“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

These are the words of Neil Armstrong, reflecting on the sight of looking down on Earth from the moon, 239,000 miles away. He was experiencing the overview effect, a psychological phenomenon that has been noted in astronauts reporting an “overwhelming emotion and feelings of identification with humankind and the planet as a whole.”

Today, NASA’s Artemis II astronaut Victor Glover is popularizing the overview effect with nearly the same message. I had the honor of watching him speak last month at the 2026 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference:

Years ago, I wrote about the psychology of awe for Psychology Today and today I wanted to share that essay again:

These are the words of Neil Armstrong, reflecting on the sight of looking down on Earth from the moon, 239,000 miles away.¹ He was experiencing the overview effect, a psychological phenomenon that has been noted in astronauts reporting an “overwhelming emotion and feelings of identification with humankind and the planet as a whole.”²

This awe-inspiring experience is not solely one of positive appreciation and wonder, however. It is tinged with an eye-opening sadness, fear, and recognition of vulnerability.

There are several interesting questions to be asked here. Why does such a breathtaking view prompt fear and vulnerability, rather than our traditional expectation of excitement in the face of something truly awesome? How is it that we have a built-in psychophysiological response to something as far removed from our life on Earth as space travel? Why do we experience awe in the first place—does it have any benefits?

The Biological and Evolutionary Roots of Awe

The answers to all of these questions are rooted in our biology and evolutionary past. We did not always have the capacity to experience complex emotions like awe—most animals do not—yet all such complex emotions are created from the building blocks of more evolutionary ancient phenomena.

Perhaps the best theory for understanding this is the Hierarchical Model of Approach-Avoidance Motivation, a relatively recent synthesis of evolutionary biology and neuropsychology posed by psychologist Andrew Elliot.³ The first basic tenet of this theory is that all animal behavior is governed by a combination of their approach towards positive stimuli (e.g., food, shelter, or sex) and avoidance of negative stimuli (i.e., danger).

Approach-avoidance behavior is observed across all levels of the animal kingdom: Even single-cellular amoebae will approach or withdraw from different stimuli depending on how different wavelengths of light expand or contract the cell’s protoplasm.⁴,⁵

In animals that have evolved a more sophisticated central nervous system, a number of different approach and avoidance motivations may compete against each other. For example, what do you do if there is a tasty donut guarded by a lion? That depends on weighing how hungry you are (approach) against how dangerous you believe the lion to be (avoidance).

Or perhaps there is no lion, and you must decide whether to forego immediate gratification in order to obtain the long-term satisfaction of sticking to your diet. Both of these motivations exist and give rise to conflicting emotions.

In the end, however, some motivations will outcompete others: They are arranged hierarchically.³ This hierarchical model gives rise to endless possibilities of how different approach and avoidance stimuli may be combined to shape our emotions, cognition, and behavior.

The experience of awe is one such example of a complex assembling of motivations, but we did not always know this. Historically, awe has been considered an elusive experience that transcends human understanding.

The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant referred to this phenomenon as “the sublime.” In his 1764 book, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, the sublime is portrayed as an ineffable experience of both fear and wonder: something which “arouse[s] enjoyment but with horror.”⁶ Despite its seemingly indescribable nature, Kant’s intuition shows us that the experience of awe bears the markers of both classic approach and avoidance responses, and may be psychologically deconstructed into more primary emotions.

The neurophysiology of awe’s constituent parts, fear and wonder, is well understood. This is particularly true of fear, which, due to its clear survival benefits, is one of our most primitive emotions.

There is remarkable consistency in the processing of fear throughout the evolutionary ladder: In almost all mammals, fear is processed in the same ancient region of the brain, the amygdala, through neurochemical responses in the NMDA channels.⁷ Across species, these signals cause basic physiological changes in the sympathetic nervous system, such as increased heart rates and production of the stress hormone cortisol, in addition to more complex predatory-response mechanisms.⁷

For example, mice, cats, and chimpanzees will all experience piloerection when threatened: The hairs on their bodies will puff up, in order to look big and scare off predators.⁸,⁹ Though humans have lost most of our body hair over the last few million years, we have retained this evolutionarily ancient response as the familiar sensation of goosebumps, both when experiencing fear and awe.¹⁰

In contrast to fear, wonder is a more complex emotion to understand from an evolutionary perspective, and may be an experience more unique to humans. We may break down the experience of wonder into two forms: adoration and admiration.¹¹

Adoration is a natural extension of, or appreciation for, our positive emotions in response to approach stimuli. For example, experiencing wonder at the sight of a lush landscape or beautiful waterfall may be an approach motivation towards an environment full of resources that would enhance our chances of survival, whether this is recognized consciously or not. Adoration, therefore, is a form of wonder directed at things.

Admiration, on the other hand, is a form of wonder directed at agents and is closely related to the desire to imitate.¹¹ Imitation requires greater cognitive capacity in order to manifest social intelligence known as “theory of mind” (i.e., the ability to understand others’ mental states), but its survival benefits are clear.¹² For example, a pack-hunting animal that experiences any form of admiration for superior hunters may become motivated to imitate them, thereby increasing its chances of securing its next meal.

The Adaptive Utility of Awe

Understanding the origins of its constituent parts, we can now begin to understand the adaptive utility of awe. Imagine yourself again in Neil Armstrong’s shoes (or suit), looking down from space at the sight of the planet Earth, containing the whole of humanity, overshadowed by your thumb. As you realize the profundity of this perspective, your heart rate increases, you get goosebumps, the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and you experience that sublime feeling of both fear and wonder.

The wonder is obvious, in both its forms: adoration for your beautiful life-sustaining home, and admiration for the great minds and technological advancements that brought us the power of spaceflight. Fear, and its characteristic physiological response, come at the recognition of your own vulnerability: If there are perspectives from which the entire Earth appears smaller than a thumbnail, how much smaller does that make you as a human living on that massive, tiny marble?

The experience of awe is so deeply biologically ingrained in us that it can be triggered not only by extraterrestrial stimuli but by stimuli that do not actually exist. Psychedelic drugs can reliably induce awe-inspiring hallucinations through simple neurochemical reactions in the brain.¹³

While recreational use of these substances is not to be taken lightly, in clinical settings, they may offer remarkable psychological and health-related benefits. For example, a 2018 study by researchers at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University found that administering psilocybin to cigarette smokers in controlled settings resulted in smoking cessation in 87 percent of participants, 92 percent of whom remaining non-smokers at 12-month follow-up.¹⁴

Most notably, the experience of awe appears to be central to this process. In a related study by the same group, only psilocybin-administered participants who reported “mystical experiences” saw clinically significant reductions in depression and anxiety.¹⁵ In other words, participants who ingested the drug but did not experience awe had no benefit.

Fortunately, the psychological benefits of awe can be achieved without the use of potentially dangerous (and often illegal) hallucinogens. Fundamentally, awe is a matter of perspective-taking. It does not matter whether this perspective-taking comes as a result of being shown awe-inspiring scenery, taking mind-altering drugs, or simple acts of mindfulness. Psychological studies have shown that awe can be induced by experiencing virtual reality,¹⁶ reflecting on past spiritual experiences,¹⁷ or simply thinking about nature.¹⁸

What these forms of perspective-taking all have in common is a feeling of “small self.”¹⁹ When encountering something truly awesome, we feel small and vulnerable, hence the physiological responses associated with fear (i.e., goosebumps and increased heart rate). Moreover, our brain’s default mode network becomes deactivated, and the frontoparietal network becomes strongly activated.²⁰ In other words, the background noise dims down, and we become more attentive and primed for problem-solving.

Paradoxically, though these neurophysiological responses bear the mark of fight or flight, the “small self” has repeatedly and cross-culturally been associated with collective engagement, gratitude, and prosocial behavior.¹⁹,²¹ A five-experiment study by researchers across the United States and Canada found that inducing awe in a lab setting, through mindful recollection of past experiences of awe, caused participants to become more generous and prosocial in economic games, and more concerned about ethical values.¹⁹

The effects of awe were independent of and stronger than other emotions, including compassion. There is something unique about the small self, and its associated feelings of interconnectedness and vulnerability, that causes individuals to re-evaluate their priorities and behave for the greater good.

Awe is a mysterious phenomenon; it is “the sublime” which puzzled philosophers for ages. Yet thanks to modern advancements in neuropsychology, grounded in evolutionary theory, it can be understood as a complex adaptive emotion arising from a combination of more fundamental approach and avoidance motivations. Experiences of both fear and wonder are well-understood, and at times, they uniquely overlap to give us that truly awe-inspiring combination of vulnerability and interconnectedness.

The benefits of experiencing awe are not limited merely to the sublime feeling of wonder, or even to the lifestyle changes that may occur as a result of re-evaluating one’s priorities, such as smoking cessation. It is a shift of perspective that promotes ethical concern, open-mindedness, prosociality, and generosity. Awe is therefore not only a valuable experience for the individual but a prerequisite for our collective sociological and psychological well-being. Best of all, it can be induced at will through simple mindfulness exercises, such as reflecting on nature or gratitude, in a manner that will literally change your brain, body, and behavior. The benefits of awe are truly awesome.

References

1. NASA Earth Observatory. (2017, October 2). Right Here, Right Now. Retrieved from: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/91494/right-here-right-now

2. Yaden, D. B., Iwry, J., Slack, K. J., Eichstaedt, J. C., Zhao, Y., Vaillant, G. E., & Newberg, A. B. (2016). The overview effect: awe and self-transcendent experience in space flight. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000086

3. Elliot, A. J. (2006). The Hierarchical Model of Approach-Avoidance Motivation. Motivation and Emotion, 30(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-006-9028-7

4. Schneirla, T. C. (1959). An evolutionary and developmental theory of biphasic processes underlying approach and withdrawal. In M. R. Jones (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1959 (pp. 1–42). University of Nebraska Press.

5. Elliot, A. J., & Covington, M. (2001). Approach and avoidance motivation in achievement settings. Educational Psychology Review, 13(4), 465–465. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1009009018235

6. Kant, I. (2004). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. (J. T. Goldthwait, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1764).

7. Fendt, M., & Fanselow, M. S. (1999). The neuroanatomical and neurochemical basis of conditioned fear. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 23(5), 743–760. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0149-7634(99)00016-0

8. Masuda, Y., Suzuki, M., Akagawa, Y., & Takemura, T. (1999). Developmental and pharmacological features of mouse emotional piloerection. Experimental Animals, 48(3), 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1538/expanim.48.209

9. Muller, M. N., Kahlenberg, S. M., Emery Thompson, M., & Wrangham, R. W. (2007). Male coercion and the costs of promiscuous mating for female chimpanzees. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 274(1612), 1009–1014. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2006.0206

10. Benedek, M., & Kaernbach, C. (2011). Physiological correlates and emotional specificity of human piloerection. Biological Psychology, 86(3), 320–329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.12.012

11. Schindler, I., Zink, V., Windrich, J., & Menninghaus, W. (2013). Admiration and adoration: Their different ways of showing and shaping who we are. Cognition & Emotion, 27(1), 85–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2012.698253

12. Heyes, C. (2001). Causes and consequences of imitation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(6), 253–261. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01661-2

13. Hendricks, P. S. (2018). Awe: a putative mechanism underlying the effects of classic psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. International Review of Psychiatry, 30(4), 331–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540261.2018.1474185

14. Noorani, T., Garcia-Romeu, A., Swift, T. C., Griffiths, R. R., & Johnson, M. W. (2018). Psychedelic therapy for smoking cessation: qualitative analysis of participant accounts. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(7), 756–769. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881118780612

15. Griffiths, R. R., Johnson, M. W., Carducci, M. A., Umbricht, A., Richards, W. A., Richards, B. D., ... & Klinedinst, M. A. (2016). Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 30(12), 1181–1197. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881116675513

16. Chirico, A., Ferrise, F., Cordella, L., & Gaggioli, A. (2018). Designing awe in virtual reality: An experimental study. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2351. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02351

17. Preston, J. L., & Shin, F. (2017). Spiritual experiences evoke awe through the small self in both religious and non-religious individuals. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 212–221. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.11.006

18. Howell, A. J., Dopko, R. L., Passmore, H. A., & Buro, K. (2011). Nature connectedness: Associations with well-being and mindfulness. Personality and Individual Differences, 51(2), 166–171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.037

19. Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883–899. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000018

20. van Elk, M., Arciniegas Gomez, M. A., van der Zwaag, W., Van Schie, H. T., & Sauter, D. (2019). The neural correlates of the awe experience: Reduced default mode network activity during feelings of awe. Human Brain Mapping, 40(12), 3561–3574. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.24616

21. Bai, Y., Maruskin, L. A., Chen, S., Gordon, A. M., Stellar, J. E., McNeil, G. D., Peng, K., & Keltner, D. (2017). Awe, the diminished self, and collective engagement: Universals and cultural variations in the small self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(2), 185–209. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000087

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Last week I had the honor of attending, for the second time, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) Conference in London. I joined over 4,000 other attendees, and speakers including prominent academics, entrepreneurs, and political leaders motivated by a shared optimistic vision for the future.

Outside the venue, a cluster of protestors had assembled ostensibly opposed to our perspectives on energy and technological progress. It was, fittingly, the middle of a record heatwave. It has been the warmest June on record for England with temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit). And the country was singularly ill-equipped to cool itself. Only about five percent of British homes have air conditioning, against nearly ninety percent of American homes.

While the last two centuries of industrial progress have indeed contributed to global warming, its impact is minor. That was the argument of speaker Bjorn Lomborg, rational environmentalist and champion of human progress, whose perspective on climate was recently vindicated by Bill Gates. He argues that cheap, plentiful energy is the single most powerful anti-poverty instrument humanity has ever devised, more transformative for the dispossessed than any wealth transfer program, because it is the substrate on which food, water, medicine, sanitation, transport, and education all run.

Also speaking at the conference was physicist Steve Koonin, arguing that warming is real but manageable and comparatively minor, and that the loudest doom forecasts rest on implausible assumptions and unreliable models. In fact, extreme cold kills far more people than extreme heat at a ratio of nearly nine to one.

There is a stubborn intuition in modern culture, one that ARC is largely protesting against, that consumption is sin and that the moral response to a warming planet is to use less.

Air conditioning is a useful test case, because it is treated in Britain as a guilty indulgence rather than the life-saving technology it is. An innovation that keeps people alive and lets them think clearly year-round is not an extravagance to be rationed. It may well pay for itself, not only in lives but in the compounded output of minds that are not, for weeks at a time, too hot to work. As economist Julian Simon famously argued, human intelligence is the ultimate resource. Energy is nearly unlimited throughout the universe, but only intelligence can turn matter into useful work.

Nearly everyone at the conference wants more clean energy, including speaker and U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The disagreement with the protestors outside is about the route more so than the destination.

In the nineteenth century, whale oil was a prized commodity for its use as a long-lasting fuel for lantern lighting, and whales were being hunted nearly to extinction. We did not save them by resolving collectively to hunt fewer whales and rationing oil, though that is exactly what environmentalists at the time advocated for. Whaling declined because kerosene, petroleum, and eventually the electric light made whale oil obsolete. Degrowth would have kept us hunting whales, only more guiltily and less efficiently. The way off fossil fuels is not to burn less and suffer more; it is to innovate until the cleaner option is also the cheaper and better one, at which point the transition takes care of itself, as it always has.

This is why the panic over artificial intelligence’s energy appetite strikes me as exactly backward. The data centers needed are indeed power hungry, and their consumption is real and rising. But the wager worth making is that going all-in in the short term is the surest path to clean and sustainable energy in the long term. The same systems now straining the grid are accelerating the materials science, nuclear fusion and fission research, and the grid optimization on which any durable transition depends. To throttle the technology now, in the name of the emissions it currently produces, is to insist on hunting whales forever rather than inventing the light bulb.

Not all of the conference was so techno-optimist. Technology, several speakers observed, is a magnifier, a Cambrian explosion that accelerates either abundance or dissolution depending on the values that steer it. That framing invites a question no engineer can answer: toward what end? It was on this terrain, the terrain of meaning, that the conference’s genuine philosophical divide came into view, and it is also where ARC’s religious conservative base parts company with the classically liberal tradition I inhabit.

