Anxiety affects an estimated one in five teenagers. The condition can seriously affect their social lives, school performance and overall wellbeing. And, worryingly, anxiety disorders that begin during adolescence often continue into adulthood.
Biological, genetic and environmental factors are all known to play a role in a person’s likelihood of developing anxiety. But a growing body of research suggests that diet may also influence mental health.
On the other hand, diets high in free sugar have been linked to poorer mental health in adolescents. Free sugars include sugar added to foods and drinks, as well as those normally present in honey, syrups and fruit and vegetable juices.
UK guidelines recommend that free sugars make up no more than 5% of our daily calorie intake. Adolescents typically consume the most free sugar of any age group, sometimes up to 20% of their daily total energy intake – much of it coming from sugary drinks.
Now, my colleagues and I have published new research showing that sugary drink consumption may be linked to higher levels of anxiety in adolescents.
This review combined data from several previous studies looking at the amount of sugary drink teenagers consume and how anxious they feel. Our research group pulled together findings from multiple studies published between 2000 and 2025. Of the nine studies included, seven found a clear link between sugary drink intake and anxiety.
The studies involved young people aged ten to 19. Sugary drink intake was usually measured through surveys. Sugary drinks included fizzy drinks, colas, sweetened fruit juices, sweetened milk drinks, energy drinks and sweetened tea or coffee.
The results of the study showed a significant positive association: teenagers who consumed high amounts of sugary drinks had 34% higher odds of being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.
Some teens get up to 20% of their daily calorie intake from sugar. razum/ Shutterstock
It’s important to remember that the included studies were observational. This means they can show patterns or associations, but they do not indicate that sugary drinks cause anxiety. It’s also possible that anxiety leads teenagers to consume more sugary drinks.
The gut-brain axis, which is the network that links your brain to your gut, could also play a role in the connection between sugary drink consumption and anxiety. However, there are many things that affect gut health as well, including overall diet, stress levels and sleep – all of which have also been linked to anxiety.
Overall, our study suggests that reducing sugary drink consumption could be a helpful way to support adolescent mental health. While numerous studies have investigated the impact reducing sugary drink intake has on the physical health of adolescents, there is a need now to investigate whether this also has mental health benefits.
Reducing sugary drink intake
UK dietary guidelines recommend that adolescents and adults consume no more than 30 grams of sugar per day (approximately seven teaspoons). Given that a single can of fizzy drink can contain around 35 grams of sugar, cutting back on sugary drinks is an effective way to stay within this limit.
There are other practical ways of reducing intake of sugary drinks. This includes drinking sparkling or soda water with a slice of lemon, cucumber, berries or mint to get natural flavour without added sugar. Sugary drinks can be replaced with water, milk or sugar-free alternatives.
Another option is to switch to low-calorie, artificially-sweetened drinks (though these should only be consumed in moderation). Energy drinks can have a negative effect on sleep quality, academic performance and behaviour in adolescents so it’s a good idea to replace these with alternatives that contain less caffeine, such as tea or coffee.
With growing concerns about anxiety in teenagers, it’s becoming increasingly important to identify whether changing certain lifestyle factors can help reduce their risk of experiencing poor mental health. Although we still don’t fully understand how sugary drinks might influence anxiety, this study suggests they could play a role.
Chloe Casey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Samuel Finnerty, Senior Research Associate, Social Psychology, Lancaster University
From marches and demonstrations to civil disobedience, scientists are increasingly turning to climate protest. As a social psychologist, I’ve been investigating why researchers – who are trained to value scientific norms of objectivity and restraint – choose to engage in such public and sometimes disruptive action.
My study, just published in the journal PLOS Climate addresses this question by exploring scientists’ own experiences and decision-making. I spent two years observing, participating with, and interviewing scientists engaged in climate activism to understand their motivations.
Science and activism are very different. Scientific training emphasises restraint, uncertainty, narrow expertise, and objectivity. Activism demands urgency, moral clarity, and visibility. This tension often fuels the critique that scientists who protest have abandoned scientific norms in favour of ideology. Yet, a significant number of scientists engage in advocacy and activism. This marks a culture change in how scientists communicate.
So, how do scientists advocate without betraying what it means to be a scientist?
Most activism does not begin with actions that risk arrest such as blocking a road. Scientists typically become involved through roles aligned closely with their professional identity: public communication, giving talks, producing evidence summaries for social movements or acting as visible “scientist” figures within protest spaces. This reflects wider research showing that continuing to “feel like being a scientist” rather than stepping outside that role altogether, is critical for scientists’ engagement in activism.
Scientists for Extinction Rebellion protesting at Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy in 2022. Andrea Domeniconi, CC BY-NC-ND
The white lab coat is one tool scientists use to manage this tension. In protest spaces, it serves as visible signal of expertise, collective identity and legitimacy. Lab-coated scientists can challenge expectations of what an activist looks like, while also helping participants feel united and reassured that they are still acting as scientists. This helps reconcile identities that might otherwise appear in conflict.
However, for some social scientists who do not wear lab coats in their everyday research, this approach risks reinforcing narrow ideas about what counts as “real science”, both in public perception and within activist spaces, discouraging some from participating.
Acting alongside other scientists helps normalise and legitimise activism, reduce anxiety and build confidence. Being part of a collective also mitigates concerns about reputation damage. Participants nevertheless described activism as emotionally demanding. Continued involvement therefore depended on feeling supported by others.
Escalating actions
Some scientists choose to take part in civil disobedience, a form of peaceful protest that involves deliberately breaking the law to draw attention to an issue, such as sitting in roads or attaching themselves to buildings.
Many scientists told me this move was driven by frustration with the limits of conventional science communication. Many had spent years publishing research, advising policymakers and engaging with the media, yet saw little meaningful political response. For some, civil disobedience felt like a last resort. They framed it not as abandoning science, but as acting on it, when producing and communicating evidence no longer felt sufficient.
As one scientist, arrested during a protest at the London headquarters of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said: “As scientists, we have tried to warn the world as reasonably and as rationally as possible, […] But what is the point of doing it if it just gets ignored?”
Researchers answer questions from the public at the Ask a Scientist stand at The Big One, a climate action protest in 2023. Crispin Hughes., CC BY-NC-ND
The challenges of advocating as a scientist
Once scientists appear in activist spaces, their identity is not always taken at face value. Wearing a lab coat or invoking scientific credentials can open conversations and signal trust. But it may also invite scepticism, heightened scrutiny, or unrealistic expectations that one person can speak for all of science. Participants described being questioned by members of the public, journalists and sometimes other scientists about whether they were “real scientists”, whether their research field counted, or whether they were qualified to speak at all.
