When animals fall sick, they ramp up production of the proinflammatory cytokine interleukin-1β, a molecule that acts on certain brain neurons and dials down the urge to socialise, as Yang and colleagues showed in a January issue of Cell. The behaviour serves two useful purposes at once: the animal gets to rest without feeling guilty about it, and it reduces the risk of spreading the infection to others. Similar mechanisms operate in humans, too. Yet when people fall sick, many reach for so-called immune-boosting supplements to cope with the fatigue so they can get back to work or social life as quickly as possible, along with the viruses they carry. Writing in EMBO Reports, Fedor Pichanič and Vladimir Leksa argue that if some unbiased extraterrestrial scientists were watching Earth, they might come away with the impression that animals are more rational than humans, and that the longer they looked, the stronger that impression would get.
The commentary, published on 3 November 2026 under the title When science meets philosophy, uses this immunological example to open a broader argument about the relationship between scientific knowledge and human behaviour. The authors, who are affiliated with the journal’s Science & Society section, contend that technological power has raced ahead while everyday scientific literacy has barely moved, and that in some important respects it may even be sliding backwards. They point to the fading of public support for vaccination as perhaps the clearest example. Not long ago, vaccines allowed humankind to wipe out deadly diseases like smallpox and polio, yet after only a few decades children are dying of measles again because vaccination coverage is slipping away, which they describe as the direct result of reckless rejection of vaccines, citing Mercado and colleagues from 2026.
The authors illustrate their point with a desert ecosystem of fennec foxes, snails and cactus plants. The snails eat the cacti but never all of them, a taboo that makes sense because wiping out every plant would eventually starve them, and because snails help to pollinate the plants, as Sarma and colleagues reported in 2007. The foxes, in turn, eat the snails but do not finish them off either. Humans are born with the same basic instinct, the authors write, noting that indigenous tribes in the remaining tropical rainforests still see nature as the source of everything they need but treat taking more than is essential for living as a taboo, citing Mere Roncal and colleagues from 2018. Sigmund Freud described taboo as a social institution that collectively regulates individual desires in the interests of social life, in which the violation of taboos arouses a powerful sense of guilt, so that social life itself becomes structured by repression and fear of ostracism.
Yet if extraterrestrials were to turn their attention to modern people, the authors suggest, they would conclude that we have lost our primitive taboos. In the modern world, they argue, it is ideology that regulates individual behaviour and establishes hierarchies, transforming inner taboos together with animal instincts into intelligible concepts, norms and rules through which individuals are constituted as social subjects. Drawing on Althusser, they write that ideology gives men a certain knowledge of their world, but that something is amiss in this form of knowledge. As an example they cite the Western diet, foods low in nutrients and fibre but high in calories, loaded with salt, sugar and saturated fats. These foods entered our diets only a few centuries ago during cold-climate periods when it was not possible to grow enough crops in the Northern Hemisphere, as Alt and colleagues described in 2022. People started eating more meat and learned to preserve it by salting, smoking and other methods, and the Industrial Revolution later perfected those techniques. The authors observe that we have grown so used to this diet that we still stick with it today, even though it is bad for our health, even though it is wrecking the environment, and even though the Little Ice Age ended long ago and we have moved into global warming.
The argument then widens to science itself. It has been only a short time, the authors note, since humanity discovered the laws of relativity and quantum physics, along with other major insights such as evolutionary theory, the second law of thermodynamics and the immune system. These discoveries have driven the technologies we rely on, but almost no one truly understands them. Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue has become a piece of pop art thanks to Andy Warhol, and that, more or less, is where public engagement in modern physics seems to end, they write. We still act as if we are the crown of creation, as though Charles Darwin never showed how closely we are related to and dependent on other living beings. We still chase economic growth as if it were a basic human right, as though Rudolf Clausius never explained that the second law of thermodynamics rules out any perpetual-motion machine. Children are dying in large numbers again, as though Edward Jenner never developed vaccination. And many people insist the Earth is flat, as though Eratosthenes had not calculated its circumference in the third century BCE.
