AMERICAN Scientist

July–August 2026

www.americanscientist.org

A More Perfect Union

For 250 years, science and democracy have sustained each other in the United States.

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~~[1]~~ 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局（NASA）宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

~~[2]~~ 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局（NASA）宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[3] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[4] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[5] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[6] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[7] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[8] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[9] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[10] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[11] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[12] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[13] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[14] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

[15] 2017年1月1日，美国国家航空航天局宣布将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》，并将在2018年1月1日发布《关于加强和改进航天科技创新应用的指导意见》。

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AMERICAN

Scientist

Volume 114 • Number 4 • July–August 2026

194 From the Editors

■ 214 Science

232 Implicating the Brain

Human-centered methods of countering online misinformation

■ 204 Commentary: Biotechnology and the Spirit of American Discovery

How a national initiative will advance innovation

TODD YOUNG AND MICHELLE ROZO

Elections in the Age of AI

Balancing minimum ballot errors and maximum voting convenience

R. MICHAEL ALVAREZ

■ 226 Science and Engineering Values: Revolutions and Revolutionaries

anyway?

253 Sigma Xi Today

The wonder we share, the responsibility we carry • Student Research Showcase winners • Sigma Xi members attend 2026 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting • Northeast Region Research Conference • Faces of GIAR: Holly m concept to launch

ON THE COVER

Scientific research, from vaccines to oceanography to space exploration, has flourished in the United States since its Declaration of Independence 250 years ago. However, science is information, commercial ing priorities. To oppose the such influences, democratic rules must continue to guide search and decision-making. (Ly Clare Nicholas.)

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From the Editors

Science and the American Experiment

Science is an international endeavor, not be holden to any geopolitical borders. Sigma Xi is an international society and has members worldwide; the Society is celebrating its 140th anniversary this year. And although our publication has “American” in the title, we work hard to cover research across the globe. However, it would be a lost opportunity not to acknowledge this year’s 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence: The history of the country since its inception has influenced how the research enterprise has developed, and science policies of the United States will continue to have implications for the worldwide science ecosystem.

The American experiment was established on the ideal that a country could govern itself as a constitutional democracy, with standards rooted in equality and liberty. In this issue, we examine some of the results of that experiment so far, with a special section focused on 250 years of science and democracy. The articles in this section look at the past 250 years from a historical perspective, and we also look forward to the possible future results of the frameworks that this history has established.

In this issue’s Spotlight article (“When Inflammation Met Insurrection,” pages 198–200), Philip A. Rea looks at a case of medical misinformation and how it might have affected the outcome of the American Revolutionary War. In Science and Engineering Values (“Revolutions and Revolutionaries,” pages 226–230), Robert T. Pennock examines the country’s founders, their connections to the ideals of the Enlightenment, and how these ideals affected their composition of the Declaration of Independence and later legislation. And in Perspective (“Salt of the Earth,” pages 218–221), Laura Clerx reviews how commercial enterprises in the early days of the United States informed the development of scientific research.

Moving to more recent eras, in Science Policy (“The Case for Sea Grant,” page 208–212), Samantha Muka describes how this government program created a research network for a basic understanding of our world’s oceans, which would not have been possible through private industry alone. In Science Communication (“Competing Histories,” pages 214–217), Judith Kaplan takes a deep dive into how a museum exhibition revealed competing ideas of how to portray the history of American science. And in Technologue (“Elections in the Age of AI,” pages 222–225), R. Michael Alvarez explains how ballot challenges during the 2000 U.S. presidential election spurred research into how to quantify problems with voting systems, and how that research is evolving with new advances in technology.

In our First Person interview (“Information and Community,” pages 202–203), Ahmer Arif discusses human-centered ways to address online misinformation, and how access to good information is vital to good governance. And in an unusual step for American Scientist, we have invited a current U.S. senator, Todd Young, along with Michelle Rozo, to author a Commentary column (“Biotechnology and the Spirit of American Discovery,” pages 204–207), in which they discuss the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology and proposed legislation to support a national biotechnology initiative.

Be sure to also look on our blog for highlights of past content, as well as reviews of books, all related to the theme of this special section. And check out Sigma Xi’s blog for more historical information on the Society’s 140-year legacy.

Recently, federal funding for research has taken a lot of hits, and celebrating history at this time might give us conflicting feelings. But more than ever, it’s important to acknowledge the effects that science and democracy continue to have on each other. —Fenella Saunders

AMERICAN Scientist

VOLUME 114, NUMBER 4

EDITORIAL

Editor-in-Chief Fenella Saunders
Managing Editor Stacey Lutkoski
Senior Consulting Editor Corey S. Powell
Associate Editor Nicholas Gerbis
Book Review Editor Jaime Herndon
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Contributing Editors Sandra J. Ackerman, Carolyn Beans, Christa Evans, Dan Falk, Jeremy Hawkins, Flora Taylor, Sarah Webb
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ART

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President David B. Allison
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EDITORIAL ADVISORY PANEL

Richard Boudreault, University of Waterloo
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American Scientist gratefully acknowledges support for engineering content through the Leroy Record Fund.

Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society is a society of scientists and engineers, founded in 1886 to recognize scientific achievement. A diverse organization of members and chapters, the Society fosters interaction among science, technology, and society, encourages appreciation and support of original work in science and technology, and promotes ethics and excellence in scientific and engineering research.

Printed in the USA

194 American Scientist, Volume 114

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Wired for This | Jason Lodge and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen

Making Learning Stick

This interview is part of episode 4 of Wired for This, American Scientist's podcast series exploring human behavior and neuroscience. The episode features Jason Lodge, professor of educational psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia (below, left), and Philipp Lorenz-Spreen of the Synergy of Systems center at TU Dresden in Germany (right), discussing online information and learning with host Celia Ford. This excerpt has been edited for length and clarity. Link to the full podcast series on the American Scientist website.

Why does some information stick, while other things seem to go in one ear and out the other?

Jason Lodge [JL]: A significant bottleneck is our ability to only pay attention to a certain number of things at a time. Decades of research have told us that things we selectively pay attention to are much more likely to be processed, because they enter into consciousness and memory. These things then impact us in a persistent way. For various reasons, the way that technology has evolved—including built-in advertising—has been about trying to capture that selective attention.

Philipp Lorenz-Spreen [PLS]: We prefer novelty and surprise. Our attention guides us to that because it's important to know new things. But there are other factors as well, especially if you think about the competition between sources of information. Also, negativity and other emotions such as outrage often guide our attention. There's negativity bias; negative headlines are more successful. There's another factor, in-group and out-group feelings, that humans are quite susceptible to. Whenever content talks about "us versus them," it tends to succeed more than other content.

How does the speed of online information affect people's processing of it?

PLS: We know there are millions, even billions of people active online, post-

ing stuff, writing content, and sharing and engaging with it. We can look at metadata, such as engagement: What gets a lot of likes? How do posts move through social networks? Who is sharing what? We can see if certain terms are getting a lot of traction, and watch trends go up and down.

We were inspired by sociologists who were talking about social acceleration, the idea that technological progress speeds up our lives and makes us more efficient, but it also pushes society to move faster. It creates a vicious cycle where we're basically trapped. We quantified "public discourse" as the popularity of hashtags, and observed that popularity increased and faded quicker over the years. Then we went for other datasets such as Google search queries, Reddit discussions, terms used in published books, movie ticket sales, and so on.

We also saw these accelerating dynamics, where waves of interest in discourse jumped from one topic to another very quickly. We're still studying the consequences this has on the quality of discourse, but you can imagine that the quicker that turnover is, the more difficult it is to keep up. It does create a vicious cycle, where we have to keep up with the discourse, but we might do so to the detriment of other things, such as the depth of the discourse.

How has the delivery of information affected learning?

JL: We know from research that if you want to learn something deeply, it requires hard mental work. Often, that hard mental work comes with confusion, frustration, and anxiety, depending on what you're trying to learn. This hard work that takes you from point A to point B is actually the key piece. You have to invest effort to create an effective learning experience. But things that are entertaining or aesthetically pleasing are easy for our minds to process. It tends to draw our attention because it feels nice for information to go down easily. Something we've seen a lot, especially with multimedia resources such as videos and podcasts, is that the easier to process the information is, the more it lures you into being overconfident about how much you know.

For example, there are fancy documentaries about really complex ideas like cosmology or quantum physics. Because they're so beautifully made, you might watch one for an hour and feel like you completely understand quantum physics. Of course you don't, but technology lures us into thinking that we can get to the finish line faster. Over time, these misjudgments compound. For students, that misjudgment would lead them to make the wrong decision—they probably need to spend more time studying the material, but they've developed a level of overconfidence.

Our research studies use classic testing approaches to assess people's understanding, but we also ask people how confident they are. Somebody who didn't perform well on a test but was very confident, didn't think they needed to put in much effort, and didn't think the material was difficult, is clearly overconfident in their learning.

The trick is to help our students test their understanding. If you think you understand something, you can try to explain it to someone else. If you can't, you probably don't understand it well enough. That calibration is critical. An expert is not just someone who knows lots of things; it's someone who knows the limits of their knowledge.

The full podcast is available online at americanscientist.org.

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GL Archive/Alamy Images

In September 1781, the formidable Admiral George Brydges Rodney was in England convalescing from gout, which left the less-capable Rear Admiral Thomas Graves in charge of the British fleet during the strategically decisive Battle of the Chesapeake. Graves's defeat precipitated the Siege of Yorktown a month later, which resulted in British surrender to American and French troops.

had they been brought to bear off the coast of Virginia, might have changed the fate of an empire.

Resistance to Treatment

Rodney's incapacitation raises an intriguing medical question: Why were England's best doctors unable to treat gout, a disease that had plagued leaders for centuries? The answer can be traced to the influential physician Thomas Sydenham.

Sydenham, revered as "England's Hippocrates" and himself a longtime sufferer of gout, died in 1689, nearly a century before the American Revolution, but his work had a lasting impact on the nation's medical practices. One of his strongly held medical positions was to eschew treatments for gout. In his 1683 publication A Treatise on Gout and Dropsy, Sydenham wrote, "I scruple not to affirm from a long course of experience, that most of those who are supposed to perish by the gout, are rather destroyed by wrong management, than by the disease itself."

This assertion contradicted common practice in mainland Europe, where physicians administered a standard treatment with great success. That treatment was a tincture made from a small purple flower that blooms in autumn—the colchicum, or autumn crocus (Colchicum autumnale), which is not a true crocus but a member of the lily family. Extracts from this plant yield colchicine, a chemical that is still widely

prescribed today for inflammatory conditions, most notably gout. Its use was not novel: Colchicum is described as a remedy for joint pain in the Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian manuscript written in approximately 1500 BCE.

Yet in 18th-century England, colchicum was regarded with deep suspicion and largely excluded from respectable medical practice. Sydenham had de-

The weight of Thomas Sydenham's authority was such that, for more than a century, colchicum as a treatment for gout all but vanished from the British pharmacopoeia.

nounced colchicum as a dangerous poison after experiencing its gastrointestinal effects firsthand. Diarrhea, nausea, and abdominal cramping—reactions now recognized as common, often dose-dependent, and typically self-limiting as the body adjusts—were in his opinion enough to condemn the drug to oblivion. The weight of Sydenham's authority was such that, for more than a century, colchicum all but vanished

from the place, R to stand bloodle eral dog Sydenha opium-d Rodney

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SPECIAL EDITION: 250 YEARS OF SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY

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with greater tactical precision, a battle might have gone the other way, and the world map might look quite different from what we see today. Who knows, perhaps even the import duties that were to fan the flames of colonial resentment and set rebellion alight might never have been imposed.

Such speculation belongs to the shadowland where medicine and history overlap, but it also offers a quiet reminder that empires, like bodies, are undone from within as much as they are conquered from without. The gout of an admiral or a statesman may seem incidental to the grand narratives of war and diplomacy, yet such ostensibly trivial inconveniences may play their part in shifting the tides of empire and quietly shaping the destinies of nations.

The autumn crocus, once scorned as poison, endures as a quiet symbol of what could have been—a flower that might have nipped rebellion in the bud had it, guided by a willing physician's hand, bloomed a little earlier.

Bibliography

Bywaters, E. G. L. 1962. Gout in the time and person of George IV: A case history. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 21:325–338.

Copeman, W. S. C. 1964. A Short History of the Gout and Rheumatic Diseases. University of California Press.

Dasgeb, B., D. Kornreich, K. McGuinn, L. Okon, I. Brownell, and D. L. Sackett. 2018. Colchicine: An ancient drug with novel applications. British Journal of Dermatology 178:350–356.

Lee, M. R. 1999. Colchicum autumnale and the gout. Naked ladies and portly gentlemen. Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 29:65–70.

Nuki, G., and P. A. Simkin. 2006. A concise history of gout and hyperuricemia and their treatment. Arthritis Research & Therapy 8:S1.

Pinals, R. S. 2021. How Admiral Rodney's disability saved the American Revolution. Pharos Spring:27–29.

Porter, R. 2001. The prince's poison. New Scientist (January 20).

Philip A. Rea is professor of biology and Rebecca and Arie Beldegrun Distinguished Director of the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management at the University of Pennsylvania. His research as a plant biochemist explores membrane transport and cellular detoxification processes. Email: parea@sas.upenn.edu

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methods of countering online misinformation

Community

Many social challenges that he hoped he found that many of the appli- cated would not have their intended were related more to human behavior PhD in human-centered design and to further understand these issues. People interact with misinformation, addressed in more democratic ways, conversations about the intersection to studies how people circulate and and he works with different com- help them cultivate healthier forms of now an assistant professor of com- ask, spoke with editor-in-chief Fenella has been edited for length and clarity.)

Are there cultural differences across countries that come up in these online environments related to information?

My colleague Kayo Mimizuka and I have studied QAnon in Japan. Yes, there is a large QAnon presence in Japan, and the dynamic there is some groups orient around right-wing U.S. political narratives and politicians, and they have anti-vaccine views. There are lots of cultural differences in how that country deals with problematic narratives like this. One is that they have a different argument culture, a notion developed by linguist Deborah Tannen. Here in the West, such as in America, our argument culture is more combative. Think about how deeply ingrained that is in our culture: People defend their dissertations, you attack an argument, you use bullet points. Japan has a different attitude. For instance, when they have a debate, they often don't bring two speakers to duke it out on television. They often bring three positions. There's more of an emphasis on collective harmony and preserving the social fabric. Some Japanese communities that have tried to combat QAnon are often not trying to disprove QAnon, but rather these communities start from the idea that people may be seeking belonging or meaning, and they try to offer healthier alternatives. That's a different approach.

How have you been able to engage with librarians and communities?

Our work was focused on using participatory design methods with communities across the nation to help them do

media literacy work. We would bring together librarians from across the country into groups where they would design solutions that they think would help their communities. An example of one is called Leveling Up Seniors. You teach younger students about misinformation, how it spreads online, or how AI can help spread it. And then they have to educate seniors. The idea is that grandparents are much more likely to show up if they're curious about what their grandchildren are doing. That kind of design, personally I would have never come up with. It took people on the ground in the communities to develop these ideas and make them real.

But this project was labeled as a DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] project and defunded. Community partners such as libraries had made plans and incurred costs based on that commitment. When the funding disappeared, we were left trying to piece together alternative support. We managed to figure out different solutions, finding pockets of money to help. But we spent months of our lives dealing with the fallout.

Another term you use is participatory disinformation; how does that relate to your research?

Participatory disinformation is the idea that these technologies enable us to participate in the production and dissemination of propaganda in new ways. One example is we were studying the information space around shooting events during Black Lives Matter, before

Courtesy of Alison Ault

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create friction, complexity, and delays in biotechnology reviews. Engineered insects, for example, may fall under the FDA's animal drug authority, the EPA's pesticide authority, and APHIS's plant and animal health authority. In one case, developers of gene-drive mosquitoes, which are engineered to reduce pathogen transmission or fertility in their offspring, were passed off from agency to agency for nearly 10 years.

Third, the federal government must mobilize the private sector to scale U.S. biotech innovations faster and compete against China's brute-force economic tactics in the global marketplace. Strengthening our R&D ecosystem—through initiatives such as biotechnology grand challenges and developing AI-ready biological data—will help ensure the United States continues to out-innovate our strategic rivals. In practice, this might involve the establishment of Centers for Biotechnology at existing National Laboratories, and the creation of a Web of Biological Data as a single point for accessing high-quality biological data. Congress should authorize the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create standards that researchers must meet to ensure that U.S. biological data is ready for use in AI models. It should fund the Department of the Interior to create a Sequencing Public Lands Initiative to collect new data from the immense genetic resources found on U.S. public lands. And it should authorize the National Science Foundation to establish a network of 'cloud labs,' a series of high-tech facilities that researchers can operate remotely, giving them access to state-of-the-art tools.

Biotechnology also offers important opportunities for our national defense, from improving logistics and reconnaissance to enhancing medical readiness for warfighters. At the same time, however, we must ensure that U.S. technology and capital do not contribute to the military capabilities of strategic competitors. Provisions in the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (FY26 NDAA) address some of these considerations, particularly the establishment of the Biotechnology Management Office within the Pentagon to coordinate agency focus on this sector.

Fourth, our nation must take proactive steps to build the biotech workforce of the future. In part, this goal means equipping the government with the necessary resources and expertise to

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Subcommittee on Oceanography of the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries of the U.S. House of Representatives. The participants also included Robert W. Corell, who chaired a task force that evaluated the impact of Sea Grant activities on the U.S. economy. Corell opened the testimony by saying that, with an annual budget of around $38.8 million, Sea Grant provided $217 million to the U.S. economy every year.

Sea Grant research supports the essential identity of this country as a land of opportunity with a good quality of life for all.

The testimony of one of the commercial users of Sea Grant research illustrated the value of the program especially well. In a letter dated March 23, 1981, that was read to the subcommittee, James Hudlow, president of a seafood distribution company in Chattanooga, Tennessee, said he had begun his relationship with Sea Grant when he contacted the National Marine Fisheries Service in St. Petersburg, Florida, to ask how he should smoke his catch to meet new U.S. Food and Drug Administration standards. They put him in touch with the University of Georgia, where Sea Grant-funded scientists who carried out research in that area taught him the methods he eventually used to smoke and distribute "30,000 [pounds] of fish for which there had been no demand at that time in the existing fresh fish market." Thus, the Sea Grant network was already leading Hudlow to the information and contacts he needed. Later, when Hudlow was seeking help improving the shelf life of his product, he worked with the Sea Grant schools Texas A&M and the University of Wisconsin to learn new methods that they had developed. Hudlow's testimony showed that not only was the knowledge produced by Sea Grant not limited to local concerns, but that the true importance of the program was that any knowledge requested could and would be readily shared.

This free availability was a crucial point, a benefit that could not be expected from industry funders or even necessarily from individual states or municipalities. Science done at these Sea Grant institutions was of national importance and could not be adequately funded by other sources without losing the open network of knowledge sharing that made Sea Grant so valuable. None of that has changed.

But Sea Grant is once again facing an uncertain future; U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has proposed cutting NOAA's budget by $1.6 billion, or roughly 27 percent. It is unclear how that will affect Sea Grant in the long term, but the subsequent wrangling has already hamstrung NOAA's ability to issue grants.

Sea Grant is government doing what it does best: taking modest amounts of money, applying it where nobody else will invest, and producing big payoffs for the general good. The long American legacies of land-grant universities and Sea Grant research support the essential identity of this country as a land of opportunity with a good quality of life for all. As I hope I've shown, defunding such a valuable and productive resource would be tragically shortsighted.

Bibliography

Carlton, J. S., C. J. Foley, and T. O. Höök. 2024. Sea Grant research funding: Advancing the scientific discourse by addressing local research priorities. Oceanography 37:140–145. Foley, C. J., M. Behl, and R. A. Briggs. 2020. A case study of the importance of publicly-funded research to coastal regions. National Sea Grant College Program. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 2026. Sea Grant by the Numbers. Accessed May 27, 2026. seagrant.noaa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Sea-Grant-By-the-Numbers_January-2026_508.pdf Oreskes, N. 2021. Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don't Know about the Ocean. University of Chicago Press. Ray, G. C. 1970. Ecology, law, and the "Marine Revolution." Biological Conservation 3:7–17. Ray, G. C. 1985. Man and the sea—the ecological challenge. American Zoologist 25:451–468.

