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Gaze into the Milky Way’s black hole with NASA’s ‘back catalog’ of X-ray data
NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory is considered one of the agency’s greatest achievements, but it’s not necessarily as recognizable as siblings like the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes. However, since 1999, the powerful spacecraft has peered deep into the cosmos to provide astronomers with never-before-seen glimpses of the Milky Way galaxy. As the observatory nears its 27th anniversary, NASA is highlighting its Chandra Source Catalog (CSC), an absolutely massive archive of visualization data collected over the years.
The most recent CSC update adds more than 400,000 unique compact and extended X-ray sources, as well over 1.3 million individual X-ray light detections collected through 2021. The latest examples from CSC include an image the Galactic Center, the area surrounding the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* that anchors our Milky Way galaxy home. The image encompasses around 60 light-years of space, which NASA describes as a “veritable pinprick” in the night sky. Despite its comparatively small size, the final result required combining 86 separate images totaling over 3 million seconds of observation time. Within this, Chandra detected more than 3,300 individual X-ray sources.
While the observatory’s information is indispensable for other ground and space telescopes to study new areas of the galaxy, much of the raw data is essentially invisible to the human eye. Similar to previous projects, NASA used “sonification” techniques to convert observations into ethereal audio clips to better illustrate their grandeur. To compliment the view of Sagittarius A*, NASA also provided a sonification of 22 years of space sounds. Repeat observations are given different notes, resulting in a cosmic choir of tones showcasing the vastness of Chandra’s capabilities. If that weren’t enough, the audio clip is also layered onto a map of the Milky Way. Over nearly two-and-a-half minutes, viewers can watch as each X-ray detection is pinpointed within the galaxy, with larger circles representing locations with more frequent observations.
Chandra’s initial mission was only scheduled to last five years, but has continued to surprise astronomers by outperforming their wildest expectations. Despite a period of funding uncertainty in 2024, it appears that the observatory will continue shedding light on the galaxy for years to come.
The post Gaze into the Milky Way’s black hole with NASA’s ‘back catalog’ of X-ray data appeared first on Popular Science.
Babysitting grandkids can boost brain health
From physical fitness to doing puzzles to going out with friends, there’s a laundry list of advice out there to help protect our brains from cognitive decline as we age. Taking care of grandchildren may also help brain health, according to new research from the American Psychological Association published today in the journal Psychology and Aging.
“Many grandparents provide regular care for their grandchildren—care that supports families and society more broadly,” Flavia Chereches, a study co-author and Ph.D. candidate at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. “An open question, however, is whether caregiving for grandchildren may also benefit grandparents themselves. In this research, we wanted to see if providing grandchild care might benefit grandparents’ health, potentially slowing down cognitive decline.”
To take a deeper dive into how grandparenting affects the brain, Chereches and her team examined data from 2,887 grandparents. All of the participants were over the age of 50 (the average age was 67) and took part in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Between 2016 and 2022, the volunteers completed cognitive tests and answered survey questions three times.
The survey asked whether or not the participants had provided care for a grandchild at any point during the past year. It also asked them detailed questions about how frequently they provided childcare and what kinds of care they provided. Types of childcare included watching their grandchildren overnight, caring for grandchildren when they were sick, playing or engaging in leisure activities with them, helping with homework assignments, driving grandchildren to school and activities, and preparing meals.
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Overall, the team found that those who spent time with their grandchildren scored higher on tests of memory and verbal fluency compared with those who didn’t. These results held even after adjusting for age, health, and other factors. More involved grandparents also scored higher on these tests regardless of the frequency and type of care they provided.
Additionally, they saw that grandmothers who provided care experienced less decline on cognitive tests over the course of their study compared with those who didn’t.
“What stood out most to us was that being a caregiving grandparent seemed to matter more for cognitive functioning than how often grandparents provided care or what exactly they did with their grandchildren,” said Chereches. “More research is needed to replicate these findings, yet, if there are benefits associated with caregiving for grandparents, they might not depend on how often care is provided, or on the specific activities done with grandchildren, but rather on the broader experience of being involved with caregiving.”
