I am an MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School. I am the first in my family to go to college and the son of a working-class household that knows the weight of loss, and the hope of science to recover such losses. I am also a three-time Trump voter from Washington State, and as one among few conservatives at Harvard, I think my perspective is quite unique.

When I was 11, I lost my mother, a strong, beautiful, and stunningly brilliant woman to cancer at the age of 48. That loss became a defining compass in my life. It is what led me to medicine, to science, and eventually to Harvard. From St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis, TN, to the hospitals and labs boasted by Harvard, I have devoted over a decade of my career to understanding the proteomic and biochemical underpinnings of cancer. Having the honor of being a member of such an institution, in a fully funded MD-PhD, is a role I do not take lightly. It is the motivation of my life.

My current research — at the intersection of artificial intelligence, kinase signaling, and mass spectrometry — aims to understand how cancer cells rewire signaling networks and how we might stop them. So many of cancer's complexities rest beyond what is immediately perceptible to us, making AI critical in redefining our understanding of this disease. Our discoveries have real implications for drug development, targeted therapies, and the future of precision oncology. The algorithms I write in this endeavor have tremendous national security interest, and the scientific knowledge accrued in this field has great potential to impact the broader public. This is the very reason we devote so much to the funding of good science.

This week, I received word that the grant funding which supports my research — and that of countless other physician-scientists in training — has been terminated by the federal government. In fact, a majority of my MD-PhD cohort, who have fully funded positions in the medical school and graduate school, are no longer being funded.

In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration has abruptly ended NIH funding to Harvard Medical School, including the cancellation of 32 F30 fellowship awards1 and both of our MD-PhD training grants, representing millions of dollars lost just within our small cohort of ~100 trainees, all of whom are funded by the NIH. These cuts are not based on scientific merit, fiscal necessity, or public health priorities. They are political. And they threaten to unravel decades of progress.

I want your readers to understand what this means.

It means students like me, students from low-income backgrounds with a real hunger to effect change in this world, may no longer have a path to contribute to the future of medicine.2 It means that entire labs will grind to a halt. It means that research into Alzheimer’s, cancer, cardiovascular disease, rare diseases, and more may be delayed or derailed. It means that scientific innovation, which has long been a point of pride and promise in this country, is now vulnerable to political retaliation.

For those of us who have given our lives to research, this isn’t a funding issue. It’s a moral issue. To defund science is to betray the very people we seek to serve — patients, families, the future.

I urge ​you to shine a spotlight on this story. There is more than academic inconvenience at stake. There is a fundamental question of who we are as a country and whether we will continue to stand behind science, truth, and the kind of future my mother dreamed her son might live to build.

Sincerely,
[name redacted]
MD-PhD Candidate
Harvard Medical School

The author and I exchanged several emails after he sent me this. He provided both more details on his research3, and moving words on the tragic early death of his mother. I am compelled that he is doing valuable and honest scientific work, and that his agreement with Harvard was contingent on Harvard’s agreements with NIH, which have been yanked through no fault of his own.

As the author of the letter says in a later communication with me,

Scientific funding is largely bloated and cuts are certainly necessary, but outright termination of funding across entire universities likely does more harm than good.

I agree with him.

But let’s take a step back for a moment.

American science has become so reliant on federal funding that even the wealthiest institutions run much of their operations on the taxpayers’ dime. Or perhaps it is especially the wealthiest institutions that rely the most on federal funds.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) runs an annual survey called the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey. The HERD Survey attempts to summarize how much research each institution of higher education in the United States does, as measured by that most quantifiable of proxies—dollars. That is: research is variable in quality and effect, but dollars are dollars, so let’s assume that the best research is both the most expensive, and the best funded, and just count the grant dollars that came in.

These assumptions are some of what led us into the scientific morass we’re in today, but put that (substantial) criticism aside for the moment. What does the HERD Survey reveal?

Spend time looking through many of the HERD Survey's tables, if you will, but in case you’re not so inclined, just take a look at these top 15 rows of table 24, which shows federally financed higher education R&D expenditures for fiscal years 2010 – 2023:

Note a few things:

• Data are in thousands of dollars. So, for instance, in 2023 at Johns Hopkins, at the top of the list, there were

  • 3,324,551 * 1,000 = $3,324,551,000 in federal R&D funds. That’s far north of three billion dollars. I do hope that they did good work with that money.

• All of the top “earners” in federal grant monies are garnering substantially more every single year, from 2010 – 2023. In those 13 years, most universities have increased their take from the federal coffers by at least 50%.

• Money begets money, both at the individual and institutional level.

The total amount of federally financed higher education R&D expenditures in 2023 was over $59 billion dollars.4

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Taxpayer dollars fund American science at a level that is difficult to comprehend, and utterly shocking to many. How science can and should be funded is a tricky question with no easy answers. Back in the era of gentlemen scientists, being born white and male into a family of means was necessary (and hopefully not sufficient) if one wanted to try one’s hand at science. Today, being the “wrong” race, sex, or class are not inherent barriers to being a scientist. Surely this is progress.

But when you make headway in solving one set of problems, be assured that you will create new ones. Now that science is available to more people: How shall it be funded? If it is to be funded by the public, as so much of American science is, who gets to make the decisions?

Letting only “experts” decide—those people who are already intimately familiar with the questions and methods in play—creates the perfect conditions for the same kind of circle jerk we see in peer review. Science becomes a popularity contest, and the most fashionable ideas, rather than the ones with the most promise, get funded.

But letting people wholly unfamiliar with the research decide what will get funded seems absurd. On what basis would they make their decisions?

Public funding of science seems to me to be the (or at least a) right solution, but operationalizing it fairly and objectively may be impossible. Collectively, we have allowed the entire system to become broken. So much of what passes for science isn’t science at all. The questions being asked are overly simplistic,5 or the research is corrupt,6 or the whole enterprise comprises a rejection of reality.7

And yet: actual science, science which is not beset with conflicts of interest or incompetence or fraud, is a beautiful, necessary human endeavor. And much of the value of scientific exploration is not in the form of obvious positive ramifications for human health or well-being. We can’t know what avenues may open up later as a result of basic research today. We cannot know.

So it may be fun to laugh at absurd sounding research, but we cannot restrict ourselves to asking only questions that have obvious utility. If we do so, our horizons will narrow, our vision will constrict, and ultimately, we will have no creativity, no analysis, no capacity at all. This is the unhooking of the human spirit. Science is an expansive and liberating endeavor that, when edited down to only its most practical manifestations, becomes a straitjacket.

Science is and must remain open. Technology and engineering are important, too, but they’re different. “Basic research,” the kind that “just” tries to answer questions about reality, is necessary. But we are failing to teach people to think broadly, to ask big questions, to make careful predictions that follow from hypotheses. These are the core of science. Instead, today’s scientists are too often trained to do highly specific things with very narrow scope.

And yet—again, and yet—there are many good scientists still out there, with more in the wings. Surely some among them are at Harvard. A May 14 email signed by both the president and provost of Harvard began thusly:

We write today to reaffirm the University’s commitment to the research enterprise as we navigate this extraordinarily challenging time. Last month, the federal government announced a freeze on more than $2 billion of grants and contracts that had been competitively awarded to Harvard researchers8.

A freeze of two billion dollars in grants and contracts is immense. As the MD-PhD student who wrote to me said in a later message to me,

The approach that is currently being taken by the Trump administration is with a sledgehammer rather than with a scalpel.

His analogy is a good one. Is a sledgehammer to the entire enterprise the only way to do this? Would a scalpel work?

I don’t think so. Scalpels are designed to do detail work—they don’t work at scale. Sledgehammers, on the other hand, can be scaled up. Sledgehammers, wrecking balls, bombs…agents of destructions exist at every scale. Maybe it all needs to be destroyed, before being rebuilt anew. Then the precision work can begin.

I remember, however, one of the most salient critiques of the leftist activists who took over American cities during the Summer of 2020, after George Floyd died in Minneapolis. Those activists, antifa clad in black bloc among them, had already been destroying good things for some years, including at The Evergreen State College, when my professorship there was unraveling, and in Portland, Oregon, where I lived afterwards. Nancy Rommelmann, who had been living in Portland for many years when the activist mob came for her husband’s business, brought that salient critique of those activists to the table: they create nothing. Destruction is easy, and they are good at it. They are creating only rubble and emptiness. With no thought to what happens afterwards, this is mere vandalism.

Is the DOGE9 approach akin to that of leftist activists, then? Or is the comparison unfair?