Samantha Muka is an associate professor and the director of the Science, Technology, and Society program at the Stevens Institute of Technology. She is the author of Oceans under Glass (2022) and is currently working on a book that examines the history of American coastal engineering and waste management policies in the latter half of the 20th century. Email: smuka@stevens.edu

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riences and values that public audiences brought to the NMAH were also a crucial part of the story. Both the Smithsonian staff and the ACS sought audience feedback to help shape the exhibition.

As Smithsonian staff were developing the script for the wall text and labels, they conducted focus groups to tap into public opinion. After Science in American Life had opened, their research continued via questionnaires distributed to museum visitors. Their questions began with the very definition of science itself. Surveys found that visitors believed science was “inseparable from computers, cars and automatic teller machines”; at the same time, they often cited more philosophical concepts such as “understanding,” “ideas,” and “how things work.” Even more generally, the questionnaires revealed that audiences associated science with “how we live, the air we breathe,” with “basic elements of our world,” and even with “space and everything in between.”

Respondents expressed complex views about the relationship between science and society. As one internal summary of public opinions reported:

They are aware that society provides the financial support for scientific research and creates the demand for scientific products, but non-scientists have less clear ideas about the different roles that people play within the scientific community. Science is often discussed in monolithic terms, and when visitors discuss it specifically, they talk about the aspects that are most familiar to them. . . . They first think of their role as educators for their children, informed citizens, and consumers.

The Smithsonian’s audience research suggests that the ACS’s concerns about negative public attitudes were overblown. When discussing science and society, interviewees tended to reflect more on progress and advancement than on risks. And they were divided when it came to identifying the locus of ethical responsibility. Whereas some “spoke of industry and big business with suspicion,” others argued that “citizens’ and consumers’ demands influenced how science is used.”

Focus groups also encouraged the curators to represent museum visitors’ diverse identities and backgrounds. Drawing on this feedback, designers created cardboard cutouts of scientists

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representing various demographic groups to guide visitors through the displays. Private correspondence archived by the ACS dismissed such efforts as unnecessary “political correctness.”

But the ACS’s own informal research reinforced the importance of centering public opinion. For example, Heindel asked a group of fifth graders at Wilson Hill School in Worthington, Ohio, who they would like to have host a video tour of the exhibition. At the top of the list were votes for their friends and other students, far outranking pop culture heroes such as Michael Jordan and Macaulay Culkin. The students’ responses confirmed the Smithsonian’s findings that visitors wanted to see themselves reflected in the exhibition.

Balance or Bias

At the root of the disagreement between the curators and advisers was the ACS’s fear that a narrative rooted in history rather than discovery would come across as anti-science. Correspondence between the Smithsonian and the ACS details a characteristic dispute regarding how to present Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, the 1962 bestseller that called attention to the dangers of indiscriminate pesticide use, and in particular the synthetic pesticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro (DDT). Silent Spring inspired environmental movements around the country while simultaneously facing fiery position from U.S. chemical comp

Heindel called out the curator interpretation of Silent Spring as emphasizing the “impacts (mostly negative) of Chemistry with scant credit successes.” Members of the ACS were sory board, accordingly, took up pens to edit their way toward a “balanced” public representation history of chemistry. Among other suggested changes, they demanded a vision of the humanitarian motivation behind the development of DDT.

The earlier decision to begin exhibition in 1876 with the establishment of Remsen’s laboratory an

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Laura Clerx | Revolutionary-era geological knowledge was rooted in human experience.

Salt of the Earth

The first page of the Ohio State Geological Survey's 1837 report bears an illustration of the rocks lying beneath the surface of the Earth in southern Ohio. Layers of rock lie one atop the next, in the order they were laid down in time. The smooth layers stretch horizontally across the page, disrupted only by two faint lines that cut vertically from the coal series at the top of the image to the sandstone layer in the middle. The labels next to these two lines read, in even fainter text, "salt well." The wells were dug by early settlers eager to access the briny mineral deposits flowing beneath the surface of the state.

The salt wells gave me pause as I pored over the geological survey. Salt was a useful and profitable commodity in 18th- and early 19th-century Ohio. But why had early geologists included these relics of human economic engagement on what was plainly supposed to be a geological map of the state? The reason, as it turns out, has to do with the ways that science itself has changed over the course of the United States' 250-year history.

Today, scientists often rely on specialized instruments and methods, their experiments taking place in laboratories and field sites that seem to stand apart from everyday life. At the time of the United States' founding, however, scientific knowledge came by way of ordinary human experience, including economic experience. The political economy of America's founding—including Ohio's early salt industry—created the conditions in which 19th-century U.S. scientists came to understand and describe the world beneath their feet. And when contemporary economic experience failed to provide scientists with the knowledge they sought about the region's rocks, 19th-century Americans turned to the past, looking to the human history of the region's settlement for the facts that would help them understand the history of the Earth.

Science in the Early Republic

In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, the word science meant something different than it means today. (Indeed, the word scientist, in the modern sense of a person who researches the natural world, did not come into common usage until after the 1830s.) To be scientific, or philosophical, in the 18th century was to be

Early geologists found that those who labored to produce mineral resources were often well equipped to offer facts about North American rocks.

equipped with a method for logically organizing facts to support a conclusion. Science did not pertain exclusively to the study of the natural or physical world. One could speak of a "science" of any systematically organized field of knowledge: Religion, law, politics, and economics could all be sciences.

Revolutionary-era Americans did, of course, theorize about the Earth's history. In 1793, Benjamin Franklin synthesized existing theories on the formation of the Earth in an essay published by the American Philosophical Society. In addition, since the colonial period, settlers had reported on the location and identity of economically useful minerals such as copper, lead, and zinc. They used a combination of physical characteristics and chemical analyses to identify minerals in the territories they explored.

Although late 18th-century natural philosophers carried out experiments with the goal of discovering the properties of the material world, experiments were not the only way they learned about nature. They also turned to human experience. In the 17th century,

Francis Bacon wrote that facts about the natural world were gleaned through human engagement with nature. At the time of the nation's founding, human experiences of the natural world, including the everyday experiences of economic life, were still an important source of scientific information. Early geologists found that those who labored to produce mineral resources were often well equipped to offer facts about North American rocks.

In 1837, Ohio's First Annual Report of the Geological Survey was part of a wave of 19th-century efforts to fund scientific surveying in the United States. The report offers many instances in which Ohio's early geologists depended upon the experience of laborers to map Ohio's rocks and understand their properties. The scientist and historian Samuel Prescott Hildreth, serving as the assistant geologist behind the report's section on salt, forthrightly admitted that much of the information in the report was "confirmed by facts connected with the boring of salt wells." For example, he knew the color and texture of

218 American Scientist, Volume 114

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western lands that Britain had ceded to the United States at the end of the Revolutionary War. Hildreth's father had been a shareholder in the land company that settled the region.

In addition to serving on the state geological survey in the 1830s, Hildreth was Marietta's town doctor, had a brief stint on the state legislature, and authored histories of the region's settlement that are still used today. He spent much of his life collecting historical documentary sources such as letters and maps from his neighbors and friends, creating an archive of the region's history, especially its settlement in the 18th century. In addition to supplying him with facts for his civil history of Ohio, these sources helped him to write the state's natural history.

The history of Ohio's salt industry was particularly important for Hildreth's geological work. On a 1795 map that he collected from one of the region's first settler families, the geologist scrawled across the top: "The discovery of Salt Springs excited as much interest as the finding of Gold mines in these days—1859—S.P.H."

The map originally belonged to Ohio settler Griffin Greene. It had come into Hildreth's possession in the mid-1800s, together with some of Greene's correspondence with family, friends, and the early U.S. government. Like many early settlers, Greene moved to Ohio in search of opportunity during the economically difficult years that followed the Revolution. Ohio's naturally occurring salt springs seemed like the answer to his troubles.

Salt was a profitable commodity in the early United States, used for everything from food preservation and medicine to livestock care and leather tanning. In the territory west of the Allegheny Mountains, people dug wells deep into the Earth to reach the salt deposits below. Once the brine was at the surface, they boiled off the water to leave behind the precious white mineral.

At the time of Ohio's settlement in the 1780s, most salt was imported from England or from the East Coast of

Historic American Engineering Record/Library of Congress

Remnants of Ohio's early mineral-based industrial economy abound. The Buckhorn Iron Furnace, a charcoal furnace for smelting iron, was built in Lawrence County, Ohio, in the early 1800s, and is still standing.

North America, where it was obtained by evaporating seawater, and sold at high prices in the territory west of the Alleghenies. Greene and other settlers hoped to profit by obtaining salt from inland salt springs and selling it at lower prices to the surrounding markets.

As salt workers dug deeper into the Earth, they brought to the surface new information that state survey geologists used to map the layers of rock beneath Ohio.

Like the settlement of western lands, the discovery of Ohio's salt springs did not go uncontested by Native Americans living in the lands now claimed by the United States. Throughout the 1790s, the Northwest Confederacy of Native nations challenged U.S. sover-

eighty in the Northwest Territory. In practice, Indigenous knowledge often preceded and guided colonial economic development. Greene's "discovery" of the salt springs shown on Hildreth's diagram was the result of a clandestine canoe trip he made after hearing rumors of a place where the region's Indigenous inhabitants boiled salt.

Greene immediately appealed to the U.S. government to lease him the lands on which the salt springs were located. Because Ohio was not yet a state and was still under control of a territorial government, this appeal meant petitioning the federal government back east, and in 1796, he asked Congress for the right "to improve and work" the spring. Greene's argument was that the current settlers who illegally worked the springs used primitive methods, digging into the soft sandstone and then

boiling the brine that puddled up. To produce a quantity of salt profitable to the state would require investment in expensive equipment—wells, boring equipment, wooden piping, and furnaces—that "no private individual" would "supply, at his own expense" without assurance of the government's legal protection.

In 1803, Ohio became the 17th state in the Union. The state's legal incorporation provided a framework for more intense economic development of its mineral resources, including the salt springs that Greene had been so eager to operate a decade earlier. In 1806, the state legislature began to subsidize the development of Ohio's saltworks. They gave financial incentives to those who bored deeper wells, constructed furnaces, and used coal for fuel instead of wood.

As time went on, salt workers found it necessary to delve ever deeper into Ohio's rocks if they wanted to produce a profitable amount of salt. In 1815, the state legislature offered salt workers $750 to construct wells at least 107 meters deep. Still, many found it difficult to force the briny water to the surface and abandoned the sites they drilled.

220 American Scientist, Volume 114

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Deeper Geological Knowledge

As salt workers dug deeper into the Earth, they brought to the surface new information that state survey geologists used to map the layers of rock beneath Ohio. The legislature's encouragement motivated more intense economic engagement with Ohio's rocks in the early 1800s. This intensification facilitated a knowledge of the underground realm that was—quite literally—deeper. In 1833, Hildreth created a table of the various rock types found to a depth of 305 meters below the surface of the Earth at a site near the Muskingum River, a tributary of the Ohio River in the southeastern part of the state. The geologist drew from the notes of a salt boiler named L. G. Barker, who had dug a well at the site earlier in the century. The salt worker's notes described 250 of the 305 meters of rock in Hildreth's table.

By the 1820s, salt was no longer considered a scarce commodity in Ohio. Faced with competition from more productive wells in Kentucky and West Virginia, the state sold the springs to private individuals and stopped subsidizing the works.

Even as fossil fuel production came to dominate the economy of Midwestern states, the history of the region's salt industry continued to pay scientific dividends. Salt workers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries had witnessed a gas that rose from their drill sites and "scattered spray round the well," as one worker described it to Hildreth. In the state survey report of the 1830s, geologists including Hildreth associated this gas, likely a mixture of methane and other gases from nearby coal beds, with salt rock deposits. As coal (and later oil and natural gas) increased in economic importance in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the locations of old salt wells served as potential indicators of nearby fossil fuel deposits.

At the nation's founding, human needs and human imperatives—the ingenious and the exalted, the profit seeking and the profane—shaped scientists' knowledge of the natural world. In the early days of Ohio's settlement, political and economic demands such as the development of the early salt industry shaped was what known about the natural world.

As time went on, however, the geological sciences developed to such a degree that their relationship to the econ-

