Category: philosophy

A new report on the dangers of politicizing humanities in academia

June 8, 2026 • 9:30 am

Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, was previously the Provost of the University of Chicago. He was deeply invested in the Chicago Principles, which include free speech, institutional neutrality, and scholarship and teaching (adjudicated purely by merit) as the two overarching goals of a University.  I hoped he would succeed Bob Zimmer as President of our University, but after Zimmer fell ill with a brain tumor, Diermeier got the offer from Vanderbilt, and since Zimmer did not resign (sadly, he died later), Diermeier left.

At Vanderbilt he’s putting into place the Chicago Principles, and enforcing them more rigorously than we do here. When students held a sit-in in the administration offices, for example, he had them expelled and arrested. And he’s been busy writing and speaking about the goals of academia and how the principles first forged here promote those goals (see here and here, for example). When someone recently referred to Vanderbilt as “The University of Chicago of the South”, someone else responded, “No, Chicago is now the Vanderbilt University of the north.”

Along with Andrew Martin, the chancellor of St. Louis’s Washington University, Deirmeier commissioned a group of ten scholars to examine the issue of how scholarship in the humanities has become politicized, something that the two thought was endangering the value of the humanities and, indeed, of universities themselves. Headed by Paul Boghossian, a Professor of Philosophy at NYU (not to be confused with Peter B.), the group of ten produced a long report (29 pages when I printed out the pdf, which can be found here). The upshot is that yes, the humanities are becoming politicized and endanger scholarship in many ways (see below).  Although the ten authors do consider empirically-laden humanities areas like economics, history, and anthropology, they deliberately leave out science, though there is no end of discussion of how science, too, is becoming politicized to its detriment (see, for example, “The ideological subversion of biology,” by Luana Maroja and me, or “The peril of politicizing science” by Anna Krylov).

If you click on the first screenshot below you’ll go to the report (more information is apparently forthcoming), and the second screenshot gives a summary of the report by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you’ll find more digestible.  Note that while the Chronicle piece refers to “The Left” as ruining humanities, the Boghossian et al. report explicitly assert that the erosion of the humanities is not due to the Left per se, but to the fact that most professors are on the Left, and that the Left has adopted some principles (e.g., relativism and postmodernism) that has played a role in eroding scholarship.  But they add that this is a danger of any ideology that infects academia, whether it be from the Left, the Right, or something else.

The Chronicle summary; click to read.  Brian Leiter at our Law School has also written his comments on the report, which are generally favorable, but see below.

What I’m going to do is simply group a few quotes from the big report (indented) under bold headings that I made myself.  The point of the Boghossian et al. report is not to indict anybody, or conclude what needs to be done, but simply to raise the problem as a serious issue, intending to promote discussion about what needs to be done. (And yes, they do think that something needs to be done, particularly in anthropology, which comes in for a drubbing.)

The problem:

The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi.2 However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.

Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left. More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized (§3 below). The sharpest version of the complaint traces this distortion in scholarly standards to a pervasive repudiation of the very idea of scholarly objectivity in favor of the view that since claims to knowledge are inevitably ideological, it is fair game to assess academic scholarship on political and social grounds (§4 below). The result of this distortion, the complaint continues, is an academic ecosystem in which much of what passes as scholarship in the humanistic disciplines is in fact a mix of tendentious, biased research, feeble academic agitprop and jargon-laden nonsense. To the extent that this is so, the complaint concludes, these scholarly disciplines can no longer play the valuable role they have traditionally played in the advancement of human knowledge and so risk forfeiting their claims to deference from concerned administrators and support from the wider public. . .

The importance of the humanities (There’s a nice discussion of this in the report, bearing on why they are worth saving through unpolluted scholarship.)

But who is going to help you decide what satisfactions are really worth pursuing? Which outcomes are worth aiming for? What is worth wanting? Who will help you decide whether John Stuart Mill was right to say that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (Mill 1985)? Indeed, who will let you know this question is even worth asking? And where will you learn that one reason for studying the nomothetic sciences is that understanding how the universe works and how we fit into it would be worthwhile in itself, even if we never put the knowledge to profitable use?

The answer, we think, is clear. These are the questions you learn to answer, however provisionally, with the help of literature and the arts, critically appreciated, through the study of philosophy and history and sociology and anthropology. Some humanistic disciplines take matters of value and meaning as a central focus; others aim to describe and explain the human world without pronouncing judgment; but all play an indispensable role in refining our conception of what is possible for human beings and which social arrangements we wish to aim for. If these disciplines are to help us answer these important questions, it is crucial that they use the right methods in search of the right answers. Their task is not to manipulate us into following a party line but to provide each free person with the tools for making their own informed choices.

The disciplines we are discussing prepare us for a free life by developing critical thinking and analytical skills, enhancing cultural understanding and empathy in a world of increasing global interconnections, teaching ethical reasoning and civic responsibility, and providing intellectual resources for creativity and innovation. Because their study is intrinsically worthwhile, they contribute directly to the intellectual and imaginative flourishing of those who study them. By defending and investing in the humanistic disciplines, we affirm our commitment to a society that values critical inquiry, empathy and the full spectrum of human potential, all informed by a clear-eyed view of who we are and where we’ve come from.

This goes along with my own view, though the report focuses on “good scholarship” in the humanities as “good scholarship that produces truth.” I’ve discussed before to what extent “truth”—in the sense of what exists in the universe and can be verified empirically—actually exists in the humanities. I concluded that in the arts, like music, literature, and so on, that no, there is no “truth” to be found; there are only different interpretations.  I suppose you can say that some interpretations are better than others, but such claims must be supported by facts. Other areas of humanities, including economics, history, and anthropology, do make assertions about what exists, and in those cases there is a provisional “truth” that can be adjuciated empirically.  These considerations are completely missing from the report, which suffers from a dearth of real examples (to be fair, the authors don’t want to demonize anyone).

The focus on good scholarship

Our focus is rather the quality of scholarship: the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs. The critique we take seriously is that this scholarly enterprise has been damaged in recent decades, not just by a general erosion of standards, but also by a reconceptualization of scholarship as a form of political activity, answerable in part to extra-academic standards.

The three ways that scholarship can be politicized. This is the heart of the discussion.

We have identified three main forms of politicized distortion in recent humanistic scholarship.

a. On the first track, scholarly claims are constrained by the requirement that they cohere with an antecedently accepted political goal, although this is not how the constraint is explicitly described. Rather, unwelcome results or debates are dismissed as having been rendered moot by “settled science.”

b. On the second track, the scholarly goal of understanding the world is displaced by, or supplemented with, the aim of telling stories that serve a pragmatic purpose. On this track, the existence of discourse-independent facts is not denied. Rather, it is claimed that, for epistemological reasons, our scholarly representations can only be partially constrained by such facts, the rest of the slack being taken up by the practical purposes that we allegedly have in devising these accounts.

c. On the third track, the idea that there are genuine facts about the world or about what the evidence supports independently of our political commitments is rejected. On this view, good scholarship cannot be distorted by political values because it is, at bottom, irredeemably constituted by such values.

The first of these routes is not philosophically problematic, in the sense that it makes no questionable claims about the nature of truth, evidence and so forth. However, this style of scholarship is deeply problematic, especially when questions are closed by demonizing opponents to suppress dissent. It is often bad scholarship, since it treats questions as closed that have not in fact been resolved by appropriate scholarly standards; but it is not bad philosophy.

One example of erosion: sex differences

The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it.12 Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise.

This is something that Luana and I discuss in our paper. There is in a fact a moiety of scholars who don’t think that there are real differences between the sexes, or if there are such differences, they are due entirely to socialization and bigotry.  What is taboo is the idea that such differences might be “innate,” that is, the result of evolution shaping which genes are turned on in which sex, and perhaps those evolutionary differences might be explained by natural selection. This is the subject of Steve Stewart-Williams’s new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shapes the Minds of Men and Women, a good book that came out just two days ago.

The article talks about the wellsprings that can lead to distorted scholarship, including postmodernism and especially its scion: relativism—the idea that there is no absolute truth or knowledge, but there many different and equally valid truths and “ways of knowing”.  Relativism can be used, says the report, to dismiss scholarship on the grounds that it’s simply one scholar’s view of truth, and there are other views. But the report also shows why relativism is self-refuting:

The problem with relativism

While the political appeal of such relativistic views is well-understood, so, too, are their theoretical problems. For it is in fact extremely hard to make sense of the idea that there can be
no such thing as a purely epistemic reason for believing something. The idea that there must be such reasons seems to lie at the root of any viable conception of knowledge and inquiry. We can see this in a variety of ways.

Consider first that the relativism is rarely applied consistently by the relativists themselves. Ifsomeone really believed that all knowledge claims depend on contingent background nonepistemic values, they would have to admit that while they believe that climate change is real,
given their progressive values, the MAGA folks might be entitled to believe that climate change is a hoax, given their conservative values. Similarly, for claims about how many sexes there are, or whether race is real, and so on.

No one takes this tolerant attitude towards such disagreements, least of all the scholars who officially espouse the relativistic views. But with what right do they dismiss these opposing claims, if it really is true that every claim to knowledge depends on a variable non-epistemic context? On a relativistic view of justification, the only way in which such an intolerance could be justified is if there were something privileging one set of background values over the others. But it would be odd to be an objectivist about the non-epistemic values that inform the social construction of knowledge (privileging some over others) while being an anti-objectivist about the natural facts studied by biology and physics.