Antifa terrorized the good citizens of cities across America, including Portland, where they showed us who was boss by finally—finally!—knocking over several historic public sculptures, including those of presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, and sufficiently vandalizing an iconic bronze elk sculpture such that it was quietly disappeared. The elk had it coming, presumably. One could argue that leftist activists had some real grievances—persistent bias and prejudice, uneven playing fields that would not level themselves. Those small rocks of grievance, however, were overrun by rivers of confusion, hedonism, and fury.

DOGE is terrorizing good scientists by yanking their funding midstream, breaking contracts for work that had already begun, and effectively breaking promises to young scientists who had not merely worked hard, but worked well, to get where they are. They do not deserve to be terrorized. DOGE is also, however, terrorizing the very university administrators who have helped create and benefit from the mess. Those of us who voted for this administration—myself included—knew that the swamps of federal graft and other corruption needed to be drained. We knew that it would get ugly. This is very ugly indeed. It is also true that the hypocrisy of the administrators who helped create the grotesque mess that is being so uglily dismantled is now on full display.

Here is the director of Harvard’s joint MD/PhD program in a May 16 email that describes the vast cuts to Harvard’s federal funding, while asking the MD/PhD students to “stay focused and keep doing your critically important work:”

At least some among Harvard’s leadership apparently have heavy hearts and unwavering senses of duty. I do not doubt that this is true.

But where was the leadership at Harvard when, for instance, evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was driven out of her position for daring to take the obvious position that sex in humans is real and binary? Dr. Hooven is now being encouraged by the leadership at Harvard to back them up, while they are under attack. Hunh. Seems that she could have used some back-up when an absolutely rudderless assault was made on her, and she ended up having to leave her job, one for which she had been celebrated, justly and often.

As Dr. Hooven wrote on May 19^th of this year:

Yes, Trump is overstepping, and there's lots worth saving. I also know I'm not alone in feeling that I can't stomach the hypocrisy of now being called on to do everything I can to help Harvard.

When I asked my correspondent at Harvard how he could be sure that the cuts his program was experiencing were political, he said this:

I do not want to give the impression that I believe there is no wasteful academic spending going on or controversial research being performed….I can empathize with the Trump Administration’s desire to cut certain projects. However, for work like mine and others who I know full well have tremendously powerful implications for the future of science and our country, I simply cannot rationalize a motive other than one which is political.

There are many incompetent, lazy, and greedy people among the good, and no approach would be perfect at discerning between them. Perhaps burning it all to the ground, a tactic shared by antifa and DOGE, is in fact the best approach. I am not sure.

There will, however, be much to clean up and rebuild in the aftermath. Will there be anyone left to do so?

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My virtual life is fairly clean, while not being nearly as clean as it might be. I say yes to receiving newsletters and tables of contents from a great many publications, ranging from scientific journals to substacks to legacy media outlets. I read to appeal to my own interests, and also to see what people wholly different from me are reading. I sign up for updates, even pay for subscriptions, from publications about which I know little. It is good to see what is out there.

Forbes is one such publication. I know it only as a business magazine, one which offers commentary and advice on finance and investment, and publishes lists of rich people.

It also puts out newsletters that are highly specific, one of which I received in my inbox yesterday morning. Forbes: Current Climate. The blurb about this newsletter—the pitch that you see when deciding whether to toggle it into or out of your inbox, is this:

Forbes: Current Climate: Get a temperature check on the environment and sustainability.

Cute. Not clever, exactly, but cute. Maybe. Except that they’ve tipped their hand, haven’t they. They already have a conclusion, hidden in word play. Also, “environment” is understood to be a subset of climate in this framing. I object. The environment is so much more. I am an environmentalist. And I am deeply skeptical of much of what is passing for climate science.

This week’s “Current Climate” newsletter began with these two paragraphs:

Hurricane Milton hit Florida hard earlier this month. Without climate change, it wouldn’t have been as bad, according to scientific researchers.

Hurricane Milton was wetter, windier and more destructive because of climate change, according to a study by the international scientific group World Weather Attribution. The group figures that without climate change Milton would have been a Category 2 storm rather than a Category 3 hurricane when it made landfall. Perhaps more worrisome, the researchers found that storms with Milton’s wind speeds have become 40% more frequent because the climate has warmed by 1.3 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times.

Those deadly hurricanes that many Americans will be recovering from for a long time to come? Blame climate change. By extension: blame those who reject Carbon-reducing “solutions” to climate change.

Forbes, in its hard-hitting way, has provided its references, so let’s check.

Hurricane Milton hit Florida hard earlier this month. Without climate change, it wouldn’t have been as bad, according to scientific researchers.

This first link goes to a website called “Yale Climate Connections,” which contains nearly identical text to what is in the Forbes article. So, kudos to Forbes for not stealing without (some) attribution, but this site is not a scientific source. Yale Climate Connections is, according to its own press, “an initiative of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication.” Headlining their site is this:

We know you’re worried about climate change. So are we.

Yale Climate Connections is a news service that aims to help you understand the reality of climate change and what you can do about it.

News service. Journalists? Maybe. Scientists? No. Foregone conclusions? Definitely.

Back to Forbes then.

Hurricane Milton was wetter, windier and more destructive because of climate change, according to a study by the international scientific group World Weather Attribution. 

Click on that link and try to read the analysis in question. It is opaque and full of caveats and jargon. Through the obfuscating tangle, however, you find the conclusion, like a beacon, stated repeatedly. Here is just one example among many of the conclusion that World Weather Attribution has arrived at:

we find that heavy 1-day rainfall events such as the one associated with Milton are 20-30% more intense and about twice as likely in today’s climate, that is 1.3°C warmer than it would have been without human-induced climate change.

The problem with this conclusion is that it is missing one critical element: evidence.

The whole analysis is based on models. I have lots to say about the risks of relying on models, especially when you treat the output of those models as if they’re empirical data, but put those concerns aside for the moment. Let’s assume, for the moment, that the models are accurate. Let’s assume that the modelers are correct, and that in modern times, temperatures are higher than they were historically, and that in turn, higher temperatures correlate with more extreme storms.

Why, though, are there higher temperatures in the first place?

The modelers have not established the anthropogenic nature of the higher temperatures. In fact, they have not even tried. “Human-induced climate change” is an assumption made by the researchers, but it is being presented as a conclusion of their analysis.

I would love to be wrong about this—not because I’m rooting for anthropogenic climate change, but because I’m rooting for science. The work being done here is not close to my core area of expertise. Perhaps I’ve missed something, or misunderstood something, or misunderstood many things. I hope and I trust that if that is true, someone will bring it to my attention.

I doubt it, though.

Here’s the thing:

I am really, really, really tired of having science paraded in front of me that doesn’t turn out to be science. “Scientists find X” all too often means “Scientists modeled Y and extrapolated Z and snuck in X at the end because that’s the conclusion they were shooting for all along.”

If I were to rewrite the “scientific analysis” being promoted by Forbes and Yale and presumably many others this week, it might read like this:

Extreme storms are doing great damage. Models suggest both that temperatures are higher than they used to be, and that extreme storms are more likely when temperatures are higher. The only explanation that we are willing to consider for why temperatures are higher is anthropogenic climate change.

That would be honest. But it would be too transparent, and many people would see the problem. The problem is that careful scientific analyses do not posit only one possible explanation for observed phenomena.1

Thus, this is not careful scientific analysis. It is conclusion-driven, model-based, propaganda.2

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, mind you. It might be right. Personally, I suspect that we are having an impact on the atmosphere, and therefore the climate, with our industrial behavior.

I also have reason to think that there are other, non-anthropogenic forces that are affecting our climate. And I do wonder why we’re not talking about them.

Meanwhile, “news services” from the Ivy League are spreading the good word far and wide, and legacy business magazines are getting in on the evangelism as well. It’s a new religion, with a distinctly unreligious sounding name. It’s the religion called “The Science.”3 Because of the name it’s been given, it has fooled a lot of people. But actual science is withering on the vine.

Shortly after the error of reading email on my phone first thing, I went out into a bracing and vibrant Autumn day and stood barefoot in the wet grass. The cool Earth thrummed below, and the Sun warmed my face. Actual birds—not the ones captured on my phone—chirped and twittered in the bushes. All of that did something to mitigate the bad start I had gotten. Try it. You might find that it helps you, too.

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Our galaxy alone has billions of stars that are similar to our sun, our sun being a fairly standard sort of a star. Many of those billions of other sun-like stars almost certainly have Earth-like planets orbiting them, planets with a good likelihood of having liquid water at their surfaces. And many of those other Earth-like planets are far older than Earth. If even a tiny fraction of those life-amenable planets evolved life earlier than we did, we should expect some of them to have long since evolved sentient life, and in turn, for some of that sentient life to have innovated interstellar travel, and in turn, for some of them to have reached out by now.

There should, that is, be many other technologically advanced civilizations out there, and yet we seem to be alone.

