WHICH SCARES YOU MORE—A BEHEADING OR A SUNBURN?
I’m sure you will debate the answer to this carefully—well, a beheading happens really fast if done properly, just blink and it’s all over, while a really bad sunburn is extremely uncomfortable and could actually substantially raise my risk of eventually developing melanoma, and though advances in treatment for late-stage melanoma have certainly been coming fast and furious in recent years, it is still an incurable disease with extremely poor prognosis and seems a fairly excruciating way to die—but it’s okay, you can give the easy answer. Aloe soothes only one of those two.
In early 2015, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee began rolling out a line in speeches designed to do two things at once: criticize President Obama’s treatment of radical groups in the Middle East, and ridicule the president’s recent focus on combating climate change. Here’s how Huckabee put it at an event in Iowa, in January, a few months before he declared his candidacy for the presidency:
When [Obama] said: “The greatest threat this nation faces . . . is climate change.” Not to diminish anything about the climate at all, but Mr. President, I believe that most of us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn!1
He used the line more than once. Huckabee was banking on the fact that his target audience was deeply concerned about the spread of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other threats halfway around the world, but essentially not concerned at all about climate change. He tried to enhance that perceived divide even further by describing the scientific issue in such ridiculous fashion as to make it nearly impossible for the relatively underinformed to disagree. A sunburn?! The president is being ridiculous! How can ISIS be less of a threat than climate change? How can climate change be considered a threat at all?
That’s the RIDICULE AND DISMISS, the technique of making a complicated scientific topic sound so silly that the audience members can only shake their heads and laugh. A political point is made at the expense of people actually understanding the scientific topic in question.
Huckabee managed to belittle something and completely mistake the science at the same time. A sunburn, though of course something to be avoided, certainly doesn’t sound all that scary. But a sunburn has essentially nothing to do with climate change.
We get a sunburn when ultraviolet radiation from the sun—or a tanning bed! (Don’t use tanning beds. Seriously.)—causes damage to DNA in our skin, provoking a molecular reaction and resulting in that familiar painful burn. But clearly, you get more sunburns when it is sunnier outside, not hotter. Just think of skiers and snowboarders who put on sunscreen on a sunny winter day; they know that even in those 20-degree temperatures, the bright sun can fry your face just as quickly.
The president, in his State of the Union address in January 2015, and again at other times, has indeed called climate change one of the greatest threats facing the world, and facing future generations.2 He has not, however, reminded everyone to cover up at the beach or on the slopes and wear sunscreen. These issues are totally, completely, unrelated.
Okay, not totally unrelated. Here’s the only possible way Huckabee could have defended this bit of misdirection. Remember the ozone hole? Different environmental issue entirely, right? Well, there is a connection: chlorofluorocarbons, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, and the related gases primarily responsible for causing the hole in the ozone layer, which was big news in the late 1980s and early 1990s, are also greenhouse gases, meaning that just like carbon dioxide, they trap heat when in the atmosphere. In fact, they trap heat thousands of times more effectively than carbon dioxide does.3 We emit a far smaller volume of these gases than of carbon dioxide or methane (and the world has made substantial progress toward phasing out their use entirely), so this potency is somewhat attenuated by the smaller amounts, but they are still important warming agents.
So, let’s connect the dots for Governor Huckabee: Gases that help cause global warming also cause a hole in the ozone layer. A hole in the ozone layer, if above your head, would let more UV rays hit you and increase your risk of . . . you guessed it, sunburn. If that sounds a bit thin . . . well, yes. It is.
I think it’s safe to say that Governor Huckabee was not trying to connect the continued use of fluorinated gases to climate change by mentioning sunburns. Instead, he was mistaking one thing (the world getting warmer) for another thing that sort of sounds like it might be connected (sunny days and sunburn). Reducing climate change and all its attendant, potentially catastrophic effects to a sunburn makes it sound silly enough, even before comparing it to the very scary idea of ISIS beheading you and broadcasting the video on the Internet.
Contrary to Huckabee’s RIDICULE AND DISMISS, however, climate change does indeed represent a significant threat to countries and individuals around the world. And since he brought it into the realm of the military by comparing his not-at-all-relevant sunburn to a beheading by militant groups in the Middle East, let’s go straight to a very relevant source to see why he’s wrong: the Pentagon.
Though much of the US government has dragged its heels on addressing the issue of climate change, the military has, in fact, been calling for action on the issue for years. Without any elections to run, military leaders seem free to look at the science without bias, and they see a dire situation.