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422. 423. 424. 425. 426. 427. 428. 429. 430. 431. 432. 433. 434. 435. 436. 437. 438. 439. 440. 441. 442. 443. 444. 445. 446. 447. 448. 449. 450. 451. 452. 453. 454. 455. 456. 457. 458. 459. 460. 461. 462. 463. 464. 465. 466. 467. 468. 469. 470. 471. 472. 473. 474. 475. 476. 477. 478. 479. 480. 481. 482. 483. 484. 485. 486. 487. 488. 489. 490. 491. 492. 493. 494. 495. 496. 497. 498. 499. 500. 501. 502. 503. 504. 505. 506. 507. 508. 509. 510. 511. 512. 513. 514. 515. 516. 517. 518. 519. 520. 521. 522. 523. 524. 525. 526. 527. 528. 529. 530. 531. 532. 533. 534. 535. 536. 537. 538. 539. 540. 541. 542. 543. 544. 545. 546. 547. 548. 549. 550. 551. 552. 553. 554. 555. 556. 557. 558. 559. 560. 561. 562. 563. 564. 565. 566. 567. 568. 569. 570. 571. 572. 573. 574. 575. 576. 577. 578. 579. 580. 581. 582. 583. 584. 585. 586. 587. 588. 589. 590. 591. 592. 593. 594. 595. 596. 597. 598. 599. 600. 601. 602. 603. 604. 605. 606. 607. 608. 609. 610. 611. 612. 613. 614. 615. 616. 617. 618. 619. 620. 621. 622. 623. 624. 625. 626. 627. 628. 629. 630. 631. 632. 633. 634. 635. 636. 637. 638. 639. 640. 641. 642. 643. 644. 645. 646. 647. 648. 649. 650. 651. 652. 653. 654. 655. 656. 657. 658. 659. 660. 661. 662. 663. 664. 665. 666. 667. 668. 669. 670. 671. 672. 673. 674. 675. 676. 677. 678. 679. 680. 681. 682. 683. 684. 685. 686. 687. 688. 689. 690. 691. 692. 693. 694. 695. 696. 697. 698. 699. 700. 701. 702. 703. 704. 705. 706. 707. 708. 709. 710. 711. 712. 713. 714. 715. 716. 717. 718. 719. 720. 721. 722. 723. 724. 725. 726. 727. 728. 729. 730. 731. 732. 733. 734. 735. 736. 737. 738. 739. 740. 741. 742. 743. 744. 745. 746. 747. 748. 749. 750. 751. 752. 753. 754. 755. 756. 757. 758. 759. 760. 761. 762. 763. 764. 765. 766. 767. 768. 769. 770. 771. 772. 773. 774. 775. 776. 777. 778. 779. 780. 781. 782. 783. 784. 785. 786. 787. 788. 789. 790. 791. 792. 793. 794. 795. 796. 797. 798. 799. 800. 801. 802. 803. 804. 805. 806. 807. 808. 809. 810. 811. 812. 813. 814. 815. 816. 817. 818. 819. 820. 821. 822. 823. 824. 825. 826. 827. 828. 829. 830. 831. 832. 833. 834. 835. 836. 837. 838. 839. 840. 841. 842. 843. 844. 845. 846. 847. 848. 849. 850. 851. 852. 853. 854. 855. 856. 857. 858. 859. 860. 861. 862. 863. 864. 865. 866. 867. 868. 869. 870. 871. 872. 873. 874. 875. 876. 877. 878. 879. 880. 881. 882. 883. 884. 885. 886. 887. 888. 889. 890. 891. 892. 893. 894. 895. 896. 897. 898. 899. 900. 901. 902. 903. 904. 905. 906. 907. 908. 909. 910. 911. 912. 913. 914. 915. 916. 917. 918. 919. 920. 921. 922. 923. 924. 925. 926. 927. 928. 929. 930. 931. 932. 933. 934. 935. 936. 937. 938. 939. 940. 941. 942. 943. 944. 945. 946. 947. 948. 949. 950. 951. 952. 953. 954. 955. 956. 957. 958. 959. 960. 961. 962. 963. 964. 965. 966. 967. 968. 969. 970. 971. 972. 973. 974. 975. 976. 977. 978. 979. 980. 981. 982. 983. 984. 985. 986. 987. 988. 989. 990. 991. 992. 993. 994. 995. 996. 997. 998. 999. 1000. 1001. 1002. 1003. 1004. 1005. 1006. 1007. 1008. 1009. 1010. 1011. 1012. 1013. 1014. 1015. 1016. 1017. 1018. 1019. 1020. 1021. 1022. 1023. 1024. 1025. 1026. 1027. 1028. 1029. 1030. 1031. 1032. 1033. 1034. 1035. 1036. 1037. 1038. 1039. 1040. 1041. 1042. 1043. 1044. 1045. 1046. 1047. 1048. 1049. 1050. 1051. 1052. 1053. 1054. 1055. 1056. 1057. 1058. 1059. 1060. 1061. 1062. 1063. 1064. 1065. 1066. 1067. 1068. 1069. 1070. 1071. 1072. 1073. 1074. 1075. 1076. 1077. 1078. 1079. 1080. 1081. 1082. 1083. 1084. 1085. 1086. 1087. 1088. 1089. 1090. 1091. 1092. 1093. 1094. 1095. 1096. 1097. 1098. 1099. 1100. 1101. 1102. 1103. 1104. 1105. 1106. 1107. 1108. 1109. 1110. 1111. 1112. 1113. 1114. 1115. 1116. 1117. 1118. 1119. 1120. 1121. 1122. 1123. 1124. 1125. 1126. 1127. 1128. 1129. 1130. 1131. 1132. 1133. 1134. 1135. 1136. 1137. 1138. 1139. 1140. 1141. 1142. 1143. 1144. 1145. 1146. 1147. 1148. 1149. 1150. 1151. 1152. 1153. 1154. 1155. 1156. 1157. 1158. 1159. 1160. 1161. 1162. 1163. 1164. 1165. 1166. 1167. 1168. 1169. 1170. 1171. 1172. 1173. 1174. 1175. 1176. 1177. 1178. 1179. 1180. 1181. 1182. 1183. 1184. 1185. 1186. 1187. 1188. 1189. 1190. 1191. 1192. 1193. 1194. 1195. 1196. 1197. 1198. 1199. 1200. 1201. 1202. 1203. 1204. 1205. 1206. 1207. 1208. 1209. 1210. 1211. 1212. 1213. 1214. 1215. 1216. 1217. 1218. 1219. 1220. 1221. 1222. 1223. 1224. 1225. 1226. 1227. 1228. 1229. 1230. 1231. 1232. 1233. 1234. 1235. 1236. 1237. 1238. 1239. 1240. 1241. 1242. 1243. 1244. 1245. 1246. 1247. 1248. 1249. 1250. 1251. 1252. 1253. 1254. 1255. 1256. 1257. 1258. 1259. 1260. 1261. 1262. 1263. 1264. 1265. 1266. 1267. 1268. 1269. 1270. 1271. 1272. 1273. 1274. 1275. 1276. 1277. 1278. 1279. 1280. 1281. 1282. 1283. 1284. 1285. 1286. 1287. 1288. 1289. 1290. 1291. 1292. 1293. 1294. 1295. 1296. 1297. 1298. 1299. 1300. 1301. 1302. 1303. 1304. 1305. 1306. 1307. 1308. 1309. 1310. 1311. 1312. 1313. 1314. 1315. 1316. 1317. 1318. 1319. 1320. 1321. 1322. 1323. 1324. 1325. 1326. 1327. 1328. 1329. 1330. 1331. 1332. 1333. 1334. 1335. 1336. 1337. 1338. 1339. 1340. 1341. 1342. 1343. 1344. 1345. 1346. 1347. 1348. 1349. 1350. 1351. 1352. 1353. 1354. 1355. 1356. 1357. 1358. 1359. 1360. 1361. 1362. 1363. 1364. 1365. 1366. 1367. 1368. 1369. 1370. 1371. 1372. 1373. 1374. 1375. 1376. 1377. 1378. 1379. 1380. 1381. 1382. 1383. 1384. 1385. 1386. 1387. 1388. 1389. 1390. 1391. 1392. 1393. 1394. 1395. 1396. 1397. 1398. 1399. 1400. 1401. 1402. 1403. 1404. 1405. 1406. 1407. 1408. 1409. 1410. 1411. 1412. 1413. 1414. 1415. 1416. 1417. 1418. 1419. 1420. 1421. 1422. 1423. 1424. 1425. 1426. 1427. 1428. 1429. 1430. 1431. 1432. 1433. 1434. 1435. 1436. 1437. 1438. 1439. 1440. 1441. 1442. 1443. 1444. 1445. 1446. 1447. 1448. 1449. 1450. 1451. 1452. 1453. 1454. 1455. 1456. 1457. 1458. 1459. 1460. 1461. 1462. 1463. 1464. 1465. 1466. 1467. 1468. 1469. 1470. 1471. 1472. 1473. 1474. 1475. 1476. 1477. 1478. 1479. 1480. 1481. 1482. 1483. 1484. 1485. 1486. 1487. 1488. 1489. 1490. 1491. 1492. 1493. 1494. 1495. 1496. 1497. 1498. 1499. 1500. 1501. 1502. 1503. 1504. 1505. 1506. 1507. 1508. 1509. 1510. 1511. 1512. 1513. 1514. 1515. 1516. 1517. 1518. 1519. 1520. 1521. 1522. 1523. 1524. 1525. 1526. 1527. 1528. 1529. 1530. 1531. 1532. 1533. 1534. 1535. 1536. 1537. 1538. 1539. 1540. 1541. 1542. 1543. 1544. 1545. 1546. 1547. 1548. 1549. 1550. 1551. 1552. 1553. 1554. 1555. 1556. 1557. 1558. 1559. 1560. 1561. 1562. 1563. 1564. 1565. 1566. 1567. 1568. 1569. 1570. 1571. 1572. 1573. 1574. 1575. 1576. 1577. 1578. 1579. 1580. 1581. 1582. 1583. 1584. 1585. 1586. 1587. 1588. 1589. 1590. 1591. 1592. 1593. 1594. 1595. 1596. 1597. 1598. 1599. 1600. 1601. 1602. 1603. 1604. 1605. 1606. 1607. 1608. 1609. 1610. 1611. 1612. 1613. 1614. 1615. 1616. 1617. 1618. 1619. 1620. 1621. 1622. 1623. 1624. 1625. 1626. 1627. 1628. 1629. 1630. 1631. 1632. 1633. 1634. 1635. 1636. 1637. 1638. 1639. 1640. 1641. 1642. 1643. 1644. 1645. 1646. 1647. 1648. 1649. 1650. 1651. 1652. 1653. 1654. 1655. 1656. 1657. 1658. 1659. 1660. 1661. 1662. 1663. 1664. 1665. 1666. 1667. 1668. 1669. 1670. 1671. 1672. 1673. 1674. 1675. 1676. 1677. 1678. 1679. 1680. 1681. 1682. 1683. 1684. 1685. 1686. 1687. 1688. 1689. 1690. 1691. 1692. 1693. 1694. 1695. 1696. 1697. 1698. 1699. 1700. 1701. 1702. 1703. 1704. 1705. 1706. 1707. 1708. 1709. 1710. 1711. 1712. 1713. 1714. 1715. 1716. 1717. 1718. 1719. 1720. 1721. 1722. 1723. 1724. 1725. 1726. 1727. 1728. 1729. 1730. 1731. 1732. 1733. 1734. 1735. 1736. 1737. 1738. 1739. 1740. 1741. 1742. 1743. 1744. 1745. 1746. 1747. 1748. 1749. 1750. 1751. 1752. 1753. 1754. 1755. 1756. 1757. 1758. 1759. 1760. 1761. 1762. 1763. 1764. 1765. 1766. 1767. 1768. 1769. 1770. 1771. 1772. 1773. 1774. 1775. 1776. 1777. 1778. 1779. 1780. 1781. 1782. 1783. 1784. 1785. 1786. 1787. 1788. 1789. 1790. 1791. 1792. 1793. 1794. 1795. 1796. 1797. 1798. 1799. 1800. 1801. 1802. 1803. 1804. 1805. 1806. 1807. 1808. 1809. 1810. 1811. 1812. 1813. 1814. 1815. 1816. 1817. 1818. 1819. 1820. 1821. 1822. 1823. 1824. 1825. 1826. 1827. 1828. 1829. 1830. 1831. 1832. 1833. 1834. 1835. 1836. 1837. 1838. 1839. 1840. 1841. 1842. 1843. 1844. 1845. 1846. 1847. 1848. 1849. 1850. 1851. 1852. 1853. 1854. 1855. 1856. 1857. 1858. 1859. 1860. 1861. 1862. 1863. 1864. 1865. 1866. 1867. 1868. 1869. 1870. 1871. 1872. 1873. 1874. 1875. 1876. 1877. 1878. 1879. 1880. 1881. 1882. 1883. 1884. 1885. 1886. 1887. 1888. 1889. 1890. 1891. 1892. 1893. 1894. 1895. 1896. 1897. 1898. 1899. 1900. 1901. 1902. 1903. 1904. 1905. 1906. 1907. 1908. 1909. 1910. 1911. 1912. 1913. 1914. 1915. 1916. 1917. 1918. 1919. 1920. 1921. 1922. 1923. 1924. 1925. 1926. 1927. 1928. 1929. 1930. 1931. 1932. 1933. 1934. 1935. 1936. 1937. 1938. 1939. 1940. 1941. 1942. 1943. 1944. 1945. 1946. 1947. 1948. 1949. 1950. 1951. 1952. 1953. 1954. 1955. 1956. 1957. 1958. 1959. 1960. 1961. 1962. 1963. 1964. 1965. 1966. 1967. 1968. 1969. 1970. 1971. 1972. 1973. 1974. 1975. 1976. 1977. 1978. 1979. 1980. 1981. 1982. 1983. 1984. 1985. 1986. 1987. 1988. 1989. 1990. 1991. 1992. 1993. 1994. 1995. 1996. 1997. 1998. 1999. 2000. 2001. 2002. 2003. 2004. 2005. 2006. 2007. 2008. 2009. 2010. 2011. 2012. 2013. 2014. 2015. 2016. 2017. 2018. 2019. 2020. 2021. 2022. 2023. 2024. 2025. 2026. 2027. 2028. 2029. 2030. 2031. 2032. 2033. 2034. 2035. 2036. 2037. 2038. 2039. 2040. 2041. 2042. 2043. 2044. 2045. 2046. 2047. 2048. 2049. 2050. 2051. 2052. 2053. 2054. 2055. 2056. 2057. 2058. 2059. 2060. 2061. 2062. 2063. 2064. 2065. 2066. 2067. 2068. 2069. 2070. 2071. 2072. 2073. 2074. 2075. 2076. 2077. 2078. 2079. 2080. 2081. 2082. 2083. 2084. 2085. 2086. 2087. 2088. 2089. 2090. 2091. 2092. 2093. 2094. 2095. 2096. 2097. 2098. 2099. 2100. 2101. 2102. 2103. 2104. 2105. 2106. 2107. 2108. 2109. 2110. 2111. 2112. 2113. 2114. 2115. 2116. 2117. 2118. 2119. 2120. 2121. 2122. 2123. 2124. 2125. 2126. 2127. 2128. 2129. 2130. 2131. 2132. 2133. 2134. 2135. 2136. 2137. 2138. 2139. 2140. 2141. 2142. 2143. 2144. 2145. 2146. 2147. 2148. 2149. 2150. 2151. 2152. 2153. 2154. 2155. 2156. 2157. 2158. 2159. 2160. 2161. 2162. 2163. 2164. 2165. 2166. 2167. 2168. 2169. 2170. 2171. 2172. 2173. 2174. 2175. 2176. 2177. 2178. 2179. 2180. 2181. 2182. 2183. 2184. 2185. 2186. 2187. 2188. 2189. 2190. 2191. 2192. 2193. 2194. 2195. 2196. 2197. 2198. 2199. 2200. 2201. 2202. 2203. 2204. 2205. 2206. 2207. 2208. 2209. 2210. 2211. 2212. 2213. 2214. 2215. 2216. 2217. 2218. 2219. 2220. 2221. 2222. 2223. 2224. 2225. 2226. 2227. 2228. 2229. 2230. 2231. 2232. 2233. 2234. 2235. 2236. 2237. 2238. 2239. 2240. 2241. 2242. 2243. 2244. 2245. 2246. 2247. 2248. 2249. 2250. 2251. 2252. 2253. 2254. 2255. 2256. 2257. 2258. 2259. 2260. 2261. 2262. 2263. 2264. 2265. 2266. 2267. 2268. 2269. 2270. 2271. 2272. 2273. 2274. 2275. 2276. 2277. 2278. 2279. 2280. 2281. 2282. 2283. 2284. 2285. 2286. 2287. 2288. 2289. 2290. 2291. 2292. 2293. 2294. 2295. 2296. 2297. 2298. 2299. 2300. 2301. 2302. 2303. 2304. 2305. 2306. 2307. 2308. 2309. 2310. 2311. 2312. 2313. 2314. 2315. 2316. 2317. 2318. 2319. 2320. 2321. 2322. 2323. 2324. 2325. 2326. 2327. 2328. 2329. 2330. 2331. 2332. 2333. 2334. 2335. 2336. 2337. 2338. 2339. 2340. 2341. 2342. 2343. 2344. 2345. 2346. 2347. 2348. 2349. 2350. 2351. 2352. 2353. 2354. 2355. 2356. 2357. 2358. 2359. 2360. 2361. 2362. 2363. 2364. 2365. 2366. 2367. 2368. 2369. 2370. 2371. 2372. 2373. 2374. 2375. 2376. 2377. 2378. 2379. 2380. 2381. 2382. 2383. 2384. 2385. 2386. 2387. 2388. 2389. 2390. 2391. 2392. 2393. 2394. 2395. 2396. 2397. 2398. 2399. 2400. 2401. 2402. 2403. 2404. 2405. 2406. 2407. 2408. 2409. 2410. 2411. 2412. 2413. 2414. 2415. 2416. 2417. 2418. 2419. 2420. 2421. 2422. 2423. 2424. 2425. 2426. 2427. 2428. 2429. 2430. 2431. 2432. 2433. 2434. 2435. 2436. 2437. 2438. 2439. 2440. 2441. 2442. 2443. 2444. 2445. 2446. 2447. 2448. 2449. 2450. 2451. 2452. 2453. 2454. 2455. 2456. 2457. 2458. 2459. 2460. 2461. 2462. 2463. 2464. 2465. 2466. 2467. 2468. 2469. 2470. 2471. 2472. 2473. 2474. 2475. 2476. 2477. 2478. 2479. 2480. 2481. 2482. 2483. 2484. 2485. 2486. 2487. 2488. 2489. 2490. 2491. 2492. 2493. 2494. 2495. 2496. 2497. 2498. 2499. 2500. 2501. 2502. 2503. 2504. 2505. 2506. 2507. 2508. 2509. 2510. 2511. 2512. 2513. 2514. 2515. 2516. 2517. 2518. 2519. 2520. 2521. 2522. 2523. 2524. 2525. 2526. 2527. 2528. 2529. 2530. 2531. 2532. 2533. 2534. 2535. 2536. 2537. 2538. 2539. 2540. 2541. 2542. 2543. 2544. 2545. 2546. 2547. 2548. 2549. 2550. 2551. 2552. 2553. 2554. 2555. 2556. 2557. 2558. 2559. 2560. 2561. 2562. 2563. 2564. 2565. 2566. 2567. 2568. 2569. 2570. 2571. 2572. 2573. 2574. 2575. 2576. 2577. 2578. 2579. 2580. 2581. 2582. 2583. 2584. 2585. 2586. 2587. 2588. 2589. 2590. 2591. 2592. 2593. 2594. 2595. 2596. 2597. 2598. 2599. 2600. 2601. 2602. 2603. 2604. 2605. 2606. 2607. 2608. 2609. 2610. 2611. 2612. 2613. 2614. 2615. 2616. 2617. 2618. 2619. 2620. 2621. 2622. 2623. 2624. 2625. 2626. 2627. 2628. 2629. 2630. 2631. 2632. 2633. 2634. 2635. 2636. 2637. 2638. 2639. 2640. 2641. 2642. 2643. 2644. 2645. 2646. 2647. 2648. 2649. 2650. 2651. 2652. 2653. 2654. 2655. 2656. 2657. 2658. 2659. 2660. 2661. 2662. 2663. 2664. 2665. 2666. 2667. 2668. 2669. 2670. 2671. 2672. 2673. 2674. 2675. 2676. 2677. 2678. 2679. 2680. 2681. 2682. 2683. 2684. 2685. 2686. 2687. 2688. 2689. 2690. 2691. 2692. 2693. 2694. 2695. 2696. 2697. 2698. 2699. 2700. 2701. 2702. 2703. 2704. 2705. 2706. 2707. 2708. 2709. 2710. 2711. 2712. 2713. 2714. 2715. 2716. 2717. 2718. 2719. 2720. 2721. 2722. 2723. 2724. 2725. 2726. 2727. 2728. 2729. 2730. 2731. 2732. 2733. 2734. 2735. 2736. 2737. 2738. 2739. 2740. 2741. 2742. 2743. 2744. 2745. 2746. 2747. 2748. 2749. 2750. 2751. 2752. 2753. 2754. 2755. 2756. 2757. 2758. 2759. 2760. 2761. 2762. 2763. 2764. 2765. 2766. 2767. 2768. 2769. 2770. 2771. 2772. 2773. 2774. 2775. 2776. 2777. 2778. 2779. 2780. 2781. 2782. 2783. 2784. 2785. 2786. 2787. 2788. 2789. 2790. 2791. 2792. 2793. 2794. 2795. 2796. 2797. 2798. 2799. 2800. 2801. 2802. 2803. 2804. 2805. 2806. 2807. 2808. 2809. 2810. 2811. 2812. 2813. 2814. 2815. 2816. 2817. 2818. 2819. 2820. 2821. 2822. 2823. 2824. 2825. 2826. 2827. 2828. 2829. 2830. 2831. 2832. 2833. 2834. 2835. 2836. 2837. 2838. 2839. 2840. 2841. 2842. 2843. 2844. 2845. 2846. 2847. 2848. 2849. 2850. 2851. 2852. 2853. 2854. 2855. 2856. 2857. 2858. 2859. 2860. 2861. 2862. 2863. 2864. 2865. 2866. 2867. 2868. 2869. 2870. 2871. 2872. 2873. 2874. 2875. 2876. 2877. 2878. 2879. 2880. 2881. 2882. 2883. 2884. 2885. 2886. 2887. 2888. 2889. 2890. 2891. 2892. 2893. 2894. 2895. 2896. 2897. 2898. 2899. 2900. 2901. 2902. 2903. 2904. 2905. 2906. 2907. 2908. 2909. 2910. 2911. 2912. 2913. 2914. 2915. 2916. 2917. 2918. 2919. 2920. 2921. 2922. 2923. 2924. 2925. 2926. 2927. 2928. 2929. 2930. 2931. 2932. 2933. 2934. 2935. 2936. 2937. 2938. 2939. 2940. 2941. 2942. 2943. 2944. 2945. 2946. 2947. 2948. 2949. 2950. 2951. 2952. 2953. 2954. 2955. 2956. 2957. 2958. 2959. 2960. 2961. 2962. 2963. 2964. 2965. 2966. 2967. 2968. 2969. 2970. 2971. 2972. 2973. 2974. 2975. 2976. 2977. 2978. 2979. 2980. 2981. 2982. 2983. 2984. 2985. 2986. 2987. 2988. 2989. 2990. 2991. 2992. 2993. 2994. 2995. 2996. 2997. 2998. 2999. 3000.

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Voting Technology Project

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stantially more Republican registered voters are labeled "Rep-Leaning," those with substantially more Democratic registered voters are labeled "Dem-Leaning," and those with relative partisan balance are labeled "Competitive." There is a correlation to note in panel D: in general, Republican-leaning counties have lower distributions of presidential residual vote rates than do Democratic-leaning counties. Although this correlation needs further study, it is most likely the reflection that Democratic-leaning counties are demographically different than Republican-leaning counties, with voting populations that are made up of groups that can be more likely to undervote or overvote.

What's Next

The 2000 Florida election was a shock to the system of election administration, leading to significant election reforms across the country, a large investment of state and federal funds in voting technology and election administration, and the development of the new academic field of election science. However, the financial investment in new technology and improvements in election administration has not continued, election administration has become increasingly complex and costly, and we are at a point where many votes are being lost because of relatively simple mistakes and problems, especially with the rise of convenience voting reforms.

Ironically, although our voting systems are complex and the technology is slow to evolve, we are living through a period of rapid technological adoption, particularly with the explosive growth of generative artificial intelligence. The obvious question is whether AI can be used to improve U.S. election administration.

Through a unique partnership with Washington University in St. Louis, in 2025 we hosted two large convenings of election officials, election scientists, technologists, and other stakeholders to discuss this exact question. We learned that election officials have been slow to adopt new technologies such as AI; running elections in a vast democracy means that they want to use new technologies only when they are 100 percent reliable. Instead, we heard about how election officials were using AI only in relatively limited ways, such as for basic office tasks.

But election scientists need to be moving toward the development and testing

of AI for improving election administration, reducing cost and complexity, and improving the experiences of voters. For example, AI systems are now being tested throughout the nation to automate the signature verification process for mail voting. To improve election administration, these systems should be able to reduce costs, improve the accuracy of signature verification, and contact voters more quickly when there are errors on their mail ballots that can be cured.

AI systems also could be developed to help election officials test and improve election materials. For example, an important task prior to an election is that officials must prepare information and balloting materials for all the elections on the ballot, across different "ballot styles," and in many languages. AI systems need to be developed, tested, and deployed to make this process fast, accurate, and cost effective. These systems should also be designed to alert election officials to problems with ballot layouts and designs. Although ballot design issues have been studied extensively, such as by political scientist Michael Morse of the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues, these problems can still persist in election materials.

Can technologies be used to reduce the common mistakes we see in voting by mail? One idea is to consider the model of the "interactive sample ballot" available in Los Angeles County: Voters can access their sample ballot on any personal electronic device and mark their selections before going to a vote center by creating a "poll pass" (basically a QR code). Once they arrive at the vote center, and are authenticated, they can use their poll pass at a ballot marking device to obtain a pre-marked ballot. The system prevents overvotes and warns of undervotes. And because voters authenticate themselves in person at the vote center, many of the problems that might lead to a rejected mail ballot (a missing signature, or late-arriving ballot) can be eliminated. Using AI, it might be possible to design similarly secure and private systems to help voters scan information on their ballots or ballot envelopes, to mitigate or prevent by-mail ballot problems.

But with the rise of technology in voting systems, officials need to spend more time on election cybersecurity. The AI company Anthropic recently announced that its Mythos model could be co-opted for cyberattacks. Those who may want

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Knowledge is in every Country the surest basis of public happiness.” He called on the legislature to promote these goals, such as through institutions of higher learning.

As Washington asserted, basic and applied sciences support the pursuit of happiness that, along with life and liberty, was to be protected and advanced. The conceptual elements of the Scientific Revolution’s enlightened mindset had energized the American Revolution, blazed forth in the Declaration of Independence, and illuminated the way forward.