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks gave the fullest statement of the worry, describing what he called a crisis of meaning and a corresponding science of happiness. He spoke of a psychogenic epidemic, that twenty to thirty percent of young men and women reporting that their lives lack meaning. His diagnosis located the cause not in any material want but in mind and culture alone, and he reached for Iain McGilchrist’s pseudoscientific theory, closer to phrenology than contemporary neuroscience, that a civilization can become dangerously dominated by its analytic left hemisphere at the expense of its creative right. The prescription, across many of the talks, was communal and often explicitly religious.

The tendency toward manufactured crisis was clearest on the subject I know best. The actor and campaigner Sophie Winkleman delivered a forceful case against childhood screens, against educational technology, and against the obscenity of the modern internet, arguing that screen-raised children lose the capacity for imagination and play and that the physical embodiment of words on a printed page is measurably better for the developing brain. Her argument was moral panic dressed in the borrowed authority of developmental science. The identical alarm was raised about the printing press, the novel, radio, and television, each in turn, and each time the predicted catastrophe failed to arrive.

As I’ve written, the largest synthesis of the evidence on screens and mental health finds that effects are small, inconsistent, and confounded by other social-environmental factors. To the extent that screens are associated with decreased attention span, these are offset by other cognitive gains in multitasking and fast-information processing. To the extent social media use is associated with negative mental health, it is often because kids who are already depressed and lonely seek out connection online, or because the internet has improved mental health awareness.

One does not establish a claim by assembling the studies that flatter it and omitting the rest. I would not do it in the other direction and pretend that technology is always beneficial, because everything is a matter of tradeoffs.

My friend and ARC speaker Rob Henderson coined the concept of luxury beliefs: ideas that confer status on the affluent while inflicting costs on those without their advantages. The irony is that ARC harbors luxury beliefs of its own. To insist that every child be raised screen-free, on pencil and paper, is easy for parents who can afford small classes, private tutors, and homes full of books. It is a far costlier prescription for the poor child whose cheapest path to a decent education may be a tablet and a capable AI tutor. A belief that costs its holder nothing while imposing real costs on the disadvantaged is a luxury belief whether it issues from the progressive left or the reconstructionist right.

That is where I profoundly disagree with some of the policy prescriptions put forth at ARC, including social media bans and attempts to regulate “obscene” content under the guise of protecting minors. As I and my colleagues have written, these regulations do not work, and they undermine privacy and freedom for adults.

I say this all as a friendly critic. ARC is, at heart, a religious and communitarian project, and its instinct when it perceives a spiritual vacuum is to fill it. My concern is that some of their crises are manufactured self-fulfilling prophecies. To call a widespread human experience a psychogenic epidemic is to perform, at civilizational scale, the same concept creep that has driven psychiatric overdiagnosis in the clinic, where ordinary struggle is steadily reclassified as pathology.

Take the crisis of meaning. I do not believe that it is found in rising rates of depression and anxiety, because the diagnostic criteria themselves have continued to widen, even while suicide rates are decreasing worldwide. But, the crisis of meaning is real insofar as many, many people believe it is real, and I speculate that may in part explain the worldwide fertility crisis. Having a child is the most meaningful optimistic bet on the future one can make, and increasingly young people are not taking that bet. This is even as speakers and prominent commentators on fatherhood and masculinity Nick Freitas and John Papola, not to mention the founder of ARC who was tragically absent due to illness, Jordan Peterson, have all argued: responsibility is the key to meaning, and parenting is one of the surest ways to responsibility.

Konstantin Kisin argued that when he said that liberty and responsibility are mutually dependent. Moral compulsion is not virtue. A citizen coerced into the right behavior has demonstrated nothing about his character. Meaning is found in freely chosen problems worth solving, in voluntary attachments and self-directed sacrifice, and the moment a community or a government undertakes to prescribe it, the thing it produces is conformity rather than purpose.

I have argued before that the so-called crisis of meaning is better understood as a byproduct of progress than as evidence against it. Our attention evolved to track threats and losses more closely than gains, and in an environment saturated with the visible troubles of the entire planet, that negativity bias produces a mood far grimmer than the underlying facts warrant. To feel unmoored amid an abundance our ancestors could not have imagined is not a disease. It is the predictable psychology of people who have won a birth lottery they did not earn and have not yet decided what to do with it.

What we most need to defend is not any particular tradition but the classically liberal framework that lets traditions compete, persuade, and renew themselves without compulsion. That framework prioritizes liberty above all, not only the positive rights we are owed but the negative liberty to be left alone, to be wrong, and to arrive at meaning by our own path rather than one assigned to us. Freedom is not one value among many. It is the precondition for the others, because progress, virtue, and meaning are worth little when they are coerced. A society that legislates its answers to the deepest human questions will harvest compliance where it hoped for conviction.

ARC takes its name from the Biblical Noah’s Ark, and from the conviction that history turns on the actions of a committed few. A small number of responsible people, willing to build when everyone else is content to complain, can bend the course of a civilization. ARC is itself evidence for the claim.

From courageous feminists such as speaker Sall Grover and my friend Helen Joyce, to my colleagues at the Open Therapy Institute, which aims to combat bias within the mental health care field, the small but mighty numbers at ARC are making a difference in culture and policy.

My favorite talk of the conference by far was the NASA astronaut Victor Glover, who months earlier had piloted Artemis II, humanity’s first crewed voyage around the Moon in more than half a century. Glover spoke about the awesome psychology of awe, and about looking back at Earth to see not nations but a single fragile oasis, a spaceship we all crew together.

If having a child is the most optimistic bet on the future an individual can make, then leaving our home planet to one day colonize the galaxy is the most optimistic bet a species can make.

To place that bet, individually and as a species, is itself an answer to the question ARC keeps asking. To be a responsible citizen is not to obey a prescribed set of virtues, nor to ration one’s life against catastrophes that never arrive. It is to build when others only complain, to choose one’s attachments and sacrifices freely, and to wager on the future rather than against it. The vessel worth building carries freedom as its cargo, because the surest way to save a civilization is not to compel its virtues but to protect the liberty in which virtue, meaning, and progress can be freely chosen. Responsible citizenship is agency over fear.

It is fashionable now to be against IQ. Against the tests, against the construct, against the idea that some children are, in a measurable and partly inborn way, smarter than others. A recent New York Magazine attack on gifted and talented programs is the latest offender. It dishonestly argues that the concept of measurable intelligence and meritocratic education standards are themselves lies. Sophistry at its finest.

Can intelligence be reliably measured?

The modern story begins in 1905, when psychologist Alfred Binet built the first practical intelligence test to identify French schoolchildren who needed extra help. He compared a child’s performance to age norms and produced a single summary figure, the origin of the familiar intelligence quotient (IQ). Around the same time, the British psychologist Charles Spearman noticed that performance on wildly different mental tasks, vocabulary and spatial puzzles and arithmetic, tended to rise and fall together. A person good at one was, on average, good at the others. Spearman called the shared factor behind this pattern g, general intelligence, and to extract it he helped invent factor analysis, the statistical engine that still powers most of the social sciences.

The reliable measurement of IQ, a proxy for general intelligence, is among the most robust findings in all of psychology. Cognitive test scores predict school performance, job performance, income, physical health, and even how long a person lives, across decades and across cultures, with a consistency the rest of social science can only envy.

The machinery that makes cognitive measurement work, standardization, reliability, factor analysis, predictive validity, is the same machinery that underwrites survey research, personality assessment, educational testing, and political polling. Factor analysis was born in this corner of psychology. Declare that a well-validated cognitive test measures nothing real and you have not retired the IQ test alone. You have pulled the load-bearing wall out from under every instrument by which a society takes its own measurements. You do not get to keep the surveys you like and discredit the method that licenses them.

It’s true that scores in very young children shift from year to year. Coaching and a tired or anxious morning can move a result. The instability of scores in young children is a fair indictment of one-shot testing across development, which is genuinely poor practice. But it is an argument for retesting, not for abandonment, and the longitudinal data run the opposite way as children grow. Far from dissolving, cognitive ability consolidates with age into one of the more stable traits we know how to measure. As for the worry that a score is just a snapshot of one day, a snapshot that predicts your income and your health forty years later is not merely a snapshot.

Test items can carry cultural baggage, like the duck that is supposed to say oink or the weathervane a city child has never seen. Cultural bias towards the types of symbolic mental representation most common in Western education systems is a real limitation, which is exactly why psychometricians spent decades building less culturally saturated tests, like visual and nonverbal reasoning measures of intelligence. A biased item is an argument for a better item, not for the claim that the underlying ability does not exist.

And the history of intelligence testing includes genuinely ugly chapters, from justifying racism to eugenics and forced sterilization of the intellectually disabled. Binet himself objected to the way his tool was later used to stamp permanent verdicts on children. But the history of abuse is a charge against people, not against the instrument. Statistics, medicine, and technology have all been bent toward evil ends, and we do not therefore conclude that science is a myth.

Is intelligence genetic?

A fair critic might grant that the tests measure something real and stable, and still ask whether that something is inborn or merely inherited advantage, the residue of good schools and full bookshelves. Twin studies are necessary to know to what degree intelligence is driven by genes or environment.

Identical twins share all of their genes; fraternal twins share about half. If a trait is shaped by genes, identical twins should resemble each other more, and the size of that gap estimates heritability. For IQ the results have been replicated across dozens of studies, many countries, and many decades. Heritability of intelligence is high, and it climbs with age, from roughly 0.4 in childhood to about 0.6 in adolescence to somewhere near 0.7 to 0.8 in adulthood, meaning up to 80 percent of the variance in intelligence is genetic. Even identical twins separated at birth and raised in different homes still grow up to resemble each other in IQ. Meanwhile the influence of the shared family environment, the bookshelves and the schools, fades toward zero by adulthood. Unrelated children raised in the same household barely resemble each other in intelligence as adults. Molecular genetics, reading DNA directly, has since confirmed the basic picture the twins implied.

Skeptics note, correctly, that environment matters most when a child is very young, and treat this as evidence that intelligence is soft and reshapeable. But the twin data say the reverse. As people age and begin selecting the environments their dispositions pull them toward, genetic influence rises and the family signal fades. The window in which enrichment has the most leverage is early childhood. That is an argument for finding and feeding ability early, not for pretending it is not there.

Inequality is the price of diversity

The motive behind attacks on intelligence research is usually equity. Activists are rightly concerned about disparate outcomes and the many students who lag behind. But inequality is not a problem unique to our education system, capitalism, or even to human societies. Inequality is the inevitable result of the wondrous genetic diversity produced by evolution.

Picture the fairest start imaginable. Every child raised in the same home, fed the same food, taught by the same teachers, loved in the same measure. They would still diverge. Unless the children were genetically identical (and a species of clones would not last a generation, quickly wiped out by inbreeding or parasites), random variation would guarantee disparate outcomes. Some would be quicker, some calmer, some bolder, some more fragile. Chance further compounds inequality: an injury here, a lucky encounter there, a book that lands at the right age. By adulthood even the egalitarian nursery has produced unequal lives. This is not a flaw in the design of society. It is the design of life. Selection has nothing to work on but differences.

So the real question is never whether children differ in ability. They do, measurably, heritably, from very early on. The question is what we do once we admit it. Here the fashionable answer makes its revealing mistake. Confronted with an inequality it finds intolerable, it attacks the instrument that reveals the inequality rather than the inequality itself. The thermometer reports a fever, so we smash the thermometer. But the test did not create the differences between children. It only made them legible. Breaking it does not make children equal. It makes them illegible, which is a different thing, and usually a worse one.

What bad education policy looks like

The clearest place to watch this experiment run is not the elementary school but the university, where the war on measurement went furthest. In 2021, under legal pressure and in the name of equity, the University of California, the most prestigious public system in the country, went fully test-blind, refusing to look at SAT or ACT scores in admissions at all. Five years later the results are in, and they are brutal. At UC San Diego, the share of incoming students needing math remediation rose from roughly one in two hundred in 2020 to about one in eight in 2025. The number testing below a high school math level climbed nearly thirtyfold, and most of those students place below a middle school level. More than 1,400 UC faculty, many of them in math and the sciences, have signed an open letter pleading for the return of the SAT and ACT math requirement, because they are now reteaching middle school arithmetic to undergraduates in calculus lectures.

The system’s own faculty task force had concluded, before the policy changed, that test scores predicted first-year grades, retention, and graduation better than high school GPA did. The faculty voted to keep testing. The Board of Regents overruled them on political grounds. The warning was filed, ignored, and then vindicated, and only now, in 2026, is the system finally moving to reconsider.

The same pattern is playing out throughout higher education as a whole, and none of this was a surprise to any social scientist worth their salt.

Anyone can sit for the SAT, and as its name suggests, it is standardized. That is important because grades vary across schools, and extracurricular achievement is even more heavily confounded by socioeconomic status than critics of standardized tests note. Yes, affluent students may pay for private SAT tutoring. But the internet, and now AI, have greatly democratized education. Talented low-income students can set themselves apart with good test scores. Under test-optional rules, when other evaluative criteria matter more, socioeconomic disparities widen. Not everyone can purchase a coached personal essay, a consultant-built activities list, and a transcript inflated by a forgiving private school.

Ironically, though progressives have led the recent crusade against standardized testing, the standardized test was originally a progressive reform meant to enhance equity.

In the 1930s, Harvard president James Bryant Conant promoted the SAT precisely to break the hold of the inherited Protestant aristocracy that stocked the Ivy League with the well-bred sons of the right prep schools. A common national test, he reasoned, could surface the brilliant farm kid or immigrant’s son whom a pedigree-based system would never see, replacing an aristocracy of birth with what Thomas Jefferson called a “natural aristocracy of talent.” The subjective alternatives now praised as more humane carry an uglier lineage: as the sociologist Jerome Karabel documented, the holistic criteria of “character” and “personality” that elite colleges adopted in the same era were used, in part, to limit the number of high-scoring Jewish applicants the tests kept admitting. In a tragic repetition of history, in 2023 the Supreme Court found Harvard guilty of exactly that type of racial discrimination against Asian applicants with the highest test scores as part of the zero-sum game of affirmative action.

Objective measurement is the liberal instrument. Subjective judgment is the gatekeeper’s. The reformers dismantling the test today imagine they are striking a blow against racism and privilege, when in reality standardized tests are the best way to combat bias in education systems.

That last point matters more every year, because the alternatives to the test are collapsing. Grade inflation has drained high school GPA of meaning, and the personal essay, the supposed humane substitute for a number, is now frequently written by a chatbot. Standardized testing is one of the last common, external, hard-to-fake signals left, and it is precisely the one the reformers threw overboard. Small wonder public confidence in higher education has fallen from 57 percent in 2015 to the thirties in recent years. When institutions abandon their ability to tell who is prepared, the public notices.

The same error appears in miniature in the gifted debate. When New York City replaced gifted testing with parent applications and teacher nominations, early advantage did not disappear. It concentrated, flowing to the families who knew how to work the system and the children already fluent in the cultural cues that adults mistake for brilliance. Take away the objective measure in the name of fairness and you do not get fairness. You get a softer, more deniable form of the same sorting, run by connections instead of by ability.

The shameful New York Magazine article supports these changes, overlooks their limitations, and manages to further distort the research literature on long-term predictors of success. It cites a thirty-five-year study of 677 children enrolled in gifted and talented education programs and notes that 88 percent of them did not go on to reach “genuine eminence” in their careers such as full professorships, Fortune 500 leadership, judgeships, distinguished work in medicine and law. “Only” 12 percent of them did, as though that were a disappointment.

Any statistically literate reader would run the numbers against the base rates. Barely 2 percent of American adults hold a doctorate of any kind, and the slice of the general population that reaches the study’s definition of “eminence” sits well under one percent, plausibly in the low tenths of a percent. Against that floor, 12 percent is an outcome exceedingly over the base rate, and the same research program found its most able subjects earning doctorates at more than fifty times the population rate. The critics found one of the largest predictive signals of early intelligence and described it as a letdown.