And so the Fermi Paradox was born. Where is everybody?

Many possibilities have been considered.

Perhaps the conditions required for the evolution of life are far more unusual than we understand. Being in the “habitable zone” around an appropriate star may well be necessary, but also insufficient. Perhaps our moon is a critical piece of the equation, and Jupiter too, a gas giant of a planet that could almost have been a second sun.

Perhaps extinction events over which a planet’s inhabitants have little control are more common than we like to imagine. Sixty-five million years ago, more or less, an asteroid that was at least six miles in diameter smacked the Yucatán peninsula. This event is now usually credited with ending the Age of Dinosaurs and ushering in the Age of Mammals.1 Giant space rocks are a credible threat. Less intuitive but also credibly threatening are coronal mass ejections, pole shifts, and fluctuations in galactic magnetic fields.

Or perhaps sentient life has indeed evolved, over and over and over again, but it keeps snuffing itself out before it manages to reach for the stars.

In that vein, some years back, I half-jokingly proposed that it was the inevitability of postmodernism that takes out civilizations, and all of the sentient beings along with it.

It was only kind of a joke.2

Postmodernism has been defined a nearly infinite number of ways3, but its starkest and most dangerous tenets include rejection of rationality, and rejection of the very idea of an objective reality. Postmodernism is destructive rather than generative, it narrows one’s field of view rather than expands it, cuts off possibilities rather than creating them. It is, I think, anti-science.

Science is absolutely necessary for a civilization to thrive.

Science can be defined as a process by which we build knowledge through observation, hypothesis and prediction. By repeatedly attempting to prove ourselves wrong—to falsify our most cherished beliefs by putting our hypotheses to rigorous tests—we hope to incrementally arrive at a more complete and accurate understanding of the universe. Science is not its results, though—a litany of facts. It is also not inherently quantitative, and certainly not inherently reductionist.

Postmodernism is adopted most enthusiastically by academics who eschew science consciously and intentionally. Yes, its tenets and confusions are creeping into science. But postmodernism isn’t accomplishing the death of science on its own. It’s getting a lot of help along the way.

The technocrats who rule our world are bludgeoning us with something they call science. It’s not science, though. The majority of modern people in the West were, through no fault of their own, poorly educated in the ways and means of science. Faced with endless terms and processes to memorize, they became convinced that they’re not “good at science.” Once so convinced, they are easily swayed by the technocrats.

Technocrats win when the people are incapable of thinking scientifically for themselves. The technocrats accomplish this by putting a kind of spell on the populace, placing them in the sway of something called The Science, which the people cannot see has nothing to do with actual science.

Long before the rise of postmodernism, we saw attacks on actual science—gatekeepers arose in the form of federal agencies doling out research dollars, editors at scientific journals restricting publications, tenure committees declining to award tenure. Gate-keeping is not the problem, though—it’s the gameable nature of the gates that’s the problem. If the gates being kept are gameable, the entire system is a farce.

Behind the façade of meritocracy is a network of connections—you favorably review my paper and help it get published, and I’ll favorably review yours. Scientism becomes a stand-in for science; measurable, titratable units a stand-in for hypothesis and prediction. “Data-driven” is proclaimed without irony to be the goal by generations of would-be scientists. These are scientists with the appropriate degrees and grants and instrumentation and publication records. These are also scientists without, apparently, any idea what it is that the scientific process is capable of.

Data do not come first in science. Observation and hypothesis come first. Absent that, data are nothing more than numbers. Numbers are easy to manipulate. When data come first, data can quickly turn into propaganda.

Many would argue the benefits of science in terms of the practicality—look at all the  problems that it can solve, from curing disease to making travel safer and faster! But I wish to make a different argument entirely. Understanding how to wield the tools of science is an individual imperative for everyone, for without that capacity, you are beholden to others, and can be taken advantage of by anyone who claims the mantle of science. That mantle is yours. It is not theirs to have. But in order to claim it, and keep it as your own, you need practice discerning patterns and falsifying ideas, and you need a combination of confidence and humility. Confidence and humility are the very things with which one does science.

I now fear, and I’m not half-joking this time, that the resolution to the Fermi Paradox may lie with the power-hungry technocrats who gate-keep actual science, while wearing it like a skin suit. Perhaps they do not realize that once they’ve killed off science, they will doom us all.

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A few hearty souls have taken on the challenge of trying to salvage the reputation of beavers, and to help them reestablish in American landscapes. Our waterways and water tables will begin to heal if we can learn to coexist with this persistent rodent. This is a big job, and not for the faint of heart.

Leading the charge for the last several years was a non-profit called The Beaver Coalition, which has recently reincarnated itself as Project Beaver. The man behind both organizations is Jakob Shockey. Jakob was a student of mine at Evergreen, and has been a friend for many years. Jakob taught me about beavers—among many other things—and I wrote about them in this space fourteen months ago. My goal then was to raise awareness of the central role that beavers have played in North American ecology, and also to direct people to Jakob’s work.

What happened behind the scenes after I published my piece was truly awful, and wholly unexpected by either Jakob or me. In retrospect, perhaps we both should have seen it coming.

As the maelstrom was still happening—as it would be for a long time to come—Jakob had this conversation on DarkHorse with Bret. It steers clear of the chaos, and it is well worth a listen.

A couple of months ago, I asked Jakob if he would like to reflect publicly about what had happened a year earlier. Neither of us had said anything to the world about it, although a careful observer might wonder why The Beaver Coalition had to die, only to be replaced by Project Beaver. Project Beaver has a Board that is far more anti-fragile than that of the previous organization, but otherwise, they seem to be doing very much the same work.

Jakob said yes. He wrote me a letter—a hand-written letter that he mailed to me by post, from his home in the Siskiyou mountains of southern Oregon. I wrote back, and he wrote me again, and what follows is that exchange, now in electronic form. It neither provides salacious details, nor does it name names. What it does do, however—and what Jakob does in his life—is provide for anyone who finds themselves the subject of a witch hunt, anyone who is suffering from attempted cancellation, a model of how to live with integrity and in truth.

Never cave to the mob.

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February 1, 2024

Dear Heather,

At three years old I met another little boy at a campout. We played. Our parents had similar interests so our friendship developed, carried on by inertia and the interests of children. He lived in the mountains above the Oregon coast—I was in the Siskiyous—so as we grew our parents took turns driving, at least twice a year, the four hours between our houses to drop off a kid for a week. At my house, he’d help pick apples in the fall, we’d go on rambling walks with my herd of goats and play jacks on the concrete patio. At his house, I saw my first beaver dam—he and his dad broke apart beaver dams to help the elderly neighbor keep water off the land where he pastured cattle. We drove around on a three-wheeler to look for those dams. I got to try driving once but jammed down the little accelerator with my thumb too hard and popped a wheelie. From then on I got to watch and he made fun of me about that for years.

I did a lot of watching at his house. He was six months older and possessed high-value resources like a BB gun and a trampoline. My role was to witness his prowess with these extraordinary objects, then he might let me have a turn.  In our early adolescence, his favorite activity became sitting at the family’s gray-plastic desktop computer to scroll through the photos posted to Myspace.com by girls he knew. I’d pull up a dining-room chair and make appropriate noises of approval at intervals. Bored, I remember considering his mouse pad—a flexible rubber square with rounded corners—a gift from the Go Army! recruiters at the county fair. Its cloth surface was printed with the photo of a soldier in a tan muscle shirt doing pull-ups and the words “Pain is Weakness Leaving Your Body!”

No, said my indignant fourteen-year-old mind, pain is your body signaling for attention; telling you to stop doing that before something breaks.

This time last year was painful.

In the beginning, I was provided the opportunity to publicly condemn my friends, swear “I didn’t know” and offer apologies and loyalty oaths. (You have strayed from the path, but we may be willing to overlook it, if…)

Then, there was the rush of vitriol from my colleagues—outraged by my lack of shame and compliance. (Youare the problem! How can you be SO tone-deaf to your own hate-adjacency?)

Later, the last set of ultimatums and hostages, a parade of their power to destroy the organization, projects and relationships I’d built. (We wouldn’t have to do this if you’d behaved. This is for your own good and it hurts us as much as it hurts you.)

Last, follow-through on all the threats; calls and emails to collaborators, contractors, funders and advisors to warn them that I have a hate problem that they can’t discuss in depth. (Silence.)

It is morning yet again, and as you stand in your banishment to ‘beyond the pale’ the living world rushes in and welcomes you back to the wilds. Birds sing and a female praying mantis pragmatically chews off her mate’s head while his coupled body continues to thrust. A red-tailed hawk spots an invisible thermal—launching from their perch in a straight vector and beating wings until they catch that warm swell and rise into clean air.

