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The dangers of a post-truth world
Current Biology
Magazine Feature
The dangers of a post-truth world The election of a ‘post-truth’ US president raises important issues for scientists. If rational arguments and proven facts cannot compete against demagoguery and scapegoating, how can we establish evidence-based policies to avert catastrophic climate change and other environmental disasters? Michael Gross reports. Gas Light is a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, written in 1938 but set in the Victorian Era. It features a husband terrorising his wife by hiding household items and then accusing her of misplacing them, making her question her own memory and perception of reality. A crucial piece of evidence that eventually helps her uncover her husband’s malicious deception is the nightly dimming of the gas lights, which gave the play its name. Derived from the play, the term gas lighting describes similar types of abuse based on deception, aiming to make the victim question their perspective. As the US journalist Lauren Duca has argued in a widely shared commentary first published in Teen Vogue, “Trump won the Presidency by gas light. His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception.” While the carefully crafted political deception is as old as politics itself, traditionally the perpetrators tried not to get caught and often had to resign from office if they did. For many politicians, especially those trained as lawyers, the truth was whatever their opponents couldn’t prove to be wrong. By contrast, in the brave new world of Trump and other populist leaders around the world, the rational truth appears to be irrelevant. For their voters, a vague emotional connection of feeling left out and wanting to regain some elusive past greatness outweighs any argument based on verifiable facts. It does not appear to matter any more if the incoming US President releases mutually exclusive statements via his twitter feed — fact-checking is for nerds. As Time magazine named him person of the year, the Oxford Dictionaries made ‘post-truth’ the word of the year. After two centuries of social progress based on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, from the abolition
of slavery through to equal rights for homosexuals, humanity’s path seems to have made a U-turn threatening to go back to darker times. Scientists are left wondering not only how this could happen, but also what they can do to make verifiable scientific truth heard in a post-truth scenario. Angry voters The US presidential election followed in the tracks of the earlier seismic event of 2016, the June referendum in the UK, which produced a narrow majority for leaving the European Union. Like the election result, the Brexit victory has been explained as the result of a large number of voters feeling disenfranchised, because they are not benefiting from recent social progress, largely aimed at minorities, and globalisation, which created a new middle class in the developing world but undermined the social security of workers and employees in the western
world (Curr. Biol. (2016) 26, R689– R692). In his forthcoming book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra argues that the failure of Enlightenment’s rationalism to account for emotional needs of people, which was already highlighted by early 20th century writers such as Robert Musil, has led to the recent surge in support for anti-intellectual, nationalist strongmen. “Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new ‘irrationalism’ through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism,” he writes. “Indeed, their universal assumption, hardened since 1989, that there are no alternatives to western-style democracy and capitalism — the famous ‘end of history’ — is precisely what has made us incapable of grasping the political phenomena shaking the world today.” While these concerns are all good and understandable, the extent to which voters have lined up behind pied pipers of the far right, such as Trump and the candidate for this year’s French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, has surprised and shocked liberal observers. Mishra also includes Russia’s Putin and India’s Modi in the line-up of leaders favoured by the
Sudden impact: Press reactions to the result of the US presidential election. The German news magazine Der Spiegel adopted a translation of the REM lyrics: “the end of the world as we know it.” (Images with permission from Daily Mirror and © 46/2016 DER SPIEGEL. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel.)
Current Biology 27, R1–R18, January 9, 2017
R1
Current Biology
Magazine our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.” This adds to the number of migrants heading from the countryside to the cities (Curr. Biol. (2016) 26, R1205–R1208) and from poorer to richer countries. At the arrival point, social media helps those who would otherwise have muttered something rude about immigrants to get organised — at least in Germany the anti-immigration movement started life as a Facebook group.
News feed: The amplification of clickbait and fake news stories through Facebook’s algorithms has been recognised as a problem in the US presidential election. (Image courtesy of Ashley George.)