The Pentagon released a “Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap” in October 2014,4 calling global warming a “threat multiplier.” This means it could exacerbate existing problems; if an issue we face is a 3 out of 10 on the “Should We Be Worried?” scale, a threat multiplier might turn it up to 6 or 7.
How exactly would that happen? Here’s what the Pentagon wrote in that report:
Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.
Now that sounds terrifying. Basically, every global and geopolitical issue you can think of will potentially be made worse by a warming planet. Almost as if it were a direct rebuke to Huckabee’s rhetoric, the Pentagon report even specifically cited terrorism as a threat that climate change could “exacerbate.” Here’s the report’s explanation of how that might happen:
The impacts of climate change may cause instability in other countries by impairing access to food and water, damaging infrastructure, spreading disease, uprooting and displacing large numbers of people, compelling mass migration, interrupting commercial activity, or restricting electricity availability. These developments could undermine already-fragile governments that are unable to respond effectively or challenge currently-stable governments, as well as increasing competition and tension between countries vying for limited resources. These gaps in governance can create an avenue for extremist ideologies and conditions that foster terrorism.
Once again, terrifying. Some research has even connected climate change to very specific geopolitical crises, such as the civil war in Syria—the exact place where ISIS and its penchant for beheadings got its start. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early 2015 found that “anthropogenic forcing”—meaning human influence—made the drought that Syria experienced from 2007 to 2010 as much as three times more likely than by natural variability, and that drought contributed to the subsequent unrest.5 “We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict,” the authors wrote, meaning that yes, climate change arguably played a part in those beheadings broadcast on the Internet.
So, to recap: Mike Huckabee completely misstated what climate change actually is, comparing it to a thing you get from standing out in the sun for too long. And he belittled its importance by comparing it to terrorism—which American military leaders have specifically said could be made worse by climate change.
He got some cheers, of course, and made his point: the president is weak on the real issues (the radicals that commit atrocities and broadcast them online), and he is strong on this fake issue (this silly climate thing that won’t actually affect us in any meaningful way). In a sense, Huckabee gave his audience the easy way out; he gave them permission to ignore the complexities of climate science, by making it all sound ridiculous.
NOT EVERY VERSION of the RIDICULE AND DISMISS involves terrifying ways to die; politicians can also belittle and undermine life-and-death science without playing to your fears. Let’s switch from beheadings to fruit flies.
For a few years, former Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn released what he called the “WasteBook”—a list of some of what he and his staff considered the most egregious bits of “pork” on the government ledger. Coburn, consistent with the standard GOP platform, wanted to rein in government spending, and he used the “WasteBook” as a way to highlight how much is squandered.
The table of contents of one of these books alone makes for a great read. Here are some of the science-ish selections from the 2012 version, ostensibly descriptions of things the government actually spends money on: “Out-of-this-world Martian food tasting. . . . When robot squirrels attack. . . . How to build a farm in a galaxy far, far away . . . Crazy for cupcakes . . .”6 And so on. Each “WasteBook” generally featured a hundred entries.
Entry number 70 in that 2012 version is titled “Fruit fly beauty is fleeting.” This bit of near-Pythonian nonsense found its way into a speech given by Kentucky senator Rand Paul in the early days of 2015. Though Coburn’s book version had time to actually explain what it was talking about in some detail, here’s how Paul described it, after mistakenly saying the budget at the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, had been rising for years (it hadn’t):
But you know what they did discover? They spent a million dollars trying to determine whether male fruit flies like younger female fruit flies. I think we could have polled the audience and saved a million bucks!7
Just like Huckabee and his sunburn, Paul took a complicated topic—we’ll get to it—and made it sound outlandish. Why would the government spend any money, let alone a million dollars, to investigate fruit fly sexual proclivities?
If that’s all the information you have, it sure does sound absurd—and Paul got a good laugh from his audience about it. But Paul was engaging in a double-layered RIDICULE AND DISMISS: he made light of a particular study that is far more important than he let on, and more generally, he made it seem as though studying anything at all with fruit flies would be a waste of money. This is about as far from the truth as you can get.
First of all, the specific research Paul was talking about was part of an ongoing series of studies in the lab of a professor named Scott Pletcher, now at the University of Michigan. Pletcher’s lab examines sensory perception and olfaction, the aging process, and how these things relate to sexual and social activity.8 To study these issues, the lab uses fruit flies as a “model organism.” A model organism is, basically, a substitute for humans; many of the things we want to know about ourselves would be impossible to actually study in people, so we use smaller, less complicated animals instead.