Approval is not love—approval promises love if you act in a certain way. Like a bully who has caught up your arm behind your back and twists up toward your neck—those who “cancel” others use leverage, wielding approval to pry at your public sense of self. Of course, the secret of leverage is that it only works by pivoting against something substantial. In this, that fulcrum is your hope for future security.

As Helen Keller wrote:

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

The cancellation of a year ago tore away my public sense of self, assassinating my hopes with cold precision. “Cancelled” is a word that applies to business, commerce, and the digital ether—a living entity cannot be canceled —the word for that is killed. I was symbolically murdered in the world of social and status games, which left me without the expectation, coercion, and distraction of that culture. I was cast out into the mud and sticks of the real, breathing world with no public sense of self, no approval, and no hope of security—all those notions that made me prone to the manipulation of others were gone. I was freed.

Big, financially successful nonprofits are in the morality game—regardless of what their mission says they will do in the real world. Civilization is killing the planet. The winning environmental nonprofits are in the business of selling absolutions for the soul.

This time last year was painful. I’d wake up every morning nauseous with stress—my body signaling that if this tension continued, something would break. Then it did. Even as our organization’s efficacy increased, board members resigned, contractors abandoned projects, and scientific advisors scattered like quail. Funders took back over $100,000, while others said they would no longer support us in the future. Upcoming high-definition media coverage in National Geographic and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom withered to dust. In hindsight, of course there was a clamor for the exit.

It had become clear that we were not in the morality business. Those who wanted to build a successful nonprofit left in disgust, leaving the rest of us to get on with our work.

We now wake up every day and go to work for life, not to build a living—and we are more effective than we’ve ever been.

Jakob

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February 26, 2024

Dear Jakob,

When the mob came for you last year, I hoped that I could make them go away. I thought, for a moment, that you just needed permission to give me up. If you prostrated yourself before the mob—allowing that I, formerly your professor and now your friend, was in fact a terrible person and that you had had no idea of my beliefs, none whatsoever, before facilitating me writing about the value of beaver in North American landscapes—maybe that would work. Perhaps, if you did this, you could escape the maw of the mob.

Shocking, really, that I had any such thoughts, given that I am all too aware of how mobs work, and that signs of weakness are met not with respect but with enhanced wrath. In truth, I don’t think that I believed that it would work. But I needed you to know that it would be okay with me if you threw me under the bus, to try to protect what you had built.

In deeper truth, I knew that you would never do it. That’s the thing about integrity. It shows itself in bad times more than in good. And I’ve seen you in both before this. After all, we’ve had some other difficult times together. Those weeks on and around the remote Panamanian island of Escudo de Veraguas, where you would go on to conduct ground-breaking research on the endangered pygmy sloth, was nothing if not exciting. And on domestic soil, do you remember climbing the Capitol building together in Olympia, during Occupy? In retrospect, all good times. At the very least, important times. But never, before last year, had the difficult times that we experienced together been entirely social in their construction.

After graduating from Evergreen, you built something so important and beautiful in The Beaver Coalition. You are that rare creature who seems equally comfortable in the analytical and creative realms, speaking both quantitative and qualitative languages, fully aware of the value of both logic, and of story. And you have a special skill for finding necessary, little known ecological truths—such as that beavers were once dominant in the American landscape, and if we welcomed them back, we would have less drought and fire—and pairing those truths with a deep sensitivity to the lives and concerns of the people who live on the land.

Perhaps this has no place here, but when I was your professor and you spoke of Lydia, your high school sweetheart who was in college far away on the East coast, I could hear in your words and see in your affect how deeply in love you were, and how loyal and honorable you were. When you were my TA one quarter, Lydia came with you on a field trip that we were running together, in the Columbia River Gorge. She was everything you had said. And now I have also met all but one of your children, whom both of you are raising to be full of curiosity and integrity, on land that you yourself grew up running almost wild on.

When Evergreen blew up on Bret and me in 2017, you were one of the first people to show up for us—virtually, that is, for you had graduated several years earlier. There was much distressing in that time, and surprising. People whom we thought were solid abandoned us, and others whom we hardly knew stood up in our defense, but some were no surprise at all. Of course you were staunch in our defense. Of course you were. That is the kind of person that you are.

When Bret and I lived in Portland you came to visit and gave us a tour of some of the beaver wetlands within the city, places that had been invisible to us. Previously subtle, now they were obvious. When I wrote about the beaver in early 2023, I hoped to draw attention not just to them, but to your work. And after writing my piece, I asked if you had any photographs of beaver that might go nicely with it. You directed me to someone on your Board, a photographer. That’s when it all went to hell.

She found me guilty of “spewing transphobic and hurtful garbage,” and engaging in “intentional disrespect” of others on twitter. Citing “respect and integrity” as core values of the non-profit that you had started, she then launched a war. I was not inside those battles, but it went badly very quickly. The mob had come for you, and there was nothing I could do to help. Everything you had built was at risk, because one of your Board members insisted that you acquiesce to a mob of her creation, and apologize for the opinions of your friends.

You didn’t.

And yet the reach of the mob is long. It comes with many heads and ravening claws and crazy eyes and it has secret meetings behind closed doors with those who have not yet chosen a side.

“You’re not one of them?” it asks of the uninitiated.

“Surely you’re on our side?” it continues, a scaly paw gripping the leg of its interlocutor, who has begun to grow wary.

“You wouldn’t want us to have to do this to you, now, would you?” The last question is rhetorical.

The toolkit of the mob is vast. In your letter to me you speak of the ultimatums and hostages, and when that didn’t work, the follow-through, via a whisper campaign as to your character: high-profile media projects died on the vine, grants were rescinded, and insinuations were made to people with whom you had built relationships over years. Some of those people then quietly disappeared from your sphere. Scared. Cowardly.

This mob, spun up from nothing by righteousness and vitriol, had as its only claim that you are the one living a life of hate. Funny, that.

And so from the ashes of The Beaver Coalition, you have formed Project Beaver. The Beaver Coalition is dead. Long live Project Beaver.

Yours in friendship and admiration,

Heather

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March 3, 2024

Dear Heather,

There was sunlight on the leaves outside your office at The Evergreen State College, refracting a rare green brightness into the second-story cube of glass and concrete, causing a fuzzy shadow to catch just behind the skull that sat on a smooth pine side table. A suspended moment, and I pivoted the spare chair to face you and your desk—to make my pitch. Later, after you’d agreed to this proposal, after the logistics of flights, buses and boats necessarily mediated by currency and clocks, another memory of sun on leaves.

A pygmy three-toed sloth dozed above in the canopy of a mangrove—her butt resting on a forking branch, one loose-elbowed arm stretched casually to a nearby limb. From my perch midway up that squat, saltwater-dwelling tree, I watched her at her afternoon nap—lulled into the present moment by the beauty of this novel reality. A gentle sea breeze rocked us. Less accustomed to sleeping in trees—I took out my pocket notebook. Two pieces of cardboard with a stack of thick drawing paper between; a spiraling black wire bound it together. There was an image of a fox on the cover. In the white space below its chin I’d written “Be aware.”

The beautiful thing about observing other animals is that they don’t talk; their behavior speaks to their motivations. Even the fox who chases its tail to lure in rabbits—or the duck who pretends a broken wing to lure away the fox—are honest in their deceptions. The arc of their actions tells a truth about their intent. Humans are no different really; we just talk a lot too. Our deceptions, often reliant on what is said, become as transparent as those practiced by foxes or ducks when you tune out the words and pay attention to actions.

You will remember we were warned not to associate with the indigenous people of Escudo de Veraguas by a PhD employee of the Max Planck Institute, who bragged about how he’d hired Noriega’s personal bodyguards (the deposed dictator of Panama) to protect him while he was on the island. He told us we would probably get robbed, how the Indigenous get violent when they drink, that there was a cemetery on Escudo as an outcome of their drunken fights. He only accessed the island using the powerful motorboats provided by the Smithsonian Institute, which enabled him to reach the island without stopping at any of the indigenous communities on the adjacent mainland.

We stayed in one of those communities, Kusapín, for over two months. The Ngäbe people were welcoming and curious. Nobody from the international research institutes had bothered to tell them that the sloths on that island were special or endangered. The Ngäbe asked for our findings in Spanish so they could use these to enact protections for the pygmy sloths in their indigenous Congress. They asked us why the other foreign scientists didn’t coordinate with them. We were the first to spend expedition dollars on local room and board, on guides and boat captains. And we never saw alcohol or drunkenness.

