Category: book reviews

Short (?) review: “Sex is a spectrum”

September 11, 2025 • 10:45 am

Reading time: Whatever. . .

You’ll probably guess from the title of this short (150-page) book by Agustín Fuentes (Princeton University Press) that I am not keen on its thesis, and you’d be right.  In fact, the thesis is nothing new, even if you have read Fuentes’s article about it in Natural History and Scientific American or the many attacks on the sex binary coming from woke but misguided people.  These attacks, which assert that sex is really a “spectrum”, have also been launched by Steve Novella at Science-Based Medicine,  the editors of Natural History, the Lancet, and other places that Luana and I discussed in our piece in Skeptical Inquirer (see our point #1).

In fact, it seems more common to see pieces attacking the sex binary than defending it, even though, in terms of biological sex—the binary of male and female, based on gamete type (big and immobile versus small and mobile)—happens to be true. As Dawkins and I (and others) have mentioned, it’s as close to a binary as you can get, with exceptions (“intersex” individuals) having a frequency of about 1 in 5600 or 1 in 6700, depending on how you define intersex. That is lower than the frequency of individuals born with extra or missing digits, but we don’t say that “humans lie on a digit spectrum”.

I won’t go into the numerous reasons why biologists in general see a sex binary in vascular plants and all animals; read Richard Dawkins’s eloquent exposition of the reasons here. Nor will I give a long review of Fuentes’s book, as a good critical one has already appeared, and Fuentes’s recycled arguments have been attacked by many of us. Let me just add that why this has suddenly become a big kerfuffle is not because any new biological facts have surfaced showing that animals actually have three or more types of gametes (they don’t), but because of the rise of gender ideology.

Fuentes wrote his book for the same reason that most others criticize the sex binary: because of the recent increase in the number of people who see themselves as not belonging to either sex, but lying outside the male/female dichotomy –or in between.  This is gender, though, and while people do have these feelings, some of which may even have a biological basis, it does not dispel the reality of the gamete binary, which biologists seized on as the “concept” of biological sex for two reasons. First, the two-gametes reality is sole binary true of all animals and vascular plants; and second, because the binary concept is also deeply explanatory, giving insight into things like sexual selection.  But because some people feel they’re not male or female, “progressive” scientists feel a duty to twist our view of nature so that sex becomes a spectrum. They may mean well, but they damage biology by misleading people about biological sex. They also damage biology by leading people to distrust it because the distorters demand that folks deny things that are palpably real.

And so Fuentes, though he feels the binary is “damaging” (his arguments are not convincing), actually does the damage himself. You can see his ideological motivation in the last two sections of the book, which deal respectively with why trans-identified males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, and why we should not have bathrooms based on natal sex. (I happen to agree with the latter point but not the former.) But these are questions of politics and ideology, not biology.

So what is Fuentes’s argument? Again, it’s familiar. Sex as “enacted” in the real world of humans (note the concentration on humans) involve the 3 “Gs” (genitals, gonads, and genes), as well as physiology, hormones, reproductive leanings, and psychology (how one “feels”). These don’t always align perfectly, and because they don’t, sex is not binary.  But this is a straw-man argument, since he’s arguing against the biological binary based on gametes, and none of us have asserted that there is always a perfect match between chromosomes, genital morphology, self-concept, physiology, and gamete type (the concordance, however, is often very high).

Fuentes raises familiar and already-rebutted arguments: fish like wrasses and clownfish change sex as sequential hermaphrodites.  Bees have three types of castes, workers, queens, and drones. And so on and so on. But none of this refutes the sex binary. Fish, at a given time in their lives, produce either large or small gametes, and worker bees, as everyone with a brain knows, are females. Although their reproductive organs are underdeveloped, these organs are clearly female, and in fact some colonies of honeybees in South Africa have no queens: the normally “sterile” workers have fully developed female organs and lay parthenogenetic eggs without a need to be inseminated. Those colonies are 100% female.

Every example Fuentes gives falls into the gametic binary, and, as Bogardus’s review notes, Fuentes tacitly ACCEPTS a sex binary. Fuentes shies away from the words “male” or “female” (unless they’re in parentheses after “3G”), but instead constantly refers to “large gamete producers” and “small gamete producers”. Never does he refer to “intermediate gamete producers” or any other type of gamete producers. This is a tacit admission that sex, conceptualized through gamete type, is indeed binary.

As Bogardus said in his review (his bolding)

But there are strong reasons to deny that sex “comprises” multiple traits and processes. There is really only one trait that seems to be necessary and sufficient for being a male, namely having the function of producing a component with the function of producing sperm. And similarly for females, with regard to ova. To be “hormonally female” is to have hormone levels typical of the females of the species, but a male who has e.g. hormone levels typical of females of that species does not literally become a female in any sense of the word. Nor does he have multiple sexes, being both male and female.

Instead, what’s true is that there are many traits and processes that are linked to sex—there are a variety of sex-linked traits. But in order for these traits to be linked to sex, they must be distinct from sex. Fuentes is mistaken, then, to think that sex “comprises” multiple traits and processes: he’s confusing a multiplicity of sex-linked traits with sex itself.

Fuentes spends much of the book in a misguided quest to show that there aren’t really any biological differences between human males and females (or such differences are inconsequential), and so sex becomes a slippery concept. He never actually tells us how he defines “male” and “female”, perhaps because he thinks they don’t exist. Even differences in musculature and bones that mandate the creation of men’s vs. women’s sports, Fuentes suggests, have a social origin, perhaps based on differential training (“gendered training dynamics,” p. 143).

I can see that this is going to get long unless I bring it to a halt, and so I will. I’ll make one more point, involving how Fuentes contradicts himself—not for the first time in this book. Although he argues that any differences between men and women are “biocultural”, based on an interaction between nature and culture (he’s right for some traits), he also argues that it is imperative to take self-identified sex into account when doing medical or scientific investigations.  And that is right, too: some drugs have differential effects on the sexes because of their biological differences (whatever the source of those differences). But if biology is only part  of the reason for those differences, and sometimes a small one, shouldn’t we be dividing up research subjects not by biological sex, but by gender, culture, or even “lived experience”.  Imagine designing a medical study based on experience!

At any rate, I’m done. I did my due diligence in reading the book, even though I already knew everything Fuentes was going to say—because he’d said it before. I’ll add that it’s not only a tendentious book, but a tedious book. The writing is poor, droning on in a hybrid popular + academic style that is hard going.  Fuentes, for example, never cites one area without citing three. (Example on p. 135: “”These conditions represent complex interlacing of physiological, neurological, social, experiential, and individual processes.”) Over and over again you must slog through such sentences. The man needs to learn how to write popular scientific prose.

I’ll finish with the final paragraph of the review by Bogardus, who did much more due diligence than I (plus he’s a biologically-informed philosopher, good at pointing out and refuting muddled arguments):

Though Fuentes offers much sound and fury against “the binary view,” in the end it amounts to nothing: his thesis is either uncontroversially true or obviously false. Even worse, in tragic Shakespearean fashion, Fuentes sows the seeds of his own undoing, unwittingly supplying himself with premises sufficient to prove that the title of his book is exactly false: Sex itself is not a spectrum at all, but rather is binary.