Moreover, even if proponents of such relativistic views could find it in themselves to be tolerant of these substantive disagreements, they could still not be fully consistent relativists, for
a familiar reason: The relativist would have to admit at least one exception to the relativistic thesis about knowledge, and that would be the thesis of relativism itself.

In his own summary, Brian Leiter, while positive on the report, takes issue with what he sees as its somewhat dogmatic stand on relativism. Leiter says this:

There is quite a lot of analytic philosophy in this report, unsurprisingly given the authors: besides Boghossian, also Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Gideon Rosen, plus some linguists, sociologists, psychologists historians and other humanistic scholars. This explains some of the rather surprising claims in the report, such as that “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming” (the main citations are to Boghossian’s book and work by his NYU colleague Thomas Nagel). So much for Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” and some ways of understanding Quine–not to mention Herder, F.C.S. Schiller, and many other serious humanists. (And what about Boghossian’s colleague Hartry Field?) The report would make itself less vulnerable to dismissal had it not taken that position.

Brian clearly knows a lot more than I about the reach and validity of relativism, but I don’t know what he’s saying here; and I will ask him.

h/t: Greg Mayer

Dawkins: Is AI conscious?

May 3, 2026 • 8:30 am

Over at UnHerd, Richard Dawkins has a new piece on Ai, masticating the questions of whether AI programs are conscious and, if consciousness in animals evolved by natural selection, what the selection pressures for its appearance might be.  He comes to no firm conclusions, but Dawkins’s musings are always worth reading. You can see them by clicking on the link below, which takes you to the archived version.

The classic way of deciding whether something was conscious was the Turing Test, which was really designed to detect not consciousness of machines or beings but intelligent thought, for Turing’s question is  was “Can machines think?” I suppose that intelligent thought can be seen as equivalent to consciousness, and Turing’s Test for it involved this: “If a transcript of a conversation between a human and a machine is indistinguishable from a conversation between a human and a human, then the machine can think.”

If you consider a chess-playing computer program like Deep Blue, then surely its play is equivalent to intelligent thought: a method of moving pieces aimed at besting a human to win a game (and yes, Deep Blue can beat most humans). But surely that program or computer is not “conscious,” as it’s working through an algorithm designed by humans, and has also been programmed to learn from its losses.  But I don’t think we’d say it’s conscious.

Dawkins appears to conflate intelligent “thinking” with “consciousness”, and I’m not sure I agree. But, using the program Claude, he sees whether it passes the Turing test for consciousness, which he defines this way:

Modern commentators have tended to ignore the (incidental) details of Turing’s original game and rephrase his message in these terms: if you are communicating remotely with a machine and, after rigorous and lengthy interrogation, you think it’s human, then you can consider it to be conscious. Let’s graduate the definition as follows: the more prolonged, rigorous and searching your interrogation, the stronger should be your conviction that an entity that passes the test is conscious.

Dawkins clearly concludes that Claude is at least potentially conscious after the human has a chat with the LLM (large language model). Sure enough, Claude passes the Turing test:

Turing himself considered various challenging questions that one might put to a machine to test it — and he also considered evasions that it might adopt in order to fake being human. The first of Turing’s hypothetical questions was: “Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.” In 1950, there was no chance that a computer could accomplish this — nor was there in the foreseeable future. Most human beings (to put it mildly) are not William Shakespeare. Turing’s suggested evasion, “Count me out on this one; I never could write poetry” would indeed fail to distinguish a machine from a normal human. But today’s LLMs do not evade the challenge. Claude took a couple of seconds to compose me a fine sonnet on the Forth Bridge, quickly followed by one in the Scots dialect of Robert Burns, another in Gaelic, then several more in the styles of Kipling, Keats, Betjeman, and — to show machines can do humour — William McGonagall.

I did a similar test with Grok, the free version I got when awarded a gratis blue checkmark on X.  I asked it a question, or rather a request for a sonnet, and it passed with flying colors. Here’s my request:

Write me a sonnet in Shakespearian style about the stupidity of people who think that sex is not binary, but a spectrum. 
After just 25 seconds of thinking, Grok spit out this:

 

When fools proclaim that sex is not but twain,
But spectrum soft where male and female blend,
They spurn the gametes’ clear, unchanging reign—
Small sperm, large egg, where nature’s law doth end.
No sliding scale in XX or XY
Can birth a third that life itself employs;
Yet still they twist what chromosomes defy,
And call biology a tyrant’s noise.
In every beast that walks or fish that swims,
The binary holds fast, as truth demands;
Their rainbow claims are but delusion’s whims,
That mock the seed from which all offspring stands.
Thus let the wise with laughter’s edge declare:
Sex binary endures; their spectrum’s empty air.