Representatives of Independence

In the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin was the best representative of the linkage between science and the state. Peale had met Franklin while he was studying painting in London and Peale later made a copy of Scottish artist David Martin’s 1766 “thumb portrait” of Franklin, which depicted him opposite a bust of Isaac Newton in his distinctive reading pose—elbow on desk and thumb on chin—which helped to keep his spectacles focused on the page. As a young man in 1724, on his own trip to London to learn the printing trade, Franklin had tried unsuccessfully to meet Newton, whose revolutionary physics would inspire his subsequent scientific research. Franklin’s theory and experiments regarding electricity, especially his 1752 kite experiment demonstrating that lightning was a form of electricity, established his scientific reputation, which was critical for his political reputation abroad, helping him work in France as an ally. A later French portrait would depict Franklin as a Zeus-like figure, banishing lightning with the help of the goddess of wisdom and commanding the god of war to overthrow avarice and tyranny. The Latin inscription beneath the image proclaims his glory: “He snatched lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”

John Adams, who served on the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence and who later became the second U.S. president, grumbled that the popular imagination had reduced the American Revolution to Franklin’s snatching of the lightning bolt and handing it to Washington to wield. Indeed, many American Founders had shouldered responsibility and shared a scientific mindset. Josiah Bartlett, likely the second sign

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Newton's laws of motion. Thomson was right in asserting that natural law was thought of more broadly than in the scientific sense at the time, but the debates sometimes missed the forest for the trees. Even if they did not all understand the technical details of Newton's laws, the Founders were absorbing its revolutionary scientific mindset.

According to the influential model of scientific revolutions developed by Thomas Kuhn, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology historian and philosopher of science, scientists work within a normal theoretical structure unless anomalies between a model and observations build up to a point that requires a fundamental change in approach. For example, the Copernican Revolution rejected the model of a stationary Earth at the center of a system of nested spheres in favor of one in which Earth moved around the Sun, but only after an accumulation of anomalies forced what Kuhn called a paradigm shift. One finds a similar pattern in the Declaration's list of grievances highlighting the king's tyranny, such as his refusal to comport with laws that are 'necessary for the public good.' The list's clear implication was that the disconnect between the monarchy and the natural rights of American colonists necessitated a radical break.

Kuhn also described scientific revolutions as gestalt switches, inverting foreground and background, like what happens in visual illusions. The Newtonian Revolution, for example, offered a reconceptualized model of the physical world—a new gravitational physics that governed the planetary spheres. A parallel political gestalt switch was occurring in the public sphere when the Declaration was written. Although incomplete, it too had the markings of a paradigm shift, involving a fundamental change in how political power was represented.

Representative Government

Scientific models seek to better represent natural laws, the cause-effect relations that structure the natural world. Similarly, political philosophers of the era sought a model government better representing the natural rights they believed structured the moral world. Jefferson's broadside was not just a declaration; it accepted a duty to justify the revolution in moral terms. This necessity was an element of the political philosophy of John Locke, the second of Jefferson's trinity, who had articulated the political ideal of government

by consent of the governed. Revolution is warranted if there is a pattern of oppression—'a long train of abuses'—a Lockean phrase Jefferson used verbatim in introducing the colonists' grievances against the Crown. The colonists' complaint against the Stamp Act about taxation without representation is but one instance of this revolutionary ideal.

What such a political conception demands of its citizens is what science demands of researchers. It rejects privileged viewpoints by heredity or birth; evidence, not authority, should determine conclusions. It assumes equality of opportunity for independent assessment of truth; any knowledgeable person can in principle make observations and test them. And it seeks to discover the world; scientific theories aim to represent natural law, not our preferences.

A representative government depends on elected officials to represent not our personal predilections but rather our rational interests, providing a framework to allow our expression of preferences within bounds that will allow others to do the same. In this view, government does not create rights; instead, it represents natural rights inherent in the moral structure of the world. Fundamental rights, as Dickinson put it, 'are not annexed to us by parchments and seals,' but are grounded in 'the laws of our nature.'

Laws of Nature and Nature's God

The Declaration's notion of natural law encompassed both the physical and the moral; natural rights were taken to be inherent. Philosophical arguments aside, assuming natural rights exist, are they ascertained by reason alone or with the help of a moral sense? Were they created by God, or do they have an autonomous basis? So long as one accepted the Enlightenment idea that reason and reflection allow us to identify such principles, not all of these questions needed resolution. In the Declaration of Independence, Franklin changed Jefferson's original language that these truths were 'sacred and undeniable' to 'self-evident' which sidestepped this issue, but he kept the clause that rights were 'endowed by their Creator.' Jefferson is unlikely to have objected; he and Franklin were both Deists who rejected much of traditional Christianity, holding to a more general notion of God as creator of the world's order.

The Founders held differing personal religious beliefs, but they agreed that

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government had no authority over such operations of the mind. Jefferson's reasoning was representative. He wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia: 'The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god.' Washington's 'Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island' highlighted this 'liberty of conscience' as an American policy worthy of imitation. Freedom of religious expression was not to be a 'toleration' or an 'indulgence,' but rather the exercise of 'inherent natural rights.' The U.S. Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, formalized this and other key freedoms, even those not enumerated, within the Constitution.

The process of determining a proper set of political rules for the government of a pluralistic society was a necessary step after the war, because these rules were to be the foundation for the future happiness of the nation's citizens. In his diary, Adams reflected on the importance of order, system, and plan, and on their application for new experiments and laws: 'He who has a Faculty of combining all these into Rules, for the Government of Society, to procure Peace, Plenty, Liberty, has a great political Genius.' Writing to his wife Abigail in 1780, he said that it was his duty to study politics, war, and negotiation so that their children might have liberty to study mathematics and the sciences, to give their grandchildren the right to study painting and the arts. For him, to procure these benefits, his own first duty was to 'the science of government.'

Government as a Science

A methodological commitment to scientific investigation into truths of nature is essential for peaceable government: Neither freedom nor justice can be successfully conceptualized or defended without it. Liberty, Equality, Reality! should be the tripartite motto of a well-ordered State. The Founders, because they held rights to be part of the lawful structure of the world, thought that these were the foundation for building a functional government, but they also understood there were many possible implementations of these rights. On such a theory of government, the Constitution may be seen as a political hypothesis.

Rush, during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, said that 'Government is a science,' so representatives needed time to acquire the requisite knowledge

through experience; he recommended longer terms of office than the proposed three-year limit, so that they could develop their qualifications. The rules for officeholders had to be determined. What balance of powers would best prevent the return of tyranny? Would a unicameral or bicameral system be more stable? What system of checks and balances could prevent a president from becoming a king? The Founders vigorously debated, often using scientific analogies, about which model would best represent the natural ideals. Dickinson had offered his Solar System analogy to recommend his model of the balance to strike between empowering states versus the central government.

Testing these options may be seen as a political version of the scientific mindset and experimental method that Francis Bacon had pioneered. Bacon was Dickinson's intellectual hero and was, as Dickinson opined in his diary, 'the greatest Man that ever lived, whose Mind was reckoned a Counterpart to Nature.'

The Founders held differing personal religious beliefs, but they agreed that government had no authority over such operations of the mind.

Jefferson held a similar opinion; for the trinity he commissioned, he wanted Bacon in the top spot of the triangle of portraits. Jefferson was optimistic about the success of Baconian methods, as he wrote in a letter to Benjamin Waterhouse of Harvard University: 'When I contemplate the immense advances in science and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been, as we than our fathers were.'

Washington also spoke of 'the science of government' in his last annual address to Congress as part of his argument for establishing a national university. He reiterated this call in his 1796

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The Founders saw the science of government and the possibility of its moral progress in the same light. Jefferson opposed frequent changes in constitutions, but he argued in a letter (using words now inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial) that “laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.”

Washington believed that the value of the Constitutional union would be apparent “to every reflecting and virtuous mind,” who should therefore distrust false patriots who might try to weaken it or try to divide its members against one another, as he wrote in his Farewell Address. The revolution against despotic power is always incomplete. Citizens must continue to test and reinforce the strength of their system of laws to preserve a true government for the whole. “Is there a doubt,” he said in his address, “whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it. . . . We are authorized to hope that a proper organization of the whole . . . will afford a happy issue to the experiment. It is well worth a fair and full experiment.” To keep the Revolution moving forward, it behooves us to recommit ourselves to the scientific mindset that sparked and grounded it.

Bibliography

Calvert, J. E. 2024. Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson. Oxford University Press.

Cohen, I. B. 1995. Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison. W. W. Norton.

Kuhn, T. S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

Pennock, R. T. 2019. An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Character of Science. MIT Press.

Sellers, C. C. 1969. Charles Willson Peale. Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Thomson, K. S. 2012. Jefferson’s Shadow: The Story of His Science. Yale University Press.

Robert T. Pennock is Sigma Xi Senior Fellow for Science and Engineering Values and University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University. His research involves both empirical and philosophical questions that relate to evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and the scientific character virtues. Email: rpennock@sigmaxi.org

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I (EEG) graphs that show the brain activity of experiment participants as they listened to a series of artfully constructed clauses and phrases. Sentences can be informative, imperative, or interrogative; they can even be beautiful. But they can also be highly suspect—the lexical equivalent of a suspicious package, concealing toxic assertions or volatile presuppositions.

Hidden meanings are tricky things. We've all experienced that momentary mental tension or comprehensive stumble as we listen to someone talk and something they say, or something in how they say it, feels off. We might not be conscious of it, but the parts of our brain that deal with language processing catch it nonetheless. That's what these EEG graphs of voltage potential and stimulus-response latencies reveal to a neurolinguist: the extra effort exerted by certain areas of the brain as it works harder to unpack meaning, resolve inconsistencies, and update memory. Understanding which specific aspects of these troublesome statements trigger such reactions—strange word combinations, odd sentence structures, suspicious facts—brings us ever closer to comprehending ourselves and safeguarding our minds from verbal manipulation and pernicious online content.

What kinds of statements are we talking about? To borrow an example from British philosopher Bertrand Russell, consider the sentence, 'The present king of France is bald.' Anyone paying attention to the history of the past 150 years or so knows that France has no

of a present king of France) makes our brains work harder, tricking us into thinking that this false assumption is information we are expected to already know. Our brains compare the 'fact' of 'the king' with our memories of France and, if convinced, might even update that memory falsely. This example is relatively harmless, but it isn't difficult to see how such presuppositions might be used to influence voter opinion or witness testimony or, put another way, to manipulate our minds. By learning to recognize these tricks and traps and how our brains respond to them, we not only can teach ourselves to resist their effects, we can also improve our education systems.

Although many animals communicate through sounds or gestures, the human capacity for complex, structured, symbolic, and endlessly inventive language sets us apart as a species. Indeed, the notion that humankind owes much of its success and ability to spread across the Earth to verbal language is so deeply ingrained that we have cultural myths about confounding human progress by confusing people's languages, such as in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. Similarly illustrative of the importance placed on language are nationalistic myths that exalt a particular ethnic group or nation as being the source of all language. In Turkey in the 1930s, for example, President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his supporters promoted the Sun Language Theory, which claimed that Turkish was such an Ur-language.

ment of a language faculty conferred even greater advantages by making the cognitive and neural architecture of our brains increasingly more complex and suitable to different socializing functions. Language and the brain constantly influence each other when we interact with external reality, engage in conversations, make decisions, and cooperate with other humans to achieve goals. In this way, verbal language became an indispensable tool for regulating interactions between people in different communicative contexts, and for ensuring the preservation and transmission of culture from generation to generation.

The importance of the interplay between brain and language processes is evident in the gradual changes the brain has undergone to master such increasingly complex linguistic tasks. Understanding those changes has been the work of many researchers for more than a century, and has required the development of particular techniques to study certain areas of the brain.

Clues from Aphasia

For a long time, the structure and nature of human language has been mostly investigated by looking at data from natural languages, that is, languages actually used by humans (as opposed to, say, languages generated by AI models). This research has notably explored the traits that differentiate one language from another (linguistic parameters) and those

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The complex neural connections of the human brain involved in language, collectively called the connectome, have been mapped in detail, as shown here. The emergence of language influenced the evolutionary formation of our brains, and the two-way interaction between language and how we think has been essential to the development of culture and society. Unfortunately, the brain's linguistic hardware is vulnerable to manipulation.

that are assumed to be shared by all languages (linguistic universals). Although some EEG responses may be universal across languages, others differ due to language-specific structures. Universals, if they exist, likely revolve around broad mental processes common to all humans, such as allocating attention, noticing inconsistencies or unexpected meanings, or updating context. Ultimately, we simply do not yet have enough side-by-side comparison studies between languages and associated phenomena to say for certain.

The first inquiries into the relationship between language faculty and brain structures were conducted through postmortem examinations and mainly concerned research into aphasia, a language disorder that affects communicative abilities to different degrees. Aphasia-related linguistic impairments may originate from selective damage

or lesions in brain areas controlling language production or comprehension. Two well-known cases believed to have inaugurated research into the neurology of language involved two aphasic patients whose brains exhibited localized lesions taken to be the cause of specific language impairments.

The first case involved a French man, Louis Victor Leborgne, who was treated in 1861 by French surgeon and anthropologist Paul Pierre Broca. Broca studied the expressive deficits in his patient until Leborgne's death several days later. For almost 20 years, from the age of 30, Leborgne could only pronounce the syllable 'tan,' which earned him the nickname 'Monsieur Tan.' Aside from this linguistic limitation, all of Leborgne's other cognitive faculties, including hearing, comprehension, and calculus (internal computation, evaluation, or weighing of factors), had remained intact. Broca's

Courtesy of Omniscient Neurotechnology's Quicktome®

postmortem examination of Leborgne's brain revealed a profound lesion in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the left hemisphere (see figure on page 236). This area of the left frontal lobe—now called Broca's area—corresponds to the premotor cortex, which is responsible for planning, controlling, and executing voluntary actions. Because of his brain lesion, Leborgne was no longer able to govern the facial movements and speech organs needed to convert concepts into grammatical strings of words.

A few years later, German neurologist Carl Wernicke investigated an almost opposite case: a patient with a comprehension deficit who could speak fluently but who failed to mentally represent the meanings of words and sentences (a condition now called Wernicke's aphasia). After the patient's death, Wernicke noticed an injury in the decedent's superior temporal gyrus of the left hemisphere, not far from Broca's area. This observation supported the hypothesis that the structure now called Wernicke's area controls comprehension abilities (see figure on page 236).

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Stephanie Freese

Certain sentences can trick our brains into deceiving themselves by filling in implied or presupposed information. Here, a listener tries to make sense of the sentence, “The present king of France is bald.” The use of the definite article “the” implies that the listener should already know the (false) fact that France has a king, which could lead them to update their memory with this implied information.

These discoveries by Broca and Wernicke marked the beginning of research that would uncover a functional asymmetry affecting the brain’s two hemispheres. For around a century and a half, they and other scientists advanced the idea that the language

Holism, Localization, and Mapping The development of noninvasive techniques for studying neurological activity has been aided and informed by our ever-evolving understanding of how and where certain functions are handled in the brain. Within neuroscientific re-

century by American behaviorist Karl Lashley (1890–1958) and German neurologist Kurt Goldstein (1878–1965), the brain can compensate for damage to one area through the activity of other areas. The localizationist approach, endorsed by German neuroscientist Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1918) in the early 1900s, held that physical differences between brain areas correlate with specific functional limitations. Moving from this latter premise, Brodmann pinned down approximately 52 functionally distinct areas based on brain cell organization, layers, and architecture.

Coloring in these broad outlines, and unseating the left hemisphere as the perceived sole repository of language production and comprehension, required new evidence from improved tools. Indeed, the advent of brain imaging techniques revealed the important role played by the right hemisphere in understanding the relationship between language and context, including such faculties as inference, emotional content, and metaphor.

The most common methodologies used in neuroscientific approaches to language processing are EEG and magnetoencephalography (MEG), which respectively record electrical activity in the brain and the magnetic fields it generates. Both techniques can register neuronal activity corresponding to stimulation by specific cognitive events, such as seeing an object or decoding a message. Moreover, EEG and MEG each offer extremely high temporal resolution. They can measure brain activity changes on the order of milliseconds, which makes them highly suitable for studying the brain’s swift progression through several rapid language-processing stages.

Other techniques monitor brain activity by looking at hemodynamics, phenomena involving blood circulation that reveal which brain areas are more strongly involved when a participant attends to a stimulus. These methods include functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in oxygenated blood flows during the execution of a task; positron emission tomography, through which brain activity can be monitored by looking at the spatial distribution of radioactive tracers (and often metabolic indicators); and near-infrared spectroscopy, which analyzes how biological tissues respond

By default, the brain tends to accept presuppositions without questioning them—it constructs meaning first, and then (sometimes) checks accuracy later.

faculty was mostly controlled by the left hemisphere. This model of left-hemisphere language dominance has held sway ever since, although recent research has begun to refine this view. Such a nuanced understanding has made possible the gradual establishment of a solid theoretical grounding in the field and the development of the technology needed to test key hypotheses on living patients.

search, brain functions have been investigated from two main perspectives, usually referred to as holistic and localizationist. The holistic view says that brain functions result from the synergistic activity of different regions of the cortex, whereas the localizationist perspective holds that those functions involve the activity of neatly delimited regions.

According to the holistic view, chiefly advocated in the early to mid-20th

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to light in the near-infrared spectrum, a further indication of changes in hemoglobin and blood oxygenation. In addition to these blood-based imaging techniques, transcranial magnetic stimulation lets researchers fire up brain activity by using a magnetic coil to administer short but powerful magnetic pulses through the skull.

Compared with EEG, other neurophysiological techniques are more difficult to use in experiments on language processing. They are generally more expensive; therefore, experimenters need to rely on facilities external to their universities. Moreover, because each technique has a particular way of measuring language processing, the linguistic stimuli used for a given experiment must be adjusted and calibrated to match the constraints imposed by the machine. For example, stimuli suitable for EEG, which has higher temporal resolution, may prove less appropriate for fMRI, which provides higher spatial resolution and less precise temporal resolution. In addition, some techniques are more sensitive to the movements of the experiment participant, and therefore the resulting signal is more susceptible to recording “noise.” These unwanted phenomena generate artifacts, that is, parts of the signal that do not reflect the effect to be observed.

More recent experimental designs aim to come as close as possible to how linguistic messages are processed during a real conversation. Unfortunately, the measurement parameters imposed by each imaging technique make reaching this goal difficult, though not impossible. But even our current technologies allow us to move well beyond lesion studies and inferential behavioral experiments to observe brain activity directly and seek out the telltale signs of mental encoding. Now we can seek out timing patterns and witness moments in which the brain responds to sentences by recognizing words, parsing syntax, or trying to construct meaning. These functions are all key aspects of how language is processed and stored—and of how tricky constructions can slip false facts by us.

Searching for Signatures

The current panorama of neurolinguistics studies draws substantially from contributions made possible by the advent of EEG. Much of this work

Chorus/Mononomic/Wikimedia Commons

This diagram shows a classic event-related potential (ERP) waveform—an electroencephalograph of changes in a brain’s electrical activity following a stimulus. Plotting negative as “up” is somewhat arbitrary and reflects the placement of the active and reference electrodes. Patterns of negative (N) or positive (P) peaks hint at specific processes, such as being surprised by sentence content. Using this approach, the field of neurolinguistics has produced considerable evidence supporting a correlation between certain positive and negative deflections and different types of language processing, as well as the effort required for processing.

takes advantage of EEG’s versatility, which lets it be used with a variety of linguistic stimuli. The resulting search for signatures assumes that language processes can be mapped onto spe-

But how can language-related brain processes be measured? The first inquiries into the brain mechanisms that make language possible, such as behavioral tasks and reaction

Our current technologies allow us to move beyond lesion studies and inferential behavioral experiments to observe brain activity directly and seek telltale signs of mental encoding.

cific cognitive and neural structures based on measured, systematic brain responses. In other words, neurolinguists are seeking a kind of Rosetta Stone that correlates electroencephalograph patterns with the brain processing a particular linguistic stimulus, be it a word, a phrase, or a sentence or its structural characteristics.

times, relied on procedures developed within experimental psychology and, later on, the field of neurology, which is where most of our present-day knowledge on the brain-language interface originated.