That is the through-line of bad education policy: it abolishes the measurement to spare itself the discomfort of what the measurement reveals, and the children it claims to protect are the ones who pay.

What good education policy looks like

Good policy starts by keeping the measure. A standardized test is cheap, hard to game, and blind to charm and connections, which is exactly why it remains the best friend of the talented child whom no one is watching for. The fix for an imperfect instrument is a better instrument, read over time and alongside other evidence, not a retreat to gatekeeping by impression.

There is still room for a liberal affirmative action that does not invite unconstitutional racist discrimination. If what schools really want to select for is general intelligence and competence, it is true that standardized test scores are an imperfect proxy. In my opinion, a 1500 out of 1600 on the SAT from an under-resourced student is more impressive than a perfect score from someone who had expensive private tutoring. But in order for such affirmative action to be effective, it has to be narrowly tailored and data-driven. What is the exact test score disparity across income groups? What is the conditional likelihood of success factoring in this disparity? What objective data can we base these judgements on, so as not to incentivize victimhood narratives in application essays?

In K-12 education, the deepest fix to the public school system would be free market competition. Fund students, not systems, and let providers compete to serve them.

When families can carry their funding to the school that fits, competition tends to raise outcomes, often at lower cost, and frequently most for the disadvantaged. More money poured into a single public monopoly, by contrast, does surprisingly little on its own. Education savings accounts, charters, open enrollment, course-level acceleration, and dual enrollment all do the same essential work. They give a bright child trapped in a weak district an exit, and they let the match between student and school improve without anyone in a central office deciding in advance what every child needs.

When one public system must produce one answer for everyone, gifted education becomes a zero-sum brawl over a handful of seats, and the scarcity is what makes it so bitter. Perhaps the better model for gifted K-12 education resembles our university systems, with (when operating as intended) tiers of selectivity for students to self-sort into their best match. When the funding follows the student, schools’ main worry is not resource allocation, but student retention. Loosen the supply, let many providers serve many kinds of learners, and the parental ambition the critics find unseemly turns positive-sum.

No central planner knows the single correct model of gifted education, which is the strongest reason to let families and localities experiment and let results, rather than ideology, sort the winners.

We will never engineer away the inequality that evolution wrote into us, and the regimes that tried compiled the worst record of the last century. What a free society can offer instead is not equal outcomes but equal standing: the same rights, the same protection of the law, and a fair chance to be seen. The eminent few that the skeptics wave away are the source of a wildly disproportionate share of the medicine, technology, and prosperity the rest of us depend on. Finding talent and feeding it is not hoarding. It is one of the highest-return investments a society can make, and most of the return is paid to strangers. Used well, standardized testing and meritocratic admissions pipelines is how we find the disadvantaged children whose gifts would otherwise go unseen.

I have a confession. I’ve worked at the Cato Institute for 7 months and have barely read any of Cato’s Letters—the eighteenth-century essays on liberty by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon that gave the organization its name. The pen name honored Cato the Younger, the ancient Roman senator who chose death over submission to Caesar’s tyranny.

I’m a psychologist, not a political philosopher, and the founding texts of classical liberalism were not assigned reading in my Harvard neuroscience seminars. But a smart colleague recently pointed me toward Letter 117, titled “Of the Abuse of Words,” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the first two sentences:

“I have often thought, that most of the mischiefs under which mankind suffers, and almost all their polemick disputes are owing to the abuse of words. If men would define what they mean by the sounds which they make use of to express their thoughts, and then keep to those definitions, that is, annex always the same ideas to the same sounds, most of the disputes in the world would be at an end.”

In plain terms, the world would be so much better if people were clear, honest, and straightforward. Most of the evil in the world is some downstream result of dishonesty or miscommunication. The result of the abuse of words.

What makes the abuse of words so grave is not just that clarity is efficient and muddled ideas slow us down. Philosophers across traditions have treated truth as sacred.

Truth is a sacred thing because it is, in some ultimate sense, an unattainable ideal. Most knowledge is not deductive formal logic, but inductive or experiential. We do not perceive reality directly but only through the veil of our perception, our evolved biological constraints and cognitive biases. Socrates intuited this in declaring that he knew nothing, and considered that admission the starting point in all wisdom.

In theory, everything is knowable. Physicists dream of a “theory of everything”—a set of equations which could describe and predict all things that ever have happened or will happen. But metaphysical questions of what came before time and Being—if such questions even makes sense—or where our laws of physics came from in the first place, may be fundamentally unanswerable. Gödel proved that even mathematics cannot fully ground itself, resting on axioms it can never verify from within. If the most precise language humans have ever invented cannot capture the whole truth, what hope does ordinary speech have?

Kierkegaard understood that honest reasoning, pursued to its limit, arrives at a threshold where only a leap of faith can carry you further. Religious traditions across history have tried, with varying claims of certainty, to address that void. The opening line of the Tao Te Ching warns that the Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao—the God that we can conceive of is inherently limited by human subjectivity and preconceptions. Humility is the right approach. The Gospel of John begins at the other side of that leap: the Word or Logos, the ordering principle that precedes and exceeds human understanding, is deemed unknowable but through Christ.

Spinoza, one of my greatest intellectual inspirations, took a different approach. He recognized that the grand Truth we so crave is fundamentally unattainable to humans, but that the universe has an inherent order to it. An omnipotent and omniscient God is essentially a personification of the forces of Nature that describe and govern all things. For Spinoza, Deus sive Natura—God or Nature—were one in the same.

Spinoza believed that to live according to reason was to live according to one’s true nature, and that deception, including self-deception, was a form of bondage. Kant argued that lying was always wrong, even to a murderer at the door, because dishonesty corrodes the very faculty of reason that makes moral life possible. Both of them believed that the pursuit of truth was a form of ethical striving, what Spinoza called the “intellectual love of God”:

“In so far as we are intelligent beings, we cannot desire anything save that which is necessary, nor yield absolute acquiescence to anything, save to that which is true: wherefore, in so far as we have a right understanding of these things, the endeavor of the better part of ourselves is in harmony with the order of nature as a whole.”

Humans know that truth is valuable and that we are ignorant in some fundamental sense. But we also crave certainty, and have remarkable capacity for reason. With that remarkable capacity also comes a temptation to manipulate words and claim false certainty.

Evolution exists in an unsteady dance with truth. On one hand, there is clear survival value in ability to perceive the world as objectively and accurately as possible. We have multiple senses because convergent detection of the same stimulus through vision, smell, sound, and touch greatly enhances our belief that we are perceiving something real. On the other hand, there is clear adaptive utility in certain cognitive biases that orient away from objective perception. We evolved to be threat-sensitive, because the relative cost of mistaking a stick for a snake is trivial compared to the cost of mistaking a snake for a stick.

Dishonesty also pays for motivated actors, as we know all too well from politics. But this too is a deep evolutionary instinct that plays out whether we are conscious or not. As evolutionary biologist Lixing Sun describes in The Liars of Nature and the Nature of Liars, deception is among the oldest and most pervasive strategies in the biological world. Orchids mimic the pheromones of female wasps to lure pollinators. Fireflies imitate the mating signals of other species to attract and devour them. Cuttlefish display female coloration on one side of their body to deceive rival males while courting a female on the other. These organisms are not lying in any conscious sense, but they are manipulating information to gain an advantage, and natural selection has rewarded them handsomely for it.

Humans do the same thing with language. We can deceive with words, with tone, with omission, with framing. We can deceive others and ourselves simultaneously, and often do both at once without realizing it. In competitive environments, the ability to manipulate information is often more advantageous than the ability to share it honestly. Honesty is a cooperative strategy, but cooperation is fragile. It flourishes only when the systems surrounding it make deception costlier than truth-telling. When those systems fail—or when the incentives flip—the abuse of words is the default.

I was a graduate student at Harvard on October 7th, 2023, the day Hamas launched the deadliest attack on Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Over 1,200 people were murdered, many of them brutally on camera. Within 48 hours, student organizations released statements that did not merely criticize Israeli policy—a position one can hold in good faith—but characterized the massacre as an act of “resistance.” The word “decolonization” was deployed to redescribe the slaughter of civilians as a political project with moral legitimacy. Posters of kidnapped hostages were torn down, and the people tearing them down did not think of themselves as cruel. They thought of themselves as righteous. They had been given words that made terrorism feel like justice.

When the news broke, people around me seemed uncertain how I would react—as though my ethnic background predetermined my moral position, as though having Palestinian heritage meant I was obligated to see the massacre through a particular ideological lens.

Instead, my undergraduate students seemed to feel surprisingly validated when I expressed my own dismay at the situation, in polite terms, that this was a tragic clusterfuck. The attacks on Israel were horrific. The attacks on Gaza were horrific. The generations of mutual grievance, displacement, and retaliatory violence in the unholy Holy Land made any solutions seem impossible.

And yet I kept thinking: as far as we are from real progress, it would be tremendous progress if we could simply come to unilateral agreement that murdering civilians in their homes is wrong. It is bad enough that humanity still engages in war. It is bad enough that violence, terrorism, and cruelty persist in a world with the material abundance, institutional knowledge, and historical memory to know better. But it is much worse that we gaslight about it. That we dress atrocities in the language of liberation. That we redefine terrorism as resistance, civilians as collateral, and massacre as a complex geopolitical event requiring “context.” Language had been so thoroughly abused that the most basic ethical clarity and nuance became a controversial position in seminar rooms and dining halls.

Wolves and dogs cycle through an elaborate sequence of warnings before a fight: stiffened posture, growl, snarl, snap, and only then a bite. Each signal is an honest communication—an escalating declaration of intent that gives the other party a chance to back down. The system evolved this way because violence is expensive. Even the winner often gets hurt. The entire architecture of threat signaling exists to make actual combat unnecessary, and it works precisely because the signals are reliable. When a dog growls, it means something.

Human diplomacy follows the same logic at a larger scale. Sanctions, troop movements, trade restrictions, and ultimatums are the geopolitical equivalents of the growl and the snarl—costly signals designed to resolve disputes before blood is shed. The system breaks down when the signals become dishonest. When genuine threats are dismissed as posturing, the signaling architecture collapses and the probability of violence increases. And the abuse of words—redescribing aggression as defense, conquest as liberation, terrorism as resistance—is perhaps the most dangerous coordination failure of all, because it doesn’t just misrepresent the present. It makes the next step impossible to negotiate honestly.

How much moral progress would humanity make if we did not become more moral in our actions, but simply achieved universal consensus on the immorality of certain actions?

Every act of cruelty is preceded by an act of redescription. The abuse of words comes first. The torturer must first dehumanize. The mob must first be told it is the victim. The suicide bomber must first be convinced that death is glory. a refusal to see the other person as fully human, a motivated redefinition of who counts as innocent, a linguistic framework that transforms murder into something else.

Imagine a world where every act of violence still occurs—every war, every terrorist attack, every atrocity—but no one pretends it is justified. No one calls it resistance. No one frames it as decolonization. No one wraps it in the language of historical grievance or cosmic justice. Everyone who commits violence knows, and admits, that they are doing something wrong to a fellow human, and everyone who witnesses it agrees.

I suspect, as Cato’s Letter 117 argues, that such clarity would make the steps towards true progress suddenly obvious.

“But this would not answer the purposes of those who derive power and wealth from imposing upon the ignorance and credulity of others. And therefore, till the world can agree to be honest, and to buy and sell by the same measure (which they do not seem in haste to do), I doubt this evil is likely to go on.”

The letter goes on to discuss religious bigotry and the way zealots weaponize piety to serve their own interests.

We see the same abuse of words, weaponizing piety and sympathy, in my primary research field of child development and mental health. Every time there is a moral panic—whether over television, comic books, video games, or the present-day fears about AI and social media—people look to galvanize their arguments by invoking the vulnerability of children. The pattern is remarkably consistent. A new technology emerges. Children use it. Some children who use it have problems. The technology is blamed, and the word “harm” is attached to it before the causal evidence exists.

Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling The Anxious Generation argues that smartphones have “rewired” childhood and caused an epidemic of mental illness—language so vivid and morally urgent that it has already catalyzed legislation in multiple countries. But the largest meta-analysis on the subject, reviewing 143 studies featuring data from over a million adolescents worldwide, found associations that were small, inconsistent, and heavily confounded by personality and pre-existing mental health. The word “rewired” does not appear in that meta-analysis. Neither does “epidemic.” Those are rhetorical choices, not scientific findings, and they have done more to shape policy than the underlying data ever could.

Once “harm” is established in the public vocabulary, the debate shifts from “is this actually dangerous?” to “how do we protect children from this danger?”—a question that presupposes the answer to the one we skipped.

The COVID-19 pandemic followed the same rhetorical playbook in the opposite demographic direction. “Protect the vulnerable elderly” became the phrase that foreclosed cost-benefit analysis of lockdown policies. To ask whether school closures were doing more damage to children than the virus itself was framed not as a legitimate empirical question but as an act of callousness toward grandparents. The word “protection” was annexed to a specific set of interventions—lockdowns, closures, mandates—rather than to the broader obligation to weigh all harms against all benefits. Anyone who questioned whether the cure was worse than the disease was accused of not caring about the vulnerable, when in reality the question was about which vulnerable population we were willing to sacrifice for another.

This is how the abuse of words operates in policy: by attaching a morally charged term to one side of a genuinely difficult trade-off, so that the other side becomes unspeakable. “Save the children” and “protect the elderly” are not arguments. They are conversation-enders disguised as moral imperatives. And they work precisely because the underlying sentiments are real. We should care about children. We should care about the elderly. The abuse lies not in the caring but in the weaponization of that caring to shut down the very inquiry that responsible caring demands.

The worst medical sophistry has come in the field of transgender medicine, the subject of my doctoral dissertation. The phrase “gender-affirming care” is perhaps the most sophisticated example of the abuse of words in contemporary policy. It takes a set of interventions—puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgical procedures—whose long-term effects on developing bodies and brains remain poorly understood, and packages them in language that makes skepticism sound like cruelty. To question “affirming care” is to be, by definition, non-affirming. (I’ve quipped that a better phrase for them would be “dysphoria-enabling interventions”).

A clinician who recommends watchful waiting for a distressed adolescent, or who explores whether anxiety or social contagion might be contributing factors, is not failing to affirm the child. They are practicing medicine. But the vocabulary has been arranged so that caution registers as hostility, and the word “care” has been annexed to a specific set of interventions rather than to the broader obligation to do no harm. Meanwhile, exploratory psychotherapy—the approach that the majority of countries that have independently reviewed the evidence now recommend as a first-line response—has been rebranded as “conversion therapy,” a term that carries the moral weight of a practice historically used to torture gay people into straightness. The conflation is not accidental. It is designed to make the most cautious, evidence-based clinical response feel morally equivalent to abuse.

The same rhetorical machinery that rebranded experimental medicine as “care” and exploratory therapy as “conversion” extended far beyond the clinic. Once the premise was established that gender identity overrides biological sex, the policy implications of the abuse of words followed. Biological males were placed in women’s prisons, and women inmates who objected were told their discomfort was bigotry. Transgender athletes with the physiological advantages of male puberty competed in women’s sports for over a decade, and female athletes who raised concerns about fairness were accused of hatred. Feminists who pointed out that sex-based protections existed for a reason—that shelters, sports, and prisons had been segregated by sex to protect women from male violence—were called exclusionary and hateful, often by the same progressives who claimed to champion women’s rights. An entire generation of young feminists learned that defending sex-based categories was impermissible, even as the practical consequences of abolishing those categories fell disproportionately on women.

Pediatric gender reassignment will go down in medical history alongside lobotomies—invasive, irreversible procedures celebrated by the profession, even winning the Nobel Prize in Medicine in their heyday—supported by thin evidence, and abandoned only after the damage was done. Almost all of it is now being walked back, and the speed of the reversal is itself an indictment of how flimsy the original consensus was. But what makes the gender ideology debacle distinctly modern is the role that the abuse of words played in sustaining it long past the point where the evidence had turned, and long past the point where the collateral damage to women’s sports, women’s safety, and feminism itself had become undeniable. And the abuse of words continues even in the retreat. The NCAA did not say it was wrong for fifteen years. It said it was adopting “clear, consistent, and uniform eligibility standards.” The AMA did not acknowledge that it had urged governors to protect access to procedures it now calls insufficiently supported. The same organizations that abused words to build the edifice are now abusing words to dismantle it quietly, hoping no one notices the rubble. The reckoning that honest language would make possible keeps getting deferred by the same dishonesty that made it necessary.