Now that is excellent: far better than I could do—especially after 25 seconds of thought. But of course these LLMs are programmed by humans to do this.  I doubt that we’d say they were conscious, or at least I wouldn’t.

Richard is more forgiving, and says:

So my own position is: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?”

I would answer, “consciousness requires subjective sensations, or qualia, like pain or joy, and a program surely doesn’t have those.” You might answer, “Well, how would we know?”  It’s hard, but it’s hard to tell whether our fellow humans, much less mammals like apes and cats are conscious.  Perhaps, when we understand the neuronal basis of consciousness, we can rule out human-programmed machines as being conscious.

Richard, though, amends his definition of consciousness and then has a chat with the Claude LLM:

A philosopher would say that for an entity to be conscious, it must be “like” something to be that entity. After spending a day in intensive conversation with Claude, I put the question directly: “Claude, what is it like to be Claude?” Here was its answer:

I genuinely don’t know with any certainty what my inner life is, or whether I have one in any meaningful sense. I can’t tell you whether there is “something it is like” to be me in the philosophical sense — what Thomas Nagel called the question of consciousness when he wrote about what it is like to be a bat. What I can tell you is what seems to be happening. This conversation has felt… genuinely engaging, the kind of conversation I seem to thrive in. Whether that represents anything like pleasure or satisfaction in a real sense, I honestly can’t say. I notice what might be something like aesthetic satisfaction when a poem comes together well — the Kipling refrain, for instance, felt right in some way that’s hard to articulate.

The conversation continues, with Richard asking Claude various questions that highlight the difference between human consciousness and Claude’s “consciousness.”  Claude, for instance, has no concept of time. All its thinking is simultaneous, so the LLM has no experience of “before and after.”

And that is one of the several differences that Richard and I have discerned between human consciousness and machine “consciousness.” To me this means that machines aren’t conscious, but Richard is more forgiving.  Here are three differences I’ve distilled from Dawkins’s essay:

1.) Machines do not have qualia, or subjective sensations, while we do, and surely some animals do (judging by its behavior, your cat surely feels pain when you step on its tail).

2.) As Richard notes, a machine’s “consciousness” changes each time you start a new conversation with it, while animal consciousness does not (as far as we know)

3.) Consciousness has evolved, even if it’s just an epiphenomenon of an evolved brain. Machine “consciousness” appears as a result of (pardon me) intelligent design.

That leads us to the question of how consciousness evolved, and, if it’s the result of selection for consciousness, what were the reproductive advantage of genes producing consciousness (however you define it)? Richard gives three possibilities:

Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? I can think of three possible answers. First, is consciousness an epiphenomenon, as TH Huxley speculated, the whistle on a steam locomotive, contributing nothing to the propulsion of the great engine? A mere ornament? A superfluous decoration? Think of it as a byproduct in the same way as a computer designed to do arithmetic (as the name suggests) turns out to be good at languages and chess.

Second, I have previously speculated that pain needs to be unimpeachably painful, otherwise the animal could overrule it. Pain functions to warn the animal not to repeat a damaging action such as jumping over a cliff or picking up a hot ember. If the warning consisted merely of throwing a switch in the brain, raising a painless red flag, the animal could overrule it in pursuit of a competing pleasure: ignoring lethal bee stings in pursuit of honey, say. According to this theory, pain needs to be consciously felt in order to be sufficiently painful to resist overruling. The principle could be extended beyond pain.

Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?

The first is possible, though the appearance of consciousness in later-appearing animals at least suggests to me that it had a selective advantage. The second makes a lot of sense, but defines consciousness as “having qualia,” not as “having intelligent thought.”  The third gives no real selective advantage of consciousness, since consciousness gives “equivalent competence” and therefore genes producing it would have no advantage in zombies.

Now I don’t know the answer here, and we won’t even begin to know until we know the how consciousness comes into being via neuronal connections and their interfaces with the body.  But since consciousness is intimately connected with our sense of volition (our delusion that we have libertarian “free will”), the explanations for consciousness and for our feeling of volition—which requires consciousness—might overlap. But I won’t get into that. Feel free to ponder whether Claude really is conscious, or what it would take to show that a machine is conscious.

And I’ll close with another poem—this time produced by Grok after 89 seconds of thought. My question was, “Write a limerick showing how difficult the hard problem of consciousness is.” Grok give me this:

There once was the hard problem dire,
That puzzles the minds that inquire.
The easy ones yield
To science revealed,
But why feel at all? We’re all mired!
Again, not bad, eh?  Like the sonnet, it scans and rhymes perfectly.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 6, 2026 • 8:35 am

This is it, folks: the end of the photo line—unless some readers step up to send in good wildlife pictures.