The only thing I’ll add is that you don’t need to read this book if you already know about the “binary” controversy. Fuentes sheds no more light on it.

A review (not mine) of “Sex is a Spectrum” by Agustín Fuentes

September 3, 2025 • 10:15 am

This is not my review, thank Ceiling Cat, but it’s one I agree with. Although I’m doing so reluctantly, I’m reading Agustín Fuentes’s recent book Sex is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary. Its thesis is, well, pretty much what the title says, although, as you’ll see, the evidence supporting that thesis is nonexistent, at least for biological sex.  I’ve read about half of the short book, but then the review below, by Tomas Bogardus (a professor of Philosophy at Pepperdine University) appeared at Colin Wright’s Substack Reality’s Last Stand.  This has blessedly relieved me of the need to write my own review, since Bogardus says pretty much what I’d say given what I’ve read so far.  Although I haven’t yet finished the book, and may weigh in later, Bogardus’s review is thorough, accurate, and very critical. Although Bogardus works in philosophy, he knows the relevant biology, and, in addition, his philosophy training has helped him spot the logical errors in Fuentes’s book.

Sex is a Spectrum is, as you may have guessed, not really a work of science but one of ideology: an attempt to show people who feel nonbinary that nature justifies their feelings (this is what I call “the reverse naturalistic fallacy”). Note, though, that transsexual people almost invariably affirm the binary of biological sex, as they are born having one natal sex but attempt to change their appearance, behavior, and physiology to mimic those of the other sex.  This of course implies two sexes.  It is gender activism rather than sex activism that motivates efforts like Fuentes’s. And in his effort to show that animals and plants don’t conform to a biological sex binary, Fuentes gets himself tangled up in a ball of confusion about what he really means by “binary”, “spectrum”, and even “sex.”

You can read Bogardus’s review by clicking below, and I’ll give some excerpts (indented).


Excerpts (bolding is Bogardus’s):

What is “the Binary View”?

It’s clear that Fuentes means to target “the binary view.” But it’s unclear what the binary view is meant to be. The first possibility is suggested by the back cover, which says the book explains “why we can acknowledge that females and males are not the same while also embracing a biocultural reality where none of us fits neatly into only one of two categories.” So, perhaps this is what Fuentes means by “the binary view”:

  • Binary View 1.0: Some of us are clearly only male, or clearly only female.

Perhaps Fuentes means to deny this, and to claim that none of us is clearly male, or clearly female. But if Binary View 1.0 is what Fuentes means by “the binary view,” it seems hopeless to argue against it. For surely Binary View v.1.0 is true. I myself am clearly only male, for example. And so are at least some of the wild peacocks that roam my neighborhood. No doubt it’s true that many (all?) of our biological concepts admit of borderline cases. Nevertheless, at least some also admit of clear cases. “Male” and “female” are two examples. [JAC: remember, Bogardus is talking here about biological concepts; later in his review he deals with “disorders of sex determination”]

What Fuentes seems to be trying to express is that while some of us are male and others of us are female, nobody is “neatly” one or the other. Because, as he says on page 36, “bodies, physiology, and behavior are not so easily classified, and are queer indeed.” In other words, while I might be clearly only male, nevertheless, Fuentes thinks, at least some of my sex biology—some of my sex-linked traits—will be had by at least some females. This brings us to the second possible meaning of “the binary view.”

Bogardus gives two other interpretations of “the binary view”. The second is confused and wrong, but here’s the third:

  • Binary View 3.0: There are exactly two sexes: male and female.

If Fuentes thinks Binary View 3.0 is false, that would indeed be worth saying, and worth arguing for. That would engage some of the recent discussion in the literature as well as the popular culture. And this interpretation is supported by parts of the text, as we’ll see below. In the book, Fuentes seems to give reasons to think there might be more than two sexes, reasons having to do with mating types, reasons having to do with some birds, and reasons having to do with disorders of sexual development.

Let’s discuss these arguments in turn.

You can see the arguments in turn, but the easiest one to see through, and the dumbest one, is the “argument from birds”. Let’s see what Bogardus says:

 The argument from sparrows:

On pages 30 to 31, Fuentes reasons this way:

Like so many other animals, the patterns of how sex biology varies with bird species is dynamic and multifactorial: there are not simply two uniform sex types…. There are even some bird species with multiple ‘sex’ categories. The white-throated sparrow has some changes to its chromosomes that effectively produce four chromosomal types that have different plumages and a mating system wherein certain types are not compatible with others. So, while there are only two gamete-producing physiologies in the species, there are functionally four sexes in the reality of the actual mating system.

The idea seems to be that this species of sparrow features multiple sex categories, indeed that there are “functionally four sexes” in this species. And the reason is that, allegedly, males with a certain plumage are not reproductively compatible with females of a certain plumage.

First of all, there are only two biological (gametic) sexes in the white-throated sparrow, as everyone who works on it recognizes—and mentions in their publications.  There are, however, two color and pattern morphs of each of the two sexes. There is disassortative mating between the morphs, but it’s not complete, as Fuentes mistakenly says.  Regardless, this, and similar examples of different morphs of the sexes, do not refute the biological sex binary (based, again, on gametes); they just show variation within each of the two sexes.

Here’s where Bogardus’s philosophy expertise enters:

But does Fuentes really think that there are more than two sexes? On the one hand, it seems like he does. Recall that Fuentes says that mating types are often called “sexes,” and there are thousands of mating types. He says that there are some bird species with multiple “sex” categories. And he says that the binary view of sex “does not allow space” for people like Caster Semenya. Together, this seems to me like powerful evidence that Fuentes means to argue that there are more than two sexes. Sarah Richardson (2025, 437), in a recent review of Fuentes’ book, reads him as saying that “there are not only two sexes, and sex can most definitely change.” So, there’s at least one prominent ideological ally who hears Fuentes talk out of that side of his mouth.

But, out of the other side of his mouth, he tells a very different story. On the podcast Academics Write, published on June 19th, 2025, at the 9:25 mark, Fuentes says this about his book: “And so I’m not saying there’s [sic] more than two sexes—there are male and female, that’s how we’re talking about it. But male and female are not essential, distinct entities compared to one another. They’re typical clusters of variation. And within each of those typical clusters, there’s huge variation.”

What are we to conclude from all this?

Unfortunately, it seems me the best explanation is that Fuentes’ view is not clear even to himself, and that he vacillates between a controversial and implausible claim that there are more than two sexes, and the modest and uncontroversial claims that sex-linked traits are often shared among both females and males, and that sex-linked traits vary significantly among males and among females. That is, Fuentes conflates an interesting but false thesis with a trivially true thesis, retreating to the latter when the former is challenged. A motte and a bailey, one might say.