“irruption of the irrational”, as he calls the trend. As the Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran wrote in December, the current situation in the US and parts of Europe reminds her of Turkey 15 years ago: “This refashioning of a post-truth, post-fact Turkey has not happened overnight. The process has involved the skilful and wilful manipulation of narratives. We gave up asking the astonished questions ‘How can they say or do that?’ some time ago. Truth is a lost game in my country.” Turkey’s president Erdogan, who now also seeks the support of a far-right party in his quest to strengthen his already excessive power, looms as an example of where this road may lead. Citizens following their self-interest rationally would direct at least some of their anger and frustration at the tax-avoiding billionaires who have siphoned off the financial gains of globalisation, which failed to show up in the pockets of the working people. Instead, the angry voters in the US made one of these billionaires their president, while those in the UK followed the instructions that five others handed out via the toxic press organs they own. Trump and the UK newspaper moguls successfully directed the popular anger against minorities, R2
foreigners and international institutions, in a move reminiscent of the 1930s. As the British columnist George Monbiot has warned recently, continuation of this path is likely to produce a war between major powers in his lifetime (he is 53 now). Another puzzling element is that, objectively, today’s angry voters in the US and the UK are enjoying a fairly high standard of living and low unemployment, compared with the crisis that led to fascism in Europe in the 1930s. They are also much better off than people in Southern European countries such as Spain, where the living memory of a fascist dictatorship has so far ruled out the resurgence of such ideas. One new piece in the puzzle is that, thanks to the internet and social media, inequality is more visible and grievances can be readily amplified. As the physicist Stephen Hawking noted in a recent article warning of the threats to the survival of our species, the global reach of social media means “that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on
Current Biology 27, R1–R18, January 9, 2017
Filter bubbles A much-debated feature of the US election has been the large amount of ‘fake news’ stories widely shared on social media, with headlines such as “Pope endorses Trump”. Many of these were in favour of Trump’s campaign and enthusiastically spread by his supporters on Facebook. This is significant, because a survey by the Pew Research Center has found that close to half of adults in the US now use their Facebook feeds to access news. This development is highly problematic for several reasons. The timeline, while creating the illusion of being a simple chronological list of things as they happen, is in fact selected by Facebook’s algorithms based on each user’s previous history of clicks and likes. This creates the famous filter bubble effect, meaning that everybody is selectively fed opinions that they are likely to agree with and news that they want to see (Curr. Biol. (2015) 25, R255–R258). The filter bubbles also contributed to the perception in the liberal media that Hillary Clinton was on track to win the election. People amplified the results they wanted to hear, even though in reality the error margins were typically wider than the gap between the candidates. Moreover, Facebook presents news stories from all kinds of sources in the same format, with only a small icon marking the source of the content. As some sites set up to spread false news may be masquerading as local TV stations or papers, this is making it difficult to judge at first glance whether something comes from a reliable source or not. The uniform presentation opens the gates for ‘clickbait’ stories with a
Current Biology
Magazine catchy headline and little or no truthful information in the accompanying text once a reader has clicked through. Here, too, every click on a fake news story reinforces the preference of the algorithms, so they will present users with even more of the same, regardless of quality. Facebook has at first strenuously denied that fake news spread via its site played a role in the election but is now looking into the problem. Although Facebook has so far rejected the view that it is like a global publisher and thus bears some responsibility for the quality of the content it distributes, by mid-December, the company was advertising for the new position of ‘head of news partnerships’. The election and the tsunami of false information that preceded it has been embarrassing for technology companies like Facebook and Google, as it has always been their declared ambition to make the world a better place by connecting people and facilitating the flow of information between them. At the moment, it is looking like this world improvement project has collapsed spectacularly, as information technology with its unprecedented global connectivity has helped to divide society, spread misinformation, and thereby create serious risks to our environment and the survival of our civilisation. Clear and present danger Based on the pledges and announcements the president-elect has made during his campaign, a large number of people are now worried about very real dangers to their prospects. Foreigners living in the US may not only face more stringent examination of their right to stay, but also the more rampant aggression of xenophobes who feel emboldened by the election result. A surge in incidents ranging from harassment to hate crimes has been reported since the first day after the election, echoing similar transgressions observed in the UK after the Brexit referendum. A harsher climate for foreign workers may also undermine the leading role of US institutions in global science and technology, which critically depends on academic exchange and the steady flow of foreign students
and academics. Similarly, technology companies including Facebook may have to worry that their highly international workforce may feel less accepted in their local environment. Other minorities are also becoming more vulnerable, including transgender people who have in recent years become more visible and gained new rights both in Obama’s America and elsewhere, as science is beginning to realise that such gender issues are much more common than thought (Curr. Biol. (2016) 26, R141–R143). They are now bracing for the backlash from those who want to end political correctness and insist that there are only two genders. Again, aggression from individuals who feel that the tide has turned in their favour is a very real danger. On the global scale, however, the biggest risk is that the new administration may follow up on the campaign pledges to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change and to do everything to fire up the US fossil fuels industry, including a return to coal. Even though the Paris accord is already in force and a formal withdrawal would take several years to take effect, the support and subsidies for a return to dirtier industries could already have devastating effects within the four-year time span of the presidency — not least by setting a bad example for developing countries that look up to the US as a world leader. Specifically, Trump has pledged to support the controversial pipeline projects Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline, both of which are currently halted, and to revive the coal industry. While campaign pledges don’t always survive election day, the initial nominations for cabinet posts seem to suggest a rather hard anti-environment line. Tellingly, the nominee for secretary of state is a fossil fuel magnate, Exxon-Mobil president Rex Tillerson. The candidate has close business connections to many countries including Russia, adding another layer of potential conflicts of interest to those already surrounding the president, which are impossible to disentangle, as his biggest business asset appears to be his brand name. Many of Trump’s nominations for government positions have sent
shockwaves around the world, but the most dangerous decision so far is his nomination for the leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For this, he chose Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, who is currently involved in a legal action brought by 28 states against the agency to stop Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Pruitt has gone on record as a sceptic of climate change and as a fierce critic of the EPA’s regulations. “Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the US Environmental Protection Agency is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires,” said the executive director of the Sierra Club, Michael Brune. “He is a climate science denier who, as attorney general for the state of Oklahoma, regularly conspired with the fossil fuel industry to attack EPA regulations.” Writing on the CNN website, Meg Jacobs pointed out that “appointing people who hate the agencies they lead” follows the precedent set by Ronald Reagan, who appointed Anne Gorsuch to the EPA in an attempt to roll back the environmental regulations of the Carter administration. Together with the interior secretary, James Watt, Gorsuch made sure that environmental regulations that they did not like were not enforced, even if they could not abolish them. However, Jacobs notes, Reagan’s strategy had some unintended consequences: “In Reagan’s time, this kind of overt hostility [of the EPA leader to the agency’s mission] led to a countermobilization. Environmental organizations saw their membership numbers skyrocket, these groups filed lawsuits to force compliance, they chased Watt and Gorsuch from office, forcing them to resign amid scandal, and they made their presence known in the following elections.” So maybe there is something to look forward to in the next four years. What can science do? Considering both the announcements and the cabinet nominations of the incoming president, the US and the world are facing the very real risk that the new administration will act against well-established scientific knowledge and thereby endanger human lives and the environment.
Current Biology 27, R1–R18, January 9, 2017
R3
Current Biology
Magazine At the time of going to press, the nominations have not included the post of a science advisor, so scientists in the US and their world-leading institutions and associations are wondering how, if at all, verifiable facts from the real world can reach the president. Writing in Science magazine, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Rush Holt, scrambles to find constructive ways out of the crisis. Pointing out that many other people on all levels of political organisation have contributions to make, Holt remarks that “there is now important work to do ensuring that all citizenry, including the president, understands the powerful benefits of science and that decisions made with scientific input are more likely to succeed.” Even though the election has been all about rejecting the political establishment, Rush notes, “we cannot let that mean rejecting the established facts.” Although on present form, it appears that the incoming post-truth administration has absolutely no qualms about doing just that. While the transition team and the government posts so far are packed with industry figures not known to care for science or the environment, the only silver lining from a climate perspective is the president’s daughter Ivanka, who reportedly wants to be involved in the administration and make climate change one of her signature issues. In December, she arranged meetings with former vice president Al Gore and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, both of whom have produced documentaries on climate change (An Inconvenient Truth and Before the Flood, respectively). While Gore refused to reveal what was discussed, reports suggest that DiCaprio emphasised the business opportunities to be found in the conversion to clean energy, along with the risk that China may get ahead of the US in this field. Scientific facts may not have much influence in the posttruth White House, so finding the right kind of economic incentive may be humanity’s last hope. Michael Gross is a science writer based at Oxford. He can be contacted via his web page at www.michaelgross.co.uk
R4
Q&A
Kenneth Catania Ken Catania was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland at College Park and a research assistant at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. He obtained his Ph.D. in neurosciences from the University of California, San Diego in 1995 working with Glenn Northcutt and did his postdoc with Jon Kaas at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Psychology. In 2000, he took a faculty position at Vanderbilt in the Department of Biological Sciences, where he is now a Stevenson Professor. Ken works at the interface of neurobiology and behavior, specializing in the brains and behaviors of unusual and specialized species. He has won numerous awards for his studies, including a MacArthur Award (2006), the Pradel Award in Neurosciences from the National Academy of Sciences (2013), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014). What turned you on to biology in the first place? Like so many scientists before me, I was obsessed with all the creatures I could bring home from the woods and streams where I grew up in Columbia, Maryland. My parents were key supporters, even when the water snake got loose in the house and ate my father’s guppies. I think informal science training can begin with a walk in the woods. And what drew you to your specific field of research? I turned down just the right road, literally. I got to the fork in the road as an undergraduate, after taking a part-time position at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. For this I am indebted to Ed Gould, the head curator of mammals at the time. He was housing and studying starnosed moles at the zoo, and wanted someone to conduct experiments testing whether they could detect electric fields with the star. But he also needed someone to catch moles. I was sent on this seemingly impossible mission (star-nosed moles are legendarily hard to find). I drove to rural Pennsylvania, where I stayed in local parks and slept in a cargo van.
Current Biology 27, R1–R18, January 9, 2017
After many days searching for the right habitat, I found what looked like the perfect site, but there was a hitch. Access was through someone’s land and next to their hunting cabin. Park rangers had warned me, with colorful stories involving shotguns, about trespassing in the wrong place (and I was a long-haired student from outof-state). So I explored further up the road for a few days. As I was driving back to the local park, I noticed a car parked next to the cabin. I was conflicted and had to quickly decide: take a chance and turn down the dirt drive and introduce myself, or keep going and find another place? I turned. The owner’s name was Carmen Pastella, and he was friendly, curious, and helpful. He not only invited me to trap on the land, but offered his cabin for future trips. After 30 years, my lab still collects star-nosed moles on the same land and I have never found a better site (sadly Carmen has passed away). The experience of randomly meeting generous people has been repeated many times in my career. Despite the apparently growing chasm between scientists and society, I have found that, in person, most people are inherently supportive and respectful of science. But back to star-nosed moles. Like most undergraduates, I had little idea about the literature to help guide experiments. So I went to McKeldin
