Suggestions for philosophers who want to contribute to philosophical biology

Can modern biologists get along with modern philosphers of biology? James DiFrisco and Steven Orzack think they can and they have suggestions for both biologists and philosophers (DiFrisco and Orzack, 2026).

Here are their suggestions for philosophers who want to contribute to philosophy of biology.

1. Justify engagement with philosophical biology by its capacity to improve biology. Do not justify engagement with a topic by pointing to its interest to philosophers, or by a generic appeal to interdisciplinarity, or by apparent thematic overlap.
2. Understand that conceptual analysis needs to make a difference to scientific reasoning and practice. The development and clarification of biological concepts is best when based upon actual biology as opposed to imaginary counterfactual scenarios and thought experiments.
3. Attain at least the level of comprehension of biology possessed by a senior undergraduate major in biology.
4. Publish normative claims about biology in biology journals, not just in philosophy journals.
5. Attend and present work at biology conferences. Collaborate with biologists.
6. Ensure that articles or books about a philosophical issue in biology are reviewed by a biologist with relevant expertise.
7. Do not claim what author X means (without documentation), as in “what Smith really means here is ….” Accept potential ambiguity as a part of human communication.
8. Anchor a descriptive claim about biology in the actual practice of biology. Engage with current biology and not just biological authorities from the past (e.g., Darwin).
9. Understand that claims by biologists need to be understood in their social and historical context in addition to their epistemic context.

---

DiFrisco, J. and Orzack, S.H. (2026) Biology Needs Philosophy, But What Philosophy? BioScience:biag016. [doi: 10.1093/biosci/biag016]

Suggestions for biologists who want to contribute to philosophical biology

Can modern biologists get along with modern philosphers of biology? James DiFrisco and Steven Orzack think they can and they have suggestions for both biologists and philosophers (DiFrisco and Orzack, 2026).

Here are their suggestions for biologists who want to contribute to philosophy of biology.

1. Understand that debate over definitions is often not quibbling over “mere” semantics. After all, semantics concerns meaning, and meaning connects concepts to inferential roles in reasoning, including prediction.
2. Understand that concepts having an uncertain connection with facts may still be useful. For example, the notion of a species as an ensemble of potentially interbreeding individuals has underwritten many important empirical insights into evolution, even though it can be hard to measure the potential for interbreeding over time and space. Similarly, the notion of an organ as a well-defined ensemble of cells has underwritten many important empirical insights in anatomy, pathology, and physiology even though the criteria that define organs remain in dispute.
3. Understand that there can be useful theory in biology even if it is not expressible in compact mathematical form.
4. Understand that theory can be important apart from its immediate empirical usefulness. However, theory that is informed by data and that informs data is most useful.
5. Understand that explanations of phenomena do not have to be molecular in order to be causal and mechanistic. The limits of explanations based upon molecular mechanisms do not necessitate switching to a different mode of explanation (e.g., one based on agency; see below).
6. Take guidance from philosophy when making philosophical claims. Debates by philosophers over issues such as falsifiability as a defining criterion of science; the uses of abduction, deduction, and induction; essentialism in classification; and the nature of scientific laws can improve scientific practice.

---

DiFrisco, J. and Orzack, S.H. (2026) Biology Needs Philosophy, But What Philosophy? BioScience:biag016. [doi: 10.1093/biosci/biag016]

Chris Christie says baby boomers are the most selfish generation in American history

The leading edge of the baby boomer generation is turning 80 this year (that's me!). Chris Christie is a trailing edge baby boomer.

Christie is upset about the number of old people in American politics and he singles out Donald Trump (a baby boomer) and Joe Biden (a member of the previous generation). I assume he's also annoyed at old members of Congress, many of whom are older than 80 and therefore not boomers.

Here's what he said ...

I don't think they are this period of our time. I call this the last gasp of the most selfish generation in American history. The baby boomers. The most selfish generation in American history. The most self-centered generation in American history. The least sacrificing generation in American history. [see Chris Christie on baby boomers]

The fact that old politicians can consistently get re-elected in America is not the fault of American baby boomers. It's a systemic problem with American politics and I'm pretty sure that 20 years from now Chris Christie will be complaining about old gen X and millenial politicians.