Chereches added that future studies could explore the effects of family context and other variables on the aging brain.
“Providing care voluntarily, within a supportive family environment, may have different effects for grandparents than caregiving in a more stressful environment where they feel unsupported or feel that the caregiving is not voluntary or a burden,” Chereches concluded.
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‘Walking sharks’ lay eggs without breaking a sweat
Being pregnant and giving birth is hard work for any species—but epaulette sharks (Hemiscyllium ocellatum) might disagree.
These fish and a number of other species are known as “walking sharks” for their ability to traverse both the seafloor and land with their fins. But as of now, that’s no longer the coolest thing about this rather adorable predator. Epaulette sharks’ energy use didn’t change during their reproduction cycle, as described in a study recently published in the journal Biology Open.
“Reproduction is the ultimate investment … you are literally building new life from scratch,” Jodie Rummer, a marine biologist at James Cook University and co-author of the recent study, said in a university statement. “We expected that when sharks make this complex egg, their energy use would shoot up. But there was no uptick in energy use, it was completely flat,” she adds. They “appear to have adapted their physiology to be able to optimise their energy use.”
Researchers broadly believe that reproduction is a major energy investment for a majority of species. The new study, however, represents the first time scientists have recorded sharks’ reproductive cycle’s direct energetic expenditure (or metabolic cost). The sharks in the new study were living in captivity, and the researchers analyzed the rates of their oxygen consumption as a way to track their metabolic rate.
Furthermore, the team monitored shifts in blood and hormones while the mother sharks laid eggs, explained lead-author Carolyn Wheeler, also from James Cook University.. The sharks proved to be, once again, unphased.
“Everything was remarkably stable, so this research challenges our fundamental assumptions about chondrichthyan fishes (sharks, rays, skates and chimaeras),” Wheeler said.
During times of environmental stress, many species will choose between reproduction and survival. However, the epaulette shark may still continue to produce eggs, even under major stressors. According to the team, this is encouraging since healthy sharks equal healthy reefs and ecosystems.
“This work challenges the narrative that when things go wrong—such as warming oceans—that reproduction will be the first thing to go,” Rummer explained.
We need to understand the extent of this small shark’s apparent significant resilience in the face of the aforementioned issue, she added.
“Sharks have been around since before the dinosaurs and have already shown incredible resilience to the earth’s changing climate,” Madoc Sheehan, media liaison officer and a senior lecturer at James Cook University, who is not one of the study’s authors , tells Popular Science, “these new observations reinforce [our understanding of] their capacity to endure change.”
Moving forward, the team plans to investigate how much it takes wild epaulette sharks to produce eggs.
The post ‘Walking sharks’ lay eggs without breaking a sweat appeared first on Popular Science.
Snowed in? Watch albatrosses nest on a sunny Pacific island instead
While winter is raging in an unusually large swath of the United States, the weather is balmy for the birds nesting on the Pacific Ocean’s Midway Atoll. As many as 75,000 pairs of Laysan albatrosses (or mōlī in Hawaiian) are nesting in the wildlife refuge on the northwestern edge of the Hawaiian Archipelago.
Now you can watch these brilliant snow-white birds while avoiding the actual snow with a 24/7 live cam. This live cam is run by Friends of Midway Atoll via memberships and donors.
Laysan albatrosses (or mōlī in Hawaiian) return to this same nesting site every year and will reunite with their mates. If all goes well, the pairs will lay a single egg and stay on the atoll to nest.
As nesting progresses, you may see a single egg dotting some of the nests. In the distance, you may also catch a glimpse of ka‘upu (black-footed albatross), the endangered koloa pōhaka (Laysan duck), manu-o-Kū (white terns), kolea (Pacific golden plovers), and ʻakekeke (ruddy turnstones). Koaʻeʻula (red-tailed tropic birds) may also be seen doing their “magnificent aerial mating dance.”