Later, as we were preparing our paper on pygmy sloths for publication, two PhD employees of the London Zoological Society reached out and asked to see the draft. They were getting ready to launch a “large conservation project” on Escudo de Veraguas; a vision that included stationing rangers on the island to protect it from the indigenous people of the area (an old tactic in a new location). I shared how we’d counted the sloths and would be publishing those population numbers, and advised them to coordinate with the locals. They assured me they had it handled, thanked us for sharing our methods, then went quiet. A few months later, after one of those same ex-bodyguards had dropped them back in civilization, their flashy media hit the internet proclaiming “We've collected data for the first time to get an accurate picture of how many pygmy sloths are left in the world."

It was a lie. And that man with all the trustworthy credentials who looked into the camera to claim this triumph, he knew it was a lie, as I’d emailed him the requested details on our earlier research just months before. Yet he looked into the camera with all the steady conviction of an expert and lied. While the deceptions of a fox are in the honest service of life—its own and its young ones—the tricks that people practice on each other are often base self-promotion. In this case it backfired. You wrote their supervisor, as did another mentor at that time—the renowned marine mammal researcher John Calambokidis. The liars outed, they quietly transitioned to other conservation projects.

Later, a famous television show by the BBC showed a pygmy sloth swimming in the seawater “to find a mate” as David Attenborough narrated. In all our time on Escudo, we never saw a sloth swim…The film crew that captured this magic footage was on the island just a few days, yet, somehow, they happened to spot and film a sloth swimming for land. The multiple camera angles and lighting are perfect, and the underwater shot from below as the sloth swims overhead—amazing!

Conservation is big business, a high-definition venture that features heroes using science to save cute animals. For this business model to work (and oh boy does it), the story is more important than the reality, the words more than the actions. The people who are still on the land find themselves cast as the villains in a play they haven’t auditioned for, uprooted in the name of conservation while the trustworthy experts catalog their “natural resources.” A sloth may get dropped over the side of a boat in service of a photo op.

With Project Beaver, we are attempting a different business model—one that is accountable to reality before words. Instead of spinning up stories to pull at heartstrings, our “product” is simply our good work in the real world. When we do tell a story, it will speak to our best understanding of reality.

This may not work. It is a special human who gives money to better the world for life. There aren’t that many of these people and organizations compete for their attention—since attention equals donations. In the race for attention, those who focus their resources on producing glossy media will win. However, there is a growing community of philanthropists for whom “telling the story” isn’t enough—they want their money to contribute to a better planet and they are tired of being emotionally manipulated for funds.

These are the people who are behind Project Beaver, and our agreement is simple; they entrust me with their money and I use it to support our mission in the most effective way I can. We listen to the people who are still on the land. We aren’t shy about using hypothesis-driven field science. We prioritize understanding reality.

In the end, being “canceled” was just noise, and it will probably happen again (and again)—to me, to you, to anyone who points out that the king is running around naked. If the punishment of cancellation is that truth-tellers are banned from that digital space where humans curate their own promotional deceptions; then great. Getting canceled only frees us from the distractions and subtle power games of that emperor’s court. It is an honor to accept this merit badge in Dumbledore’s Army—as a Yankee Doodle committed to the truth of the living world.

Jakob

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Please, dear readers—consider supporting Project Beaver—for our North American ecosystems, and for a man who has demonstrated his integrity, and dedication to truth, beauty and science, over and over again.

You can also follow Jakob on Substack and X.

There is life after cancelation. We can stand up for truth. And we can stand up for one another. In fact, we must.

If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of a craftsman. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of the artist. The surprises along the way can expand your work, and even the art form itself.

This pronouncement is apt, if restricting. Craftsmen, too, explore and discover and go on adventures of creation that they did not foresee. That said, as a rule of thumb, the distinction is useful: art is more completely open to possibility, while craftsmen have a product in mind.

How about if I change Rubin’s subjects, but nothing else:

If you know what you want to do and you do it, that’s the work of an engineer. If you begin with a question and use it to guide an adventure of discovery, that’s the work of the scientist. The surprises along the way can expand your work, and even the science itself.

Again: apt, if restricting. Engineers, too, explore and discover and go on adventures of creation that they did not foresee. That said, as a rule of thumb, the distinction is useful: science is more completely open to possibility, while engineers have a product in mind.

Art, craft, science, and engineering: All are beautiful human endeavors. They produce beauty and truth, functional forms and ways of understanding the world that are useful and, sometimes, unexpected.

In some ways, art and science have more in common with one another than either do with craft or engineering. Thus: Art is to craft, as science is to engineering.

Art and science are driven by exploration and discovery and openness to possibility, while craft and engineering are driven by outcome: by the desire to solve a particular problem, or bring a particular thing into being.

While all four of these ancient human endeavors require creativity, in science, creativity is at the forefront. Science asks “why” and “how,” “what if” and “if that, then what else?”

It is a common mistake, made by people who call themselves creatives but also by those who do not, even by many people who call themselves scientists, to believe that science does not require creativity.

Science requires creativity and openness, of a sort that we see little of in the brash hubris of the lab-coated #FollowTheScience types. They who would pass themselves off as the new arbiters of truth. They who would have us believe everything that they say, no questions asked.

Seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously wrote—although not precisely in these words—of the God-shaped hole that is left in humanity’s heart when it abandons religion. Attempts to fill that hole have been many and varied, including by those who invoke an anti-creative, pro-authority “science” that demands to be followed. That God-shaped hole is being filled with something calling itself science, but that thing is based on authority and dogma, rather than on openness and exploration. It is not science at all.

In this authoritarian pseudo-science that would take the place of God, we have the death of wonder, and the rise of the unquestionable expert. Religion, for all of its flaws, at least had the wisdom to retain wonder in its ranks.

We need to recognize the creativity and messiness inherent to science and the scientific process, and wrest it back from the credentialed thugs who would claim it as their own.

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These things can nag at one’s consciousness.

Most who were compliant, however, still believe on balance that it was the right choice, even if it came with risks that we were not told about.

“Because I had my shots, when I did get Covid, I was barely sick for a day or two.”

“Because” has no place in that sentence. It assumes a causality for which there is no evidence.

We have been told that those who easily survived Covid did so because they got their shots and, conversely, that those who got very sick suffered so because they were not vaccinated against Covid. But this has no relationship with reality. Covid is a nasty disease, the full extent of which we surely do not yet know. The frankenvirus behind Covid causes a suite of damages that are not produced by other, naturally occurring viruses. This is true, but it is also true that most people who get Covid are just fine, at least for now. A substantial minority of those infected are asymptomatic. Many more who know they have it only get a bit sick. Your comorbidities, not your vaccination status, predict how well you will do. The risk is higher the more comorbidities you have. The older you are, the fatter you are, the sicker you are, especially with heart or kidney or metabolic disease—the more likely you are to get walloped by Covid.

We are all trying to run our own statistics based on personal anecdotes, but we are doing so in a landscape of misinformation. The assurances that good personal outcomes are due to compliance, and bad ones are because you didn’t follow along: it’s a modern form of karma. The New Karma has been brought to you by the government and by pharmaceutical companies. Ask no questions, stick out your arm, get the shot, go on about your business—you are one of the good ones. Point out the inconsistencies in the official story, move, perhaps, from hesitancy to refusal, and be vilified. You will pay the price. That’s karma for you.

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The tests are bad. The treatments are worse. The official advice is useful as a way to know what not to do. Do not stay inside. Do not take their new-to-market drugs. Do not avoid long-established and safe drugs, drugs known to be effective against other viruses. Do not vilify your family, friends, and neighbors for making decisions for themselves.

Do not forget what it feels like to have agency. You are a complete human being, one responsible for your own decisions, and for your fate. Luck will play a role, to be sure. Your past, some of which was luck, plays a role. But you also play a role. Your actions help decide your fate.

The Pied Piper led the children of Hamelin away from their homes, luring them with charisma and pretty lies. The children never returned. Today’s Pied Piper is luring whole populations with authority and pretty lies, pretending to be science. #FollowTheScience should have been a tell. (For some of us it was.) Science is neither a result, nor a set of static facts. Science is not a thing to be followed. Science is the best process we have by which we discover what is true about the Universe. It’s a messy and inelegant process, likely to take unexpected twists and turns, but is the most likely one to arrive us, ultimately, at the truth. The scientific process does not merely tolerate dissent; it requires it.

We were handed a bill of goods, in which science was coopted. Scientific consensus appeared to arrive fully formed, after a scant few months. The One True Answer was arrived at behind closed doors, by people no doubt bearing the most credentially of credentials. They bestowed on us the One True Answer, they told us to Follow, and so we were blessed.

Ah, mighty Science, hallowed be thy name.

For many years I worked in the tropics—conducting field research in Madagascar and Costa Rica, then running study abroad programs in Panama and Ecuador. On behalf of both myself and my students, I had to make decisions about which vaccines to get. The analysis included consideration of the risk of contracting a particular disease given where we were going to be and what we were going to be doing, the severity of the disease and the ability to treat it, and the efficacy of the vaccine. I was vaccinated against yellow fever, typhoid, and rabies, among other diseases. I was not—and I recommended that my students not be—vaccinated against cholera, despite it being present in some of the places that I went. Cholera is a nasty disease. It can kill you. But cholera is unlikely to make you sick if you have access to clean, fresh water. Add to this that the cholera vaccine was ineffective, barely reducing the incidence of contracting the disease. So I never accepted the cholera vaccine.

It was with this background that I watched the roll-out of the mRNA Covid vaccines and thought: Is this the right decision? Considering the question was the responsible thing to do.

Being a dog-lover doesn’t mean that you love all dogs. And being enthusiastic about vaccines doesn’t mean that you embrace everything that is called a vaccine.

Furthermore, calling something a vaccine doesn’t make it one. And calling something science doesn’t make it science. Fear of being called an anti-vaxxer, or anti-science, though, that’s powerful. If you think that “being on the side of science” means accepting all pronouncements handed down by authorities who claim the mantle of science, then you have misunderstood science, and handed over your fate to those who have demonstrated, over and over again, that they do not have your best interests at heart.

If you veer off the path of following the science, and discover that the world doesn’t look as you’ve been told, they may well call you all sorts of nasty names. It doesn’t make them true. And it is never too late to change your mind.

In 2006, Celia Farber wrote Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. It has just been republished by Chelsea Green Publishing. On page 23, Farber writes:

“The NIH maintains tight control over the ideas that emanate from U.S. government science, and that control extends to the media, who are rewarded and punished in accordance with their suspension of curiosity.”

Curiosity is the linchpin of science. What if? How does it work? Why is it that way? We suspend our curiosity at our peril. Generating all possible hypotheses, even those that seem ludicrous at first glance—this is the purview of science. If we are to understand what is true, then we must explore all the possibilities. What if the world isn’t as we think it is—wouldn’t you like to know? I would.

What we believe is sometimes handed to us in the guise of science—here is the answer. Once we all agree on that answer, it can seem crazy, dangerous even, to question what is now understood. Obviously the Spanish Flu of 1918 was unavoidably fatal to young people. Or was it?1 Obviously mRNA vaccines against Covid are safe and effective. Or are they? Obviously HIV causes AIDS. Or does it? What is the evidence, and how thoroughly have the alternative hypotheses been investigated?

Farber’s powerful book addresses that last topic, along with several other questions pertaining to AIDS. Simultaneously, it reveals the playbook by which the government and media suppress scientific curiosity, while enforcing orthodoxy and compliance on a largely unwitting populace.

One of the arrows in the quiver of compliance is to make those who question the orthodoxy out to be an enemy of the people. Those who question the consensus are literally killing people. They should be ashamed of themselves. If they don’t have the common sense and decency to shut up, then it is our obligation to do it for them2.

Those are obvious tactics, and blunt. Some are more subtle. Doctor Peter Duesberg, the loudest and most persistent defender of the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS, was indeed told that he was killing people, then systematically removed from polite society and mainstream science—he was denied grants, grad students, and publications. But he was also pilloried in part for suggesting that choices people were making might be contributing to the progression of the disease. Is it possible that having sex with hundreds or thousands of strangers, or doing a lot of street drugs, puts your body under greater stress, and makes you more susceptible to illness, than if you did not do such things? How dare he.

Kary Mullis, the scientist who won the Nobel Prize for his invention of PCR, was outraged by Peter Duesberg’s treatment at the hands of mainstream scientific institutions. As he told Farber, “Peter has been abused seriously by the scientific establishment, to the point where he can’t even do any research. Not only that, but his whole life is pretty much in disarray because of this, and it is only because he has refused to compromise his scientific moral standards. There ought to be some goddamn private foundation in the country, that would say, ‘Well, we’ll move in where the NIH dropped off. We’ll take care of it. You just keep right on saying what you’re saying, Peter. We think you’re an asshole, and we think you are wrong, but you’re the only dissenter, and we need one, because it’s science, it’s not religion.’”3

Mullis continues: “I am waiting to be convinced that we’re wrong. I know it ain’t going to happen. But if it does, I will tell you this much—I will be the first person to admit it.”

That is what true scientists sound like. And that is why science, as done by scientists, is the route by which we attain an ever more accurate model of the world in which we live. False consensus and arrogance are replacing curiosity and humility, and this is how science dies.

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As AIDS emerged into human bodies and consciousness and became a global phenomenon, the following patterns emerged, as reported by Farber in Serious Adverse Events.4

• The nature of the pathogen causing the disease was loudly agreed upon by the medical and public health establishment soon after the disease emerged. Those who disagreed with the conclusion were mocked, silenced, erased.

• The progression of the disease—which we were assured was unprecedented in its spread, and inexorably deadly—was used to instill fear, and quell dissent.

• The data from which both death counts and case counts are generated were suspect at best. Many such “data” were based entirely on models, which is to say, they sprung from the assumptions and ideas in people’s heads, rather than from actual, measured, empirical data.

• The science that was used to justify draconian measures was abominable. In the words of one researcher who dug deep into AIDS research, “it’s hard to believe what kind of non-science they got away with.”

• Those who asked whether everyone who had “died of AIDS” had merely died were called denialists. While on a tour of a hospital ward in Côte d’Ivoire in Africa in 1992, Farber observed that patients “had TB, malaria, meningitis. They had wasting syndrome, diarrhea, fevers, and vomiting. If they were HIV-positive, they were told they had AIDS. If not, then they had whatever they had.”

• The tests for evidence of infection were bad—being both subjective in their interpretation, and unreliable even when standards were held firm.

• Pharmaceutical companies created expansive and lush installations at major conferences, replete with plush seating and large screens that ran high-production videos which oscillated between two messages: Be afraid; be very afraid. And: Our product is the only path out of the darkness.

• Money, rather than science, drove decision making around AIDS. As Farber writes of the business of AIDS, “it is like a global corporation, and what it produces and sells is primarily fear.”

• Toxic medications were considered the only legitimate response to the pathogen for a long time. They were recommended even for asymptomatic people. They were pushed even on asymptomatic pregnant women.

• The efficacy of said toxic medications was heralded by public health officials—including one Dr. Anthony Fauci, already the head of the NIAID in the mid-1980’s—on the basis of vaguely alluded to “research” that was not published, the only record of which was a short press release. This was true of AZT, and then later, a similar playbook emerged for protease inhibitors, which received FDA approval without any clinical evidence that they were effective.

• Those who refused the toxic medications were out of “treatment compliance.” African Americans were particularly suspect of the new treatments, and thus particularly likely to be out of treatment compliance. Some parents who refused to give their at-risk children the toxic medications had their children taken from them because of their failure to comply.

• If you had the disease, at the worst part of the epidemic, there was no treatment other than with one of the toxic medications. There was nothing you could do. The messaging was: You are not in control of your own life, or your own health. Be sick, and hope for the best. There is nothing we can do for you now.

Sound familiar? To me, too.

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Epilogue from Serious Adverse Events, by Celia Farber

The battleground for the war on AIDS is the human body; those who advocate conventional AIDS drug regimens share a belief that any degree of destruction to the human body is still preferable to allowing the virus to go unchecked. It is the virus, and the virus alone, that is the “enemy.” In AIDS, as in military wars, death is ennobled by the necessity of battle, the virulence of the enemy. The now twenty-six drugs, in four classes, that have been marketed to tackle the elusive, endlessly cunning virus are described as the armamentarium in this war. In addition, there are at least thirty drugs that have been developed to offset the side effects of anti-HIV drugs.

The hysteria-laden question of whether anti-HIV drugs are “life-saving,” as the AIDS orthodoxy holds, or “deadly,” as the HIV dissidents claim, is unanswerable in the currently available language, which was blunted and rendered incoherent by political forces as early as 1981. Language is the only interface between phenomena and our comprehension of them, and I have grown weary of being forced to use AIDS rhetoric that is itself inaccurate and loaded. First of all, lives can’t really be “saved”—they can only be extended. To prove that a life has indeed been extended, one must first know, with absolute certainty, that without intervention the life would have ended. In order to know that, one must know the natural history of the disease, and then one must examine the face of the untreated population.

But whatever treatments the future might hold, it feels as if we’ve already been there, and now we need to get back—“back to basic science,” as leading AIDS researchers have been chanting for years. I once pressed the editor of The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, to explain exactly what basic science might mean. He said that, for one thing, it would mean recognizing that we “have been forced to admit certain things . . . one of them is that we don’t know the true cause of immunodeficiency.”

But each nodule of this retrovirus has been spliced and examined in detail, using the most elaborate techniques known to humans. AIDS research has been a dizzying odyssey of high-tech research so elaborate you’d think it must be guided by some higher intelligence. And yet nothing happens, year after heartbreaking year. No cure, no vaccine, no nothing. What we have is a vast sea of data—diagnostic tests measuring shadows of cells we never even knew we had—but we still don’t know why person A gets sick and person B does not. Official estimates are now saying that at least 5 percent of all HIV-positive people will never develop AIDS. Research is also showing that many people get exposed to HIV but never develop antibodies because they have a strong enough “cellular immune response” to keep the virus in check. Surely it’s worth trying to figure out why.

AIDS itself is already a “futuristic” phenomenon in the sense of technology backfiring—casting off a huge cloud of information that tends to obfuscate rather than illuminate. There is also the Orwellian sense of an invasive, if well-intentioned, new social order being imposed that tries to save humanity from itself. But AIDS is so much more than just AIDS. It’s so much more than the sum of its parts: its statistics, its death toll, its newly infected. It’s so much more than its thirty symptoms, that is, to most of us who live with the luxury of not actually having it. AIDS now has a twenty-five-year history dense with, above all, death and loss but also terror, strife and drama, intrigue and hysteria. Hopes, phony cures, violence, fraud, but also incredible acts of compassion and sacrifice.

If the early years of AIDS were characterized by a near-total surrender to the draconian, AZT-centric mandates of the health establishment, we are now entering an era of scientific glasnost. In 1984, a deafening, global alarm went off, warning each and every last one of us that we could be next—that AIDS would wipe out humanity, that the Black Death would seem pale by comparison. Today it has become official that there is no “heterosexual AIDS explosion” in the West. According to original predictions, AIDS was supposed to have decimated, with equal impact, all sections of the population in the U.S., and virtually annihilated Africa. In 1986, Jonathan Mann, then director of the World Health Organization (WHO), estimated there would be 100 million HIV infections worldwide by 1990. He was off by over 90 million—in 1990, the WHO said the figure was only eight to ten million. Estimates for the U.S. were also in the millions and proved to be equally wrong. Gene Antonio—in his terror book The AIDS Cover-up?—predicted that 64 million Americans would be dead or dying by the end of 1990.

____

As AIDS grew in the 1980s into a global, multibillion-dollar juggernaut of diagnostics, drugs, and activist organizations whose sole target in the fight against AIDS was HIV, something got lost. It is hard to say what exactly, but one can point to loosening standards: Moves away from good clinical practice and the quick approval of untested drugs are some of the most alarming changes we’ve seen. But the history of the AIDS epidemic has also seen the emergence of an exclusive attitude toward treatment and research where dissent isn’t tolerated and the prevailing attitude is that anything goes in the fight against “the virus.”

Truth is, AIDS is spreading not along the lines of sexual activity but along economic lines. Poverty in America is now the single greatest “risk factor” for AIDS. In populations where not only drugs but malnutrition and lack of health care are problems, we have a perfect setting for the disease. And this of course raises the old question: What is AIDS? To what extent is it viral, to what extent associated with living conditions? We have been vastly motivated to explore the viral aspects of AIDS—and all but thoroughly disinterested in exploring the sociological ones.

Which brings me to the core point: The future of AIDS is that it is no longer an equal-opportunity sexually transmitted disease but a social catastrophe. Socially disadvantaged women have already been used as guinea pigs (and that is no exaggeration) for very risky experiments such as taking AZT and nevirapine during pregnancy. This is already, in a way, futuristic: Giving carcinogenic and mutagenic drugs to women while they are pregnant in the hope of reducing viral transmission by a few percentages.

What next? One AIDS researcher I interviewed in 1995 said, “AIDS won’t be perceived as a disease of gay men in twenty years. It will be a disease of impoverished drug addicts and you won’t hear much about it.” The quickfix questions—Will there ever be a cure? Will there ever be a vaccine?—are sprung from, and only apply to, other diseases with far simpler causes, like polio or gonorrhea. AIDS, by contrast, has spawned some of the greatest research debates in the history of medicine. Perhaps the single greatest cliché of AIDS is the idea that there is not enough money in it to find a cure. There may be too much money in it to find a cure. And besides, “cure” is the wrong word. “Resolution” is a better one.

But the multibillion-dollar research agendas die hard. Ultimately, the future of AIDS lies squarely at the feet of a research establishment paralyzed by hubris. If AIDS is ever to be solved, in all its infinite mystery, the very language has to change from the expansionist dogma we’ve seen so far to a softer, more flexible, less defensive stance. Call it “AIDS research with a human face.” Dress it up, tear it down, start over. That’s science at its best.

On March 23 of this year, the outstanding publishing house, Chelsea Green, republished Celia Farber’s 2006 book. I encourage all who are curious about their world, and interested in becoming more informed, to buy and read this book.

Buy it from Chelsea Green directly (book site, main site), or buy it from Amazon (paperback or audio book), where it is a best seller in multiple categories.

Read it, and become better at recognizing patterns, at seeing tricks and tactics when next they show up. Read it, and remain curious.

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The 112th livestream of DarkHorse that Amy Johnson linked to was broadcast on January 21, 2022. Bret and I called it “The Scramble to Protect the Elites.” With some help, I have transcribed part of it here, the part that feels most relevant to Oster’s request that an amnesty be granted over Covid policies. I was liberal in my transcription, removing “um” and “you know” and “the point is” more often than not, but if you choose to listen along (timestamps provided), you will hear that this rendering is very close to the live conversation that we had in January of 2022.

You will also find, in this conversation, that Bret and I do not always agree. We did not, for instance, find ourselves in exactly the same place with regard to how to feel about what we predicted then, over nine months ago: a request, by those who wrought this chaos, to just move on. A request for amnesty, if you will. How should we contend with a request for amnesty, or forgiveness, in the absence of an awakening, or an apology? As this conversation lays bare, we need a reckoning before amnesty, and apology before forgiveness.

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From DarkHorse Livestream #112: The Scramble to Protect the Elites

Heather (16:47): The people who are yelling anti-vax, just like the people who were yelling racist four and five and six years ago, are in fact ideologues. They may have dressed up like scientists and like humanists and like thinkers and like intellectuals, but that doesn't make it so. What they are is ideologues, and they've got a conclusion, and they're going to stick to it, no matter what else happens.

Because they are ideologues, and [because] that is the basis by which they make decisions, they assume that everyone else that they encounter is as well.

They're like “yeah, yeah I know, you claim you're a scientist but so am I, right? ha-ha-ha. I also have a conclusion and we have just come to different conclusions so we're going to argue about it.” But you know what? We're not all ideologues.

And what is happening right now is, the narrative is crumbling. You begin to see some of the ideologues backpedaling, and some of the backpedaling is going to convince some of the people. And some of the people who would have been very happy to see us and the others like us who have been vocal and out there from the beginning, disappeared into the abyss, and in fact tried to help that happen—some of them are going to be the ones who are positioned to win in the new world order.

Bret (18:10): Well, that's the next thing I want to talk about, is the scramble that is about to unfold, which I think, frankly, most of the people who have been paying attention to the better, more predictive, dissident narrative about public health and COVID are having the sense of: Omicron swept in and it took the pandemic out of the public health tyrants’ hands. It effectively handed us something that couldn't be controlled, and wasn't killing very many people, and that has brought us to a place that feels like it could be the end of the pandemic.

Now, I will say some people who are well positioned to think about these things have warned about what might emerge next. I don't yet know what to think about that but let's just say assuming that we do not have a next variant that kicks this into some other phase that we haven't yet thought about, this does look like well probably the end of something, because so many people are getting this, vaccinated and not vaccinated, that at some level to the extent that natural immunity is a decisive factor, we're going to reach herd immunity quickly because it's racing through the population.

So, with that said, the point is all right mandates are coming down because people can see that mandates don't really make any sense. What are you mandating? You're mandating a vaccine that doesn't prevent people from contracting the disease, doesn't prevent them from transmitting it, doesn't reduce viral load. On what basis are you doing that? And they will say, well because it reduces hospitalizations. Well even if that's true for young healthy people, that is no reason to mandate. Are you protecting me from me by locking me in my house and firing me from my job? That doesn't seem like it's very likely to actually be coherent.

Heather (20:04): Also, I’m kind of not feeling protected here.

Bret (20:06): Right. So the point is the absurdity of the mandates. What has happened is that Omicron has revealed what we have been saying all along, which is that something else is driving this. They swear it's being driven by a desire to protect civilization, but at the point that makes no sense, they still want to do it.