Many scientists therefore found themselves balancing the need to speak with authority while remaining honest about the limits of their expertise. Research on scientist advocacy shows mixed effects on public trust, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and often context-dependent.
Scientists in my study were acutely aware of this. They sought to manage how their activism was perceived by clarifying their expertise, acting alongside other scientists, and choosing forms of participation consistent with their professional values.
Looking at the wider picture, as political inaction, hostility towards climate activism, politicisation of science and misinformation grow, scientists face growing pressure not only to produce knowledge, but to decide how to visibly stand for it. The rise of scientist activism reflects this shifting terrain, and the difficult choices it brings.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Samuel Finnerty does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The place of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, former prince and brother of the king, in the line of succession to the British throne appears to be under threat in the United Kingdom.
Currently, Mountbatten-Windsor is eighth in line (after the families of princes William and Harry) to the Crowns of the United Kingdom and Australia. This makes it extremely unlikely he would ever become monarch, but his removal is more a symbolic act of repudiation.
Is it possible to remove him? The short answer is yes – but it would most likely be a time-consuming process involving many parliaments passing legislation.
Does the same line of succession apply to the British and Australian Crowns?
At the time of Australia’s federation in 1901, the British Crown was described as “one and indivisible”. Queen Victoria exercised constitutional powers over all her colonies, acting on the advice of British ministers.
That changed after the first world war, due to a series of Imperial Conferences, with the self-governing “dominions” (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland) having separate Crowns by 1930. This meant the Australian prime minister could advise the monarch about the appointment of the governor-general of Australia and other federal (but not state) Australian matters.
However, the rules of succession to these separate Crowns remained the same. They are a hotch-potch of English laws, including common law rules of inheritance and statutes, such as the Bill of Rights 1689 and the Act of Settlement 1701.
These laws became part of Australian law in the 18th century, but for a long time Australian parliaments had no power to alter them. This changed in 1931 with the enactment of the Statute of Westminster. It gave the dominions power to repeal or alter British laws that applied in their country.
However, recognising this could cause havoc in relation to succession to the Crown, a clause was included in the preamble to the statute, making it a convention that “any alteration in the law touching the Succession to the Throne” shall require the assent of the parliaments of all of the dominions and the United Kingdom. Section 4 of the statute continued the power of the UK parliament to legislate for a dominion, but only if it gave its request and consent.
In 1936, when King Edward VIII abdicated, the UK parliament enacted a statute to alter the rules of succession to the throne, to exclude any children he might have. Australia assented to the British parliament extending its law so it applied to Australia too.
That option is no longer available since the enactment of section 1 of the Australia Act 1986. It says that no act of the UK parliament shall extend as part of the law of the Commonwealth, or a state or territory. Any changes made to the operation of the laws of succession to the Crown of Australia must be made in Australia.
How could Australia change the law of succession?
When the Commonwealth Constitution was enacted, the Crown was still “one and indivisible”. This meant no one inserted a section giving the Commonwealth parliament power to make laws about succession to the Crown. However, the framers of the Constitution were clever enough to insert a mechanism to deal with such unanticipated developments.
Section 51(xxxviii) of the Constitution says the Commonwealth parliament may exercise a power, at the request or with the concurrence of all the states directly concerned, which only the UK parliament could have exercised at the time of federation. This means the Commonwealth and state parliaments can cooperate to change the rules of succession to the Crown of Australia.
This issue arose in 2011, when the various realms (being countries that retained Queen Elizabeth II as head of state) agreed to change the rules of succession so that males would no longer be given preference over females, and heirs would no longer be disqualified for marrying a Catholic.
The UK parliament enacted the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 to give legal effect to this change. However, it delayed commencing the act until other realms had enacted their changes too. The British act only made the change with respect to the Crown of the United Kingdom.
Some realms accepted they needed to change the law in relation to their own Crown. Others concluded they didn’t need to act, because their Constitution makes their sovereign the same person who is king or queen of the United Kingdom. Legislation was ultimately enacted in Australia, Barbados, Canada, New Zealand, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
In Australia, each state enacted the Succession to the Crown Act 2015. The Australian process took a long time, due to different legislative priorities and sitting periods, and the intervention of state election periods.
Australia was the last to enact its law, after which the alteration in succession was brought into effect simultaneously across all the realms.
How would the process operate today?
If it were proposed to remove Mountbatten-Windsor from the line of succession today, the UK government would probably first seek the agreement of all the realms. While not legally necessary, it is important if a shared monarch is to be retained for all realms to be consulted.
The UK parliament would then prepare its own bill, providing a template for other jurisdictions. This means the changes are uniform across the realms. The bill would probably also specify whether Mountbatten-Windsor’s exclusion affects his heirs, princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, and their children. Under the old law, a person who married a Catholic was treated as “dead” for the purposes of succession, so that their exclusion from the succession did not affect the hereditary position of their heirs. The same approach might be taken in relation to the exclusion of Mountbatten-Windsor.
The same parliaments that enacted laws in relation to the last change of succession (apart from Barbados, which is now a republic), would also need to enact an equivalent law, if they wish to maintain symmetry in such rules across the realms. Putting such a bill before a parliament runs the risk that other issues will be raised, opening broader questions concerning the role of the monarchy in different realms.
Could Australia make such a change on its own?
While Australia could unilaterally enact a law to exclude Mountbatten–Windsor from succession to the Crown of Australia, it is unlikely it would do so. There are two reasons for this.
First, it involves a lot of legislative hassle, getting seven parliaments to enact a law that will probably have no substantive effect, given how far Mountbatten-Windsor is down the line of succession.
Second, covering clause 2 of the Commonwealth Constitution says that references to “the Queen” in the Constitution shall “extend to Her Majesty’s heirs and successors in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom”.
There is considerable disagreement about whether this is just an interpretative provision about updating references, or whether it has a substantive effect.
Keeping Australia’s rules of succession in sync with those of the United Kingdom avoids opening that potential Pandora’s box.
Anne Twomey has received funding from the Australian Research Council and sometimes does consultancy work for governments and inter-governmental bodies. She also has a YouTube channel – The Constitutional Clarion.