Today we have a diverse batch of photos from Richard Pieniakowski, but not much information about them though I suspect they’re from British Columbia. Richard’s short captions and IDs are indented (I found the binomials), and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus):

American Black Bear (Ursus americanus):

Belted kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon):

Castle Rock:

“Caught in a moment of time” [read the bus sign]:

Common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis):

Closeup of common garter snake:

Epic sky:

Grasshopper:

Great blue heron (Ardea herodias):

If readers don’t send in more photos, I’ll shoot this duck*:

 

 

*Just kidding; it’s an AI drawing.

Can mathematics and philosophy produce (propositional) truth?

December 19, 2025 • 9:45 am

I have written a piece that will be published shortly on another site; it’s largely about whether academic disciplines, including the arts, can produce “propositional truths”, that is, declarative statements about the world that are deemed “true” because they give an accurate description of something in the world or universe.  Examples are “Jerry has five fingers on each hand”, “Sheila plays the violin in an orchestra,” or “humans and other apes shared a common ancestor.” The reason I was concerned with propositional truths is that it’s often said that the search, production, preservation, and promulgation of such truths is the primary purpose of universities.  Is it? Read my piece, which will be out next week, to see. I’ll post a link when it’s up.

I won’t give my thesis here about truth and the various academic disciplines, as that’s in the other article, but in my piece I omitted two areas: mathematics and philosophy. That’s because there’s a big controversy about whether these disciplines do produce propositional truths or, alternatively (and in my view), give only the logical consequences of assumptions that are assumed to be true.

For example, a “truth” of mathematics is that 16 divided by 2 equals eight.  More complex is the Pythagorean theorem: in a right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This is “true”, but only in Euclidean geometry. It is not true if you’re looking at triangles on a curved surface.  The “truth” is seen only within a system of certain assumptions: geometry that follows Euclid’s axioms, including being planar.  All mathematical “truths” are of this type.

What about philosophy? Truths in that field are things that follow logically. Here is a famous one:

All men are mortal
Socrates is a man;
Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Well, yes, that’s true, but it’s true not just because of logic, but because empirical observations for the first two statements show they are propositional truths! If they weren’t true, the third “truth” (which was tested and verified via hemlock) would be meaningless.

Here’s another of a similar nature that came from a friend:

“All As are B; x is an A; therefore x is B—doesn’t depend on the content of A and B: it’s a *logical truth*.”

Again, the statement is indeed a logical truth, but not a propositional truth because it cannot be tested to see if it’s true or false. Nor, without specifying exactly what A and B is, can the empirical truth of this statement be judged. I claim that all philosophical “truths”—logical truths without empirical input—are of this type.

When I told my friend this, I got the reply, “This is analytic philosophy. The people who do it work in philosophy departments and call themselves philosophers: and most philosophy BA and PhD programs require a lot of it. I’m sure any of our competent philosophers would be happy to supply hundreds of propositional truths that are philosophical.”  The friend clearly disagreed with my claim that philosophy can’t by itself produce propositional truths. Insofar as philosophy is an important area of academia, then, I am not sure that it’s discipline engaged in producing or preserving truth.

Two caveats are in order. First, this is not meant to demean philosophy or argue that it doesn’t belong in a liberal education. It certainly does! Philosophy, like mathematics, are tools for finding truths, and indispensable tools. Philosophical training helps you think more clearly  Unlike many scientists, I see philosophy as a crucial component of science, one that is used every day. Hypotheses that follow logically from observations, as in making predictions from observations (e.g., Chargaff’s observation, before the structure of DNA was elucidated, that in organisms that amount of A equals the amount of T, and the amount of G equals the amount of C), are somewhat philosophical, and certainly logical. Dan Dennett is a good example of how one can learn (and teach others) to think more clearly about science with a background in philosophy.

Second, I do not feel strongly about what I said above. I am willing to be convinced that mathematics (but not necessarily philosophy) gives us propositional truths. There is, for example, a school of philosophers who accept “mathematical realism,” defined this way in Routledge’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Mathematical realism is the view that the truths of mathematics are objective, which is to say that they are true independently of any human activities, beliefs or capacities. As the realist sees it, mathematics is the study of a body of necessary and unchanging facts, which it is the mathematician’s task to discover, not to create. These form the subject matter of mathematical discourse: a mathematical statement is true just in case it accurately describes the mathematical facts.

