America as the Creedal Nation: A Response to Paul Gottfried

A few days ago, I wrote a response to Mark Brennan's essay in Chronicles Magazine arguing that the idea of America as a "Creedal Nation" is a "myth," because anyone who knows anything about American history knows that America has always been identified by its "Anglo-Protestant culture."  Yesterday, Paul Gottfried, the editor-in-chief of Chronicles, responded to my post by defending Brennan's claim as a "self-evident" truth about American history.

So what historical evidence does Gottfried cite to support his belief that, of course, America has always been culturally homogeneous in its identity as an "Anglo-Protestant" nation that does not depend on any affirmation of the Lockean liberal ideas of the Declaration of Independence?

THE MYTH OF PROTESTANT AMERICA

To prove that "there was a long-time Protestant dominance over American religious and moral life," Gottfried cites this passage from Michael McClymond's chapter in The Cambridge History of Religions in America:

Statistics tell a story. The newly formed United States of America included roughly 300,000 Protestant Christians in the year 1800. Yet by the year 1950, this number had grown to 43 million. This is a 143-fold increase, or a growth of 14,300 percent. The figure becomes more striking when one considers that the population of the nation, according to the United States Census, increased during the same period by the order of 28.4 times, from 5.3 million to 150.7 million. The increase in Protestant Christian affiliation during this period was 5.0 times the rate of the general population increase. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark noted that “the most striking trend in the history of religion in America is growth.” The overall rate of religious adherence in the U.S. population steadily climbed from 17 percent in 1776, to 34 percent in 1850, 45 percent in 1890, 56 percent in 1926, 59 percent in 1952, and 62 percent in 1980.

There are three interesting points here that Gottfried doesn't notice.  First, I fail to see how "17 percent in 1776" shows "Protestant dominance."  Indeed, the conclusion that McClymond draws from this (in a passage not quoted by Gottfried) is that "it is a mistake to think that there was a Christian golden age in the United States during the colonial era," because "the period of lowest religious affiliation in American history occurred around 1800 when there were much lower levels of church membership than at the present."

Second, when we speak about the growing numbers of "Protestant Christians," what kind of Protestantism are we talking about?  Is it the illiberal Protestantism of John Winthrop or the liberal Protestantism of Roger Williams?  In my post, I argued the Protestant liberalism of Williams--based on the liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty--eventually prevailed over Winthrop's illiberal theocratic principles.  I also pointed to the Constitution of 1789 as manifesting William's liberalism: the "no religious test" clause, the "no establishment of religion clause," and the absence of any reference to God or Jesus Christ made it clear that the Constitution did not establish America as a Protestant Christian Nation.  Brennan and Gottfried are silent about all of this.

Third, notice the title of the book from which Gottfried quoted: The Cambridge History of Religions in America:  "religions" is plural because this three-volume book is all about the religious pluralism of American history.  There are chapters on over two dozen religious traditions:  native American religion, Catholicism (actually a half dozen different traditions of Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, African religions, Islam, and many more.  In the Introduction to the book, the editor states the conclusion that emerges from the book:  "The net result of this historical development in North America is a rich religious culture that includes representatives of most of the world's religions. . . . One result of the religious freedom mandated by the Constitution was the dramatic expansion of the religious diversity in the new nation."  Gottfried is silent about this.

THE MYTH OF BRITISH AMERICA

First of all, let's remember that the American Revolution was to a large degree a civil war fought over the question of whether America's national identity was fundamentally British.  The American Patriots (or Whigs) said no.  The American Loyalists (or Tories) said yes.  That's why the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of the separation of the American People from the British People, and the statement of Lockean liberal principles in the Declaration was the justification for that separation.  By claiming that American national identity is necessarily British, Brennan and Gottfried take the losing side in the American Revolutionary War.  (They also take the losing side in America's second civil war--another war in which the Lockean Whigs defeated the Filmerian Tories.)

Like Brennan, Gottfried cites David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed as confirming America's British identity.  But like Brennan, Gottfried is silent about my reference to Fischer's African Founders as showing how African folkways were mixed with British folkways to create a new American culture. 

Brennan and Gottfried are also silent about this passage from Gordon Wood's essay:

Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society.  In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country.  In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry.  Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch.  The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.

And notice that this 60% English ancestry would be even lower if one counted the African Americans.

As I said in my post, this racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of America increased dramatically over the 19th century when the U.S. had a virtually open borders immigration policy.  Brennan and Gottfried say nothing about this.  Nor do they say anything about how this massive immigration favored the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War.

In my post, I pointed out the hypocrisy of people like J D Vance and Stephen Miller who argue that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture.  I wrote: Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?  No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.

Gottfried quotes this passage but he doesn't answer my charge of hypocrisy against Vance.  Gottfried does conclude his essay this way:

I agree with much of what I hear JD Vance say and would happily vote for him. I also think his wife is a much nicer person than the scowling Methodist Hillary Clinton or the goofball Lutheran Tim Walz. But we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody “our culture,” which means the one that has been obsessively vilified by our ruling class. Unfortunately, whatever has taken its place seems far, far worse.  

So it's all right for the Hindu Usha to be an American citizen because she's "nicer" than the Methodist Clinton or the Lutheran Walz?

And notice what he says in that last sentence: "we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody 'our culture.'"  So is he saying that we should not restrict immigration to those who embody our Anglo-Protestant culture, because it is "too late" to do that?

My other example of hypocrisy was Stephen Miller, whose grandparents were Russian Jews.  Brennan and Gottfried make no attempt to defend Miller on this point.  This is personal for Gottfried because he was born into a Hungarian Jewish family that immigrated to the U.S. in 1934.  Can Gottfried also be charged with hypocrisy?  He does say this: 

As everyone who knows me knows, my family came as refugees to this country long after the country was founded, and I was not born into its onetime dominant culture.  But I profoundly respect that culture and am glad to live in a country that once embraced it.