The Great Omari Mosque in Gaza City after it was damaged by an Israeli strike.Ali Jadallah/Anadolu/Getty Images
Since October 2023, Israel’s war in Gaza has caused mass human suffering. But it has also brought devastation to the cultural heritage of the Palestinian people.
In our recent article in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, we documented the extent of heritage destruction in Gaza and analysed the strikingly limited response by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
We argue that UNESCO’s failures have consequences beyond Gaza, as they weaken deterrence of attacks on heritage sites globally and risk normalising impunity for these types of crimes in conflict.
Heritage destruction in Gaza
Gaza has a rich and layered heritage, with archaeological traces dating to at least 1300 BCE. It has long sat at the crossroads of many cultures, and has been controlled by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.
Gaza is also home to historical sites important to the three main faiths of the region – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
Much of this cultural heritage now lies in ruin. UNESCO’s Gaza damage assessment list includes 150 sites that have been damaged or destroyed since the war began.
Some of these are globally significant sites. Two are on UNESCO’s World Heritage Tentative List:
the Anthedon Harbor, Gaza’s oldest known seaport, inhabited between 800 BCE and 1100 CE.
Other damaged or destroyed sites include:
the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrios Church, which dates to 425 CE and is sometimes referred to as the third-oldest church in the world
the seventh-century Great Omari Mosque, thought to be the first mosque in Gaza, along with its 13th-century library containing rare Islamic manuscripts
the Qasr al-Basha, a fortress also known as Pasha Palace, which was built in the mid-13th century by the Mamluk sultanate and had been turned into an archaeological museum
Apart from creating this list, UNESCO has been relatively muted in its response, compared with the role the agency has played in other conflicts.
This doesn’t mean it’s been completely silent. It has issued several statements condemning the destruction in Gaza and calling on “all involved parties to strictly adhere to international law”.
It has also elevated one heritage site to its List of World Heritage in Danger – the Saint Hilarion Monastery. Taking this step strengthens the protections around the site, with potential penalties for intentional damage.
Yet, despite these efforts, we question whether UNESCO has truly met the moment. Our analysis identifies a pattern of omission and understatement that is difficult to reconcile with UNESCO’s own mandate and the legal architecture that exists to protect cultural property in armed conflict.
For example, UNESCO has failed to publicly invoke the 1954 Hague Convention in relation to Gaza, which aims to protect cultural sites during conflict. The agency has cited it in virtually every major conflict since its ratification.
It also didn’t seek urgent action from the UN Security Council or the UN General Assembly to protect cultural sites. The agency did this in response to the Islamic State’s acts in Syria and Iraq (including the desecration of the World Heritage site of Palmyra). In 2017, for instance, the security council passed a resolution backed by UNESCO that laid out a number of steps to help protect cultural heritage in conflict.
Similarly, UNESCO has not worked with the International Criminal Court or the International Court of Justice to initiate proceedings against Israel or Israeli officials for the destruction of heritage in Gaza. The agency did this after conflicts in the Balkans and Mali. These trials established the intentional destruction of cultural property during conflict as a war crime.
Finally, UNESCO has not taken its usual approach of explicitly naming Israel as the perpetrator of cultural destruction in Gaza. It has taken this step in many recent conflicts. This includes Ukraine, where is has frequently named and condemned Russia as the perpetrator.
Why has UNESCO been so cautious?
One explanation offered by critics is geopolitical constraint. UNESCO has increasingly been criticised for an overdependence on voluntary state contributions. This can make the agency reluctant to confront powerful countries for fear of alienating supporters.
This dynamic is certainly evident in UNESCO’s long and strained relationship with Israel and the US. Both formally withdrew from UNESCO in 2019 because the agency had described Israel as an occupying power in Gaza and the West Bank, and condemned its destruction of Palestinian heritage.
But we argue there’s something more troubling occurring – the erosion of UNESCO’s willingness and capacity to activate the legal and normative tools it helped build.
Once a mighty advocate for the protection of culture worldwide, UNESCO has slowly withered into a largely ineffective and technocratic agency that sidesteps complex issues and is hamstrung by internal division.
UNESCO’s response
In response to the arguments raised here, UNESCO sent a detailed email explaining its actions on heritage protection in Gaza. These are some of the points raised by a UNESCO spokesperson:
On citing the 1954 Hague Convention:
Across different conflicts, UNESCO sometimes explicitly cites the 1954 Hague Convention […] and in other instances use the broader formulation “international law”.
UNESCO also communicates with the concerned Member States bilaterally […] This has been done on several occasions through correspondence addressed to the authorities of Israel, for example to remind Israel of its obligations under the 1954 Hague Convention.
On explicitly naming Israel as a perpetrator:
UNESCO is not a judiciary body, therefore its role is not to assign responsibility. In specific case of Ukraine, there are several Security Council and/or UNESCO governing bodies decisions that may explain specific statements.
On the lack of willpower to use its tools and resources on Gaza:
UNESCO activates its legal, normative and programmatic tools within the remits of its mandate and available funds. The needs are enormous, and we take this opportunity to renew UNESCO’s call in support of the people of Gaza.
Why Gaza matters
UNESCO’s limited response to the destruction in Gaza matters. Heritage protection is not only about salvaging damaged sites and trying to rebuild them. It’s also vital for defining unacceptable conduct and deterring future violations.
When the world’s foremost body on the protection of cultural heritage limits itself to cautious generalities, it fosters a permissive environment. It allows this destruction to be treated as regrettable collateral damage of war, rather than an actionable crime. This undermines UNESCO’s credibility.
It can also set a dangerous precedent. If the large-scale destruction of heritage occurs in full view of the world, with no repercussions, future belligerents may believe the costs of heritage crimes will be tolerated.
Benjamin Isakhan has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the United Kingdom Research and Innovation fund, and the Australian Department of Defence.
Eleanor Childs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Anyone who engages in serious dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM) may get the impression they are interacting with an intelligence. But many experts in the field argue the impression is just that. In philosopher Daniel Dennett’s words, such systems display “competence without comprehension”.
The hype about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) from big corporations and their celebrity spokespersons has prompted a backlash, in which scepticism turns to cynicism, often tinged with paranoia about how “stochastic parrots” may start to control our lives.
“Intelligence” itself has become an overheated topic, one that calls for less assertiveness, more cool thinking, and refreshed attempts at a starting point.