Although much of our spatial and structural knowledge derives from fMRI, MEG, and lesion studies, the

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Paul Pierre Broca

Carl Wernicke

Wellcome Collection, J. F. Lehmann, Munich; James.med.nz/Wikimedia Commons, Leborgne et al. Brain 130:1432

Two pioneers of neurolinguistics, French surgeon Paul Pierre Broca (upper left) and German neurologist Carl Wernicke (upper right) identified relationships between brain structures and language through postmortem examinations of people who had language disorders. Broca tied a patient's inability to say anything but the syllable 'tan' to a profound lesion in a brain area linked to voluntary actions (bottom photo, left side), now called Broca's area (middle diagram, blue). Wernicke linked a patient's inability to mentally represent the meanings of words and sentences to an injury in a different left-hemisphere region, now called Wernicke's area (middle diagram, green).

analysis of the brain signatures of language processes has mainly been conducted using EEG techniques, which allow measuring both patterns of brain oscillations (also known as brain rhythms) and time-dependent components such as waveforms developing within specific time windows, called event-related potentials (ERPs). ERPs generally manifest as waveforms with positive or negative voltage deflections. These upswings and downswings generate telltale bumps and dips (known as components) that are identified by a latency (the time elapsed between the onset of a stimulus and its elaboration by the human processor), a positive or a negative polarity (a direction of voltage change

in response to a stimulus, such as a word), an amplitude, and a scalp distribution (a pattern of electrical activity roughly indicating where brain response is strongest—see the diagram on page 238).

As shown in the diagram on page 235, an EEG graph contains several components, each typically named for its polarity (N for negative, P for positive) and its latency in milliseconds. These windows of time roughly correspond to known events: 0–100 milliseconds is the window for basic sensory detection; 100–250 is the timing of perception and attention; and 250–500 is when higher-level thinking and decision-making occur. The result are labels such as P300, N200, P600, or N400.

To be clear, the peaks and valleys of these waveforms should not be thought of as corresponding to regions of greater or lower activity in the brain. Rather, they are patterns of synchronized brain activity that have been experimentally tied to specific mental processes. Nor should they be imagined as pointing to individual neurons. They are more like the effect of an orchestral performance rising above the static of a poor radio signal: The static may still drown out some of the background music, but some instruments and voices stand out and are clearly recognizable. Moreover, positive and negative here mean the direction of current at the electrode, not more or less activity. The field of neurolinguistics has thus far produced considerable evidence supporting a correlation between certain positive and negative deflections and different types of language processing, as well as the effort required for processing.

Semantic Signals

The first scholars to notice this connection were Marta Kutas of the University of California, San Diego, and Kara D. Federmeier of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In the 1980s, they discovered that a negative component called N400 tended to be elicited by words in a sentence bearing anomalous or unexpected meanings. So, for example, when experiment participants read a sentence such as, 'She ate bread with socks,' quite prominent peaks of the N400 component occurred on their EEG signals.

In subsequent studies, N400 strongly correlated with the detection of anomalies in the meanings of words or sentences (the semantic level), as well as in the particular packaging of some information received in a sentence. For example, a phrase like 'my white car'—which presupposes the fact that I have a white car—will elicit a stronger N400 effect if that referent is not yet shared in the conversation. Conversely, the same neurological effect will be weaker if my possessing a white car is asserted, as in 'I have a white car.' This disparity indicates that the presupposition of new information causes a mismatch in the processing instruction dispensed to the addressee: The addressee receives the presupposition with the indication of treating it as already shared, when in fact it is not yet part of the common background knowledge. This suggestion

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imposes a revision of former expectations with additional processing costs.

Over the past 10 years, neurophysiological research (mostly conducted using EEG) has contributed profoundly to revealing how the human brain constructs meaning in context. Among other things, this work has examined how speakers convey meanings behind other meanings, or how they leave some contents implicit by resorting to strategies such as implicatures (intentionally hidden meanings) or presuppositions (contents taken for granted in an interaction). I have discussed these concepts in a previous article (see “The Art and Science of Manipulative Language,” September–October 2022), but here I intend to delve more specifically into the brain activity related to these tricky elements and what we can learn from such activity about how the brain processes language.

One 2016 study by neurolinguist Valentina Bambini of the University School for Advanced Studies in Pavia, Italy, and her team illustrated how the brain responds to nonliteral and implied meanings. In it, researchers recorded the EEG activity of study participants who were presented with metaphors and their equivalent literal expressions in different frameworks, such as contexts containing cues to metaphorical interpretation and contexts without such cues.

For example, some of the participants read context-statement pairs such as, “Do you know what that fish is? A shark.” (This usage of “shark” is literal.) Others were presented with pairs such as, “Do you know what that lawyer is? A shark.” (This usage of “shark” is metaphorical.) Overall, metaphor comprehension was associated with larger amplitudes in the N400 and P600 components, which respectively indicate increasing difficulties in disentangling the metaphor’s nonliteral content (N400 effects) and the effort required to update the current mental model of the discourse (P600 effects).

Recently, fMRI has been used to investigate brain activity in response to certain types of implicated meaning—hidden meaning that the listener is led to infer. In a 2022 study, neuroscientists Shiri Hornick and Einat Shetreet of Tel Aviv University in Israel presented their experimental participants with sentences such as, “She walked Lassie,” embedded in a context that allowed deriving the inference that only

Recent neurophysiological research has examined how speakers convey meanings wrapped in other meanings by resorting to strategies such as metaphors, implicatures (intentionally hidden meanings), or presuppositions (content taken for granted in an interaction). EEG and fMRI results have shown that such sentences produce telltale activity patterns in the brain as it tries to make sense of nonliteral content and update its mental model of what is being discussed.

Lassie (and no other dog) was walked. The authors noticed that this type of implicit meaning activated brain areas called the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (which they associated with inference generation) and the right inferior parietal lobule (possibly correlating to theory of mind abilities—that is, capacities such as attributing mental states to other individuals and shifting attention from one stimulus to another according to the task).

Earlier, in papers published in 2017 and 2018, I reported particular electroencephalograph components that

ing”). In each case, the existence of an entity or an event is expressed as if it were already shared knowledge.

In the two experiments reported in those papers, whenever the presupposition involved unshared content (data that was not in the receiver’s mind), we observed more pronounced N400 effects. In one of the two studies, more prominent peaks in the N400 component were followed again by P600. In the scientific literature, P600 has also been associated with increasing difficulty in the analysis of syntactic structures, with processing repairs (or corrections) in

Participants were only able to recognize false information that was asserted, whereas presupposed information was treated as true.

were elicited when participants processed presuppositions in utterances. As already seen, presuppositions are triggered by specific lexical units and constructions, including definite phrases (nouns preceded by definite articles, such as “The gift”); subordinate clauses (“When that building was demolished . . .”); and verbs indicating a change of state (such as the word “stopped” in “John stopped smok-

cases of grammatical anomalies (for example, the subject-verb disagreement in “The boys eats the ice cream”), and more recently with the update of one’s mental representation of discourse information, that is, information forming part of the preceding linguistic context.

As an example of the relationship between P600 and the difficulty of sentence analysis, consider the observation by neurolinguist Petra B. Schumacher of

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the University of Cologne in Germany that a noun phrase such as “the chief” is costlier to process when it is preceded by another sentence that does not contain the same piece of information. In an EEG of a participant who hears someone say, “I’m going shopping now. The chief will not know this,” the presupposition “the chief” will show greater

them—it constructs meaning first, and then (sometimes) checks accuracy later. This situation arises because the brain is built for efficient and coherent analysis. Unfortunately, this tendency lends itself to speakers subtly introducing assumptions and listeners potentially accepting them uncritically. It is not difficult to see how this aspect of brain function might

representation in the brain. This line of study began in the 1970s in the cognitive psychology field, notably in the research of psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine.

Loftus investigated how presuppositions associated with false information induce recipients to mentally represent that information as true, thereby incorporating false details into memory. In one test, Loftus showed a short film to some participants and then asked comprehension questions. Some of these questions contained false presuppositions; they might have asked, “Where was the road sign with a picture of a bridge?” when no such sign was shown. Other questions, which contained false assertions, might instead have asked, “Was there a road sign with an image of a bridge?” Participants were only able to recognize false information that was asserted, whereas assumed or presupposed information was treated as true.

Loftus’s research was a major contributor to the study of cognitive psychology and memory, and it was an inspirational if not literal forerunner to many experimental linguistics studies focused on identifying cerebral and attentional responses to manipulative communication. More broadly, the phenomenon of presupposition has been widely studied in relation to propaganda discourse and all kinds of persuasive communication.

More recent experimental designs aim to come as close as possible to how linguistic messages are processed in a real conversation.

P600 amplitudes than if they had instead heard the question, “Have you seen the chief in the office?” followed by the reply, “No, the chief has left for England today.” The need to update the mental model of the discourse correlates with higher P600 peaks because the brain requires additional effort to update its mental model when information is new and presupposed.

Concerningly, research shows that these updates need not be factual. By default, the brain tends to accept presuppositions without questioning

be leveraged when framing topics, making persuasive arguments, or spreading misinformation. It is equally clear that citizens and consumers would benefit from knowing these tendencies and would do well to keep them in mind.

Unpacking Misinformation

Many recent studies on language processing have attempted to understand how the human brain responds to different kinds of linguistic manipulation, particularly how different ways of packaging information can influence its

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An important development in this line of research concerns the didactic dimension, specifically the possibility of instructing citizens on how certain communication strategies can subtly instill information in our minds at a level below our conscious attention. As part of one experiment at Roma Tre

ence proved particularly useful because it was aimed at students close to the voting age, and it guided them in decoding the implicatures and presuppositions that often lurk in political messages.

The data obtained from such experiments could prove useful in designing exercises and educational paths that

guage learning, potentially making such instruction more effective, scientifically based, and responsive to the cognitive style of the learner. In this way, I believe that neurocognitive language studies can offer a valid reference and useful tool for the design of teaching materials that will increase the effectiveness of education in all its forms.

This knowledge lends itself to making instruction more effective, scientifically based, and responsive to the cognitive style of the learner.

University, we offered training courses to high schoolers on how to recognize manipulative communication in different genres of persuasive text. Following a theoretical session in which manipulative phenomena such as presupposition, implicature, and vague and figurative language were presented and exemplified in some common uses, students were asked to identify these phenomena in different text types, as well as to produce them. For example, after presenting a sentence type similar to Coca-Cola's 2009 slogan, "Open Happiness," we asked students questions such as, "What implicit content can you find in this message?" and "What presuppositions and/or implicatures are conveyed in this message?" Successful students pointed out that the slogan not only presupposes that happiness can be found inside a Coke bottle, but that it also implies that a person who consumes the soft drink will feel happier.

As revealed by post-training tests, students displayed significant improvement in detection of presuppositions, and they improved their abilities to reflect metalinguistically on messages containing between-the-lines content. Such improvements are common when people receive language-focused learning. These results tell us that implicit language detection can be taught with a structured and well-grounded training; that different types of implicit meaning may call for different exercise types; and that teaching how to detect implicit language may enhance students' text-comprehension abilities in the long run and keep them from falling victim to distortive uses of language. This experi-

leverage the processing mechanisms discussed in this article. Unfortunately, neurocognitive evidence on human language processing remains little used in the field of educational experimentation; neither the teaching and learning of foreign languages nor that of specific communication phenomena (including presuppositions and implicatures) follow cognitively based paths. In other words, modern education techniques do not reflect the way our brains decode language and fix such data in our memory. It seems reasonable that ignoring the specific cognitive determinants that lie at the base of the human understanding of communication leads to slower and generally less effective memorization processes, frustrating the efforts of both teacher and learner.

I have made these ideas the focus of a nascent research project called R.A.I.S.E. (Raising Awareness on Implicit linguistic Strategies in Environmental discourse). Although it is too soon at this exploratory stage to foresee all the variables involved in the planning of more-structured learning paths, I hope one day to gather enough data to develop syllabi that can be structured to meet different learning needs. Above all, I hope to address the various strategies of cognitive information processing, precisely calibrating learning objectives in order to improve the students' chances of achieving their learning goals.

Knowing the phenomena that characterize the relationships between language and the brain opens a window on the complex ways in which we interact with our fellow humans. This knowledge lends itself to being applied to lan-

Bibliography

Bambini, V., C. Bertini, W. Schaeken, A. Stella, and F. Di Russo. 2016. Disentangling metaphor from context: An ERP study. Frontiers in Psychology 7:559. Brocca, N., V. Masia, and D. Garassino. 2024. Empowering critical digital literacy in EFL: Teachers' evaluation of didactic materials involving the recognition of presupposed information. Language Teaching Research. DOI:10.1177/13621688241235019. Burkhardt, P. 2006. Inferential bridging relations reveal distinct neural mechanisms: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Brain and Language 98:159-168. Domaneschi, F., P. Canal, V. Masia, E. L. Vallauri, and V. Bambini. 2018. N400 and P600 modulation in presupposition accommodation: The effect of different trigger types. Journal of Neurolinguistics 45:13-35. Giunta, G., and V. Masia. 2025. Raising awareness about implicitizing strategies in upper secondary school pupils. In Unlearning Languages That Control the Mind, first edition, ed. V. Sutanovac, pp. 67-78. Routledge. Hagort, P., and S. C. Levinson. 2014. Neuropragmatics. In The Cognitive Neurosciences, fifth edition, eds. M. S. Gazzaniga and G. R. Mangun, pp. 667-674. MIT Press. Hornick, S., and E. Shetreet. 2022. Pragmatic inferences: Neuroimaging of ad-hoc implicatures. Journal of Neurolinguistics 64:101090. Kappenman, E. S., and S. J. Luck, eds. 2012. The Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components, first edition. Oxford University Press. Kutas, M., and S. A. Hillyard. 1980. Reading senseless sentences: Brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. Science 207:203-205. Loftus, E. F. 1975. Leading questions and the eyewitness report. Cognitive Psychology 7:560-572. Masia, V. 2017. Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure. John Benjamins Publishing. Masia, V. 2021. The Manipulative Disguise of Truth. John Benjamins Publishing. Masia, V., P. Canal, I. Ricci, E. L. Vallauri, and V. Bambini. 2017. Presupposition of new information as a pragmatic garden path: Evidence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Neurolinguistics 42:31-48. Russell, B. 1905. On denoting. Mind 14:479-493. Sbisà, M. 2007. Detto non detto. Laterza.

Viviana Masia is associate professor of linguistics at Roma Tre University in Italy. With editor John Benjamins, she published Sociobiological Bases of Information Structure in 2017 and The Manipulative Disguise of Truth in 2021. Email: viviana.masia@gmail.com

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A side—even after its entire head has been surgically removed. This strange fact was no surprise in 1853 when a young German physiologist named Eduard Pflüger published his findings; researchers had long known that many reflexes are preserved in brainless vertebrates. But Pflüger's experiment became a blockbuster because of what happened next.

In a second step, Pflüger also amputated the frog's favored wiping leg and then reapplied acid in the same place on the animal's side. If the first wipe was a blind reflex, the beheaded frog should now simply wave around its amputated stump. Instead, after a brief period of waving, the frog tried a different technique—it wiped with its sound leg. Pflüger repeated the experiment dozens of times, and other experimentalists confirmed his observations. Eventually, decapitated frogs were reported to produce a whole range of ingenious responses to irritation when the favored wiping foot was impeded, including rubbing against other available objects.

These results were perplexing because the frog's response was purposive—it involved working through different means to achieve an end—and purposive behavior had long been regarded as evidence of consciousness. Yet Pflüger had removed the entire head of his frogs, using scissors to cut just below the medulla oblongata, a structure at the base of the brain stem. (If cared for properly, frogs can survive in this and similar conditions, as can many birds, snakes, and reptiles.)

critics simply rejected purposive behavior as a marker of consciousness. Which side was right?

Today, researchers are still debating how to determine which beings are conscious, especially in gray area cases such as insects, artificial intelligence systems, and human patients in a vegetative state. As in the 19th century, many present-day philosophers and scientists rely on ostensible markers of consciousness, such as purposive behavior or the ability to learn or play, but they face the same conundrum Pflüger did. They can run experiments to test whether a creature demonstrates any number of behaviors, but to know whether a given behavior is a meaningful marker for consciousness—a good measurement criterion, as it is sometimes called—they need to test whether the potential marker actually correlates with conscious creatures. To run this test, however, they need a reliable criterion for separating conscious from nonconscious creatures. But such a criterion is the very thing they are trying to test in the first place.

In consciousness science, this conundrum has a name: the measurement problem. Researchers remain entangled in the debate despite an explosion of consciousness-related research on a wide range of organisms, including octopuses, bees, and hermit crabs. But perhaps one way to move forward is to look to the past.

An Elusive Definition

Consciousness is notoriously difficult to define. By the 1850s, the Scottish

than 15 different meanings of the term. Today's scientists and philosophers are scarcely closer to a consensus as to what it means to be conscious. (See 'Consciousness: The Road to Reductionism,' March–April 2025.)

In 1974, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel offered one approach in his influential article, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' A creature is conscious, he argued, if it has subjective experience in the sense that there is 'something it is like' to be that creature. Nagel's 'something it is like' definition was designed to highlight the limits of the empirical study of consciousness. Even if researchers understood bat neurophysiology perfectly, they still wouldn't understand what it's like to be a bat, he thought, and so they wouldn't fully understand bat consciousness. Others have proposed more objective definitions of consciousness, such as the capacity to integrate the kinds of information neural signals can encode, or to make that information broadly available for guiding action. But all these definitions remain somewhat controversial.

There is a separate but equally important debate about which animals or systems are conscious. Even without agreeing on a hard-and-fast definition, increasing the consensus as to who or what is considered conscious could help researchers navigate many social issues—from the ethical treatment of lab and farm animals, to support for nonverbal patients with brain trauma, to our quickly changing relationship with AI. From an evolutionary per-

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Emma Skurnick

In the 19th century, researchers conducted experimental studies of consciousness by observing the behavior of living frogs after removing parts of their brains, or even their entire heads. The American psychologist William James noted that although a frog without cerebral hemispheres (shaded gray) still displayed remarkable balance, it would react mechanically and inflexibly to environmental change. For example, when James tilted his hand sharply downward, the frog always walked back up his hand, never jumping off. Intact frogs are not so predictable.

spective, determining which organisms are conscious could also help researchers understand which branches on the tree of life contain minds, when minds evolved, and why.

Back in the 19th century, Pflüger helped to pioneer experimental methods for testing which physiological functions are associated with consciousness. In his era, many scientists already used vivisection—surgery on live animals—to pinpoint the parts of the brain or nervous system that control specific bodily functions. These ablation (surgical removal) studies tested which functions cease with the destruction or disconnection of specific nervous structures. For example, a frog whose cerebellum has been destroyed loses the capacity to hop, but only if its medulla oblongata is destroyed or disconnected will it also lose the capacity to regain normal posture when placed in an odd position, such as on its back.

The application of these methods to the study of consciousness proved more difficult, however. After some brain structure is destroyed, we can directly observe whether a frog still hops when poked with a stick, but we cannot peer into its mind to see whether the frog is conscious. Instead, researchers often appealed to observable behaviors that might indirectly indicate the presence of consciousness, such as spontaneous movement or purposive behavior. Some also looked for anatomical clues, such as intact cerebral hemispheres.

Inevitably, each researcher favored consciousness markers that fit their own broader theoretical and philosophical views. Pflüger can be considered a vitalist, someone who doubted that purely physical mechanisms are enough to explain all animal behavior. A proper mechanism must go through the same output phases given the same input, regardless of whether a goal is

or is not achieved. But what Pflüger called “movement aroused by thought” seemed to him fundamentally different.

To understand this view, imagine a woman walking toward an apple tree while her mechanical watch keeps time. If she winds the watch and a gear seizes, the mainspring will still put pressure on the gear train, even though the time-keeping function will be lost. Same input, same output, regardless of whether the watch is serving its purpose. But if the woman encounters an obstacle, she simply chooses a different path. Same input—she still sees the tree—but with a different output—she varies her path.

Hence, vitalists such as Pflüger contended that not all behavior is mechanistic. Purposive behavior, in particular, seemed not to conform to the “same input, same output” principle that governs machines. Such behavior could only be achieved with the aid of consciousness, Pflüger contended. He, therefore, had theoretical reasons—vitalist reasons—for treating purposive behavior as a measurement criterion for consciousness.