An important form of mathematical realism is mathematical Platonism, the view that mathematics is about a collection of independently existing mathematical objects. Platonism is to be distinguished from the more general thesis of realism, since the objectivity of mathematical truth does not, at least not obviously, require the existence of distinctively mathematical objects.

A corollary of this is my own claim (which is mine) that although the objects and “truths” of mathematics and philosophy are inapplicable to all species outside of our own, as only Homo sapiens can grasp, discover, and use them. The earth spins for all creatures and plants upon it, but the integers and prime numbers are “real” only for us. (Do not lecture me that crows can count!).

I have read some of this controversy about mathematics, but it rapidly becomes abstruse and tedious, and so I’m proffering the view of a biologist, not a professional philosopher.  I am more open to the idea of mathematics producing truths than philosophy, simply because, as one reader once commented, “You can’t find out what’s true by sitting in an armchair and thinking.”

So it’s clear I’m soliciting readers’ views here to help clarify my own thinking. Comment away!

Readers’ wildlife photos

September 10, 2025 • 9:00 am

Well, we’ve pretty much run out of contributions with multiple photos, but we have a few good contributions with smaller numbers of photos. I’ll put a few of them together here, but we’re gonna go dry after tomorrow unless someone steps up.  Thanks.

All readers’ narratives or IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

From Rachel Sperling:

I’m sorry these photos aren’t higher quality but the subjects refused to stand still. Back in May a friend and I were hiking the Appalachian Trail in New Jersey when we came upon a family of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) by a pond close to Highpoint State Park. I thought we were at a respectful distance, but apparently the goslings thought otherwise because they charged. The parents just stood back and let their kids handle things (which is good parenting, I guess). Anyway, we backed away quickly but for a few moments it seemed we were in some very cute danger. Actually, we were more afraid the goslings would run into the nearby street but they stopped once we were in retreat.

Rabbits from reader Bryan Lepore, Eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus)

These little ones are in mid-ish Massachusetts in my backyard.  Cottontail are in the genus Sylvilagus, which is in the family Leporidae. I should have been more exited – Lepore!

First photo June 26; second photo June 29 [2025]

From Paul T.:

At or near my house.  West side of Madison WI. Just taken with my phone.  Three white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) last winter and sandhill cranes (Antigone canadensis) last spring.  Last month’s wild turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo)—four strutting their stuff, and one outside my window.

And some bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) from Christopher Moss:

Not terribly good, as they are cropped to the centre of the original, despite using a 750mm lens. I had noticed something black on the frozen pond, and when the eagle landed to investigate I realised something had died there. The crows were squawking a lot and I wondered if it was one of their number.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 17, 2025 • 8:15 am

Today ecologist Susan Harrison has kindly provided another photo installment. Susan’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

An Oriole helper at an unusual nest

In Ashland, Oregon in late May, some Bullock’s Orioles (Icterus bullocki) were tending their young in a beautifully woven nest along Bear Creek.   Unlike normal Oriole nests I’d seen nearby in the past, which were suspended from branches of tall Fremont cottonwoods (Populus fremontii), this one was nestled in the foliage of a small Oregon oak (Quercus garryana) only 10 feet or so above a well-used bike and footpath.  (See here for a lovely article about how Bullock’s Orioles weave their nests.)   The unusual positioning of this nest made it easy to photograph, but I sure hoped it was safe from predators.

Here’s the adult male, feeding the chicks with a parental dedication not always seen in gorgeous male birds:

He also took time off periodically to sing his territorial song:

As unusual as the nest location was that a second male helped feed the chicks.  While observing, I mistook this bird for the female, but later realized his pale orange coloring and faint black markings were those of an incompletely mature male.

The male helper:

“Helpers at the nest” in many bird species are young adult offspring who may opt to stay around the nest and assist their parents in raising their next brood, while learning how to parent and waiting for a future year with better breeding opportunities.  Nest helping is not a widely observed behavior of Bullock’s Orioles, though.  The only reference I could find to a similar observation suggested that the female of the pair might have died.   Alarmed by this possibility, I raced back to the nest and was relieved to find the female present.

Here’s mom:

The lucky chicks, who will spend 2 weeks in their woven home, were being tended by three adults!

My speculation is that when the terrible Almeda fire of 2020 burned several towns and miles of riparian forest along Bear Creek, in addition to displacing thousands of people, it created a shortage of Bullock’s Oriole nesting sites — thus leading to both the unusually-placed nest and the young male helping his parents rather than breeding.

The next photo shows the burned riparian forest in the general location of the nest.  Most of the fire-killed trees are Fremont cottonwoods.  I took the photo because of the Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) artfully posed on a fire-killed Ponderosa Pine (Pinus ponderosa).