This approach isn’t perfect. Just because, say, a cancer drug works in mice does not necessarily mean it will work in humans. But before we test that drug on real people with cancer, who are desperate for anything to extend their lives, it’s good to know that at least in some other creatures with important similarities in terms of genetics and anatomy, it does seem to work.
In the case of the fruit fly, we’re not testing drugs, generally. Fruit fly research is more fundamental, aiming to understand cells, parts of the brain, connections between those parts, and various important proteins—some of the most basic biological functions of living organisms.
Pletcher’s lab has done some important work, reflected in particular by one paper the group published in the prestigious journal Science in 2013. The research showed that exposing male flies to female pheromones without giving them the opportunity to mate—imagine watching the object of your desire walking past you over and over, on the other side of a one-way mirror—had decreased life spans.9 Pletcher said in a press release at the time that, in other words, sexual reward “specifically promoted healthy aging.”10 This is not without relevance to people, obviously.
The specific finding that Paul sarcastically attacked was related. It focused on the decline of those pheromones in female flies over time, which led to the male flies trying to mate with younger females.11 Though again, this may sound silly, the point, once more, is to learn something about ourselves, or other animals, or the world in general from these little critters. That paper’s abstract concludes that production of those pheromones, or similar compounds, “may be an honest indicator of animal health and fertility.” Does that sound like as much of a waste?
Paul’s point is that this particular million dollars is representative of larger wasteful tendencies. He suggested that the budget for the NIH, which, along with the National Science Foundation, accounts for the bulk of US dollars going into basic science research, is too high. As we saw in Chapter 3 (the BUTTER-UP AND UNDERCUT), the NIH actually has an annual budget that has stagnated at about $30 billion—less than 1 percent of the total federal budget—since 2003 (and declined when inflation is considered).
And though the NIH’s budget stagnated under George W. Bush, there is increasing understanding that supporting many types of scientific research does not have to be a partisan issue. In fact, former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich published an op-ed in the New York Times in 2015, calling for a doubling of the NIH budget in order to help prevent disease and save far more money later on. “We are in a time of unimaginable scientific and technological progress,” he wrote. “By funding basic medical research, Congress can transform our fiscal health, and our personal health, too.”12
If politicians resort to sarcastically deriding the basic research that Gingrich is talking about, public support will never shift in favor of science.
But making fun of one study was just the first, surface level of Rand Paul’s derision. By belittling Pletcher’s work, he managed to belittle fruit fly research in general, ignoring more than a century of crucial scientific research and advancement. As any biologist, neuroscientist, pretty much any other type of scientist, and of course large chunks of the general population could probably tell you, the fruit fly is super important.
The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster.
Credit: Thomas Wydra, Wikimedia Commons
Scientists began using the fruit fly—Latin name Drosophila melanogaster—in the first decade of the twentieth century. Here’s fly expert Hugo Bellen, of Baylor College of Medicine, with a good rundown of some of the fruit fly’s accomplishments:
It has been pioneering research. . . . [Drosophila] has led to the discovery of genes that cause cancer, genes that [affect] metabolism, genes that cause developmental defects, genes that play a critical role in neurodegeneration. It has been a discovery tool for many, many different pathways, proteins, diseases.13
Impressive! Bellen also explained some of the reasons why such a tiny creature, so foreign-looking when compared to humans, could help us understand so many new things about ourselves. Among the most important points is what’s known as the “conservation” of the fly’s genetics in humans. Of the fruit fly’s approximately fourteen thousand genes,14 about eight thousand are “conserved” in humans. Essentially, we have a whole lot of the same genes that a fruit fly has. Therefore, studying how these genes operate in flies can give us a pretty good idea of how they also operate in humans. For example, researchers can create flies in which a specific bit of genetic code is “knocked out,” so that a certain protein is not produced (or is overproduced); the resulting “phenotype”—basically, how the fly without that gene looks and behaves—can give us information about what that gene does.
Combine these ideas with the particulars of the flies themselves—they breed, are born, and die very quickly—and you’ve got essentially a perfect model organism for understanding basic neuroscience.
Even this wonderfully useful organism, however, can sound absolutely ridiculous if described in certain ways. Paul made that clear with his remarks. But ridiculing fly research is actually really easy; we can all do it! How about this: Scientists spent years counting up how many fruit flies have red eyes, and how many have white eyes.