Now what is he saying here?  That America should open its borders to immigrants who do not belong to America's Anglo-Protestant culture as long as they "respect" that culture?  

And what does he mean by "onetime dominant culture"?  When did that "onetime dominant culture" cease to be dominant?  Sometime before 1934 when his parents came to America?  Sometime before the Civil War during the long period of open borders?  In 1789 with the ratification of the Constitution, which some of the Antifederalists denounced as "godless"?

Both Brennan and Gottfried are so obscure in their writing that I find it very hard to understand exactly what they are saying.

Do the Large Cetacean Brains Deny the "Human Advantage" in the Cerebral Cortex?

                                                                                      Orcas

I have agreed with Suzana Herculano-Houzel's argument that the (very rough) estimate of 16 billion neurons in the human cerebral cortex--out of the (very rough) estimate of 86 billion neurons in the whole human brain--gives us a "human advantage" that explains why we are the dominant animal on the Earth.  No other animal, she predicts, has more cortical neurons than the 16 billion in the human cerebral cortex.

But what about those animals that have brains larger than the human brain--elephants, whales, and dolphins?  Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues have reported that the African elephant brain is about three times larger than the human brain, and the elephant cerebral cortex is about twice the weight of the human cerebral cortex (Herculano-Houzel, et al. 2014).  Using the isotropic fractionator method for counting neurons, they counted an estimated 257 billion neurons in the elephant brain, which is three times more than the average human brain.  They also found that 97.5% of the neurons in the elephant brain (251 billion) are in the cerebellum.  So the elephant cerebral cortex has only about 5.6 billion neurons, which is only about one-third of the neurons in the human cerebral cortex.  This confirmed Herculano-Houzel's prediction that animals with brain larger than human brains would not have as many cortical neurons as in the human cerebral cortex.

As I have indicated in previous posts, these claims come with at least two kinds of reservations.  First, all of these numbers are only very rough estimates, because there is such a great range of variation in brains.  Second, the estimates here are based on a very small sample size--only the right half of one adult male elephant brain!  Counting the neurons in other elephant brains will result in widely varying numbers.  And there's always the problem of relying on "convenience samples": whether one has access to even one fresh elephant brain is happenstance.

But now if you look at Wikipedia's "List of Animals by Neuron Count," you will see (at the end of the article) the highest estimated numbers of cortical neurons.  And while humans rank near the top--with Herculano-Houzel's estimate of 16 billion--you will also see the Orca (Orcinus orca), or killer whale, has 43.1 billion cortical neurons (Ridgway et al. 2019), about two and a half times more than in the human brain.  You will also see estimates of 37.2 billion cortical neurons for the long-finned pilot whale (Mortensen et al. 2014), 12.8 billion for the common Minke whale (Eriksen and Pakkenberg 2007), and 11.8 billion for the short-finned pilot whale (Avelino-de-Souza 2018).  So here we have two cetacean species with many more cortical neurons in their brains than in the human brain, and two cetacean species whose number of cortical neurons are very close to the number in the human brain.

These data seem to falsify Herculano-Houzel's prediction in 2016 that the number of cortical neurons in the cetacean cerebral cortex would always be much lower than the 16 billion neurons in the human cerebral cortex (Herculano-Houzel 2016, 103-107).  But if you look more carefully at the various reports of neuron counts for cetacean brains, it's not so clear that her prediction has failed.

Eriksen and Pakkenberg (2007) reported using the stereological technique in counting 12.8 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex of the Northern common minke whale based on averaging the counts for five brains.  But Kamilla Avelino-de-Souza, Nina Patzke, Karl Karlsson, Paul R. Manger, and Suzanna Herculano-Houzel (2025) have recently reported using the isotropic fractionator technique in counting 3.2 billion neurons in the Northern minke whale based on a count for one adult male brain.

Why was the stereological estimate so much higher than the isotropic fractionator estimate?  Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues argue that the stereological technique suffers from undersampling.  Eriksen and Pakkenberg (2007, 87-88) report that they sampled only 12-13 sections out of over 3000 sections of the Northern minke whale cerebral cortex, counting only up to 215 neurons per brain.  Sampling from so few and minute sites creates undersampling because the neuronal densities in different areas of the brain are highly variable.  By contrast, the isotropic fractionator method eliminates undersampling by collecting samples from the brain structure of interest only after it has been homogenized into a soup in which the neuronal cell nuclei are evenly distributed (Avelino-de-Souza et al. 2025, 17; Herculano-Houzel 2016, 25-26, 28-34, 104-105).

Previously, in 2018, in her dissertation at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Avelino-de-Souza had reported using the isotropic fractionator technique to calculate that the Minke whale's cerebral cortex had 3.1 billion neurons--virtually the same number as in her recent report.  But in her dissertation, she also reported 11.8 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex of the short-finned pilot whale.  That's the number given in the Wikipedia list.  And it contradicts what Herculano-Houzel had predicted in 2016--that the number of cortical neurons in the pilot whale would be around 3 billion cortical neurons (Herculano-Houzel 2016, 104).  

I asked Herculano-Houzel about this, and she responded (in an email message):

In my recollection, the pilot whale [in Avelino-de-Souza's study] was a VERY old specimen--old in the sense that it had been sitting in fixative for a very, very long time, contrary to the minke whale we reported, which was freshly caught.  The nuclei still had detectable DNA, but were very autofluorescent.  Those counts were therefore an estimate based on total numbers of nuclei, but we cannot be really certain of what fraction were neurons.  We have a better specimen of a beluga whale now that we can work on and get a proper estimate for an odontocete.