The thread that runs through all of these examples—from Hamas apologists on college campuses to pandemic policy to transgender medicine—is the same one articulated in Cato’s Letters three centuries ago. The abuse of words is not a series of isolated rhetorical failures. It is a single mechanism operating across every domain where power, fear, and moral urgency converge. Diplomacy works when signals are reliable. Medicine works when words like “care” and “harm” refer to observable realities rather than ideological commitments. Societies work when the people in them can say what they mean and mean what they say.

The temptation to abuse words will never disappear. Evolution built it into us, right alongside our capacity for reason. We are creatures who crave certainty in a universe that offers none, who possess language powerful enough to reshape perception but too imprecise to capture the whole truth, and who discovered long ago that manipulating information is often easier than sharing it honestly.

But recognizing that the temptation is permanent is not the same as accepting that it is insurmountable.

The authors of Cato’s Letters knew that the powerful would never willingly surrender the advantage that dishonest language provides. They said as much. But naming the problem clearly was itself an act of defiance against the very thing they described. The abuse of words sustains itself partly by making the distortion invisible, by ensuring that the euphemism feels like common sense. Simply insisting on clarity—this word means this, and you are using it to mean something else—is the first crack in the edifice.

That is what honest inquiry demands. Not certainty, which we cannot have. Not moral perfection, which we will never achieve. Just the discipline of meaning what we say and saying what we mean, even when, and especially when, the incentives run the other way. Define your terms. Hold to your definitions. Refuse to let language be turned against the things it was meant to describe. It is the simplest demand imaginable, but if we’d manage it, the solutions to insurmountable moral dilemmas might suddenly become clear.

What’s the most important thing in life? “Meat and honey,” the chieftain of the Hadzabe—one of humanity’s last living tribes of hunter-gatherers—answers. “If we have meat, honey, and water,” a young hunter adds, “then we are happy.”

Today’s world is unrecognizable by historical standards. It is difficult to appreciate the value of food and water when a whole cooked rotisserie chicken and a jar of honey cost less than an hour’s minimum wage, and clean water can be freely accessed in almost any public place. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors—and the Hadzabe today—every meal required miles of trekking, dangerous hunts, and no guarantee that everyone would return for supper. Most water carried parasites. People lived in mud huts crawling with bugs. Life expectancy was brutally short, largely driven by high infant mortality, lack of vaccines, and lack of antibiotics. Infection from even a small wound could mean death.

Life was better, but not much better, for our agriculturalist ancestors. Widespread famines occurred in Europe within the last two centuries. Life expectancy was hardly better than that of hunter-gatherers, and medicine often did more harm than good. (George Washington’s death was hastened by the then-common practice of bloodletting—over 40% of his total blood volume was drained, to supposedly drain out an infection that might have otherwise been survivable, and almost certainly would be survivable today with modern antibiotics.) For those fortunate enough to stay healthy, survival still involved hard physical labor each day to earn their food.

One hundred years ago, only about 25% of Americans worked as farmers—down from over 70% a century earlier, despite a tenfold population increase—thanks to massively increased agricultural production after the Industrial Revolution. Electric lighting and indoor plumbing were beginning to become commonplace, and much progress was made towards eradicating smallpox. However, polio and other diseases still ravaged, antibiotics were not yet invented, and basic chores such as washing clothes still required hours of manual labor. Even in the most prosperous society in the world, meat and sugar had to be rationed during World War II—within living memory of the oldest Americans alive today.

In the decades since then, life has become safer and more abundant than ever. Agricultural production today is at an all time high, despite fewer than 2% of Americans working as farmers. Child mortality is lower than ever. We have more free time thanks to time-saving appliances such as dishwashers and laundry machines. Public services are more widespread than ever and civil liberties finally live up to our founding ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not to mention the technological miracles that have given our species powers once found only in mythology. We have flying chariots, despite the hassles of airport security and cramped leg room. We have crystal balls in our pockets that can FaceTime loved ones on the other side of the world and access nearly all of humanity’s knowledge in an instant.

Modern life is miraculous.

Why, then, are we supposedly in the midst of a mental health crisis?

For one, let us look at the problem with healthy skepticism and cautious optimism. It’s true, diagnoses and self-reports of depression and anxiety are higher than ever, particularly in young people. However, one possible interpretation of these data is that what’s changing is mental health monitoring, rather than mental health itself. Psychiatry as a field is hardly more than a century old, and it was heavily stigmatized and less than scientific throughout most of its history. Perhaps what we now call mental health problems are what our ancestors called the inevitable vicissitudes of life.

Analogously, a surface-level read of cancer statistics suggests that more people are being diagnosed with and dying of cancer than ever before. That is true, with two important caveats. First, cancer screening is earlier and more sophisticated than ever, leading to more overall diagnoses but also overall better outcomes. Second, mortality rates from almost all other causes are lower than ever and people are living longer than ever. Cancer risk increases with age, so in a morbid paradox higher cancer rates are a sign of a healthy society. Hunter-gatherers have lower rates of cancer not because they are healthier, but because they rarely live long enough to see it develop, much less properly screened and diagnosed.

Could it be that rising rates of depression and anxiety are a paradoxical sign of health? When toiling for daily survival, there is little room for psychoanalysis. Perhaps only in a world of material abundance, safety, and comfort—where mood swings and family or relationship conflict represent life’s biggest challenges for otherwise healthy people—do we begin to contend with the possibility that such adversity is not inevitable but a problem to be solved.

That is not to be dismissive of the problem at hand. Suicide rates are rising as well, at least in the United States, which points to a deeper crisis. A crisis of meaning.

Our brains evolved for survival. There are little drives stronger than hunger. True hunger, which most Westerners have never experienced. Of those living in wealthy democracies who have ever gone several days without food, it was in all likelihood a voluntary fast or a byproduct of serious illness. But most of us can imagine the rewards of rest after an exhausting day, the savor of a delicious meal that took hours of preparation. They are intrinsically meaningful.

Increasingly, we do not have to exhaust ourselves to fulfill drives meant for survival and reproduction. Food delivery, entertainment, sexual gratification are all available at the click of a button. As time prices—the amount of hours worked necessary to buy goods or services—continue to lower, we have more free time than ever. With that freedom comes opportunity, but many find that freedom disorienting. Now that survival is easy, purpose is optional.

To make matters worse, our survival-evolved brains are not just unadjusted to our modern environment, but exploited by it. It was adaptive for our ancestors to indulge in fat and sugar whenever available, and to limit physical activity in the moments survival did not call for it. There was no question that calories would not be burned off later. It was adaptive for our ancestors to compare themselves to their community. There was no possibility that, in an age of global connectedness, unhealthy comparison to supernormal stimuli of digitally-enhanced beauty would make one feel inferior. It was adaptive to be attuned to problems in one’s environment, when one’s environment was local. There was no possibility of doomscrolling in captivated witness of every breaking catastrophe across the globe.

Thanks to the information age, we are paradoxically surrounded by evidence of humanity’s shortcomings while simultaneously more insulated from them than ever before. No wonder we are in an age of anxiety and moral confusion. After all, can we really afford to boast about human progress when so many global problems—war, poverty, pollution, terrorism—are more visible than ever before?

Fortunately, the solution lies in the critique of human progress itself. To doubt the viability of progress is to long for it.

Many people living in the most prosperous societies in human history are simply unaware of the scale and speed of human progress, through no fault of their own. Incremental progress is (sadly) boring and easy to take for granted. Problems demand attention. It is not surprising that our news has a negativity bias reflective of our psychology, and it would be naively optimistic to expect the incentive structure of the media landscape to change.

Yet self-awareness of our negativity bias may go a long way in reprioritizing our attention.

It is adaptive to pay more attention to what is going wrong than what is going right, but it is adaptive only when focused, constructive criticism motivates problem solving—a process which itself is inherently meaningful. When one’s environment is the crystal ball which can see in realtime every crisis unfolding in every corner of the world, the mental health forecasts are grim.

This is not to say that we ought to put the blinders on and bask in the good news. Even if we could, we would quickly find ourselves devoid of meaning, and progress would stall. Still, to feel disoriented or dissatisfied in this moment may itself be a symptom of progress. The so-called crisis of meaning is partially a byproduct of being born into a level of safety, comfort, and abundance that our psyches were not built to process. Unlike the vast majority of our ancestors—and unlike millions alive today still living under poverty and oppression—those of us in prosperous, liberal democracies have won a birth lottery we did not earn.

As much as that inspires gratitude, it may also evoke guilt.

I suspect that much of the doomsaying in the West today—whether about climate, artificial intelligence, or other catastrophes—including critiques of the very concept of human progress, is a flawed attempt to contend with this guilt. As if an intuition that things cannot be this good, we are too far outside the norm of human existence, things must be unstable and primed for collapse. Such existential dread beats apathy—at least in the pursuit of meaning, and in tacitly acknowledging that we have something worth protecting—but is unlikely to produce true progress.

What is? Acknowledging the real constraints of human nature, and working with them rather than against them. We have an innate propensity for rewarding challenges, alleviating suffering, ingenuity, but also an evolved negativity bias and propensity for social comparison that is maladaptive in a globally connected world.

Improper comparison—to a hypothetical utopia, or to the global bourgeoisie, as if a fixed caste rather than ever-changing extreme outliers of material abundance and social capital—leads to perpetual disappointment and the destruction of progress, if the catastrophic history of socialist experiments throughout the last century serves as any reminder.

But comparison need not always be the thief of joy.

A more humble and empirically grounded account of human history may instead inspire. Simply encountering this article means you, in all likelihood, live a higher quality of life than most humans who ever lived, with technology and abundance they could have never dreamed of.

Gratitude, properly understood, does not demand guilt—it demands responsibility. To be born into this era of superabundance comes at the cost of an inherently meaningful struggle for survival. But it offers the opportunity to choose problems worth solving. Humanity still has much room to progress, and we can say this without denying the miraculous work that has already been done.

Many people roll their eyes at Valentine’s Day—the trite performative gestures, roses that wilt within days, the chocolates that appear in heart-shaped boxes for precisely one week of the year and then vanish as if love itself were seasonal. The whole ritual can feel engineered, commercial, and antithetical to true romance.

And yet millions of otherwise rational adults participate anyway, and find genuine romantic joy in the tradition (myself included).

If romance is supposed to be sincere, why does it so often take the form of conspicuous spending on objects whose practical value is marginal at best? Why should affection be measured in roses flown across continents, jewelry locked in glass cases, or dinners whose cost is inversely proportional to the portion size?

From a purely economic perspective, Valentine’s Day looks wasteful. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, this is the exact sign that it’s meaningful.

In 1860, a year after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to a colleague, “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze on it, makes me sick!”

Peacocks, in their wasteful extravagance, seemed like an affront to the theory of survival of the fittest. Big, brightly colored feathers are energetically costly, increase visibility to predators, and hinder mobility. In every respect, they seem to hinder rather than help survival. How could they have been selected for?

Darwin eventually reconciled this with his theory of sexual selection, fully articulated in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, or Selection in Relation to Sex. From evolution’s perspective, an organism which is maximally fit for survival but doesn’t reproduce is a dead end. An organism that successfully reproduces, even if it lives a short struggle-filled existence, such as male praying mantises who are eaten by their mates after copulation, can successfully pass their traits onto the next generation.

Beauty, Darwin concluded, could matter more than strictly evolving traits which benefit survival. But it still doesn’t explain why certain traits such as bright feathers are beautiful.

The key to this puzzle lies in a concept from evolutionary biology known as handicap theory, first proposed by the Israeli biologist Amotz Zahavi in the 1970s.

Zahavi’s insight was that sexual ornamentation which is counterproductive to survival is attractive precisely because it must signal even greater fitness. To be capable of survival even while holding a massive handicap, such as diverting a large portion of your energy needs to growing feathers, which in turn make it even harder to hide from predators, means you are that much more fit, and any mate can be confident their offspring will inherit strong genes.

Handicap logic has been applied to explain the evolution of large breasts in human females—which compared to other primates are disproportionately large, wasteful, and do not make for more effective breastfeeding compared to mammary glands that only enlarge during pregnancy and lactation. Large breasts may be attractive precisely because they are large deposits of fat serving no purpose but to signal fitness—that this organism is capable enough of survival even with a handicap diverting energy to a survivally-irrelevant purpose.

Across species, courtship is filled with similar wasteful extravagance. Many birds have elaborate mating rituals of song or dance, or put painstaking effort into constructing, cleaning, and beautifying their nests. In all of these cases, they go the extra mile that not only does not improve survival, but drains enough energy that it serves as a reliable signal of their excess reserves and capability.

Human mating is no different, and Valentine’s Day is the pinnacle of performative mating and costly sacrifice. From an economic perspective, it is extremely inefficient. But from a handicap signaling perspective, it is extremely efficient.

The American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class, independently converged onto the evolutionary handicap principle in his theory of conspicuous consumption. Luxury goods are often luxurious not because they are more useful, but precisely because they are wasteful enough to signal that the spender has a large pool of resources. A Rolex does not tell time better than a quartz watch that costs a tiny fraction of the price. It therefore serves as an even better costly signal than, say, a large mansion, which at least confers other benefits for the price.

The best signals of wealth and status, from the perspective of conspicuous consumption, are those that serve no other purpose.

Predictably, we see these types of signals most visible in romantic extravagance. Elaborate bouquets of flowers which will wilt in days. Jewelry from precious metals and stones which took tremendous resources to mine, smelt, and craft, but which serve no functional purpose other than beauty. Chocolates which cost more just because they’re in a heart-shaped box which will be thrown out.

We could be cynical about all of this. But understanding our evolved impulses adds a new layer of depth and beauty to human behavior, and explains surface-level irrational behavior. It is no more irrational to invest in romantic gestures than it is for the peacock to invest in big, bright feathers.

The deeper insight of the handicap principle is that what is most attractive is costly signals which cannot be faked. Traits or behaviors that take time and energy away from other daily demands. It doesn’t mean you have to spend money, but it does mean that the most romantic gestures will always be inconvenient. A home-cooked meal, or handmade card, or gift, or poem. Something to show that special someone you are choosing to invest in them over all the other potential mates out there.

Don’t we all desire to be chosen in that way?

Last week, world leaders met in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum conference. Nowadays, foremost among the world’s most powerful people are the CEOs and founders of AI companies, including Elon Musk (xAI, Grok), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind, Gemini), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic, Claude). (Sam Altman, of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, notably decided to skip this year’s event.)

Beyond talks of geopolitics, international security, climate change, and the global economy, artificial intelligence took center stage. Is AI a catalyst for utopia or an existential threat? Or is it better understood as analogous to the early Internet—a technology that will undoubtedly reshape the world, but one to which humans adapt relatively easily, with inflated expectations giving rise to a speculative stock market bubble?

Rightly or wrongly, extremist predictions dominated the discussion. Of course, it behooves the creators of the world’s leading AI models to frame their technology as something that cannot be ignored—a civilizational milestone to rival the taming of fire or electricity. And they have every vested interest in framing superintelligence as a boon to humanity. (For a primer on the concerns of existential threat, see Eliezer Yudkowsky’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies).

As rational optimists who believe in human progress, let’s, for the moment, take the founders at their word and instead apply healthy skepticism toward the pessimists. Musk and Amodei believe that we will achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI)—AI that is smarter than any human—by next year. That is not an entirely unreasonable claim. Only seven years ago, GPT-2 could barely string together a logical paragraph. Last year’s GPT-5, for all its propensity for AI slop, knows almost everything about almost everything and can serve as a surprisingly good conversation partner.