This conflation is the usual argument against the binary:  that because there is variation among individuals of a sex within species in some sex-related traits (e.g., penis length, breast size), and also among species in the way sex is determined or expressed (temperature in some reptiles, chromosomes in homeotherms, but in different ways in birds vs. mammals, haploidy vs diploidy in bees), there must be more than two sexes. But if you’re going after the gametic sex binary, which is how biologists conceive of the sex binary, this is a fallacious form of reasoning.  All of this variation fails to efface the stark fact that there are two types of gametes and no more: eggs and sperm. Although there are some hermaphrodites that make both, most animals have individuals with the reproductive equipment evolved to produce only sperm (males) or only eggs (females). There is no third type of gamete.

And this binary was not made up by biologists who are “transphobes” and want to erase people of non-standard gender: it is an observation that’s been made for well over a century and was clarified when eggs and sperm were discovered. As Richard Dawkins has elegantly pointed out, the gamete-based definition of biological sex is both universal and utilitarian: it holds in all species of animals and vascular plants, and explains a number of otherwise puzzling biological phenomena, like sexual dimorphism that arises from sexual selection.

Yes, of course the carriers of two types of gametes show intra-sex variation, but so what? What is remarkable is that variation is ubiquitous in the natural world—except for the types of gametes produced within most species (we are ignoring “mating types” in some simple organisms, though Bogardus covers that).

Fuentes also stumbles when he encounters sequential hermaphroditism:

What is a sex?

Let us turn now to the question of what a sex is, according to Fuentes. In this book, he seems to endorse a gamete-based account of males and females. On page 1, we read this:

“Imagine you are a fish called a bluehead wrasse… You are what we’d call female, so you produce eggs. There is only one very large member of your group, and they are the group male, so produce sperm.”

And on page 29 he moves seamlessly between these two descriptions:

“There are species [of reptiles] where females are larger than males…, others where males are larger than females…, and yet others where there is little or no size difference… …it’s likely that both competition between small-gamete producers… and environmental constraints on body size (for both small- and large-gamete producers) are involved.”

This happens again on pages 33-4:

“Similarly, there is a whole group of primates that challenges the expected roles of large- and small-gamete producers. Most primates live in big groups of several males and females and young, and others live in groups of one male and many females and young….”

So, it sure looks as though Fuentes admits that the sexes are defined in terms of gamete production: females are “large-gamete producers,” and males are “small-gamete producers.” One might think, then, that Fuentes would define having a sex more generally as the producing an anisogamous gamete-type (sperm or eggs).

And yet he does not do that.

What a pity that someone who is clearly intelligent has twisted up his neuronal wiring to deny what he really realizes!  Like the clownfish, the blue-head wrasse has sequential hermaphroditism: one sex can become another depending on age and social milieu: but there are always just sperm producers and egg produces. Two sexes, no more! And yet there are those benighted individuals, believe it or not, who think that this sequential hermaphroditism refutes the gametic binary. I pity them deeply.

As you see, I’m getting tired of repeating these arguments over and over again, so I’ll draw to a close.  What irks me the most is that this is not an argument about biology, it is an argument about semantics, and one that has already been resolved. It has been revived not because some new biological facts have appeared, but because gender ideology has surfaced. Ergo the desire of people (well-meaning though they may be) to change biology so it conforms to an au courant gender ideology.

And here I’ll leave you to read the review for yourself, and, later on, I’ll wearily drag myself back to the book.

Maarten Boudry defends our anthology

August 25, 2025 • 9:30 am

As I’ve mentioned before, an article by Luana Maroja and me was included in Lawrence Krauss’s new anthology, The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process (Amazon link here).

I’ve now read the whole book, and won’t review it myself save to say that it merits reading although there is some duplication of material between chapters.  However, a number of chapters, including the opening one by Richard Dawkins and the one by Steven Pinker, in which he’s reworked and expanded his 2023 Boston Globe op-ed, are marvelous. (And of course you should read the piece on biology by Luana and I, updated from this one.) Lawrence provides a good introduction as well as commentary for each section to tie the book together.

I have to add, though, that the one chapter I simply could not read was the last one by Jordan Peterson. It is so convoluted and prolix—par for the course—that I had to give up. 

The book was put together before Trump began his assault on universities by punishing science grantees and by appointing people like RFK Jr. to science positions.  I expected that, after this unpredictable bout of executive-branch bullying, there would be some wokesters who adopted a “whataboutery stance,” saying, “This book largely comprises attacks on how the progressive Left wing is eroding science. But Trump is dong much more damage from the Right.” And right now that is indeed the case, but Trump will be gone in a bit over 3 years, and I expect that, when Democrats take over (fingers crossed), the government will cut back strongly on interfering in the funding and production.

The effect of the Right on science, then, will probably be more temporary. In contrast, that from the Left will last a lot longer, for progressive professors who believe in nonsense like a spectrum of sex in animals will teach this nonsense to their students, and thus it will pass among academic generations.  We simply cannot sit by and let progressives distort science in the cause of ideology, regardless of what the Right is doing.

And, as Luana wrote me, “I would add that the right-wing attacks on science are well understood by all, both inside and outside academia, whereas the left-wing attacks are unknown to many and not acknowledged by most in academia.  For being so underreported, they deserve to be in the light. . . ”

Sadly, some people, including  scientists and journalists, don’t understand that both Right and Left both merit criticism and should be criticized. No part of the political spectrum should be immune to scrutiny, regardless of what the other parts are doing.

This reminds me of the criticism I got for going after the pre-election Kamala Harris for being clueless.  The comments were to the effect of “Shut up until after the election. When you criticize her you’re simply increasing the chances of Trump winning.”

Such people don’t realize that extremism of the Left, exactly what was instantiated by Harris (and now by woke scientists) actually helps Trump. Harris’s declaration that undocumented immigrants should get government-funded sex-change surgery, for example, was a huge part of Republican advertising during the election, and it made Democrats look clueless.

The same goes for science. Declarations that there is a spectrum of biological sex in humans, for example, is what plays into the hands of Trump, because everyone knows that such a claim (made loudly and frequently by progressives) is false and stupid.  Criticizing ideologically-based infection of science by the Left, then, is essential in keeping science free from politics. You may recall that Nature’s endorsement of Joe Biden for U.S. President in 2020 didn’t help Biden a bit: it only made people distrust science (and Nature) more and strengthened support for Trump while having no significant increase in support for Biden.

None of this has been taken in by journalist Sarah Jones, who produced a hit job on our anthology in New York magazine. Jones is described as “senior writer for Intelligencer who covers politics and labor.” Her critique is largely an ad hominem attack on the contributors, failing to come to grips with our substantive criticisms. Further, Jones takes the book to task for ignoring Trump’s attacks on science, which many of us have written about elsewhere. We were, she says, attacking the wrong target, and even helping Trump.

