Can ecosystems malfunction?

Well yes.  in fact this is an ongoing problem.  Recall the carboniferous when bioloogy; did not know how to break down lignon.  recall any rainforest in which the seed bank remains undisturbed.

my central problem is discovering ways in which any biome can be at least activated.  Reczll biochar retains working nutrients and it is human produced with intent.  Canada needs to manufacture fertilizer blended with biochar in order to optimize and ultimately minimize application.    al these intervention matter to produce a thriving ecosystem.

agriculture is now discovering and fully embracing rotational grazing and even working up chickens, let alone cattle.

Can ecosystems malfunction?

We are told the natural world is ‘breaking down’. But forests don’t work like airplanes or human hearts

https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-need-to-think-again-about-ecosystem-failure?

he Amazon rainforest, according to a 2021 study, is losing its capacity as a carbon sink and now emits more than it absorbs. In the tropics, marine scientists are reporting that coral reefs are in decline, threatening fish stocks. Equally concerning is research into the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a vast system of ocean currents that helps regulate the climate and is at risk of collapsing this century. The entire global ecosystem appears to be losing its ability to function.

We find this view in newspapers, magazines, technical reports and the journals of learned societies. But thinking about the environment in terms of its functions is also how many of us tend to understand the world. We may think that forests exist to produce oxygen, wetlands to filter water, and bees to pollinate our crops.

There is a problem with this way of thinking: ecosystems don’t exist to perform goals. The Amazon absorbs carbon, but it doesn’t ‘aim’ to do so. It simply exists. Any standards of operation we find in nature have come directly from our own desires for things like climate stability, abundant fisheries, beauty or cultural meaning.

So why do we keep thinking ecosystems have functions they could fail to perform?

I came to this puzzle as a graduate student in the late 1990s, a time when research into biodiversity and ecosystem function was rapidly increasing. Initially, I thought I would write my dissertation on a conventional ecological topic: whether species richness drives productivity. Instead, I fell in with the philosophy of science crowd, attended their seminars, and eventually earned a master’s degree in philosophy alongside my work in ecology. There I encountered a rich debate over the concept of function – what it means, when it applies, what work it does. But no one seemed to be connecting that debate to the way ecologists were using the same word, unreflectively, to describe what ecosystems do. This essay is an attempt to bring those conversations together.

However, my concern with ecosystems and function was never just academic. I am an environmentalist, unsettled by the loss of natural places. And as a father, I am concerned that my generation will leave to our children a planet depleted in both richness and resilience. These commitments also drive my interest in debates about function. If the way we think about ecological crisis is conceptually shaky, we risk obscuring what’s really at stake.

I worry that the ways we often conceive of the problems before us are inadequate. For if ecosystems have no intrinsic ends and cannot truly ‘break down’, then how do we repair them? How do we respond to environmental crises in a world of aimless ecosystems?

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Approaches to conservation have long been shaped by debates about whether nature has a purpose or whether we are projecting our own aims onto it. Behind every attempt to justify new protections lies an implicit answer to the question: what is the environment for?

In the United States and the United Kingdom during the 19th century, these answers were rooted in game laws and hunting traditions that sought to maintain populations of species valued for sport or resource use. By the mid-20th century, the American forester and early conservationist Aldo Leopold offered a more expanded answer by proposing that our moral community should include ‘the land’ itself: soils, waters, plants and animals. In the 1970s and ’80s, the answers of conservationists were increasingly grounded in the intrinsic value of specific species, reflected in legislation such as the US Endangered Species Act. But a decade later, the species-focused approach of ‘conservation biology’ was seen by many as lacking. It targeted only rare organisms that contributed little to the circulation of their ecosystems – species like the spotted owl and the snail darter fish. In doing so, some researchers worried that the species approach might have overlooked more consequential concerns, such as the major ‘services’ provided by ecosystems, such as food production, clean water, drought mitigation, storm protection, timber and fibre.

The answer to ‘What is nature for?’ had become this: nature is for the services it provides to people

In the late 1990s, this crisis led to a new research agenda, which crystallised around ‘biodiversity and ecosystem function’ (BEF). This approach presented itself as a scientifically rigorous framework while simultaneously serving as a rhetorically powerful justification for conservation. In contrast to a hyper-focus on individual populations of rare species, BEF embraced all biodiversity, a holistic value.

In the early decades of the 21st century, this logic scaled up. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) embedded an ecosystem services framework in international policy. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services adopted a similar structure. National governments began commissioning natural capital accounts, attempting to assign monetary value to pollination, flood regulation, carbon storage and other ecological phenomena. The answer to the question ‘What is nature for?’ had become this: nature is for the services it provides to people. The language of ecosystem function was the conceptual bridge that made this answer sound scientific rather than merely political.

As a result, the idea of function now pervades how ecosystems are described and understood. Consider for a moment how you think about the ecosystems around you. If you have ever described a forest as a carbon sink or a wetland as a natural filter, you have inherited the ethic of BEF. If you’ve ever thought of a rainforest as something that provides oxygen for humans, or a reef as something that helps provide us with protein (in the form of fish), you’ve inherited the logic of ‘ecosystem services’.

What do we mean when we use the word ‘function’? Sometimes, it refers to designed purposes. For example, when we say that the function of a clock is to tell time, or the function of a carburettor is to mix air and fuel for combustion. In these cases, the object (or one of its parts) was intentionally made for a specific end. The same logic applies up a hierarchy of wholes and parts: the carburettor is part of the engine, the engine part of the car, the car part of a transport system.

Other kinds of functions arise through co-option rather than design. Writing at a picnic table, I might use a book or a rock to keep my papers from blowing away. The rock was not designed and the book was intended for another purpose, yet both can serve the goal I have in mind. I give them their function by using them in a certain way.

Still other functions emerge without any intention, particularly in nature. The philosopher Karen Neander offers a striking example: penguins are myopic on land. Their eyes are not defective but optimised for underwater focus, where penguins feed. Land myopia is a byproduct of a visual system shaped for a different environment.

Though there are several ways that ‘function’ is used, there are two main theories that guide (and justify) the ways scientists typically think about it: causal role theory and selected effects theory.

Everything exists for something else, from this perspective

Robert Cummins developed the causal role theory in response to Ernest Nagel’s argument in The Structure of Science (1961) about how science should avoid teleological language. That is, scientists should not explain things in a way that suggests the influence of specific goals or purposes. Such explanations appear to directly conflict with the scientific aim of explaining things in terms of laws. Nagel tried to explain that functional claims can and should be made without reference to goals or purposes. For example, rather than saying: ‘The function of the lungs is to oxygenate the blood,’ Nagel might say: ‘Given the structure of lung tissue, the properties of gases, and the pressure differences during breathing, oxygen diffuses into the bloodstream and carbon dioxide diffuses out.’ This becomes a scientific explanation based on laws and initial conditions. Cummins, however, thought this missed how scientists actually think about function. He saw that references to function could be a useful explanatory shortcut when talking about how things work, and so proposed a different approach. According to Cummins’s argument, ascribing function to anything is simply a way of identifying a component’s contribution to the ‘capacity’ of the system that contains it. Functional language, from this view, is fine. For example, the carburettor in a car enables the engine to convert chemical energy to mechanical energy; the engine enables the car to transport passengers; and so on.

It is easy to see why this theory would be attractive to ecologists who are typically interested in tracing causal chains. The function of bacteria and other decomposers, in their view, is to break down dead organisms into smaller particles and transform their chemical composition; the function of green plants is to convert carbon dioxide into bioavailable carbon for herbivores. Everything exists for something else, from this perspective.

