In the study of politics, many theoretical accounts assume that we are experiencing a ‘crisis of democracy’, with declining levels of political trust. While some empirical studies support this account, others disagree and report ‘trendless fluctuations’. We argue that these empirical ambiguities are based on analytical confusion: whether trust is declining depends on the institution, country, and period in question. We clarify these issues and apply our framework to an empirical analysis that is unprecedented in geographic and temporal scope: we apply Bayesian dynamic latent trait models to uncover underlying trends in data on trust in six institutions collated from 3,377 surveys conducted by 50 projects in 143 countries between 1958 and 2019. We identify important differences between countries and regions, but globally we find that trust in representative institutions has generally been declining in recent decades, whereas trust in ‘implementing’ institutions has been stable or rising.

During the years of Japan's “bubble” economy, writers and artists in the United States became increasingly susceptible to “Japan-bashing,” a discourse that objectified Japanese for their trade practices, overseas purchases, and tourist presence. In the following article, I draw upon a range of cultural texts, from Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's to Michael Crichton's novel Rising Sun, in order to investigate how the trope of the camera-toting Japanese expatriate encapsulated the fears of the era. I then move to explore the ways in which Japanese Americans negotiated these tropes in their writings, paying particular attention to Ruth Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats. I hypothesize that Japanese Americans remained aware of the phenomenon of “Japan-bashing” throughout the era, yet did not confront it in a sustained fashion. Instead, tropes were either dismissed out of hand or, as in Ozeki's case, incorporated into a narrative before undergoing a process of gradual dismantlement.

From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief formation system (e.g., delusions) and those arising in the normal course of that system's operations (e.g., beliefs based on incomplete or inaccurate information). The former are instances of biological dysfunction or pathology, reflecting “culpable” limitations of evolutionary design. Although the latter category includes undesirable (but tolerable) by-products of “forgivably” limited design, our quarry is a contentious subclass of this category: misbeliefs best conceived as design features. Such misbeliefs, unlike occasional lucky falsehoods, would have been systematically adaptive in the evolutionary past. Such misbeliefs, furthermore, would not be reducible to judicious – but doxastically1 noncommittal – action policies. Finally, such misbeliefs would have been adaptive in themselves, constituting more than mere by-products of adaptively biased misbelief-producing systems. We explore a range of potential candidates for evolved misbelief, and conclude that, of those surveyed, only positive illusions meet our criteria.

The commentaries raise a host of challenging issues and reflect a broad range of views. Some commentators doubt that there is any convincing evidence for adaptive misbelief, and remain (in our view, unduly) wedded to our “default presumption” that misbelief is maladaptive. Others think that the evidence for adaptive misbelief is so obvious, and so widespread, that the label “default presumption” is disingenuous. We try to chart a careful course between these opposing perspectives.

Transcriptomic studies are useful for elucidating molecular mechanisms through which changes in nutrient availability produce pleiotropic effects on whole-body and tissue physiology. To further the knowledge of gene-regulatory effects of Zn on tissues important for adult and fetal Zn nutrition, we analysed the responses of human intestinal Caco-2 and placental JAR cells to changes in Zn supply. Analysis of oligonucleotide microarrays demonstrated that, despite the analogous roles of the two tissues in nutrient transfer, different genes respond to changes in Zn availability in intestinal cells compared with placental cells. A number of Fe- and Cu-related genes were identified as targets for regulation by Zn, revealing potential mechanisms underlying reported dietary interactions between Zn and other metals. We established that there are fundamental differences in Zn-regulated transcriptional control in Caco-2 compared with JAR cells. We demonstrated that Zn-induced transcriptional activation of the metallothionein 2A promoter occurs over different, and physiologically relevant, concentration ranges in Caco-2 and JAR cells, indicating that these cell lines sense changes in the extracellular Zn concentration over different ranges. Also, we established that mRNA levels of the Zn-responsive metal response element binding transcription factor (MTF)-1, and its homologue MTF-2, are regulated by Zn in Caco-2 but not JAR cells, which may in part underlie differential gene responses to Zn in intestinal and placental cells. The present study identified a number of novel molecular targets that may underlie symptoms associated with deficient or excessive Zn supply and highlighted the necessity of taking account of cell- and tissue-specific processes when investigating Zn-regulated gene expression in mammals.

Mesoudi et al. overlook an illuminating parallel between cultural and biological evolution, namely, the existence in each realm of a continuum from intelligent, mindful evolution through to oblivious, mindless evolution. In addition, they underplay the independence of cultural fitness from biological fitness. The assumption that successful cultural traits enhance genetic fitness must be sidelined, as must the assumption that such traits will at least be considered worth having.