Review: What is Intelligence: Lessons from AI about Evolution, Computing, and Minds – Blaise Agüera y Arcus (MIT Press)
What Is Intelligence? by Google luminary Blaise Agüera y Arcus is the first book in a new series from MIT in collaboration with Antikythera, a think tank focused on “planetary-scale computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force”. A foreword from series editor Benjamin Bratton makes the bold claim that “computation is a technology to think with” and that the building blocks of our reality are themselves computational.
Research on intelligence has a chequered history, tainted by eugenics, statistical manipulation and a banal obsession with metrics. Agüera y Arcas counters this by opening up the topic as wide as it can go. A physics graduate with a background in computational neuroscience, he is something of a polymath. He draws explanatory frameworks from microbiology, philosophy, linguistics, cybernetics, neuroscience and industrial history.
His book presents almost as a sequence of foundation lectures in these areas. Its release has been accompanied by dozens of online talks and interviews, in which Agüera y Arcas presents the case that we are up for a seismic shift in how we think about intelligence – biological and artificial.
“Few mainstream authors claim that AI is ‘real’ intelligence,” he writes. “I do.”
Could the nerds be right?
The fundamental case against the “I” in AI is that intelligence is organic, derived from sensory interaction with a physical environment. Agüera y Arcas turns the tables with the premise that computation is the substrate for intelligence in all life forms.
The claim builds on an apparently crude proposition: prediction is the fundamental principle behind intelligence and “may be the whole story”.
What he means by prediction here is something much more radical than what we see with autocorrect. He explains it in biological terms as a process of pattern development. Single cells like bacteria predict sequences of events that may influence their capacity for survival. The synaptic learning rules in single neurons give rise to local sequence prediction.
Agüera y Arcas recounts how his journey into the enigmatic terrain of AI reached a turning point with his counterintuitive recognition that “the nerds were right”: in computation, bigger really was better and might actually be the key to moving from Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – the kind that can play chess – to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which can participate in a philosophical discussion.
Setting aside his contempt for the apparently simplistic dedication to scaling up, Agüera y Arcas returned to the biology lab for a reassessment of what was observable in living systems. If every form of life is an aggregation of cooperative parts, he reasoned, the evolution of cells into organs and organisms may be a matter of predictive modelling.
A central tenet of What is Intelligence? is that every form of life is an aggregation of cooperative parts. Links proliferate through patterns that enable increasingly complex functions. When Agüera y Arcas says the brain is computational, it’s not a metaphor: it is not that brains are like computers, they are computers.
Correlations between biological and mechanical forms of intelligence are his deep and abiding interest. What is Intelligence? follows What is Life?, a shorter book in which Agüera y Arcas lays the groundwork for this larger, more ambitious publication.
These are the originators of modern thinking about artificial intelligence, and the quest for origins runs through all Agüera y Arcas’ lines of enquiry.
It is worth noting that Antikythera, the publishing series launched with this book, is named after an ancient device found in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece, which has been called the original analog computer.
Computation was discovered as much as it was invented, Bratton says in his foreword. This might apply to the Antikythera. If it is indeed the first computer, it was literally discovered at the bottom of an ocean.
But it corroborates Bratton’s statement in another sense. As a device for tracking astronomical phenomena, the Antikythera testifies to computation as an aspect of how the universe works.
Getting specific about origins
Agüera y Arcas wants to get more specific about origins. How does pattern emerge from randomness? How does code emerge from an unorganised soup of molecules?
In approaching these questions, he takes his cue from Turing and von Neumann, whose experiments anticipated the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953. The 1936 Turing machine established a minimalist prototype for computational function with the simple components of a coded tape and a read/write head. Von Neumann brought in a focus on embodied computation, where the components of the machine or body are part of what is written.
This is where Agüera y Arcas situates his work. His breakthrough came from adopting a programming language, devised in 1993, called “Brainfuck”. With just eight command symbols, Brainfuck set the parameters for a controlled experiment, in which Agüera y Arcas and his team used 64 byte tapes coded with “junk” drawn from a soup of code and data.
In the experiment, two tapes are selected at random, joined end to end, and run to test for interaction patterns. Then it’s rinse and repeat. The tapes are returned to the soup, and two more are run.
At first, nothing much shows up amidst the randomness. But after a million or so repeats (not massive in computing terms) the magic starts to happen. Loops appear. Patterns emerge. At around the five million mark, the non-functional code or “Turing gas” transforms itself into a “computorium” of replicating code.
In lectures, Agüera y Arcas shows a screenshot of this on his laptop: a vertical line down the centre of the field of data marks the “phase transition”. The image is reproduced on the cover of his book, as an emblem of the paradigm shift he is tracking.
If the transition to replicating code is indeed an expression of what is happening in the development of life forms, the theory of natural selection may lose its claim to primacy as the explanatory model for evolution. Richard Dawkins enthusiasts, hang on to your hats.
Agüera y Arcas does not engage in a polemical critique of Dawkins, but his book brings Margulis, an early adversary of Dawkins, into the centre of the arena. The pair faced off in a public debate in Oxford in 2009, where Dawkins’ popularised concept of the “selfish gene” came under pressure from Margulis’ theory of symbiogenesis, literally genesis through combination or fusion.
The Dawkins account is based on a Darwinian view of natural selection through competitive advantage; Margulis was drawing on research into the formation of microorganisms through combinations of mitochondria and chloroplasts, once independent life forms.
It was survival of the fittest versus a vision of biological complexity generated through endosymbiosis, a relationship in which one organism lives inside another, potentially resulting in a new life form – or, as Agüera y Arcas sees it, an impetus towards “fit” understood as pattern completion, rather than “fitness” understood as advantage.
Microbiologist Lynn Margulis was an early adversary of Richard Dawkins’ theory of the ‘selfish gene’. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Prediction and function
Agüera y Arcas’ central concepts are prediction and function, which work together to explain intelligence as the development of functional complexity through predictive pattern completion.
He is erasing a familiar conceptual boundary here: intelligence does not prompt function, it is function.
Intelligence, he argues, is a property of systems rather than beings, and function is its primary indicator. A rock does not function, but a kidney does. This is demonstrated simply by cutting them in half. The rock becomes two rocks, but the kidney is no longer a kidney.
So does a kidney have intelligence? Or an amoeba? Or a leaf? These questions are opened up, along with the question of whether Large Language Models have intelligence, which may a better way to frame it than asking whether they are intelligent.