However, Cummins’s causal role theory has some serious limitations. First, it provides no real way of determining which processes count as genuine capacities. The capacities we select depend on what phenomena scientists happen to be interested in, rather than those that are objectively important to the system. The philosopher Ruth Millikan illustrates the difficulty this way: the heart pumps blood, but it also makes a thumping noise. Doctors may use this noise diagnostically, yet they do not treat it as a function of the heart. Why not? In the causal role theory, there is no way to distinguish genuine functions from incidental effects. For this reason, Millikan and others have developed an alternative to causal role theory.

Another limitation is that causal role theory cannot account for how something could malfunction. As the philosopher Ema Sullivan-Bissett explores in her essay ‘Malfunction Defended’ (2017), any adequate theory of function must be able to explain how biological items can fail to do what they are supposed to do. Though the causal role theory can explain that a heart with a defective valve is still doing something (moving blood, albeit inefficiently), it cannot say that the heart is doing its job badly. It offers no way of describing what the standard for doing a good job is supposed to be.

The ‘goal’ of photosynthesis is not imposed from outside, as if nature must have had a designer

The alternative to causal role theory, and probably the dominant theory among philosophers of biology today, is the selected effects theory, developed by Larry Wright along with two philosophers I’ve already mentioned: Neander and Millikan. The selected effects theory is an etiological theory of function: to say that a trait has a function is to give an account of its history, identifying the cause for which it exists and persists. According to this theory, any biological function is the effect for which the trait was selected in the process of natural selection. It’s likely that you have understood the world in this way, too. You may understand that the function of the heart is to pump blood because pumping blood was the reason proto-hearts were favoured by animals in the evolutionary past. Likewise, chloroplasts carry out photosynthesis because that was the effect that contributed to the reproductive success of the organisms that possessed them long ago. This historical anchoring distinguishes selected effects explanations from causal role accounts, which focus only on present-day contributions and not on how the trait came to be.

Selected effects theory has two important consequences. First, it explains what it means for something to work properly or fail. A heart is not just something that happens to move blood around. It was shaped, over evolutionary time, because moving blood kept organisms alive. That history gives us a standard. This matters because the idea of malfunction depends on having such a standard. Without it, we could describe what something does, but we could not say whether it is doing it well or badly. Second, selected effects theory shows where this sense of purpose comes from. It gives a naturalistic grounding to teleology: the ‘goal’ of photosynthesis or blood circulation is not imposed from outside, as if nature must have had a designer, but is implicit in the evolutionary history that produced these traits. In this way, biologists can talk about purposes without appealing to intention or design.

This theory matters because it provides scientists with a standard against which something can succeed or fail. If a trait has a function grounded in evolutionary history, then it can malfunction when it fails to do what that history selected it to do. The question is whether ecosystems can also have this kind of standard.

As we’ve seen, ‘function’ doesn’t mean the same thing in all cases. Across all the examples and theories above, some uses of the word ‘function’ simply describe how a system works – how parts contribute to a larger process. Other uses imply a normative standard. They explain what a system is for and how it can fail at that. To keep these two uses apart, we can distinguish between two broad uses of ‘function’. The first sense is descriptive: explaining how a system works. The other is goal-directed (or teleological): it specifies what a system is for (and how it can fail). This distinction becomes particularly important when we turn to rainforests, coral reefs and other systems that have effects we can describe but no ends that we can point to – and without ends they’re meant to achieve, the idea that an ecosystem can ‘malfunction’ begins to unravel.

Where did the idea of malfunctioning ecologies come from? This way of thinking about ecosystems did not arise from ecology itself. It draws on a much older habit of thought: treating complex wholes as if they were organisms, with parts working together toward a common end. To understand that inheritance, we need to return to the 17th century, at the dawn of mechanistic physiology, when the English physician William Harvey would often combine a mechanistic ‘how’ with a teleological ‘why’ in a single thought.

In his treatise on the ‘motions of the heart’, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1628), Harvey concedes to Hippocrates that the heart is a muscle:

Finally, it is not without good grounds that Hippocrates in his book, De Corde, entitles it a muscle; its action is the same; so is its function, viz, to contract and move something else; in this case the charge of the blood.

– translation by Robert Willis (1847)

Here, Harvey offers a clear ‘how’ (contraction) and at the same time a ‘why’ (propel blood through the body). By articulating both modes together, Harvey illustrates how early modern physiology could accommodate purpose-driven language while advancing a causal, anatomically grounded science of life.

Are we describing how ecosystems work, or quietly importing a sense of purpose that may not belong there?

Even as our mechanistic understanding of biological systems has grown vastly more sophisticated, the teleology in our descriptions of physiological function remains unmistakable. We may say that pattern-recognition receptors detect pathogens and trigger inflammatory pathways (the how) while serving as the body’s ‘first line of defence’ against infection (the why). We may say that neurons in the hypothalamus respond to the hormone leptin by suppressing food intake (the how) to maintain energy balance (the why). We may say that endocrine systems coordinate the secretion of hormones from the pituitary with target tissues (the how) to ensure healthy postnatal growth (the why). In all these cases, it does indeed seem that receptors, neurons, hearts and polymerases have purposes.

This matters because it shows where our intuition about function comes from. In organisms, combining how and why feels natural. Parts appear to have roles, and those roles can be fulfilled or not. But this raises a larger question: when we use the same language for ecosystems, are we describing how they work, or are we quietly importing a sense of purpose that may not belong there?

In the early 20th century, the ecologist Frederic Clements proposed that ecosystems develop through predictable stages of succession toward a stable ‘climax’ community, much as an organism grows and matures. Other ecologists even used the metaphor of a ‘superorganism’, implying that ecosystems had an intrinsic trajectory and a kind of unified purpose. While influential for decades, this view has long since been abandoned. Nowadays, ecologists think that ecosystems, for the most part, are not like organisms at all. Ecosystems are not shaped by selection; they do not reproduce, and it’s debatable whether they are even identifiable biological entities such as hearts or cell receptors. Instead, they are open, dynamic systems composed of countless interactions among organisms and their local microenvironments – contingent combinations of organisms that we identify and name primarily for the purposes of our understanding. If you haphazardly throw together a bunch of organisms in a place, you have an ecosystem.

And yet, ecologists continue to borrow the language of function to describe ecosystem-level processes. Wetlands ‘function’ to filter surface water; forests ‘function’ as carbon sinks.

The establishment of the journal Functional Ecology in the 1980s marked one moment in this conceptual evolution. Articles in this journal began investigating how individual species within ecosystems used their ‘functional traits’ to influence major ecological processes. Consider the ways that vultures scavenge animal carcasses. For the vulture, scavenging provides sustenance. At the level of the ecosystem, however, this same behaviour can be described differently: thinking in terms of ‘trait-based ecology’, scavenging becomes just one process of many by which organic matter is broken down. That is, it contributes to the large-scale processes usually defined by ecologists as ‘ecosystem functions’, including nutrient cycling, primary production, and decomposition. By describing the behaviour of vultures this way, ecologists turn a goal-directed function in the organism into a contribution to the ecosystem. But it is easy to slip from this description into a stronger claim about function.

The Amazon may be described as ‘the lungs of our planet’, but it has nothing in common with human organs

Once species are assigned roles in this way, they begin to resemble carburettors in an engine or organs in a body. This is where the language becomes unstable.

