefits, Claims, Prove, Evidence

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Language, Human sciences

*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.

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If you're the parent of school-age children, you'll probably be at least dimly aware of Prime - the drinks brand that's lately been changing hands in playgrounds for up to £10 a time. Promoted by YouTube stars Logan Paul and KSI (subscribers: 24mn each), this range of sports and energy drinks is based on a sugar-free mix of coconut water, electrolytes, B vitamins and muscle-boosting BCAAs. Some varieties contain caffeine; flavours include Tropical Punch, Blue Raspberry and Grape. Think of it as the bastard child of Red Bull, Vita Coco and Lucozade.

It's easy to sneer until you see the numbers - Paul claims Prime made $40mn in January alone. And the truth is consumers of all ages are increasingly thirsty for drinks that not only hydrate but make them smarter, stronger, leaner, meaner, and maybe give them a gentle buzz as well.

CBD soft drinks opened the floodgates for more experimental ingredients

Stuart Bale, founder of Crucible, creative consultants and product developers to the drinks industry

It's triggered an explosion of "functional" drinks featuring adaptogenic and nootropic ingredients; plants that in some cases have been used for thousands of years to boost mood and cognitive performance. Trailblazers include the vermouth-like "social elixir" Three Spirit (and its wine alternative Blurred Vines) and Kin Euphorics, a rather woo-woo range of drinks backed by Bella Hadid that features everything from turmeric and the "aphrodisiac" damiana to complexion-brightening collagen. Fungtn is a non-alcoholic beer range laced with reishi, chaga and lion's mane - adaptogenic fungi often used in meditation. HOP WTR is a hopped, non-alcoholic sparkling water brewed with nootropics and adaptogens.

"CBD soft drinks opened the floodgates for more experimental ingredients," says Stuart Bale, founder of Crucible in east London, which has helped develop disruptive recipes for some of the world's biggest brands. "Lion's mane and cordyceps are very popular, and ashwagandha. People create 'stacks' of ingredients to get a wide range of benefits."

Sex Education star Gillian Anderson's cheeky new brand G Spot is an all-natural fizzy drinks range that promises to hit "the sweet spot between taste and functionality" (before you get too excited, it doesn't claim to make you better in bed). "I've had a serious soft drink habit for the past 20 years, and I don't drink enough water," says Anderson, who is also teetotal. "I know sugar and caffeine are not good for me, but I haven't found an alternative that has the same effect. So, I thought, 'If what I'm looking for doesn't exist, why don't I make it?'"

Made from a blend of fruit juices, botanicals, and no added sugar, G Spot comes in three varieties. Lift is a fruity, peppery blend, featuring mood-boosting theanine and bacopa; Protect is a fortifying mix of turmeric, chaga, lemon and ginger; Soothe contains apples, sage, calming reishi and ashwagandha. I'm not a big soda drinker but I liked them - they were refreshing and not too sweet, with a subtle spicy and/or bitter herbal bite. However, when it came to actual function they didn't move the dial. Maybe 20 years as a drinks journalist have left me impervious to herbal highs.

The world's leading market for new-wave functional drinks is North America. At non-alcoholic retailer Boisson, which has nine outlets across the States as well as an online store, business is brisk. "Demand is primarily coming from a mix of Gen Z consumers and imbibers who are looking for the 'feel' without the feel tomorrow," says CEO Nick Bodkins. "But fully abstaining customers are a very small subset of our consumer base."

When it comes to hero ingredients, l-theanine, a soothing amino acid found in tea leaves, is "a big one", he says, along with "mushrooms and full-spectrum hemp". Regulation is struggling to keep up with the pace of change - which can make brands' claims very hard to prove. The quality of ingredients - and therefore the potency - can be erratic too, warns Professor Michael Heinrich of UCL School of Pharmacy. "Always ask yourself: do the producers provide evidence for the quality of their products and responsible and sustainable sourcing? Sadly many producers are not doing this." He cites the example of the Rhodolia rosea plant, an adaptogen harvested in the wild, whose population has been decimated in the rush to meet demand.

Alas, I don't think the plight of Rhodolia rosea will be keeping KSI awake at night. And if he is having trouble sleeping, it's doubtless due to an overdose of Prime Blue Raspberry and far too much screen time.

Recommended

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Gillian Anderson wants us to find her G Spot

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A new wave of "functional" drinks promise to boost your mood, brain power and energy. Do they work?

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A Conversation article, looking at the history around rejecting scientific advice when it comes to dealing with pandemics. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the history around rejecting scientific advice when it comes to dealing with pandemics. 

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Exhibition prompt What insights can we gain from learning about Smallpox, and the Scopes trial? What are the three components that make an expert credible, and how can these be diminished? What problem does the article identify in terms of the way some scientists engage with the public - and how can this be overcome? Overall, how does ignoring history undermine our ability to understand modern scientific issues?

KEY TERMS Fear, Resistance, Misinformation, Expert witnesses, Objectivity, Biased, Engaging the public

LINKS TO Natural sciences, History, Human sciences

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Rejecting science has a long history – the pandemic showed what happens when you ignore this

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You’d be surprised how far back the roots of anti-vaccine arguments stretch.

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A Big Think article, which considers whether we rely on scientific conclusions even when they cannot be proven. 

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A Big Think article, which considers whether we rely on scientific conclusions even when they cannot be proven. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This article reads like a primer on the nature of science, and is a great introduction to the natural sciences for both TOK and non-TOK students and teachers. Think first of all about why science is sometimes criticised, perhaps in the context of the present crisis we’re living through, and the scientific guidance we’ve received about it. How are these criticisms based on a flawed understanding of the nature of science? How should we, in fact, view the pursuit of science? Do you agree with the author that ultimately, we should trust science because it is based on a “preponderance of evidence that has been carefully evaluated by credible experts”?

KEY TERMS Scientific conclusions, True knowledge, Permanent doubt, Falsification, Preponderance of evidence, Experts, Contingency, Illusion of uniqueness

LINKS TO Natural sciences,Human sciences

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A Big Think video, in which Sasha Sagan talks about one of the key things she learned from her father: learning to “tolerate ambiguity”.

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A Big Think video, in which Sasha Sagan talks about one of the key things she learned from her father: learning to “tolerate ambiguity”.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Who is Sasha Sagan, and why are her parents considered to be so significant in the scientific community? What does she pick out as one of the key things she learned from her parents? Why is this so hard for humans to accept? Finish by giving students this quote from the video: “Tolerating ambiguity, waiting until you have evidence, knowing that sometimes the evidence will change, is central to any scientific advancement”. What does Sasha Sagan mean, and do you agree?

KEY TERMS Scientific worldview, Tolerating ambiguity, Placeholder, Evidence, Wonder, Believe vs. know

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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Humans do not like unanswered questions. We always feel the need to provide an answer, even if it's just a placeholder.

In particular, the future tortures us, because we want to be able to predict what will happen. But being able to tolerate ambiguity is an important skill.

The Universe fills us with awe and wonder. The more we understand it, the more magnificent it seems.

SASHA SAGAN: Science and technology have come a long way in making it possible for us to do things that would've seemed like magic tricks not too long ago- space travel, flight! For most of history, that seemed absolutely impossible. Birds can do it. We're stuck here on the ground, looking up. Think of how many gods and mythical figures were given the power of flight. We wanted it so bad, and now we've managed to do it. The oldest living person in the world was alive when the Wright brothers flew the first flight at Kitty Hawk and now we have a helicopter on Mars. The more we understand ourselves and our Universe, the more magnificent it is. I'm Sasha Sagan, and I'm the author of a book called "For Small Creatures Such as We." I was brought up with a very scientific worldview. My dad was the astronomer Carl Sagan, and he and my mom, writer-producer Ann Druyan, fell in love working on the Voyager Record, which is a golden phonograph that is a compilation of the sounds of life on Earth. Greetings and human languages, and one whale language.

NARRATOR: 'Hello from the planet Earth.'

SASHA SAGAN: Music from around the world. Sounds of a heartbeat. Brainwaves of a young woman in love who happened to be my mom. These two records are on the Voyager Spacecraft, and they have a shelf life of a billion years. Right now, the Voyager Spacecrafts are the furthest objects from Earth ever touched by human beings. And then my parents wrote essays and books, and the television series "Cosmos," about the awe and wonder that we can find in the Universe. Things that we really do understand that we've managed to discover can be presented with enthusiasm and wonder and awe that makes people feel welcome in reveling in how astonishing things are in the natural world, as revealed by science.

CARL SAGAN: 'In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the cosmos and our place within it.'

SASHA SAGAN: One of the things I learned from my parents is this idea of tolerating ambiguity. Sometimes when we make up an answer, it's just a placeholder because we're so bad at sitting with an empty question mark. But I think we can all improve on sitting with the discomfort of not knowing. Tolerating ambiguity, waiting until you have evidence, knowing that sometimes the evidence will change, is central to any scientific advancement. My dad, one of the things he was most curious about in his life was: Are we alone in the universe? Is there anybody else out there?

CARL SAGAN: 'Everyone wants to know how unique the human species are. How is it possible that in a galaxy of 400 billion stars that we are the only inhabited planet? Is that possible?'

SASHA SAGAN: He was so eager to understand. He wanted to find out what was really going on. But the discomfort we sit with, even with the very small questions, reveals how we feel about the unanswered great mysteries in our lives. It's so hard to not know. Even the future tortures us with our inability to predict it. And we have struggled for eons with this problem. It's a source of so much stress, but science is the only, only tool that has given us any real shot. I think about "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court": an eclipse was terrifying all over the world. The Sun goes away all of a sudden. What could be more petrifying? And now we know when they're coming, and we know it's safe. It won't hurt us. Little by little, we're getting some of the tools that we've always longed for through science. Not that long ago, for our species, so much in life, even the most mundane, ordinary things would've seemed like a magic trick. And I think that's true for so much of science, and so much of the reality of our Universe. And the more we understand ourselves and our planet, the more magnificent it is. My dad felt an enormous, joyful wonder about the Universe from his earliest childhood. If he had been born a few hundred years earlier, it would've been a lot harder for him to get the answers that he so deeply craved about our place in the Universe. A quote that you'll often hear of his is: "I don't want to believe, I want to know." And I think that really sums up a lot of his philosophy. He really instilled in me this idea that reality, nature, is more astonishing and more breathtaking than the stories that we create for ourselves.

NARRATOR: Get smarter, faster with videos from the world's biggest thinkers. And to learn even more from the world's biggest thinkers, get Big Think+ for your business.

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The big lesson Carl Sagan taught his daughter

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"The more we understand ourselves and the universe, the more magnificent it is."