Pflüger’s allies added other behavioral markers that fit a similar philosophical outlook, such as spontaneity (the ability

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to initiate action without stimulation) and learning (the ability to adjust current behavior in light of past experience). The English philosopher and physiologist George Henry Lewes, for example, identified learning as a consciousness marker, which he justified by imagining a purely mechanical dog interacting with a generous beggar on the street. It is inconceivable, he asserted, that such a dog could “bark one day at the beggar and the next day wag his tail, remembering the food and patting that beggar had bestowed.” In contrast, a conscious dog could learn from past kindness. Same input, different output.

Lewes also developed a related metaphysical view that biological and psychological phenomena, including full consciousness, “emerge” from increasingly complex organizations of physical matter, such as in a nervous system (even without a brain). Neither he nor Pflüger denied that living systems are made of ordinary physical

an attractive breadbasket of consciousness markers.

A Rival Camp

Vitalism was part of a backlash against a rival view of nature, mechanism, which was widespread in 19th-century physiology. Mechanists sought to explain living function with nothing more than the “processes already revealed by the study of lifeless nature,” as the English psychologist and physician Charles Myers put it.

The mechanistic approach rested on earlier work by figures such as Marshall Hall, an English physiologist. Starting in the 1830s, Hall helped establish the concept of a purely mechanical reflex arc—an unbroken mechanical chain starting with an inflowing sensory stimulus that is reflected through the central nervous system and back out to muscles, producing behavior. The more physiological function one could model in terms of reflex arcs, the more one could hope to build a science of physiology

causal role in bringing about purposive behavior, even for healthy, intact humans. In Huxley’s view, it’s absurd to think a decapitated frog is conscious. And if nonconscious, brainless frogs are capable of purposive behavior, surely our own neural structures can accomplish such behavior on their own—purely mechanically—without any mysterious help from conscious thought.

Huxley did not doubt that consciousness existed. He argued, however, that consciousness made no causal impact on the body. The sound of the steam train’s whistle is caused by the engine driving air through a pipe, to use his famous metaphor. But that sound does not in turn affect the engine. The same one-way causal arrow may be ascribed to the brain-consciousness relationship, argued Huxley. In his view, the brain somehow produces consciousness, but consciousness does not in turn affect the brain.

Huxley rejected purposiveness, spontaneity, and learning as observable

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Wikimedia Commons: Well/BOT/Alamy; Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

German physiologist Eduard Pflüger (left) and English biologist and anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley (center) disagreed about which traits were reliable markers of consciousness. William James (right) took an evolution-inspired approach that avoided reliance on behavioral markers.

markers of consciousness that alter behaviors. And he had philosophical reasons for doing so, because according to his version of mechanism, no behavior was ever altered by consciousness. He instead judged the presence or absence of consciousness by anatomical markers, at least for nonverbal animals. Because serious damage to the cerebral hemispheres results in a loss of consciousness in adult humans, Huxley insisted that the frog is unlikely to be conscious when these structures are removed.

And so two warring interpretations of Pflüger's experiment emerged. These interpretations were staked on mutually exclusive consciousness markers. Vitalists reasoned that purposive behavior is a marker of consciousness in the decapitated frog, which in turn suggests that consciousness emerges from a sufficiently complex neural system, even in creatures without a brain. Mechanists appealed to anatomical markers to claim that decapitated frogs cannot really be conscious. It would follow, according to mechanisms, that purposive behavior must be abandoned as a consciousness marker. In turn, this argument suggests that a purely mechanistic nervous system can account for all behavior, and consciousness must be a causally impotent by-product.

The William James Solution

With the debate deadlocked, a quirky American entered the fray. William James, now widely recognized as one of the founders of empirical psychology,

was still early in his career when he wrote in 1879 that rival interpretations of ablated frogs 'may mutually eat each other up to all eternity.' His solution was to reject the marker strategy entirely. Instead of testing which creatures are conscious by looking for markers, then testing the markers by looking for which creatures are conscious, James identified specific incapacities observed

whose cerebral hemispheres he'd removed (presumably using a scalpel or lance, two common ablation techniques of the day). He noticed that every time he tilted his hand steeply downward, the frog would crawl back up his hand, but not jump—without fail. When James pinched a particular spot under the frog's armpits, the frog would croak precisely once. When placed in water, the frog would begin swimming, without exception. If James touched the swimming frog's hand with a stick, it would immediately stop. So, although

Absent an independent theory about function, inferring consciousness from behavioral markers is like a cat trying to pull itself up by the scruff of its own neck.

in ablation studies. He then asked if any of these incapacities could be explained by a lack of consciousness.

Importantly, his answer did not depend on markers. James instead supported his explanation by appealing to evolutionary and introspective considerations about what consciousness does—what functional role it plays in a creature's overall physiology. His insight was that, absent an independent theory about function, inferring consciousness from the bare presence of markers is like a cat trying to pull itself up by the scruff of its own neck.

At first, James came to this approach through his own experiments on frogs

it could pursue goals, the decerebrate frog's behavior still had a predictable, mechanical character, like pulling the string on a jumping jack toy.

Relatedly, James noted that creatures without cerebral hemispheres would not do much of anything without external stimulation. 'The brainless pigeon will starve though left on a corn-heap,' he wrote. Pflüger's decapitated frogs may have acted with purpose, but only in response to the acid burn. Left alone, they simply sat still.

And James recognized yet another deficiency: Decerebrate creatures in these studies seemed unable to evaluate potential harms or benefits. He cited

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James was influenced by German physiologist Friedrich Goltz, who demonstrated that a frog missing its cerebral hemispheres can repeatedly adjust its balance to remain on a board that swivels through extreme angles.

German physiologist Max Schrader's observations of decerebrate pigeons. Pigeons, like frogs, have the remarkable ability to maintain basic bodily functions even without their cerebral hemispheres. Schrader, whose writing James translated and excerpted, noted that a decerebrate pigeon will navigate around its enclosure without distinguishing inanimate objects from other pigeons, or even from cats, dogs, or birds of prey that might be in the

overall they still behaved with machine-like regularity, displayed an inability to initiate action, and seemed unable to discriminate relative value. In a word, they lacked what James called "prudence."

But James did not summarily conclude that prudence is a marker of consciousness. And he did not appeal to a metaphysical theory about the relationship between mind and body to support such a marker. Instead, he developed a hypothesis about evolutionary func-

complexity, it may be a virtue to react "infallibly and certainly" to a small band of changes in stimuli. In contrast, more neuroanatomically complex creatures develop mobility so they can navigate an environment where nutrients and threats are distributed unevenly. If these species responded mechanically to every scent, tickle, sound, and change of color or position in their visual fields, they would be liable to go off half-cocked at the slightest suggestion.

James's hypothesis was that consciousness regulates behavior in creatures with more complex nervous systems by affording them the capacity to evaluate objects and situations. He gave the example of seeing a rattlesnake on a hiking trail. You could scream and run away, or you could pause and weigh the risk of a bite if you were to proceed against the increased fatigue if you took a detour. This process is an evaluation of possible responses to a problematic situation. Crucially, James wrote, the evaluation requires entertaining "reproductions of what I have felt or witnessed" in the past, such as experiences of "a sudden pain in my leg, of a state of terror, a swelling of the limb, a chill, delirium, unconsciousness, etc., etc., and the ruin of my hopes."

James called the contents of such reproductions absent objects because they are not perceptually present as a creature evaluates how best to react. His thought was that consciousness helps regulate behavior by affording an ability to entertain and evaluate those absent objects, which include not-yet-actualized courses of action.

To further support his hypothesis, James appealed to our own introspection. Whenever one finds consciousness, he claimed, one finds evaluation incessantly at work. Consciousness constantly takes selective interest in some things and ignores many others, dividing objects into the more and less harmful, or the more and less beautiful. Perfectly dispassionate perception is quite challenging. The watch may tick with acoustically even beats, but James pointed out that what we hear is "tick-töck, tick-töck, tick-töck."

Whatever one thinks of James's theory, his path around the measurement problem is important. He saw the futility of justifying marker behaviors by identifying them in conscious creatures, and then circularly identifying conscious creatures by appealing to markers. Instead, he crafted a hypothesis about

William James saw the futility of justifying marker behaviors by identifying them in conscious creatures, and then circularly identifying conscious creatures by appealing to markers.

way. The decerebrate pigeon, he wrote, "turns out of his path for an ordinary pigeon no otherwise than for a stone. He may try to climb over both."

Schrader characterized the decerebrate pigeon's behavior as radically "impersonal." He noted that sexual attraction ceases, as does any sign of friendship or enmity. "In the thickest company it lives like a hermit," he wrote. Schrader's pigeons were virtually value blind: They showed a diminished capacity either to value other creatures, or to evaluate different courses of action.

So, although decerebrate creatures could still perform purposive behaviors when prompted, as Pflüger had shown,

tion that would explain the ablation observations. Perhaps, he proposed, consciousness is localized in the cerebral hemispheres, and it functions to regulate behavior by affording prudence.

A Darwinian Approach

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859, during James's student days. He became an early devotee. James noted that as more complex nervous systems evolve, one should expect a trade-off between behavioral stability and sensitivity to increasing varieties of stimuli. He argued that for very simple creatures with little need to cope with environmental

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Emma Skurnick

Researchers disagree about which behaviors are definitive markers of consciousness. Possible indicators include (clockwise from top left) laughter, making motivational trade-offs, learning, self-recognition in a mirror, and purposive behavior.

consciousness’s evolutionary function, checked the hypothesis against introspective evidence, and sought to show that it provided the best explanation of experimental observations.

Unlike emergentists, James was not trying to explain consciousness by searching for reasons why it arises from this or that brain activity. And he was not trying to address the metaphysical disputes between vitalists and mechanists that had powered the earlier controversies around Pflüger’s work. Instead, James tried to understand consciousness by identifying the functional difference it might make in creatures that evolve this trait.

In a sense, the outcome of James’s approach is similar to the marker strategy. Both methods issue a correlation between consciousness and observable behaviors—in James’s view, conscious creatures should be those with complex nervous systems that display a capacity for prudence. The difference is that James’s approach did not begin by classifying cases as conscious or not, so he avoided the circularity of using be-

behavioral markers to support behavioral markers. With his approach, the correlation between consciousness and behavior is supported by an independent evolutionary theory that purportedly gave the best explanation of what researchers had observed in ablation studies.

Return of the Markers

James died in 1910, and one could almost say he took consciousness science with him to the grave. Three years later, the American psychologist John B. Watson published a manifesto arguing that psychology’s subject matter should be behavior, and for decades the field diminished consciousness as scientifically suspect. By trafficking only in something publicly observable—responses to stimuli rather than private, conscious phenomena—behaviorist psychology could style itself “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science,” as Watson put it. Consciousness did not return as an object of serious scientific scrutiny until the late 20th century.

Today, the scientific study of consciousness is again thriving, but it is

alienated from its own past. The neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and biologists pushing the field forward do not usually appeal to 19th century science in their own consciousness research, understandably. But without reflecting on this history, are they condemned to repeat it?

With the return of consciousness science, we are also seeing the return of the marker strategy. In fact, it is dominating the field again, especially with respect to animal studies. For example, a 2021 landmark review paper used markers to make the case that certain mollusks and crustaceans are sentient, meaning that they are conscious in the minimal sense of having feelings, such as pain, thirst, or excitement. Funded by the U.K. government, the review led to creatures such as crabs, octopuses, and lobsters being formally recognized for legislative purposes as sentient beings.

One such consciousness marker—the ability to make motivational trade-offs—was illustrated by a 2009 study at Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland. Researchers subjected hermit crabs in both preferred and unpreferred shells to increasingly strong electric shocks. They found that crabs in preferred shells evacuated at

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Reiss, D., et al. PNAS 98:5937; Plotnik, J. M., et al. PNAS 103:17053

Some consciousness researchers today accept recognition of one's own reflection as a marker of consciousness. In 2001, researchers at Columbia University in New York and Emory University in Georgia reported that two individual dolphins used a mirror to investigate ink painted onto body parts that were not otherwise visible, such as above the eye (left). Five years later, researchers from those institutions reported the same capacity in an Asian elephant (center) who looked in the mirror and touched a marked spot with her trunk (right).

higher shock intensities than those in unpreferred shells, suggesting that they weighed the need to avoid noxious stimuli against the need to retain a good quality shell. Because a reflexive response to pain should activate on the basis of a fixed physiological threshold, the researchers took their results to sup-

put a visible spot of red dye on their foreheads. When the chimps saw their marked faces in the mirror, they repeatedly touched the corresponding area of their own faces. Researchers have since documented similar behavior in Asian elephants, bottlenose dolphins, and even cleaner fish (which can use

foraging, mating, or clutter-clearing. The authors concluded that the observations help support sentience in these insects.

Some consciousness researchers argue that, collectively, these marker studies suggest that many animals are indeed conscious. There is strong scientific evidence that many mammals and birds are conscious, and at least a realistic possibility that all vertebrates and many invertebrates are conscious as well, according to the group of philosophers and brain scientists who issued and signed the 2024 "New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness." The declaration's 600 signatories urge policymakers to take empirical evidence of consciousness seriously when making decisions that affect the welfare of animals.

Just like in the 19th century, however, there is now division over the significance of markers. For one thing, applying these criteria consistently in the animal kingdom can lead to unlikely results. The microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, for example, has fewer than 400 neurons, whereas humans have about 86 billion. Yet this tiny worm displays purported markers of consciousness, such as learning and motivational trade-off.

Debates about consciousness markers remain bound up with philosophical disagreements about the nature of the mind. Most consciousness researchers today accept, for example, that the cerebral cortex is necessary for human consciousness. But a minority argue that the upper brain stem might give rise to at least a minimal form of consciousness. Such researchers cite studies on children born without a cerebral cortex. These children are severely impaired, but they do display some apparent markers of consciousness, such as

Caenorhabditis elegans has fewer than 400 neurons, yet it displays purported markers of consciousness, such as learning and motivational trade-off.

port pain experience, not just a pain reflex. Similar capacities to trade-off motivations have been reported in rats, iguanas, bumblebees, predatory snails, various fish, and other species.

Crabs may be sentient without consciously reflecting on their feelings, but another vein of experimental work has tried to develop markers for full-blown self-awareness. Many animals, including human infants, respond to a mirror as though the image were that of another creature. In 1970, a classic study at Tulane University in Louisiana showed that chimpanzees can be made to recognize themselves. After allowing several chimps to become accustomed to mirrors, researchers surreptitiously

mirrors to scrape a mark off the side of their body). Dogs, wolves, and garter snakes have been shown to pass olfactory versions of the test. Although there are debates about the implications of these findings, some researchers now accept mirror self-recognition as a marker for self-consciousness.

Play has been suggested as yet another marker. In a 2022 study, researchers at Queen Mary University of London gave small wooden balls to bumblebees, who appeared to play with them for no practical purpose. (See "Expanding Consciousness," November–December 2019.) Researchers ruled out various functional explanations of the ball-rolling. The behavior was not, for example, driven by

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sleep-wake cycles, simple emotions and preferences, and purposive behaviors. These accounts are intertwined with a broader philosophical conception of consciousness as rooted more in embodied action and biological regulation than in higher cognitive capacities, the latter of which are associated with the cerebral hemispheres.

Other theorists argue that consciousness arises only with higher order awareness of what one is feeling, thinking, or doing. Hermit crabs may act so as to balance pain avoidance against the need for a good shell, but that does not necessarily mean that they are aware of their own preferences. Higher order theories reflect a contrasting philosophical attitude that views consciousness as rooted not in biological regulation but in the mind's cognitive abilities, especially the mind's ability to represent its own states. Accordingly, such theorists emphasize quite different markers of consciousness, such as satisfactory performance on metacognitive tasks where subjects are asked to report their confidence about what they have experienced. Monkeys, for example, will wager more food if they think they have performed well on a cognitive task than they will if they are less confident.

As philosophical debates go, vitalism versus mechanism may be antique, but researchers today remain divided over philosophical issues. Is consciousness more closely associated with sensory or intellectual processes? With embodied action or reflective cognition? It is hard to escape the sense that our preferred consciousness markers are intertwined with our preferred philosophical theories. And so, the field is just as mired in the measurement problem today as it was in the 19th century.

A Cautionary Tale

To reach a consensus on consciousness markers, researchers are now attempting a so-called iterative method. If consciousness is a single, stable feature or process, they reason, then different markers should all be present in the same creatures. By checking which intuitively plausible markers actually appear together, we can build a bread-basket of reliable markers and discard the rest. In this way, researchers hope to refine a collection of consciousness markers iteratively over time.

But the history of consciousness research provides a cautionary tale. Sometimes, different initial assumptions never

Dona, H. S. G., et al. 2022.

A team led by researchers at Queen Mary University of London gave wooden balls to bumblebees and watched as the insects rolled them around, seemingly for no practical purpose. The findings, reported in 2022, showed that younger bees were the most playful, much like in mammals. Some consciousness researchers point to play as a marker of consciousness.

converge. Instead, they get built up into increasingly elaborate, increasingly divergent philosophical outlooks that ultimately prove irreconcilable.

James would probably be impressed with these modern-day studies of animal cognition. But he'd also likely caution against inferring that a creature is conscious solely because it displays certain markers—or because whatever markers it displays cohere with one's preferred philosophical framework. His insight was that such inferences can only be made plausible if set inside an evolutionary framework that does not itself rest on marker-style evidence. If there were independent reasons to think that consciousness's evolutionary function is behavior regulation, for example, then there would be reason to expect that conscious creatures are capable of motivational trade-offs.

Many decerebrate creatures in 19th-century studies lacked a capacity for making motivational trade-offs, since they lacked motivation to do much of anything. If both evolutionary theory and our own introspection point to consciousness as a prerequisite for prudent, evaluative action, then we can conclude, as James did, that Pflüger's frogs suffered from a disorder of consciousness. And we can look to evolutionary history to understand when, why, and in which animal populations prudent behavior might have first taken hold.

James's lesson is, if we want to understand consciousness, we should look to evolution, we should look to functional incapacities, and we should look to the only truly incontrovertible cases of conscious experience any of us can ever directly observe—our own.

Bibliography

Andrews, K. 2024. "All animals are conscious": Shifting the null hypothesis in consciousness science. Mind & Language 39:415–433. Andrews, K., J. Birch, J. Sebo, and T. Sims. 2024. New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. nydeclaration.com Bayne, T., et al. 2024. Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 28:454–466. Birch, J., C. C. Burn, A. K. Schnell, H. Browning, and A. Crump. 2021. Review of the evidence of sentience in cephalopod molluscs and decapod crustaceans. LSE Consulting, London School of Economics and Political Science. Freiburger, T., N. Miller, and M. Skinner. 2024. Olfactory self-recognition in two species of snake. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 291:20240125. Godfrey-Smith, P. 2016. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Huxley, T. H. 1899. On the hypothesis that animals are automata, and its history. In Method and Results: Essays, pp. 199–250. Appleton. James, W. 1879. Are we automata? Mind 4:1–22. James, W. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. Holt and Company. Klein, A. M. 2025. Consciousness Is Motor: William James on Mind and Action. Oxford University Press. Merker, B. 2007. Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: A challenge for neuroscience and medicine. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30:63–134. Shea, N., and T. Bayne. 2010. The vegetative state and the science of consciousness. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61:459–484.

Alexander Mugar Klein is a Canada Research Chair and a professor of philosophy at McMaster University in Ontario, where he also directs the Bertrand Russell Research Centre. His work weaves together philosophy, history, and cognitive science. Klein's 2025 book about William James, Consciousness Is Motor, was published by Oxford University Press. Email: kleina7@mcmaster.ca

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Nightstand

The Dynamics of Mutation

Sarah Marion

BEYOND INHERITANCE: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health. Roxanne Khamsi. 304 pp. Riverhead, 2026. $30.

We tend to think of genetic disease as something we inherit, written uniformly into every cell—but many genetic diseases begin with mutations that emerge in only a subset of our cells. Although we each have a unique genome sequence, we are all composed of cells that carry slight genetic differences. Within our bodies, populations of genetically distinct cells can expand or outcompete others, echoing natural selection on a much smaller scale. Beyond Inheritance: Our Ever-Mutating Cells and a New Understanding of Health by Roxanne Khamsi explores the parallels between mutation and natural selection on the organismal scale to those acting on genetically distinct cells within our bodies, and the profound impacts these cell lineages can have on our health.