But there's another problem with Chris Christie's remarks. He's mad at certain members of his generation but instead of focusing his criticism on those individuals he slanders an entire generation. Most baby boomers know that's not right. It wasn't right when talking about Blacks, Jews, women, Muslims, or people from New Jearsey and it's not right when talking about an entire generation.

---

How can we combat the spread of misinformation?

This is a serious question. We (Sandwalk readers) know that there's a lot of science misinformation being spread in the popular science literature.¹ So far, scientists have been spectacularly unsuccessful in stopping it.

The misinformation covers all aspects of science but my particular bugaboos are evolution, genomes, and junk DNA.

I'm going to quote the first few paragraphs from an article on the Knowable Magazine website. It seems to be associated with Annual Reviews and it certainly looks like it should be a credible source of science information.

The article is The silent majority: RNAs that don’t make proteins. The author is Christina Szalinski and here's how she describes herself on her website.

I know science.

I became a science writer in 2013 after finishing my PhD in cell biology at the University of Pittsburgh. So when it comes to writing, I can shake out the molecular tangles, unravel the cellular threads, and wade through the formidable details of scientific studies.

Is it wrong to specifically identify science writers who are spreading misinformation? Is it cruel or mean to imply that they don't understand their subject?

Do other science writers and their organizations have any obligation to police their own discipline to ensure scientific accuracy?

Does anybody have any good ideas on how to clean up this mess?

Here's an excerpt from the article. I don't think I need to explain what's wrong.

When scientists first cracked the genetic code, they expected a simple story: DNA makes RNA, and that RNA, known as messenger RNA, makes proteins. Proteins would do all the important work — building tissues, fighting infections, digesting food.

But when the DNA of our genome was finally sequenced, researchers encountered a head-scratcher: The 20,000-plus genes that carry instructions for making our proteins account for less than 2 percent of our DNA. What was the rest of it good for?

For years, the remaining 98 percent was dismissed as “junk DNA” — evolutionary debris, filler. But as sequencing technology improved, a startling picture emerged. Our cells were busy making RNA copies of all those expanses, not just making messenger RNA — or mRNA — from the protein-coding genes. They were churning out vast quantities of RNA molecules with no known purpose.

The question became: Why would cells waste so much energy on copying that junk?

Today, however, the importance of this non-coding RNA — the catchall term for RNA molecules that don’t carry instructions for proteins — is undeniable. Non-coding RNAs turn out to regulate everything from embryonic development to immune responses to brain function. They help determine which genes get turned on and off, and when. They can promote cancer or suppress it.

I contacted the author last week to warn her that I was about to publish this post. I asked if she wished to comment or to provide the source of her information on the history of the field. I did not get a reply.

The problem with this kind of description is that it misrepresents the way science is done. Most scientific models are due to slow and steady, incremental advances building on previous studies. That kind of science is (usually) self-correcting—when new information becomes available, the old models are revised.

The picture that is being presented to the general public is that old scientists were pretty stupid because they thought there was only one kind of gene (protein coding) and that everything else in the genome (98%) had to be junk. According to that false history, the old fuddy-duddies were shown to be totally wrong when the human genome was sequenced and thousands of non-coding genes were discovered for the first time. That disproves junk DNA according to the false history.

Is there a way of writing the true history in a way that's accessible to the general public? I don't know but I thought I would give it a try in order to try and show modern science writers how it coould be done.

It's not easy. Read my attempt below and let me know if it works.

Scientists were actively working out the functions of DNA back in the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid-1960s they had discovered two kinds of genes. The majority encoded proteins but there were also non-coding genes that specified important RNAs such as ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA) that were used in protein synthesis.

Scientists also established that DNA contained regulatory elements that controlled the expression of those two types of genes. Other functional DNA elements were also identified at this time.

Most of this work was done in bacteria and their viruses where genes took up a very large percentage of the DNA in their chromosomes. However, it soon became apparent that this was not the case in humans where the coding regions of the protein-coding genes seemed to account for only 2% of the genome. (The genome is the total amount of DNA in all chromosomes.) Other functional elements, such as non-coding genes and regulatory sequences only accounted for a bit more of the genome.