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A Big Think article, looking at how Carl Sagan’s ‘ECREE’ maxim can be applied not only to scientific knowledge, but at how we view the world in general.

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A Big Think article, looking at how Carl Sagan’s ‘ECREE’ maxim can be applied not only to scientific knowledge, but at how we view the world in general.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The ‘ECREE’ acronym represents a crucial idea for students to be aware of, and will really help them with their critical thinking skills. But they should try to go further than this, and prove themselves as sophisticated thinkers: first, why is it useful to us? What examples can they think of to support it? And most of all, what are the limitations and problems with ECREE - can it actually hinder the production of new knowledge?

KEY TERMS ECREE

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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Is there an omnipotent all-knowing entity, otherwise known as "God", ruling our daily affairs and caring enough to judge our behaviors on an individual basis? Or is our life ruled by an invisible supercomputer that pre-ordains most of our actions, ensuring an impenetrable veil between us and reality, preventing all knowledge of the true nature of things? Or maybe there are advanced aliens out there, either responsible for guiding our meager attempts at civilizing or simply using us as guinea pigs in some incomprehensible experiment? Whatever it is that is really going on, the late astronomer Carl Sagan coined an aphorism to deal with just such grand proposals. "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence," asserted Sagan in what has become known as the Sagan Standard. The same can also be referred to by the aphorism's acronym " ECREE ".

While Sagan made the statement popular on his "Cosmos" shows of the 1980s, he wasn't necessarily the one who came up with the idea entirely on his own. Historians have pointed to a similar thought expressed in 1899 by the Swiss psychologist Théodore Flournoy who stated that "the weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness". Flournoy, in his turn, actually based his idea on an 1814 saying by the French scientist and philosopher Pierre-Simon Laplace, who said "we ought to examine [seemingly inexplicable phenomena] with an attention all the more scrupulous as it appears more difficult to admit them".

Other historians even go farther back, seeing the roots of this kind of thinking in 18-century critiques of magic by people like the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1748: "A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence", and "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

Certainly, while there are large amounts of humans who still believe in actual miracles, we are also constantly bombarded by claims of both scientific and unscientific nature that beggar belief. ECREE can be a useful tool to keep in mind next time you encounter an outlandish political statement, a deepfake video, or an unprovable claim of a cure for cancer or alien sighting. Don't take outlandish statements for granted and ask for evidence. The greater the claim, the greater the amount of evidence required to prove it.

It's Getting Harder to Spot a Deep Fake Video

While the idea behind the Sagan standard seems intuitively clear at first glance, to our science-minding modern brains, it has been the subject of criticism. Some, like the geologist and geophysicist David Deming, have argued that Sagan's dictum doesn't really define "extraordinary". After all, what is extraordinary to someone depends on their level of knowledge and their beliefs. Someone who knows very little would find many things beyond ordinary. It is also true that much of what is known scientifically today was not known even a hundred years ago, so certainly many claims which we generally agree upon now could be considered "extraordinary" by previous generations.

What this results in is that the popular concept has been used to bolster up orthodoxy and discredit innovation and research into science anomalies or even mainstream hypotheses which have much empirical evidence.

Still, keep that in mind, it can be a useful tool in these extraordinary times.

Carl Sagan's most important lesson about science

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How the Sagan standard can help you make better decisions

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Is there an omnipotent all-knowing entity, otherwise known as "God", ruling our daily affairs and caring enough to judge our behaviors on an individual basis? Or is our life ruled by an invisible supercomputer that pre-ordains most of our actions, ensuring an impenetrable veil between us and reality, preventing all knowledge of the true nature of things?

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A BBC article, discussing how to debate with those who reject conventional scientific thinking.  

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A BBC article, discussing how to debate with those who reject conventional scientific thinking.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Can and should we seek to overcome antagonistic perspectives about science?

KEY TERMS Fearmongering, Overblown, Evidence, Responsibility, Power differential, Humble, Disinformation

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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What can you do when the people closest to you believe climate change is a hoax?

It was during school pick-up a few years ago that Lance Lawson first asked his father about his views on global warming.

"He basically told me something along the lines of 'It's nonsense'," Lance recalls.

His dad spoke of unscrupulous politicians "fearmongering" for electoral gain. Climate change, he told Lance, was completely "overblown".

Lance, now 21, lives with his father, Brian Anderson, in the US state of Florida. He was just a teenager when that conversation happened, but it made a huge impression on him.

"My father is a very smart man," he says. "So I assumed that, if my father is telling me this, then it must be true."

But, as time went on, Lance started realising his father's views weren't backed by scientific evidence - and he decided to challenge him.

"Whenever he drove me to school, I would give my own argument, and he would downplay the evidence. It would force me to acquire new evidence, and that cycle helped expand my own understanding."

'Vessels for communication'

If someone close to you believes climate change is a hoax, you may find it hard to do what Lance did.

Maybe you fear confrontation, maybe you simply don't know how to explain the basic science of global warming.

But Gail Whiteman, professor of sustainability at the University of Exeter, says it's important to talk: "If we don't tackle climate denial and climate indifference, then the uphill battle to find a safer future is lost.

"We need to tackle our teachers, our neighbours... All of us have to become vessels for communication."

But how exactly do you go about starting the conversation?

Sander van der Linden is professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge, and studies how people get sucked into conspiracy theories.

He says years of research have shown him that confronting people with hard evidence is not the way to go.

While it might be tempting to try to bluntly fight conspiracy theories with facts, "there's a very high chance it backfires".

"Telling people that they don't know what they're talking about, or that they're wrong, just creates more defensive responses."

Lance says there is a common misconception that people who don't believe that climate change is real are "stupid or uneducated".

"But there are a lot of people out there who are just naturally sceptical as part of their personality," he says.

His father, Brian, is one of them - he grew up in rural Minnesota in the 1970s. "It was incredibly cold," Brian says, and this made it hard for him to believe scientists who spoke of a "warming planet".

Affirm their worldview

Lance says that his father is a very religious man - so he asked him to assume that climate change might be real, and questioned whether he wouldn't then have a moral responsibility to take care of what God had provided.

"Lance spoke in a language that I could appreciate and understand," says Brian. "You have to approach people in terms of where they're at."

Prof van der Linden believes that changing the minds of climate deniers is impossible without affirming - to some extent - their worldview.

He says it's important to "[expose] techniques of manipulation" by asking questions such as: "Have you considered that some of these theories might be created to take advantage of people?"

'Remain humble'

No-one likes being talked down to, and the same goes for someone engaging with climate change denial.

"You can't convince someone if they perceive that there's a power differential," says Prof van der Linden. "The whole point of a conspiracy is the idea that there are these powerful elites conspiring against us."

Lance's close bond with his dad is something he believes was key to persuading him, but he also says it's important to check your tone: "Ask yourself, 'Am I sounding sanctimonious?' Remain humble. Be gentle."

Is it worth it?

Falling down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking can be a long process - taking months, or even years.

Prof van der Linden believes that thinking you'll win someone over with a single, one-off conversation is simply not realistic: "You have to be content with small wins, and compromise."

And yet, some experts question whether talking to climate change deniers is really worth it.

Abbie Richards researches the spread of misinformation on social media.

"Effort is better spent on pushing for actual change, rather than trying to combat solidified disinformation that has been pushed... for years," she says.

"But I also think trying to find things that you can agree upon might be more helpful, like [other] policies that we could both get behind."

On TikTok, she debunks disinformation about climate change, but says she's given up trying to engage with hardcore conspiracy theorists.

"I don't give credibility to people who are denying climate science, and I don't want to waste my energy on debunking more of their disinformation."

But Prof van der Linden points out that "some of these dismissive individuals are very loud and have a disproportionate influence on public debate".

"It's quite risky to do nothing, especially when [they] have outsized voices."

'Breathtaking moment'

With time and patience, Lance managed to convince his father that climate change was real - so much so that he was surprised by his own success.

"One time, my dad came downstairs in the middle of the night, so enthused after watching a documentary about deforestation that he was like: 'Lance you won't believe what's going on in the rainforest!'

"It was a breathtaking moment, to see him so engaged."

Do you have a story for us? Get in touch.

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Tips about how to engage with people who think climate change is a "hoax".

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A Guardian article, looking at a report that says we should take a far more qualitative approach to measuring the value of nature. 

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A Guardian article, looking at a report that says we should take a far more qualitative approach to measuring the value of nature. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Why has a report by 82 leading scientists concluded that the wider benefits of nature have been ignored - and what are the consequences of this? What balance between qualitative and quantitative methods should we use to evaluate the natural world? Why is this an important question for the future of humanity? Overall, how should we draw on different academic and cultural perspectives in order to establish a fuller understanding of the natural world?

KEY TERMS Spiritual, Cultural and emotional values, Qualitative, Experts, Super-quantitative, Good science

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences, Indigenous societies

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Taking into account all the benefits nature provides to humans and redefining what it means to have a "good quality of life" is key to living sustainably on Earth, a four-year assessment by 82 leading scientists has found.

A market-based focus on short-term profits and economic growth means the wider benefits of nature have been ignored, which has led to bad decisions that have reduced people's wellbeing and contributed to climate and nature crises, according to a UN report. To achieve sustainable development, qualitative approaches need to be incorporated into decision making.

This means properly valuing the spiritual, cultural and emotional values that nature brings to humans, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Ipbes). The assessment includes more than 13,000 references, including scientific papers, and indigenous and local sources of information. It was done in collaboration with experts in social science, economics and humanities.

The report builds on the Dasgupta review, which found the planet is being put at "extreme risk" by the failure of economics to take account of the true value of nature. Incorporating diverse worldviews and knowledge systems will be key to leading to a more sustainable future, the report says.

Prof Unai Pascual, from the Basque Centre for Climate Change, who co-chaired the assessment on the diverse values and valuation of nature said: "There has been a dominant way of taking decisions based on things that look more simple, super-quantitative, and more scientific, and we're saying: 'No, that's not good science.' There are a lot of social sciences and humanities, and other knowledge systems, that can also tell us how to do things."

The review highlights four general perspectives that should be taken into account; "living from nature" which refers to its ability to provide us with our needs like food and material goods; "living with nature", which is the right of non-human life to thrive; "living in nature" which refers to people's right to a sense of place and identity, and finally, "living as nature", which treats the world as a spiritual part of being human.

"The type and quality of information that valuation studies can produce largely depends on how, why and by whom valuation is designed and applied," says Prof Mike Christie, of Aberystwyth University's business school. "This influences whose and which values of nature would be recognised in decisions, and how fairly the benefits and burdens of these decisions would be distributed."