I told her that I will be happy to see the numbers for that beluga whale.

Herculano-Houzel still has to explain the 43.1 billion count for the cortical neurons of the Orca (Ridgway et al. 2019) and the 37.2 billion count for the cortical neurons of the long-finned pilot whale (Mortensen et al. 2014).  Presumably, she will argue that these calculations suffer from the undersampling problem of the stereological technique.  But if some study using the isotropic fractionator technique were to confirm these counts for these cetaceans, that would falsify her predictions.

REFERENCES

Avelino de Souza, Kamilla. 2018. "Analysis of the Cellular Composition of the Cetacean Brain."  Ph.D. Dissertation. Program in Morphological Sciences. Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Avelino-de-Souza, Kamilla, Nina Patzke, Karl Karlsson, Paul R. Manger, and Suzana Herculano-Houzel. 2025. "Cellular Composition of the Brain of a Northern Minke Whale." Journal of Comparative Neurology 533:e70089.

Eriksen, Nina, and Bente Pakkenberg. 2007. "Total Neocortical Cell Number in the Mysticete Brain." The Anatomical Record 290:83-95.

Herculano-Houzel, Suzana, Kamilla Avelino-de-Souza, Leber Neves, Jairo Porfirio, Debora Messeder, Larissa Mattos Feijo, Jose, Maldonado, and Paul R. Manger. 2014. "The Elephant Brain in Numbers." Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 8: Article 46.

Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Mortensen, Heidi S., Bente Pakkenberg, Maria Dam, Rune Dietz, Christian Sonne, Bjami Mikkelsen, and Nina Eriksen. 2014. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy 8: article 132.

Ridgway, Sam H., Robert H. Brownson, Kaitlin R. Van Alstyne, and Robert A. Hauser. 2019. "Higher Neuron Densities in the Cerebral Cortex and Larger Cerebellums May Limit Dive Times of Delphinids Compared to Deep-Diving Toothed Whales." PLoS ONE 14 (12): e0226206.

The History of America Makes It a Creedal Nation

Now that we are in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, there is debate over the significance of that document.  For Gordon Wood, the distinguished historian of the American Founding, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Declaration helps Americans understand who they are, because it states those truths that Americans must hold to be self-evident--the truths of equal liberty--that make America a "creedal nation" rather than a nation defined by race, ethnicity, and religion.  But for Mark Brennan, writing in the January 2026 issue of Chronicles Magazine, Wood's creedal nation is a myth that contradicts the history of "America's Anglo-Protestant culture" as the real identity of the American nation (quoting from Samuel Huntington's Who We Are: The Challenges to America's National Identity).

Notice the contradiction in what people like Huntington and Brennan say.  They claim to be defending America's unique identity.  But the idea that national identity depends on race, ethnicity, and religion is a foreign idea imported from Europe and elsewhere outside America.  By contrast, America as a creedal nation as declared in the Declaration of Independence makes America uniquely American, unlike all the other nations.  Before 1776, no nation had ever had anything like the Declaration of Independence.

If you read Brennan's essay, you should notice that he arrogantly asserts that Wood is somehow ignorant of American history as showing that America has been always an Anglo-Protestant culture.  But he never presents even a brief summary of this history--as if it should be obvious.

Brennan does invoke David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America as showing that "the legacy of the four British folkways remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today."  But Brennan is silent about Fischer's more recent book African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, in which he shows how slaves from different regions of Africa interacted with European colonists to create new regional cultures in the United States.  The mixing of African folkways and British folkways created a new American culture.

PROTESTANT AMERICA?

So what about Brennan's insistence on America's Protestant culture?  Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians cannot be real Americans?  And certainly Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religious traditions would have to be excluded.  Think about what that means.  

As I have indicated previously, it has become common for nationalist conservatives like J. D. Vance to say that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture: if America had open borders, it would cease to exist as nation because it would have no distinctive social identity.

But remember that JD's wife Usha was born in 1986 in California to Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri, who are both Telugu Indian immigrants, speaking the Telugu language, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from Andhra Pradesh, which is a state on the east coast of southern India.  Usha met JD at Yale Law School.  They married in 2014 in an interfaith marriage ceremony: Usha is a practicing Hindu, while JD was raised as an Evangelical Christian before converting to Catholicism in 2019.  They have three children.

Hmm.  Sounds like a heck of a lot of cultural diversity to me.  Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?  No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.

Similarly, consider the strange case of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who wants to deport those immigrants who might threaten the cultural homogeneity of America.  As has been noted in a recent article in The New Republic, Miller's ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903 when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser landed at Ellis Island, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in czarist Russia.  Glosser then began sending money back to relatives in Russia and helped them immigrate to the U.S.  But that was stopped by the Immigration Act of 1924 that shut down immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, because so many Americans thought they had to protect the purity of white, Christian, and western European culture.  Miller says he wants to restore something like the 1924 Act.  Does that mean that he and his family should be deported?  After all, his ancestry is neither Protestant nor English.  Of course, like Vance, Miller doesn't really believe what he says.

But let's go back to the beginning--to the earliest European immigrant settlers in North America in the seventeenth century.  What do we see?  Brennan would say: they were almost all Protestants!  Well, but what kind of Protestantism?

From 1607, the Virginia Colony had established Anglican churches in each county with taxpayer support.  But the Anglican Church was weaker in the other colonies, particularly in Puritan New England. In 1779, the Anglican Church was disestablished in Virginia; and in 1786, the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty separated church and state.  By 1833, all the states had abolished the state funding of established churches.

This vindicated Roger Williams in his defense of religious liberty against the Puritan theocracy that John Winthrop had established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.  When Williams was banished from Massachusetts, he founded the city of Providence (later incorporated into Rhode Island) in 1637.  Williams thus became the first Founding Father of America by promoting the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state that became a critical part of the American Creed of cultural pluralism.