This gave rise to a model developed by the leading experts of the time, including several Nobel Laureates. They proposed that only 10% of the human genome is functional and 90% is junk DNA. Based on a lot of experimental data, they estimated that there were about 30,000 genes in the human genome.

Additional non-coding genes specifying regulatory RNAs were identified at this time (early 1970s) but the biggest advance in this area ocurred in the 1980s with the discovery of a host of genes specifying various new RNAs. Some of these new non-coding genes specified RNAs that acted like protein enzymes to catalyze biochemical reactions. Others were involved in regulating gene expression and still others were structural components of large cellular complexes.

These results, and others from the 1990s, raised the number of non-coding genes in humans to as many as several thousand but they still only accounted for a fraction of the total number of protein-coding genes.

The first draft of the human genome was published 25 years ago and it confirmed the model developed more than 50 years ago. There were about 30,000 genes, just as the experts had predicted, and most of the human genome was junk.

Subsequent work on identifying features of the human genome have, by and large, confirmed this model but there are scientists who are skeptical.

Most of the human genome is transcribed into RNAs—a fact that was known 50 years ago—but many of the leading experts concluded that most of those RNAs were probably junk RNA of various sorts. The idea here is that the human genome is very messy and it gives rise to lots of spurious, accidental RNAs that are not biologically relevant. Most of those RNAs are present in small amounts and they are rapidly degraded. They are not conserved in our closest relatives. (Sequence conservation is a good indication of function and lack of sequence conservation is a good indication of junk.)

The skeptics, on the other hand, argue that most of those RNAs have a function and there are far more non-coding genes than protein-coding genes. The debate continues to this day.

---

1. And, unfortutnately, in the legitimate scientific literature.

How can philosophy contribute to science?

I've written quite a bit about the perceived conflict between science and philosophy and defended my view that science is best described in broad terms as a way of knowing that requires evidence, skepticism, and rational thinking. As far as I know, there is no other way of knowing that has produced true knowledge.

In this sense, the proper practice of philosophy has to involve science—and by that I mean evidence— if the results are going to produce knowledge. There's lots to debate on this topic, including discussions about the meaning of "knowledge" [Is science the only way of knowing?].

But that's not what I want to talk about today. Today's topic is about the contribution that philosophers can make to science. I'll focus on philosophers of biology and on scientific topics that I'm knowledgeable about and I'll assume that most philosophers agree with Elisabeth Lloyd when she says, "As a philosopher of science, I have always been oriented towards addressing problems that scientists have, not so much problems that philosophers have. That is how to do good philosophy of science."¹

Now, let me be clear about the issue. It is blindingly obvious that philosophers could use their deep understanding of logic and argumentation to make significant contributions to biology, especially in cases where scientists are misusing logic. The question is not whether philosophy is incapable of ever contributing to biology but whether it is actually fulfilling that potential.

Is the American President the leader of the free world?

I was intrigued by a recent article by Carlos Lozade in The New York Times: America Has Become a Dangerous Nation. The opening paragraph sets the stage.

We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world. A successor for that post has not been named, and it appears unlikely that the European Union, or NATO, or whatever constitutes “the West” these days will promote from within. The job might even be eliminated, one more reduction in force courtesy of President Trump.

Here's the problem. I'm a Canadian. I think Canada is part of the "free world" but it's not a term that Canadians use very often. I also don't think it's popular in European countries but I'd like to hear from Europeans. Do the people of France think of themselves as being part of the "free world" (using the French translation)?

I remember the 1960s when the United States was bogged down in Vietnam and I don't recall thinking of either Johnson or Nixon as any kind of a leader of Canada or of similar countries such as Sweden, Australia, or Switzerland, let alone Japan or South Korea.

Ronald Reagan may have been a good President for Americans but I never thought of him as the leader of the free world in spite of the fact that Americans give him credit for the downfall of the Soviet Union. He would not have been a very good leader in Canada.

I think Canadians have enjoyed freedom for a very long time and so have many countries in Europe and elsewhere. We don't owe that freedom to the United States and we don't look to the United States as the standard of freedom. If that's what it means to be the leader of the "free" world then it's a term that doesn't resonate outside of the USA.