Magazine Feature
The dangers of a post-truth world The election of a ‘post-truth’ US president raises important issues for scientists. If rational arguments and proven facts cannot compete against demagoguery and scapegoating, how can we establish evidence-based policies to avert catastrophic climate change and other environmental disasters? Michael Gross reports. Gas Light is a stage play by Patrick Hamilton, written in 1938 but set in the Victorian Era. It features a husband terrorising his wife by hiding household items and then accusing her of misplacing them, making her question her own memory and perception of reality. A crucial piece of evidence that eventually helps her uncover her husband’s malicious deception is the nightly dimming of the gas lights, which gave the play its name. Derived from the play, the term gas lighting describes similar types of abuse based on deception, aiming to make the victim question their perspective. As the US journalist Lauren Duca has argued in a widely shared commentary first published in Teen Vogue, “Trump won the Presidency by gas light. His rise to power has awakened a force of bigotry by condoning and encouraging hatred, but also by normalizing deception.” While the carefully crafted political deception is as old as politics itself, traditionally the perpetrators tried not to get caught and often had to resign from office if they did. For many politicians, especially those trained as lawyers, the truth was whatever their opponents couldn’t prove to be wrong. By contrast, in the brave new world of Trump and other populist leaders around the world, the rational truth appears to be irrelevant. For their voters, a vague emotional connection of feeling left out and wanting to regain some elusive past greatness outweighs any argument based on verifiable facts. It does not appear to matter any more if the incoming US President releases mutually exclusive statements via his twitter feed — fact-checking is for nerds. As Time magazine named him person of the year, the Oxford Dictionaries made ‘post-truth’ the word of the year. After two centuries of social progress based on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, from the abolition
of slavery through to equal rights for homosexuals, humanity’s path seems to have made a U-turn threatening to go back to darker times. Scientists are left wondering not only how this could happen, but also what they can do to make verifiable scientific truth heard in a post-truth scenario. Angry voters The US presidential election followed in the tracks of the earlier seismic event of 2016, the June referendum in the UK, which produced a narrow majority for leaving the European Union. Like the election result, the Brexit victory has been explained as the result of a large number of voters feeling disenfranchised, because they are not benefiting from recent social progress, largely aimed at minorities, and globalisation, which created a new middle class in the developing world but undermined the social security of workers and employees in the western
world (Curr. Biol. (2016) 26, R689– R692). In his forthcoming book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Indian writer Pankaj Mishra argues that the failure of Enlightenment’s rationalism to account for emotional needs of people, which was already highlighted by early 20th century writers such as Robert Musil, has led to the recent surge in support for anti-intellectual, nationalist strongmen. “Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new ‘irrationalism’ through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism,” he writes. “Indeed, their universal assumption, hardened since 1989, that there are no alternatives to western-style democracy and capitalism — the famous ‘end of history’ — is precisely what has made us incapable of grasping the political phenomena shaking the world today.” While these concerns are all good and understandable, the extent to which voters have lined up behind pied pipers of the far right, such as Trump and the candidate for this year’s French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen, has surprised and shocked liberal observers. Mishra also includes Russia’s Putin and India’s Modi in the line-up of leaders favoured by the
Sudden impact: Press reactions to the result of the US presidential election. The German news magazine Der Spiegel adopted a translation of the REM lyrics: “the end of the world as we know it.” (Images with permission from Daily Mirror and © 46/2016 DER SPIEGEL. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel.)
Current Biology 27, R1–R18, January 9, 2017
R1
Current Biology
Magazine our increasingly crowded planet will not be able to escape the inequality.” This adds to the number of migrants heading from the countryside to the cities (Curr. Biol. (2016) 26, R1205–R1208) and from poorer to richer countries. At the arrival point, social media helps those who would otherwise have muttered something rude about immigrants to get organised — at least in Germany the anti-immigration movement started life as a Facebook group.
News feed: The amplification of clickbait and fake news stories through Facebook’s algorithms has been recognised as a problem in the US presidential election. (Image courtesy of Ashley George.)