Moreover, we should realize that Williams extended the principle of freedom of conscience to support toleration of not just all Protestants, but also Catholics, Muslims, pagans, and even atheists.  That broad principle of toleration is evident in the Constitution of 1789--particularly, in the "no religious test" clause, the no "establishment of religion" clause, and the Constitution's silence about God, which provoked some critics into denouncing the Constitution as "godless."  Thus, America's national identity was tied not to any particular religious tradition but to the creedal commitment to religious liberty and freedom of conscience, which protects Catholics like Vance and Jews like Miller from being persecuted.  This American history of toleration and pluralism denies Brennan's claim that the American nation must be Protestant.

ANGLO AMERICA?

Similarly, the American history of immigration denies Brennan's claim that American national identity depends on English ancestry.  Wood writes:

Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society.  In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country.  In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry.  Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch.  The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.

Brennan is silent about this.  He is also silent about the massive immigration into America during the long period of almost completely open borders from 1789 to 1921.  Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States.  If their American-born descendants are added to this number, this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.

This immigration altered the cultural and political history of the United States.  The most dramatic illustration of this is the American Civil War.  From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States.  This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860.  That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration helped to decide the outcome of the Civil War.  

In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery.  As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.

In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality.  Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).

Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield.  He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument.  The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."  Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).

It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504).  So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.

On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants.  When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers."  But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans.  We have

. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.  If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).

This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their patriotic love of America and their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal.  What makes Americans Americans is their moral character as "patriotic and liberty-loving men."

In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States.  And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy.  The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.  Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field.

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them.

As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.

But once Trump and the MAGA Republicans are out of power, we can work to restore the promise of America as a creedal nation dedicated to that "electric cord" in the Declaration of Independence "that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."

"Absolute Immunity" for Trump's Paramilitary ICE Agents Murdering Americans

 

  ICE Officer Jonathan Ross Murders 37-Year-Old Renee Good in Minneapolis

Last August, I predicted that Trump could use the "absolute immunity" granted to him by the Supreme Court to use his paramilitary federal officers to murder Americans.  Now that has started.  After ICE officer Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis, J. D. Vance spoke at a press conference where he said: "That guy is protected by absolute immunity.  He was doing his job."

Some MAGA politicians are predicting that ICE agents will be murdering more Americans.  Randy Fine, a MAGA Republican congressman from Florida, has said: "If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they seek to repel foreign invaders from our country, you get what's coming to you.  I do not feel bad for the woman who was involved."

The Very Rough Estimate of 86 Billion Neurons in the Human Brain--Or At Least in the Brains of Four Men--Explains Our Human Nature

As I said a few years ago, I have been persuaded by Suzana Herculano-Houzel's argument that the number and distribution of neurons in our brain largely explain why we have become the dominant animal on planet Earth (Herculano-Houzel 2016).  The brain is the organ that organizes our thinking and our behavior.  Of the three main components of the brain--neurons, glial cells, and vasculature--neurons are the functional units that integrate synaptic activity and then pass it on.  We can infer, therefore, she argues, that the ultimate causes for the flexibility and complexity of cognition and behavior arise from the numbers of neurons in well-defined circuits in the brain.  

But now, after reading Alain Goriely's recent article in Brain (2025) criticizing Herculano-Houzel's claim that she has correctly counted the number of neurons in the human brain, I have been reconsidering her whole argument.

Let's begin by reexamining the techniques for counting neurons in the brain.

THE ANSWER IS IN THE BRAIN SOUP

How many neurons are in the human brain?  For many years, the answer from many scientists was 100 billion.  But, surprisingly, when Herculano-Houzel began some years ago looking for the original scientific research that provided evidence for this number, she found nothing.  She discovered that neuroscientists had repeated this number over and over again without realizing that there was no scientific verification for it (Bartheld, Bahney, and Herculano-Houzel 2016). 

Moreover, she discovered that scientists had no reliable method for counting brain cells.  The most common method for attempting to do this was stereology: virtual three-dimensional probes are placed throughout thin slices of brain tissue from some part of the brain, then the number of cells within the probes are counted, and finally this is extrapolated to the total number of cells in the entire tissue volume.  The problem is that this works only for tissues with a relatively homogeneous distribution of cells.  In fact, the highly variable density of neurons across different structures of the brain, and even within a single structure, makes stereology impractical for counting the cells in whole brains.

Herculano-Houzel developed a new technique for counting neurons that starts with creating brain soup.  She dissects the brain into its anatomically distinct parts--such as the cerebral cortex, the cerebellum, and the olfactory bulbs.  She then slices and dices each part into smaller portions.  Next, she puts each small part in a tube and uses a detergent that dissolves the cell membranes but leaves the cell nuclei intact.  By sliding a piston up and down in the tube, she homogenizes this brain tissue into a soup in which the nuclei are evenly distributed.  She stains all the cell nuclei blue so that she can count them under a fluorescent microscope.  She then adds an antibody labeled red that binds specifically to a protein expressed in all neuronal cell nuclei, which distinguishes them from other cell nuclei such as glial cells.  Going back to the microscope, she can then determine what percentage of all nuclei (stained blue) belong to neurons (now stained red).  Finally, she can estimate the number of neurons for each structure of the brain.  She has done this in studying the brains of many mammalian animals.

Now she can tell us that the total number of neurons in the whole human brain is not 100 billion but about 86 billion.  Of that total, about 16 billion are in the cerebral cortex, which includes about 1.3 billion neurons in the prefrontal cortex.  The cerebral cortex is the outer covering of the surfaces of the cerebral hemispheres.  The prefrontal cortex covers the front part of the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex located behind the forehead.  