Worse still, the authors argue, many people have drawn the mistaken conclusion from the theory of relativity and the uncertainty principle that truth is something relative, that everyone can have their own truth, or that no truth exists at all. These narratives, they contend, do not lead to responsibility or wisdom. Instead, they lead to ignorance wrapped in a sense of superiority, twenty-four hundred years after Socrates, who understood that the more people know, the more they realise their own fallibility and responsibility, captured in the phrase I know that I know nothing. The authors then invoke Stephen Hawking’s well-known claim, made with Leonard Mlodinow in 2010, that traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead, that philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics, and that scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. If philosophy is dead, they ask, who is left to answer questions about why the gap between knowledge and technology and mankind’s ignorant behaviour is so vast and keeps growing? Leaving these questions open would push science further and further away from humanity, they warn, until one day the public is left shrieking in horror at what science has delivered, as Bertolt Brecht warned in Life of Galileo. The fact that so many people now fear artificial intelligence, they write, proves that his words are still relevant.
To make that case, the authors revisit what science and philosophy actually are. The story often starts with the Greek philosopher and mathematician Thales of Milet, who brought back useful knowledge of Egyptian mathematics and, watching how people measured and divided distances, turned those practical skills into a more abstract system of thought, geometry, as Zhmud recounted in 2018. This created a distinction between practice, using knowledge, and theory, generating knowledge for its own sake. This first era of philosophy was characterised by the absolute identity of theory and practice, or of philosophy and science. Though we may distinguish one from the other retrospectively, the ancients regarded thought and reality as inherently complementary modes of being, as Parmenides maintained. Yet it is precisely with Parmenides, the authors write, that the apparently solid edifice of this system begins to fissure, because with him logic as an autonomous method of thought was inaugurated. Parmenides’ introduction of strict logic also prepared the ground for the Sophists, who took logic in a fresh direction, arguing that truth depended more on clever reasoning than on facts. Then came Socrates, who broke the unity and formed philosophy as a distinct discipline. He was not interested in collecting facts about nature. Socrates shared with the Sophists the insight that truth must pass through subjective thought, yet he rejected their tendency to leave truth dependent on a private standpoint, nor did he identify truth with scientific fact. Truth, or the principle of the Good, must instead emerge and be sought within human society, in the spirit of his remark that landscapes and trees have nothing to teach him, only the people in the city.
In and by dialogue, the elenchus, Socrates examined people’s everyday opinions and beliefs. His method works by testing ideas against each other, immanently. In this sense, the authors write, philosophy means a critical practice: it does not produce a coherent theory of the world, but it offers a way of examining the frameworks through which we make sense of things. Socratic dialogue questions inherited ways of thinking and acting, exposing the limits and contradictions of the categories through which interlocutors understand their world. Aristotle, by contrast, developed an approach that looks much more like modern science. He focused on careful study of actual objects in the world to classify, compare and explain them, and he distinguished theory from practice, with science concerned with the former and politics or ethics with the latter. Where Socrates dealt mainly with shared opinions and concepts, Aristotle was interested in knowledge about the things themselves. The distinction we still feel today has deep roots, the authors continue. Although the divergent stories of science and philosophy have continued to develop, especially after Hippocrates of Cos revolutionised medicine and Paracelsus transformed alchemy into modern evidence-based science, the categories established by Socrates and Aristotle are still relevant. Philosophy has a distinctive self-reflective character: it examines and reworks its own claims in relation to concrete practices and experiences, drawing distinctions and revealing contradictions within those practices. Science, by contrast, produces knowledge about objects and processes in the world, and its self-examination, present in the method of experimentation and verification, remains essentially internal to its production. But neither is simply the immature form of the other, the authors stress; each does something the other cannot.