In the evening hours on Midway Atoll—around 11 p.m. or midnight on the East Coast—nunulu (Bonin petrels) arrive by the thousands to take care of their nest sites in underground burrows.
The nesting birds also include a record-breaker named Wisdom. The 75-year-old albatross is known as the world’s oldest breeding bird and was spotted on the atoll in November 2025. She was first identified and banded in 1956 by wildlife biologist Chandler Robbins after she laid one egg. Wisdom has since produced 50 to 60 eggs and as many as 30 chicks have fledged in her lifetime. In 2024, Wisdom became the world’s oldest known wild bird to successfully lay an egg at the estimated age of 74.
The post Snowed in? Watch albatrosses nest on a sunny Pacific island instead appeared first on Popular Science.
Should you eat invasive species? We asked an ecologist.
“By definition, invasive species are harmful in some regard,” says Jacob Barney, a professor of invasive plant ecology at Virginia Tech University. So when we eat them, he adds, “we turn that harm into something positive.” Although just how positive an impact eating invasives has can vary.
Wherever human beings go, we introduce plants and animals from other places, both deliberately and accidentally. However, not all introduced species have the same impact on their new environments.
An introduced species is only considered invasive if it poses a threat to native species, for example by competing with them for limited resources. In the absence of natural predators, invasive populations may swell far beyond what their new environment can support. Fortunately for those concerned about the ecological impact of these interloping plants and animals, it just so happens that a lot of them are pretty tasty.
At the end of each semester, Barney challenges his students to bring dishes made with invasive ingredients to a class potluck. “I like to say it’s where we eat what we’ve been studying,” he says.
Last semester’s banquet included cookies made with prickly pear cactus fruit, invasive in many desert regions, and sausage made from feral hogs, which Barney describes as “delicious.” Students voted on the most creative and best-tasting entries. This time, the winner in both categories was a riff on spinach-and-artichoke dip, using invasive kudzu vine leaves in place of spinach.
Many invasives have culinary valueIn some cases, invasive species were introduced because they’re tasty. Barney points to the Mediterranean fig tree, introduced to California for cultivation and now invasive there, as one example.
There are also many invasives that have a well-known culinary value in their place of origin, but were introduced for a different reason. Kudzu is one example. Introduced in the United States as an ornamental garden plant, it has since become known as the infamous “vine that ate the South” for its uncontrollable growth. But in its native Asia, kudzu’s leaves are eaten as a vegetable, and its potatoey roots provide starch for jellies such as Japanese kuzumochi.
Kudzu, an invasive Asian vine, grows near the Mississippi river in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The plant is often used in Japanese and Chinese cooking: Its leaves are similar to spinach and its potatoey roots provide starch for jellies, such as Japanese kuzumochi. Image: DepositPhotosBarney notes that in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, where the invasive blue catfish has done damage, there’s currently an effort to industrialize harvesting catfish for food. “That’s the kind of scale that I think can have a meaningful impact,” he says. The effects of a large-scale commercial food operation on an invasive species would be far greater than occasional foraging by individuals.
But such efforts are still relatively rare, and not all invasives are seen as a desirable food source, or even recognized as being edible. This has sometimes led environmentalists to get creative with marketing. In Illinois, invasive Asian carp meat has been sold under the name “copi” (for its copious numbers) since 2021, due to perceptions of carp as an inferior food fish.
In Florida, the Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) has been hosting “Lionfish Derbies” since 2009, in which divers compete to see how many invasive lionfish they can spear. These events culminate in free lionfish tastings. According to REEF, “tastings give the public a chance to see how delicious lionfish are and encourage the consumption of lionfish in local restaurants. Derbies also draw media attention to the Atlantic lionfish invasion and help promote development of the commercial lionfish market.”
