Don’t need a theme to lead off with a ‘new’ Stevie Wonder song that has been sitting in the vault for 50 years:
There’s clickbait and there’s good clickbait. The NYTimes poll of the best TV of the 21st Century is great clickbait. So, click, read, and argue. I preferred the Readers’ Top 100 to the ‘Pro’s List’.
Humans have a cognitive quirk for the number three. Think of the many stories that use it, from The Three Little Pigs to Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Three Musketeers. Public information and political campaigns use it for impact and ease of recall (“Stop, look and listen”; “See it. Say it. Sorted”; “Reduce, reuse, recycle”). And then there are psychological or philosophical frameworks: Freud with his id, ego and superego; Plato’s three parts of the human soul; the Holy Trinity.
Well, it turns out neuroscience isn’t immune from tri-mania. In 1959 Paul D MacLean set out a new way of thinking about the evolution and function of the brain, which he christened the “triune” – three-in-one – model. It quickly became one of best known and most enduring concepts in human biology. His idea was that a trio of distinct brains are layered inside our skulls, one on top of the other, all fighting to generate our feelings and thoughts.
Deep inside, at the centre, lurks the primitive lizard brain, retained from an ancestor we share with reptiles. This contains ancient regions responsible for survival, helping us to hunt and forage, and driving our sexual impulses so that we reproduce. A second layer sits wrapped around the first, the so-called mammalian brain. It contains the limbic system, deemed to be the seat of our emotions. It enabled mammals to play, care for and nurse their young and communicate in some crude way.
The third and final layer, sheathing all of this and making humans in particular a cut above, is the “neomammalian” brain: the eminently rational cortex. This, it was proposed, provides us with our superior intellect, capacity for language and ability to reason. According to MacLean, it helped to keep in check our primitive, lizard-like impulses and rudimentary emotional reactions.
Sadly, though, the ‘lizard brain’ theory has been debunked:
As Guy Leschziner, consultant neurologist at London’s Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital put it to me: “the concept of different parts of the brain having different functions is extremely well established. However, to portray humans as having different brain layers, for example a ‘lizard brain’ underlying basic physiological functions, is not borne out by evolutionary or physiological evidence. For a start, mammals and reptiles split early in evolutionary terms. Whilst it is true that more primitive functions in our brains evolved earlier in the course of life on Earth, this view of three separate brain systems driving our basic instincts, emotions and logic respectively does not stack up.”
Lisa Feldman Barrett, professor of psychology at Northeastern University is another contemporary voice actively debunking the lizard brain myth. In her view, rather than operating as a battleground between ancient instinct, raw emotion and sophisticated logic, the brain is a dynamic, integrated system, whose aim is to keep us alive by predicting and budgeting our energy requirements.
Not really debunked, though. Just wait awhile and the Lizard Brain Theory will enjoy a resurgence. My lizard brain is certain of it.
Killer Fur Seals? Poor guys have been infected with rabies:
In 2021, an uptick in negative interactions between seals and humans signaled something was wrong. “Suddenly we saw this unexplained, very aggressive seal behavior,” says Gregg Oelofse, coastal manager for the city of Cape Town. In the past 20 years, he’d recorded only a couple of instances of seals biting humans.
Other illnesses, including a mysterious 2021 mass mortality event, also “masked this slow emergence of this rabies in the Cape fur seals,” says Tess Gridley, founding director of Sea Search in Cape Town, and author of a pre-print study on the outbreak.
The puzzle pieces didn’t fall into place until May 2024 when a pet dog caught rabies after a seal attack. Rabid dogs are rare in the Western Cape, prompting experts to consider whether the seal was the vector. Testing four seals confirmed that three animals that had displayed abnormally aggressive behavior were positive for rabies.
Here’s how scientists solved the puzzle of the rabies origin:
To solve the mystery, experts had to work backwards. Using genetic sequencing and phylogenetic analysis—mapping out how animals are related through evolution—they traced the source to black-backed jackals, a species known to carry rabies in South Africa.
Jackals live close to seal colonies where they hunt pups and scavenge carcasses, so it’s plausible that rabies was transmitted during a fight. Sequencing reveals the virus first entered seal populations around 2015, long before anyone knew such a thing was possible.Now, experts are desperately trying to contain the outbreak by vaccinating habituated seals and euthanizing animals suspected of having the disease. While individual seals can be vaccinated, injecting every seal from southern Angola through Namibia to South Africa’s eastern cape is logistically impossible. “How do you vaccinate two million Cape fur seals?” says Gridley. “We’re working in a complete unknown.”
The Church is not facing a crisis, exactly—more of a demographic ravine than a cliff, Jana Riess, a historian who studies the LDS faith, told me. But as of 2024, only about half of young people born into the Church stay in it—down from more than 80 percent in the 1980s. Its marriage rate has fallen 10 percent since 2011, and in the past 40 years, the number of annual recorded births per 1,000 LDS members has dropped from 25 to five, according to an analysis of Church records by the independent data scientist Alex Bass. If Latter-day Saints’ peculiarity was defined in part by their early marriages, their minivans full of kids, and their loyalty to the Church, some of that peculiarity seems to be slipping away.
In some ways, what’s happening to the LDS now is what happens to any religion that grows beyond a core of strong believers. Over time, the more particular edges of a faith—the meatless Fridays of Catholicism, for instance—can get sanded down until it more closely resembles mainstream American culture and mainline Protestantism, Matthew Bowman, the chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, told me. To him, the demographic shifts in the LDS indicate that “the long process of assimilation is becoming more noticeable now.”
The Church is having a particularly hard time keeping young women. In 2025, fewer than 40 percent of 18-year-old girls stayed in the faith, according to Dyer’s research. Many apostates leave because they are more liberal than the Church on issues such as same-sex marriage, but when Riess interviewed young women for her upcoming book on people who leave the faith, many of them also brought up feeling undervalued by the Church.
In LDS theology, only men can hold what is called the priesthood—the authority given by God to Joseph Smith and passed down through every generation of LDS men—which allows them to bless children and the sick, pass the sacrament, and serve in certain leadership positions. Because of this, essentially, “there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a man reports to a woman on questions of final authority, and there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a woman has final say,” Bowman said. And the 1995 Family Proclamation made clear that a wife’s role is to nurture the children. “It’s a tough position for the Church to be in,” Riess said. “It wants to remain attractive to women in a culture that has moved in a different direction, but also wants to stay pretty much on the same path of emphasizing this very particular configuration of the nuclear family.”
Meaning, the answer I posed in the headline above is “both”. Ladeez, why don’t you just ‘man up’?:
