Every claim
Every claim the site shows, in one list. Each has a page with its sources and a way to dispute it.
KnownReplicated, consensus empirical finding.
SpeculativePublished and serious, but disputed, emerging, or not reliably replicated.
ImaginedThe author's own framework, synthesis or proposal: a way of seeing, or a case argued in the open.
- FRM-01A person can be understood as four nested kingdoms: molecules, body and sense, relationships, and mind.
- FRM-02Upward constraint: what a higher level can be is limited by the levels beneath it.
- FRM-03Upward emergence: higher levels show properties that their parts do not have.
- FRM-03QWhat emergence ultimately is remains disputed: whether properties of the whole are new in reality, or new only in our descriptions of it.
- FRM-04Downward causation: higher levels reshape the levels beneath them.
- FRM-04QPhilosophers still dispute whether the higher level is itself the cause, or only the lower-level processes that make it up.
- FRM-05The same four-layer architecture recurs at the scale of the person, the cosmos and civilisation.
- THR-01A woman sits across from you on a train, looking at her phone. In a few minutes one of you will stand and leave.
- THR-02In Libet's experiments, brain activity preparing a simple movement began about a third of a second before people reported deciding to move.
- THR-03What that timing means for free will is disputed: a later reanalysis suggests the early signal may be background neural noise rather than a decision already made.
- THR-04In chronically lonely people, white blood cells show a shifted pattern of gene activity: inflammation-related genes turned up, antiviral and antibody-related genes turned down.
- THR-05Human eyes respond to light between about 380 and 750 nanometres, a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.
- THR-06How small the sliver looks depends on how the spectrum is drawn: a vanishing fraction of one per cent on a linear scale, closer to two per cent on a logarithmic one.
- THR-07Colour is constructed by the brain from the light that reaches the eye; it is not a property carried by the light itself.
- THR-08A human body contains roughly seven octillion (7 x 10^27) atoms.
- THR-09Each set of human DNA has about 3.1 billion letters, and nearly every cell carries two sets.
- THR-10When cells copy DNA, proofreading and repair bring the error rate down to roughly one mistake in ten billion letters.
- THR-11The iron in human blood was forged in stars that died before the Earth formed.
- THR-12Her atoms are borrowed from the Earth and will be returned. She lives inside a maintained state of air, water and warmth she has never had reason to notice.
- THR-13Many affective neuroscientists hold that grief, fear, care and play run on brain circuits humans share with other mammals; constructionist researchers dispute that these are dedicated circuits.
- THR-14She belongs to an unbroken line of descent that reaches back to the earliest life on Earth.
- THR-15She was born into one of more than seven thousand living languages.
- THR-16The language you grow up in measurably affects how quickly you tell some colours apart.
- THR-17Thirty-seven trillion cells agree on a shape and call it you.
- THR-18The adult brain has about 86 billion neurons.
- PLN-01Before you can think anything, your senses must take in the room and your brain must be supplied with glucose and oxygen.
- PLN-02Damage the lower kingdoms and the higher ones change or fail; the mind depends on the body far more than the body depends on the mind.
- PLN-03Moral and evaluative judgements often arrive as intuitions first, with reasons supplied afterwards.
- PLN-04The experience of insight is something new: no neuron has insights and no molecule reasons.
- PLN-05Social evaluation, such as arguing in front of others, can raise listeners' and speakers' cortisol.
- PLN-06A thought spoken in one mind can travel down through a room's relationships and hormones and, over time, into other people's gene expression.
- CAS-L1What matters for loneliness is feeling cut off, not the number of people nearby.
- CAS-L2Lonely people show an inflammatory, low-antiviral pattern of gene activity in their white blood cells.
- CAS-L3Over four years, the loneliest people's systolic blood pressure rose 14.4 mm Hg more than that of the least lonely.
- CAS-L4Loneliness is linked to more broken, less efficient sleep.
- CAS-L5Weak social ties carry a mortality risk comparable to well-known risk factors such as smoking.
- CAS-L6Lonely people attend more to signs of social threat, which makes withdrawal more likely and can close the loop.
- CAS-C1Health tracks the quality of a person's social embedding at every level, from family to nation.
- CAS-C2People with six or more kinds of social tie were about four times less likely to develop a cold after deliberate exposure to the virus than people with one to three.
- CAS-C3Social support during a stressful task lowers the cortisol response to it.
- CAS-C4The narrator that tells a lonely mind it is unsafe tells a connected mind that it belongs; either story shapes the body.
- CAS-S1In stable primate hierarchies, subordinate animals carry higher baseline cortisol; when the hierarchy is contested, dominant animals fare worse.
- CAS-S2In the Whitehall studies of British civil servants, each step down the grade ladder brought worse health, even after lifestyle was accounted for.
- CAS-S3Prolonged stress that cannot be controlled produces passivity. Its discoverers now argue that passivity is the default, and what is learned is control.
- CAS-T1Secure rank brings lower baseline cortisol and faster recovery from stress, but only while the hierarchy holds.
- CAS-T2Across primates, posture reflects social rank. Claims that adopting a powerful posture changes hormones have failed to replicate.
- CAS-T3Studies suggest power can reduce perspective-taking, but a large replication of the best-known experiment found no effect.