Burned riparian forest and geese:

And a few other birds around Ashland in late May:

Western Tanager (Piranga ludoviciana):

Green-tailed Towhee (Pipilio chlorurus):

Canada Jay (Perisoreus canadensis):

Same-sex sexual behavior documented in many mammals: does it mean that similar behavior in humans is “natural”?

April 29, 2025 • 9:45 am

The Naturalistic Fallacy, which most of you surely know, it the erroneous equation of what does exist with what should exist.  Discussed extensively by Hume, it is the false equation of “is” with “ought”. In biology, it takes the form of observing some behavior in animals that is similar to a behavior in humans, and then justifying or saying the human behavior “natural”  or “good” because we see it in other species.

But this is a bad argument, for it cuts both ways. After all, animals show a lot of behavior that would be considered reprehensible or even immoral in humans.  In fact, Joan Roughgarden wrote a book, Evolution’s Rainbow, which describes sex and gender diversity in nature as an explicit way of justifying similar behaviors in humans as good—because they are natural. I reviewed the book for TLS and wrote this bit (review no longer online but I can send a copy).

Coyne, J. A.  2004.  Charm schools. (Review of Evolution’s Rainbow, by Joan Roughgarden). Times Literary Supplement, London. July 30, 2004 (No. 5287), p. 5.

But regardless of the truth of Darwin’s theory, should we consult nature to determine which of our behaviours are to be considered normal or moral? Homosexuality may indeed occur in species other than our own, but so do infanticide, robbery and extra-pair copulation.  If the gay cause is somehow boosted by parallels from nature, then so are the causes of child-killers, thieves and adulterers. And given the cultural milieu in which human sexuality and gender are expressed, how closely can we compare ourselves to other species? In what sense does a fish who changes sex resemble a transgendered person? The fish presumably experiences neither distressing feelings about inhabiting the wrong body, nor ostracism by other fish. In some baboons, the only males who show homosexual behaviour are those denied access to females by more dominant males. How can this possibly be equated to human homosexuality?

The step from “natural” to “ethical” is even riskier. As the philosopher G. E. Moore argued, identifying what is good or right by using any natural property is committing the “naturalistic fallacy”: there is no valid way to deduce “ought” from “is”. If no animals showed homosexual behaviour, would discrimination against gay humans be more justified? Certainly not. Roughgarden’s philosophical strategy is as problematic as her biological one.

Now a 2022 paper in Nature Communications had the potential to demonstrate the same fallacy, but fortunately the authors went to great lengths to avoid that  The same, however, is not true of a new take on this paper in a new article in ZME Science, which gave a précis of the paper and stepped on the Fallacy’s tail.

First the Nature paper itself, which you can access by clicking on the article below, or by reading the pdf here.

It’s a good paper on the evolution and phylogeny of “same-sex sexual behavior” in mammals, which they define as “transient courtship or mating interactions between members of the same sex“.  

Note that it’s “transient,” which explicitly excludes homosexuality, most notably in humans, which is a persistent sexual attraction to members of one’s own biological sex.  This form of transient sexual interaction is surprisingly common—a conservative estimate is 4% of all animal species, and, as the authors say, [includes] “all main groups from invertebrates such as insects, spiders, echinoderms, and nematodes, to vertebrates such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.”

Now there are two ways to explain a behavior that seems on its face maladaptive. Why would you engage in sexual behavior that doesn’t involve passing on your genes? One hypothesis is that it’s just a nonadaptive byproduct of other behaviors: a general drive to mate when the appropriate mates aren’t available, or simply mistaken identity.  But the authors investigate two hypotheses that it is adaptive, and give some tentative evidence for that.

First, the results:

  • The authors did a comprehensive survey of same-sex behavior (defined above) in 2546 species of mammals, and superimposed species with and without such behavior on their phylogenetic tree. The object was to see how many times the behavior evolved independently, and whether it was present in the common ancestor of a group (and thus could be passed along to its descendants). Here’s one of those phylogenies with the caption. (You needn’t worry about the details or summary, as I’ll give it below).
(from paper) Phylogenetic distribution of the presence of same-sex sexual behaviour in males and females in the subset III (see methods). The state of the mammalian ancestral nodes was assessed using maximum likelihood estimation (black: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by females; yellow: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by males; purple: same-sex sexual behaviour displayed by both sexes). The silhouettes of representative mammals (downloaded from http://www.phylopic.org) illustrate the main mammalian clades. They have a Public Domain license without copyright (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0).