Agüera y Arcas is not alone in taking an affirmative position. Influential biologist Michael Levin runs a research laboratory at Tufts University, where he and his team study the functional correlations between natural organisms and synthetic or chimeric life forms in search of “intelligence behaviour in unfamiliar guises”.
Their declared goal is to develop modes of communication with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots and software-based AIs.
Such an approach steers a course between the stochastic parrots view and biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance,” which proposes that organic form is a manifestation of memory, resonating through generations as genetic heritage. Agüera y Arcas avoids both Sheldrake’s intuitive and telepathic orientations, and the hard-headed constraints of mechanistic determinism.
The thesis presented in What is Intelligence? is unfamiliar rather than intrinsically difficult. Much of the explanation is easy enough for the general reader to follow, though Agüera y Arcas has a tendency to veer into more the technical and abstract terrain of programming, as if addressing an insider audience. The extensive glossary does not include standard programming terms, such as logic gates, gradients, weights and backpropagation.
At over 600 pages, What is Intelligence? is a marathon read and it is encumbered by tangential excursions. I’m not sure why Agüera y Arcas needs to go into the history of industrialisation, or anthropological studies of the Pirahā people of the Amazon. This is a book for dipping into rather than swallowing whole.
But its ideas are important. They may well be part of a major transformation in our thinking about where human intelligence sits in the rapidly evolving environment of AI.
Jane Goodall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Good adaptations take advantage of the affordances the cinematic medium provides, so some changes are permissible. Fennell goes well beyond this, altering essential characters, relationships and themes to the point that the film feels like erotic fan-fiction with a Hollywood budget.
To synopsise, Brontë’s story is a tragedy of intergenerational trauma. It follows Heathcliff, an abused serial abuser, and Catherine, an intergenerational manipulator. The pair’s toxic relationship – and mutual revenge on everyone they knew (beyond the grave in Catherine’s case) – wreaks havoc.
Visually loud, emotionally mute
Given its tagline “the greatest love story ever told”, Fennell’s film was destined to make some changes.
The frame narrative of the novel is missing. The novel is told through housekeeper Nelly Dean, who is recounting it to Heathcliff’s tenant, Lockwood. The film, meanwhile, starts in Catherine’s childhood and ends at her death.
This also means Fennell stops short of the final act of the novel. In doing so, she omits an entire generation of important characters on whom the original Catherine and Heathcliff – two traumatised, irredeemable wrecking balls – foist their damage.
The interpersonal dynamics that underpin Brontë’s story are warped into a vacuous caricature, missing the point with virtuosic flair. And make no mistake: there is flair. The visual design is bombastic, pointedly anachronistic, and utterly at odds with the novel’s gloomy Gothic countenance.
The opulent, richly saturated sets veer sharply from Brontë’s bleak, wind-swept moors. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Brontë’s perpetually grey and haunted moors are swapped for technicolour highlights, elaborate outfits and, at times, saturated tangerine sunsets. It watches like Sofia Coppola attempting Edgar Allan Poe – or a Charli XCX clip (guess who wrote the original soundtrack). This is an odd liberty for a film named after the story’s original setting – the stormy Wuthering Heights estate.
As pioneering Gothic theorists Sanda Gilbert and Susan Gubar write, the Heights in the novel are blanketed by “a general air of sour hatred” that manifests as “continual, aimless violence”.
In the Gothic, setting functions as a haunted presence that reflects the characters’ aberrant psychological states. The past haunts, even when there are no ghosts.
Fennell’s version retains the melodrama, but not the foreboding, hate and malice. And despite the explicit sexuality (none of which appears in the novel beyond euphemism), her take on the story feels oddly toothless. Neutered, even. It trades Gothic for vaudeville.
The erasure of Hindley and Heathcliff
To say the film lacks the novel’s social commentary is an understatement.
From the opening scene, the changes to the source material are clear. We see a young Catherine witnessing a hanged man with an erection – and this tone remains for the entire runtime.
Hindley – Catherine’s brother who forces Heathcliff into servitude, and is arguably the lynchpin of Heathcliff’s revenge – is also entirely absent from the film.
Literary critic Terry Eagleton notes how it is Hindley’s inherited status that enables his abuse of Heathcliff. It is Heathcliff’s lack of wealth, status and property that sees Catherine wed the wealthy Edgar Linton; and, as theorist Arnold Kettle argues, it is Heathcliff’s weaponisation of wealth and inheritance that finally serves as his vehicle for revenge.
To remove these factors is to remove the novel’s entire moral framework.
In the film, Heathcliff’s grievances shrink to Catherine choosing to marry Edgar Linton. This is as close as the film comes to the novel’s treatment of classism, racism and intergenerational trauma.
Likewise, ending on Catherine’s death erases the consequences of the deuteragonists’ manipulations – namely the suffering of their respective children and servants.
The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has its own controversy. In the novel, Heathcliff’s ambiguous racial identity, within the context of Georgian England, shapes almost every interaction he has.
Even though it’s not clear what his racial identity is (some scholars point to hints that suggest he may have escaped from slavery), his character is defined by “othering”. This is something Elordi’s Heathcliff is at no risk of believably experiencing.
The film flattens the novel’s broader account of how trauma replicates across generations, and how systemic marginalisation can both attract and beget abuse.
Jacob Elordi’s casting sidesteps the racialised marginalisation central to Heathcliff’s character. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
On abuse – perhaps Fennell’s strangest departure from the source material is reframing Heathcliff’s treatment of Isabella (Edgar Linton’s sister and later Heathcliff’s wife) as a consensual BDSM dynamic.
Brontë’s Heathcliff terrorises Isabella physically and emotionally, and implicitly sexually, until she flees with their son.
The switch from repressed, complex desire in the novel to explicit sex scenes (absent from the book), and the rewriting of abuse as kink, seems to cater to audiences raised on post-50 Shades Of Grey erotica rather than Victorian Gothic.
Literary classics for a Tiktok generation
Like 2020’s colourful Austen adaptation, Emma (well received as a film, but criticised as an adaptation), Fennell’s Wuthering Heights signals a trend towards the “tiktokification” of literary adaptations.
Hollywood has long taken liberties with books, but this recent wave feels engineered for clips, reels and virality, rather than the necessary sacrifices of adaptation.
We know it’s possible to have adaptations with both flair and substance. Consider Baz Luhrmann. The Oscar-nominated Romeo + Juliet (1996) is just as visually bombastic, yet the extent of verbatim Shakespeare retains a dedication to the source that Fennell’s film lacks.