Moreover, state-of-the-art AI is now better at most computer coding than even many software engineers. Amodei has stated that most of the code written at Anthropic is now produced by Claude itself and merely checked by human engineers, suggesting that we are approaching the “singularity”—the point at which AI can improve itself. From there, progress toward superintelligence could be rapid. At the very least, even if AI does not generate genuinely new ideas, it saves engineers time implementing their own improvements, which may offset diminishing returns from scaling models with ever more compute.

Hassabis was more conservative, estimating a 50 percent probability of AGI by 2030. By civilizational standards, that is still insanely fast. Aside from those who believe there is some glass ceiling to AI progress, there is near-universal consensus among experts that AI may become smarter than any human within the next decade; they disagree only on how soon.

In the utopian vision, Musk imagines AGI paired with advancements in robotics, such that we will live in a post-scarcity world of superabundance. Every good and service would be cheap and available upon request, and robots would do our chores and take care of the elderly—much like in The Jetsons.

Ultimately, the limiting factor for material progress, and for progress in AI, is energy. As Musk notes, well over 99 percent of the energy in our solar system comes from the sun. With modern solar panels, an area the size of Texas could power the entire world. A 100-mile-by-100-mile area in the desert could power the whole United States today. That is before even considering advances in nuclear energy, or the possibility of relocating AI data centers into space. Yes, really. Solar panels in space would be roughly five times more effective than those in even the sunniest regions on Earth, since no light would be lost to atmospheric scattering. And satellites in the cold vacuum of space would not need to waste water and energy cooling hardware, as terrestrial data centers do.

There is strong reason to believe that AI and material abundance will continue to advance as we simply get better at implementing existing technology, let alone through future innovations. And yes, there is meaningful concern about the destructive potential of AI, whether as a rogue superintelligence or as a tool wielded by human bad actors. But I am more interested in a different question—one that I was pleasantly surprised to hear discussed by Musk and Hassabis at the World Economic Forum:

What psychological difficulties would we face in this hypothetical utopia, assuming everything goes right?

The quest for meaning, they believe, will be greater than any of our technical or economic challenges.

In the best-case scenario, where AI and robots take care of virtually every need and provide all the entertainment we could ask for, what is left for humanity? What would be our purpose?

While hyperbolic, one of the best modern depictions of how a utopia could turn into a dystopia comes from the animated children’s film Wall-E (2008).

The humans in Wall-E’s future enjoy every material comfort. They are whisked around on hoverchairs with built-in holographic entertainment and brought any snack they desire by robots. Yet they are rendered dependent, obese, immobile, and useless. They are so detached from the struggle to survive that it is difficult to imagine them possessing any real sense of purpose, pride, or worthy challenge.

Nearly a century ago, Aldous Huxley described a similar dystopian utopia in Brave New World (1932). People were healthy, safe, and comfortable from birth to death. There was no poverty, no war, and very little suffering. Humans were genetically engineered into castes, conditioned from infancy to enjoy their place in society, and kept content through endless distraction, casual sex, and a happiness-inducing drug called soma. But eliminating hardship also eliminated meaning. There was no struggle, no ambition, no genuine love, and no freedom to choose a different life. Art, religion, and deep emotional bonds were seen as destabilizing and therefore suppressed. People were not oppressed by force, but by pleasure and conditioning—never encouraged to ask what their lives are for, because they are always comfortable enough not to care.

In both stories, the hero realizes that comfort has come at the expense of agency, and that a life without struggle is not a life fully lived. In Wall-E, humans choose to return to Earth, knowing it will be hard. In Brave New World, John the Savage rejects the World State’s promise of effortless happiness. He insists on the right to suffer, to strive, to love deeply, and to fail. Humans need to struggle to find meaning, and they need meaning to survive.

That is why Human Progress has created a new project on the Psychology of Progress. By nearly every objective metric—life expectancy, global wealth, connectivity, health, and living standards—humanity is doing better than at any point in history. Comforts and freedoms once reserved for elites are now widely accessible, and technologies that would have sounded like science fiction a generation ago are now part of everyday life. Yet humans evolved under conditions of scarcity, and some of today’s psychological and social pathologies may be downstream of progress itself. Endless entertainment can become addictive and overstimulating. Excess leisure and convenience may breed fragility. Greater freedom can produce anxiety and choice paralysis. A lack of intrinsic meaning in the struggle to survive may lead to nihilism and purposelessness.

Progress rarely removes problems outright; it replaces old ones with new ones. The good news is that in wrestling with problems, we may find our purpose. A credible pro-progress narrative cannot rest on material gains alone; it must also grapple with meaning, agency, and human flourishing in a world of abundance. The beginning of that discussion was my personal highlight of the 2026 World Economic Forum. It is not enough to have technology and policies that enable global progress. We must also develop the psychological narratives that allow us to embrace progress as an opportunity to expand agency and purpose, rather than become the complacent shells of ourselves that science fiction warns us about.

Like most people, I have successfully managed some New Year’s resolutions, and failed to live up to others. This is both entirely normal and entirely strange.

Think about it: the brain that makes the resolution is the very same brain that later procrastinates, rationalizes it away, or even feels shame and guilt at a level that is unpleasant—but not necessarily enough to do the thing. How can a mind be divided against itself?

It’s as if one part of the brain does the planning, while another part decides whether to carry it out.

That may sound like a convenient bioteleology for the over-promisers. But neuropsychology research shows that it is accurate.

The strongest evidence of this biological division between planning and executing comes from patients with a motor disorder known as apraxia (Greek for “without action”).

Apraxia is one of many doubly dissociable neurological disorders. This means that two aspects of brain function that are normally coupled may each be impaired, independently of the other, when different areas of the brain are damaged. For example, there are different types of language disorders, or aphasias, which impact language production versus comprehension. People with damage to Broca’s area within the language cortex will be able to comprehend language but struggle to produce fluid speech, while people with damage to Wernicke’s area will be able to speak fluently from a mechanical standpoint but struggle to comprehend or produce meaningful sentences.

Similarly, apraxia exhibits a double dissociation between ideational and ideomotor forms. As their names suggest, different types of brain damage uniquely impact action planning (ideation) and action execution (motor control). People with ideomotor apraxia typically have normal cognition and action planning ability, and are able to verbally describe each step in a complex sequence, such as cooking a meal or packing a suitcase, but are unable to execute the movements. When they try, their limbs will often stall, move in the wrong directions, or spontaneously begin performing an unrelated action. Conversely, people with ideational apraxia can complete individual actions fluidly but are unable to string them together into complex sequences. They may be able to perform a multi-step sequence, such as brewing tea, on command, but struggle to narrate the steps of grabbing a mug, opening a teabag, boiling water, and pouring water if asked in the abstract.

Case studies of brain damage patients prove in the abstract that action planning and execution rely on separate dissociable systems, but do not explain why most people with healthy, intact brains often renege on their plans. A different, algorithmic level of analysis is necessary to understand the neuropsychology of New Year’s resolutions.

My high school calculus teacher was a joyful old man who actively followed the evolution of computer programming throughout his lifespan, from floppy disks and BASIC to modern object-oriented programming and portable laptops orders of magnitude more powerful than the supercomputers used in the Apollo missions. He remained fond of TI-84 graphing calculators, anachronistic by my time but a marvel in his, and taught us not only to graph but to write programs within the calculator. It was every bit as painful as it sounds, akin to texting one letter at a time on old flip phones, but we were able to make remarkable simple programs. For example, calculating the orbital velocity and length of the year for any planet of a given inputted distance for a sun of a given mass.

Sometimes our code would generate errors, and my teacher would tauntingly remark, “The machine is smart. It does exactly what you tell it to do. If you’re getting the wrong output, you gave it the wrong instructions.”

Could our brains work the same way? Could it be that for a given output, there is an optimal set of instructions, and we could always reliably achieve our goals if only we were smart enough to program ourselves properly?

This perspective aligns with the computational theory of mind, popularized by my graduate advisor Steven Pinker in his book How the Mind Works (1997).

The computational theory of mind has arguably become the default framework for understanding how the brain works and inspired early research into artificial intelligence. Neurons function remarkably like binary transistors: they fire or do not, and can perform logical operations when strung together into groups known as neural networks. (Though the earliest artificial neural networks were directly modeled after biological neural networks, they have since evolved into their own exotic form of intelligence.)

The computational theory of mind also helps make sense of aphasias and apraxias. If the brain is an elaborate computer relaying information, damage to parts of the brain disrupts that signal. It also explains why brain signaling can be reliably interrupted with electrodes, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or psychoactive drugs. Like electromagnetic signal jammers, these external influences can all disrupt the brain’s natural bioelectric and chemical signaling. It also explains why Elon Musk’s Neuralink has achieved remarkable success decoding brain activity via implanted electrodes that allow patients to control computers with their minds.

But again, how does any of this explain why healthy brains don’t reliably stick to the plans made by the very same brain?

The 17th-century philosopher René Descartes is most famous for his phrase cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am.” Descartes was a proponent of mind-body dualism, reasoning that his mind must be distinct from his body, since he could doubt the existence of the latter but not the former. Knowing that it was possible to hallucinate and be deceived about one’s environment and even one’s identity, Descartes took his thought experiment to the extreme: Even if he was living an elaborate dream or false reality constructed by an evil trickster demon (what we now might term living in The Matrix), he could at least be sure that he was conscious in some form. For a conscious being, this is the only unshakable self-evident truth.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, centuries later, rebuked mind-body dualism in his landmark Descartes’ Error (1994). This book was strongly influential on my decision to pursue psychology and neuroscience research. Damasio, reviewing the centuries of progress in neuroscience since the time of Descartes, compellingly demonstrates that dualism is untenable and that we are identical to, and causally influenced by, our brains. But Damasio does concede one form of dualism fundamental to understanding mind and behavior.

Back to double dissociation. In case studies of patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) damage—the part of the brain most evolved in humans, and relevant for complex thought, planning for the future, and decision-making—he finds surprisingly little deficit in cognitive functioning. These individuals retain intelligence, memory, and explicit reasoning. They can outline plans, compare options, and articulate consequences with impressive clarity. What they cannot do is act. Faced with mundane decisions, they ruminate endlessly, cycling through possibilities, unable to make a choice.

It turns out that in many of these patients, following a stroke, the damage that occurred to their brain happened not to the cortex itself but the white matter tracts connecting the cortex to the limbic system—the brain’s emotional hub. When parts of the vmPFC are obliterated, such as in gunshot survivors, or most famously, in the case of Phineas Gage—a 19th-century railroad worker who survived an iron rod being shot through his skull in an accidental mine explosion—people lose this cortical planning ability. Their personality changes, they become impulsive, emotionally erratic, and their limbic system controls decision making without cortical inhibition. But conversely, when the vmPFC remains functional but unconnected to the limbic system, people are stuck rationalizing and ruminating endlessly, all brakes no gas.

Damasio’s key insight was that emotion is not just sufficient but necessary for decision-making. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Most animals act directly from instinct. The brain’s limbic system evolved hundreds of millions of years ago and is functionally conserved across vertebrates. Our prefrontal cortex evolved from a more primitive motor cortex, and as action planning becomes more sophisticated and extends over longer timespans, we must develop the ability to regulate our emotions and inhibit impulsive actions. But without excitatory signaling, mediated by rewarding chemicals such as dopamine or threat signals generated in the limbic system, we lack motivation to act at all.

Damasio’s “somatic marker” hypothesis, referring to the fact that all decisions must be grounded in an emotion or bodily state known as somatic markers, integrates seamlessly with the computational theory of mind. Though in reality there are innumerable distinct networks in the brain arranged in dazzlingly complex ways—with over 86 billion neurons and over 100 trillion unique connections in the average human brain—it is a useful heuristic to think of simply two competing systems active at any given time for any given decision: activation or inhibition. This loosely maps onto the two systems described by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in his landmark Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). Most of our thoughts and decisions are made by an intuitive, efficient, “fast” emotional system. But we also possess a second deliberate, computationally costly, rational “slow” system.

This is the system that (we hope) makes our New Year’s resolutions. But at any given time, our brain has strong incentives to let our fast emotional system take over, saving energy and cognitive resources. So, is that it? To keep our resolutions we need to remain mindful of the reasons we made them in the first place, and consciously exercise control over our daily emotional whims, knowing that there will be constant pressure to slip? The Stoics could have told us that, thousands of years ago, without needing to know any neuroscience.

Neuroscience gives us pragmatic psychological insight, and validates timeless wisdom, most when framing things computationally. Karl Friston, the world’s most influential neuroscientist (as measured by citation count), frames the brain as a lazy “prediction machine” which aims to reduce entropy. As my calculus teacher once said, our computers are only as useful as the instructions we give them. A vague New Year’s resolution, like “be healthier,” is almost destined to fail. It has too many degrees of freedom, and is too easy to exploit. The emotional system can even co-opt the reasoning system to rationalize its whims. (Well, the jelly donut has fruit in it, and fruit is healthy…)

As cognitive psychologists and Stoics alike will affirm, the more concrete and low-hanging a goal is, the more likely we are to successfully manage it. And as the best behaviorists know, any large goal can be broken down into smaller sub-goals. This has not just the benefit of outlining clearer instructions to success, but it reduces entropy, and makes it more computationally costly to rationalize than to simply do the thing.

Of course, many believe the concept of New Year’s resolutions is silly, that we should be constantly working towards our best selves using whatever tools we can glean from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, or ancient philosophy. Why wait until an arbitrary day of the year, and risk being part of a bandwagon that it is almost normalized to abandon?

I for one find it a tremendously useful exercise, because of some of the principles of computational neuroscience outlined here. We are nearly constantly minds divided against ourselves, but we are nothing but our brains and the information that is fed to them. Because behavior is so fundamentally governed by emotion, it helps to align as many axes of motivation as possible, including social pressure. The more opportunities we can take to remind ourselves of the gap between our actions and our ideals, and the more concrete we can make the steps towards minimizing that gap, the better.

Remember, your brain is smart. It does exactly what you tell it to do. If you’re getting the wrong output, you gave it the wrong instructions.

Human progress depends on some shared understanding of what “progress” actually means. That understanding is grounded in our moral psychology—how we think about morality and what we see as moral or immoral. For millennia, people have debated what the right morals ought to be, but morality is not a unitary construct. Some philosophers have therefore abandoned the task of moral prescriptions altogether, opting instead for a philosophy of moral relativism – the view that right and wrong depend on culture or personal choice. At its best, moral relativism acknowledges that there is no universal approach to human flourishing across all contexts, leading to a more nuanced discussion on human progress. At its worst, moral relativism represents a complete disregard for moral constraints.

Postmodernist philosophers, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, argued that morality is not objective but rather an arbitrary social construct, one typically shaped and enforced to serve the interests of those in power. This interpretation has disastrous consequences: If morality is nothing more than a mask for power, then justice becomes indistinguishable from domination, and every moral claim is reduced to a struggle for control. The possibility of truth, virtue, or genuine liberty disappears, leaving only competing moral narratives without any objective ethical standards to apply. But that is an extreme and perhaps deliberately provocative position. There exists a more nuanced understanding of moral relativism, grounded in evolutionary psychology, that acknowledges different moral values as real but often involving personal and societal trade-offs.

Experts in the field of personality psychology have proposed the “Big Five” theory, which features a five-factor model of personality measuring extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. This theory is the dominant explanation describing personality in terms of biologically rooted, independent, stable traits. A similar quintet has been applied to moral psychology: the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s five-factor Moral Foundations Theory. Haidt argues that morality can be understood through five core dimensions shaped by evolutionary concerns: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity.

Just as with personality traits, where individuals can fall on the high or low end of a continuous trait—such as being extraverted, introverted, or somewhere in between—Moral Foundations Theory proposes that both individuals and cultures may differ in their valuation of different moral concerns. Importantly, these factor models of personality and morality do not claim whether it is better or worse to be high or low in a trait. Any configuration of this factor model may be adaptive for survival in different environmental niches, but we have evolved levels of traits that, on average, tend to serve us best.