There are 50 different methods and approaches of making the value of nature visible in decisions, yet researchers found that the way stakeholders valued nature was only taken into account on 2% of studies. Moving forward there are many tools available to make the values of nature visible and these need to be implemented, authors say. One way of working is using citizen assemblies, which reflect the sociology of a given people and gives them a chance to discuss their values, interests and understandings. These are happening at a national level in a number of countries.

One successful example is how the Canadian Nuclear Waste Management Organisation has integrated indigenous perspectives in planning, which involved decision-makers participating in ceremonies and "experiencing" the land together. Another was the Indian government's decision not to mine near the Niyamgiri mountain which is sacred for Dongaria Kondh peoples. The intrinsic value of the site for rare species and its cultural and spiritual value to indigenous people was seen as more valuable than the financial gains from mining it.

There are consequences of not taking other values into account, such as environmental leaders being killed because they had claims to land that have been ignored, says Prof Patricia Balvanera, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, who co-chaired the assessment. "The evidence shows that if, from the onset, local values are taken into consideration, people will feel part of the project and will be more onboard with whatever was agreed ... This entails redefining 'development' and 'good quality of life' and recognising the multiple ways people relate to each other and to the natural world," she says.

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The assessment was approved by representatives of 139 countries in German city of Bonn. "The delegates who endorsed this report say this is a game-changer," says Pascual. "They realise we've been going through a way of understanding nature in a too-narrow sense, and that has brought us to this situation where we live in a planet with interconnected crises ... this [report] is one ingredient out of many which will be needed to convince very powerful stakeholders and decision makers to start changing the way they treat nature."

Ipbes, which is the equivalent of the IPCC for biodiversity, was set up to provide governments across the world with scientific advice on how to protect nature. Last week, it released another report that found wild species support half the world's population but their future use is threatened by overexploitation.

It comes ahead of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Cop15 in Montreal in December, which will set the next decade of nature targets, and authors say the findings should provide a valuable contribution to the process. Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of CBD said: "I applaud the work of all Ipbes experts for this and look forward to its active use by all parties and stakeholders to the convention."

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Humans need to value nature as well as profits to survive, UN report finds

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Focus on market has led to climate crises, with spiritual, cultural and emotional benefits of nature ignored

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A Conversation article, which explores why so many people believe that crystals provide health, prosperity, and well-being. 

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A Conversation article, which explores why so many people believe that crystals provide health, prosperity, and well-being. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How did the pandemic affect the crystal industry - and why do they believe this was? Which four characteristics does the article identify as ‘metaphysical religions’ possessing, and how do these relate to crystal spirituality? What separates metaphysical religions from more traditional religions? Overall, why do people subscribe to metaphysical religions?

KEY TERMS Metaphysical religion, Correspondence, Evidence, Energy and vibrations, Contagious magic, Culture, Scientific validation

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Knowledge & the knower, Religion

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As New York City mayor Eric Adams attends ribbon cuttings, marches in parades and bulldozes dirt bikes, he wears an energy stone bracelet that his supporters gave him. In a recent interview, Adams discussed his belief that New York City has a "special energy" because it sits atop a store of rare gems and stones - the so-called " Manhattan schist," which is over 450 million years old and contains over 100 minerals.

Adams isn't the only one imbuing rocks with metaphysical significance. During the first year of the pandemic, the crystal industry boomed, with customers hoping the gems might relieve their anxiety.

Some people might be confused about the allure of these stones. But crystal enthusiasts aren't deviants. Current ideas about crystals come from a larger tradition called " metaphysical religion " that has always been part of the American spiritual landscape.

More than rocks

Technically, a crystal is any matter with a repeating pattern of atoms or molecules. The crystals for sale in shops are known as euhedral crystals because they have well-defined surfaces, or "faces."

For centuries, people have attributed special properties to crystals. Scientist Carl Sagan, in his book "The Demon-Haunted World," traces their modern popularity to a series of books written in the 1980s by Katrina Raphaell, who founded The Crystal Academy of Advanced Healing Arts in 1986.

Crystals aren't just eye-catching stones. Quartz is used in electronics because it possesses piezoelectric properties that cause it to release an electric charge when compressed. But, as skeptics are quick to point out, there is no evidence crystals can bring health, prosperity or any of the other properties that crystal enthusiasts may attribute to them.

Mining the metaphysical

Yet crystals are part of a broader tradition called metaphysical religion, a term coined by historian Catherine Albanese.

Metaphysical religion includes modern New Age movements, a nebulous milieu of alternative spiritual beliefs and practices, such as synchronicity or psychic abilities. Older traditions like Mesmerism, the idea that humans beings emit magnetic energy that can be used for healing, and Spiritualism, the belief that mediums can communicate with the dead, also fall under the metaphysical umbrella.

Albanese ascribes four characteristics to metaphysical traditions: a preoccupation with the mind and its powers; "correspondences," or the idea of hidden connections between things; a tendency to think in terms of energy and movement; and a yearning for salvation understood as "solace, comfort, therapy, and healing."

'Contagious magic'

Metaphysical ideas about crystals exhibit each of these characteristics.

While crystals are physical objects, not thoughts, many crystal enthusiasts recommend "cleansing" and "charging" crystals through visualization and other meditative techniques. So the mind plays a key role in crystal spirituality, as it does in other forms of metaphysical religion.

Correspondence refers to the belief found in many occult traditions that ordinary things possess secret qualities or connections to other things. A classic example is astrology, which postulates a correspondence between one's birthday and certain personality traits. Metaphysical claims about crystals also reflect a belief in correspondences. For example, Colleen McCann, a self-described shaman affiliated with the crystal purveyor Goop, described the positive qualities of different crystals: bloodstones promote good health, rose quartzes help with love, and pink mangano calcites are good for sleep.

Modern crystal enthusiasts often use words like "energy" and "vibrations" that present their ideas in a scientific register. When enthusiasts talk about the energy of crystals - like Eric Adams did - they really mean that it exerts influence within a certain proximity. This is the principle behind crystal water bottles that can be used to "charge" water with "vibrational energy."

Stripped of scientific language, the logic of energy and vibrations is another form of what anthropologist James Frazer called " contagious magic " found in many cultures, where simply placing one thing next to another is believed to cause an effect.

A source of stigma

Finally, metaphysical religion tends to focus on solving problems in this life rather than the hereafter. This includes health and prosperity, but also emotional growth and well-being. Crystal spirituality is certainly centered around these worldly goals.

This is a big distinction from traditions like Christianity that emphasize salvation in heaven. It is also a factor in why metaphysical ideas are stigmatized despite their popularity.

Protestant Christianity, with its emphasis on "sola fides" - faith alone - has historically dismissed many forms of material religion, or objects with religious significance, as superstition. So in a culture shaped by its historically Protestant majority, some Americans may be predisposed to look at crystal spirituality as foolish, greedy or even blasphemous.

But while claims about the hidden properties of crystals lack scientific validation, so do many of the claims of Christianity and other mainstream religions.

From a historical perspective, Adams' ideas about crystals don't make him an outlier. As a scholar of religious studies, I see him as a normal part of the American religious landscape.

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What's behind the enduring popularity of crystals?

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Crystals are part of a larger tradition of metaphysical religions that have a long history in the U.S.

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A Wired article, looking at how ordinary people are increasingly helping to gather data about the natural sciences.

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A Wired article, looking at how ordinary people are increasingly helping to gather data about the natural sciences.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE In what way does ‘citizen science’ increase people’s confidence in scientific knowledge?

KEY TERMS Citizen Scientists, Data, Synoptic sampling, Decentralized data capability, Untrained, Democratized, Uncertainty

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Language

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Richard Battarbee spent his entire life studying freshwater ecology as an academic at University College London-but it was only when he retired to Yorkshire that he found himself on the frontline of a battle to save a river. Fishermen in the town of Ilkley near where he lived started catching condoms, wet wipes and sanitary towels on their lines. Residents were noticing that fish and other animals were dying en masse. The water was discolored every time it rained heavily. Something was wrong in the river Wharfe.

Battarbee, along with other local members of the Wharfedale Naturalists Society, suspected that the real cause of the pollution was a sewage outflow further down the river run by Yorkshire Water, the region's privatized water company.

But when the government and Yorkshire Water all refused to help, the residents of Ilkley turned to citizen science, research conducted by the general public that is not only helping to change the way citizens protect their environment, but making many question the entirety of our scientific institutions.

That can range from designing and leading studies into certain issues to just helping to collate data on something.

In Ilkley, residents' concerns were rebuffed by the council and Yorkshire Water, the local water company responsible for sewage outflow into the river. The UK's Environment Agency (EA), whose budget has been slashed from £120m to £48m since 2010, said it wasn't able to investigate or even monitor the river's contamination.

Unable to get help, locals now working under the name the Ilkley Clean River Group, took it on themselves to scientifically prove the extent of the problem.

Battarbee suspected the real threat wasn't the rubbish and excrement you could see, but the invisible pathogens that now filled the river-a popular wild swimming spot for thousands of people each year. "There was absolutely no data on the concentration of pathogens in the river associated with effluent going into it," he explains. "I couldn't find any protocols out there, so I just did what any scientist would do really and looked at the literature and worked out a methodology."

But running a scientific study with a group of volunteer citizens is harder than it seems. Unable to rely on university grants like most scientists, the Ilkley Clean River Group had to raise the money to pay for professional water sampling themselves. Then there was gathering the samples themselves-leading a group of untrained locals to collect up to 100 samples from different parts of the river. Once they had the samples, each had to be properly stored below eight degrees Celsius and sent to a lab in Coventry in 24 hours, in order to get any reliable results.

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Brace Yourself For the Comeback of Citizen Scientists

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From water-testing polluted rivers to measuring radiation levels, ordinary people are taking environmental research into their own hands.

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A Massive article, looking at the implications of understanding that “life on earth is complex and irreducible”. 

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A Massive article, looking at the implications of understanding that “life on earth is complex and irreducible”. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE If they grasp the implications, this is one of the most important articles students will ever read. You can begin (if you feel like a heated discussion!) by asking them how they would define biological sex. How many of them have gone with a binary definition? Now ask them to read the article. What initial point does the article make about how biological divisions are ‘drawn by humans’? Why do Sarah Richardon and Anne Fausto-Sterling say that there can be no clear definition of biological sex? How does the article extend this lack of clarity to genes and species? Why has there been so much pushback on this by people “who prefer the old ways”? Finally, do students agree with the writer that “You cannot succeed by making biology simple. It’s not simple and would not be biology if it were” - and are they willing to accept the implications of this?

KEY TERMS Defy definitions, Desires and biases, Spectrum, Context, Cut-and-dry vs. fuzzy and blurred, The eye of the beholder

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences

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Life on Earth is complex and irreducible

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A TED talk, which debunks certain myths about ‘detoxing’ our bodies, in contrast to the real science about what will rid your body of harmful substances. 

