Science as Defiance
In this benighted era, a scientific lecture seems like an act of resistance.
HOBOKEN, SEPTEMBER 23, 2025. Last week I headed to Manhattan for a scientific lecture. The gathering ended up feeling subversive, like an act of resistance.
Here’s the story:
My pal Tyler Volk, a big-picture scientist, alerts me to an upcoming lecture at NYU, where Tyler taught environmental studies for decades. Dietrich Stout, an anthropologist at Emory, is talking about “The Neuroscience of Cultural Evolution.”
I arrive at the theater-style classroom in NYU’s anthropology building 20 minutes early. Only two people are there, a freshman and a grad student in psychology. I chat with the latter about psychology’s post-Freudian quest for a unifying paradigm.
Meanwhile my friend Tyler and other humans of diverse ages, colors and genders trickle in. People are sitting and standing in the aisle by the time Dietrich Stout takes the stage. He’s a big, bearded guy, who speaks with a kind of casual intensity.
He has a lot to cover, he says, so he’s going to jump right in. He investigates how culture emerged in human pre-history. But before he gets into the details of his research, he wants to air some questions:
What is “culture” anyway? It’s often defined as “information,” but culture includes behaviors and artefacts that can’t be reduced to information in any simple way. (Right, I think, like MAGA rallies and AR-15s.)
What, if anything, makes humans “exceptional,” different from other animals? It can’t be that we make tools, because chimps, crows and octopuses make tools too. Are we special because we’re so smart? Well, how smart are we, really? Are we smart individually or collectively? (Yeah, how smart are we really?)
Stout dwells on what he calls the “progress problem.” Anthropology was invented by white males of European descent who saw evolution as a “success” story culminating in (surprise!) white, male Europeans. Anthropology and biology provided pseudo-scientific justifications for slavery and colonialism.
We’ve rejected racist evolutionary narratives. (But have we?) Some anthropologists nonetheless propose that culture has progressed in the sense of becoming more “complex,” Stout notes. But “complexity” turns out to be hard to define. (Yup, chaoplexologists ran into that problem decades ago.)
Was there a crucial factor that catalyzed the expansion of human culture and brains? Stout flashes an image from 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which an ape-man gleefully brandishes a bone with which he has just beaten a rival to death. In that film, Stout says with a smile, mysterious aliens got everything going. (But lots of people still believe the killer-ape theory.)
Was the emergence of modern civilization in some sense inevitable? Or was it a fluke? Stout displays The Dawn of Everything, in which anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow document the varieties of early societies. Maybe our current capitalist, militarist, patriarchal system wasn’t inevitable. (Maybe we still have options!)
Stout does such a great job exposing anthropology’s pitfalls that you wonder: How can anthropologists say anything with certainty? Stout reminds me of Clifford Geertz, who once said of “progress” in anthropology: “What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other.”
Stout has nonetheless come up with a down-to-earth approach to a key question: How did our ancestors learn from each other? How did they transmit knowledge? In Stout’s “Paleolithic Technology Laboratory,” students and others learn how to make stone tools.
Or try. Turning a chunk of flint into an axe blade is hard, requiring at least 100 hours of practice. Skilled toolmakers then show rookies how to do it. Here’s where “neuroscience” comes in: Stout scans toolmakers’ brains at various stages of learning, hoping to gain clues about neural processes that underpinned prehistoric cultural transmission.
I can’t do justice to Stout’s talk. I urge you to check out his publications, which include his 2016 Scientific American article “Tales of a Stone Age Neuroscientist.” But I want to comment on the style of Stout’s lecture, which impresses me as much as its substance.
Stout imparts information and speculation with wit, self-deprecation, doubt. He interrupts his riff on the “progress problem” by imagining us thinking: Oh no, not another anti-progress rant! He emphasizes the uncertainties of his research, acknowledging that he, like earlier anthropologists, might have blind spots,
And yet he’s passionate about his work, as he should be. In his own idiosyncratic way, he’s investigating the mind-body problem, the question of what we are, can be and should be. A little illumination—progress!--might be possible, he clearly believes, if we are sufficiently curious, imaginative and self-critical.
Stout’s audience impresses me too. They follow him raptly, and they pepper him with questions about how factors like language or violence might have affected prehistoric culture.
I recently argued that science has always been primarily a quest for power: the power to manipulate nature, get rich, kill rivals. Stout and his audience serve as a counterpoint to my cynical generalization. In this packed room, curiosity reigns. We’re after knowledge for its own sake.
At a time when it’s hard to talk about “progress” with a straight face, when our moral and even material progress seem in doubt, we’ve gathered here to ponder our origins because that’s a cool thing to do. What a defiant act! I’m not saying tears came to my eyes, but I felt an upswelling of pride for my flawed, noble species.
I went to Stout’s talk, I confess, seeking distraction, from my personal life as well as the political shitshow. I end up not distracted but inspired.
I remember what Laura Helmuth, Scientific American’s former editor, told me when we spoke last spring. I asked how scientists and science journalists can resist the current regime, and Helmuth replied that we can resist by saying:
“We can understand the world. Here's how we can understand it, here's actual data, here's reality… That's an act of resistance, to just insist on reality and to report what's true, and to explain how you know what's true.”
Postscript: I have paraphrased Stout freely. I welcome corrections and clarifications from him or anyone who attended his lecture.
Further Reading:
Holy Shit Science and My Hypocrisy