Sounds like an absurd waste of time! But that’s a fairly accurate description of a series of experiments led by pioneering fly researcher Thomas Hunt Morgan. By counting the numbers of flies that had white eyes rather than red, Morgan was able to prove that the genes are passed down from generation to generation on chromosomes, organized like beads on a string.15 He essentially discovered exactly how you get traits from your parents. For his efforts, Morgan won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933.16
Let’s keep going: A scientist irradiated male fruit flies and then had them mate to see what happened. This is not a setup for a sci-fi movie. (Though it probably should be.)
This silly-sounding experiment may have even more practical import than Morgan’s work on heredity. Hermann Müller, in 1926 and 1927, showed that X-rays can cause mutations to our genes. The flies were subjected to doses of radiation and then mated to female flies; their progeny exhibited a wide range of mutations, some deadly and some not.
This is, essentially, why you wear a lead apron when you get an X-ray. But not only that; Müller’s research showed us that genetic manipulation is possible, since the mutations were passed on to subsequent generations. This finding had far-reaching implications, not just in medicine, but in fields like agriculture as well. Müller also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work, in 1946.17
Fly work hasn’t stopped there. At least two other Nobels have gone to research directly involving fruit flies,18 and many others have arisen out of the basic science that flies helped illuminate. To this day, Drosophila melanogaster remains among the most important model organisms, along with mice, rats, and a few others. They are involved in research into some of our most pressing biological and medical questions, including the neurobiology involved in nervous system diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Paul’s brand of the RIDICULE AND DISMISS provides a clear example of how science can be misused in the hands of politicians. Though he mentioned only one particular study—and mischaracterized it—Paul (who is, by the way, a doctor, and should know better) managed to dismiss a century’s worth of important science with the wave of his hand, just for a cheap laugh. One would not expect the average person listening to a political speech to know about Thomas Hunt Morgan and Hermann Müller and the genetics of Drosophila melanogaster—and after hearing lines like that, why would the general public come away thinking that supporting scientific research is a good idea at all?
The details of government spending are, obviously, up for debate. Maybe Paul would prefer that other areas of science receive more support. But even that is a bit shortsighted: Bellen, the fly expert at Baylor, said: “You get 10 times more biology for a dollar invested in flies than you get in mice.”19 That’s thanks to the ease with which we can manipulate their genes, and the speed at which they reproduce. If you’re belittling something to make a point, it helps to actually know about the thing you’re belittling.
THIS SORT OF ANTISCIENCE SENTIMENT—or, at best, misunderstanding of scientific method and process—has been around for decades, if not longer. Years before Senator Coburn began his “WasteBook,” Democratic Wisconsin senator William Proxmire had a similar project called the Golden Fleece Awards. The premise was essentially the same: give the “award” (handed out semiregularly from 1975 through 1988) to a particularly egregious bit of government waste, and describe the winning work in a way that made it nearly impossible to defend. Many of the targets were scientific in nature, and such was Proxmire’s influence that a Golden Fleece sometimes was equivalent to a death knell for your research.
Just as with Coburn and Paul, occasionally Proxmire was way off base with his criticisms. For example, he called out the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 1975 for funding a study on aggression related to alcohol. On its own, such a study sounds reasonable, but this one was conducted in fish and rats—an easy joke to make. One of the researchers, though, pointed out some of the absurdity of attacking science in this way: “I would really enjoy having Proxmire make a proposal to give people alcohol and ask them to fight.”20
In recent years, some have come up with antidotes to the “WasteBooks” of the world. The Golden Goose Awards (established in 2012) aim to show that even silly-sounding science sometimes yields big returns; if we ridiculed and ignored all of it, some major discoveries would never have happened. For example, a 2014 award went to researchers for a technique involving massaging rat pups. According to the awards group, that technique “led to a momentous change in how premature babies are cared for that has saved lives and billions of dollars in health care costs. Because of this research, thousands of preemies have survived, grown stronger, thrived, and gone on to live healthy lives.”21 Sounds a lot more “Goose” than “Fleece” now, doesn’t it?
In some ways, science is an easy thing to ridicule. A lot of scientific research is basic, and simple, and adds up to something relevant and practical only when each layer is added on to many earlier layers. As such, it’s an easy target for a politician. Just as we discussed with the OVERSIMPLIFICATION, sound-bite politics can harm the actual practice of science. The tactic of obscuring the importance of a scientific issue, be it climate change or fly research or rat pup massages, through sarcasm and quick quips may garner some applause at a stump speech, but it also actively erodes the public’s understanding of and appreciation for science.