From the perspective of function, descriptions of how biodiversity shapes ecological processes can start to merge with judgments about what those processes are for, and whether they are being sustained or lost. For example, a decline in insect populations can be described as a change in pollination rates but also recast as a loss of the ecosystem’s ‘ability’ to support crops. Likewise, reduced microbial activity in soils can be described as leading to slower decomposition but also framed as a failure of the system to maintain soil fertility.

The distinction between describing how something happens and making normative judgments about what the resulting processes are for is one that matters if we want to think clearly about what’s taking place when ecosystems change. When these two are not kept apart, the idea of ‘ecosystem function’ begins to carry more weight than it can support.

What about the standard justifications for using functional language? For ecosystem processes, the conventional selected effects theory account will not work. First, ecosystems are not shaped by natural selection as cohesive units; they are assemblages of interacting organisms and abiotic components, governed by dynamic processes. A forest such as the Amazon may often be described as ‘the lungs of our planet’, but it has nothing in common with human organs, or any other cohesive unit shaped by natural selection. Rainforests, like all ecosystems, don’t have selected effects. They do not reproduce. Their boundaries are often impermanent. It is debatable whether they are even identifiable biological entities.

Plants fix carbon, microbes decompose organic matter, and forest animals redistribute nutrients. These processes can be described straightforwardly. But it is so easy to take the further step and say the rainforest is for storing carbon or maintaining stability. At that point, a description of what happens begins to look like a claim about what the system is meant to do. Any such claims are necessarily anthropocentric. And so, if we say an ecosystem is malfunctioning, we must also ask: malfunctioning for whom, and for what purpose? These questions reveal the assumptions embedded in our language and highlight the risks of conflating ecological processes with human-centred goals.

Were ecologists aware of the normative and teleological connotations of functional language when they began using it for ecosystems? The answer is yes.

I asked Peter Calow, the founding co-editor of Functional Ecology, how the journal got its name and whether he had misgivings about applying ‘function’ to ecosystems. He told me he was ‘comfortable with the notion of function applying to adaptation within species through natural selection’ – that is to say, a selected effects account of the biological functions of traits in organisms – but ‘less comfortable with it being applied to ecosystems’. The British Ecological Society’s publication committee, which oversees the journal, debated the matter at length before, in Calow’s words, ‘getting tired of discussing it’ and adopting the title. He recalled that ‘functional’ terminology was not an unthinking carryover; it was chosen despite conceptual unease and largely because the kinds of papers the journal was seeking to publish connected ecology with physiological research, where functional concepts were well entrenched and largely understood through the selected effects account.

Another place to look is the landmark book Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function (1993), based on a 1991 symposium in Germany and supported in part by UNESCO’s ‘Man and the Biosphere Programme’ – tellingly gendered, and unabashedly anthropocentric. Both the sponsorship and the volume itself bear out this orientation. In the foreword to the book, the late Paul Ehrlich justifies its intellectual premise:

Of special interest to humanity is the relationship of biodiversity to the variety of services provided by ecosystems and, in particular, to the stability of the flow of those services, such as the maintenance of the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, preservation of soils, recycling of nutrients, and provision of food from the sea.

He then revisits the ‘rivet popper’ analogy, which he had previously introduced in the environmental classic Extinction (1981), co-authored with Anne Ehlich. They described each species in the ecosystem as a rivet in an airplane wing: remove one rivet and the plane will fly on, but remove enough rivets and the plane will fail, typically catastrophically. The presupposition is that ‘failure’ matters because the airplane’s value lies in safely transporting people. The metaphor is rhetorically powerful but imperfect. Rivets are static, fully interchangeable, and single-purpose; species are dynamic, unique and exhibit a vast diversity of behaviours that shift across contexts. Importantly, rivets were placed by design engineers. The analogical slippage smuggles in the idea that ecosystems, like machines, have a proper configuration, and that deviation constitutes malfunction.

The car analogy frames ecosystems as objects with optimal configurations and latent points of breakdown

Ernst-Detlef Schulze, co-editor with Harold Mooney of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function (1993), has since rejected the term ‘ecosystem function’ altogether. He calls it ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘vague’. Nonetheless, in their conclusion to the volume, Schulze and Mooney extend this engineering theme with their own analogy. I will share it in full, as it conveys a way of thinking that is still common today:

Everyone has experienced the breakdown of a car. Opening the hood will not enable one to recognise the function of most components. One needs to know the function of the components in detail for any repair. There are very simple components, which are absolutely necessary for the function of the total automobile, such as the gasoline line that connects the gasoline tank with the motor. Other components improve the function but are not essential to the use of a car, such as the exhaust, but its malfunction will result in increased cost, noise, and pollution. There are parts which are not essential for immediate function, such as the bumper, but it is this part which may save lives under extreme conditions. Brakes are used intermittently and for emergencies. Their importance is such that cars contain two independent systems of braking fluid, ie, a redundancy exists as a back-up for this very important function. Last but not least, there are parts that make the car more attractive, such as chromium parts, which have nothing to do with function, but which may become important when selling the car. Even if all components of the car are present and are all intact, the car may still not run properly, if it is not well-tuned, ie, if the assembly of individual components is not acting together.

What follows is a retreat: ‘Obviously, the automobile analogy is not totally applicable to an ecosystem. An ecosystem is not a machine constructed to accomplish a given function.’ The issue is that, even with the caveats, function isn’t the only problem with the broken-car analogy.

Schulze and Mooney may have disavowed the teleology, but they left the normativity fully intact. Their metaphor imports an evaluative schema: cars have proper working states, deviations from which are malfunctions, and there exists some critical but unknowable threshold at which the system fails. In this way, the imagery frames ecosystems as objects with optimal configurations and latent points of catastrophic breakdown.

Another approach comes from David Tilman, who was a central figure in biodiversity-ecosystem research during the 1990s. He tells me that he resists the term ‘function’ for ecosystems, preferring the ostensibly non-teleological ‘functioning’. For Tilman, ‘function’ implies the ‘evolutionarily and logically unsupportable view that ecosystems are designed to benefit people,’ while his alternative – ‘functioning’ – simply describes processes without ascribing purposes. Yet, as Neander reminds us, removing teleology does not necessarily remove normativity. Even ‘functioning’ invites judgments about whether an ecosystem is doing well or poorly (‘How well is the car functioning?’)

For all their misgivings about function and teleology, Schulze, Tilman and many other scientists concede that functional language has strategic advantages. In some contexts, thinking in terms of ‘function’ can allow for flexibility, especially when working with people in other disciplines. In the 1980s and ’90s, that flexibility – combined with the communicative punch of ‘function’ and ‘functioning’ – helped bridge ecological science with the burgeoning discourse on ecosystem services, where the benefits of ecosystems to people could be emphasised without spelling out the value assumptions. What began in UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme as studies of the ‘structure and function of ecosystems’ evolved into a research agenda on biodiversity and ecosystem function that blurred the line between describing how ecosystems work and prescribing how they ought to be.

During the past few decades, this kind of metaphorical scaffolding has done important political work. Framing biodiversity loss as akin to losing rivets from an airplane wing or parts from a car makes the stakes vivid for policymakers and the public. It can also harmonise neatly with the ‘ecosystem services’ agenda, which links ecological science directly to human welfare. In this policy context, ‘ecosystem function’ becomes a conceptual hinge: it can be presented as a purely scientific measure of ecological processes, while simultaneously serving as a proxy for the benefits those processes deliver to people. That duality (straddling the descriptive and the normative) made the term powerful but also ensured that the teleological and value-laden connotations scientists worried about in private (and sometimes explicitly denied in their writings) would persist in public discourse.