A more concrete institutional distinction emerged in medieval scholasticism, when Aristotelian natural philosophy and Platonic metaphysics came to occupy different departments within the university curriculum, though both remained closely connected via theology. As knowledge became increasingly institutionalised and therefore politicised, the two approaches came into sharper conflict, and the central issue was not the truth or usefulness of either discipline but authority over legitimate knowledge. As medieval universities were supported by both the Church and the state, their function was not simply to study nature but to organise knowledge in ways that legitimised ecclesiastical and royal authority, as Verger argued in 1999. Beginning with the modern period, the knowledge generated by the sciences increasingly gained practical importance for states, militaries and emerging economies. Francis Bacon articulated this new significance by presenting knowledge as an organised power aimed at profitable inventions and the benefit and use of life, though he was largely describing an already ongoing shift in the socio-political organisation of the state and its institutions, as Peltonen noted in 2025. This institutional separation gave science a degree of procedural autonomy but also embedded it within political interests, a tendency that intensified through expanded public funding after the Second World War and the professionalisation of the natural sciences, bringing greater pressure to deliver usable results, milestones and outputs. Philosophy, conversely, largely lost its institutional importance. It remained independent of political or economic interests, but as a purely academic discipline it became more abstract and obscure and lost its unique power of general examination and distinction, the authors write, continuing today mainly in two currents: one that sees philosophy as explaining what seemed to lie beyond science’s scope, embodied by Leibnizian natural philosophy, and another that embraces its self-reflective character, embodied by Cartesian philosophy of the cogito.
This separation did not make either science or philosophy stronger, the authors argue, nor did it eliminate their ancient relation. Instead, it encouraged each to regard itself as self-sufficient. The task, then, is not to erase the distinction between them but to re-establish their relation without reducing one to the other. As evidence of what goes wrong without it, they cite leaded petrol: tetraethyllead improved engine performance, but its widespread use caused extensive environmental contamination and serious health harms, as Rosner and Markowitz documented in 1985. Even though science had demonstrated its toxicity, regulatory delays kept it on the market for decades. A stronger philosophical intervention, the authors suggest, might have helped to distinguish scientific evidence from industrial and regulatory impositions, and together with independent research and a stronger sense of responsibility on the part of scientists, it could have supported more honest public communication and stronger regulatory accountability. The same analysis, they add, applies to immune-boosting supplements, which ameliorate personal physical status at the expense of everyone else, and to the negative impact of fossil fuel use, non-degradable plastics, global warming and artificial intelligence. Science has repeatedly generated knowledge with hazardous applications, often with insufficient foresight regarding their uses, but it was also scientists who were the first to warn about these applications, from Albert Einstein to Robert Oppenheimer to Linus Pauling to Andrej Sakharov, whose warnings about nuclear weapons show that the problem was also the political conditions under which scientific knowledge was received and acted on. Science often acts as though it were a mere knowledge-producing institution, the authors conclude: it knows the finest movement of the stars, but not who ultimately benefits from this knowledge. Philosophy, allied with science, could bring knowledge back to humanity, just as Prometheus brought fire to humankind. And philosophy itself is not dead, they add, noting that Hawking refuted his own bon mot when he delved into philosophy, collaborating with Vangelis on a message for the people of Earth, released by the European Space Agency on Earth Day, April 22, 2020: we are all time travellers journeying together into the future, but let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit.
Subject of Research: A commentary arguing that science and philosophy must be reunited to guide technological progress and address public health and environmental crises.
Article Title: When science meets philosophy
Article References: Pichanič, F., & Leksa, V. (2026). When science meets philosophy. EMBO Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44319-026-00977-0
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1038/s44319-026-00977-0
Keywords: philosophy of science, scientific literacy, vaccination hesitancy, interleukin-1 beta, Western diet, leaded petrol, artificial intelligence, Socratic method, Aristotle, responsible research, EMBO Reports, science and society
Source: bioengineer.org