Other animals with larger brains--like elephants, whales, and dolphins--have larger brains with more neurons.  But what makes the human brain unique is the large number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, which is the part of the brain responsible for the highest levels of cognition--such as self-consciousness, abstract thinking, social engagement, language, memory, and emotion.

8 BILLION HUMAN BRAINS AND NO TWO ARE THE SAME

Notice that in stating the numbers of neurons, the numbers are qualified by the word "about."  That points to the problem identified by Goriely, a mathematician at Oxford University who has noted that if you look at the research of Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues, you will see that the average numbers they give are only rough estimates with a wide range of variation based on a small sample of human brains.  

There are two main papers--Von Bartheld et al. (2009) and Andrade-Moraes et al. (2013).  The 2009 paper reports an analysis of the brains from four deceased males aged 50, 51, 54, and 71, who had no cognitive impairment when they died.  The authors declare that the adult male brain contains an average of 86 billion neurons.  But if you look at the numbers for the four brains, you will see that 86 billion is the average of 78.82, 79.72, 90.30, and 95.40 billion.  This is a wide range--from 79 billion to 95 billion--and it's based on only four data points.

The 2013 paper reports a counting of the neurons in the brains of five elderly females--between the ages of 71 and 84--who died of non-neurological causes.  The numbers for these five brains were 62.1, 63.3, 67.3, 72, and 72.06 billion.  This is a wide range, and it's well below the range for the 2009 paper.  The average for these women was 67 billion, as opposed to 86 billion for the men.

Goriely suggests that the only statements we can make about these two studies are rather weak:

(i) Experiments have shown variations between 62 and 95 bn neurons in the human brain (n = 9).

(ii) An experimental study on the number of neurons suggests an average between 79 and 95 bn neurons in the healthy male brain (n = 4).

(iii) An experimental study on the number of neurons suggests an average between 62 and 72 bn neurons in the healthy female human brain (n = 5).

Clearly, none of these statements is satisfactory or as catchy as "the human brain has 86 billion neurons" (Goriely 2025, 691).

Notice that depending upon how you aggregate these nine data points, you could have three different averages.  If you average the four data points for the males, the average is 86 billion.  If you average the five data points for the females, the average is 67 billion.  If you average all nine data points, the average is 76 billion. 

In a response to Goriely, Christopher von Bartheld (2025) has conceded that, of course, it would be absurd to say that all human brains contain exactly 86 billion neurons.  About 8 billion human brains are currently operating in the world today, and because of the biological variability of those individuals, no two brains are exactly alike.  But it is still justifiable to look for rough estimates and approximate ranges for the number of neurons in the human brain.

We can expect that the number of neurons in different brains will vary according to the effects of gender, age, brain mass, and variation in life history.  For example, people with Down syndrome are thought to have perhaps 40% fewer neurons than a normal brain.  People with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease have fewer neurons in some part of the brain.  Malnutrition both in utero and after birth can impede the growth of neurons.  Some of the women in the 2013 study were born in World War II or shortly thereafter, and it's possible that they suffered from the malnutrition caused by the war.  That or other factors related to their life history might explain why the five women had a lower average number of neurons than the four men.

Actually, the brains of the five women in the 2013 study were used as "controls" in comparison with the brains of five other women with dementia from Alzheimer's disease, and with four women with the neural plaques and neurofibrillary tangles associated with Alzheimer's but without dementia.  The study concluded that the five women with dementia had suffered a loss of neurons, while the other nine women had not shown any dementia from loss of neurons.

For a long time it was assumed that dementia and severe mental decline were the inevitable consequence of a normal process of aging with the loss of neurons.  What this and other studies have shown is that loss of neurons is not part of the normal aging process, and therefore the neurogenerative diseases of the elderly come from an abnormal loss of neurons.

Hey, this is great news for us old folks--the rotting of our brains is not an unavoidable consequence of our aging!

So what does all of this mean for assessing Herculano-Houzel's argument?  This does not refute her claim that she can estimate the number of neurons in human brains.  But this does suggest that she needs to qualify her claim by stressing that these numbers are only very rough estimates within wide ranges created by the biological variability in individual brains--with a range between 62 and 95 billion for normal brains, and an even wider range for abnormal brains.  She should also admit that the average of 86 billion is only for the four adult male brains in the 2009 paper.  Perhaps she should put into italics this sentence from her 2009 paper: "Exact numbers are probably highly variable among humans, particularly given the variation of over 50% in the number of cortical neurons among individuals of the same sex described recently in the literature."  But she should drop the word "probably"--exact numbers are highly variable among humans!

She also needs to make a second qualification that has not been brought up by critics like Goriely:  although the sheer number of neurons in the human brain is surely a critical factor in explaining the power of the human brain, we also need to recognize the importance of the structural organization of those neurons into complex circuits.  Actually, Herculano-Houzel and her colleagues point to this when they stress the importance of how those 86 billion neurons are organized in the human brain, and particularly having 16 billion neurons organized into the circuitry of the neocortex, of which 1.3 billion are in the prefrontal cortex.

Although Herculano-Houzel's main argument is that large numbers of neurons in the neocortex are a key component of complex cognition, she recognizes that, of course, many other factors are also important--such as "cellular morphology, connectivity patterns, neurochemical properties, and cognition-related regulatory genetic sequences" (Strockens et al. 2021, 1602).

At this point, many of you are thinking of questions that I haven't answered.  What about those huge cetacean brains?  And what about those really smart bird brains that don't even have a cerebral cortex?  I'll take up those questions in my next posts.

REFERENCES

Andrade-Moraes, Carlos Humberto, et al. 2013. "Cell Number Changes in Alzheimer's Disease Relate to Dementia, Not to Plaques and Tangles." Brain 136: 3738-3752.