Eating invasives teaches you about local ecologyDoes this mean that if we all start eating invasives, it will completely get rid of them? Not exactly. “For the general, curious forager, or somebody looking to try something different, the impact [of eating invasives] on the environment is probably small to negligible,” says Barney. However, he adds, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t eat invasives. We just shouldn’t think of eradicating them as being the sole reason to do so.
While large-scale harvesting of an invasive species for food, such as blue catfish in the Chesapeake, can make a difference, eating invasives is not going to totally remove them any more than other strategies. Total elimination of an invasive species tends to only happen in more isolated environments, such as on small islands. Invasive zebra mussels have been successfully removed from Lake Waco, a manmade reservoir in Texas, as of 2021, but remain a problem in major bodies of water like the Mississippi River. In most cases, invasives are here to stay, and removal efforts focus on population management, minimizing impact by keeping numbers down.
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Barney describes eating invasives as “a really nice entry point into understanding the species in your surroundings, and a different perspective on the role that they can play in our lives.” To eat invasive species, you have to first learn what species are invasive in your area and how to identify them. This means that eating invasives is a way of learning more about your environment and the relationships between the organisms that live there—including you.
How to find edible invasivesCommercial sale of edible invasives is often small-scale and localized. Once you know what invasives there are in your area, you can keep an eye out for them on restaurant menus and in local markets. But your best bet for sampling an invasive might be to forage it yourself (where permitted). Experts like “Forager Chef” Alan Bergo offer information on how to incorporate both native and invasive species collected from the wild into your diet.
Barney cautions beginning foragers that “anytime you’re harvesting something from the wild, identification is first and foremost.” He recommends resources like iNaturalist and its Seek app for species identification. Users of iNaturalist can also upload their species sightings to a collaborative global map. This serves as a valuable database for scientists like Barney who study the spread of invasives.
When asked his personal favorite invasive to eat, Barney recommends autumn olive. This silvery shrub, native to Asia, is a common invader of open grassland in the eastern United States. “It makes these really tasty fruits,” says Barney. Autumn olive’s tiny red berries are bitter when fresh, but their pulp can be processed with sugar into jams and sauces.
Eating invasives is not so much about eradication as it is about awareness. “Once you have your eyes exposed to the number of invasive plants and animals in the environment there, you can’t not see them,” says Barney. We may never be able to eat every single invasive out of existence. But eating some of them can make us see our surroundings in a whole new way.
In Ask Us Anything, Popular Science answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from the everyday things you’ve always wondered to the bizarre things you never thought to ask. Have something you’ve always wanted to know? Ask us.
The post Should you eat invasive species? We asked an ecologist. appeared first on Popular Science.
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Perplexing blue button jelly looks like something out of ‘Lord of the Rings’
At first glance, it looks like an alien eye—a gorgeous blue iris around a carmel-colored pupil, thick eyelashes radiating out like sun rays. The reddish/orange center looks a bit like the Eye of Sauron, but we aren’t in Mordor. We’re on the surface of the ocean, where a mysterious jellyfish relative is floating along, snacking on zooplankton.
Meet the blue button jelly (Porpita porpita). It’s a cnidarian (a group of mainly marine invertebrates, like corals, jellyfish, and Portuguese man-of-war), grows to be around an inch wide, and calls l many tropical and subtropical oceans home. The funky little creature consists of a float—the round part featured in the photograph—and a number of tentacles, some of which have stinging cells.
So far, so good. Researchers believe it’s a “quasi colonial organism,” Larry Madin, a jelly expert at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, tells Popular Science.
“It’s considered sort of a colony because there are tentacles that some of them are for catching food, they have stinging cells on them. Some of them are defensive tentacles to sort of attack things that might attack this, and then it also has some reproductive structures that are suspended from the bottom of this float,” he explains.
But the situation is far from certain.
“People have been confused for a long time about is it really a colonial animal, you know, like a coral is, or is it just a single animal that has all these multiple parts?” Madin says.
Blue button jellies appear to grow from a single larva that eventually changes into an adult. Unlike the Portuguese man-of-war, which have a number of parts that catch and digest food, the enigmatic blue button jellies secure prey with many tentacles and digest it in a central stomach area.