The Lozade article implies that the President of the United States has been the de facto leader of the free world for eight decades and it's only in the past year or so that he has lost that title. That's an interesting claim. It suggests that Canadians, Australians, Swedes, etc. looked upon George W. Bush as some kind of leader when American invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.

To my way of thinking, leaders are those who improve the lives of their citizens by promoting universal health care, income equality, the rights of women and minorities, and safety & securtity (i.e. crime and gun control). I admire world leaders who promote those values. I don't look to American Presidents as world leaders from that perspective.

I think the view of Americans is that military might is the important criterion. Since the United States is the toughest kid in school then it is the de facto leader since nobody wants to be on their bad side. Americans assume that their country always uses that military might for the good of the free world and that's they think that for the past eight decades the people of New Zealand, Mexico, and India might have looked to the President as the leader of the free world.

I'd like to suggest that viewing the President of the United States as the leader of the free world is mostly an American myth that's not shared by people in other countries to any great extent. America is the most powerful country in NATO and and so it dominates military considerations within that alliance. I think that Americans view NATO as the "free world" when they use that expression.

I view the United States as a powerful partner in NATO but I think of NATO as an alliance where every country is important. I don't see America as the "leader" in NATO any more than I see Canada as the leader. What do you think?

I'd especially like to hear from non-Americans about whether they have always viewed the President of the United States as the leader of the free world.

---

Do the indigenous people of British Columbia have a special way of knowing that's better than science?

I once participated in a discussion about introducing indigenous ways of knowing in the Ontario science curriculum. The idea was to have high school students visit local indigenous (First Nation) communities and talk to the wise elders of the community in order to learn their insights into topics such as evolution.

I pointed out that one of the main goals of education is to teach critical thinking and reasonable skepticism. If we are succeeding in that goal, then we should expect our students to ask embarrassing questions, such as what evidence to the elders have to support their myths about evolution and any other "ways of knowing" that conflict with science.

The proposal was dropped.

Philosophers and definitions of evolution and allele

One of my Facebook friends posted a link to an article on genetic drift on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website [Genetic Drift]. The author is Roberta Millstein and the article is a recent update to an older version that I questioned ten years ago [A philosopher's view of random genetic drift]. I noted on Facebook that this was "Another example of philosophers who don’t understand modern science." By this I meant that the article seemed to ignore the abundant molecular evidence of drift.

That prompted a response from defenders of philosophy and Roberta Millstein joined in. Here's the essence of her defense of philosophy.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is, as the name suggests, about philosophy. Thus, the entry surveys views about drift in philosophy -- starting with the history of drift because some philosophical views about drift, such as my own, take that as their starting point -- which include debates about what drift is and other philosophical topics.

Perhaps if biologists had been crystal clear and consistent about what drift is, there would have been less to write about, but there is good evidence for the claim I make in the entry and elsewhere, that in fact scientists use the term in different ways, some of which I think are unproductive (e.g., describing drift in terms of outcome rather than as causal process).

I'll post a separate article about her views on genetic drift but here I want to address the point that biologists aren't always "crystal clear." It turns out that Millstein doesn't agree with my definition of evolution or my definition of allele so when I try to make the case that fixation of neutral alleles is a clear example of random genetic drift this is challenged by evidence that not all biologists accept my definitions so genetic drift isn't as solidly established as I might think.

Happy St. Patrick's Day 2026!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! These are my great-grandparents Thomas Keys Foster, born in County Tyrone on September 5, 1852 and Eliza Ann Job, born in Fintona, County Tyrone on August 18, 1852. Thomas came to Canada in 1876 to join his older brother, George, on his farm near London, Ontario, Canada. Eliza came the following year and worked on the same farm. Thomas and Eliza decided to move out west where they got married in 1882 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The couple obtained a land grant near Salcoats, Saskatchewan, a few miles south of Yorkton, where they built a sod house and survived the first winter. Later on they built a wood frame house that they named "Fairview" after a hill in Ireland overlooking the house where Eliza was born. That's where my grandmother, Ella, was born. Most of this house still exists—we visited it a few years ago.

This is a photo of the house where my great-grandmother, Eliza Ann Job was raised. It was in the small village of Syonee in Tyrone county Ireland. You can see Fairview Hill from there. This photo was taken 40 years ago and I'm told that the house no longer exists.

Joe Felsenstein wins the 2026 Mendel Medal

The Genetics Society has awarded the 2026 Mendel Medal to Joe Felsenstein. Some of you may know Joe because he sometimes posts comments on Sandwalk in order to "clarify" some of my more egregious errors. But I bet you didn't know all of the things he has done over the past few decades. Here's the full press release: [Mendel Medal 2026 – Professor Joe Felsenstein].

Professor Joe Felsenstein was born in 1942, grew up in Philadelphia and studied as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, with James F. Crow as his undergraduate mentor. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago with Richard Lewontin, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh with Alan Robertson. Since 1968 he has been at the University of Washington in the Department of Genetics, and then in the Department of Genome Sciences and also in the Department of Biology. He has worked on the population genetics theory of the effects of recombination, of geographic differentiation, and of speciation. From the late 1970s on, his main focus was on methods for inferring phylogenies.

His accomplishments in that field include showing that with certain shapes of the true evolutionary tree, parsimony methods will be inconsistent, tending to infer the wrong phylogeny. He developed dynamic programming methods for fast evaluation of likelihoods for DNA sequence phylogenies. He adapted the bootstrap method of statistical inference to phylogenies, which enables assessment of the statistical support for different groups. He wrote the central paper introducing phylogenetic comparative methods to investigate whether multiple characters have evolved in a correlated way.

He has also made these and other methods widely available by organising the development and distribution of the PHYLIP package of programs for inferring phylogenies, starting in 1980 and still continuing. In 2004, he published “Inferring Phylogenies”, which reviews and explains the major methods of statistical phylogenetics. He assisted his colleagues Mary Kuhner and Jon Yamato, in applying the likelihood methods for DNA sequence phylogenies to trees of gene copies within populations (coalescent trees), to infer population parameters such as population size, mutation rate, migration rates and recombination rates. They developed the LAMARC program for coalescent inferences.

He has received a number of honors, including membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Weldon Prize and Medal for biometry, and the Darwin-Wallace medal from the Linnean Society. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, and the International Prize for Biology from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Since his retirement in 2017, he has been active in critiquing mathematical arguments by advocates of Intelligent Design and creationism.

They forgot to mention that Joe has also written about sex [What did Joe Felsenstein say about sex?].

I hope he won't mind if I tell you about something else that isn't in the press release ... he likes BeaverTails [BeaverTails].

---

Three kinds of adaptationism

Arlin Stoltfus wrote an excellent book where he makes the case for mutationism—the idea that the course of evolution is determined by the occurrence of particular mutations and not by adaptation based on an infinite supply of random mutations.

Part of his argument relies on refuting adaptationism, or the idea that much of the history of life is due to adaptation (natural selection). He describes three different kinds of adaptationism in his book (p. 39) and I think it's useful to know them.

A new kind of PhD program?

Getting a Ph.D. means that you become an expert in that subject and you have demonstrated that you can think critically enough to advance our knowledge and understanding. In the case of the sciences, it also means that you have mastered some of the techniques required to advance knowledge.

But mastering the techniques in order to investigate problems should not be sufficient, in my opinion. Above all, a Ph.D. candidate needs to demonstrate a deep understanding of the basic science that underlies our current models and theories. That's absolutely necessary if you are going to be capable of challenging those models and theories.

An editorial in a recent issue of Science caught my eye because it proposes to "reimagine" graduate degrees in STEM disciplines. The authors are Ian Banks who is director of Science Policy at the Foundation for American Innovation in San Francisco (California, USA) and Prineha Narang who is a professor in Physical Sciences and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, California, USA). [Reimagining STEM doctoral training].

Here's part of their proposal ...

But if one of the goals of granting an advanced degree is to produce professionals who can drive innovation—applying new ideas, methods, or technologies to create value—then academic programs must be available to support that outcome too.

The solution is not to replace existing PhD programs, but to add a STEM innovation PhD track. The selective program would require deep private-sector engagement in an accelerated 4-year program in which a student immediately joins a structured research project with clear milestones, crafted by a faculty member in consultation with a relevant industry partner. During the second and third years, students would participate in 2- or 3-month internships with companies that are aligned with their research.