Functional language allows ecologists to describe how ecosystems work while also gesturing toward what they are for. That ambiguity has been useful. It has helped connect ecological science to human concerns. But it has also obscured a crucial distinction between processes and purposes, which we can no longer afford to ignore.

The possibility that something can malfunction implies a failure to achieve a purpose. In the case of human-designed systems, this makes sense: a broken clock no longer fulfils its intended purpose of keeping time. However, ecosystems are neither designed nor evolved systems. They have no intrinsic goals, only dynamic processes that reflect the interactions of their components.

What shall we do with the notion of ecological function? From my perspective, ecosystems can only malfunction when they are appropriated or co-opted. Just as I might select a stone to serve as a paperweight, a wetland may be designated as a water filtration system, in which case a disruption in its ability to filter water is correctly seen as a malfunction. Similarly, if a forest is managed for carbon sequestration, a decline in its carbon storage capacity should be considered a failure. In these cases, the notion of malfunction arises not from the ecosystem’s intrinsic properties but from its role in meeting human-defined goals.

‘Malfunctions’ reflect human values and priorities by framing nature’s worth in terms of utility, aesthetics, or cultural and spiritual value. Examples of undesirable ecological events such as algal blooms, coral bleaching and deforestation illustrate the complexity of these judgments. An algal bloom caused by fertiliser flowing into the ocean from rivers might disrupt aquatic ecosystems, yet whether that disruption counts as a ‘malfunction’ or a ‘natural’ response to nutrient inputs depends on the standard we apply. Coral bleaching may be described as a failure of reefs to support marine life, but this framing reflects human concerns about biodiversity or fisheries production rather than intrinsic purpose. These cases underscore that our reasons for repairing ecosystems rest on human ideas – such as duties, norms and objectives – that are external to the ecosystems themselves. So, how can we think about ecosystems, and our obligations to them, more clearly?

Recognising that value-free science is a myth does not weaken the case for environmental action

To more fully move beyond teleology in their descriptions of the world, ecologists could focus simply on characterising the interactions in an ecosystem and quantifying changes of state, without any reference to purposes or goals. We could think of this as a positivistic, process-oriented stance. Such an approach respects the autonomy of the nonhuman world to be what it is without imposing human values and priorities. But conceptually moving beyond teleology doesn’t stop us viewing ecosystems through the lens of our duties, norms and objectives. Even when scientists engage in apparently objective research, human values always come along for the ride.

This point can be sharpened by turning to the philosophy of science. In The Empirical Stance (2002), Bas van Fraassen argues that empiricism – the view that the world is known through observation and experience – is not a doctrine about what exists, but a stance. It is a set of attitudes and commitments about how to conduct enquiry. The same is true of what is sometimes called ‘value-free science’, the ideal of describing the world independently of the enquirer’s perspective. To adopt that ideal is itself a choice, shaped by values about what counts as knowledge and what is worth knowing. It is a commitment, not a discovery. When ecologists study ecosystems, they cannot escape the values that guide their attention.

I am not saying we should purge those values. Understanding the ways that we are bound to our values is an invitation to examine carefully and honestly how they enter into and engage with scientific practice. Likewise, recognising that value-free science is a myth does not weaken the case for environmental action. It clarifies that the task of thinking about ecosystems, and our obligations to them, is both descriptive and normative.

When we say that natural systems exist to provide services for us – oxygen, protein, climate stability – we appropriate certain processes for our own purpose. In doing so, we are actively privileging one ecological process over others. We are not merely observing a function. We may value pollination, for example, for its role in sustaining crop yields while ignoring or even suppressing other equally ‘natural’ processes, such as herbivory by pests. When we then perpetuate that chosen process by intervening in an environment, through conservation or technological design, its continued existence is no longer solely the product of natural conditions but also of our deliberate selection. These functions become selected effects: they persist because they are chosen by us in the present, not because they were favoured by natural selection in the past.

Ecosystems cannot malfunction on their own. They may change, reorganise or even collapse. But these should be understood as natural processes, not failures. Teleological framings can be deployed, but only if we are explicit about the anthropocentric commitments they involve: whose needs are being served, and to what ends. Used in this way, appeals to ‘function’ can make the value of ecosystems legible to human concerns while avoiding the pretence that such purposes belong to nature itself.

What is at stake here is a question of intellectual honesty. Environmental arguments often present these purposes as if they were natural facts, rather than human commitments. When we say an ecosystem is ‘breaking down’, we risk disguising our own values as properties of the world. That move can be rhetorically effective, but it is conceptually misleading.

By reframing our understanding of ecological functions and malfunctions, we can advance a more rigorous and reflective ecology. We can directly state those reasons when we recognise that our reasons for caring about ecosystems come from us (our needs, our ethics, our futures). In doing so, we arrive at an ecology that joins scientific description with explicit moral responsibility, rather than blurring the two.

The work ahead is not to repair nature’s purposes, but to take responsibility for our own – and for the world they shape.

Flickering Enlightenment

The true enlightenment arose through the implimdentation of universal literacy as a basis to society.  this allowed all rare talent to be identified and then supported.  That was the enlightenment and suddenly plougboys could read the bible and by extension create and sell new knowledge.

Recent manipulation of the universal knowledge base can only choke in its own contradictions.  Recall feminism and eugenics and climate change.  really!  The top tier intellect never bit.

Those todays are merely promoted intellectual fashion and will all die natuaral deaths.

Flickering Enlightenment

Attacked by the Left and Right, the Enlightenment can only be saved through use of its greatest legacy: permanent critique

https://aeon.co/essays/lets-save-the-enlightenment-baby-from-its-muddied-bathwater?

The Enlightenment is going through a dark time. Critical race theorists on both sides of the Atlantic are following the philosophers Emmanuel Eze and Charles W Mills in holding the Enlightenment responsible for modern racism. In The Age of Empire (2021), the British sociologist Kehinde Andrews says that it is time to stop revering ‘dead white men’ such as Kant, Locke and Voltaire. Last year, the University of Edinburgh, which is widely seen as having had an ‘outsized’ historic role in promulgating racist scientific theories, undertook an excoriating process of self-examination, publishing a Race Review that acknowledged that the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were responsible for propagating ‘some of the most damaging ideas in human history’, including the idea that human societies exist on a hierarchical ‘ladder’, from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’, with Europeans at the top. The Review highlighted the role of David Hume, who, in a notorious footnote to the 1753 version of his essay ‘On National Characters’ (1748), stated that non-white races are ‘naturally inferior to the whites’. The university admits that it still has bequests totalling many millions of pounds from donors linked to the slave trade and other colonial conquests. At the same time, the city is embroiled in a long dispute over what to do with a statue of Henry Dundas, who most historians hold responsible for delaying the progress of abolition through UK Parliament.

Censured by the Left for its philosophy-washing of Empire, the Enlightenment is further under fire from the populist Right who see the long arm of its influence in the foundations of our established political institutions and the traditional architecture of representative democracy and professional expertise: those who stand up for Enlightenment values are liable to find themselves castigated as members of a ‘complacent liberal elite’. Writing in The Observer in 2025, Will Hutton bemoaned the fact that, in an era of populist autocracy, what were once taken-for-granted goods – ‘justice, accountability, social fairness, scientific progress, international order’ – have become associated with a ‘Brahmin class – who are the new civilisational enemy.’ Attacks on this new enemy are fuelled, Hutton wrote, by ‘the need for vengeance on the standard-bearers of Enlightenment values.’ Right-wing critics of the Enlightenment are supported by Silicon Valley tech bros. In fact, the so-called ‘Dark Enlightenment’ pioneered by the far-Right software developer Curtis Yarvin, championed by the likes of J D Vance and Peter Thiel, seeks to obliterate the Enlightenment values of equality and democracy.