I didn’t want to give Jones’s piece air time here, as it is simply a hate-filled piece that largely attacks the contributors, not their arguments. Here’s a taste of Ms. Jones:

So it’s a strange time to read The War on Science, a new anthology edited by the physicist and New Atheist writer Lawrence Krauss. In atheist and skeptic circles, Krauss is — or was — known not only for his work on the cosmos but for his campaign against creationism and for science education. Now Krauss and his collaborators have identified an “emerging threat” to science and inquiry, as he writes in an introduction to the book. What threat? Wokeness, of course. Universities prize diversity over merit, while hysterics confuse words with violence and brave truth-tellers risk cancellation. Krauss does know something about cancellation, at least. A former associate of Jeffrey Epstein, he was still defending the predator well after Epstein’s 2008 sex-crimes conviction. Epstein always had young women around him, Krauss told an interviewer in 2011, but “as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.” In 2016, he quietly wrote a birthday letter to his old pal, and two years after that, the hammer fell — this time on his own head. BuzzFeed News reported that Krauss had been the subject of sexual-harassment and -misconduct allegations for about a decade. He retired from Arizona State University after an investigation into his behavior. Now he has a Substack.

Krauss does not mention this in his introduction to The War on Science. The reader is left to assume that Krauss — and his 39 contributors — cares only for the integrity of science. They are beings of reason, united not by ideology, which is the refuge of a weak mind, but by the purity of their logic. Contributors include Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, and Jordan Peterson; others, like the skeptic and philosopher Maarten Boudry, may be less familiar. Many are atheists, while others, like Ferguson, have converted to Christianity. All are convinced of their own brilliance. Alas, our rationalists each face the same problem, the most obvious of many: Their anthology came out in July during a real war on science. Most contributors, Krauss included, have railed against DEI, and critical race theory, and social justice for years. Now their arguments are shaping policy, and the casualty isn’t creationism but science itself. One contributor, the biologist and prominent New Atheist Jerry Coyne, halfway admitted this on X. “A new book on the ideological threats to science (from the Left). And yes, we know that right now the Right poses a much more serious danger to science,” Coyne wrote before taking a final shot at “progressives.” You can’t defend reality if you aren’t willing to live in it.

The line “all are convinced of their own brilliance” gives her stand away, for that’s simply not true. Nor is it to be seen in the chapters. We are passionate, yes, but it’s hard to find arrogance in the book (do look at Peterson’s chapter, though!). If anybody’s convinced of their own brilliance, it’s Jones. But wait! There’s more fun from Jones!:

There are nearly 40 chapters in The War on Science, all pockmarked by omissions, misrepresentations, and, sometimes, obvious lies. Each section of the anthology addresses a different facet of the woke threat to reason, but a few common obsessions emerge: Genitals and what people do with them, Israel, DEI, and various professional insults — it’s all here, boomer Facebook on every page. The writers invoke the philosopher Judith Butler, but only by name, and their work on gender is never explained, quoted, or even paraphrased. Our rationalists are too sophisticated to bother with the effort. In one interminable entry, Dawkins insists that “science advances,” while other disciplines, like “theology, philosophy, sociology,” do not. “Science is the jewel in humanity’s crown,” he adds, and that is why trans people must not be indulged. Chromosomes are destiny. The “belligerent slogan” that “trans women are women” is therefore “scientifically false, a debauching of language, and because, when taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women,” Dawkins writes.

Lies? Really? We give are plenty of data and examples, and I challenge Jones to point out one lie in our chapter: something that we deliberately fib about to make our points. And if she says “boomer Facebook on every page,” well, I could say her review is “geriatric Millenial from Bluesky on every page.”  Again, no grappling with our arguments.

Note the personal character of the attacks, and that New Atheism has nothing to do with our arguments.  As for my quote, Jones leaves out my caveat that Left-wing erosion of science may be more persistent, even if it’s not as dangerous at the moment.  And of course I’m willing to live in reality: my frequent attacks on Trump and his bullying of science will testify to that. But Jones didn’t do her research to find that out.

But I will let my friend Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher, finish bringing the hammer down on Jones’s rancor-filled screed.  If you click below you can read his Substack piece for free (though he would appreciate a paid subscription).

Maarten explains the curious title:

Imagine some people in your neighborhood are mixed up in organized crime—say drug trafficking. Some locals decide to blow the whistle because they worry that the whole community will get a bad reputation, and they start urging everyone else to speak up too. Most people, though, just keep their heads down, understandably reluctant to pick a fight with the gang leaders and their enablers.

And then someday a new mayor arrives in town, eager to look tough on crime. In a big show of force, he has the entire neighborhood raided. Dozens are arrested, including plenty of people who did nothing wrong. Shops are shut down, and community leaders are strong-armed into accepting harsh, sweeping measures against anything that looks even remotely suspicious.

Now, what would you think of someone who blamed the internal whistleblowers as follows:

“Why did you bad-mouth your own neighborhood when a much bigger threat was looming on the horizon? You kept harping about some petty crime that may or may not have happened, while the police were gearing up for a massive crackdown. You didn’t see where the real danger was coming from.”

That, in a nutshell, is the reaction from a lot of left-leaning academics and journalists to The War On Science, a new collection edited by the physicist Lawrence Krauss, to which I contributed a chapter along with 38 others (including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal, Jerry Coyne, Luana Maroja and Carole Hooven).

Well that’s a bit long, but is a decent metaphor and does sum up Jones’s whataboutery. (New York magazine is a notoriously woke rag that, as you may recall, forced Andrew Sullivan to resign.) I’ll give a few excerpts from Boudry’s analysis, which is not long:

So, is it true, as the kids say, that our book “didn’t age well,” becoming cringe-worthy and out of touch even before it hit the shelves? How could we have been so oblivious to the looming right-wing assault on science while we were preoccupied with left-wing critiques? In fact, many left-wing critics were already singing this tune long before they even had the chance to read our work. For instance, this post from April, shortly after our publisher announced the title and list of contributors, racked up nearly 10,000 likes on Bluesky (which is pretty huge for this relatively small platform).

Note that Hank Green hadn’t read the book, so he goes after the authors so-called “rightism” as well as the title itself.  As Bugs Bunny said, “What a maroon!”

Yall wanna hear something extremely embarrassing? Before Trump’s election, a bunch of academics who lumbered rightward after being criticized by the left (Pinker, Dawkins, Krauss) wrote essays for a book that is coming out in July about the threats to academia from the left. YALL, THE TITLE!!

— Hank Green (@hankgreen.bsky.social) 2025-04-20T15:26:04.674Z

A bit more from Boudry:

The little story in my intro makes the point: when there’s rampant crime in a neighborhood and the community leaders look the other way, it creates the perfect opening for a sweeping police crackdown. In the same vein, the incursions of left-wing ideology in universities and other academic institutions have helped to turn them into prime targets for the populist Right. If you turn universities and academic journals into partisan lobby groups, don’t be shocked when you find yourself in the political crosshairs.

Yes, it is true that Trump’s assault on universities is both reprehensible and unconstitutional, that his professed concern about antisemitism is just a pretext for “owning the libs”, and that his sudden embrace of academic freedom is disingenuous—he just wants to swap one orthodoxy for another. But that is exactly why we should have cleaned our Augean stable before it came to this. As sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis says in this interview about our book: “We made ourselves into political actors and so therefore became political targets.”