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A TED talk, which debunks certain myths about ‘detoxing’ our bodies, in contrast to the real science about what will rid your body of harmful substances. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A great little TED talk, which explains clearly and simply why the concept of ‘detoxing’ our bodies is invalid, and could actually end up harming our bodies. Why, then, are ‘cleanses’ becoming more popular? What does Jen Gunter mean when she says it’s important to “tune out all the noise”? Which other phenomena could this help us with as we seek to become more effective knowers about the world?

KEY TERMS Noise, Informed decisions

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Language, Knowledge & the knower

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A cleanse won’t detox your body -- but here’s what will

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Put down the cayenne-lemon water and step away from the herbal tea. Cleanses and detox products like these don’t remove toxins, says Dr. Jen Gunter, and some of them may even be hurting your health. Learn how your body rids itself of harmful substances and what you can do to keep this system running smoothly. Want to hear more from Dr. Gunter? Check out her podcast Body Stuff, from the TED Audio Collective.

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An Atlantic article, which argues that despite the problems associated with predictions and prognostications during the last year, we should still put our trust in ‘experts’. 

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An Atlantic article, which argues that despite the problems associated with predictions and prognostications during the last year, we should still put our trust in ‘experts’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE One of the big consideration points in TOK and critical thinking is the extent to which we should apply skepticism. We should demand evidence, and seek clarification of other people’s claims, but if you go too far, you end up dismissing valid knowledge. How should we ‘find our sweet spot’ between our gut and our brain, according to this article? What are the characteristics of valid and invalid knowledge claims? Why is it important to distinguish between individuals and entire systems when we are evaluating an idea or theory? Finally, how important is the role of faith in helping us to make use of knowledge?

KEY TERMS Gut instincts, Inconstancy, Extraneous information, Skepticism, Beyond the reach of reason, Faith

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences

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The experts had a rough year. We still have to trust them.

About the author: Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author ofthe book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy.

I've spent years telling people, usually with exasperation and a certain amount of petulance, to trust experts and to stop obsessing about the rarity of their failure. But that was before a crisis in which millions of lives were dependent on a working relationship between science and government. Now that I must take my own advice, I feel the same anxiety I've so often dismissed in others. We-and I'm including myself here-need to come back to our senses about expertise.

My gut instincts are much like those of any other American. When my wife and I became eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations in our state, we plowed through different locations and times trying to capture an appointment. When we finally nailed down a date, I blurted out, as if it mattered: "Which vaccine is it?" I immediately ran through questions in my head. Do I trust the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine? Do I prefer one shot to two? Are Moderna's data more reliable than Pfizer's?

Perhaps most important: Do I have any idea what I am talking about?

The answer is no. I do not have any idea what I'm talking about when it comes to vaccines. I am a political scientist-which is to say that I am not a "scientist" at all. I have no special training in medical issues. Until the pandemic, I had never been given a choice about vaccines, and so I dutifully got my flu, polio, smallpox, tetanus, and other vaccines without asking any of these questions. I could have been getting jabbed with a syringe full of iced tea, for all I knew.

I feel better informed about vaccines now, but my knowledge doesn't really matter. My wife's doctor cut right to the chase when she told us (using those palpitation-inducing words "Given your age and risk factors") to take whatever's available, and that's what we're going to do.

But like many otherwise reasonable people, I've felt a bit unmoored during this chaotic year, amid the influx of new guidelines and mandates-a little hesitant to cede my instincts to the advice of strangers. (Less reasonable people have had no hesitation at all about ignoring such instructions altogether.) Our unmooring isn't entirely our fault. Policy makers and local officials allowed themselves to be whipsawed by anger that surged both for and against mask mandates, lockdowns, and school closures. Instead of turning expert guidance into public regulations, they tried to thread the needle between science and public unhappiness and ended up, in some cases, with promulgated rules that made no sense at all and that satisfied neither scientists nor ordinary citizens.

Public-health officials suffered from self-inflicted wounds great and small. Early inconstancy about masks and transmissibility confused even well-meaning people who just wanted to know the right answer. Over the summer, hundreds of the same experts who told us not to gather even in small groups-for instance, to sing in a church choir or, more personally, have a small funeral for my brother- made a political exception for gigantic street protests where people held hands and shouted and chanted together.
Read: People are keeping their vaccines secret
At the top levels of leadership, many of America's politicians simply panicked, prevaricated, or punted. Former President Donald Trump, who more than anyone bears responsibility for the public's hostility to basic life-saving measures including masking, hid the fact that he was apparently in dire condition after falling sick with COVID-19. The supposed anti-Trump of the pandemic, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, looked like a pillar of reason by comparison, but he too botched important decisions that cost lives and then, in a Trump-like scramble, tried to conceal the ugly data while writing a book about his magnificent leadership. Other irresponsible leaders, including South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, basically told people to do whatever they wanted, a YOLO approach to governance that predictably resulted in death.

Little wonder that all of this produced a certain amount of hysteria, both real and manufactured, about the failure of the experts. But when the pandemic recedes-and after we have reflected on all of this death and heartbreak-we'll need to recover some perspective and learn once again when to put aside gut instincts and listen to the people who know what they're doing.

As paradoxical as this advice may seem, one important step to regaining our footing is for ordinary citizens to stop constantly seeking information as if we were fish darting about in a tank that's been sprinkled with food. I say this as a victim of the same affliction; like everyone else, I am overwhelmed with extraneous information. I am far too awash in data, including much that I am not equipped to understand, about how each vaccine is made and which trials had better results.

I'm not advocating for accepting whatever experts say without delay or question. When our instincts and expert advice are in conflict, that presents a real dilemma. Experts can say that something is safe, but if we don't feel that it's safe, our inner voice can win out over reason. (Likewise, when experts say something is bad for us, we often dispose of that advice in favor of listening to the little imp on our shoulder telling us that it's something we want to do, so it can't be all that bad.)

The best experts help us find the sweet spot between our gut and our brain by explaining processes, risks, and benefits in ways that we can understand. The questions we pose to those experts are an important part of establishing a trusting relationship with them. But we must consider whether we are asking questions that are meaningful and intended to help us reach a decision, or whether we are asking questions to enjoy a temporary sense of empowerment. We should focus on useful inquiries that are guides to action: Do these vaccines have side effects? If I need two shots, how long can I wait between getting them? How long will immunity last? What can I do after I'm vaccinated?

We must also ask whether we distrust particular individuals or whether our beef is with the entire system. A certain amount of skepticism toward elected officials-who have a vested interest in being reelected-is normal. But in our polarized time, this distrust has become extreme. When President Joe Biden said that he thought the Fourth of July was a good target date for the return of small gatherings, many of his critics went ballistic: Who is Joe Biden to tell me what to do?

I had no particular objection to Biden's statement because I tend to trust that he is listening to experts. I did not, however, trust that Trump was doing the same. But when Trump was still president, I believed that the scientists and doctors in government institutions were doing their best to fight the pandemic, even if I was worried that Trump was interfering in their work. I trusted those professionals not because they wear a white jacket or have certificates on their wall, but because I have confidence in the educational and scientific infrastructure that created them.

This belief is the crux of the matter. Sometimes, experts and their institutions fail. But people who believe that medical schools, research institutions, peer review, and lab trials-in other words, the entire structure of modern science-have all failed or become corrupted are beyond the reach of reason, and no expert advice will sway them.
Read: The clearest sign the pandemic could get worse
The rest of us, however, can do better. We are capable of being serious adults who understand, if we choose to try, and accept that in every crisis, risks and imperfect solutions exist, while still maintaining our faith in expertise and its achievements.

I once worked with a U.S. Navy captain who commanded one of America's most advanced nuclear submarines. He told me of the wondrous experience of surfacing in the North Atlantic in the middle of the night and standing on top of the conning tower just above the waves, nothing but sea and stars before him in the pitch blackness. He thought it was ecstasy; I became anxious merely imagining it.

I asked how he overcame the sense of helplessness and isolation that I felt just hearing his description of the experience. He seemed slightly amused at the question. "You just have to have faith in all that technology under your feet."

What he meant was that you had to trust that everyone involved in making that submarine had done their job in good faith and to the best of their ability, and that their work was checked and rechecked by people who would want to feel safe putting their own children aboard that tiny sliver of steel in the midst of the great ocean.

I get a little shaky thinking about being alone on a boat hundreds of miles from land, just as I do about getting a shot in my arm to protect me from something no one knew existed a year ago. But I know that dedicated and decent people created such miracles. They have done their part, and I will do mine.

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Following Your Gut Isn't the Right Way to Go

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The experts had a rough year. We still have to trust them. About the author: Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author ofthe book Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy .

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A History Today article, exploring the world’s first ‘anti-vaxxers’, and the reasons for their opposition to science. 

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A History Today article, exploring the world’s first ‘anti-vaxxers’, and the reasons for their opposition to science. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a very interesting article reminding us that the phenomena that we witness in our present society, and which we imagine are unique to us, are often issues that have arisen before. What reasons did people have for opposing vaccinations in the 19th century - and to what extent was this just a reaction to something new and unfamiliar? When is dissent about knowledge positive, and when is it negative? What can we learn about today’s situation from a study of similar moments in history?

KEY TERMS Counter-intuitive, Incontrovertible evidence

LINKS TO Natural sciences, History

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Anti-vaccination protests are nothing new, although in the past they did have some justification. When Edward Jenner introduced smallpox inoculation at the end of the 18th century he was widely derided as yet another quack trying to make a quick fortune. Envious rivals were swift to point out his lack of professional qualifications, while one satirist imagined his children turning into cows after being vaccinated:

There, nibbling at thistle, stand Jem, Joe and Mary
On their foreheads,
Oh, horrible! Crumpled horns bud ...

Jenner's technique sounded bizarre and the testing programme was perfunctory. After learning that dairymaids apparently became immune to smallpox after catching cowpox, he embarked on an unorthodox experiment. First, he inoculated his gardener's son with lymph taken from a woman's cowpox blister and, two months later, deliberately exposed him to smallpox. The boy remained healthy, as did a handful of further conscripts: Jenner was ready to launch his new procedure.

Doctors were already practising variolation ( variola is Latin for smallpox), the Turkish antidote imported by Mary Wortley Montagu, which involved inducing a (hopefully) mild form of the disease to stimulate resistance. Risky and unpleasant - but it usually worked. In contrast, Jenner's counter-intuitive recommendation was to contaminate human bodies with matter from a creature lower down God's hierarchy. These suspicions were confirmed when patients reacted badly, probably because of poor medical hygiene. In his anti-vaccination propaganda, Dr Rowley of Oxford showed a boy with heavily swollen glands, remarking that he seemed to be 'assuming the visage of a cow'.