So what does it have to offer? Virality. Even this article contributes to the internet firestorm that will ensure Wuthering Heights’ commercial success. It will ragebait critics far longer than such a limp effort deserves – and we are all its victims.
Benjamin D. Muir does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
US President Donald Trump has announced the United States will increase baseline tariffs on imports from all countries to 15%, as the fallout continues from a seismic Supreme Court ruling on Friday.
Trump had imposed sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” last year under an emergency powers act, but the court ruled this law did not authorise him to do so.
Speaking in the wake of the ruling on Friday, Trump admonished the justices of the Supreme Court. He called the Democratic justices who ruled against the tariffs a “disgrace to the nation”.
He also said he felt “ashamed” of members of the court he considered conservative who had voted against his use of emergency powers.
Trump’s statement was riddled with insults and inaccuracies. However, he admitted he had tried to “make things simple” by using the emergency powers act. He went on to say he does have other options, but those options would take more time. This was one part of his speech that was indeed accurate.
With the clock already ticking on his landmark trade agenda, and the multi-billion dollar question of refunds looming, what might Trump do next? Here’s what could now be in store for both Australia and the world.
This part of the law has never been used. However, it appears to clearly allow the president to impose tariffs of up to 15%, and for a period of no more than 150 days.
This section does allow the president to impose tariffs in response to foreign countries who violate US rights under international trade agreements, or that burden or restrict US commerce in “unjustifiable”, “unreasonable” or “discriminatory” ways. However, it requires some steps to be followed.
The process for using this law is detailed and cannot be subverted. It would likely take either years or vast amounts of resources to introduce tariffs that were anywhere near the “Liberation Day” tariffs.
If nothing else, it requires consultations with the countries upon whose goods those tariffs will be imposed.
Section 301 has previously been used to impose tariffs on China, following an investigation by the United States Trade Representative in 2018.
Another option
Another avenue for the president to bypass Congress is a specific section of a different law, Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, that applies to a particular sector of the economy.
However, it can’t be used to recreate sweeping tariffs on all foreign imports. This provision is generally product-specific and requires an investigation into the national security threat.
Its use to impose steel and aluminium tariffs has been challenged by multiple trading partners at the World Trade Organization. A panel of experts ruled the US had used a special national security exception erroneously.
If all collected duties are refunded, it’s estimated the total repayment could reach approximately US$175 billion (A$247 billion).
Much to the president’s frustration, there was no clarity within the Supreme Court’s ruling on the process for refunds of illegally collected tariffs.
That silence, which prompted Trump to refer to the decision as “terrible” and “defective”, was likely because this would be handled by other courts.
Back in December, the US Court of International Trade stated it would have the authority to order reliquidation and refunds of the sweeping tariffs if the Supreme Court ultimately ruled them unlawful.
Many large companies had already anticipated this ruling, and acted to get on the front foot. For example, in late November, large retailer Costco sued the Trump administration to secure a full refund of tariffs in the event the Supreme Court deemed them unlawful.
In late December, faced with an avalanche of similar cases, the Court of International Trade temporarily halted all cases where companies were claiming relief from IEEPA tariffs ahead of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Refunds may not be straightforward
Some importers have argued that because the tariff payments were itemised, receiving refunds should not be messy.
But the process for refunds may not be as straightforward as it should be. Trump suggested they could be “in court for the next five years”.
What does this all mean for Australia?
Australia’s previous 10% rate was much lower than many other nations, but now at 15% the playing field has been levelled – at least for the next 150 days.
Australian exporters don’t pay these tariffs directly themselves, but may be pressured to absorb some of the cost, and it makes their imports less competitive in the US market.
However, not all Australian exporters are in the same position. The proclamation issued by the White House listed some exceptions, including beef, critical minerals, energy products and pharmaceuticals.
At Friday’s press conference, Trump said “great certainty” had been brought back to the United States and the world. In truth, the uncertainty is far from over.
Felicity Deane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A controversial policy of destroying recordings of trials after seven years is to be abandoned, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has disclosed.
The policy, affecting courts in England and Wales, had been heavily criticised by lawyers and miscarriage of justice campaigners, who said the destruction of court records makes challenging a conviction almost impossible.
They point to cases like Omar Benguit – now the subject of a BBC Panorama investigation – where vital court records were erased.
As a journalism lecturer carrying out research into court reporting, as well as miscarriages of justice, I was keen to investigate, and requested more information from the MoJ through Freedom of Information requests.
In its responses to me, the MoJ publicly disclosed for the first time that trial records will now be kept for at least as long as the prison sentence – and possibly indefinitely.
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An MoJ spokesperson said: “This updated policy safeguards continued access to court records for the purpose of appeals, reviews or any other legal proceedings that may arise during the entire period of the sentence.
“Retaining records for the full length of the sentence preserves judicial integrity, and protects the rights of all parties concerned.”
Campaigners who fought for years to halt the policy of destroying court records have welcomed the announcement. Jon Robins, a lecturer at Brighton University and co-organiser of the Open Justice Charter, told me:
This is a sensible result – and a surprising and belated victory for our campaign. We pointed out more than a decade ago that there was no possible justification for such a draconian destruction policy, ever since our courts were dragged into the digital era and began recording proceedings – other than closing off the prospect of challenges from those claiming to be wrongly convicted.
The unnecessary loss of court documents – especially, court transcripts and the audio recordings of court proceedings – has often proved an insurmountable barrier in the investigation of miscarriage of justice cases.
The official guidance for how long records should be retained is set out in the crown court’s Record Retention and Disposition Schedule (RRDS). This currently states that the recordings of crown court trials should be “kept for seven years and then destroyed”.
The MoJ confirmed to me that this policy has now been scrapped. It stated that “effective from October 9 2023 onwards”, staff had been instructed to apply the following retention periods for crown court audio recordings:
One year for not-guilty verdicts;
Seven years for non-custodial sentences;
At least seven years or the sentence length for custodial sentences (whichever is longer);
And 99 years for life imprisonment.
The MoJ said it will officially publish this updated guidance in the new RRDS later this year.
End of a ‘reckless’ policy
For many years, the policy of destroying recordings of trials attracted a great deal of public criticism.
In January 2016, a letter was sent to the then secretary of state for justice, Michael Gove, urging him to change the policy. The letter – signed by 35 lawyers, academics and campaigners – said: “In this digital age, it is both reckless and irresponsible to systematically destroy the record of court proceedings.”