We each inherit a genomic sequence from our parents. But as cells in our bodies replicate, our DNA is not always copied accurately, creating genetic variation among cells within the same body. As Khamsi succinctly explains, “The body replaces 330 billion—about 1 percent—of its cells every day, so there are many opportunities for DNA copying errors to happen.” Just as evolution acts upon genetic variation between individuals in a population, somatic mutations generate variation between cells in our bodies, laying the groundwork for what Khamsi calls endoevolution, or the evolution of cells within our bodies. Changes in the frequency of

cellular mutations are driven by cell reproduction and cell death. The mutations that occur during this process provide the genetic diversity upon which evolutionary forces such as natural selection can act.

Khamsi guides the reader through challenging genetics and evolutionary concepts with a series of concise stories. These include historical and modern tales of scientists making key treatment advancements, such as the development of a novel “lineage-based” vaccine targeting HIV, which consists of a series of shots carrying specific viral fragments aimed at stimulating the evolution of our immune cells to protect us from HIV. The author also follows patient experiences, diagnoses, and treatments, from the devastating tale of a pregnant mother with a rare blood disease caused by the expansion of a defective cell lineage, to the hopeful tale of two boys with severe inherited autoimmune disease who improved without treatment, due to a beneficial mutation that reversed the course of the disease and spread through their bodies with each passing year. Along the way, Khamsi thoughtfully braids together genetic and evolutionary lessons on inheritance, mutation, and natural selection, with each lesson building on the previous one.

Readers are eased into the idea of cells evolving within our bodies with an exploration of cancer through an evolutionary lens. Mutant cancer cells arise within our bodies and evolve and adapt to treatment due to their high mutation rates and natural selection, in the same way that weeds can develop pesticide resistance. This concept is presented to the reader before the idea that all the cells in our body may not be in coherent unison, as has been described since the beginning of the 20th century, when there was a strong biological movement “toward viewing each organism as a harmonious

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holistic system.” This view was compounded by the discovery of heritable units (genes) by Gregor Mendel, which “put an emphasis on how all somatic cells in the body contain the same genetic material.” Even now, when most of us hear the term “genetic disease,” we think about diseases caused by heritable genetic mutations, which are mutations that are present in every one of our cells because our parents gave them to us when we were just a single cell (that then divided to become the rest of our body). The author challenges our perceptions of personal genome sequences and genetic disease by explaining how we are each a mosaic of mutant cells, which lays the groundwork for a competition within us, where cells vie for the limited space in our bodies, tissues, and organs.

Although these concepts date back to the 1800s, they didn’t gain traction until the 1990s, when fruit fly geneticists discovered a concrete example of cellular competition, in which the presence of mutant cells near healthy cells could trigger the production of proteins that would wipe out the mutant cell lineage. Modern technology that allows scientists to sequence the genome of single cells has continued to enhance our appreciation of how cells with genetic differences interact with one another. The proliferation of some mutant cells can manifest as disease, including leukemia, heart disease, and even phenocopies of heritable disease—noninherited conditions that imitate inherited disorders, such as hemophilia and Down syndrome.

Khamsi emphasizes that, historically, “individuals who are genetic mosaics [have been portrayed as] medical oddities. But in reality, we all have some degree of genetic differences in our cells, no matter how small and nuanced, piling up over the years within our bodies.” Because we are all mosaics, and many of us are able to live relatively healthy lives, a major focus of the book is that not all mutations are bad for our health (even those that arise in disease-associated genes); indeed, many mutations have no health consequences at all. In fact, the influx of somatic mutations in some cells is critical to our health. The author highlights that the generation of new mutations is essential to a functioning immune system and, in some circumstances, can even rescue us from genetic diseases we inherited from our

parents. Our immune system relies on genetic variation to produce a wide variety of antibodies so that our systems have a chance to protect themselves from quickly evolving viral and bacterial threats. As Khamsi writes, “It’s a beautiful system, fueled by mutation. We cannot survive without it.” New mutations can benefit our health in other ways, too, and have been found to have the ability to “self-correct”—a disease mutation that reverts to normal functioning and then, in rare cases, accumulates in enough cells to correct the course of the disease.

Of course, some mutations that arise during our lifetimes do get passed down to the next generation. These heritable mutations are the source of variation between individuals and the groundwork for evolution on a scale we are more familiar with. So how often do new heritable mutations arise? The rate at which new mutations are generated depends on the person and can be influenced by mutations themselves. Some men, referred to in the text as “hypermutators,” have a defective DNA repair gene that results in an excess of mutations in their sperm. Interestingly, Khamsi includes current research suggesting that the rates of new mutations in some somatic tissues are significantly higher than those in cells that divide to generate sperm and eggs. Genetic diversity is unmistakably being generated rapidly within our bodies, with a wide array of potential effects on our cells’ ability to survive and reproduce, and thus on our health as individuals. Health scientists are increasingly working to harness mutations for good, and perhaps to even revert disease-causing mutations back to healthy function.

Although the book highlights many devastating health consequences of our ever-mutating and mosaic genome, please don’t be in constant fear of the next mutation that will arise in your body. Humans have evolved an essential ability to repair mistakes in our DNA, and not only are most mutations not bad, the majority of mutations that occur are fixed within minutes of being made. Furthermore, throughout the book, the author expands on how researchers are trying to utilize their understanding of mutations and endoevolution to benefit our health, such as aiding the development of modern medical treatments, including cancer therapy, vaccine de-

design, and organ transplants. Biologists have even started discussing how to maximize the efficiency of DNA repair machinery to reduce mutations and extend human lifespans.

With such a possibility in mind, Khamsi cautions, “After billions of years of life on earth, humans are the first living creature seeking to shape our genetic destinies. . . . However, we may need to ask whether it would always be wise to block or erase mutations with the possible gene-editing or drug interventions being contemplated.” The stories and lessons in Beyond Inheritance leave the reader with a new perspective that our personal genetic code is not fixed but rather a dynamic system fueled by mutation—a system that is constantly changing, with both harmful and beneficial impacts to our health.

Sarah Marion earned her PhD in evolutionary genetics from Duke University. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Reed College, studying the evolution of germline mutation rates.

Shades of Meaning

Claire Bowern

TRUE COLOR: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink. Kory Stamper. 320 pp. Knopf, 2026. $32.

Kory Stamper’s True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color—from Azure to Zinc Pink gives a delightfully detailed view of how the lexicographers behind the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary grappled with the impossible: how to define the words of the English language that describe color. Stamper calls this task a “quest,” and rightly so. The creation of these dictionary entries was a major benchmark in a search for accurate, succinct, and principled ways to use language that had been going on for more than a century.

Dictionary writers face an unenviable and exacting task. Their job is to use language to write concise but exhaustive definitions of words and their many subsenses. Dictionaries are founded on the premise that it is possible to state what words mean in terms of other words, delineating a standard set of discrete meanings that all who speak the language agree on. But people don’t agree on what words

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Tom Cowap/Wikimedia Commons

This color swatch illustrates how vast the color spectrum can be, even within a small sample. For this reason, the color forecasting company Pantone initially used numbers and not color names because such terms are imprecise and can be highly subjective. Such is the challenge facing a lexicographer when determining definitions of colors.

mean, and they don't all use words in the same way—and so dictionaries have to simultaneously describe usage (people call this color 'teal') and prescribe meaning (this color is 'celadon,' not 'teal').

There are three main threads in True Color: Stamper's explanations and explorations of how dictionary authors write definitions; the history of Webster's Third New International Dictionary; and the contributions to that seminal book by Isaac Hahn Godlove (a scientist hired by Merriam-Webster to help with dictionary revisions) and Emma Margaret Godlove (who was employed as a stenographer but who was really the driving force behind many of the eventual printed definitions).

Color is often defined with respect to something else—for example, something that prototypically has a particular hue, such as teal or lapis lazuli. A nice example is how words meaning 'ashes' end up meaning either 'black' or 'white' in some Indigenous Australian languages: black if you have charcoal in mind, white if it's cold ashes. Stamper writes about how these issues led to Webster's color definitions fluctuating for many years

before publication, such as trying to define terms scientifically by dye recipes, math, or physics, which are more precise approaches but less informative than 'goldenrod.' Gold standard definitions in terms of spectrography don't capture what color words mean, because the experience of color is subjective and the words we use to describe colors are bound up with much more than the reference points in a color atlas.

The domain of color makes it clear just how difficult it is to define words by using other words. How does it help someone to understand meaning to define 'begonia' as 'stronger than average coral,' or 'buttercup' as 'a variable color averaging a vivid yellow that is redder and deeper than dandelion (see dandelion 3b) or goldenrod (see goldenrod 2a)?' This approach gives a sense, perhaps, but we don't always need color terms to express color. I read this book on a flight heading west out of New York at sunset, on a cloudy, slightly smoky evening where the color of the sky could only be described as apocalyptic. We can express hues with color words and still be none the wiser, or we can call our

feelings 'blue' or 'see red,' and use these terms where color is irrelevant.

True Color was both more specific and more general than I expected. Ironically, this concern is often what students say about introductory linguistics classes, so I thoroughly enjoyed a dose of my own medicine. The book is broad in the sense that there is a lot of information about dye manufacturing during World War I, the personalities of early 20th-century lexicographers, and arguments over what constitutes meaning. The book's pages detail how language is everywhere, intertwined with everything from philosophy to paint mixing. But it is narrower in its approach to language and color itself. True Color isn't really a book about color words in general; it's about Merriam-Webster's definitions of color.

Stamper also introduces readers to the concept of the 'triangle of meaning,' attributed here to linguists Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards, but which actually goes back in various forms to Aristotle. It is the idea that meaning has three parts: the word, its referent in the world, and the 'concept' that the word evokes. Words don't just mean the things they refer to in the world, because we can understand words that don't refer to real things, or words may refer to real things, even if we don't have firsthand knowledge of said things (you have a meaning of 'platypus'

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even if you've never seen one). To this list, I usually add that we need a grammatical and a social context to map concepts to referents and words. Otherwise, we don't have a way of describing the difference between 'spew' and 'throw up' (same concept, same sticky referent, different tone).

The meaning triangle helps explain why words are so difficult to define. There's a slippery slope between the meanings of words and the context that we need to know in order to understand them fully. For example, pink and blue are 'gendered' colors in North America, to the extent that if you see a baby in a pink onesie you'll probably assume the baby is a girl. Is that part of the referent (that is, the actual pink color)? No. It's arbitrary, and 100 years ago 'pink' had no such connotations. Is it part of the concept of pink? Probably so, at this point. But should that go in a dictionary? That's where I'm glad I don't have to make these decisions.

Early on, Merriam-Webster decided to standardize color terms, defining such words in terms of saturation, lightness, and range of hue. These are definitions based partly on the physics of light, partly (in the case of chrome green, for example) on chemistry. For other terms, the lexicographers got creative. But where to stop? One problem seems to have been that, at that point, standard dye recipes already had named colors. Those colors are now color terms and in the dictionary, and what's in the dictionary (circularly, according to linguists) is enshrined. That's probably why there are more than 3,000 color names in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, many of which can be traced back to mid-century fabric or paint brands.

The snapshot of colors that Stamper provides in True Color tells an engaging history: of meaning, of dictionary crafting, and of the unique imprint left by those whose task it was to bring the language of color into this specific edition of Merriam-Webster's dictionary. Thousands of color words later, did Stamper and her lexicographer predecessors succeed in their quests? Maybe so, at least until the next batch of colors need defining.

Claire Bowern is a professor of linguistics and anthropology at Yale University. She studies how language changes over time, and she works with Indigenous Australians on language documentation, including dictionaries.

Whose Cosmos Is It, Anyway?

Keivan G. Stassun

MEXICO IN SPACE: From la Raza Cósmica to the Space Race. Anne W. Johnson. 296 pp. University of Arizona Press, 2026. $35.

'Space is for everyone.' This slogan is everywhere in the global space industry—painted on booths at aerospace expos; threaded through the promotional rhetoric of companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and their government counterparts; even stitched onto the mission patches of international astronaut corps. Growing up Mexican American in Los Angeles, I came to astrophysics with almost no view of the night sky—the city saw to that—yet with a persistent, not entirely explicable sense that the cosmos was not foreign territory. Anne W. Johnson's Mexico in Space: From la Raza Cósmica to the Space Race helped me understand where that feeling might have come from.

Johnson opens the book by taking the phrase 'space is for everyone' seriously—and then systematically dismantling it. Her argument is not that space is for no one, but that the very grammar of 'everyone' implies a singular outer space available for appropriation by a singular humanity. That implication, she shows through eight years of ethnographic fieldwork across Mexico, is both politically consequential and empirically wrong.

Johnson's central conceptual move is to borrow the notion of milieu from the French philosopher of biology Georges Canguilhem—a term she translates as something like a constitutive environment: neither backdrop nor container, but an active medium through which organisms (or, in her usage, people, institutions, and ideas) simultaneously shape and are shaped. She adapts this idea into space milieux: the plural, historically situated, socially embedded contexts through which different communities in Mexico have engaged with outer space, not as a single infinite frontier, but as overlapping, sometimes contradictory places and practices.

The book's six chapters trace these milieux across strikingly diverse settings. We begin with pre-Hispanic

cosmologies and the Aztec calendar stone (the Piedra del Sol), whose astronomical sophistication Johnson treats not as a romantic origin story but as evidence of a long engagement between Mexican peoples and the cosmos that predates and complicates European narratives of 'discovery.' We move through the postrevolutionary construction of a nationalist cosmic identity (la raza cósmica)—the early 20th-century Mexican philosopher and education minister José Vasconcelos's famous and politically fraught vision of a spiritually superior mixed race destined to transcend both Europe and the United States—into Mexico's little-known Cold War satellite program and its fitful contemporary successor, the Mexican Space Agency (AEM). Along the way, we encounter dark sky activists fighting light pollution in Baja California; a collective of artists and scientists imagining a Mexican city on Mars; and Mennonite farmers in Chihuahua launching amateur rockets whose engines run on the same fuel that powers the pumps used to irrigate crops in a drought.

That last scene—Johnson at a rocket competition in the desert, eating tortillas and corn, watching judges evaluate student projects for compliance with the safety protocols of ENMICE (a high-power rocketry competition in Mexico), while a NASA official frets about heightened tensions in Gaza—is characteristic of the book's method and its pleasures. The ethnographic detail is dense without being inert. It serves as analysis: These rockets are not pale imitations of U.S. space technology; they are expressions of a specific Mexican space milieu, shot through with local anxieties about water, national identity, and whether Mexico belongs among the spacefaring nations or is, as one interlocutor puts it dryly, still waiting to be invited to the table.

One of the book's most unexpected threads involves not rockets, but seaweed. Johnson's field sites include coastal communities in Quintana Roo and Oaxaca that are working with Mar de Sal, a company using satellite imagery to track and manage the massive influxes of Sargassum, a type of macroalgae, that have been washing up on Mexico's beaches due to climate change and nutrient runoff. The connection to outer space might seem tenuous, but Johnson uses it as one of her most productive analytical

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moves: showing how satellite data, which originates in the most distant and technologically rarefied of outer space programs, becomes entangled with the most immediate, smelly, and economically devastating ecological problems of the terrestrial milieu.

This kind of analytical surprise is exactly what good ethnography delivers. The Sargassum seaweed is not a meta-

conquest of the Americas was not only a historical event, but a template.

This argument is provocative, and Johnson is careful not to flatten it. Many of her interlocutors are deeply ambivalent: They are excited by the prospect of a Mexican presence in the broader conversation about humanity's future off-Earth, but troubled by the terms on which that presence

sion of dark sky communities in the final chapter, in particular, could benefit from the same depth of ethnographic texture that makes the Chihuahua rocket competition and the Sargassum sections so vivid.

These are minor notes about a book that is doing something genuinely difficult: explaining why "Mexico" and "space" are not two separate topics that happen to intersect, but two names for a single, deeply entangled set of historical, political, and material practices. The fact that Johnson largely succeeds is a considerable achievement.

The question in the blurb on the book's back cover—"Who belongs in outer space?"—turns out to be the wrong question, or at least not quite the right one. What Johnson's book shows is that the question assumes a singular outer space waiting to be populated by the right kind of people. What she finds instead is a multiplicity of outer spaces—as many as there are communities with skies over their heads, histories behind them, and technologies within reach. The "spaces" of a Baja astronomer, a Chihuahuan Mennonite rocketeer, and a Quintana Roo sargasso-mapper are not competing versions of the same thing; they are genuinely different objects, constituted by different practices.

If it is true—as the recent proliferation of commercial and governmental space programs suggests it is—that humanity is about to spend an enormous amount of money, engineering talent, and political capital on the project of expanding beyond Earth, then the questions this book raises are not merely academic. Who gets to define what "space" means? Whose cosmologies count as knowledge, and whose count as mythology? What kinds of communities and what kinds of futures do we carry with us when we go? I found myself thinking of the children now growing up in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Chihuahua—starved of dark skies but not starved of a cosmos. Mexico in Space does not answer all these questions. But Johnson asks them in ways that should make anyone who cares about the future of space exploration stop and think.

Keivan G. Stassun is the Stevenson Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include stellar astrophysics and archaeoastronomy. He is also the author of The Life and Death of Stars, a Great Courses lecture series.

Colonizing Mars replays the same dynamic of dispossession that structured the conquest of the Americas.

phor for anything; it is a real problem with real economic consequences for tourism operators and fishing communities. But it is also, Johnson argues, another milieu that connects the biological and the orbital, the human and the nonhuman, in ways that the standard "space is for everyone" narrative—focused on individual heroes launching into the cosmos—entirely misses.

The book's most theoretically ambitious chapter, "Transhabiting Mars," is also its most politically charged. Johnson follows the collective Marsarchive.org, a group of Mexican artists, scientists, and writers who have spent years imagining what a Mexican city on Mars might look like. It is not an endorsement of Elon Musk's "colonization" plans, but a way of asking what it means to project desires and fears about terrestrial life onto an extraterrestrial canvas. The collective's fictional city, Martenochtitlan, is named for both Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital, now Mexico City) and the Spanish conquest that destroyed it. The allusion is deliberate: Colonizing Mars replays the same dynamic of dispossession that structured the conquest of the Americas, now with Silicon Valley in the role of Cortés. In Marsarchive.org's telling, the technologies and rhetoric of Martian colonization—terraforming, "unclaimed" land, indigenous populations framed as obstacles or resources—are not neutral engineering problems but a recognizable repertoire inherited from 16th-century European expansion. To recognize Mars as a site of potential conquest, the collective argues, is already to recognize that the

would have to occur. A telling moment comes when an AEM official, at a diplomatic reception in Chihuahua, uses the language of "investment opportunities" to describe Mexico's space aspirations while, in the same breath, invoking the legacy of Aztec astronomical genius. The juxtaposition is not lost on Johnson or, one suspects, on the official himself: Mexico's modern space ambitions are being marketed in the vocabulary of global capital while drawing legitimacy from a pre-Columbian past whose descendants remain largely excluded from the AEM's boardrooms and budgets.

Mexico in Space is not without its difficulties. The book's theoretical apparatus draws on a constellation of science studies theorists: Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour on how scientific facts are assembled, Donna Haraway on the politics of knowledge, Anna Tsing on how global systems work through friction and local difference, and Lisa Messeri, whose ethnography of planetary scientists directly anticipates Johnson. But this breadth of perspectives occasionally weighs down the prose in ways that will challenge readers outside the social sciences. The introduction's extended meditation on milieu as a concept is necessary but demanding, and readers who persevere will be rewarded by later chapters that deploy the concept with considerably more grace. The book also covers a great deal of ground—from pre-Hispanic cosmology to contemporary satellite programs to speculative fiction about Mars—and although the thematic coherence holds, some chapters feel more fully realized than others. The discus-

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Volume 35 Number 04

Sigma Xi Today

A NEWSLETTER OF SIGMA XI, THE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH HONOR SOCIETY

Student Research Showcase Winners

On April 26, Sigma Xi presented awards for its 2026 Student Research Showcase. The virtual competition included 311 student participants across 13 disciplinary categories. Awards were given in the high school, undergraduate, and graduate divisions. Additional prizes were awarded for the top overall winner, people's choice, and interdisciplinary categories.