“irruption of the irrational”, as he calls the trend. As the Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran wrote in December, the current situation in the US and parts of Europe reminds her of Turkey 15 years ago: “This refashioning of a post-truth, post-fact Turkey has not happened overnight. The process has involved the skilful and wilful manipulation of narratives. We gave up asking the astonished questions ‘How can they say or do that?’ some time ago. Truth is a lost game in my country.” Turkey’s president Erdogan, who now also seeks the support of a far-right party in his quest to strengthen his already excessive power, looms as an example of where this road may lead. Citizens following their self-interest rationally would direct at least some of their anger and frustration at the tax-avoiding billionaires who have siphoned off the financial gains of globalisation, which failed to show up in the pockets of the working people. Instead, the angry voters in the US made one of these billionaires their president, while those in the UK followed the instructions that five others handed out via the toxic press organs they own. Trump and the UK newspaper moguls successfully directed the popular anger against minorities, R2
foreigners and international institutions, in a move reminiscent of the 1930s. As the British columnist George Monbiot has warned recently, continuation of this path is likely to produce a war between major powers in his lifetime (he is 53 now). Another puzzling element is that, objectively, today’s angry voters in the US and the UK are enjoying a fairly high standard of living and low unemployment, compared with the crisis that led to fascism in Europe in the 1930s. They are also much better off than people in Southern European countries such as Spain, where the living memory of a fascist dictatorship has so far ruled out the resurgence of such ideas. One new piece in the puzzle is that, thanks to the internet and social media, inequality is more visible and grievances can be readily amplified. As the physicist Stephen Hawking noted in a recent article warning of the threats to the survival of our species, the global reach of social media means “that the lives of the richest people in the most prosperous parts of the world are agonisingly visible to anyone, however poor, who has access to a phone. And since there are now more people with a telephone than access to clean water in sub-Saharan Africa, this will shortly mean nearly everyone on
Current Biology 27, R1–R18, January 9, 2017
Filter bubbles A much-debated feature of the US election has been the large amount of ‘fake news’ stories widely shared on social media, with headlines such as “Pope endorses Trump”. Many of these were in favour of Trump’s campaign and enthusiastically spread by his supporters on Facebook. This is significant, because a survey by the Pew Research Center has found that close to half of adults in the US now use their Facebook feeds to access news. This development is highly problematic for several reasons. The timeline, while creating the illusion of being a simple chronological list of things as they happen, is in fact selected by Facebook’s algorithms based on each user’s previous history of clicks and likes. This creates the famous filter bubble effect, meaning that everybody is selectively fed opinions that they are likely to agree with and news that they want to see (Curr. Biol. (2015) 25, R255–R258). The filter bubbles also contributed to the perception in the liberal media that Hillary Clinton was on track to win the election. People amplified the results they wanted to hear, even though in reality the error margins were typically wider than the gap between the candidates. Moreover, Facebook presents news stories from all kinds of sources in the same format, with only a small icon marking the source of the content. As some sites set up to spread false news may be masquerading as local TV stations or papers, this is making it difficult to judge at first glance whether something comes from a reliable source or not. The uniform presentation opens the gates for ‘clickbait’ stories with a
Current Biology
Magazine catchy headline and little or no truthful information in the accompanying text once a reader has clicked through. Here, too, every click on a fake news story reinforces the preference of the algorithms, so they will present users with even more of the same, regardless of quality. Facebook has at first strenuously denied that fake news spread via its site played a role in the election but is now looking into the problem. Although Facebook has so far rejected the view that it is like a global publisher and thus bears some responsibility for the quality of the content it distributes, by mid-December, the company was advertising for the new position of ‘head of news partnerships’. The election and the tsunami of false information that preceded it has been embarrassing for technology companies like Facebook and Google, as it has always been their declared ambition to make the world a better place by connecting people and facilitating the flow of information between them. At the moment, it is looking like this world improvement project has collapsed spectacularly, as information technology with