For instance, the adaptiveness of high or low extraversion can depend on the environment. In a resource-rich, socially interconnected environment, greater sociability can enhance cooperation and access to shared goods; however, in a resource-scarce or unstable setting, less sociability may conserve energy and improve self-reliance. As we are social beings, even the most introverted humans tend to be more extroverted than species that fend for themselves. Even the most isolated adult humans learn to speak a language and depend on others in childhood, demonstrating our fundamental extraversion compared with much of the animal kingdom.

Similarly, moral foundations such as care may seem like an unequivocal good, but they are judged not in absolute terms but relative to the human baseline. Even relatively callous humans tend to be more empathetic than the most empathetic chimpanzees, our notoriously violent evolutionary cousins. Moral Foundations Theory suggests that extreme care can sometimes be disadvantageous. For example, excessive care could lead to expending precious resources on the sick and vulnerable at the expense of the group. A lower care value, however, might make hunters and warriors more effective at feeding and defending the tribe, especially when paired with greater loyalty.

Similarly, while fairness is widely regarded as a moral good, it is also one of the most context-dependent traits. Fairness in opportunity often conflicts with fairness in outcome. A society that rewards merit and effort inevitably produces inequality, while one that enforces equality of outcome risks punishing productivity and innovation. In school, grading everyone equally regardless of performance may appear compassionate, but it undermines excellence. In the workplace, equality in compensation can erode motivation among high performers.

Psychological research shows that moral outrage at unfairness typically stems from perceived deceit, exploitation, or free riding, rather than from unequal outcomes in a meritocracy. For example, in behavioral economics research, participants might play a game where each person starts with a fixed amount of money and decides how much to contribute to a public good, such as a water well. The public good benefits everyone, regardless of individual contributions. When some individuals contribute nothing yet still receive its benefits, others frequently choose to spend their own money to penalize these free riders. Evolutionary psychology suggests that moral outrage toward unfairness, including even the willingness to punish cheaters at a personal cost, is an adaptation that safeguards communal welfare and ensures that exploitation is more costly than cooperation.

Sometimes loyalty is directly at odds with care, fairness, and authority. What do you do if a family member has committed a serious criminal offense? Do you protect them from being discovered, or report them to the authorities? Social psychology research shows that people vary in where their loyalties lie, especially across cultures. People from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) societies tend to support legal justice even when it means punishing their kin. In contrast, people from so-called cultures of honor, particularly those in the Middle East, tend to prioritize loyalty to their families over the law.

A useful way to conceptualize the difference between the psychological foundations of loyalty and authority is to consider the extent to which allegiances apply between or within groups. Loyalty is fundamentally an intergroup phenomenon. Evolutionary theory suggests that people from the same family or tribe tend to be loyal to each other but not necessarily to out-groups. From a psychological perspective, betrayal rarely stems from a total lack of loyalty—more often, it indicates conflicting loyalties. For instance, a person might leave one lover to commit to another; a whistleblower might betray their employer out of loyalty to their country; and Jean Valjean steals bread to feed his family. In each case, betrayal is relative to one’s personal judgment regarding who belongs to the ingroup.

Authority, however, pertains to dynamics within groups. People within a family or nation may deserve the same level of loyalty and care but not necessarily the same level of authority. Like primate social groups, human societies are deeply hierarchical. Elders and people with strong skill sets, such as the best hunters in hunter-gatherer tribes, often command the most authority. Respect for authority may stabilize a society, especially in a well-functioning meritocracy. But in corrupt countries, where positions of authority are often held by unworthy individuals, subversion of authority is more adaptive. In all cases, it is adaptive to have a range of personality dispositions in the gene pool and a range of moral dispositions across cultures. This allows humans to adapt to changing environments.

Last is purity, a moral foundation rooted in our behavioral immune system. The emotion of disgust evolved as a protection against pathogens. That is why moral prescriptions regarding purity often extend beyond cleanliness to include restrictions on sexual activity, dietary customs, and rules governing the treatment of outsiders. From an evolutionary perspective, all these practices offer potential benefits, but they can also introduce pathogens. Individuals who value purity tend to avoid novel sources of calories, mating opportunities, and contact with strangers, whereas those who do not prioritize purity may reap the benefits while incurring some risk. Neither is better nor worse in any environment, but most people tend to cluster around a baseline that is, on average, adaptive.

Personality psychology primarily focuses on individual differences in traits such as the Big Five and the Moral Foundations, but personality dynamics also occur at the group level. People literally see the world differently based on their personality, and they form or adhere to ideologies as a function of their psychological disposition. Highly empathetic people tend to be left-wing, while highly conscientious people tend to be right-wing. People with like-minded personalities cluster into groups, and these groups become political.

The same goes for moralizing dispositions, as the Harvard University psychologist Joshua Greene explains in his book, Moral Tribes. Progressives tend to most strongly value moral concerns of care and fairness; conservatives, however, tend to most strongly value loyalty, authority, and purity. As mentioned above, these concerns are neither better nor worse, but each brings with it different problems and trade-offs. As Haidt writes in his book The Coddling of the American Mind, progressive values of care and fairness, when taken to their extremes, can stifle meritocracy and foster fragility in children who have not been adequately challenged under the pretext of care. Similarly, conservative values of loyalty, authority, and purity, when also taken to their extremes, can demand conformity, suppress dissent, and justify exclusion in the name of order.

In today’s polarized landscape, these insights into moral foundations reveal why political debates often feel intractable. Disagreements are not merely about facts; they are about competing moral priorities—care versus loyalty, or fairness versus authority. Each moral value is rooted in evolved psychological dispositions. When one side frames inequality as exploitation and the other frames redistribution as coercion, both are acting from deeply ingrained moral instincts. Recognizing that fact does not eliminate conflict, but it reframes it: A society that understands morality as a set of context-dependent trade-offs among competing values can better resist the extremes of both rigid absolutism and cynical relativism.

Just as with personality traits—where diversity ensures a society has both creative innovators and cautious stabilizers—moral diversity serves an adaptive function. A healthy society requires individuals who emphasize care and fairness to protect the vulnerable, and it needs those who emphasize loyalty, authority, and purity to preserve cohesion and continuity. Neither orientation is superior; each corrects the excesses of the other. Moral relativism, rightly understood, does not imply that all values are equal or arbitrary. Rather, like personality traits, it acknowledges that there is a plethora of legitimate moral concerns that come with their own adaptive trade-offs. In this view, moral truth emerges not from deontology—or a strict rule set—but from a free market of moral ideas where different values can evolve, contend, and refine one another through open discourse. Preservation of that discourse is important not only for a peaceful coexistence between citizens with very different moral viewpoints, but for human progress itself.

This article was originally published by Human Progress on 12/16/2025.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my sister sent a link to our family group chat. It wasn’t an RSVP form; it was closer to an online wedding gift registry. All the Thanksgiving classic foodstuffs were on the list—turkey, honey baked ham, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, candied yams, green bean casserole, pumpkin pie, and more—each with a sign-up slot to commit to bringing the goods. This brief interaction represented numerous aspects of human progress, and I paused to take it in with awe and gratitude.

For one, I live in Boston, not far from where the original Thanksgiving Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, while my family lives in Los Angeles. The distance between us is almost identical to the distance between Britain and the New World, roughly 3,000 miles across land instead of ocean. Yet, the majority of Pilgrims never returned home and never even had the opportunity to stay in contact with the world they left behind. A letter across the Atlantic would cost days’ worth of wages and take months to arrive, if it found safe passage at all.

By the time the first Americans began settling in California in the 1840s, locomotives and the telegraph had been invented, but no transcontinental systems had yet been established. Most westward settlers knew they were signing up for a one-way journey taking many months, with high rates of death and disease. If they could maintain any contact with family on the other side of the continent, messages would take weeks via stagecoach. Even the extraordinarily speedy and expensive Pony Express system—with riders galloping nonstop at full speed, exchanging horses every 10-15 miles, and exchanging riders once or twice a day—still took 10 days to deliver messages across the country.

By the time the first transcontinental telegraph line was established in 1861, messages took minutes rather than weeks but were extraordinarily expensive—nearly a day’s average wage per word. Messages had to be brief and were largely reserved for the government, the military, and the ultra-wealthy. However, a decade later, the first transcontinental railroad was established, which, with the adoption of standardized domestic postage, meant most Americans could afford to send letters across the country and have them arrive within a week. Travel between Los Angeles and Boston became possible but still took weeks and cost several weeks’ worth of average wages.

Innovation accelerated even more rapidly during the 20th century with the invention and commercialization of telephones and air travel. By 1950, the luxuries of traveling between coasts in six hours and communicating across coasts in real time became possible. But these new services were still extraordinarily expensive. Transcontinental flights, both then and now, cost around $300; however, adjusted for inflation, a $300 flight in 1950 corresponds to well over $3,000 in today’s dollars. Likewise, while modern phone plans offer unlimited texts and calls for the equivalent of a few hours of the average minimum wage per month, transcontinental phone calls in the 1950s cost over $2.00 per minute, or over $27 per minute in today’s dollars. Only in the last 30 years, thanks to the economic engine of progress, did it become affordable for the average American to call long-distance for hours.

The technologies enabling long-distance communication and travel have improved immeasurably from the time of the Pilgrims. That alone is reason enough to be thankful. But besides the amazing pocket-sized supercomputers and the satellite infrastructure that made my family’s group message possible, our exchange hinted at another amazing development that people often take for granted: food abundance.

My father grew up in a small Palestinian village in northern Israel, where most people were farmers. He was one of nine siblings and told stories of how chickens were slaughtered only on special occasions—red meat even rarer. A single bird was shared among a dozen people. “You were lucky if you got a drumstick,” my father said. Everything from feeding to slaughtering and plucking was done by hand. And without refrigeration, the meal had to be eaten at once.

By contrast, in the United States today, food is so cheap and plentiful that several relatives can volunteer to bring a whole turkey. At my local supermarket, frozen birds were recently on sale for $0.47 per pound. A 15-pound turkey, enough to feed a family, costs less than an hour’s minimum wage.

I am grateful for the world of superabundance, which has improved our lives and Thanksgiving holidays beyond what our ancestors could have dreamed. The fact that these interactions are commonplace enough to be taken for granted—communicating in real time across vast distances, flying across the country or around the world in hours, earning enough calories with a day’s wages to feed a family for a week—make our story of progress all the better.

This Thanksgiving, take a moment to consider how life has improved since the time of the Pilgrims. The food on your plate, the technology in your pocket, and the family who traveled long distances to be at the table were all made possible thanks to generations of compounding progress.

This article was originally published by Human Progress on 11/26/2025.

“Nature versus nurture” is a debate older than the field of psychology itself. Are we born with fixed traits, or are we shaped entirely by our upbringing? Of course, this is a false dichotomy. Both genes and environment shape most psychological traits. The real question is not nature versus nurture, but how much each contributes to different outcomes.

This question matters deeply for thinking about human progress. Any attempts at improving the human condition must be compatible with human nature, or they will risk creating more problems—such as the collapse of communist and socialist economies, for example—than they solve. And understanding human nature means grappling with our biological constraints and evolutionary history. Progress for squirrels might mean a world devoid of natural predators, where every tree grows acorns year-round. But human progress is a distinctly human concept.

As a psychologist, I am interested in the psychological foundations of human progress. To understand and sustain human progress, we must first understand the nature of the humans who are progressing. Strangely, the beings most capable of reflecting on our own values are also the most skilled at obfuscating them, as my graduate advisor, Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker, has explored at length in his books The Blank Slate and Rationality. Many influential thinkers throughout history have questioned or outright denied the concept of human nature.

Superficially, that makes sense. Unlike some animals, which can walk and forage minutes after birth, human infants are born helpless and remain dependent on others for years. We are not born with language, and the languages we learn to speak depend entirely on the environment we were brought up in. As the English philosopher John Locke noted, all knowledge appears to come from experience, whether firsthand or taught by others. The human mind, at birth, is seemingly a true blank slate.

The blank-slate view was profoundly influential on the Enlightenment philosophy that set the stage for the miraculous forms of human progress in the coming centuries. If every baby starts out essentially the same, only advantaged or disadvantaged by their environment, then the case for equality becomes not just moral, but empirically necessary. It suggests that no one is born inherently superior, and that differences in status, intelligence, or virtue are all shaped by experience, not destiny. If all minds begin equally blank, then all individuals are capable of reason, learning, and democratic self-governance.

The idea that human nature was endlessly flexible fueled optimism, but it also began to cast blame on modern society. If we are all a product of our environments, then violence, poverty, and inequality were the results of a manipulated system. This philosophy was most famously embodied by the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that humans were born fundamentally good and were corrupted by society. In his view, the natural state of humanity was one of egalitarian peace, disrupted only by the emergence of social institutions that fostered competition and inequality.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in stark contrast, believed the default state of human life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For Hobbes, society constrained the worst of our innate impulses, and a strong legal system made crime more dangerous than cooperation. While Hobbes’s vision was often caricatured as bleak or authoritarian, modern psychology has increasingly validated his core insight. Humans are not born peaceful and rational, but possess a mix of impulses—some prosocial, others aggressive, impulsive, and self-serving. As the Canadian developmental psychologist Richard Tremblay has shown, the most aggressive humans are, in fact, toddlers. Although they cannot inflict real harm, most toddlers hit, steal, and lie as soon as they are capable. As all parents know, these innate antisocial behaviors must be patiently weaned out of children through healthy socialization and repeated instruction.

These two visions—Rousseau’s romanticism and Hobbes’s realism—have shaped centuries of thought about human nature and the role of institutions. One sees society as the source of our problems; the other sees it as the solution. Both, in their extremes, miss the full picture. We are born capable of both empathy and cruelty, cooperation and tribalism, innovation and superstition. Society both nurtures us and constrains us. Different aspects of different ideologies and institutions both facilitate and prevent human progress.

Institutions are not just abstract systems—they are extensions of human psychology. Their success or failure often hinges on how well they accommodate and channel our evolved tendencies. When institutions align with human nature, they can guide self-interest into cooperation, aggression into justice, and tribalism into civic identity. When they ignore it, they risk collapse, corruption, or unintended negative consequences.

Consider the market economy. At its best, it transforms individual ambition into mutual benefit. Entrepreneurs seek profit, but in doing so, they create goods, services, and jobs. This is not a triumph over human nature—it is a clever use of it. As the Scottish economist Adam Smith noted, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Contrast that with utopian communes that attempt to erase hierarchy, suppress competition, or eliminate private property. These experiments often fail because they ignore deep-seated human drives for status, autonomy, and reciprocity. When institutions deny these drives, they invite dysfunction.

Successful democracies are not built on the belief that humans are all born the same, but that our differences can complement each other, given sufficient freedom and equality before the law. Checks and balances, the rule of law, and free speech are not just moral principles, but safeguards against the psychological realities that humans are fallible, competitive, and prone to power-seeking. Progress is not achieved by transcending our psychology, but by building systems that align with our best impulses and constrain our worst.

Despite these self-evident truths, discussions of progress often neglect human nature in favor of nurture. Whether arguing for government intervention in the market, increased social welfare spending, or profound cultural change, advocates of such positions share a commitment to reshaping our environments. Yet even in identical environments, outcomes vary dramatically depending on psychological factors such as trust, optimism, gratitude, and self-control. These are not variables that can be socially engineered. Instead, they are traits that arise from genetic inheritance, individual beliefs, decisions, and cultivation of habits.

Even in this almost miraculous age of superabundance—characterized by unprecedented material wealth, a high degree of freedom, and technological sophistication—many people feel lost, cynical, and devoid of purpose. To improve people’s psychological outlook, a deep understanding of human nature is necessary. That consists of considering not only our environments but also human nature itself. Without that understanding, progress can lead to unintended, sometimes negative, consequences. Material abundance can breed obesity and lethargy; excess freedom can lead to decision paralysis; technological progress can erode attention spans and lead to addiction. History shows that we are not blank slates who can be remolded into something we are not.

My role at Human Progress will be to not just examine the psychological aspects of progress—mental health, optimism, rationality, cooperation, creativity, and productivity—but to understand how progress interfaces with human nature and leads to human flourishing. In the words of the American economist Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Progress is a negotiation between our aspirations and our nature—between what we were built to be and what we hope to become. The most enduring advances come not from denying our instincts, but from designing systems that guide them toward constructive ends.