About Jones’s piece:

. . . . the point is not that we’re facing two separate attacks on science from different directions and are now trying to determine which one deserves more of our attention—the point is that the more severe external assault was motivated by the internal war, marking a further escalation in the politicization of science. Conversely, these Trumpian attacks now risk radicalizing left-wing ideologues in academia even further, convincing them that science must become an even stronger fortress of progressive ideology.

You can already see it playing out. Thanks to Trump’s ham-fisted attack on DEI and campus antisemitism, anyone criticizing DEI programs now risks being lumped in with the Trumpian Right. Case in point: this hatchet job posing as a book review in New York Magazine, with the subtle-as-a-brick title: “How the New Atheists Joined the MAHA War on Science”.

. . .The reviewer claims that we—the book’s authors—weren’t merely blindsided by the MAGA assault on science, but have actively contributed to it. By “railing against DEI, critical race theory, and social justice for years,” the argument goes, we supposedly handed Trump and his allies ammunition and, in effect, joined their camp.

This line of reasoning is strikingly similar to the argument, endlessly repeated by progressives (mostly in Europe), that we shouldn’t discuss the negative consequences of mass migration, as doing so might “help the Far Right”. The reality, however, is quite the opposite—it’s precisely the unwillingness of progressives to engage honestly with these uncomfortable truths that drives people toward the Far Right. Similarly, many academics’ reluctance to call out the ideological antics within their own circles has led to a widespread perception that universities have devolved into left-wing boot camps (which is still a wild exaggeration).

Maarten then tells us how flattered he is that Jones devoted a whole paragraph to him in her frothings, and he ends with this: “If you continue to politicize science, then sooner or later the chickens will come home to roost.”  Progressives have only hurt themselves by trying to inject ideology into all STEMM fields, and so we face a flock of roosting chickens.

No Ms. Jones, I am not a sycophant of Trump—I detest the man, as you would know if you did your homework. And perhaps you should recognize that nobody should be immune from criticism in a society that has free speech.

Books to read

March 28, 2025 • 11:21 am

Between reading science stuff that I’m going to write about elsewhere, and my pleasure reading of a mammoth book (not one about the woolly mammoth!), I don’t have many books to report on. In fact, I’m about to be at a loss for books to read, and thus will tell you what I’ve read as a way of extracting suggestions from readers.

For a while I was on a Holocaust kick, and (as I think I mentioned earlier) I read The End of the Holocaust, by Alvin Rosenfeld, which you can get from Amazon by clicking below. His thesis is that the true horror of the Holocaust has been lessened by everyone using the word to mean “any bad thing that happened to a lot of people.” The book is especially concerned with Anne Frank, who, he says, was just one of a number of young victims who wrote about their situation, and somehow the attention devoted to her alone lessens the experience of other victims. Well, you can argue about that, but I think the book is worth reading now that words like “genocide,” “concentration camp,” and “Holocaust” are being thrown around willy nilly in a way that distorts their original meaning.

After that I read another short but very famous book about the Holocaust, Night, by Elie Wiesel. Click below to see the Amazon link:

Wiesel, a Romanian-born Jew, was taken to the camps with his family when he was young, and managed to survive two of them, writing several books about his experiences (this one, like the others, is either partly fictional or completely fictional but Night is mostly true). Wiesel was separated from his mother and sisters at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and they did not survive (they were probably gassed). Throughout the book he tries to stay with his father and keep him alive, but the father finally expires on a forced, foodless march through the snow as the prisoners are marched to another camp by the Germans as the Russians approach. Wiesel survived, but just barely.

After the war, Wiesel dedicated himself to writing and lecturing about the Holocaust, and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.  Night is one of the best books about the Holocaust, at least in conveying its horrors, and was recommended by Rosenfeld in the book above. I too recommend it highly, and, at 120 pages, it’s a short read.

Here’s a photo of Buchenwald five days after its liberation by the Red Army, showing the arrangement of bunks and the skeletal nature of those still alive. Wiesel is in the photo; I’ve circled him next to one bed post. What better proof can you have that you really did experience what you wrote about?

Buchenwald concentration camp, photo taken April 16, 1945, five days after liberation of the camp. Wiesel is in the second row from the bottom, seventh from the left, next to the bunk post. From Wikimedia Commons

And below is the behemoth I just finished, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Circle Award in 2009. Click the cover to go to the Amazon site.

Several people recommended this book highly, and while I think the 730-page monster was very good, I didn’t find it a world classic. It recounts the life of Thomas Cromwell, who started life as the son of a blacksmith but worked his way up to being the head minister of Henry VIII. It deals largely with the intrigues and relationships of Henry’s court, which reminds me of Trump’s America.  Henry was sometimes amiable, but would ruthlessly order the death of those who crossed him, including Anne Boleyn, who met her end simply because she couldn’t provide Henry with a son that could be his heir.  Sir Thomas More is a prominent character, and he too meets his end for refusing to affirm that Anne Boleyn was the lawful queen. Everyone tiptoes around in constant fear of the KIng.

The book is quite involved, and has a big list of characters which are listed on the first page and to which one must constantly refer. It is the convoluted plot and surfeit of characters that made the book hard for me to read. Perhaps I’m getting old and my concentration is waning.  But the dialogue is fascinating, and parts of the book are quite lyrical, with the prose style changing quickly from conversational to rhapsodic. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Mantel’s writing of the book, and the effort shows.

Mantel said she spent five years researching and writing the book, trying to match her fiction to the historical record. To avoid contradicting history she created a card catalogue, organised alphabetically by character, with each card containing notes indicating where a particular historical figure was on relevant dates. “You really need to know, where is the Duke of Suffolk at the moment? You can’t have him in London if he’s supposed to be somewhere else,” she explained.

In an interview with The Guardian, Mantel stated her aim to place the reader in “that time and that place, putting you into Henry’s entourage. The essence of the thing is not to judge with hindsight, not to pass judgment from the lofty perch of the 21st century when we know what happened. It’s to be there with them in that hunting party at Wolf Hall, moving forward with imperfect information and perhaps wrong expectations, but in any case, moving forward into a future that is not pre-determined but where chance and hazard will play a terrific role.”

The book (part of a trilogy) was made into a mini-series for t.v., and here’s the trailer. It feature Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII. Has anyone seen it?

So that’s my reading. Now I ask readers to recommend books for me—and other readers. They can be fiction or nonfiction, so long as they’re absorbing.  I’m not sure I’m yet ready now for another 700-page novel (Amazon’s version says only 600-odd pages, but I have an older edition).  Please put your recommendations, as well as the subject of the book, in the comments.