Famously, the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has rushed to defend the Enlightenment, subtitling his 2018 book on the subject: ‘The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress’. These core values, says Pinker, have led to measurable improvements in human health, prosperity and peace. Although it’s good to see prominent commentators stand up for agreed facts and the pursuit of knowledge, especially at a time when scholarship, politics and the media are being eroded by post-truth, conspiracy theories and a mistrust of experts, I cannot align myself wholeheartedly with this big-beast bandwagon. In the midst of glaring economic inequalities, climate breakdown and widespread poverty in the Global South, Pinker’s faith in civilisational progress seems optimistic to say the least. Besides, I believe there is something to the Leftist critique of the Enlightenment as either intrinsically or circumstantially racist. If we don’t engage with the Enlightenment’s complexities, it will continue to be weaponised by the culture wars, and for extremist polemical ends. Leftists can cancel, wholesale, the Enlightenment’s reminder of the need for intellectual rigour and a commitment to truth, while conservatives can use it as a tub-thumping defence of the West that marginalises the vital campaign for social justice.

In consequence of this pincer-movement attack, the Enlightenment’s legacy is existentially vulnerable. It makes me deeply worried as someone whose entire career has been built on trying to understand and analyse the world around me – especially a world that still tries to confine thinking women to the realms of emotion and ‘personal experience’.

I believe that Enlightenment values are essential, but that we have largely forgotten how to make a good case for them: we need to rely on shared facts, tested by experiment; a public sphere where open discussion can take place; and the belief that discussion should be founded on reasoned argument. We need, moreover, to cherish the more political values of tolerance, freedom, human rights and the common good. Advocates for artificial intelligence have the temerity to claim that large language models are ushering in a ‘second Enlightenment’ (a claim that was uncritically echoed in a paper published by the World Economic Forum last year) when what we are in fact seeing is the destruction of the Enlightenment legacy under the false banner of its name. As the historian David Bell argued in The New York Times in 2025, AI is actually ‘shedding Enlightenment values’ by simply reinforcing ‘what we already think we know.’ In The Guardian, the journalist and geopolitical risk consultant Joseph de Weck warned that ‘AI is taking us back to the dark ages’, making us lazy, and stymying independent thinking.

Reason is in danger of being demonised as a white man’s oppressive tool

The evidence suggests that we are going through a rapid de-enlightenment. Newspaper circulations, attention spans and trust in forms of agreed knowledge are in freefall. Misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes are gaining ground. If we let go of the valuable aspects of the Enlightenment project, we open ourselves up to a world of AI blather, ‘my truth’ pronouncements, wobbly sentiment and unchecked power.

My unease with this parlous state of affairs has provoked me to go back and rethink the Enlightenment and what it has to offer. But, rather than unthinkingly recouping it as a mission, I want instead to tease out and weigh up its merits, to discern with nuance what is still fit for our times. I want to ask if it is possible to rescue the Enlightenment’s rallying power, and if it’s worth defending what the combined forces of Left and Right are coming together to attack. Are the Enlightenment’s deficiencies barnacles on an old ship, or integral to its design?

Ironically, in critiquing the Enlightenment, the postmodern Left has deconstructed the basis of its own belief systems, and now liberal intellectuals no longer know what to defend outside of demands for affirmation, or the assertion of the individual right to be who you want to be. In the midst of intolerant purity spirals, reason is in danger of being demonised as a white man’s oppressive tool, and writers and thinkers such as Kate Clanchy or Slavoj Žižek are cancelled rather than engaged with. Yet what is more dangerous: holding to a set of Enlightenment values that might be flawed, or opening the floodgates to a post-truth world in which any authoritarian agenda might well hold sway? I believe that it’s possible to conserve intellectual standards and be politically radical at the same time. Because there is another side to the Enlightenment that is not surfacing in the culture wars, and which is the opposite of centrist complacency: namely, intellectual humility and political challenge.

The difficulty with any discussion of the Enlightenment is that it’s not clear what the word actually means. Broadly speaking, it was a philosophical project that grew out of the establishment of the scientific method in the 17th and 18th centuries: Francis Bacon and his circle had pioneered the rejection of alchemy, mysticism and superstition in favour of the empirical study of the physical world, and this became the basis of philosophical positivism. If you visited the National Gallery’s exhibition devoted to Joseph Wright of Derby, you might have seen An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) – a tribute to natural philosophy that offers stark contrasts of darkness and light to dramatise the impact of scientific discovery.

In 18th-century France, a group of thinkers emerged known as the philosophes. Led by Voltaire, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot and Montesquieu, they championed the secular pursuit of knowledge. Over the course of 20 years, Diderot and d’Alembert produced a 28-volume Encyclopédie, a ‘systematic dictionary’ to be passed on to future generations for the improvement of mankind. Voltaire championed the primacy of mathematical logic. And Montesquieu argued for the division of power within government to ensure that no one group could exert tyranny. Enlightenment was also pursued in Scotland by figures such as Adam Smith, David Hume, James Hutton and Thomas Reid, and in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, who sought to bring together human rationality and an exploration of the world around us.

What these thinkers had in common was a belief in the power of reason to liberate us from inherited custom and received wisdom. The Encyclopédie defined the philosophe as someone who, ‘trampling on prejudice, tradition, universal consent, authority, in a word, all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for himself’. In 1784, a Berlin periodical invited readers to respond to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant sent in an essay, defining it as ‘man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity’, which he identified as ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.’

Some historians not only charge the Enlightenment with hypocrisy, but believe that racism is in its bones

This rejection of dogma is inspiring. But the Enlightenment was a diverse, even contradictory movement, which is partly why it can now be deployed as a political football by those who occupy very different positions (see also liberalism). ‘I’m really not at all convinced that there was such a thing as Enlightenment,’ the historian Dorinda Outram, author of several books on the Enlightenment, told me. The philosophes declare that they’re ‘producing universal categories that apply to all human beings, like universal humanity’, but then they ‘repeatedly exclude people from being under the aegis of those universal categories’, such as ‘Black people, women and the poor’. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft lambasted the Enlightenment for claiming universality while excluding women from the realm of rationality. ‘She really takes it and shakes it and says, look, this is all wonderful, but it’s not real unless you include everybody,’ Outram said. Critics of the Enlightenment don’t necessarily reject universalism as an ideal, but point out that the commitment to universalism was selective.

Some historians not only charge the Enlightenment with hypocrisy, but believe that racism is in its bones. Angela Saini is a science journalist who has written about the origins of race science. ‘I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment,’ she told me. ‘It gave us so much of the world as we know it today,’ in terms of ‘rationality and the scientific method’. Carl Linnaeus’s system of biological classification, however, one of the main artefacts of Enlightenment science, divides people up by skin colour, which is ‘incredibly arbitrary’, Saini told me: he’s ‘essentially taxonomising humans in the same way that he’s drawing up taxonomies of the natural world.’ Voltaire believed that different ethnic groups had fundamentally different origins – a theory known as polygenism – and that the age of reason had arrived at maturity only in Western Europe. ‘Humanity,’ wrote Kant in 1802, ‘has its highest degree of perfection in the white race.’