its unprecedented global connectivity has helped to divide society, spread misinformation, and thereby create serious risks to our environment and the survival of our civilisation. Clear and present danger Based on the pledges and announcements the president-elect has made during his campaign, a large number of people are now worried about very real dangers to their prospects. Foreigners living in the US may not only face more stringent examination of their right to stay, but also the more rampant aggression of xenophobes who feel emboldened by the election result. A surge in incidents ranging from harassment to hate crimes has been reported since the first day after the election, echoing similar transgressions observed in the UK after the Brexit referendum. A harsher climate for foreign workers may also undermine the leading role of US institutions in global science and technology, which critically depends on academic exchange and the steady flow of foreign students
and academics. Similarly, technology companies including Facebook may have to worry that their highly international workforce may feel less accepted in their local environment. Other minorities are also becoming more vulnerable, including transgender people who have in recent years become more visible and gained new rights both in Obama’s America and elsewhere, as science is beginning to realise that such gender issues are much more common than thought (Curr. Biol. (2016) 26, R141–R143). They are now bracing for the backlash from those who want to end political correctness and insist that there are only two genders. Again, aggression from individuals who feel that the tide has turned in their favour is a very real danger. On the global scale, however, the biggest risk is that the new administration may follow up on the campaign pledges to withdraw from the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change and to do everything to fire up the US fossil fuels industry, including a return to coal. Even though the Paris accord is already in force and a formal withdrawal would take several years to take effect, the support and subsidies for a return to dirtier industries could already have devastating effects within the four-year time span of the presidency — not least by setting a bad example for developing countries that look up to the US as a world leader. Specifically, Trump has pledged to support the controversial pipeline projects Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline, both of which are currently halted, and to revive the coal industry. While campaign pledges don’t always survive election day, the initial nominations for cabinet posts seem to suggest a rather hard anti-environment line. Tellingly, the nominee for secretary of state is a fossil fuel magnate, Exxon-Mobil president Rex Tillerson. The candidate has close business connections to many countries including Russia, adding another layer of potential conflicts of interest to those already surrounding the president, which are impossible to disentangle, as his biggest business asset appears to be his brand name. Many of Trump’s nominations for government positions have sent
shockwaves around the world, but the most dangerous decision so far is his nomination for the leadership of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For this, he chose Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, who is currently involved in a legal action brought by 28 states against the agency to stop Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Pruitt has gone on record as a sceptic of climate change and as a fierce critic of the EPA’s regulations. “Having Scott Pruitt in charge of the US Environmental Protection Agency is like putting an arsonist in charge of fighting fires,” said the executive director of the Sierra Club, Michael Brune. “He is a climate science denier who, as attorney general for the state of Oklahoma, regularly conspired with the fossil fuel industry to attack EPA regulations.” Writing on the CNN website, Meg Jacobs pointed out that “appointing people who hate the agencies they lead” follows the precedent set by Ronald Reagan, who appointed Anne Gorsuch to the EPA in an attempt to roll back the environmental regulations of the Carter administration. Together with the interior secretary, James Watt, Gorsuch made sure that environmental regulations that they did not like were not enforced, even if they could not abolish them. However, Jacobs notes, Reagan’s strategy had some unintended consequences: “In Reagan’s time, this kind of overt hostility [of the EPA leader to the agency’s mission] led to a countermobilization. Environmental organizations saw their membership numbers skyrocket, these groups filed lawsuits to force compliance, they chased Watt and Gorsuch from office, forcing them to resign amid scandal, and they made their presence known in the following elections.” So maybe there is something to look forward to in the next four years. What can science do? Considering both the announcements and the cabinet nominations of the incoming president, the US and the world are facing the very real risk that the new administration will act against well-established scientific knowledge and thereby endanger human lives and the environment.