Azevedo, Frederico A. C., et al. 2009. "Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Nonneural Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-Up Primate Brain." The Journal of Comparative Neurology 513: 532-541.

Goriely, Alain. 2025. "Eighty-Six Billion and Counting: Do We Know the Number of Neurons in the Human Brain?" Brain 148: 689-691.

Herculano-Houzel, Suzana. 2016. The Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Strockens, Felix, et al. 2022. "High Associative Neuron Numbers Could Drive Cognitive Performance in Corvid Species." The Journal of Comparative Neurology 530:1588-1605.

von Bartheld, Christopher S. 2025. "Understanding and Misunderstanding Cell Counts of the Human Brain: The Crux of Biological Variation." Brain 148: e72-e74.

von Bartheld, Christopher, Jami Bahney, and Suzana Herculano-Houzel. 2016. "The Search for True Numbers of Neurons and Glial Cells in the Human Brain: A Review of 150 Years of Cell Counting." The Journal of Comparative Neurology 524: 3865-3895.

Lauren Hall's Radical Moderation as a Response to Trump's Dictatorship: Evolutionary Ordoliberalism?

 

Recently, Lauren Hall appeared on the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie.  She was asked to explain how her proposed "radical moderation" could overcome America's social and political polarization, which has become ever more destructive under Donald Trump's dictatorial rule.  Although she might not like the term, what she says here sounds to me like an evolutionary ordoliberalism.  

Hall is a professor of political science at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.  She writes about her Radical Moderation at her Substack.  I know her as one of my very best graduate students at Northern Illinois University.

Hall says that her radical moderation is moderate in the fundamental sense of avoiding excessive or extreme ideas and behavior and more particularly rejecting binary thinking.  So she rejects the tribalism that forces a false binary choice of Blue or Red, Left or Right, Black or White, Black Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, and all the other zero-sum choices imposed on us.

But her moderation is radical because it goes beyond a one-dimensional moderation that would seek a middle ground between two extremes--a compromise in between Left and Right, black and white, either/or.  Instead, she says her radical moderation is a four-dimensional moderation that recognizes that human beings live in a complex four-dimensional world: the breadth of social networks, the depth of the deep challenges of life, the heights of human achievement, and the extended historical, developmental, and generational time in which life is lived.

In contrast to this messy complexity and contingency of real human life, America's social and political polarization simplifies life into a binary tribalism: it's us or them, friends or enemies, the real Americans or those Americans who are not real Americans.  This binary tribalism has created a hate-filled division not only in our political life (the vicious partisan rage that divides Republicans and Democrats) but also in our personal life (for example, families that cannot discuss politics at the Thanksgiving dinner table without fear of it becoming a mean-spirited fight).

To overcome this polarizing conflict that is tearing us apart, Hall suggests, we must first understand what it is in our human nature that has caused it.  And then we must search for a solution--some way to resolve or at least moderate the conflict.

First, we must understand the evolutionary psychology of tribalism as a propensity of our evolved human nature.  Hall explains how she studied the evolutionary biology of human behavior with David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University where she was an undergraduate student.  She then continued those evolutionary studies in combination with political theory as a graduate student in political science.  When she was a student at NIU, the Department of Political Science had "Politics and the Life Sciences" as a graduate field of study, which combined behavioral political science, political theory, and biopolitical science.

Drawing on these biopolitical studies, Hall can explain polarized tribalism as a deep tendency of human nature.  Human beings have a natural desire for social membership--for belonging to a group, collaborating with others in that group, and deriving one's identity from that group.  We can belong to many different groups--our family, our neighborhood, our church, our school, our profession, our political party, our ethnic group, our nation.

There's a dark side to this social cohesion of a group, however, because we often cooperate within our group to compete with those outside our group.  This is the in-group/out-group psychology of tribalism.  I have written about this as the evolutionary psychology of "parochial altruism"--we have evolved to be nice to insiders but nasty to outsiders.  This explains why some MAGA intellectuals have embraced Carl Schmitt's argument that politics is all about the fight between friends and enemies as supporting Trump's politics of rewarding the loyalty of his friends and punishing the animosity of his enemies.

While it would be foolish and dangerous to try to suppress the tribalism of our nature, Hall argues, we can and should mitigate tribal conflict by bringing under the "big tent of liberal democratic institutions" that protect liberal pluralism without agreement on a particular way of life for America.  She describes her appreciation for pluralism as a product of her life in America's liberal social order.  

She stresses the complex multiplicity of her social identity: "I'm Lauren Hall, an author, speaker, professor, wife and mother, university administrator, and haphazard gardener.  I grew up in a Zen Buddhist house in a Jewish town with evangelical and Mormon relatives.  After a childhood spent navigating different perspectives, I went off to graduate school and studied evolutionary psychology, political behavior, and political thought.  I've worked and studied with progressives, conservatives, libertarians, and everything in between and am all the better for it."  In 2019, she converted to Catholicism.  So she belongs to, or at least appreciates, many different tribes.  And in a liberal open society like America, there is enough tolerance for cultural diversity that those tribes can live together in peace.

But then came Trump.  She has admitted "I Was Wrong About Trump."  After his first term, she thought Trump was "egotistical and uninterested in governance, but maybe not completely pathological," and therefore he would not be too dangerous in his second term.  But she was wrong because she did not foresee what he has done in the first year of his second term in his vicious attacks on the institutional foundations of liberal democracy.  She identifies the five most prominent examples of this: attacks on the rule of law and checks and balances, attacks on civil society institutions, undermining shared epistemological foundations (through misinformation and conspiracy theories), undermining respect for elections, and violent rhetoric and dehumanization of citizens.