The standard defence of Enlightenment figures, Kehinde Andrews told an Open University seminar, is that ‘yes, they were racist, but that’s separate from their moral philosophy … so why would we throw the baby out with the bathwater?’ That is the wrong way to think about it, Andrews said, since Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Kant ‘all had these beliefs that Europe was superior, that whiteness was better, that Black people were inferior’, and that this is ‘not a coincidence’, it’s actually the ‘premise of where they come from’.

Saini points out that these racist attitudes were also a product of their time, and were economically and politically expedient: the Enlightenment’s cherished notions of ‘freedom and equality and reason and secularism’ were forged alongside ‘these ideas about some people being inferior to others’. The hierarchies that were described as ‘natural’ were ‘self-serving’, Saini explained, because they not only justified colonial expansion but also ‘reinforced the social order’.

Enlightenment was invoked by anti-slavery revolts, such as in Haiti at the turn of the 19th century

The experience of colonisation nonetheless mitigated racist attitudes as Westerners came into contact with cultures that were evidently intellectually and culturally sophisticated. For example, ‘they get more and more interested in China,’ Outram told me, and ‘the confrontation there is clearly not between reason and unreason. It’s just different sorts of reason.’ The Enlightenment was inconsistent because it was changing over time. ‘It’s a very different thing at the beginning of the 18th century from what it is at the end,’ Outram said, ‘when the focus is on a new sort of humanitarianism’ and new forms of ‘altruism’, such as ‘the philanthropic founding of lifeboat stations’, which is inspired by the idea that ‘people will willingly go out in dangerous conditions to try and rescue people who they have no links with, who are total strangers.’

As the historian Jonathan Israel argued in Radical Enlightenment (2001), in contrast to negative images of pale, male, wealthy elites with direct or indirect links to slavery, prominent Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Nicolas de Condorcet were in fact passionate abolitionists: Diderot contributed some stridently anti-slavery arguments to the Histoire des deux Indes (1770), a polemic against colonial rule, and bemoaned the treatment of ‘Negroes’ in the Encyclopédie (although he simultaneously describes them as having ‘little intelligence’), writing that ‘We have reduced them, I wouldn’t say to the conditions of slaves, but to that of beasts of burden; and we are reasonable! And we are Christians!’ Condorcet wrote in 1795 that the gains of the ‘Age of Discovery’ counted for nothing unless Europeans ‘acknowledge men of other climates, equals and brothers by the will of nature, have never been formed to nourish the pride and avarice of a few privileged nations’. Enlightenment was invoked by later anti-slavery revolts, such as in Haiti at the turn of the 19th century, and by later anticolonial thinkers such as W E B Du Bois, who drew on its assertion of a common humanity and emancipation through reason.

I spoke to Richard Whatmore, a historian and author of The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (2023), who cited Voltaire writing in 1764 that ‘Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.’ For Whatmore, Enlightenment is ‘any strategy that prevents wars of religion from breaking out.’ In the 18th century, ‘diversity means disagreeing without wanting to flatten your rivals. As soon as you want to ostracise and exile, that’s the end of Enlightenment. That’s fanaticism.’ The difficult thing, he said, ‘is living together with people who think completely differently to the way that you do.’ Whatmore believes the Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution and its desire to create ‘an exclusive community’, which he likens to ‘our culture wars’. As soon as you descend into culture war, ‘that shows you’ve lost to an 18th-century mind’. Whatmore identifies this tendency on both the Trumpian Right and the identitarian Left. To oppose prejudice but cancel those who disagree with you is – arguably – a particularly modern form of hypocrisy.

Tolerance – applied to both people and opinions – is a slippery virtue. I can see both sides of the debate between universalism and particularity. So I mistrust the warm embrace St Paul extends to the Jews, inviting them into the Christian fold while simultaneously erasing the boundaries of Jewish identity, and also the disingenuous republicanism of France, where claims to a level playing field between religious groups are disputed by members of the Muslim community. But I do subscribe to a genuinely egalitarian universalism that prioritises the capacity for peaceable disagreement over narrow demands for recognition by either identitarians or nationalists.

Universalism was hotly debated by members of the Jewish Enlightenment, including Moses Mendelssohn, who – like Kant – contributed an essay to the Berlin magazine essay call. Mendelssohn was in favour of Jewish assimilation, but the preservation of Jewish identity remained a fraught issue – coming to a head with the Nazi Holocaust and the widespread conclusion that the assimilationist ‘experiment’ had failed. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many of the foremost historians of the Enlightenment were postwar Jewish scholars, among them Peter Gay, who looked back to the Enlightenment to provide a model for how to avoid fascism. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has also argued against ethnocentrism and in favour of a universal morality that transcends national or cultural particularity.

Curators, book editors and academics hold some power but not compared with the tech corporations, billionaires and political strongmen

Critics of Enlightenment universalism are right to uncover the power dynamics that too often underlie claims to ‘objectivity’. But the key point for me is that most attacks on Enlightenment values fail to take account of the power disparity actually in play: the fact that the so-called ‘liberal elite’ is actually in timid retreat. The populist Right taking aim at the ‘mainstream media’, experts, professionals and especially the apocryphal exclusive cabal called the ‘illuminati’ is essentially targeting embattled remnants or phantom ghouls. Meanwhile, the Left trains its sights on cultural ‘gatekeepers’ whose influence is also either fictive or on the wane. Relative to the most downtrodden members of society, curators, book editors and tenured academics hold some power but, compared with the tech corporations, billionaires and political strongmen who are ruthlessly undermining them and everything they stand for, they really don’t.

When Eleanor Roosevelt drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, she took great care to include representatives from other countries and cultures, including the Chinese philosopher and diplomat P C Chang. Chang was a pluralist and supported the Declaration, but there remained a particularist challenge: namely, that the Declaration emphasises individual rights and liberties whereas, according to the Confucian tradition, the self is defined by communal ties. We should remember challenges like these, but we must not let them contribute to the destruction of those universalist institutions that were built on the philosophical foundations of the Enlightenment. The entire international order is currently teetering on the edge, threatened by neo-totalitarian leaders and undermined in turn by its former allies on the Left for being Western-centric and exclusionary. We let them perish at our peril, as it is these institutions that support the less powerful and hold the real elites to account.

Reason is the compass I look to in my work and in my interactions with others – especially when there is conflict to resolve. But we should also recognise its limitations: its sometimes stolid sidelining of qualities like habit, cognitive dissonance and ineffable experience. An over-insistence on rationality can look like arrogance if it is not checked internally, and an unfortunate consequence of the attack on experts is that they can become more dogmatic in self-defence. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the Enlightenment’s rigid insistence on reason led inevitably to totalitarianism. They believed that the suppression of alternative value systems such as religion or tradition was a ‘disenchantment’ that was always underpinned by the threat of violence. ‘The fully enlightened earth,’ they wrote, ‘radiates disaster triumphant.’ Outram thinks that Adorno and Horkheimer put their finger on something important: ‘the way in which Enlightenment values and Enlightenment thinking were very likely to tip over into their opposites.’

Enlightenment reason has always had its critics. Rousseau believed that it corrupted innocent human nature. Michel Foucault didn’t like its tendency to stigmatise those who don’t fit society’s definition of the ‘reasonable’: vagabonds, criminals and the mentally ill. The philosopher John Gray thinks that its faith in progress is quixotic. Saini told me that, as a journalist, she is focused on the end goal of changing people’s minds for the good, and simply stating what is ‘reasonable’ as self-evident truth is not always the best way of achieving that. ‘If I’m trying to convince someone who is hesitant about taking a vaccine to take it, it doesn’t work to hit them over the head with this idea that vaccines are safe and scientists have proven this,’ she said. After all, their fears often ‘come from a rational place. It could be a fear of losing bodily autonomy, a genuine fear of vaccine injury, or doubts that have been seeded by some information that they’ve read.’ Categorising someone’s mistaken position as irrational tends to entrench them in it further, ‘because they feel they’re under attack.’