My Quillette review of Francis Collins’s new book on healing America with science, truth, trust, and faith

March 13, 2025 • 9:15 am

As I note in my new review of Francis Collins’s new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, he’s a very good scientist and science administrator, but also a pious evangelical Christian (remember the frozen waterfalls that brought him to Jesus?).  Collins had previously written a book arguing that science and Christianity were not only compatible, but complementary ways of finding the truth, but now he’s produced another. As I say in my review of the new book in Quillette (click on screenshot below, or find my review archived here):

While much of the Road to Wisdom reprises the arguments of the earlier book, this new one takes things a bit further. Collins is deeply concerned about the divisions in American society highlighted by the last presidential election, by people’s inability to have constructive discussions with their opponents, and by our pervasive addiction to social media and its “fake news”; and he believes that accepting a harmony between religion and science will yield the wisdom that can mend America.

As the author of Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, I wouldn’t be expected to laud Collins’s thesis, and I didn’t.  You can read the review for yourself, but I spend a lot of time criticizing Collins’s claim that science combined with religion is the best way to find the “truths”to repair the deep divisions in America’s polity. Even if those divisions—Collins largely means Republicans vs. Democrats—can be repaired, saying that the way forward is combine the “truths” of science and religion is a deeply misguided claim.

I won’t go into details, but of course religion is simply not a way to discover truth, especially since Collins’s definition of “truth” is basically “facts about the world on which everyone agrees”: in other words, empirical truth. Religion can’t find such truths, as it lacks the methodology.  Note that Collins does not espouse Gould’s “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” claim that science and religion are compatible because they deal with completely different issues, with science alone getting the ambit of empirical truth. Gould’s claim, described in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, was also misguided, and you can read my old TLS critique of it here.) No, Collins asserts that religion can find empirical truths. Sadly, he gives no examples where religion can beat science–just a bunch of questions that religion can supposedly answer (e.g., “How should I live my life?”).

I’ll give one more quote from my review:

What are the truths that religion can produce but science can’t? Collins’s list is unconvincing. It includes the “fact” of Jesus’s resurrection and the author’s unshakable belief that “Jesus died for me and was then literally raised from the dead.” In support of this claim, Collins cites N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God as compelling evidence for the Resurrection, which Collins claims is “historically well documented.” But when I worked my way through the entirety of Wright’s 817-page behemoth, I found that the “historical documentation” consists solely of what’s in the New Testament, tricked out with some rationalisation and exegesis. Neither Collins nor Wright provide independent, extra-Biblical evidence for the crucifixion and resurrection, much less for the Biblical assertion that upon Jesus’s death the Temple split in twain and many dead saints left their tombs and walked about Jerusalem like zombies. Absent solid evidence for these claims, they are little more than wishful thinking.

Other “truths” that one finds in religion are “moral truths”: the confusing set of rules that Collins labels the “Moral Law.” To him, the fact that our species even has morality constitutes further evidence for God, for Collins sees no way that either evolution or secular rationality could yield a codified ethics. That claim is belied by the long tradition of secular ethics developed by people like Baruch Spinoza, Peter Singer, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls. While many faiths and societies aspire to common goals like “love, beauty, goodness, freedom, faith, and family,” this does not suggest the existence of a supernatural being.

Click below (or here):

Although it seems obvious to me that religion and science are incompatible insofar as both make empirical claims (granted, some of faith’s claims are hard to test), it’s not obvious to the many Americans who blithely get their vaccinations but then head to Church and recite the “truths” of the Nicene Creed. Sam Harris pointed this out in a piece he wrote opposing Collins’s appointment as NIH director:

It is widely claimed that there can be no conflict, in principle, between science and religion because many scientists are themselves “religious,” and some even believe in the God of Abraham and in the truth of ancient miracles. Even religious extremists value some of the products of science—antibiotics, computers, bombs, etc.—and these seeds of inquisitiveness, we are told, can be patiently nurtured in a way that offers no insult to religious faith.

This prayer of reconciliation goes by many names and now has many advocates. But it is based on a fallacy. The fact that some scientists do not detect any problem with religious faith merely proves that a juxtaposition of good ideas/methods and bad ones is possible. Is there a conflict between marriage and infidelity? The two regularly coincide. The fact that intellectual honesty can be confined to a ghetto—in a single brain, in an institution, in a culture—does not mean that there isn’t a perfect contradiction between reason and faith, or between the worldview of science taken as a whole and those advanced by the world’s “great,” and greatly discrepant, religions.

While I wouldn’t have opposed Collins’s appointment on the basis of his faith, I would have if he had shown any signs that his faith would affect his science. As it turned out, it didn’t: Collins left his religion at the door of the NIH.  But he continues to proselytize for both Christianity as the “true” faith and for a perfect harmony between science and religion.

In a patronizing New Yorker article (is that redundant?) about Collins and his book that I just discovered, I was sad to see another pal soften his views about Collins, science, and faith:

Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who fiercely criticized Collins’s nomination on account of his “primitive, shamanistic, superstitious” religious views, told me in an e-mail that he had changed his mind about Collins, for two reasons. “One is the sheer competence and skill with which he’s directed the Institutes, blending scientific judgment with political acumen,” Pinker wrote. “The other is a newly appreciated imperative, in an age of increasing political polarization, toward making institutions of science trustworthy to a broad swath of the public, of diverse political orientations.” In a way, I thought, Pinker was saying that representation matters: science has an audience, and the right speaker can persuade all of that audience to listen. “A spokesperson for science who is not branded as a left-wing partisan is an asset for the wider acceptance of science across the political spectrum,” Pinker said. But Collins is more than a spokesperson for science. He is also a kind of representative, within the scientific community, of American communities that his peers sometimes fail to reach.

Pinker’s first point is right, and, as I said, I wouldn’t—and didn’t—oppose Collins’s nomination as NIH director.But the author then interprets Pinker as making the “Little People” argument: science will be accepted more broadly if scientists accept religion, even if those scientists don’t practice it. In other words, we have to avoid criticizing superstition if America is to fully embrace science.

But while there’s no need for scientists to bang on about religion when we’re teaching about or promoting science, no scientist should ever approve of a belief in unevidenced superstition, or of any system of such supterstition.  Yet that’s exactly what Collins does in his book, and it’s why the book is misguided, flatly wrong about accommodationism, and unenlightening.

New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent

February 13, 2025 • 11:00 am

I have a friend with Alzheimer’s so I was especially depressed to read Jesse Singal’s discussion of a new book, Doctored, claiming that research on both Alzheimer’s disease and drugs that purport to ameliorate is all badly flawed, even fraudulent. You can read Singal’s discussion below (free access by clicking on the headline), and access the book on Amazon by clicking on the cover below.

An excerpt from Singal:

In his book, Piller, an investigative reporter at Science magazine, presents copious evidence of severe fraud, negligence, and buck-passing in Alzheimer’s research. From fabricated images published in major research journals (many of them still unretracted) to data manipulation conducted by pharmaceutical companies to the complete negligence of federal watchdogs, Piller’s reporting demonstrates indisputably that the field of Alzheimer’s research is in sorry shape.