On the topic of food, they themselves are also prey. One of their predators is a swimming snail called Glaucus, that looks like it popped straight out of a fantasy world, too (Avatar’s Pandora, specifically). Rather appropriately, it’s also known as the blue dragon.
It remains to be seen if or when the blue button jelly’s status as a quasi colonial organism will be clarified. In the meantime, just keep floating…just keep floating…just keep floating, floating, floating.
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Stingray-inspired robot cracks the mystery of how rays swim
To help figure out what makes stingrays such unique and unusual swimmers, a team of mechanical engineers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) created a wavy robotic fin. After submerging the robot in underwater tunnels designed to mimic swimming near the sea floor, their tests indicate that different types of ray species may have evolved alternative swimming techniques that best suit their setting. Specifically, the findings suggest that some ray species swimming near the seafloor adjust the way their fins move and tilt to counter a downward force that would otherwise pull them toward the ground.
It turns out that stingrays gracefully gliding along waves near seabeds aren’t doing it to look cool. Instead, the fancy flapping is likely an evolutionary adaptation for stability and durability while swimming. The team behind the mechanical fin believes those same principles could one day be applied to designing energy-efficient underwater mapping robots. And they aren’t alone in admiration for rays. Other researchers are already attempting to use insights from stingray swimming to develop stealthier next-generation underwater vehicles.
The robotic fin study was published this week in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Putting stingray swimming to the testWhen it comes to swimming, not all ray species are alike. Massive manta rays and other pelagic ray species tend to hover near the ocean surface using a flapping motion. Benthic rays, like stingrays who spend their time in more shallow waters, rely on a different undulating movement which often resembles the motion of the very waves they’re swimming in. This second wavy swimming style in particular has fascinated scientists for its apparent simplicity and efficiency. Past research on that swimming method has shown that the undulating motion used by stingrays actually appears to recycle energy from surrounding water more efficiently than brute-force fin flapping.
Varying styles of stingray fin movements. Image: Yuanhang Zhu/UCR.UCR mechanical engineer and paper co-author Yuanhang Zhu had a hunch that the divergence in swimming styles might stem from the different environments ray species inhabit. To test that theory in controlled environments, the team set out to create the robotic fin. By testing the fin under different conditions, the researchers could observe how physical forces in the water affected its movement. The final fin design measured only 9.5 millimeters (about 0.4 inches) thick and was molded from silicone rubber. They also constructed a large water tunnel designed to simulate ocean flow.
During their experiments, the team placed the robot both near the surface of the tunnel and lower, closer to the artificial sea floor. In both cases, they were looking to see how various levels of ocean flow impact the amount of lift imparted on the fins. Understanding lift is important because it plays a key role in determining whether or not objects moving through space can stay level. For example, birds flying close to the ground experience positive lift keeping them more level and steady. The researchers expected to see something similar occur for the robotic ray swimming near the sea floor. Instead, the exact opposite happened. Their robot was being sucked downwards.
“This wasn’t what we expected,” Zhu said in a UCR blog post. “Instead of gaining extra lift near the ground, the rays were pulled downward.
Surprised by the findings, the team made slight adjustments to the robot to try compensate for the negative lift. They found that the downward force could be reduced simply by tilting the robot fin upward by a few degrees. Extrapolating out from that, the researchers suggest that stingrays and other benthic rays naturally swim with a slight upward fin angle, something that wasn’t clear before. During testing with, the stingray-like undulating motion also consistently maintained better clearance from the seafloor than the flapping motion used by pelagic ray species.
“Nature seems to have already solved the problem,” Zhu added.
Robots and underwater vehicles of the futureThis isn’t the first time engineers have tried to apply a ray’s unique biology to the world of robotics. In 2018, engineers from UCLA designed a 10 millimeter long tissue-based stingray-style robot made up of a mix of heart cells and flexible electrodes. Researchers from Harvard made an arguably even stranger stingray biohybrid robot in 2017, powered by rat muscles and propelled forward by a propulsion system triggered by light.