The story of Eve eating the apple expresses a fear of knowledge and the chaos it brings, yet we find that chaos actually comes from ignorance

Saini also cautions against dismissing the populist turn in our politics as wholly irrational. ‘There’s been a kind of block in politics for a long time, where people felt that nothing was happening; it didn’t matter who they elected.’ When populist candidates promise wholesale change, ‘it is very appealing to people,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily retreating from reason. It just means that they’re frustrated.’ Outram likewise stresses the importance of maintaining a pluralistic view of what reason and knowledge mean. ‘The attack on expertise is, in fact, a struggle between different forms of knowledge … I am an expert,’ she acknowledges, ‘so I have some skin in the game,’ but the expertise that ‘going through the Cambridge History School gives you is as valid as the tacit knowledge of, say, brewers of beer.’

For Outram, promoting morality is a more pressing priority than defending reason, because ‘unreason, misinformation and disinformation are all used in the service of cruelty … If you lie to somebody, you show that you don’t respect them.’ Lying – by governments or corporations, say – is invariably carried out ‘in defence of projects which are morally indefensible, otherwise you wouldn’t have to lie about them.’ It is the later Enlightenment value of care for others – articulated by Adam Smith and Edmund Burke – that Outram believes we should remember now: ‘the idea that we’re linked to all other human beings by sympathy and empathy,’ that ‘we can’t see other people suffer without feeling pain ourselves.’ (This recalls Kant’s moving statement, made in the context of advocating a cosmopolitan internationalism, that ‘a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’.) Morality is what stops reason succumbing to hypocrisy.

Of course, the accumulation of knowledge doesn’t automatically lead to human progress. But there is an alternative, counter-Enlightenment narrative that is hardly preferable: the narrative of Pandora opening her box, or Eve eating the apple. These stories express a fear of knowledge and the chaos it brings, yet we find that chaos actually comes from ignorance. We must maintain epistemological humility, but we must also keep our cognitive bearings as the reality around us dissolves into White House-generated memes, clickbait advertising and AI slop.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s reputation for high-minded entitlement, its proponents aimed above all to promote critique that was both unassuming and restless. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume wrote that if those who are ‘dogmatical in their opinions’ could become ‘sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state’, this realisation would ‘naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve’ and ‘diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists’. Intellectual modesty was intimately linked to tolerance of others: since ‘we are all formed of frailty and error,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature’. Kant emphasised the inescapable limits of human knowledge. I am not the first to note that our own age of increasing ignorance is characterised, ironically, by people holding trenchantly to what they think they know.

Like Kant, Foucault also asked ‘What is Enlightenment?’ – the title of a 1984 essay. He defined it as ‘the permanent reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era’. Seen in this light, the Enlightenment laid the foundations for the social sciences: the conviction that our ‘historical era’ is endlessly readable. This is my favourite definition of the Enlightenment: a commitment to ‘permanent critique’: of our world, and also – crucially – of ourselves. It is the best remedy for both manipulation and self-delusion.

In our age of binaries, the fact that the Enlightenment contains multitudes is actually helpful

Neither the identitarian Left nor the flag-waving Right is currently very good at self-critique. The Left is too self-righteous and the Right too wedded to an illusion of ‘balance’ to acknowledge its own ideological agenda. As for political radicalism, the Left’s narrow focus on identity prevents it from examining big-picture, socioeconomic power dynamics, and the Right’s rose-tinted nostalgia for Western greatness leads it to defend the status quo. Neither side is remotely ‘enlightened’. We need to be humble and self-questioning, to be sure, but that should not stop us speaking truth to power, and challenging financial and technological elites. With the tech bros laying claim to a new Enlightenment (when, really, it’s the same white, male and Anglophone-centric old guard in new clothes), there’s all the more need to bolster the good in our intellectual inheritance.

The Enlightenment may have been a mixed, paradoxical project, but its critical attitude was bound up with revolutionary intent: to lay the intellectual foundations for a better world. We must save the Enlightenment baby from its muddied bathwater by remembering its own teaching of discernment; advocating for rationality as an ambition rather than an absolute; and above all rejecting attempts to link expertise, cultural capital and high intellectual standards with power and privilege at a time when they are so gravely imperilled.

In our age of binaries, the fact that the Enlightenment contains multitudes is actually helpful. ‘There was a great deal of plurality in the way that people thought, even at that time,’ Saini said. ‘And that’s why I think, when we look at the past, we should hesitate from being too judgmental, because we ourselves will be judged by future generations for the way we live now.’ Refusing to consign people or ideas in history to wholesale categories of good or bad allows us to say, she told me: ‘We know the kind of world that we want and, if anything is possible, which is I think the lesson of history, then we can take what we know is useful.’ About the rest of it, Saini concludes, ‘We can say that was fine for you, it’s not fine for us. And that’s OK.’

Sunspot Activity Going Off A Cliff, Volcanoes and Cold Climate Change

Not so fast folks.  We have a working solar maxima on tap and the decline will be through the next four years.  all this remains within the expected channel.  That channel is centuries old so go back to sleep.

We have a hard lapse coinciding with the Little ice age and  no real understanding of how it comes about, except that we should care.

A far more real risk is a solar flare cooking off our comms and power though we are becoming way more protected.

Sunspot Activity Going Off A Cliff, Volcanoes and Cold Climate Change

Dr. Sircus

May 6

In the shadows of the mainstream climate narrative — filled with fears of overheating, carbon overload, and global boiling — lies a quiet admission from one of the most established scientific institutions in the world: NOAA predicts a complete drop-off of sunspots beginning around 2030. Yet NOAA still insists global warming is a threat.

This sunspot prediction is not just a data point. It’s a cosmic alarm bell, but no one is listening. Climate change has become a globalist religion of insanity. It is also scientific insanity, for CO2 is the most necessary gas and highly healthy. Without CO2, oxygen would not exist at a concentration that supports life on Earth.

After Athens logged its coldest May Day on record, the cold pushed deeper overnight into May 4, with historic May lows across Greece and the wider Balkans. Russian-sourced cold drained south through the Balkans, returning frost o basins and valleys and threatening orchards, vineyards, and early-season crops.

For most of modern history, climate discussions have focused almost entirely on what happens here on Earth—carbon, industry, methane, oceans, aerosols, deforestation, economics, politics. Yet long before factories, SUVs, carbon taxes, and climate conferences, the Earth was already moving through powerful cycles of warmth and cold, abundance and famine, glacier retreat and glacier advance.

To understand climate honestly, we must occasionally lift our eyes from the ground and look upward. The Sun is not merely a distant lamp hanging in the sky. It is the energetic engine of the entire planetary system. And one of the clearest fingerprints of solar behavior comes through sunspots—dark magnetic regions on the Sun whose numbers rise and fall in roughly eleven-year cycles, but also in much longer grand cycles that can last decades or even centuries.

Denver, Rockies face potentially biggest snowstorm of the season on the 4th and 5th of May.