Current Biology 27, R1–R18, January 9, 2017
R3
Current Biology
Magazine At the time of going to press, the nominations have not included the post of a science advisor, so scientists in the US and their world-leading institutions and associations are wondering how, if at all, verifiable facts from the real world can reach the president. Writing in Science magazine, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Rush Holt, scrambles to find constructive ways out of the crisis. Pointing out that many other people on all levels of political organisation have contributions to make, Holt remarks that “there is now important work to do ensuring that all citizenry, including the president, understands the powerful benefits of science and that decisions made with scientific input are more likely to succeed.” Even though the election has been all about rejecting the political establishment, Rush notes, “we cannot let that mean rejecting the established facts.” Although on present form, it appears that the incoming post-truth administration has absolutely no qualms about doing just that. While the transition team and the government posts so far are packed with industry figures not known to care for science or the environment, the only silver lining from a climate perspective is the president’s daughter Ivanka, who reportedly wants to be involved in the administration and make climate change one of her signature issues. In December, she arranged meetings with former vice president Al Gore and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, both of whom have produced documentaries on climate change (An Inconvenient Truth and Before the Flood, respectively). While Gore refused to reveal what was discussed, reports suggest that DiCaprio emphasised the business opportunities to be found in the conversion to clean energy, along with the risk that China may get ahead of the US in this field. Scientific facts may not have much influence in the posttruth White House, so finding the right kind of economic incentive may be humanity’s last hope. Michael Gross is a science writer based at Oxford. He can be contacted via his web page at www.michaelgross.co.uk
R4
Q&A
Kenneth Catania Ken Catania was an undergraduate at the University of Maryland at College Park and a research assistant at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. He obtained his Ph.D. in neurosciences from the University of California, San Diego in 1995 working with Glenn Northcutt and did his postdoc with Jon Kaas at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Psychology. In 2000, he took a faculty position at Vanderbilt in the Department of Biological Sciences, where he is now a Stevenson Professor. Ken works at the interface of neurobiology and behavior, specializing in the brains and behaviors of unusual and specialized species. He has won numerous awards for his studies, including a MacArthur Award (2006), the Pradel Award in Neurosciences from the National Academy of Sciences (2013), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014). What turned you on to biology in the first place? Like so many scientists before me, I was obsessed with all the creatures I could bring home from the woods and streams where I grew up in Columbia, Maryland. My parents were key supporters, even when the water snake got loose in the house and ate my father’s guppies. I think informal science training can begin with a walk in the woods. And what drew you to your specific field of research? I turned down just the right road, literally. I got to the fork in the road as an undergraduate, after taking a part-time position at the National Zoo in Washington D.C. For this I am indebted to Ed Gould, the head curator of mammals at the time. He was housing and studying starnosed moles at the zoo, and wanted someone to conduct experiments testing whether they could detect electric fields with the star. But he also needed someone to catch moles. I was sent on this seemingly impossible mission (star-nosed moles are legendarily hard to find). I drove to rural Pennsylvania, where I stayed in local parks and slept in a cargo van.
Current Biology 27, R1–R18, January 9, 2017
After many days searching for the right habitat, I found what looked like the perfect site, but there was a hitch. Access was through someone’s land and next to their hunting cabin. Park rangers had warned me, with colorful stories involving shotguns, about trespassing in the wrong place (and I was a long-haired student from outof-state). So I explored further up the road for a few days. As I was driving back to the local park, I noticed a car parked next to the cabin. I was conflicted and had to quickly decide: take a chance and turn down the dirt drive and introduce myself, or keep going and find another place? I turned. The owner’s name was Carmen Pastella, and he was friendly, curious, and helpful. He not only invited me to trap on the land, but offered his cabin for future trips. After 30 years, my lab still collects star-nosed moles on the same land and I have never found a better site (sadly Carmen has passed away). The experience of randomly meeting generous people has been repeated many times in my career. Despite the apparently growing chasm between scientists and society, I have found that, in person, most people are inherently supportive and respectful of science. But back to star-nosed moles. Like most undergraduates, I had little idea about the literature to help guide experiments. So I went to McKeldin