America's two major political parties have allowed this to happen, Hall observes, and therefore we cannot expect the two parties to reverse this slide into dictatorial authoritarianism.  The one possible solution that she proposes is to have civil society institutions--charitable foundations, universities, media organizations, corporations, and prominent citizens--to form "A Coalition for America" that would protect the seven keystone institutions that secure liberal pluralism:

1. Separation of powers and checks and balances.

2. An independent judiciary.

3. Federalism that respects state and local governance.

4. Rule of law, not rule of men.

5. Free and independent media.

6. Academic freedom and independent universities.

7. Fair and transparent electoral processes.

The fundamental principle here is to establish institutions that put power against power.  Or as Madison said in Federalist 51: "This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public."  This is what I have called the principle of institutional countervailance, which is deeply rooted in the evolutionary history of politics.

I have also identified this reliance on liberal institutions to secure liberal pluralism as ordoliberalism.  This idea of ordoliberalism originally came out of the University of Freiburg beginning in the 1930s.  The central concept of the Freiburg School was captured by the German word Ordnung or the Latin word Ordo.  Liberalism, the Freiburg theorists argued, requires a market order that is a constitutional order, and thus true liberalism must be an ordo-liberalism.  Some proponents of laissez-faire liberalism sometimes convey the impression that free markets can function best without any rules enforced by government, and indeed some of them (like Murray Rothbard, for example) have been anarchists.  But the Freiburg ordo-liberals have argued that a free-market order is not anarchistic, because it depends upon a constitutional framework that sets the rules of the game of free competition, in which all economic agents meet as legal equals and coordinate their activities through voluntary exchange and contract.  This constitutional order of liberty includes both the informal norms that arise through cultural evolution and the formal norms of legal and political design.  Friedrich Hayek showed the influence of ordoliberalism when he spoke about "the constitution of liberty" as an institutional framework of impartial rules that would check powerful rulers and special interests seeking unfair advantages from government and thus secure liberty in a pluralist society.

So I see Hall's argument for protecting the institutions of liberal democracy as ordoliberalism.  I also see it as an evolutionary ordoliberalism, because it is rooted in her understanding of how the evolution of human nature makes it necessary to have an institutional framework that constrains the pursuit of power and protects liberty.  This reminds me of her work as a graduate student.  She wrote a Master’s thesis arguing that evolutionary psychology supported Hayek’s argument for liberty under the rule of law against utopian conceptions of the centrally planned society.  She extended this line of thought in a dissertation arguing for what she called “evolutionary liberty,” which applied Darwinian science to support a classical liberal understanding of liberty.  She showed how a Darwinian conception of evolved human nature can sustain the arguments in the classical liberal tradition from Adam Smith to Hayek.  (I have written a lot about the evolutionary liberalism of Hayek and Smith.)

Reason magazine is a libertarian or classical liberal journal with the motto "Free Minds and Free Markets."  And so, as one would expect, the Reason Interview usually spotlights someone with libertarian leanings.  If I am right, then Hall's Radical Moderation might not exactly represent libertarianism, but it does suggest evolutionary ordoliberalism.

Monogamy, Polyamory, and the Primate Myth

That we can understand human nature by comparing ourselves with our closest living primate relatives--chimps and bonobos--has been a recurring theme in my blog posts over the years.  So it might seem that Jonathan Leaf's new book--The Primate Myth--is a powerful critique of my position, because Leaf argues that we cannot learn who we are by studying chimps and bonobos, assuming that the underlying patterns of their behavior are the same as ours, which is what Leaf calls the Primate Myth.  Even if we share some common genetic ancestry with primates--particularly, the great apes--we are radically different from apes, Leaf insists, in our genetic profile, in the configuration of our brains, in our anatomy, and in our social behavior.  To explain those differences, we need to see how our evolutionary adaptations for hunting and language made our earliest human ancestors less like apes and more like dolphins, dogs, rats, and elephants.  

Leaf stresses that human beings are unique in their extreme sociality--their social awareness and their capacity for social collaboration.  While primates are social animals, they are not as highly social as the animals that live in packs or herds.  Humans are more a herd or pack animal than a primate, because our earliest evolutionary ancestors depended on collaborative hunting in packs and herding together to repel predators.

Because of the Primate Myth, humans have been classified as belonging to the Order of Primates and the Family of Hominidae (humans and the other great apes--chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans).  But if we recognized how radically different human beings are from primates, Leaf argues, we would classify humans as belonging to their own order (Homo), or at least in their own family, separated from the great apes (245).

Leaf is certainly right in saying that to understand human evolution, it is not sufficient to look for human similarities to those other primates with whom we share common descent, because we must also see how humans differ radically from those primates.  By convergent evolution our human ancestors evolved adaptations for filling an evolutionary niche--collaborative hunting--that made them more like the herd or pack animals than like the other primates with whom they shared genetic ancestry.

But Leaf is wrong in saying that most evolutionary scientists today deny this because they are so committed to the Primate Myth that humans are most like primates--particularly, chimps and bonobos--in their behavioral and psychological propensities and unlike all non-primate animals.  The Primate Myth is a straw man, because in attacking the Primate Myth, Leaf distorts what most evolutionary scientists say about human evolution to make it easier to refute.

In a few places in his book, Leaf comes close to admitting this.  One example is a passage about Frans de Waal, who is the primary villain in Leaf's book (38-40). Leaf says that many readers of de Waal's first book--Chimpanzee Politics--mistakenly assumed that he was saying "that humans were almost exactly the same as chimps." In fact, Leaf observes, de Waal in that book points to "a number of critical differences" between humans and chimps. And in his later writings, de Waal "emphasized the kinship that humans bear to an array of non-primate animals." "In other words, what de Waal was thought to be arguing in his first and most influential book and what he was actually proposing aren't the same."  But then Leaf devotes most of his book to attacking what he here recognizes to be a mistaken interpretation of de Waal--the belief that humans are almost the same as chimps and other primates.