When solar physicists and historians look back through telescopic records, ice cores, and isotopic reconstructions, a striking pattern emerges. During the Spörer Minimum, roughly 1450 to 1540, solar activity declined sharply, and Earth entered some of the coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age. Then came the famous Maunder Minimum, when astronomers observed fewer than fifty sunspots during decades when tens of thousands would normally have appeared. These were the years of brutal winters, advancing glaciers, shortened growing seasons, crop failures, and the freezing of the Thames.

Cyprus woke to snow in its Troodos Mountains on May 4 and 5, an event well outside the island’s early-May norms. The same cold outbreak also reached Mount Hermon in Israel.

Later came the Dalton Minimum, again accompanied by lower temperatures and agricultural disruption. This correlation between prolonged solar minima and colder climate is not speculation. It is one of the best-documented long-cycle patterns in climate history. NOAA’s own solar cycle progression data shows that after the current stronger-than-expected Solar Cycle 25, solar activity is expected to move downward toward the next solar minimum around 2030–2031. NOAA has not predicted the complete disappearance of sunspots in 2029; some will remain. But the Sun is expected to enter its natural declining phase later this decade. But the crash will be severe, according to NOAA.

Is the `Dark Comet’ 1998 KY26 the Spacecraft Phobos 1?

so far, it seems that non gravitational acceleration is produced by close by solar radiation.  natural enough.

This points out that way too much space junk is out there and we now need to sort it all out.

Still no real evidence that these objects are adjusting their orbits on a pass.  I have shown possibility but a real adjustment has not been identified.  Of course most of our objests are not extra solar as far as we can discover.

Is the `Dark Comet’ 1998 KY26 the Spacecraft Phobos 1?

Avi Loeb

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/is-the-dark-comet-1998-ky26-the-spacecraft-phobos-1-304169bce8a2

An artist’s illustration of the planned landing of JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft on the `dark comet’ labeled 1998 KY26. (Image credit: Kommesser/ESO)

Dark comets are a proposed class of curious hybrids between comets and asteroids. These objects show significant non-gravitational accelerations, yet they exhibit absolutely no sign of cometary outgassing in the form of a coma or tail. The first recognized interstellar object, 1I/`Oumuamua, showed these features and was suggested to belong to this class in a recent mainstream publication, posted here. However, based on its inferred flat shape (published here) and non-gravitational acceleration, I argued in a much earlier publication here that 1I/`Oumuamua might be technological in origin. The dark comet categorization of 1I/`Oumuamua and similar solar system objects was the mainstream response to my nontraditional suggestion.

A year ago, I wrote a paper (accessible here) with my postdoc, Richard Cloete, suggesting that the dark Comet labeled 2005 VL1 might be the Venera 2 Spacecraft, a failed Soviet mission to Venus launched in November 1965.

Another member of the proposed class of dark comets in the Solar system is 1998 KY26. The nature of 1998 KY26 is not just an academic question. The Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) plans to land the spacecraft Hayabusa2 on this object in July 2031. In its original mission, Hayabusa2 explored the 900-meter-diameter asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2018, returning asteroid samples to Earth in 2020. With fuel remaining, the spacecraft was sent on an extended mission until 2031, when it is set to encounter 1998 KY26. This will be the first time a space mission encounters a tiny object on the size scale of 10-meters. Mainstream astronomers hope that this landing will reveal the nature of outgassing from a dark comet.

1998 KY26 was observed by a number of ground-based telescopes to support the preparation of the Hayabusa2 mission, and the results were reported in a 2025 Nature Communication paper — accessible here.

Interestingly, this so-called `dark comet’ was observed to be shiny with a very high reflectance (albedo) of 0.52 (±0.08). Its inferred size of 11 (±2) meters is comparable to that of a spacecraft. In addition, it exhibits an exceedingly short rotation period of 5.3516 (±0.0001) minutes which implies a sturdy monolithic object, whereas a rubble pile asteroid would break up under the associated centrifugal force.

In a new paper that I just co-authored with the brilliant Adam Hibberd, Adam Crowl, and Carlos Olea (accessible here), we present supporting evidence that 1998 KY26 could be technological in origin. In particular, we identify it as potentially a relic of a historical Russian mission to Mars, the Phobos 1 probe, which suffered a failure 2 months after the launch in July 1988, due to upload of a faulty command.

An artist’s illustration of the Phobos 1 spacecraft. (Image credit: Michael Carroll/JPL/NASA)

Our new paper shows that that two propulsive velocity thrusts (∆Vs) combined at 1.9 kilometers per second, the first just after loss of mission and the second in May 1996, allow the orbits and phases of the two bodies to align, with an arbitrarily low separation in velocity-position space. There is also evidence that 1.9 kilometers per second was within the performance envelope of Phobos 1, which had a powerful nitric acid and amine-based autonomous thruster for Mars Orbital Insertion.

Our analysis cannot unequivocally identify that 1998 KY26 is definitely the Phobos 1 probe. Nevertheless, we have shown quantitatively that

1. The Phobos 1 and 1998 KY26 orbits are similar. The two orbits converge and are statistically compatible, given the uncertainty in the orbit of 1998 KY26, which is tightly constrained due to the existence of over 230 observations of this `dark comet’.

2. The difference between these two orbits is compatible energetically with the overall velocity thrust (∆V) envelope available to Phobos 1.

3. There is a historical record in support of the hypothesis that a propulsive velocity thrust (∆V) was delivered shortly after loss of mission.

4. The Phobos 1 mission was lost early on in the probe’s transit to Mars, enabling a large ∆V capability.

5. The observational data on the physical properties of the dark comet 1998 KY26 support the association with Phobos 1. This includes the measured small size, high albedo and unusually large spin, which favors a sturdy object over a rubble pile asteroid.

6. The dark comet appears to be quite elongated based on changes in its apparent magnitude, as expected for Phobos 1.

Gladly, the verdict on our association of the `dark comet’ 1998 KY26 with the spacecraft Phobos 1 will be indisputable once JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission gets close to it. The beauty of science is that hypotheses can be tested experimentally beyond any reasonable doubt. This is why the Vatican acknowledged publicly in 1992 (as reported here) that Galileo Galilei was right and the Sun is not moving around the Earth as they claimed for centuries. I wonder whether the mainstream of comet experts will acknowledge that 1I/`Oumuamua may have not been a natural `dark comet’ if it becomes clear that their so-called `dark comet’ 1998 KY26 is technological in origin, beyond any reasonable doubt.

My plea to the mainstream of comet experts is simple. Please extend your training data set to include not just rocks and icebergs but also the space objects launched by humans over the past 69 years. After all, we know that the truthfulness of statements made by AI systems depend sensitively on the extent of their training data sets. This is why the U.S. invests in 2026 over 700 billion dollars in data centers for training AI systems. The database on all space objects launched by humans is a rather modest addition to all the asteroids or comets we know about. Is it too much to ask that the assessments of comet experts will be trained on it as well?

On September 17, 2020, Pan-STARRS 1 — the same telescope that discovered 1I/`Oumuamua, identified another near-Earth object which showed non-gravitational acceleration without a cometary tail. Naturally, this object, labeled 2020 SO, would have been classified as another `dark comet’. However, follow-up spectroscopy by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility revealed that its spectrum resembles that of stainless steel, confirming that it is the Centaur upper stage used to launch in September 1966 the Surveyor 2 spacecraft towards the Moon. I rest my case.

2020 SO was pushed away from the Sun by solar radiation pressure, the same mechanism that I proposed in a 2018 publication here as the source of the non-gravitational acceleration of 1I/`Oumuamua. We know that 2020 SO has a technological origin because we launched it. The remaining question is who launched 1I/`Oumuamua?