Things are so bad, in fact, that the dominant theory that has guided researchers’ efforts this century — that Alzheimer’s symptoms are caused by the buildup of proteins called “amyloid plaques” in the brain — is now in serious question. That might explain why, as Piller notes, a recent meta-analysis of the available research found no evidence that any of the available Alzheimer’s drugs cause noticeable improvements in the cognition or daily functioning of patients. We’re two decades and many billions of dollars into the modern era of Alzheimer’s research, and we have precious little to show for it — a particularly dire state of affairs given that this dread condition is only going to hit us harder as America’s population continues to age. Piller’s book, which was released February 4, tells the story of a wild and heartbreaking goose-chase.

While Doctored is gripping in its own right, it also serves as a warning about the collapse of trust in expert authority. Thanks to the capacious new markets for crankery carved out by social and “alternative” media — not to mention a worldwide populist revolt against “the establishment” in general — there’s more grifting and science-denial than ever before, and the worst purveyors of pseudoscientific sludge rake in millions precisely by positioning themselves in opposition to mainstream science.

The lesson for scientists is to clean up their act and to stop misleading people about their work. I mean, I never had any doubt whatever that Alzheimer’s was caused by plaques in the brain.  Now that is not at all certain; the plaques could be a byproduct or a correlate and not a cause. If there’s that much uncertainty about it, why haven’t I heard about it.  Of course, journalists are responsible for this, too, but good scientific journalism is a species going extinct.

I believe that Singal has already been demonized on BlueHairSky, though he hasn’t been banned. The reason: the place is full of immigrants from Twitter who are “progressive” liberals and couldn’t stand the free speech on X. Singal described his apostasy: 

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”

Back to his own Substack, though; Singal won’t win many friends by arguing that both scientists and liberals have exacerbated the problem, the former by acting precipitously or even duplicitously (the attempt to dismiss a lab-leak theory for the covid virus by scientific officials in the Biden ambit is a good example), while the left-wing public by always saying “trust the science” without realizing that a. scientists are human, with all the good and bad behavior that implies and b. science like investigating covid moves quickly, and what is true today could be false tomorrow.

But I shouldn’t exculpate the Right as well. After all, that’s the side of the political spectrum that still pushes creationism as well as quacks like RFK Jr. And Trump and his cronies are busy slashing scientific research almost willy-nilly. Singal, though, concentrates on the Left, perhaps because that’s where he resides:

At a time of such uncertainty and such dangerous overcorrection, it can feel awkward or difficult to point out, as Piller does in Doctored, just how broken some of our cherished mainstream scientific institutions are. Isn’t that playing right into Trump’s hands?

I don’t think so. The strategy adopted by many mainstream liberals in response to the populist surge — effectively, plugging our ears and chanting “trust the science” over and over — might be comforting, in that it offers a Manichaean worldview in which improving the world is a relatively straightforward matter of convincing people of their own ignorance so that they will board the science train with the rest of us.

But this effort has clearly failed. Some populist distrust of mainstream science is unwarranted and harmful, such as most strains of vaccine skepticism, but in plenty of instances, they are more or less correct not to automatically trust mainstream scientists, even if they arrive at that conclusion for reasons some of us might find uncouth. (Update: I added ‘automatically’ post-publication because I think it’s an important modifier here.)

In other words, while it’s easy to accuse those red-staters out there of exhibiting an alarming lack of faith in science, especially now that their wrecking-ball avatar is in power, it’s harder — and arguably just as important — to ask whether perhaps we have too much faith in it. The scientific establishment hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent decades, given the replication crises that have roiled multiple fields, the data-fraud scandals popping up everywhere from cancer research to business-school psychology, and the frequently overconfident proclamations experts made about thorny Covid-era issues like mask mandates and school closures. And yet liberals tend to continue to reflexively trust many institutions that haven’t earned it, to the point where some of us have turned this sentiment into a mantra: “Science is real,” you will see on signs planted in front of many liberal homes.

I will read this book, as I’m particularly interested in how “fraud” was involved in Alzheimer’s research. Here’s one bit from Singal:

Piller’s book provides numerous damning examples of the difference between science as we idealize it and science as it is practiced by real-life human beings. For example, much of the data fraud in Alzheimer’s research, alleged and proven, involves doctored images. This fraud was uncovered not by journal editors or peer-reviewers — the individuals supposedly responsible for such quality-control — but by unpaid sleuths “who use pseudonyms to post comments” online, as he writes, in the hopes of someone who matters noticing and acting. (One notable exception is Elizabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist and legendary image sleuth who has taken on Alzheimer’s fraud.)

Who would have thought that we’d be catching so much fraudulent work by analysis of published images. One might conclude that reviewers of manuscripts aren’t doing their work, but I suspect that a lot of the fraud involves the same images repeated in different papers, and no reviewer has time to compare images in a submitted manuscript to other images by the same authors, but in different journals.

Doctored was released February 4 of this year.

To avoid making this post too long, I’ve put the book-publisher’s (Simon and Schuster’s) description below the fold. Click “read more” to see it:

Continue reading “New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent” →

Another wonky critique of determinism in a review of Sapolsky’s book “Determined”

January 26, 2025 • 11:30 am

I’ve read Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, and it’s pretty good, making a material—in his view, neurological—case for determinism, though the book is a bit long and can be tedious in parts if you don’t want to plow through a lot of neurobiology. But I think that in the end he makes his case (of course, I’m a hardcore determinist so I’d agree!). If you don’t want to read 528 pages, there’s also Sam Harris’s Free Will or Gregg Caruso’s books on free will (he’s a determinist).

But Sapolsky’s book has gotten some negative reviews, and I should have realized that writing about determinism will immediately get people’s hackles up, because their feeling of having free will (and I’ll be talking here about libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will) is so strong that they can brook no determinism. I’ve already recounted how I was menaced by a a jazz musician for intimating that is “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them, and was also kicked out of a friend’s house simply for calmly espousing and explaining determinism. As I always say, it’s harder for me to convince a creationist that evolution is true than to convince a “free willer” that determinism is true. And there are a lot more of the latter than the former!

But of all the reviews I’ve read of Sapolsky’s book, by far the worst just appeared in what was once a great venue, the New York Review of Books. (It went downhill fast when its wonderful editor Robert B. Silvers died in 2017.)  The review is free to access (also archived here), and you can read by clicking on the headline below.  It shows no understanding of the free-will controversy, or of science itself, and offers no alternative to determinism (it has to be some magical nonphysical agent that can affect material objects), though I suspect the author, because of her frequent references to God and theology, might believe that free will has a goddy supernatural origin. (Even if it doesn’t, libertarian free will has to rely on something supernatural.) Here’s the description of the author from the NYRB:

Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford. She is currently writing a book about the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the history of evolutionary theory. (February 2025)

Although I’m usually loath to dwell on credentials, a historian, even of biology, is not the person to review Sapolsky’s book. Perhaps a philosopher or a neurologist, but I can explain the pervasive awfulness of Riskin’s review only by appealing to massive ignorance of the topic.

I really don’t want to go through this long review bit by bit, but I’ll highlight a few weird things.