In a savage caricature, James Gillray played on contemporary fears by mocking a packed hospital clinic. Prominent in the centre is Jenner, wielding the spiked metal instrument used for scraping patients' skin. To his right stands a scruffy charity boy holding a tub of 'Vaccine Pock hot from ye Cow' for Jenner to smear into the wound on the terrified woman's arm. Above them looms a picture referring to the biblical story of Aaron blasphemously encouraging the Israelites to worship a golden calf. On the right, a pregnant woman is vomiting up a small cow, surrounded by people with cow-like tumours sprouting from their faces.

Opposition to Jenner slowly faded, but in 1853 the debates shifted gear when the government made it compulsory to vaccinate all newborn babies. What sounds like a sensible health measure proved enormously controversial, provoking riots and demonstrations. Antagonists from opposing camps were at loggerheads about two main issues: the clinical risks and benefits, and the right of the state to dictate an individual's actions.

The anti-vaccinators voiced some powerful arguments. The procedure was long, painful and sometimes life-threatening. Practitioners scored cuts into a baby's arm, rubbed in pre-prepared lymph and, eight days later, harvested new lymph from the blisters, which was then recycled for treating the next tiny patient in line. Parents might have been happier about subjecting infants to this ordeal if they could be confident it provided immunity. But, although data collection improved through the century, there was no incontrovertible evidence that vaccination guaranteed protection.

Inserting alien material threatened an innocent baby's God-given purity. Parents not only objected to polluting their babies with animal matter, but also insisted that passing bodily fluids between children enabled infections to be transmitted. Perhaps insanity and progressive diseases were present in the serum - and suppose a privileged infant received cells from one that was Irish or Black?

Anger was exacerbated by conflicts over the cause of smallpox. Was a specific germ responsible, or did illness stem from a miasma of foetid air? Reformers agreed that the filthy, overcrowded slums needed to be cleaned up, but some health experts - Florence Nightingale, for instance - insisted that cleanliness offered a sufficient solution. Such arguments led only too easily to declarations that poor people were guilty of living fecklessly, of spreading disease through their failure to keep themselves clean and well-nourished.

The virus was too tiny for even powerful microscopes to detect and sceptics denounced doctors as scaremongers. Anti-vaccinators devised various strands of persuasive soapbox rhetoric. Should freeborn Britons be subject to the whims of the medical profession? Was vaccination just another tactic for the upper classes to lord it over decent hard-working people? In any case, was there any point in spending good public money on the impoverished dregs of society?

In 1898 a new clause was introduced permitting parents to declare themselves Conscientious Objectors and withdraw their child from the national programme. A Punch cartoon articulated middle-class complaints that this governmental capitulation would encourage smallpox to ravage the country. Trampling on a copy of the Lancet, Death brandishes an anti-vaccination banner as civilisation crumbles about him. The title De-Jenner-ation puns on the flipside of evolution and progress - the possibility of degeneration. As populations expanded and societies became more democratic, fears about personal and national deterioration pervaded Europe. Anti-vaccinators whipped up chauvinist sympathies by coining bellicose slogans that emphasised pollution, depletion and contamination: the 'Anglo-Saxon race - once the finest race of people - will sink into effeminacy, disease, and premature death' proclaimed one prominent campaigner.

In a vain bid to satisfy everyone, soon after this caricature appeared the government pushed through compromise legislation that made the situation worse. To qualify for exemption, parents had to convince a magistrate that they 'conscientiously' believed vaccination would damage their child's health. Opponents immediately pointed out that the strength of a belief is intangible and impossible to measure. Applications were often flatly rejected, thus exacerbating existing resentment among lower-class people, who regarded vaccination as yet another form of oppression. And then there was the gender question: suffragists were angered by legal debates about whether mothers had the right to obtain certificates.

By 1908 the government agreed that women could make responsible decisions on their own, but opting out became easier and many babies remained unvaccinated: not a positive move for the nation's physical health, but a small step towards gender and class equality. And when war broke out in 1914, the term 'Conscientious Objector' acquired a different resonance.

Patricia Fara is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Her next book will be Life after Gravity: The London Career of Isaac Newton (Oxford, 2021).

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Anti-vaccination protests are nothing new, although in the past they did have some justification. When Edward Jenner introduced smallpox inoculation at the end of the 18th century he was widely derided as yet another quack trying to make a quick fortune.

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A Conversation article, which argues that the retractions, u-turns, and controversies over our knowledge of coronavirus shows that science is working as it should. 

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A Conversation article, which argues that the retractions, u-turns, and controversies over our knowledge of coronavirus shows that science is working as it should. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a great article to help students to understand the nature of science, and also place it firmly within the context of what’s going on at the moment. Far from retractions, updates, and corrections being the symptoms of problems within science, the article maintains that this indicates that science is actually working. Do students agree? What’s meant by the claim that science is ‘self-correcting’? And a quote towards the end of the article sounds like it has been taken straight from a prescribed title: “Uncertainty is inherent to the path of discovery”. Discuss!

KEY TERMS Retractions, Scrutiny, Update, Correction, Uncertainty

LINKS TO Natural sciences

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Several high-profile papers on COVID-19 research have come under fire from people in the scientific community in recent weeks. Two articles addressing the safety of certain drugs when taken by COVID-19 patients were retracted, and researchers are calling for the retraction of a third paper that evaluated behaviors that mitigate coronavirus transmission.

Some people are viewing the retractions as an indictment of the scientific process. Certainly, the overturning of these papers is bad news, and there is plenty of blame to go around.

But despite these short-term setbacks, the scrutiny and subsequent correction of the papers actually show that science is working. Reporting of the pandemic is allowing people to see, many for the first time, the messy business of scientific progress.

Scientific community quickly responds to flawed research

In May, two papers were published on the safety of certain drugs for COVID-19 patients. The first, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, claimed that a particular heart medication was in fact safe for COVID-19 patients, despite previous concerns. The second, published in The Lancet, claimed that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine increased the risk of death when used to treat COVID-19.

The Lancet paper caused the World Health Organization to briefly halt studies investigating hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 treatment.

Within days, over 200 scientists signed an open letter highly critical of the paper, noting that some of the findings were simply implausible. The database provided by the tiny company Surgisphere - whose website is no longer accessible - was unavailable during peer review of the paper or to scientists and the public afterwards, preventing anyone from evaluating the data. Finally, the letter suggested that it was unlikely this company was able to obtain the hospital records alleged to be in the database when no one else had access to this information.

[ The Conversation's science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]

By early June, both the Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine articles were retracted, citing concerns about the integrity of the database the researchers used in the studies. A retraction is the withdrawal of a published paper because the data underlying the major conclusions of the work are found to be seriously flawed. These flaws are sometimes, but not always, due to intentional scientific misconduct.

The urgency to find solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic certainly contributed to the publication of sloppy and possibly fraudulent science. The quality control measures that minimize the publication of bad science failed miserably in these cases.

Imperfect and iterative

The retraction of the hydroxychloroquine paper in particular drew immediate attention not only because it placed science in a bad light, but also because President Trump had touted the drug as an effective treatment for COVID-19 despite the lack of strong evidence.

Responses in the media were harsh. The New York Times declared that " The pandemic claims new victims: prestigious medical journals." The Wall Street Journal accused the Lancet of " politicized science," and the Los Angeles Times claimed that the retracted papers " contaminated global coronavirus research."

These headlines may have merit, but perspective is also needed. Retractions are rare - only about 0.04% of published papers are withdrawn - but scrutiny, update and correction are common. It is how science is supposed to work, and it is happening in all areas of research relating to SARS-CoV-2.

Doctors have learned that the disease targets numerous organs, not just the lungs as was initially thought. Scientists are still working on understanding whether COVID-19 patients develop immunity to the disease. As for hydroxychloroquine, three new large studies published after the Lancet retraction indicate that the malaria drug is indeed ineffective in preventing or treating COVID-19.

Science is self-correcting

Before a paper is published, it undergoes peer review by experts in the field who recommend to the journal editor whether it should be accepted for publication, rejected or reconsidered after modification. The reputation of the journal is dependent on high-quality peer review, and once a paper is published, it is in the public domain, where it can then be evaluated and judged by other scientists.

The publication of the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine papers failed at the level of peer review. But scrutiny by the scientific community - likely spurred on by the public spotlight on coronavirus research - caught the mistakes in record time.

The hydroxychloroquine article published in The Lancet was retracted only 13 days after it was published. By contrast, it took 12 years for the Lancet to retract the fraudulent article that incorrectly claimed vaccinations cause autism.

It is not yet known whether these papers involved deliberate scientific misconduct, but mistakes and corrections are common, even for top scientists. For example, Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of proteins, later published an incorrect structure of DNA. It was subsequently corrected by Watson and Crick. Mistakes and corrections are a hallmark of progress, not foul play.

Importantly, these errors were exposed by other scientists. They were not uncovered by some policing body or watchdog group.

This back-and-forth between academics is foundational to science. There is no reason to believe that scientists are more virtuous than anyone else. Rather, the mundane human traits of curiosity, competitiveness, self-interest and reputation come into play before and after publication are what allow science to regulate itself. A model based on robust evidence emerges while the weaker one is abandoned.

Living with uncertainty

From high school classes and textbooks, science seems like a body of well-known facts and principles that are straightforward and incontrovertible. These sources view science in hindsight and often make discoveries seem inevitable, even dull.

In reality, scientists learn as they go. Uncertainty is inherent to the path of discovery, and success is not guaranteed. Only 14% of drugs and therapies that go through human clinical trials ultimately win FDA approval, with less than a 4% success rate for cancer drugs.

The process of science generally takes place below the radar of public awareness, and so this uncertainty is not generally in view. However, Americans are paying close attention to the COVID-19 pandemic, and many are, for the first time, seeing the sausage as it is being made.

Although the recent retractions may be unappetizing, medical science has been very successful over the long run. Smallpox has been eradicated, infections are treated with antibiotics rather than amputation and pain management during surgery has advanced well beyond biting on a stick.

The system is by no means perfect, but it is pretty darned good.
This story was edited on July 9 to more precisely describe the state of hydroxychloroquine research.

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Retractions and controversies over coronavirus research show that the process of science is working as it should

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Severe scrutiny of two major papers, including one about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine, is part of science's normal process of self-correction.

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A Scientific American article, questioning the validity of the claim that falsification is a central part of the scientific method. 

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A Scientific American article, questioning the validity of the claim that falsification is a central part of the scientific method. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What role does falsification play in the production of knowledge?