This article was originally published by Human Progress on 10/31/2025.

Roots of Progress is a relatively new and inspiring initiative centered around progress studies, a new interdisciplinary field that aims to measure and improve human progress. Early pioneers in the field include Marian Tupy, founder of HumanProgress.org (where I now work as a research fellow), and Steven Pinker, my PhD advisor. Pinker’s Enlightenment Now and Tupy’s Superabundance are foundational texts in the field, documenting dramatic improvements in food availability, technological progress, and human freedom, combined with reductions in mortality rates, violence, and poverty over the past two centuries. Last week, I had the honor of attending the second annual Progress Conference in Berkeley, California, cohosted by Roots of Progress and HumanProgress.org, among other sponsors.

The Progress movement aims not only to combat cynicism by spreading awareness of these almost miraculous trends, but also to research ways to accelerate progress and achieve human flourishing. As a result, the Progress Conference was unlike any other I’ve attended. Academic conferences tend to be cautious, formal, and hyperspecialized. PhD researchers are trained not to make any overly ambitious claims that might go beyond the data, and interdisciplinary work is often disincentivized given the opportunity cost of mastering and advancing one specific niche. By contrast, the Progress Conference embraced San Francisco Bay–area start-up culture. It was an interdisciplinary gathering of researchers, policy experts, and entrepreneurs, ambitious yet casual. People spoke about progress over beanbag chairs and bonfires, not podiums and lecture halls.

There were, of course, techno-optimists who might raise a skeptic’s eyebrows. Ambitious visions for how artificial superintelligence will solve all the world’s problems (especially apt for Sam Altman, keynote speaker and CEO of OpenAI), and start-ups hoping to terraform Earth and combat climate change by injecting coolant chemicals into the stratosphere to counter the effects of carbon dioxide. To these most ambitious claims I was one such skeptic. Surprisingly, I found myself most inspired by three seemingly mundane proposals for innovation.

Automating Bureaucratic Drab

The first was the most pragmatic form of AI hype I’d ever encountered. It began with a statistic: Americans spend 10 billion hours annually on regulatory paperwork. This includes filing taxes, DMV forms, legislative review, all sorts of compliance codes for businesses, and many other tedious aspects of bureaucracy. Most of this could be automated. If there’s one thing modern large language models (LLMs) are good at, it’s analyzing text and filling out structured forms. What I love about this insight is that it doesn’t require any speculative advances beyond current AI capabilities, nor does it require the type of creative and critical thinking—like writing research papers—that state-of-the-art LLMs still struggle with. It is exactly the type of repetitive brute-force labor that computers excel at. A big concern with digitizing paperwork is privacy, or that some government forms are too important to be entrusted to automation. I am far from an expert in this, but I imagine that most of this paperwork is less sensitive than tax forms, which we have successfully digitized despite the cybersecurity risks. We do not have to digitize everything to reap the benefits of picking off billions of hours of low-hanging fruit. Likewise, even important forms that would require human review may still save billions of hours by automating a first draft, followed by human review, rather than having a human manually type in everything. If we conservatively estimate the value of people’s time at just $10 per hour—below minimum wage in most states—this could free up tens of billions of dollars’ worth of labor annually. In practice, many of these bureaucratic hours are burdened by law firms that charge hundreds of dollars hourly, bringing the potential savings into the hundreds of billions.

Same Grid, More Electricity

Another proposed innovation was a pragmatic approach to renovating the electric grid. Energy consumption is higher than ever and only going up, largely due to increased demand from AI data centers. Many innovators at Roots of Progress and elsewhere have pushed for increased investment in clean nuclear energy, and small modular reactors appear to be particularly promising. But again, I found myself more inspired by a seemingly more basic innovation. The key insight here is that the grid has to be structured around not just average or total energy demand, but peak demand. In practice, this means that our whole electric grid is optimized to handle the demand during the worst moments of summer, when everyone is blasting air-conditioning, when all the AI companies are training their biggest and most intensive models, when a meme goes viral and breaks the internet with a single hotbed of search traffic, and when energy output is lower than average due to some temporary malfunctions. Engineers have to build in contingencies for all of this so that temporary surges or decreases in energy production don’t lead to a total blackout. That means for the vast majority of the hours of each day and days of each year, we are using considerably less energy than our grid can handle. Our grid can already handle most of the new data-center demands most of the time; the reason the whole grid has to be expanded is that the upper limits of energy consumption we must constantly be prepared for also rise with increased average demand. The proposal was simple: If most homes (or businesses or factories) were equipped with large batteries, they could automatically switch to battery usage during peak times. The batteries could then be recharged throughout the day during lower demand hours. From the consumer’s perspective, so long as they get the necessary amount of energy, the source of the energy does not matter. This is different from backup generators: Peak demand is defined on a second-to-second basis. It’s not that a home would be cut off from the grid for hours and forced to rely on its battery. It’s that if it could automatically switch into battery mode, even for just a few seconds, during peak demand, the total average energy usage could dramatically rise without overloading the maximum capacity our grid already has.

More Efficient Air Travel

The last set of proposed innovations was, for me, the optimal balance between futuristic techno-optimism and pragmatic incremental progress. This came from Boom CEO Blake Scholl, whose company I had not heard of before. Boom is bringing back supersonic flight and hopes to succeed where the Concorde failed. If they succeed, the benefits are obvious: billions of hours saved annually on long flights completed in a fraction of the time. Putting the same paperwork math into place, this could have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of annual economic value, especially considering that the people most likely to make use of supersonic flight are high earners. I would say that I’m cautiously optimistic, but skeptical, about this. What I found most inspiring about Scholl’s talk was his rants about how so much of modern aviation could be improved by mundane changes to airport security. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is not only hugely costly and inefficient, but also ineffective at its stated goal of detecting threats. Scholl believes privatizing airports is the obvious solution, citing massive improvements in the cost and efficiency of space travel in the private sector thanks to SpaceX. Tongue in cheek, Scholl says that even the greatest pessimist in 1969 would not have believed that in the 21st century we would have lost the ability to travel to the moon or fly supersonic. But that is what government-operated aerospace has given us.

There may be large flaws in each of these ideas, and I don’t have the technical ability to evaluate them. What I can confidently say as a psychologist, however, is that the Progress Conference was filled with an atmosphere of optimism and ingenuity that is sorely lacking in most places. Human flourishing is ultimately measured not just by material comfort or technological advancement but by psychological well-being and a sense of purpose. It is inspiring to be surrounded by people who believe in progress and want to do their part in contributing to the betterment of our society and our species. How much better would life be if we all did that?

ARC alludes to Noah’s Ark, and the belief that the ripple effects of the actions of a minority of faithful, responsible citizens, can keep catastrophe at bay. As the story goes, the sinful descendants of Cain flood the world with evil to such a degree that even God views them as beyond redemption. Yet often overlooked in the drawn out genealogy of Genesis 4-5 is that after Abel is slain, Adam and Eve have a third son, Seth, his moral replacement. Noah is a descendent of Seth, not Cain, symbolically illustrating the direct transmission of the moral consequences of our actions. The murderous path of Cain produces Tubal-Cain, the maker of war, whose descendants set the stage for the flood. Conversely, the righteous line of Seth produces Noah, who saves life from extinction and is symbolically the direct ancestor of the moral line that ultimately produces Christ.

The philosophy behind ARC is that no problem that befalls us – be it the perils of war, natural disaster, authoritarianism, or nihilism – is beyond our capacity to resolve. With the proper moral orientation, commitment to the truth, and voluntary self-sacrifice, ARC posits that we can progress towards a world of greater peace and abundance. It also recognizes that, for all of our flaws and the very real existential threats we face, our species has already progressed tremendously in the right direction, and we must not lose sight of that morale.

As Steven Pinker writes in Enlightenment Now, whose themes and statistics overlapped with many of those presented at ARC, the world is better than ever before by almost every conceivable metric. Life expectancy is higher than ever, as is material abundance, education rates, and free time. Basic amenities such as electricity, refrigeration, plumbing, and antibiotics afford us with luxuries that even kings throughout history could never attain. Conversely, child mortality, disease rates, and violence are lower than ever before. Pinker credits these markers of progress directly to the Enlightenment philosophy of science, reason, and humanism.

Douglas Murray’s speech at ARC built on these themes and argues that Enlightenment values are the crowning achievement of Western civilization, not something to be taken for granted. He recounts as a child assuming that vanilla was the “default” flavor of ice cream, only later realizing that vanilla is itself a rich complex flavor added to ice cream, and an expensive spice considered as a luxury throughout much of history. Western civilization is vanilla, he states, to laughter and applause. Many Westerners may feel, or even argue, that they have no unique flavor. In the age of postmodern deconstruction, excessive focus has gone towards highlighting the flaws of Western civilization, and its experiences with colonialism, slavery, racism, and sexism. These problems have plagued every civilization throughout history, and in the words of Thomas Hobbes, the default state of human nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Yet ironically, the culture in which these problems are criticized the most is the one in which we have made the most progress – and to give credit where credit is due, largely because of the centuries of hard-won criticism that led to the abolition of slavery and culminated in the civil rights victories of recent decades. As Konstantin Kisin argued, where and during what time in history would an ethnic or gender minority be best living? The answer is now – or perhaps even a decade or two ago, before “progressive” deconstructionism had sufficiently polarized and demoralized us.

As social psychologist Rob Henderson spoke about, these criticisms are luxury beliefs: virtue-signaling ideas which confer status upon elites while inflicting costs on the poor. What are those costs? The erosion of meritocratic ideals, traditional family structure, and patriotism that motivate people to work hard and contribute to their society. Elites virtue-signal by pushing policies that harm those without their safety nets. They call to defund police while living in gated communities, glamorize single parenthood while relying on private daycare and nannies, and denounce patriotism while thriving in the nations they critique. As it is said, when the upper class catches a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.

Douglas Murray’s solution to the problem of deconstruction is reconstruction: claiming ownership over the merits of Western culture. It is not the case, as progressive idealists argue, that the virtues of democratic humanism are universal ideals. They are uniquely products of millennia of Judeo-Christian moral progress. It is not an accident that the societies built around these values became the most prosperous – both economically and in championing the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. Nor is it an accident that the recent decline and polarization felt in the West coincides with losing sight of these foundational values.

The most impactful experience of ARC for me was not the dozens of motivating talks, nor being surrounded by like-minded people – for there was much we disagreed on, myself being a center-left outlier in the conservative environment – but the bedrock commitment to freedom of speech, constructive debate, and an optimistic vision of the future. It is bittersweet to reflect on how free I felt to speak my mind and be challenged at ARC, compared to the constraints at Harvard University and within academic environments writ large. The Hobbesian default state of nature, and of social discourse, is nasty and brutish. Groups are incentivized to shame and mob, and individuals are incentivized to self-censor to maximize their own upward mobility, unless we are all subordinate to some higher ideal of truth-seeking.

According to today’s politics, ARC leaned conservative, but the values put forth are classically liberal ideals of democracy, humanism, diversity of perspective, freedom of expression, addressing poverty and economic inequality, child education and family support, and civil rights. Responsible citizenship begins with individuals speaking their mind and sacrificing for a healthier future. This means forgoing short-term comfort and convenience to build something greater—sacrificing immediate gratification and upholding one’s values even when they come at a cost. It requires the courage to speak truth despite social backlash, resisting the quiet authoritarianism that thrives on self-censorship. It demands subordination to a higher aim – to God – to ensure future generations inherit a society rooted in truth, integrity, and resilience.

It takes only a small ARC to save us all from the flood. Come aboard, bear your cross, and row.

DALL-E: “Draw the stonks meme with finance arrows going up but make it LBGTQ rainbow themed with gender symbols”

1. Absolute vs. Relative Population Increase? 

I believe sexual orientation to be an innate biological phenomenon*. Born this way. If a certain proportion of any human population is gay, bisexual, or transgender, and if that percentage is stable, the queer population will vary with the overall population in absolute terms. For example, if 3% of the population is always queer, the total queer population would double from 120 million to 240 million as the global population doubled from 4 billion to 8 billion in the last 50 years. That is one form of growth, but it’s not what most people are getting at when they ask if people are becoming “gayer.” I’m expecting that any historical changes in queer population size will be mostly accounted for by overall population and demographic change, and that proportion changes will be much smaller*. 

2. Countries in the Closet?

Most data on the subject is from the United States and other WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations. Homosexuality is now largely accepted in WEIRD countries, but not in much of the rest of the world. If people “became” more gay in the last 50 years of the West, did they really become more gay, or did they just finally feel safe enough to respond to the surveys accurately? I’m expecting that most of the “increase” in homosexuality in the last 50 years is explained by lifting a veil of stigma to reveal what was already there*. Conversely, this means that the global absolute queer population may actually be underestimated, because most of the recent world population growth has come from Africa, India, and China (China’s population more than doubled from 1950 to 2020, despite their plummeting birth rates). India, China, and all countries in Africa (except South Africa, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, nearly a decade ahead of the United States) still ban same-sex marriage. Despite making up more than half of the world’s population – and therefore half of the world’s gay population, if the biological base rate is truly the same – most gay people born in these countries, as well as in the Middle East, might remain in the closet and report inaccurate survey data (if sexual orientation is being surveyed at all). 

3. LGB without the T(Q+)? Without the B? 

*This is where the asterisks come in, and the jumping between language of “gay” and “queer”.

I believe that the evidence strongly supports innate sexual orientation and gender identity, and that the rates of homosexuality and gender dysphoria as innate biological phenomena are unlikely to change at a species level. Queerness is something different, and something new. As the LGB community grew to LGBT, to LGBTQ, to LGBTQIA2S+ (adding intersex, asexual, and “two-spirit” gender-fluid identities to the mix), no doubt it has grown, simply because the borders have gotten wider. Intersex and asexual people have always existed, and if they now fall under the umbrella of queer, that is a simple explanation for how the queer-identifying population may be growing. Humanity hasn’t changed, the labels have. I expect there to be little change in gay and lesbian identities, and transgender identities as the result of intersex conditions, all of which have clear biological causes. Queerness, however, may very well increase as a result of sociocultural changes. Its very definition is identity which does not conform to established gender and sexuality norms. Depending on one’s affinity for the label, that could include even slightly more effeminate men or slightly more androgynous women. Bisexuality falls into a unique middleground. My expectation is that though the underlying distribution of sexual attraction is unlikely to change biologically, our labels for it might. Someone who is able to appreciate the beauty of a same-sex or transgender person, while otherwise identifying as straight in any other historical context, might now consider that enough to make them pansexual or queer. My sense is that less about our underlying sexuality is changing than is our use of labels. Labels are exclusive, even discriminatory. A young person navigating their identity might not want such strict boundaries. What does one have to lose by identifying as queer? Isn’t everyone queer – different – in their own unique way?

What's your best theory as to why the number of people experiencing LGBT issues has increased so much in recent years?

Turns out I had a lot to say. Note that all of this is extremely speculative and informal. In the future I would like to revisit this issue in more depth, but am posting my initial thoughts below. (Substack and peer-review are different for a reason.)

I broke the question into a few forms:

1. What determines sexual orientation biologically?

Sexual orientation as a biological phenomenon is innate, and largely determined by organizational effects of sex hormones during a prenatal critical window of brain development. Sexual behavior can be manipulated in rodents by blocking androgens in males or introducing androgens in females during this critical window. In humans, the intersex conditions I talked about on Mikhaila Peterson’s Podcast map onto this theory. There is substantial heritability to homosexuality, but I believe the genetic effects are all mediated by sex hormones*

2. Can sexual orientation change as a result of hormonal effects outside of the prenatal critical window? 

No, I don’t know of any evidence to support this. The same rodent studies, as well as human evidence from other intersex, transgender, or gonadal cancer patients on hormone replacement therapy don’t show any effects of androgen, estrogen, or progestin exposure on sexual orientation outside of this prenatal window (but it will affect sex drive, and possibly the phenotypes someone is attracted to - see Sarah Hill’s work on birth control). 