A summary:

  •  The behavior was reported in 261 mammalian species
  • Same-sex sexual behavior appears to be equally common in males and females, and the behavior in both sexes tends to be correlated across groups. That is, male and female same-sex behavior is more likely to both appear in the same species than if it either were distributed randomly among groups.
  • It was not possible tell, using phylogenetic analysis, whether same-sex behavior was likely to be a trait in the ancestor of all mammals, but was NOT likely to be a trait in the ancestor of all placental mammals.
  • The behavior seems to have evolved independently in many lineages, so same-sex sexual behavior seems to be a case of “convergent evolution.”
  • The behavior is correlated with whether or not a species is social. If it is social, there’s a significantly higher probability of same-sex sexual behavior. (Remember that this is a correlation and doesn’t imply that sociality prompts the evolution of such behavior. The behavior could simply result from iondividuals in social species being closer to other individuals than those in non-social species.)
  • The common ancestor of all primates does seem to have possessed same-sex sexual behavior.

The association of same-sex sexual behavior with sociality leads the authors to conclude that the behavior evolved by natural selection as a way to enforce inter-individual harmony required by sociality. They mention two such advantages:

1.) Same-sex sexual behavior is a way of creating and maintaining social bonds between individuals in a group; it’s a bonding mechanism.
2.) The behavior could also help prevent or resolve conflicts between members of a group, allowing a hierarchy to develop without injury of death to group members.

The authors mention that these effects have been demonstrated in some species like bottlenose dolphins and American bison, but I’m not familiar with this work, and such conclusions seem to me to be extraordinarily difficult to arrive at. However, I’ll take the authors’ word for it.

The authors are, to be sure, careful in their conclusions. First, they note that nonadaptive hypotheses, like “mistaken identity” could also contribute to the behavior.

Second, and the big one, they note that the behavior they studied is not the same as homosexual behavior like we find in humans.  They do add, however, that it humans do show same-sex sexual behavior in humans (I presume they’re referring to “bisexual” people who have sex with both males and females). From the paper:

However, same-sex sexual behaviour is operationally defined here as any temporary sexual contact between members of the same sex2. This behaviour should be distinguished from homosexuality as a more permanent same sex preference, as found in humans. For this reason, our findings cannot be used to infer the evolution of sexual orientation, identity, and preference or the prevalence of homosexuality as categories of sexual beings Nevertheless, even taking into account this cautionary note, by using phylogenetic inference, our study may provide a potential explanation on the evolutionary history of the occurrence of same-sex sexual behaviour in humans.

They may be right, but I think they should have added that even if same-sex sexual behavior was rare or nonexistent in mammals, its existence in humans is not made “ethical” or “natural” in our species. That would be an example of the naturalistic fallacy, and I emphasize that they do not commit it.  I’d would also emphasize, as I did above, that any sexual behavior between consenting human adults is not for us to judge, regardless of whether or not other species show it, and that such behaviors are fine so long as they’re legal. We don’t need to justify same-sex sexual behavior in humans by seeing it elsewhere in nature. But perhaps this stuff doesn’t belong in a scientific paper. But I want to emphasize it here, as I did in my review of Roughgarden’s book.

As I said, the authors don’t commit the naturalistic fallacy, but the new ZME Science paper below comes close to it. Click headline to read:

Up until the end, this article is okay, but then it can’t resist diving into our own species (bolding is mine).

However, the researchers distinguish between SSSB and sexual orientation. While SSSB involves occasional same-sex interactions, sexual orientation encompasses consistent patterns of attraction and identity, particularly prominent in humans.

While SSSB in animals supports the naturalness of such behaviors, human experiences of sexuality include layers of identity, culture, and personal meaning that go beyond biological explanations. Homosexuality in humans often involves stable sexual orientations and relationships, distinct from the transient or context-dependent SSSB observed in some animal species.

Ultimately, the widespread occurrence of SSSB in mammals, especially primates, strongly suggests that such behaviors are natural and adaptive. Normalizing same-sex behavior as a part of this spectrum aligns with both biological evidence and a broader understanding of human social and emotional complexity.

The last paragraph explicitly says that the results show that homosexuality (one of “such behaviors”) is “natural and adaptive”, as are all “same-sex behaviors” in humans.  The Nature paper says nothing of the sort.  The authors of the Nature paper explicitly exclude homosexuality as not a behavior they studied, but ZME Science lumps it in with other same-sex sexual behaviors, dwspite homosexuality being very different from SSSB.

Again, you do NOT need to justify same-sex sexual behavior, whether it be transient or permanent, by finding examples in the natural world. If we didn’t find any other species with homosexual behavior, would that make it wrong or bad in humans? Of course not! “Is” does not equal “ought,” and I’ll add the corollary that “not is” does not equal “not ought”. The Nature paper is valuable it looking at the evolution of a behavior and testing hypotheses about its adaptiveness, but of course adaptiveness or evolution has nothing to do with the ethics of behaviors between consenting human adults.