KEY TERMS Falsification, Scientific method

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences, History

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J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology theory, was reportedly asked what it would take for him to lose faith in the theory of evolution and is said to have replied, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." Since the so-called "Cambrian explosion" of 500 million years ago marks the earliest appearance in the fossil record of complex animals, finding mammal fossils that predate them would falsify the theory.

But would it really?

The Haldane story, though apocryphal, is one of many in the scientific folklore that suggest that falsification is the defining characteristic of science. As expressed by astrophysicist Mario Livio in his book Brilliant Blunders: "[E]ver since the seminal work of philosopher of science Karl Popper, for a scientific theory to be worthy of its name, it has to be falsifiable by experiments or observations. This requirement has become the foundation of the 'scientific method.'"

But the field known as science studies (comprising the history, philosophy and sociology of science) has shown that falsification cannot work even in principle. This is because an experimental result is not a simple fact obtained directly from nature. Identifying and dating Haldane's bone involves using many other theories from diverse fields, including physics, chemistry and geology. Similarly, a theoretical prediction is never the product of a single theory but also requires using many other theories. When a "theoretical" prediction disagrees with "experimental" data, what this tells us is that that there is a disagreement between two sets of theories, so we cannot say that any particular theory is falsified.

Fortunately, falsification-or any other philosophy of science-is notnecessary for the actual practice of science. The physicist Paul Dirac was right when he said, "Philosophy will never lead to important discoveries. It is just a way of talking about discoveries which have already been made." Actual scientific history reveals that scientists break all the rules all the time, including falsification. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn noted, Newton's laws were retained despite the fact that they were contradicted for decades by the motions of the perihelion of Mercury and the perigee of the moon. It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that gives science its strength, not any philosophy. Albert Einstein said that scientists are not, and should not be, driven by any single perspective but should be willing to go wherever experiment dictates and adopt whatever works.

Unfortunately, some scientists have disparaged the entire field of science studies, claiming that it was undermining public confidence in science by denying that scientific theories were objectively true. This is a mistake since science studies play vital roles in two areas. The first is that it gives scientists a much richer understanding of their discipline. As Einstein said: "So many people today-and even professional scientists-seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is-in my opinion-the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth." The actual story of how science evolves results in inspiring more confidence in science, not less.

The second is that this knowledge equips people to better argue against antiscience forces that use the same strategy over and over again, whether it is about the dangers of tobacco, climate change, vaccinations or evolution. Their goal is to exploit the slivers of doubt and discrepant results that always exist in science in order to challenge the consensus views of scientific experts. They fund and report their own results that go counter to the scientific consensus in this or that narrow area and then argue that they have falsified the consensus. In their book Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway say that for these groups "[t]he goal was to fight science with science-or at least with the gaps and uncertainties in existing science, and with scientific research that could be used to deflect attention from the main event."

Science studies provide supporters of science with better arguments to combat these critics, by showing that the strength of scientific conclusions arises because credible experts use comprehensive bodies of evidence to arrive at consensus judgments about whether a theory should be retained or rejected in favor of a new one. These consensus judgments are what have enabled the astounding levels of success that have revolutionized our lives for the better. It is the preponderance of evidence that is relevant in making such judgments, not one or even a few results.

So, when anti-vaxxers or anti-evolutionists or climate change deniers point to this or that result to argue that they have falsified the scientific consensus, they are making a meaningless statement. What they need to do is produce a preponderance of evidence in support of their case, and they have not done so.

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after "explaining" how the theory of quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a "physicist's history of physics," which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!"

But if you propagate a "myth-story" enough times and it gets passed on from generation to generation, it can congeal into a fact, and falsification is one such myth-story.

It is time we abandoned it.

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The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

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J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology theory, was reportedly asked what it would take for him to lose faith in the theory of evolution and is said to have replied, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian."

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A New Scientist article by writer Philip Pullman, arguing that to understand the world comprehensively, we need to draw on more than ‘just’ science.

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A New Scientist article by writer Philip Pullman, arguing that to understand the world comprehensively, we need to draw on more than ‘just’ science.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Pullman is a fascinating thinker, because he blends thoughts and ideas on so many different areas of knowledge and themes - the arts, science, religion, imagination, values. Watch the video to access the whole interview, or read the text for an abridged version of what he says. Overall, what is it that science is unable to help us with? What use do we need to make of our imagination? Also, how does this story link to the Forbes article about mathematics being insufficient on its own?

KEY TERMS Hard problem, Measurable, Qualities, Nostalgia, Imagination, System

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

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Philip Pullman: ‘A story will help us make sense of anything’

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In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman touches on difficult philosophical and scientific questions about our existence. We spoke to him about science, daemons and dust

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A BBC article, reporting that Frances Arnold, the Nobel-winning chemist, withdrew a recent paper because its results were unreproducible. 

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A BBC article, reporting that Frances Arnold, the Nobel-winning chemist, withdrew a recent paper because its results were unreproducible. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE A great contemporary real-life situation about both the scientific method, and the ‘reproducibility’ crisis. Why is reproducing results such a vital part of the creation of scientific knowledge? Does Arnold’s retraction of her paper indicate the vulnerability of science, or its robustness? To what extent does this episode indicate the willingness of scientists to accept errors in their knowledge?

KEY TERMS Reproduction, Validation, Reproducibility crisis

LINKS TO Natural sciences

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American scientist Frances Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, has retracted her latest paper.

Prof Arnold shared the award with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their research on enzymes in 2018.

A subsequent paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams was published in the journal Science in May 2019.

It has been retracted because the results were not reproducible, and the authors found data missing from a lab notebook.

Reproduction is an essential part of validating scientific experiments. If an experiment is a success, one would expect to get the same results every time it was conducted.

Prof Arnold came forward with the news herself on Twitter on 2 January.

"For my first work-related tweet of 2020, I am totally bummed to announce that we have retracted last year's paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams. The work has not been reproducible," she tweeted.

"It is painful to admit, but important to do so. I apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well."

That same day, Science published a note outlining why it would be retracting the paper, which Prof Arnold co-authored with Inha Cho and Zhi-Jun Jia.

"Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. The authors are therefore retracting the paper."

The announcement is the latest example of the "reproducibility crisis" facing the sciences.

In October 2018, the journal Nature wrote online that there was "growing alarm about results that cannot be reproduced".

An earlier survey conducted by the journal found that more than two-thirds of researchers had tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments.

Reaction to Prof Arnold's tweets was mostly positive, however, as her colleagues commended her honesty.

"Can I please express my respect for you bringing this to everyone's attention. This shows that anyone can make an honest mistake and acting to correct that is the best response. Thank you," wrote Dominique Hoogland, a researcher at King's College London.

Prof Arnold is a widely respected chemical engineer, whose work pioneering "directed evolution" won her the €1m (£0.8m) Millennium Technology Prize in 2016.

She is also on the board of directors for Google's parent company Alphabet.

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Nobel Prize-winning scientist retracts paper

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American scientist Frances Arnold, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, has retracted her latest paper. Prof Arnold shared the award with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their research on enzymes in 2018. A subsequent paper on enzymatic synthesis of beta-lactams was published in the journal Science in May 2019.

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A Guardian article, exploring what the ‘right’ level of skepticism is when it comes to celebrity endorsements of pseudoscientific products and treatments.

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A Guardian article, exploring what the ‘right’ level of skepticism is when it comes to celebrity endorsements of pseudoscientific products and treatments.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE We’re all susceptible to the selling power of the stars, and this is a good place for students to start: how vulnerable are they to influencers and celebrities when it comes to buying products and services? Next, get them to read the article (and possibly this Vox one on Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Goop’), and decide for themselves whether we should always be sceptical about celebrity endorsements. Thinking more broadly, how do we find the balance between too little, and too much scepticism?

KEY TERMS Healthy scepticism, Debunked nonsense, Pseudoscience, Trends, Influencer, Availability heuristic

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Human sciences

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From vagina eggs to anti-vaxxers: is it time for an influencer detox?

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Scepticism can be healthy – especially when celebrities are pushing debunked nonsense

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The is a Vox article on anti-vaxxers, which attempts to avoid passing judgement on them, presenting them as a heterogenous group, with vastly different motives for refusing vaccinations, ranging from those who are simply anti-science, to those who have weighed up the odds of the vaccines having a tangible effect on the health of their own children.

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The is a Vox article on anti-vaxxers, which attempts to avoid passing judgement on them, presenting them as a heterogenous group, with vastly different motives for refusing vaccinations, ranging from those who are simply anti-science, to those who have weighed up the odds of the vaccines having a tangible effect on the health of their own children.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE It’s easy to be judgemental and dismissive of those who choose not to vaccinate their children. However, as John Stuart Mill pointed out, in order to properly debate, you need to base your outlook on humility. You could begin by asking students what they think of the anti-vaxxers, identifying any strong opinions. Then ask them to read through the article. What does it reveal to them? How important is it to suspend judgement in order to understand? Is having an open mind always beneficial for the way in which we gather knowledge in the human and natural sciences?

KEY TERMS Trust, Anti-science, Selfish, Ignorant, Delusional, Complicated, Fear

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

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"You know when you pick your child up from preschool and the teacher tells you he had a really good day? I have never had that day."

This is how one mother who I'll call Katie described what it's like parenting her son, who is now 6 years old. She visited 15 preschools before she found one she thought would work for him, a place where teachers would understand his passion for space but also his difficulties reading social cues or transitioning between activities. She meticulously manages his diet due to his extensive food allergies and eczema. She also rejects vaccines, which she fears could impair his seemingly challenged immune system or worsen his autism spectrum disorder traits.

Katie is just one mother I spoke to while studying parents who reject some or all vaccines for their children. I'm a sociologist who aims to understand how parents make choices for their families and children, and compiled almost a decade of research into my book Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines.

Katie, like many of the mothers I spoke with, agonizes over how to make sure her kids are healthy, happy, and able to succeed in what seems an increasingly dangerous, competitive, and uncertain world.

Their reasons for rejecting vaccines vary widely. Vaccines, these parents tell me, do not always protect children. Some insist their children's immune systems would benefit from contracting the illness. Some don't trust the government agencies that approve vaccines because they are "too close" with pharmaceutical companies. Many believe their healthy lifestyle or prolonged breastfeeding ensures that their children will not experience the worst outcomes of a vaccine-preventable disease.

All insist that each parent must gather her own information and make an informed decision without feeling pressured by expert recommendations. And all insist that whatever happens to their children, they will ultimately be responsible.

Right now, the country is watching the number of measles cases increase each day, hitting a new high of 764 cases across 23 states since it was eradicated from the US in 2000. With 60 new cases in the past week, we can expect the outbreak will continue to spread.