Ignorance of science.  Riskin doesn’t realize that getting evidence for phenomena (e.g., evolution) is very often a step-by step-process: you have an initial hypothesis, and then you either reinforce or reduce the likelihood of its being true with new data. This is a Bayesian approach, though often it’s implicit rather than specified using Bayes’s theorem.  You don’t “prove” determinism or free will, you simply gather evidence that makes one of them more likely. I would note that determinism should have high priors simply because our brains and bodies and environments, the source of our behaviors, affect our behaviors materially–usually through neuronal wiring.  (That’s why Sapolsky concentrates so much on neurons.) And material objects universally obey the laws of physics.

Riskin WANTS determinism to be proved, and says that Sapolsky doesn’t do it. But I say she’s put the bar too high, that Sapolsky makes a good case and that, combined with the presupposition that true libertarian free will must involve forces that we don’t know about—while the laws of physics appear to apply universally—should put Riskin on the defensive (which she is).

Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.” (This gives a taste of Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style.) [JAC: it’s not ALL like that, so her comment is inaccurate.]

How does he know? Because of science. Sapolsky tells us that “the science of human behavior shows” it to be deterministic. But none of the scientific evidence he offers turns out to demonstrate this. He describes psychological studies revealing changes in people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) taking place milliseconds before they were aware of making a decision, but he dismisses these—reasonably enough—as “irrelevant.” He presents other studies demonstrating that people can be subconsciously manipulated; that hormones, cultural beliefs, and moral values influence behavior; and that maturation, aging, and experience induce alterations in people’s brains and bodies with corresponding behavioral changes. After each discussion he asks, “Does this disprove free will?” and responds—again reasonably—with “nah,” “nope,” “certainly not,” and “obviously not.” Readers might wonder, equally reasonably, why they’ve slogged through all this irrelevant nonevidence.

That might be a fair criticism of Sapolsky’s style, but I don’t remember him saying that this evidence is irrelevant (it’s been a while since I read the book). But I do think that predicting behaviors before one is conscious of performing them raises the priors of determinism, as do the many, many ways that you can trick people into thinking they have agency when they don’t (brain stimulation, effects of drugs, computer experiments) or thinking they are not doing something consciously when they are (Ouija boards). Sean Carroll’s essay “On Determinism” (with extensive quotes by Massimo Pigliucci) makes a good case that the universality of the laws of physics leaves no room for libertarian free will. (Sean is a compatibilist and, although a determinist, says we have “free will” in a different sense. Dan Dennett used to say the same thing.)

More waving away of the notion of  proof:

Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds. Here’s another from Sapolsky’s final chapter: “What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning.” This might sound like the opposite of saying that science shows there’s a divine intelligence behind the world-machine, but it’s the direct descendant of that earlier claim, and comes to the same evacuation of meaning and agency from the mortal world. This isn’t a scientific proposition. It remains what it has been from the beginning: a theology.

This is wrong. One can gather data for and against determinism. If, for example, we found out that people could move objects by thinking about them, that would suggest that there is some nonmaterial brain force that can actually influence events, buttressing (but not “proving”) the case for free will. And saying that determinism is “a theology” is also wrong, for theology in the West is involved in exegesis of the Bible and beliefs in a supernatural being.

What’s the alternative to determinism?  Here Riskin is silent, though it looks from her frequent references to God and theology that she sees divine action as a possible counter to determinism and a buttressing of free will. (I can’t be sure of this, though, as Riskin doesn’t lay out what she sees as a viable alternative to determinism.) Riskin has described herself as a “Jewish atheist”, and given that she herself doesn’t see divine provenance out there, the onus on her is to admit that she is invoking some kind of supernatural but non-Goddy action.

Her only argument seem to be that because people look like they have “agency” (and they do in the trivial sense of being able to do things), this is evidence for free will. For example, this part seems deeply confused:

It’s because the many factors influencing behavior, Sapolsky thinks, place the burden of proof on defenders of human agency. It’s they who need to show that neurons are “completely uninfluenced” by any external factors and that “some behavior just happened out of thin air.” But why must human behavior be either deterministic or impervious to any influence? Sapolsky doesn’t explain; he takes as given that to show any influence at all is to show a determining influence. Similarly, he writes that we have “no control” over our biology, culture, or environment. Sure, we don’t control these things, but there’s an important difference between not controlling something and having no effect on it, or at least so anyone with teenagers is inclined to hope. Biology isn’t insulated from behavior any more than behavior is from biology. As Sapolsky himself points out, virtually everything a person does has an effect on their physiology. And a wealth of empirical evidence from Aristotle to Oprah suggests that people can indeed have cultural influence.

What is the sweating reviewer trying to say here? That there is some free will? I cannot tell. In fact, her own confusion and incoherent arguments seem to be imputed to Sapolsky, as if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve read the book, and I disagree. And “cultural influence” my tuchas! What does that have to do with refuting determinism?

Is there a god in this argument? The author makes the old “why is there something instead of nothing” argument:

Sapolsky’s turtles are of course metaphorical; they stand for deterministic causes, and by “a turtle floating in the air” he means a magical event. We must accept a strictly causal chain extending back to the beginning of time or acknowledge that we believe in miracles. But why are these our only choices? And are they really so different? Wouldn’t a chain of deterministic causes imply a miracle of some sort at the beginning—the old infinite regress problem rearing its domed shell again?

Yes, and we don’t know why there is something instead of nothing, though there have been some scientific suggestions that do NOT involve miracles. And obviously since Riskin is an atheist, she doesn’t believe in miracles. So what is her answer. She doesn’t tell us.

More touting of “agency:

Sapolsky tells the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a metal rod through the brain while working on a construction site in Vermont in 1848 and was never quite the same afterward. He offers Gage as evidence that people’s personalities depend on their “material brains,” which he thinks poses a challenge to anyone who wants to defend the idea of free will. But why should the fact that humans and their brains are made of material parts mean there’s no such thing as human agency? There’s a good answer, but it’s historical rather than scientific: because determinism retains crucial elements of the theology from which it arose, according to which the material world was a passive artifact lacking any agency of its own.

It would be nice if Riskin would tell us what she means by “agency”.  Real “I could have made either choice” agency or simply the appearance of agency? The intimation that determinism is a form of theology again arises, but denial of free will in the world is simply not theology. It’s analogous to denial of a supernatural being, which Riskin presumably does in her atheism. Is this atheism theological?

I won’t go on here, as I don’t want to waste my time. I will simply say that Riskin sounds like she’s trying to be clever, but in so doing fails to confect a consistent argument against determinism. Her sniping at Sapolsky may occasionally hit home, but she comes nowhere close to dispelling determinism, simply because she doesn’t engage in the necessarily arguments. Read for yourself how she throws in lots of historical figures like Darwin and Paley and Laplace to show her erudition, but doesn’t deal with what libertarian free will would really entail. 

This egregious review also goes to show how far the mighty New York Review of Books has fallen. Yes, it likes cleverness and erudition, but in the old days it also liked substantive arguments in its reviews. Riskin doesn’t provide any. But don’t take my word for it; if you’re interested in the topic, read the review and see if you can find any structure or coherence in it.

 

h/t: Barry