Elsewhere, researchers at the University of Washington are already exploring ways to apply stingray swimming techniques to next generation underwater vehicles. Ultimately, they hope to adapt rays’ structural characteristics to create vehicles that are both more energy-efficient and quieter than current submarines and submersibles.
When it comes to designing mechanisms of the future, the natural world remains undefeated.
The post Stingray-inspired robot cracks the mystery of how rays swim appeared first on Popular Science.
Halley’s comet may need a new, medieval name
One of most recognizable comets in astronomy may require rebranding. But even if everyone continues to call the famed space rock Halley’s comet, some researchers say an eccentric 11th century monk deserves at least some credit. According to a review of historical materials including the famous Bayeux tapestry, a team from Leiden University in the Netherlands believes it makes more sense to name the icy space rock in honor of Aethelmaer of Malmesbury—a member of the Order of Saint Benedict who also lived with an ill-fated fascination with flying.
Every 76 years, a comet from the depths of our solar system reaches its nearest point to Earth. Its orbit is anything but new, however. Chinese observers recorded the appearance of a bright light traveling from east to north in the night sky as far back as 240 BCE, while Roman historian Cassius Dio described a similar sounding event in 12 BCE. It wasn’t until 1705 that the English astronomer Edmond Halley concluded that these regularly returning sights weren’t different objects, but a single comet traveling along a predictable trajectory. Today, his discovery is reflected in both the comet’s everyday name as well as its official classification, 1P/Halley.
But if one really wanted to name the comet after the first person in England to note its significance, some astronomers recommend the honor goes to Aethelmaer of Malmesbury. Also known as Eilmer, the Benedictine monk was already an elderly resident of his abbey when Halley’s comet returned in 1066 CE. However, that particular sighting was of special importance because it’s documented on the famous (and bawdy) Bayeux tapestry. The 770-pound scroll depicts the events surrounding the Battle of Hastings, during which William II invaded England from Normandy, France. The embroidered art also illustrates William II’s victory, as well as his short-lived reign before the last Anglo-Saxon king died in battle.
King William should have seen his demise coming, according to the medieval omen experts of his era. Halley’s comet appeared not long after he assumed the throne, and everyone at the time knew such cosmic sightings warned of impending disaster. Everyone including the monk, Eilmer.
Simon Zwart, an astronomer at the Leiden University in the Netherlands, realized this while reviewing the writings of the 12th century chronicler, William of Malmesbury. According to William, when Halley’s comet brightened the sky in 1066 CE, it also jotted Eilmer’s memory. The monk recalled first seeing the same event about 76 years earlier in 989 CE.
Based on this account, it technically wasn’t Edmond Halley who first proposed that the comet was making regular reappearances. Then again, it’s somewhat understandable why Eilmer’s claims didn’t gain more traction. After all, this was the monk who is otherwise best known for attempting to fly after reading the Greek myth of Daedalus as a child. To test his own theories, young Eilmer strapped a set of makeshift wings to his hands and feet, then jumped off a tower at Malmesbury Abbey. The confident—if misguided—leap of faith broke both his legs and incapacitated him for the rest of life.
“He used to relate as the cause of his failure, his forgetting to provide himself a tail,” his friend William later wrote.
The post Halley’s comet may need a new, medieval name appeared first on Popular Science.
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Cultural Rationality
In our standard model of natural selection, organisms encode stable behavioral strategies, and pass those encodings on to their kids, only some of whom manage to make more kids, causing a drift over time toward strategies that tend to promote successful reproduction. In our standard model of decision theory, agents have fixed preferences, start with “prior” beliefs, update those beliefs based on info observed, and then pick the actions that max expected preferences.