The 2026 overall winners were Lauren Choi of Irving High School and Vijeta Garg of Edison High School. The people's choice winner, voted on by fellow participants, was Heritage Xperiential Learning School's Aryaman Chandra.

The Student Research Showcase is an annual virtual competition aimed at building students' science communication skills so they can convey the value of their research to technical and nontechnical audiences. During a month-long evaluation period, students built websites, videos, and slideshows to present their research to a panel of judges and public audiences. Judges' evaluations were based on how well the students communicated enthusiasm for their projects; explained the significance of their research; used text, charts, and diagrams; and responded to questions.

Continued on page 255

The Wonder We Share, the Responsibility We Carry

As I begin my term as your president, I have found myself reflecting on a simple question: What makes Sigma Xi so special?

This year offers us a meaningful moment for reflection, as Sigma Xi marks its 140th anniversary and the United States celebrates its 250th. These milestones invite us to consider the role science has played in shaping our nation—and how both continue to evolve alongside one another. Science has been central to American progress, from early efforts to understand the natural world to today's complex, collaborative, global scientific enterprise. And science has played a fundamental role in our country's development by expanding opportunity, improving lives, and deepening our understanding of who we are and where we fit in the universe.

Sigma Xi reflects that same evolution. The Society is remarkable for its breadth, welcoming professional scientists, students just beginning their journeys, and distinguished scholars who have spent a lifetime advancing knowledge. Sigma Xi spans thousands of miles, as well as generations and disciplines. This inclusiveness is not incidental; it is foundational.

But if many of us come from such different places, what brings us together?

At least in part, we share an appreciation of science itself. Members of Sigma Xi are united by the beauty of discovery and the unfolding of things previously unknown. Science, at its best, is fueled by curiosity and wonder.

But the Society also connects us more deeply. Scientific insights have shown us that we are not the center of the universe, that we are part of a vast and evolving natural world, and that we share common origins. These ideas can be humbling, but they also remind us of our shared humanity. And science is, of course, practical. It helps us confront everyday challenges and address pressing global problems by innovating and expanding knowledge to build a better future.

With those opportunities comes responsibility. Rather than dwell on concerns about trust in science, I believe our focus should be on trustworthiness in our scientific research—on upholding the highest standards of rigor, honesty, and transparency. Science is, in many ways, a sacred vocation grounded in a commitment to truth.

Sigma Xi plays a vital role in fostering both the wonder and the responsibility that define science. As we honor our past and look toward the future, I am excited to explore with you how we can continue advancing science—and society—in the years to come.

B. Allison

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MEETINGS & EVENTS

Two Sigma Xi Members Selected to Attend 2026 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

Sigma Xi is proud to announce that members Jared Boyce and Tengteng Tang have been selected to attend this year's Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, an international forum that brings together Nobel laureates and outstanding early-career scientists from around the world.

The prestigious Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings provide a unique opportunity for the next generation of researchers to engage directly with Nobel laureates through lectures, discussions, and collaborative exchanges that span disciplines and borders. The 2026 meeting will be the 75th anniversary of the event and will emphasize interdisciplinary dialogue, encouraging participants to explore solutions to complex global challenges through diverse scientific perspectives.

Jared Boyce is an emerging physician-scientist whose work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, medicine, and social impact. Currently a medical scientist trainee at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine and Public Health, Boyce previously earned a BA in neuroscience from Dartmouth College and an MS in medical sciences from Brown University. His research experience spans leading institutions, including Columbia University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where he has contributed to studies in brain science, behavior, and neurobiology. His scholarly interests focus on understanding how early-life experiences—particularly trauma—shape brain development and long-term health outcomes, with the goal of advancing more equitable approaches to care for underserved populations.

Tengteng Tang is a researcher and faculty member at Union College in New York, where he works at the intersection of mechanical engineering and interdisciplinary scientific research. Previously, he at-

Jared Boyce

Tengteng Tang

tended Arizona State University, earning a PhD in mechanical engineering in 2025. His work reflects the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science, drawing on principles across engineering and related fields to address complex problems. At Union, Tang contributes to a research environment that emphasizes cross-disciplinary inquiry and hands-on student engagement. He is committed to advancing collaborative research and mentoring students in interdisciplinary approaches to engineering and science.

As an academic partner of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, Sigma Xi invites students and early-career scientists to apply annually for nomination to the Young Scientist cohorts of future meetings. Applicants should be active members of Sigma Xi, be among the top 5 percent in their class, and meet additional post-grad criteria. The application portal for next year's meeting will open in the summer of 2026 at sigmaxi.org. Questions can be directed to executiveoffice@sigmaxi.org.

Northeast Region Research Conference Draws 170 Attendees for Day of Discovery and Collaboration

The 2026 Sigma Xi Northeast Region Research Conference, held April 18 at Western Connecticut State University (WCSU), brought together 170 registered attendees from 12 institutional chapters across the Northeast, showcasing 58 student research posters in a vibrant celebration of scientific inquiry and collaboration.

Hosted by the WCSU chapter of Sigma Xi, the conference highlighted the depth and diversity of undergraduate and graduate research across disciplines. Participants engaged in thoughtful discussion, peer evaluation, and knowledge exchange—hallmarks of the scientific enterprise. Keynote

presenters emphasized the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and communication, underscoring that research thrives through diverse perspectives and shared effort. Student poster presenters were recognized for their outstanding contributions, with awards presented through faculty mentors.

The success of the event was made possible through the contributions of volunteer judges, student organizers, and institutional support from the WCSU Foundation, WCSU Auxiliary and Event Services, and WCSU President John B. Clark. Sigma Xi headquarters also provided key support in helping bring the regional gathering to life.

The Northeast Regional Research Conference was the first in a recurring spring series of regional conferences, hosted annually by rotating chapters, that will build on the momentum of this year's event. Attendees are invited to continue their engagement with Sigma Xi through upcoming opportunities, including the Society's annual national conference, the International Forum on Research Excellence (IFoRE), held virtually each November.

254 Sigma Xi Today

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STUDENT PROGRAMS

2026 Student Research Showcase Winners

Continued from page 253

Overall Winners & First Place— High School Division

Lauren Choi, Irving High School AI Health Support: Low-Cost Digital Stethoscope

People's Choice Award

Aryaman Chandra, Heritage Xperiential Learning School Can a Shape Hear Itself?

First Place, Undergraduate Division

Desiree Thomas, California State University, Sacramento Size Assortative Mating in Wild Costa Rican Cichlid

Graduate

Technology Framework for

Division

Nina Grant, Rutgers University Keeping Coffee and Chocolate on the Table in a Warming World

Second Place, Graduate Division

Tsion Eshetu, Wake Forest University Skill-Based Learned Oculomotor Avoidance

Interdisciplinary Awards

Advances in Computation

Stethoscope*

Biology and Biotechnology

Zain Shariff, Curtis Senior High School AICathDesigner RV-EMB

Design, Construction, and Manufacturing

Vijeta Garg, Edison High School Soft Actuators to Improve Life for Breast Cancer Survivors

Engineering

Aditya Goel, The Shri Ram School IoT-Based Industrial Energy Monitoring & Carbon Visibility

Environmental Challenges

Arihant Jaggi, Cushman High School Can Math Predict Miami's Future?

Human Health

Lily Yuan, Amador High School Lung Cancer Drug Resistance: miR-7 Metabolic Reprogramming

Human Sciences and Policy

Anant Agarwal, Vasant Valley School Sectoral Responses to Macroeconomic Variables in India

Tools for Science, Education, and Personalized Learning

Vidushee Shekhar, Mallya Aditi International School Phonological Error Detection in Child Speech

Understanding the Universe

Priyanka Supraja Balaji, California Institute of Technology Safe LiDAR Perception Framework for Mars

2026 July–August 255

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RESEARCH

of GIAR : Holly Gamblin

Grant: $5,000 in Spring 2024; $5,000 in Spring 2026

Project Description:

My research project focused on Arctic fox and red fox spatial ecology, as well as the influence of marine carrion subsidies from polar bear kills on ice-facultative species such as the Arctic fox. With the recent expansion of red foxes from the boreal forest onto the tundra, the Arctic fox now serves as an excellent study species for examining a species-level response to the arrival of an ecologically similar competitor. Using GPS collaring techniques, this ongoing research provides a novel assessment of interactions between these foxes on the tundra during the breeding season, a critical period for recruitment, helping us to understand how red foxes influence Arctic fox habitat use and reproduction. By investigating the space-use patterns of these sympatric carnivores and the importance of marine environment food subsidies, resource managers can make informed conservation decisions on how to best conserve Arctic fox populations in a rapidly changing landscape.

How did the grant process or the project itself influence you as a scientist/researcher?

I am currently in the fourth year of my PhD research project, titled “Changing Biomes: Implications of a Rapidly Shifting Landscape on Arctic Foxes.” I am delighted to report that, thanks to this grant and several others, we were able to secure funding for 15 additional radio collars. To date, my research lab has collared and monitored 55 foxes, and we plan to deploy another 13 radio collars during the 2026 field season.

What advice would you give to future applicants?

The process of applying to various grants can be daunting and time consuming, but don’t be discouraged if you are unsuccessful on the first few attempts. My advice is to try for as many grants and scholarships as possible, because you never know what the applicant pool or reviewing committee will be like each year. Be clear in your objectives and hypotheses, avoid technical jargon, and try to highlight what makes your research project important to a broad audience.

Where are you now?

I am currently a PhD candidate in biological sciences at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. My field work is conducted through the Churchill Fox Project and is based out of Churchill, Manitoba. As I’m nearing the end of my program, you can find me most days tackling R code, analyzing data, and writing up the results of my dissertation.

Students may apply for Sigma Xi research grants by March 15 and October 1 annually at sigmaxi.org/giar.

From Concept to Launch: How a Student Researcher Is Advancing CubeSat Science

As an undergraduate researcher at the University of Charleston, Gael Gonzalez is already contributing to the future of space-based astronomy. Supported by a Sigma Xi Grants in Aid of Research (GIAR) award, Gonzalez is working with colleagues on the development of a CubeSat—a small, cube-shaped microsatellite—equipped with a specialized ultraviolet (UV) camera designed to study binary star systems. The multistage mission began with a precursor deployment to the International Space Station on April 8, 2026, followed by a full CubeSat launch in June in collaboration with partners in Chile. It’s an ambitious project that bridges engineering, astrophysics, and experimental science.

At the heart of the mission is the goal of better understanding how stars interact with their surrounding environments, particularly the planets that orbit them. By capturing photometric measurements of stellar activity in the UV spectrum, the CubeSat will help researchers refine models of stellar evolution, improve predictions of exoplanet atmospheric loss, and sharpen methods for identifying habitable zones. These questions build on a legacy of space-based observation, from the Hubble Space Telescope—which revolutionized UV and

visible-light astronomy—to more recent exoplanet-focused missions such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope.

Beyond the project’s technical achievements, Gonzalez emphasizes how transformative the experience has been in shaping his identity as a researcher. “This project revealed how much behind-the-scenes work goes into science that often goes unnoticed,” he says. Equally important has been the hands-on nature of the project. From testing instrumentation to conducting performance analyses, such as the simulating photometric drift caused by satellite motion, Gonzalez has gained a deeper appreciation for the meticulous effort required to bring a novel scientific concept to life.

Looking ahead, Gonzalez hopes to pursue a PhD in astrophysics and eventually work in a research role at NASA or a comparable institution. With a focus on space instrumentation and observational techniques, he aims to continue exploring stellar systems and exoplanets—fields that are rapidly expanding our understanding of the universe.

256 Sigma Xi Today

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NOVEMBER 6–7, 2026

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📋 QA 忠实性报告 — American_Scientist_-July-August_2026---d400055d-adda-4ebd-9fc2-26a4b2049dcd.pdf

覆盖率校验

• 总提取区块: 86
• 有效区块: 86
• 拦截垃圾区块: 0
• 恢复装配模式: 否
• 生成时间: 2026-07-31 09:31:28

交付备注

• 最终产物已生成；post-scan 为有界 best-effort 清理，不阻断交付。

质量事件 (57 件)

GATE_FAIL (3 件)

• Article 53 chunk 0: Our current technologies allow us to move beyond l
• L1_BANNED: 'NUMLOCK' in output; L3_NUM_LOSS: 3 numbers dropped: ['238', '235', '500']
• 原文预览: ### Our current technologies allow us to move beyond lesion studies and inferential behavioral exper
• Article 55 chunk 0: Participants were only able to recognize false inf
• L1_BANNED: 'NUMLOCK' in output
• 原文预览: ## Participants were only able to recognize false information that was asserted, whereas presupposed
• Article 56 chunk 0: More recent experimental designs aim to come as cl
• L1_BANNED: 'NUMLOCK' in output
• 原文预览: ## More recent experimental designs aim to come as close as possible to how linguistic messages are

GATE_WARN (28 件)

• Article 4 chunk 0: Scientist
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 2 numbers dropped: ['114', '2026']
• Article 35 chunk 0: THE WILLOW GROVE PERIDOT COLLECTION
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 2 numbers dropped: ['42', '18']
• Article 9 chunk 2: Science and the American Experiment
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 5 numbers dropped: ['202', '203', '204', '207', '140']
• Article 41 chunk 0: Deeper Geological Knowledge
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 4 numbers dropped: ['1833', '305', '250', '305']
• Article 39 chunk 0: Salt of the Earth
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 2 numbers dropped: ['1837', '250']
• Article 32 chunk 0: Community
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• Article 30 chunk 0: Meet the Beauty in the Beast
• L3_NUM_ORDER: '18' and '1980' reversed
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• Article 31 chunk 0: JEWELRY SPECS:
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• Article 48 chunk 0: Government as a Science
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 2 numbers dropped: ['1787', '1796']
• Article 38 chunk 0: Balance or Bias
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 2 numbers dropped: ['1962', '1876']
• Article 33 chunk 0: **Sea Grant research supports the essential identi
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 3 numbers dropped: ['23', '1981', '1.6']
• Article 45 chunk 0: Representatives of Independence
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• Article 43 chunk 0: What's Next
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• Article 51 chunk 0: Clues from Aphasia
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 6 numbers dropped: ['1861', '20', '30', '236', '236']
• Article 40 chunk 1: Science in the Early Republic
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 2998 numbers dropped: ['1793', '1837', '218', '114', '10']
• Article 69 chunk 0: Bibliography
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• Article 59 chunk 0: Bibliography
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• Article 77 chunk 0: Student Research Showcase Winners
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 2 numbers dropped: ['26', '255']
• Article 74 chunk 0: Colonizing Mars replays the same dynamic of dispos
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 3 numbers dropped: ['252', '114', '35']
• Article 66 chunk 0: Return of the Markers
• L3_NUM_LOSS: 8 numbers dropped: ['1910', '2021', '2009', '2001', '2024']
• Article 85 chunk 0: of GIAR : Holly Gamblin
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• Article 81 chunk 0: Northeast Region Research Conference Draws 170 Att
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• Article 71 chunk 0: The Dynamics of Mutation
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• Article 73 chunk 0: Whose Cosmos Is It, Anyway?
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• L3_NUM_LOSS: 5 numbers dropped: ['1803', '1806', '1815', '107', '220']

MISSING_NUMBERS (17 件)

• Article 4 chunk 0: Scientist
• 缺失数字: ['2026']
• 原文预览: `# Scientist

Volume 114 • Number 4 • July–August 2026

194 From the Editors

■ 214 Science

- **Article 32** chunk 0: Community - 缺失数字: ['2026', '$217 million', '$38.8 million'] - 原文预览:# Community

Many social challenges that he hoped he found that many of the appli- cated would not h- **Article 25** chunk 0: Our Bone-ified Best Blade - 缺失数字: ['$99 '] - 原文预览:# Our Bone-ified Best Blade

This knife says you're no one to mess with

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• 6 ½ ctw Helenite in gold-finished setting
• 18" gold-finished chain **Limi`
• Article 38 chunk 0: Balance or Bias
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• 原文预览: `### Balance or Bias

At the root of the disagreement between the curators and advisers was the ACS’s- **Article 43** chunk 0: What's Next - 缺失数字: ['2025', '2000'] - 原文预览:## What's Next

The 2000 Florida election was a shock to the system of election administration, lead- **Article 40** chunk 1: Science in the Early Republic - 缺失数字: ['2079', '1901', '2049', '1951', '2034', '1939', '2087', '2052', '2050', '1983', '2063', '1902', '1949', '1985', '1997', '2022', '2032', '1992', '2090', '1980', '1965', '2057', '2069', '2016', '2047', '1944', '2031', '2039', '1925', '2081', '1971', '1906', '1900', '1973', '2001', '1974', '1999', '1909', '2009', '2064', '2086', '2070', '1954', '2096', '2078', '2068', '1921', '2018', '1945', '1931', '1961', '2091', '2024', '2003', '2043', '1917', '1934', '2017', '2019', '2029', '1937', '1968', '2080', '1942', '1935', '2005', '2093', '1913', '2060', '1995', '1966', '2008', '1938', '1993', '2077', '1989', '1956', '1929', '1923', '2074', '1955', '1927', '1926', '2058', '1962', '2059', '2076', '2040', '2020', '2067', '1904', '2094', '2065', '1959', '1988', '1948', '2099', '2062', '2073', '2007', '2075', '2089', '1984', '1930', '1996', '2038', '1908', '2048', '1907', '1914', '1963', '2025', '2084', '2036', '1932', '2088', '1977', '1903', '1970', '1912', '1969', '2037', '2045', '1994', '2092', '1924', '2023', '2053', '1981', '1947', '1928', '1982', '2030', '1986', '2014', '2000', '1953', '1964', '1916', '1991', '2041', '1967', '1950', '1915', '1922', '1940', '2055', '1920', '1979', '1998', '2095', '1936', '2035', '2071', '1941', '2033', '1972', '2002', '2021', '2098', '2044', '2012', '1960', '1976', '2011', '2061', '2083', '2056', '2051', '1918', '1919', '2006', '2028', '2082', '2066', '1990', '1905', '1933', '2010', '2042', '1978', '1943', '2026', '1910', '2054', '1957', '2072', '1987', '1946', '2027', '1958', '1952', '1975', '2013', '2097', '2004', '2015', '2046', '2085', '1911'] - 原文预览:equipped with a method for logically organizing facts to support a conclusion. Science did not perta- **Article 66** chunk 0: Return of the Markers - 缺失数字: ['2001', '2009', '1910', '2024', '2021'] - 原文预览:## Return of the Markers

James died in 1910, and one could almost say he took consciousness science- **Article 78** chunk 0: The Wonder We Share, the Responsibility We Carry - 缺失数字: ['2026'] - 原文预览:## The Wonder We Share, the Responsibility We Carry

As I begin my term as your president, I have fo- **Article 81** chunk 0: Northeast Region Research Conference Draws 170 Att - 缺失数字: ['2026'] - 原文预览:## Northeast Region Research Conference Draws 170 Attendees for Day of Discovery and Collaboration

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Grant: $5,000 in Spring 2024; $5,000 in Spring 2026

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I am c- **Article 90** chunk 0: From Concept to Launch: How a Student Researcher I - 缺失数字: ['2026'] - 原文预览:## From Concept to Launch: How a Student Researcher Is Advancing CubeSat Science

As an undergraduat- **Article 73** chunk 0: Whose Cosmos Is It, Anyway? - 缺失数字: ['2026'] - 原文预览:## Whose Cosmos Is It, Anyway?

Keivan G. Stassun

**MEXICO IN SPACE: From la Raza Cósmica to the Sp- **Article 40** chunk 2: Science in the Early Republic - 缺失数字: ['$750 '] - 原文预览:In 1803, Ohio became the 17th state in the Union. The state's legal incorporation provided a framewo`

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