There is no disagreement that vaccine refusal is the cause of outbreaks. More than 70 percent of measles cases this year were in people who had received no vaccines, and in all, 88 percent of cases were associated with under-immunized, close-knit communities. Yet parents' decisions have effects that can reach far beyond these networks and neighborhoods.

Just this week, actress Jessica Biel appeared with anti-vaccine proponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the California State Assembly to lobby against a bill that limits medical exemptions for vaccines. When a photo of her appearance went viral, Biel posted on Instagram that she was against the bill "not because I don't believe in vaccinations, but because I believe in giving doctors and the families they treat the ability to decide what's best for their patients and the ability to provide that treatment."

It's easy to question why any parent would choose not to vaccinate, and to look at mothers like Katie with suspicion, confusion, or disgust. As a mother of three vaccinated children and the granddaughter of a woman who lived her life with a limp that resulted from polio, I too wonder this. And while it is easy to dismiss these parents as anti-science, selfish, ignorant, or delusional, the answer is much more complicated.

Parents who don't vaccinate are prioritizing their children over other people's children

First, a few points of clarification. Although I spoke with fathers and mothers in my research, it became clear that health care decisions tend to be maternal terrain. Mothers are most likely to take their kids to doctor appointments and make decisions about food and daily care. They also face scrutiny for their children's behaviors, performances, and abilities, which makes every decision - including whether to vaccinate - feel high-stakes.

Second, there's a small number of people who will never believe vaccines work and will never be persuaded to accept them, and I spoke to some of them. This is the group we tend to conflate with the entire world of people who don't vaccinate.

But the larger and more interesting group to discuss is the significant portion of American parents who say they believe in vaccines but just don't want them for their children - or don't want all the vaccines that experts insist are safest and most efficacious. As much as 20 to 25 percent of American parents fall into this latter group, and they arguably pose the greatest threat to herd immunity. They are also the most likely to be persuaded as long as we don't call them ignorant and selfish.

Finally, parents who refuse vaccines are most likely to be white and college-educated, and to have a higher-than-average family income. I believe their decisions are less about how informed they are and more about the culture of what I term individualist parenting - one that insists parents are personally responsible for their own children, but not other children. Individualist parenting has encouraged mothers to trust their own judgment more than that of experts and believe they can manage their way out of disease risk, even as their choices present risk to others.

For the past two decades, we have increasingly prioritized individual behaviors and choices as the key to good health. Experts recommend people count their calories, steps, pounds, or servings of vegetables as a path to disease prevention. When we hear someone is sick, our first question is often, "What did they do, or fail to do, that led to illness?" These questions ignore how the majority of illness is beyond individual control and reduce health promotion to a series of consumption decisions.

For mothers, the pressure to manage their children's nutrition, body size, learning styles, peer interactions, or physical activity is boundless and reinforced by schools, doctors, peers, and parenting magazines. Beyond health, we see demands that mothers individually manage their children's lives and optimize opportunities for their success. Choosing schools, traveling soccer teams, or SAT tutors promises to increase some children's opportunities for success. Yet when parents choose to send their kids to private schools or competitive public schools, they implicitly accept that it is fine that other children don't have safe or adequately resourced schools - as long as it's not their own kids. The culture of individualist parenting makes clear: Parents have a duty to exercise choice to the bounds of their resources, even at the expense of others.

We can persuade vaccine-refusing parents by appealing to their sense of community responsibility

Mothers often tell me how hard they work to do "research" about raising their children. They don't mean systematic research in the way scientists do. Rather, they conduct research the way we all do before making a consumption decision like going to a new restaurant or buying an appliance: They gather information, read advice from experts, talk to friends and family, peruse reviews and comments, weigh risks and benefits, and, in the end, trust their instincts. On a range of topics - from cooking to finding a pediatrician to requesting the best teacher to deciding whether to consent to vaccines - mothers routinely share information and advice to support their efforts to make good decisions for their families.

We know that parents who refuse vaccines tend to cluster and that living near a high number of other unvaccinated people significantly increases risk of infection. After all, most people are more likely to trust those who are like them. It is therefore not surprising that many of the outbreaks we are seeing are in tightly woven ethnic and religious communities with shared values and practices.

Although public health campaigns aim to convince parents to vaccinate because they love their children, the reality is that vaccines work best when used at a population level. In fact, many vaccines provide more protection to others than the child who receives them.

For example, rubella, which is the third component of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine, is a mild disease in childhood but can cause blindness, deafness, mental disabilities, and a range of birth defects in fetuses, or miscarriage, when pregnant women are infected. Measles can kill about one or two of every 1,000 people infected at any age but is most dangerous to infants and adults. The mothers I studied would often weigh each of these facts to decide if and how it would benefit their own children to get vaccinated. They would not consider that those too young, too old, or too immune-compromised to be vaccinated might benefit most from the herd immunity caused by mass vaccination.

I am not suggesting that parents should no longer advocate for their own children or prioritize their family's values in making choices for their children. Rather, I am suggesting that we should consider how we can begin to reject the logic that we are only responsible for our own children.

Parents' rejection of vaccine recommendations often emerges from fear of the uncertainties that surround children in a world that feels increasingly risky. I understand and admittedly sometimes even share these anxieties. I also recognize the pressures on parents to anticipate all possible outcomes and aim to control for them.

When thinking about her son's struggles, Katie, like many mothers, made clear that she feels alone. Feeling unsupported by schools, health care providers, insurance companies, and her extended family, Katie insists she alone must take responsibility for her child and become his advocate.

Like high-quality education, safe drinking water, food inspection, or any number of resources children need to thrive, infectious diseases cannot be controlled with individual hard work, and thus cannot remain a private concern. In the end, we must find ways to protect each other's children and support everyone's family. And perhaps then, mothers who don't think their children need vaccines will consent anyway.

Jennifer Reich is a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Denver. Her publications include the award-winning books Fixing Families: Parents, Power, and the Child Welfare System and, most recently, Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines.

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.
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I've talked to dozens of parents about why they don't vaccinate. Here's what they told me.

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"You know when you pick your child up from preschool and the teacher tells you he had a really good day? I have never had that day." This is how one mother who I'll call Katie described what it's like parenting her son, who is now 6 years old.

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This is a Guardian video that looks at the people around the world who genuinely believe that the earth is flat. Rather than passing judgement, it attempts to understand why they hold this belief.

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This is a Guardian video that looks at the people around the world who genuinely believe that the earth is flat. Rather than passing judgement, it attempts to understand why they hold this belief.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a good opportunity for students to go beyond the headlines, and try to understand what ‘flat-earthers’ believe, and why. Get students to watch the interviews with the different people, outlining exactly what they believe, and what their motives are for opposing the unanimous consensus of the scientific community and governments around the world. What is ‘true’ science? How do you balance scepticism and open-mindedness? How is new scientific knowledge created?

KEY TERMS Trust, Objective truth, Conspiracy theories, Hoax, Crisis, Doubt, Truth-seekers, YouTube, Fake news, Utopian

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

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This FiveThirtyEight story analyses claims made by Tom Brady about how he has been able to maintain such a long career in professional football, and continue to compete with athletes much younger than him. It focuses on his book ‘The TB12 Method’, considering whether or not it is based on pseudoscience and commercial interests, rather than genuine scientific knowledge.

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This FiveThirtyEight story analyses claims made by Tom Brady about how he has been able to maintain such a long career in professional football, and continue to compete with athletes much younger than him. It focuses on his book ‘The TB12 Method’, considering whether or not it is based on pseudoscience and commercial interests, rather than genuine scientific knowledge.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Tom Brady’s extraordinary achievements are also, arguably, what makes it difficult to understand the way the human body works. The origin of his abilities is much more likely to be genetic rather than environmental, but somehow this is far less satisfactory. Read through the article, and consider whether his theories are convincing or not, and compare them to other famous figures who offer controversial (ie pseudoscientific) theories on the way nature functions. Ultimately, who should be considered the authority on these ideas and theories? Can empirical knowledge blind us from scientific reality?

KEY TERMS Pseudoscience, Brilliant marketing, Products for sale

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Humans sciences, Language

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Our science staff is trying to lead a more scientific life in 2018. Throughout the week, we'll be writing about our resolutions for the new year. Here's the second entry, on Tom Brady's fitness empire.
I am done with testimonials from professional athletes. I've spent the last year and a half reporting and writing a book about exercise recovery, and what I've learned is that advice from elite athletes is often cluttered with pseudoscientific explanations for their stupendous results. The problem is that gifted athletes don't necessarily know how they got that way. Or, in the words of David Epstein, author of " The Sports Gene," "Just because you're a bird doesn't mean you're an ornithologist."

Take New England Patriots quarterback and five-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady, for instance. He's still playing at 40, a geriatric age in the NFL. What keeps him performing at such a high level all these years? It could be that he's blessed with a strong arm and a sturdy frame, or that the Patriots' strong offensive line has ( mostly) protected him from sacks and related injuries.

But Brady has his own theories. He attributes his athletic longevity to a list of 12 principles outlined in his best-selling 2017 book, " The TB12 Method." (Twelve is an important number to Brady; it's not only the number on his jersey, but also the brand on the many products he sells to his fans.) The TB12 principles include generic advice like " feeling better - that's the key" and "balance and moderation in all things."

Moderation in all things, that is, except when it comes to water. "Sometimes I think I'm the most hydrated person in the world," Brady writes after advising readers to drink at least one half of their body weight in ounces of water every day. "At 225 pounds, that means I should be drinking 112 ounces a day, minimum," he says. If you don't drink enough, he claims, you decrease the oxygen in your bloodstream, build up toxins in your cells and create an "unhealthy inner environment," whatever that means. (Brady also contends that "the more hydrated I am, the less likely I am to get sunburned," a claim disputed by scientists.)

Water alone isn't enough, though. Brady also relies on TB12™ Electrolytes, "a natural mineral concentrate that enable athletes to turn any liquid into a hydrating sports drink enriched with 72 trace minerals extracted from sea water." (Curiously, the product packaging lists only 17 ingredients.) Who doesn't love guzzling sea-water extract?

Electrolytes, though, aren't anything special. They're simply salts and minerals. "They're brilliant marketing," exercise scientist Tamara Hew-Butler at Oakland University told me. Sodium and potassium are the major ones we need, and your body maintains stores of them that it can tap into as needed to protect your body's normal functioning. "You have a lot of redundancy in the feedback systems to protect their levels," she said. Unless you're exercising continuously in excess of 18 hours or more, you normally make up for any loss through the food you eat in your next meal. Despite all the hoopla about their presence in sports drinks and fancy bottled waters, there's no need to take them in supplements or some special formula.