Culture is humanity’s superpower, and in our best models of culture, humans combine these two approaches. DNA encodes brains that act much like standard decision theory agents for decisions of small to modest scale and scope. Larger decisions are handled by agent preferences and priors, which are encoded in culture. That culture is given in childhood by parents and teachers, but such transfer also continues through our lives. For example, we continue to assimilate to the culture of our elites as they change, to cultures of those who conqueror our places, and to cultures of cities, firms, clubs, and families to which we choose to expose ourselves. For example, over the last few centuries much of the world copied a great many features of successful rich West cultures, including their Christian religion.
I’ve continued to ponder how best to combine deliberate decision strategies with cultural inheritance. And in this post I want to prod such thoughts by focusing on an especially dramatic case:
Consider someone who, like me, now expects descendants of today’s Amish, Haredim, and other insular fertile fundamentalist religious cultures to, in a few centuries, “win” by becoming much more culturally influential than descendants of today’s dominant world monoculture. Such a person might today plausibly try to respect those future winning cultures similar to how they’d respect a culture that had recently conquered their place. So they might try to make themselves open to assimilating into that future winning culture, such as by believing in the Judeo-Christian God. The reasoning is similar; in both cases a “winning” culture has shown substantial evidence of its adaptive superiority.
The general idea is that if natural selection is going to continue, and if you want to influence the longer-term future, you will have to find a way to combine the features you love with other adaptive features, to create a package with a better chance of success, to give your loved features their best chance to survive and thrive.
The reason I expect the Amish, etc. to win is that they have grown fast and maintained insularity for over a century, and survived many big change challenges in that time, while the leaders of our decaying world monoculture have far less incentive, knowledge, and power to change that culture, compared to CEOs re firm cultures, yet such CEOs consistently fail to stop firm cultures from decaying and killing firms.
Nine counter arguments:
1) What if I don’t care about influencing our long term future?
Then you are excused. But do expect people with your attitude here, and those with correlated features, to decline over time in the future.
2) Natural selection should not encourage a culture to have members promote the death of that culture, compared to others.
Cultural assimilation usually isn’t all or nothing; you retain something of your origin. Sometimes the best way to promote your culture is to merge a part of it into another more adaptive culture. While you can’t save all of your culture this way, this might still be your best shot.
3) We often try to resist, not assimilate into, a conquering culture.
Yes, when we think there’s a decent chance such resistance could succeed, getting our entire culture back seems better than having a modest influence over an invading culture. But when the chance of successful resistance falls too low, abject submission seems a better strategy.
4) Our current habits are largely of copying cultures that have recently been clearly successful, not ones that seem likely to succeed in the far future.
But the logic of copying success doesn’t care when exactly the success will be achieved, only when such success becomes sufficiently clear.
5) We can’t actually choose to believe something just because we think it would be good to believe it.
Yes, beliefs aren’t simple dials to turn in our head. But we can deliberately change many influential aspects of the contexts of our belief changes. Otherwise there would be little point to the vast literature on the rationality of beliefs.
6) But don’t we need culture to evaluate which cultures “win”?
Sure, cultures tell you which virtues to count how much in estimating cultural success, and that may influence your estimate of a culture’s adaptive success. But in most cases, including this case, that doesn’t change the answer much.
7) There’s no particular evidence that the Judeo-Christian religions of those societies is what would make them win.
We usually don’t know that much about which particular cultural features are more responsible for a culture’s success. Which is why we evolved the habit of copying culture packages wholesale.
8) How could the adaptive success of a culture count as evidence that its religion is true?
It seems that on average, all else equal, cultures that believe more true things are more likely to succeed. To bet otherwise, you’d need particular evidence that this particular claim is an exception to this general trend.
9) But if the correlation between a cultural feature and cultural success is low, success is only weak evidence re that feature.
Yes, but as we typically have great uncertainty over the future adaptiveness of cultural features, usually most of our evidence is weak. Nevertheless, if we care enough about adaptiveness, then even weak evidence will be enough to tip our actions in the direction of our best clues so far, even if those clues remain weak.
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