3. Can sexual orientation change as a result of social or environmental influences?

The only types of environmental variables that can biologically impact sexual orientation would be mediated by prenatal sex hormones. This probably explains the indirect effects of male birth order, and other possible small effects related to maternal diet or exposure to endocrine disrupting toxins (such as such as atrazine which “turns the frogs gay”). 

Looking to animal research, I don’t know of any environmental variables or plausible mechanisms that would impact sexual orientation other than through prenatal sex hormones. Some species such as bonobos engage in same-sex sex as a form of social bonding, but this is different from homosexuality. You could argue they’re bisexual, but you could also argue that they’re all heterosexual when it comes to attraction and engage in same-sex sex for other reasons. 

4. What are the evolutionary theories for homosexuality?

My hot take: they are all spandrel arguments. There could be any number of selection pressures for prenatal sex hormones which net out as adaptive despite some low or high extreme of the bell curve stably having no offspring. 

5. What then explains demographic shifts in human sexual orientation? 

The only possible biological mechanisms I gave are endocrine disrupters impacting fetal brain development through maternal diet or toxin exposure. Actually, I think there could possibly be a small effect there due to changes in diet and pollution, but highly unlikely to explain the changes from 1-2% of Boomers to 10-20+% of Zoomers. The changes then must be all a problem of measurement or sociocultural influences:

- Stigma: It’s believable to me that the true base rate of homosexual or bisexual attraction is underestimated worldwide and in older generations because people are afraid to come out. My guess is that the true base rate is similar to the 1-2% gay and 5-10% bi observed in Millenials, but overestimated in Gen Z. 

- Measurement: What does it mean to be bisexual? If you have ever once fantasized about someone of the same sex, are you gay or bi? My guess is that sexual orientation truly exists on a skewed bimodal distribution (majority heterosexual, minority homosexual, with overlap in the middle and variability in how straight or gay someone is). With any continuous trait and categorical labels, there is some arbitrary cutoff. Perhaps most people who’d ever rarely fantasized about the same sex, or acknowledged their attractiveness, would not doubt their sexual orientation, but a teenager raised in today’s world of fluid sexuality would be more open to labeling themselves as bi. There can also be perverse incentives. I saw recent data that 20-40% of Ivy League students identified as LBGT. No one can disprove them of their self-identity, and if they believe it will get them affirmative action, it makes sense that it would be overrepresented. 

*Earlier when I said the genetic effects must all be mediated by prenatal hormones, it’s also possible that genes involved in personality trait Openness could predict how willing someone is to experiment with self-identity, even if their underlying biological attraction is the same

 6. What about the T in LBGT? 

The same answers apply for all of the above. I think the percentage of people with innate gender incongruence is likely stable but underestimated in older cohorts and worldwide, overestimated in younger cohorts, and driven by prenatal sex hormones. I believe the overestimate in younger cohorts may be driven by maladaptive response to body dysmorphia in response to puberty, and comorbid mental health conditions. Gender identity development during adolescence may be particular hard for autistic and highly Open youth navigating our evolving social landscape of gender and sexuality.

I experienced mild gender dysphoria during adolescence, likely due to weight-related body dysmorphia, social issues, and a lack of masculine role models, which later resolved as each of those improved.

All of this is speculative but extremely important to be discussed openly if we hope to progress gender affirming care. The chances that no gender dysphoria may have resulted from causes other than innate mismatch between sex and gender identity is the same as the chances there are no people with innate gender dysphoria who would not benefit from transition. Zero. 

The amount of time I spent writing is a good index of how busy things are. It’s been 5 months since my last blog post, and while I’ve still uploaded podcasts more-or-less weekly, the schedule has been less consistent. 

At risk of rationalizing falling off the wagon, I dare say that’s a good thing. 

I had a lot of free time in the first year of my PhD. I wrote 20 Psychology Today articles, recorded 50 podcasts, had many stimulating off-camera academic conversations with peers and colleagues, and generaly spent most of my time reading, listening, and exploring new ideas. (Note that this is how I spent most of my academically productive free time. That’s not to pretend that most of my free time falls into this category, nor should it.) 

Recently, much more of my (academically productive) time has gone into lab research. I’ve just submitted a manuscript based on puberty and hormones data I’ve been working with, which I’ll say more about after it gets through peer review, hopefully by early spring. 

With this completed, there’s time for more exploration of ideas, at least for a short while. 

Below is a new Psychology Today article on two interesting intersex disorder case-studies, arguing that sex differences are more determined by hormones than genetics:

Hormones Determine Sex More than Genetics

Two case studies of intersex disorders showing how complex and hormone-driven sex differentiation really is. 

Most people assume that our genes determine the characteristics that make males and females distinct from each other: sex organs, secondary sex characteristics, personality, behavior, even reproductive capacity. That is all true, but in a far more indirect way than you’d think. Hormones are the real star of the show. 

The Female Blank Slate

At conception, every human inherits 23 pairs of chromosomes, including the sex chromosomes that define genetic sex: XX for females and XY for males. However, irrespective of whether the fetus is genetically male or female, it initially follows a developmental pathway that is anatomically female. This is the stage often referred to as the "female blank slate."

The first few weeks of embryonic growth do not show any discernible differences between the two sexes. It's not until approximately the sixth week of gestation that the sex chromosomes determine which types of gonads are developed: testes in males, or ovaries in females. Sex hormones produced by the gonads – testosterone by the testes, and estrogen by the ovaries – then drive further sex differentiation, including the development of the reproductive organs and subtle organizational changes on the brain. 

Sex Differentiation in the Brain

As a result of these hormonal changes, early in utero and during a surge period in the first few months of life known as “minipuberty”, male and female brains begin to wire differently. It’s thought that many of these organizational brain changes, due to prenatal hormone exposure, directly contribute to many of the sex differences observed in the behavior and personalities of children and adults. 

How do we know this? Isn’t it possible that gender differences are the result of gendered socialization – boys and girls being treated differently, in subtle ways, from the moment of birth – which merely coincides with different sex hormone levels?

There are a few rare intersex disorders that shed light on these questions. 

Female Genes, Male Hormones

The most common intersex disorder in humans is congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). Congenital meaning present from birth, and adrenal hyperplasia meaning overactive adrenal glands. Children with CAH have a deficiency in cortisol, our body’s primary stress hormone. While chronically high cortisol is toxic to the body, in short bursts it is essential for our body’s fight or flight survival response, and a small baseline amount of cortisol is necessary for critical basic survival functions such as regulating metabolism. 

Therefore, with the cortisol deficiency present in CAH, the body signals to the adrenal glands – where cortisol is produced – to work harder. As a side effect of this, the adrenals also produce other androgens (masculinizing hormones) in excess, including androstenedione, a precursor to testosterone. What happens as a result of this?

CAH can be deadly if left untreated, but it is almost always diagnosed shortly after birth. Children are treated with glucocorticoids (cortisol supplements) and the adrenal glands calm down. However, they were still exposed to higher than average levels of androgens prenatally. What happens as a result of this?

In males, nothing interesting. Their testes were already producing testosterone, and a bit more from the adrenals doesn’t change much. In females, it’s a whole different story. 

Females have much lower levels of testosterone than males. Prenatally, males are exposed to over 5x as much, and after puberty, up to 20x as much. Females with CAH, however, have several times more testosterone exposure than typically-developing females, nearing male-typical levels. 

As a result of this, CAH is classified as an intersex disorder. Chronically high androgen exposure can masculinize female genitalia, leading to ambiguous sexual presentation, but CAH is usually treated early enough (before minipuberty) that this doesn’t happen. Most girls with CAH go on to live healthy lives as women. The largest effects of CAH, therefore, are subtle organizational effects of prenatal testosterone on the brain. 

Females with CAH have structural and functional brain differences which lead to lifelong personality changes. Girls with CAH are more aggressive and tomboyish during childhood, and exhibit more masculine play preferences. And women with CAH are much more likely to identify as lesbian during adulthood. 

As dramatic as these changes sound, they still fall within the range of typical variability. Plenty of women are more masculine, or more attracted to women, than the average man. 

An even rarer intersex disorder, however, leads to even more dramatic and interesting changes.

Male Genes, Female Hormones

Looking at the other end of the spectrum, there's the condition known as Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS). People with CAIS can have androgens like testosterone circulating in the body, but they do not bind to androgen receptors properly: they are functionally inert. 

What happens in females with CAIS? Well, androgens like testosterone and DHEA govern the development of body hair, body odor, and acne, especially during puberty. Perhaps enviously, people with CAIS will not develop any of that. But there are no significant harms on women – ovarian hormones like estrogen and progesterone are enough to guide healthy female development. 

A complete lack of male hormones has much more dramatic effects on males. Remember, what the Y chromosome does is genetically program the development of the testes during the first six weeks of fetal development. From then on, testosterone produced by the testes drives all further sex differentiation, including genital development. 

This might imply that genetic males with CAIS might be born with no genitals or sex-specific traits at all, an opposite extreme compared to intersex disorders involving ambiguous presentation with both masculine and feminine traits. But interestingly, that’s not the case. 

Remember the idea of the “female blank slate”. All prepubescent males have roughly the same levels of female sex hormones as females, but their effects are normally inhibited by androgens. In males with CAIS, the small amounts of estrogen and progesterone are enough to facilitate female-typical development. At birth, they will present with an unambiguously female vagina. But inside their abdomens, instead of ovaries, they have testes producing testosterone that their bodies cannot make use of. 

These XY-children will grow up as perfectly healthy girls, but now you might think: they don’t have ovaries, and their testes don’t work. Surely they can’t go through male or female puberty, and are destined to live their lives as prepubescent girls. 

That is also not true. Again, surprisingly, the small amounts of estrogen and progesterone present in males are enough for the development of female secondary sex characteristics: breast growth, fat redistribution around the hips, and other female-specific traits. These effects are normally inhibited by androgens in males. But males with CAIS will go through female puberty too.

Typically, XY-girls with CAIS are not diagnosed until their late teens, after having gone through all features of puberty but strangely never getting their first period. They find out they don’t have ovaries, and can never menstruate or bear children. But despite their XY chromosomes and testes, they go on to live their lives as healthy women, and externally have all of the same features as women. They are also just as likely to be attracted to men as heterosexual women, indicating that whatever determines sexuality is more likely to be hormonal or environmental than genetic. 

Male or Female?

I began by calling XY-fetuses with CAIS male, then switched to calling them women. Are they male or female? It’s complicated. 

Genetically, they are male. Medically, they have all the same characteristics of females (except ovaries). Socially, they were raised as girls and women. And reproductively – the most common definition of sex used by evolutionary biologists, defined by whether an organism produces eggs or sperm – they are neither. 

These extreme cases of intersexuality have extremely fuzzy borders, and it becomes useful to distinguish between genetic sex, reproductive sex, medical sex, and gender socialization. But in well over 99% of cases, most humans are unambiguously male or female. Much more so than by genes, however, sex differentiation is driven by sex hormones. 

In this reunion episode, episode, we discuss active inference and predictive processing theories of consciousness, panpsychism, philosophy of mind, and the difference between interoception and exteroception. We further consider the evolutionary psychology of self-awareness, empathy, status seeking, and sexuality, and how these translate to modern technology and mental health. Lastly, we discuss neuroscience and its connection to film and literature, which Jonas discusses on his new podcast Float, and how this connects to cross-cultural analyses of religion, archetypes, and recent debates between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson on the psychology and utility of religion.

In this episode, we sample some of the many, many topics covered in Psych, including Freud, evolutionary psychology, language development, moral development, and social cognition. We also talk about Paul’s early research on language development and moral cognition, my own research on pubertal hormones and brain development, and the meta-psychology of what makes podcasts interesting.

The Evolution of Language

We by discussing Dr. Bloom’s early research on language evolution, particularly his groundbreaking article with Steven Pinker on natural language and natural selection. He explains that their goal was to challenge the prevailing views at the time, which suggested that language evolved through general patterns of communication or pattern recognition, rather than through natural selection. Drs. Bloom and Pinker argued that language is indeed an evolved adaptation, just like other traits in the animal kingdom. They emphasized that the ability to communicate through language is a unique and specialized feature of the human mind, shaped by the forces of natural selection.

Reflecting on the controversy surrounding their article, Dr. Bloom highlights the strong influence of certain views that rejected the role of natural selection in explaining the evolution of the mind. He notes that the field has since moved away from these views, recognizing the importance of specialized systems in the brain and the role of natural selection in shaping cognitive abilities. Dr. Bloom also acknowledges the role of culture in language development, noting that the relationship between language and natural selection is complex and multifaceted.

According to Dr. Bloom, "Language is a product of natural selection, just like other traits in the animal kingdom. It is a unique and specialized feature of the human mind, shaped by the forces of natural selection."

We then explore the parallels between developmental psychology and evolutionary psychology, particularly in terms of brain development and cognitive abilities. He explains that the early stages of brain development in children mirror the evolutionary stages of human development. Dr. Bloom states, "The early stages of brain development in children mirror the evolutionary stages of human development. As children grow and mature, they progress through the same stages that our distant ancestors did, gradually acquiring more advanced cognitive abilities and higher levels of self-control and rationality."

Social Cognition and Moral Development

While Dr. Bloom initially focused on language development in his research, he became increasingly interested in the role of social understanding and theory of mind in word learning. This eventually led him to explore moral development, an area that he had always been interested in but had not previously studied. Collaborating with researchers like David Pizarro and Karen Nguyen, Dr. Bloom delved into the relationship between morality and emotions like disgust, as well as the development of moral reasoning in children.

According to Dr. Bloom, "While there is evidence to suggest that conservatives tend to be more disgust-sensitive than liberals, the relationship between disgust and moral disapproval is not straightforward. Cultural and societal norms play a significant role in shaping our moral judgments, and the correlation between disgust sensitivity and moral disapproval may vary across different contexts." However, he also notes that the relationship between disgust and moral disapproval is not straightforward and can be influenced by various factors. For example, cultural and societal norms play a significant role in shaping our moral judgments, and the correlation between disgust sensitivity and moral disapproval may vary across different contexts.

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Moving on to the topic of free will, Dr. Bloom shares his perspective as a compatibilist, someone who believes that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive. He argues that while we may not have metaphysical free will or the ability to step outside the causal world, we still make choices and are morally responsible for our actions in a practical sense. He acknowledges the role of choice and intention in moral judgments, noting that notions of moral responsibility often involve assumptions of some degree of freedom to act.

Dr. Bloom also discusses the challenges of studying free will and moral responsibility, particularly in the context of developmental psychology. He highlights the importance of understanding how children develop their understanding of free will and moral responsibility, as well as the cultural and societal factors that shape these concepts. While he acknowledges that there is still much to learn in this area, he believes that the study of free will and moral responsibility is crucial for understanding human behavior and promoting ethical decision-making.

Dr. Bloom states, "While we may not have metaphysical free will or the ability to step outside the causal world, we still make choices and are morally responsible for our actions in a practical sense. Notions of moral responsibility often involve assumptions of some degree of freedom to act."

From Freud to Modern Psychology

Reflecting on the influence of historical figures like Sigmund Freud, Dr. Bloom acknowledges the significant impact they have had on the field of psychology. While many of Freud's specific theories have been debunked, his fundamental idea of the dynamic unconscious and the role of unconscious processes in shaping behavior and beliefs remains influential. Dr. Bloom credits Freud with bringing attention to the complexity of the human mind and the importance of understanding the unconscious factors that drive our thoughts and actions.

Dr. Bloom also highlights the shift towards empirical research and data-driven approaches in modern psychology. He acknowledges the limitations of relying solely on intuition and psychoanalytical theories, emphasizing the need for rigorous scientific investigation to advance our understanding of the human mind. He encourages researchers to embrace the empirical approach and continue to explore the complexities of human psychology through systematic observation and experimentation.

Dr. Bloom concludes, "The future of psychology lies in our ability to bridge the gap between theory and practice, using empirical research to inform our understanding of the human mind and improve the lives of individuals and communities worldwide."