Drinking excessive amounts of water when you're not thirsty isn't just dumb, it's dangerous, because it can produce a potentially fatal condition called hyponatremia, or "water intoxication." Despite the marketing campaigns of bottled water makers and sports drink manufacturers, there's no good science to show that athletes or anyone else needs to drink beyond thirst, which is your body's natural way of telling you to drink, just like hunger means you need to eat. But there's plenty of good evidence that drinking too much can kill you. Hyponatremia happens when the blood becomes dangerously diluted, which can lead to symptoms that look a lot like dehydration - such as fatigue, headache, confusion and weakness. In the most serious cases, it can provoke brain swelling, coma and even death. I have been unable to find a single case of a football player collapsing and dying from dehydration on the field, but at least two high school football players have died from hyponatremia. Yet Brady says that underhydration is a greater problem than overhydration.

But wait - there's more! Brady also recommends a restricted diet that, among other things, avoids nightshades and favors "alkaline" foods, which he says, without presenting any evidence, reduce inflammation. (The diet is apparently outlined in greater detail in the TB12 Nutrition Manual, which sells for $200.)

For every bit of advice, there's a product for sale. In addition to the electrolytes and rollers and stretchy bands, there's a protein powder that he just happens to sell, and a brain training app that you can subscribe to for $14 a month (or $96 for a year).

Brady credits his athletic longevity to something called "muscle pliability," a term invented by his "body coach," Alex Guerrero, a man twice investigated by government regulators for misrepresenting himself as a doctor (he's not) and falsely asserting that one supplement he was shilling had been clinically tested and proven to cure cancer, Parkinson's, AIDS and other diseases and that another, which Brady once endorsed, could prevent concussions.

What's muscle pliability? "Pliability is the name Alex and I give to the training regimen he and I do every day. Using his hands and elbows, Alex performs targeted, deep-force muscle work to lengthen and soften every muscle of my body, as I rhythmically contract and relax that muscle," Brady writes in his book. It may sound like massage, but Brady insists it's something different. (The best part of inventing your own word is that you can make it mean whatever you want it to.) "The goal of pliability is to reeducate your brain-body connection, which continually sends messages to your muscles to stay long, soft, and primed," he writes, adding that you can think of it as the "new 'warm-up' and 'cool-down.'"

The book illustrates a series of exercises and self-massages that Brady promises will make muscles less tight, dense, stiff and injury-prone. Do the muscle pliability exercises in his book do what they advertise? It's hard to say, because the only evidence provided is Brady's testimonials, and there's no actual scientific research on this stuff. "I don't know what they're trying to say with that," said Keith Baar, a physiologist who studies muscles and exercise at the University of California, Davis. University of Kentucky muscle physiologist Tim Butterfield told me that he'd never heard the term pliability used in muscle research. To test Brady's claims yourself, you'll have to buy some TB12 vibrating foam rollers or, better yet, hire a TB12-certified body coach. "I want to make it very clear that the best method of achieving optimal pliability is through a certified TB12 body coach," Brady writes.

Maybe he really believes in this stuff, but after reading all 303 pages of Brady's book, I can't help noticing how much of his recommendations sound like advertising. For every bit of advice, there's a product for sale. In addition to the electrolytes and rollers and stretchy bands, there's a protein powder that he just happens to sell, and a brain training app that you can subscribe to for $14 a month (or $96 for a year).

Brady has faced criticism for his association with Guerrero, and Patriots coach Bill Belichick is reported to be distancing his team from the disgraced guru, but it's easy to see what Brady sees in the guy. Brady might well be the greatest quarterback in NFL history, and Guerrero has taught him how to turn that on-field résumé into an off-field wellness empire.

CORRECTION (Jan. 3, 2018, 2:38 p.m.): An earlier version of this story missidentified sodium and potassium as molecules. They are ions when serving as electrolytes in the human body and also exist in elemental form.

CLARIFICATION (Jan. 4, 2018, 4:45 p.m.): This article has been updated to make clear that potassium and sodium are ions when serving as electrolytes in the body.

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Tom Brady Is Drowning In His Own Pseudoscience

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Our science staff is trying to lead a more scientific life in 2018. Throughout the week, we'll be writing about our resolutions for the new year . Here's the second entry, on Tom Brady's fitness empire. I am done with testimonials from professional athletes.

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This Aeon essay by Massimo Pigliucci looks at Richard Feynman’s belief that truth in physics is something that correlates to elegance and beauty.

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This Aeon essay by Massimo Pigliucci looks at Richard Feynman’s belief that truth in physics is something that correlates to elegance and beauty.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE As Massimo Pigliucci argues in this article, “there is absolutely no reason to think that simplicity and beauty are reliable guides to physical reality”. So, why do we? And is he right to say that “physicists should leave philosophy of science to the pros”?

KEY TERMS Beauty as a guide to truth, Simplicity, Aesthetic appreciation

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Mathematics, Knowledge & the knower

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by Massimo Pigliucci + BIO

Spaceborne Imaging Radar photo of the autonomous republic of Tuva, the subject of Richard Feynmann's intense interest during the latter part of his life and documented in Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton. Photo taken from Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994. Photo courtesy NASA/JPL

The American physicist Richard Feynman is often quoted as saying: 'You can recognise truth by its beauty and simplicity.' The phrase appears in the work of the American science writer K C Cole - in her Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life (1985) - although I could not find other records of Feynman writing or saying it. We do know, however, that Feynman had great respect for the English physicist Paul Dirac, who believed that theories in physics should be both simple and beautiful.

Feynman was unquestionably one of the outstanding physicists of the 20th century. To his contributions to the Manhattan Project and the solution of the mystery surrounding the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, add a Nobel Prize in 1965 shared with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga 'for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles'. And he played the bongos too!

In the area of philosophy of science, though, like many physicists of his and the subsequent generation (and unlike those belonging to the previous one, including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr), Feynman didn't really shine - to put it mildly. He might have said that philosophy of science is as helpful to science as ornithology is to birds (a lot of quotations attributed to him are next to impossible to source). This has prompted countless responses from philosophers of science, including that birds are too stupid to do ornithology, or that without ornithology many birds species would be extinct.

The problem is that it's difficult to defend the notion that the truth is recognisable by its beauty and simplicity, and it's an idea that has contributed to getting fundamental physics into its current mess; for more on the latter topic, check out The Trouble with Physics (2006) by Lee Smolin, or Farewell to Reality (2013) by Jim Baggott, or subscribe to Peter Woit's blog. To be clear, when discussing the simplicity and beauty of theories, we are not talking about Ockham's razor (about which my colleague Elliott Sober has written for Aeon). Ockham's razor is a prudent heuristic, providing us with an intuitive guide to the comparisons of different hypotheses. Other things being equal, we should prefer simpler ones. More specifically, the English monk William of Ockham (1287-1347) meant that '[hypothetical] entities are not to be multiplied without necessity' (a phrase by the 17th-century Irish Franciscan philosopher John Punch). Thus, Ockham's razor is an epistemological, not a metaphysical principle. It's about how we know things, whereas Feynman's and Dirac's statements seem to be about the fundamental nature of reality.

But as the German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out (also in Aeon), there is absolutely no reason to think that simplicity and beauty are reliable guides to physical reality. She is right for a number of reasons.

To begin with, the history of physics (alas, seldom studied by physicists) clearly shows that many simple theories have had to be abandoned in favour of more complex and 'ugly' ones. The notion that the Universe is in a steady state is simpler than one requiring an ongoing expansion; and yet scientists do now think that the Universe has been expanding for almost 14 billion years. In the 17th century Johannes Kepler realised that Copernicus' theory was too beautiful to be true, since, as it turns out, planets don't go around the Sun in perfect (according to human aesthetics!) circles, but rather following somewhat uglier ellipses.

And of course, beauty is, notoriously, in the eye of the beholder. What struck Feynman as beautiful might not be beautiful to other physicists or mathematicians. Beauty is a human value, not something out there in the cosmos. Biologists here know better. The capacity for aesthetic appreciation in our species is the result of a process of biological evolution, possibly involving natural selection. And there is absolutely no reason to think that we evolved an aesthetic sense that somehow happens to be tailored for the discovery of the ultimate theory of everything.

The moral of the story is that physicists should leave philosophy of science to the pros, and stick to what they know best. Better yet: this is an area where fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue is not just a possibility, but arguably a necessity. As Einstein wrote in a letter to his fellow physicist Robert Thornton in 1944:

I fully agree with you about the significance and educational value of methodology as well as history and philosophy of science. So many people today - and even professional scientists - seem to me like someone who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth.

Ironically, it was Plato - a philosopher - who argued that beauty is a guide to truth (and goodness), apparently never having met an untruthful member of the opposite (or same, as the case might be) sex. He wrote about that in the Symposium, the dialogue featuring, among other things, sex education from Socrates. But philosophy has made much progress since Plato, and so has science. It is therefore a good idea for scientists and philosophers alike to check with each other before uttering notions that might be hard to defend, especially when it comes to figures who are influential with the public. To quote another philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a different context: 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.'

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Richard Feynman was wrong about beauty and truth in science | Aeon Ideas

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by Massimo Pigliucci + BIO Spaceborne Imaging Radar photo of the autonomous republic of Tuva, the subject of Richard Feynmann's intense interest during the latter part of his life and documented in Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton. Photo taken from Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994.

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This BBC video by Emma Whittaker is part of a campaign to ban detox teas from sale, partially blaming them for the eating disorders she suffered when she was a young teenager.

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This BBC video by Emma Whittaker is part of a campaign to ban detox teas from sale, partially blaming them for the eating disorders she suffered when she was a young teenager.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What’s interesting about this short video is the insight of the ‘Insta influencer’ – what is her level of understanding of the products she is promoting? Why would we be persuaded by her ‘influencing’? Students can also consider the role of being psychologically vulnerable when it comes to believing in pseudo-scientific claims.

KEY TERMS Detox, Influencers, Vulnerability

LINKS TO Natural sciences, Technology, Human sciences

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Adverts for detox teas started appearing on Instagram in 2012. Young women were quickly hooked, buying into the promise to feel skinny and fit.

Many of these teas contain the laxative senna. Emma, 23, who already had anorexia, quickly fell into a dangerous cycle of abusing the teas and developed bulimia.

Now she wants to ban detox teas. But is she right? She meets a luxury Insta influencer to discuss.
Filmed, produced and edited by Lucy Proctor and Jade Thompson

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Adverts for detox teas started appearing on Instagram in 2012. Young women were quickly hooked, buying into the promise to feel skinny and fit. Many of these teas contain the laxative senna. Emma, 23, who already had anorexia, quickly fell into a dangerous cycle of abusing the teas and developed bulimia.