I do not agree that one of the goals of a Ph.D. program is to drive technology to create value. It may be a consequence of mastering critical thinking but that's not the same thing. I do not think that the average student who obtains a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, geomorphology, or astrophysics has to demonstrate that they are "professionals who can drive innovation-applying new ideas."

Furthermore, the idea that Ph.D. programs at major universities would be partially controlled by industrial partners is repugnant. When I was training Ph.D. students there was no way that I would have teamed up with a biotech company or a drug company and allowed them to exploit one of my students for free research.

What do you think? Should Science be publishing such editorials on the prominent first page of the journal?

---

Glyphosate (Roundup®) is safe

There have been dozens of studies on the possible harmful effects of glyphosate. There are many well-funded organizations and tons of lawyers who would like nothing better than to sue Monsanto/Bayer into bankruptcy for promoting Roundup® and there are many environmental and health organizations who claim that glyphosate is harmful to humans.

The claims that glyphosate causes cancer and other ill effects in humans fall into three main categories.

How glyphosate (Roundup®) works

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup®, is back in the news in the United States so I think it's time to repost an article from almost twenty years ago where I explain how glyphosate works.

I'll follow up with links to all the articles showing that glyphosate is safe for humans. This is important because there's a lot of misinformation out there and the news media are not doing a very good job of countering the hype against glyphosate by presenting the consensus views of the scientific community. It's time for scientists to push back and make sure the the media are doing the job they're supposed to do; informing the public.

Glyphosate is a relatively simple chemical called N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine. It is a potent inhibitor of one of the key enzymes in the pathway for synthesis of the aromatic amino acids, tryptophan, phenylalanine, and tyrosine [How Cells Make Tryptophan, Phenyalanine, and Tyrosine].

Specifically, the herbicide blocks the activity of EPSP synthase, the enzyme that catalyzes one of the steps leading to chorismate. Chorismate is the precursor of all three aromatic amino acids so by blocking this enzyme, the synthesis of three plant amino acids is prevented.

Plants need to synthesize all 20 amino acids so this blockage causes plants to die.

The glyphosate mechanism is well known from studies of the homologous bacterial versions of EPSP synthase. An example of glyphosate bound to the active site of the E. coli enzyme is shown on the right. When glyphosate is bound, the enzyme can't catalyze any reaction.

Animals have lost the ability to synthesize chorismate and the aromatic amino acids so they require tryptophan, phenyalanine, and tyrosine in their diet. What this means is that the potent herbicide, glyphosate, has no effect on animals since they have already dispensed with the EPSP synthase enzyme. That's one of the reasons why Roundup® is so safe for humans.

Those of you who have used Roundup® on your driveways and walkways know that it kills all plants indiscriminately. You'd better not get it on your wife's favorite roses (... not that I'm admitting anything, mind you).

You can't spray it on crops, such as soybeans, corn, cotton, granola, and wheat to get rid of weeds because it kills the crops as well as the weeds. Wouldn't it be nice to have Roundup® resistant crops so you could spray them to control weeds?

Monsanto makes Roundup® and and they thought so too. That's why their scientists searched for, and found, bacteria that were resistant to Roundup®. Then they transferred the gene for the resistant EPSP enzyme to various crop plants in order to make them resistant to Roundup®. [Roundup Ready® Transgenic Plants]

These Roundup Ready® crops are now found everywhere in Canada and the United States. Farmers routinely spray these crops with Roundup® in order to kill all the weeds in a field while saving the crop.

Since these farmers are handling tons of Roundup® every year, they would make a good group to examine for any adverse health effects, don't you think?

---

Skip the hard bits! (The Two Cultures)

I've been reading Mathew Cobb's biography of Francis Crick and a sentence in the Prologue caught my eye.

Cricks' scientific writings and ideas are described in a way that should be easy for the general reader to understand, but if you find yourself struggling, follow Crick's advice to readers of his own books and skip the hard bits.

I meet regularly with a group of retired professors to discuss a wide range of topics. Yesterday we talked about misinformation and how to deal with it but the discussion brought out the differences between dealing with misinformation in the humanities and in medicine or the natural sciences. This led to a diversion that focused on The Two Cultures.