- CAS-X1Chronic social conditions such as insecure work and unstable housing predict allostatic load: wear across the cardiovascular, metabolic and immune systems together.
- CAS-X2That wear is measured in cortisol, adrenaline and inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein and IL-6.
- CAS-X3Scarcity may tax attention and self-control. The original study's analysis has been challenged, and how large any effect is remains disputed.
- CAS-N1A parent's own attachment pattern matches the infant's, secure or insecure, in about three cases out of four.
- CAS-N2In rats, a mother's licking and grooming changes the chemical marking of her pups' stress-hormone receptor gene and sets their stress response for life.
- CAS-N3Whether early care calibrates the human stress-response system for life is still debated.
- CAS-N4The narrator learns early what to expect from other people and keeps telling that story long after.
- CAS-F1People conceived during the Dutch Hunger Winter showed less methylation of the IGF2 gene than their unexposed same-sex siblings six decades later.
- CAS-F2Whether such marks pass to grandchildren in humans is contested.
- CAS-METATracing a condition as one cascade through four kingdoms is the book's synthesis; each step comes from separate research.
- KEY-01Two identical greys look different against different surrounds, because the brain judges brightness by context.
- BRE-01Breathing at about six breaths a minute raises vagally mediated heart-rate variability while you do it; the effect fades afterwards.
- BRE-02Breathing is the one vital rhythm run both automatically and by choice, which makes it a door between mind and body.
- NAR-01Given a list of words linked to sleep, people often remember 'sleep' itself, though it was never shown, and recognise it almost as often as the words they did see.
- NAR-02Memory reconstructs rather than records: recalled memories become changeable again and can absorb misleading information.
- NAR-03When a choice is secretly swapped, about three people in four do not notice, and many give fluent reasons for a choice they did not make.
- NAR-04We deceive ourselves partly in order to deceive others more convincingly.
- WNG-01The majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans.
- WNG-02Financial capital exists to serve human flourishing, and human flourishing is to be pursued within the limits of the ecological base.
- WNG-03Every political doctrine bundles three kinds of claim: which mechanism should coordinate, how systems behave, and whom the arrangement is for.
- WNG-04A complex system persists through the reproduction of its cycles, not the persistence of its materials.
- WNG-05Civilisation can be read as eight reproduction cycles whose health can be measured and whose failure can be diagnosed.
- WNG-06Nearly every element heavier than hydrogen and helium was forged in stars or stellar explosions.
- WNG-07Each new institution is best understood by what it replaced, and some replacements cost capacities no ledger records.
- WNG-08The number 150 as a natural human group size is contested: a 2021 re-analysis put the plausible range anywhere from 2 to 520.
- PRT-01In York Minster's masons' loft, a plaster tracing floor still carries full-size working drawings scratched by medieval masons; the only other surviving English example is at Wells Cathedral.
- PRT-02The book has about 103,000 words in 29 chapters, with a Prologue, an Epilogue and notes classifying its claims.
- PRT-03If you are struggling now, talk to someone you trust or a local crisis line. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14.
- EDU-01Retrieving what you have learned, rather than re-reading it, strengthens long-term memory: the testing effect.
- EDU-02Large meta-analyses find little or no far transfer: training in chess, music or working memory does not reliably raise general cognitive ability or school attainment.
- EDU-03In children and adolescents, regular physical activity benefits fitness, heart and bone health, and mental health.
- EDU-04Across 62 studies, students in service-learning programmes gained in attitudes to self and school, civic engagement, social skills and academic achievement compared with controls.
- EDU-05Contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice on average, and more so under favourable conditions such as equal status and shared goals.
- EDU-06A leading account in neuroscience holds that the brain works by predicting its own input and learning from the errors in its predictions.
- EDU-07Manageable adversity can strengthen later resistance to stress, a 'steeling' effect, but it can also sensitise; which happens depends on the person, the dose and the support around them.
- EDU-08Reviews of programmes that improve children's executive functions find that trained skills transfer only narrowly, and expect the most successful approaches to address emotional, social and physical needs as well as cognitive ones.
- EDU-09The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke distinguishes four kinds of knowing: propositional (knowing that), procedural (knowing how), perspectival (knowing what a situation is like from where one stands) and participatory (knowing that comes from belonging to a practice or a place).
- EDU-10In the assessment of professional competence, reliability depends less on standardisation than on sampling: holistic expert judgements become reliable when they are sampled widely enough across occasions, content and judges.
- EDU-11In the 1920s Harvard, Yale and Princeton added judgements of 'character' to admission, in part to limit the number of Jewish students who would have been admitted on examination results alone.
- EDU-12Each way of knowing has its own condition of acquisition: propositional knowing can be transmitted; procedural knowing needs performance corrected by someone competent; perspectival knowing needs occupancy of a position; participatory knowing needs membership over time with real stake.
- EDU-13Participatory knowing cannot precede participation, so formation follows the widening of a person's actual sphere of participation: the body, the household, the small group with a shared task, the local institution, the society, and last the intergenerational and the planetary.
- EDU-14Perspectival and participatory knowing are formed by being at stake in a body and an arena, so no one can undergo another person's formation on their behalf, and no machine can undergo it for them.