In October 2016, Jerry Buting, the American attorney whose defence of Steven Avery featured in the Netflix docuseries Making A Murderer, told The Justice Gap that destroying recordings of court proceedings was “absolutely ludicrous”, adding: “Digital recordings take virtually no space. There is no excuse for the courts to not store forever – at least as long as the defendant is alive.”
A later campaign called Open Justice Charter (OJC) also highlighted the destruction of court records as a key failing in the justice system, stating: “No recordings of criminal court proceedings should be destroyed until at least seven years after the end of the prison term and any post-release licence period imposed.”
What was heard by the jury?
The key concern for those criticising the policy was what they saw as the deleterious affect it was having on those trying to challenge a conviction.
The way the appeal system works is that if a prisoner wants to challenge their conviction, they need to apply to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in order to be allowed to take their case to the Court of Appeal.
The CCRC will not refer the case unless there is “fresh evidence” – something new which the original jury did not hear. And so, for someone who believes they have been wrongly convicted, their starting point will be to identify exactly what was heard by the jury.
For the prisoner and their legal team, this means getting access to the transcriptions of the trial. Without these, they risk submitting an application based on evidence that is not considered new, or omitting evidence that could be highly significant.
Some applications to the CCRC may come many years – even decades – after trials have happened, meaning that not even the prisoner will be able to fully remember what happened in court. For example, one miscarriage of justice victim, Peter Sullivan, was freed 38 years after a jury wrongly convicted him.
Leading legal figures such as Michael Mansfield KC, who acted for the Hillsborough families, has argued that the destruction of records hugely disadvantages those seeking justice. He told The Guardian: “Equally important is access to the record of proceedings and case documentation, without which injustice can be washed away.”
Emily Bolton, who founded Appeal, the charity and law practice dedicated to challenging wrongful convictions, also described the destruction of court records as “a complete roadblock to investigating miscarriages of justice”. She added: “What is the British system afraid of? It’s a public trial, and there should be an accessible record of it.”
More groundbreaking than it first appears
Despite all of this, the MoJ took years to revise the policy. In response to my FoI requests, it explained the decision had nothing to do with the criticism it had received:
The change from ‘seven years to seven years or the life of the sentence’ was driven by new legislation (at the time) called The Parole Board Rules 2019. Those revisions were of particular importance so as to ensure that audio records remain accessible for the entire duration of a custodial sentence, particularly when the sentence exceeds seven years.
But a close analysis of the MoJ’s responses to the FoI requests reveals something intriguing – that the change may be far more groundbreaking than it first appears.
While the MoJ may be reluctant to spell it out explicitly, it appears that the official policy has quietly moved from a position of court records being routinely destroyed, to one where they will now be retained indefinitely. And the reason for this is not legal or political – but purely down to technology.
The destruction of court records was really a legacy of the analogue age; a time when stenographers quietly tapped away in court and any recordings were kept on physical tapes.
In 2012, all of that was swept away when proceedings in crown courts began to be recorded by the Digital Audio Recording Transcription and Storage (Darts) system, meaning there was no longer any need to physically store recordings on tape, and therefore no logistical reason to destroy them.
So, while the new policy dictates that records will be retained for at least as long as the prison sentence, the new technology has essentially removed the need or justification for ever deleting any more court records. The MoJ came very close to admitting this to me when it said: “Crown court audio recordings are retained within HMCTS Digital Audio Recording Transcription and Storage system. To date, none of these court audio recordings have been deleted.”
If the Darts system had been storing recordings since 2012, and the MoJ policy was to destroy recordings after seven years, then they should have started erasing cases since 2019.
Significant costs
While the change is very significant and should dramatically improve access to court records, one critical barrier remains.
While the audio recording of the trial may now exist, it is not possible – except in very limited circumstances – to listen to it, so it must be professionally transcribed. And this can prove to be very – even prohibitively – expensive.
Many victims, particularly those who suffered sexual violence, are now calling for transcriptions of trials to be made free. This new campaign echoes an argument that miscarriage of justice campaigners like Bolton were making a decade ago. She said in 2016:
In this country, the system was privatised, and now profit-driven transcription firms hold justice to ransom, demanding thousands of pounds to provide sections of transcript of a trial. Neither the Legal Aid system nor individual prisoners or their families can afford this, and so the recordings languish unreviewed, and the system goes unaudited.
Robins told me: “The next step for accountability in our courts is to make the audio recordings or transcripts of proceedings available at an accessible price. In an era when there are free AI transcription services, these costs make no sense.”
The decision by the MoJ to stop destroying recordings of trials means that court records will now be available – as long as someone can afford them. It brings to mind the quip by 19th-century judge James Mathew, who said that “in England, justice is open to all – like the Ritz Hotel”.
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Brian Thornton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
By any measure, 2025 is the year artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly shifted the way we work, interact with each other and engage with the world at large. It has also made undeniable the enduring reality of racism and the limits of fact-checking in an age of disinformation.
Thanks to algorithmic systems, narratives that tap into deep-seated fears and anxieties travel farther and faster than ever before. They circle the globe before fact-checkers can even flag a problematic post.
What is most striking about these videos is how deliberately the caricature of the “Black welfare queen” was staged. In one video, the speaker declares, “I need SNAP to buy an iPhone.” In another, “I only eat steak, I need my funds.” And in a clip with children in the background, the woman insists, “I need to do my nails.”
Each expression of illicit use of funds is a shorthand for the alleged irresponsibility and moral failing that has long been intertwined with the racist trope of the “Black welfare queen.” One X user aptly dubbed these videos nothing short of “digital blackface.”
In the words of Black feminist writers Moya Bailey and Trudy, these videos traffic in “misogynoir” — a term developed to capture the “ways anti-Blackness and misogyny combine to malign Black women.” Bailey and Trudy note that representations of Black women as undeserving, burdensome to the public purse and inherently fraudulent are entrenched rather than exceptional.
Even clips “clearly labeled with a Sora watermark nabbed nearly 500,000 views on TikTok alone,” journalist Joe Wilkins observed. Wilkins goes on to explain that even when viewers were told the clips were AI-generated, some insisted, [“But that is what is happening.” Some argued that even if the videos were technically “fake,” they still “highlight genuine SNAP…issues.”