I can imagine, however, that Leaf could respond by saying no, this is not a straw man, because I point to good examples of people assuming the Primate Myth in explaining human evolution.  The best example might be the argument of Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha in their popular bestseller Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships (2010).  Under the influence of the Primate Myth--"the idea that human behavior is very much like ape behavior"--they say that since chimps and bonobos are sexually promiscuous, with no enduring pair-bonding of sexual mates, that must mean that our earliest human ancestors were just as promiscuous, and therefore monogamous pair-bonding is contrary to our evolved human nature.  Human beings would be happier, Ryan and Jetha insist, if married couples were "polyamorous"--if they felt free to have extramarital sexual affairs without feeling shame or fearing that this must break up their marriage: couples can happily live together and rear their children together but sleep around without harming themselves or their children, because primate promiscuity is natural for human beings.  

Leaf devotes over eight pages of his book to explaining and refuting their argument (168-177).  He has also taken excerpts from this part of his book for an article on "The Polyamory Delusion" for National Review that will be the cover story for the February 2026 issue.  His preoccupation with Sex at Dawn makes me think that his reading of this book some fifteen years ago was what originally motivated him to write The Primate Myth to counter the harmful consequences of teaching people that imitating the behavior of chimps and bonobos would make them happy.

Leaf is correct in criticizing Ryan and Jetha for their refusing to see that ape sexuality is different from human sexuality, because in contrast to ape promiscuity, the evolutionary function of human sexuality is to strengthen monogamous pair-bonds and the biparental care of children.  He is mistaken, however, in his claim that evolutionary biologists agree with Ryan and Jetha in their primate model of human sexuality as naturally inclined to polyamorous promiscuity.  The Primate Myth embraced by Ryan and Jetha is a fringe position that is outside the mainstream thinking of most evolutionary scientists, and that's why I say the Primate Myth is a straw man.

Previously, I have written about how the evolution of monogamous pair-bonding among our prehistoric foraging ancestors gave birth to the unique structure of human society that sets it apart from the social life of chimps and bonobos as based on sexual promiscuity in mating and reproduction.  Even in cultures that allow polygamy, most people are in monogamous marriages.  And there is plenty of evidence that polygamous marriages tend to be full of conflict: the cowives fight amongst themselves, men fight with one another over access to women, and children often suffer from parental neglect.

It is true, of course, that even in societies where monogamy is the norm, there is sexual promiscuity that can create some uncertainty about paternity.  But remarkably, recent research shows that the rate of "extra pair paternity"--where a woman bears offspring from a man other than her spouse--is usually below 3 percent (Larmuseau et al. 2013, 2019; Zimmer 2016).  By contrast, extra-pair fertilization in socially monogamous bird species can range as high as 20 percent (Brouwer and Griffith 2019; Griffith et al. 2002).

Leaf cites this kind of evidence as showing that while promiscuity is a problem for human beings, it is not as pervasive as it is for primates because human beings have an evolved natural desire for monogamous pair-bonding.  Leaf rightly concludes that this refutes Ryan and Jetha's primate model of human sexuality as naturally inclined to polyamorous promiscuity rather than sexual monogamy.

But Leaf is wrong when he says that evolutionary biologists agree with Ryan and Jetha (Leaf 2025, 171, 173).  In fact, Ryan and Jetha repeatedly insist that they are attacking the "standard narrative of human sexual evolution" that upholds monogamous pair-bonding as crucial for human evolution (Ryan and Jetha 2010, 7-8, 11, 25, 34-35, 38-39, 46-60, 99, 137, 142, 149, 223, 266, 300).  Leaf is silent about this.

For example, Ryan and Jetha criticize Frans de Waal for embracing the "standard narrative."  They quote various remarks by de Waal as illustrating the "standard narrative" of human sexual monogamy that they reject.  De Waal argued that the nuclear family is "intrinsically human," and the pair-bond is "the key to the incredible level of cooperation that marks our species," because "our success as a species is intimately tied to the abandonment of the bonobo lifestyle and to a tighter control over sexual expressions." He observed: "The intimate male-female relationship . . . which zoologists have dubbed a 'pair bond,' is bred into our bones.  I believe this is what sets us apart from the apes more than anything else."   He also said: "Both chimps and bonobos are far more promiscuous than we are. Our testicles reflect this: they are mere peanuts compared to our ape relatives' coconuts" (de Waal 2005, 108, 113, 124-25; Ryan and Jetha 2010, 76, 115, 225).

Leaf does not allow his readers to see this.  Because if his readers saw that the Primate Myth as embraced by Ryan and Jetha is rejected by de Waal and most other evolutionary scientists, they would see that when Leaf attacks the Primate Myth, he is attacking a straw man.

REFERENCES

Brouwer, Lyanne, and Simon Griffith. 2019. "Extra-Pair Paternity in Birds." Molecular Ecology. 28: 4864-4882.

de Waal, Frans. 2005. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead Books.

Griffith, Simon, Ian Owens, and Katherine Thuman. 2002. "Extra Pair Paternity in Birds: A Review of Interspecific Variation and Adaptive Function. Molecular Ecology 11: 2195-2212.

Larmuseau, M. H. D., et al. 2013. "Low Historical Rates of Cuckoldry in a Western European Human Population Traced by Y-chromosome and Genealogical Data." Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 280:20132400.

Leaf, Jonathan. 2025. The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature. New York: Bombardier Books.

Ryan, Christopher, and Cacilda Jetha. 2010. Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships. New York: Harper.

Zimmer, Carl. 2013. "Monogamy and Human Evolution." New York Times, August 2.

Zimmer, Carl. 2016. "Fathered by the Mailman? It's Mostly an Urban Legend." New York Times, April 8.