These comments expose the limits of fact-checking as an antidote to disinformation, especially when dealing with charged tropes. Once a harmful framing is revived and thrust into the collective ether, Ctrl+Alt+Delete becomes ineffective.
What requires attention, then, is not only how we grapple with the new terrain of AI-driven disinformation, but that we critically ask why certain representations hold mass resonance.
Why do particular images and narratives travel so well?
From settled fraud case to viral spectacle
Another case of digital blackface that captured public attention centred on the Minnesota Somali “Black fraud alert” saga. While still rooted in the same anti-Blackness that animated the “Black welfare queen” caricatures, this incident included Islamophobia and rising anti-immigrant sentiments.
What followed was not a serious discussion of fraud or of policy safeguards. Instead, the episode reinvigorated debates about white nationalism, racialized citizenship and racial eugenics.
This reference to child care echoed back to a viral video produced by a right-wing commentator claiming to expose another chapter in the “Somali fraud scandal,” this time targeting Somali-run child-care centres. The video prompted a statewide investigation, which ultimately found that all but one of the named centres were operating normally, with no clear evidence of fraud.
The “Black welfare queen” trope and the “Somali pirate” frame may seem to name different crises and different subjects, yet both draw from the same anti-Black racial grammar. In each case, Blackness is rendered fraudulent, criminal and morally deficient, cast as both a personal failing and national burden.
Why these ideas travel even when they’re false
These instances of digital blackface succeeded because misogynoir and anti-Blackness remain readily available discursive resources. AI merely accelerates their movement. The refusal of audiences to course-correct when fact-checked underscores how intuitive and pre-assembled racist and xenophobic scripts already are.
In both the SNAP-themed misogynoiric videos and the AI-generated “Somali pirate” content, nuance and factual accuracy were beside the point. What is at work instead is a broader political project tied to racial capitalism’s eugenicist logics.
As Black radical scholar Cedric Robinson argues, racism is not incidental to capitalism but foundational to the inequalities it requires. Poverty is misdirected as evidence of personal and community failings rather than the result of massive structural inequity. And when attached to the racialized poor, especially when Black, Muslim and immigrant, this logic crystallizes into “common sense.”
What is at stake with AI-enabled digital blackface is not only the amplification of racism, but the architecture of political life. In this climate, sober analysis and nuance recede, displaced by the numbing anxiety that structures contemporary public discourse.
Nadiya N. Ali has received funding from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Matthew I. Thompson, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance, University of Regina
The fate of 30 captive beluga whales and four dolphins hangs in the balance as Marineland in Niagara Falls awaits final approval for an export permit from the Canadian government. Marineland has threatened to euthanize the whales, as they can no longer afford to feed and house them since shuttering the park.
A more humane solution for many is The Whale Sanctuary Project, a 100-acre enclosed parcel of coastal waters in Nova Scotia. The sanctuary is not yet complete, however, and Marineland is pressing the federal government to allow them to export their whales to amusement parks in the United States.
My research examines how environmental politics get transformed into Hollywood movies. Captive whales and dolphins inspired the Save the Whales movement of the 1970s and 80s, which found itself expressed in films like The Day of the Dolphin and Orca. While these films were very sympathetic towards whales, their star cetaceans were captive orcas and dolphins.
The crisis at Marineland is emblematic of human-cetacean relations in the last hundred years. Whether capturing them on film, containing them in amusement parks or subjecting them to scientific experiments, our curiosity about whales and dolphins has compelled us to fetch them out of the ocean. The irony is that, once we have gotten a good look, we recognize their right to be free in an environment they are no longer equipped for.
Free Willy
The best example of this irony comes from the 1993 film Free Willy. In it, a young boy befriends, and then leads to freedom, a captive orca named Willy. A surprise hit at the box office, once the film was released many audience members wanted to know whether the whale who played Willy had also been set free.
Keiko, as that whale was known, was held in captivity in an under-resourced aquarium in Mexico City at the time. Like the belugas and dolphins at Marineland, Keiko was suffering some of the mental and physical afflictions associated with living in a poorly maintained tank. Since 2019, 19 belugas, one dolphin and one orca have died at Marineland.
Pressure from fans of the film led to the creation of the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation, and a plan to release Keiko back into the wild was developed.
Millions of dollars were spent flying Keiko, first to Oregon, where he was taught to catch and eat live fish again, and then to Iceland where he was slowly introduced to a wild pod of orcas.
Keiko died of pneumonia in a Norwegian fjord only 18 months after his full release.
Keiko’s story highlights the problem faced by the belugas and dolphins at Marineland. Films and amusement parks expose millions of people to the intelligence, charisma and ineffability of cetaceans. This exposure transformed toothed-whales in the popular imagination from “wolves of the sea” to a “mind in the waters.” What were once thought of as dangerous gluttons who decimated commercial fish stocks became intelligent and benevolent friends.
Once this transformation has taken place in the popular imagination, the captive whales that inspired it are no longer congruent with the dominant opinion that intelligent and social creatures should not be taken from their families and held in small tanks.
What do the whales want?
The belugas and dolphins at Marineland are, from one perspective, victims of a law designed to protect them. Bill S-203, nicknamed the “Free Willy bill,” banned keeping captive whales and dolphins in Canada after passing into law in 2019. The whales at Marineland were grandfathered in, but further breeding was prohibited.
The ban on breeding means Marineland has to keep the male and female belugas separate from each other. According to one former trainer at the park, once the males were secluded from their female companions, they began aggressively raking each other with their teeth, leaving scars visible on their skin.
In 2021, Ontario’s Animal Welfare Service concluded an investigation into the park, declaring that all the marine mammals there were in distress due to poor water quality. Marineland has made efforts to improve the life-support systems since 2021, and the whale deaths at the park have not been linked to water quality. That being said, even when cetaceans are well cared for in captivity, they live shorter lives than their wild counterparts.
An ideal plan for the whales at Marineland would be made in consultation with them. Unfortunately, despite many imaginative attempts (some of which I detail in my forthcoming book), an interspecies communication breakthrough with cetaceans has yet to occur.
In the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home the crew of the Starship Enterprise is tasked with travelling back in time to collect a pair of captive humpback whales, as cetaceans are extinct in their present. Before beaming the animals up, however, Spock takes a swim with them to ask their permission. When Captain Kirk asks why he jumped into the whale tank, Spock replies:
“Admiral, If we were to assume that these whales are ours to do with as we please, we would be as guilty as those who caused their extinction.”
Matthew I. Thompson receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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