Heather (20:27): They still want to do it. I think this is a good place to show this:

I saw this on twitter today: "Nobody said you wouldn't get COVID if you're vaccinated", we keep on being told. It’s constant gaslighting by these people. And so this woman on twitter has put together just a few places where of course they said that you wouldn't get COVID if you're vaccinated.

Here we have from Joe Biden on July 21st of last year (2021) on CNN: "you're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations"

from Wolensky, the director of the CDC on March 29th on MSNBC of last year: "vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don't get sick",

Fauci, the NIAID director on May 17th of last year, on MSNBC: "when people are vaccinated they can feel safe they will not be infected.” And Fauci again, of the vaccines on May 17th, again last year: "they're really, really good against variants".

All of these things are untrue. Some of these things were lies. I’m not going to claim that Biden was lying, I’ll bet he just didn't know. But, my god. They keep on changing what it is they're claiming that they already said to us, and if we can't even keep track of that, then of course they're going to continue to win, and of course they're going to erect the new people who they can claim, “Okay yeah, well we got this wrong” and they’ll have a couple of fall guys, and they’ll make sure a couple of people have their heads sort of metaphorically cut off and they’ll prop up some new people in the positions that already existed, with the systems that already existed, with all the same incentives that already existed—

Bret (22:07): You’ve got to slow down through that because people are not going to understand what's about to happen.

Heather: Go for it.

Bret: Here's the problem: you've got public health elites and whatever it is that they represent. They have screwed up at an unprecedented level. They've effectively crashed many of the functional systems of planet Earth. They've caused untold misery, and frankly untold disease.

I would suggest people take a look at John Campbell's video from this week talking about how many people actually died of COVID. It's quite eye-opening. But he also talks about what people did die of, things like delays in cancer diagnoses. The point is this is an unprecedented catastrophe.

The natural outgrowth of an unprecedented catastrophe is a kind of collective soul searching in which we figure out who screwed up, how it happened, what system should have been in place so it doesn't happen again, and we move forward in that way.

But were that to happen, these incredibly powerful and in many cases now incredibly wealthy elites who earned so much through this colossal error—those people have everything to lose if we actually figure out what happened, and install the systems that would prevent it from ever happening again. So they're now in search of anything that can save them from facing the people who were right.

What that means is that there's a race that is going to be kicking off—we’re already seeing the first signs of it—and the race is for people who weren't right all along, who are now going to challenge the public health authority, right they're going to point out just how disastrous—

Heather (23:57): That's so brave.

Bret (23:58): It's very brave. They’re going to say these public health officials failed us BUT…and then they're going to attack those of us who had this stuff right. The elites have an incentive now to embrace this new middle ground that is neither fish nor fowl.

It is not on board with the public health narrative. It challenges it in very strong terms. But it also challenges the dissidents, who will be accused of all sorts of defects. The elites have an interest in finding that voice, the struggle to phrase it just so is now on, and so people will be falling all over themselves.

Some of them will know what they're doing—they’re jockeying for position in the new world order. Some of them will not know what they're doing—they will just detect that suddenly they're seeing articles on a particular theme in all sorts of places and they will think “I could write that article,” and they will write it.

So you'll have this whole new group of people in the middle, and their purpose—their purpose—is to prevent meaningful change.

Heather (25:00): No no no, that is their utility. That is not why they exist. They are taking advantage of an empty niche, and they will be adopted by the mainstream and the elite in order to serve the purpose of the elite.

Bret (25:15): Right, well let's just say the purpose of the niche is that, is to protect the elite from a reckoning in light of what they have done to planet Earth.

Heather (25:23): Yeah, this is reckoning insurance.

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Bret (25:24): It's reckoning insurance. But here's the other thing—there’s another dimension to this. There are a huge number of people in the audience who aren't going to write that article. They're not going to write any article. But they're in a bad position, because to the extent that for a year, you've been brow beating people for being on the wrong side of history, and then it turns out they were on the right side of history—

Heather (25:46): Closer to two.

Bret (25:47): Let’s just say, there are people who go back two years. But the point is if you're somebody who's been on the wrong side of this and you were sure you were on the right side, and you've been chastising people publicly, you've been shunning your friends and all, then the point is now you're in a very awkward position, which actually mirrors the position of the elites who want to stay in power.

You’ve got a bunch of people who will hunt for the best phrasing of this narrative so that they can be pulled up into the positions of power that will decide what will be done and what will be done is symbolic shit and nothing more.

You've got an audience in search of an excuse, which is to say “yes, the public health authorities did fail us, but those other people weren't right.”

And you've got the elites, and their point is “look, do anything so long as it doesn't take us out of our positions of power.”

That confluence of those three is going to result in a scramble that you're not going to see coming. It's going to result in the promise of reform, and there will be no reform. If you don't know what I’m talking about, I would suggest you go watch the excellent film The Big Short.

It's a beautiful and heartbreaking film and pay very close attention to the end. This is coming. We could get in the road. We could prevent this. But we have to be very careful, because the temptation to embrace these people who have been outside of the fray and are now going to rush in, and they're going to shout at the right people, and they're going to shout at the wrong people, and they're going to seem like they're somehow more moderate. But it's nonsense. It's strategic. The people that you should be talking to are people who took a risk and said what needed to be said even when it was almost impossible to do so.

Heather (27:34): And generated predictions based on an actual understanding of the situation, by deriving meaning from what we could see from first principles as much as possible.

I think, frankly, that much of what I’m wrestling with at the moment is a sadness that verges into rage. I’ve just got this deep disappointment with a lot of people whom I thought were honorable and brave and insightful and full of wisdom.

This has gone on long enough. So many people have been unwilling or incapable—and it is often hard to determine which it is—to actually investigate the evidence in front of them, and generate a claim or an opinion that runs in any way counter to the mainstream. Until like, yesterday, right, or until the last couple of weeks, maybe the last month.

It was just about a year ago when we saw the lab leak crumble in exactly this way. This is just about a year out from the lab leak narrative crumbling this way, and suddenly there were a lot of people going “yeah but I was saying so, I was saying so!” Now, that’s just this dull roar. Some people—Fauci and Baric and all and Daszak—are still denying it. But you can say that now without risking getting kicked off YouTube, for instance. But still you can’t talk about all the rest of the things—we’re still at risk, we’re still demonetized.

The people whom I thought of as honorable and brave and insightful and full of wisdom, who have said nothing that counters the mainstream narrative, until like yesterday or not even yet, are going to somehow contort themselves into positions that make them appear to have been carefully thinking it through all along. What has been revealed is that the white-coated scientism thing has confused most people, people who actually don't understand what science. Most people who actually have never thought of themselves as scientists, or done science, or engaged with people really truthfully and honestly with the people who are doing science, really have no idea. They really feel like they have no ability to assess the claims, and so we have a whole lot of people who have been claiming to assess the claims who are actually doing no such thing.

So now the narrative is crumbling, and they're going to jump up on top of that smoldering pile and say, "Aha, yes! Here I am, here I am!" And I wonder, what even are you standing on? They're still going to be unable to assess the claims that they're either now saying “yes they’re true” or “no they aren't”, because they've revealed throughout this that—again—they’re either unwilling or incapable of doing so.

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Bret (30:38): Well, we're going to have to do a better job of sorting, because there are going to be various different categories of people.

Heather: We need a hat.

Bret: I would say that there are certain heuristics. It is now going to become profitable to find that middle ground position. So anybody who adopts it now, it’s not clear why they're adopting it. If you get slightly ahead of the narrative now, but it ends up being a huge win, then the point is okay, well what is that? I think that was you promoting yourself. I don't think that was you actually figuring it out.

Heather (31:17): On the other hand, the scales will fall from people's eyes more and more rapidly.

Bret (31:20): Right, right. And so, it's a very different realm, but I adopted a policy for people who came to me—this happened somewhat regularly—people who came to me after the Evergreen thing and apologized.

They said, “you know what? I gotta tell you, I did not know what was going on. I called it backwards, and I’m so embarrassed.”

And I would say, “You know what? You don't owe me an apology, and here's why: When you figured it out, you did the right thing. Anybody who does the right thing upon discovering what it actually is: we're square.” I think we need to adopt this policy generally.

Heather (32:02): But the right thing includes not pretending that you always felt this way, or that you were really on this side and you’re like “I’m gonna dig up something that I said or wrote or tweeted once six months ago in a sea of things.” No. That's not the right thing. That's cheating, and you know it. You know it.

Bret (32:22 - 34:03): Right. So, you've got: A. Being honest about the fact that you've changed your position is fundamental. Doing the right thing—and the right thing does not mean just wagging your finger at the people who screwed this up so badly, it means not wagging your finger at the people who got it right.

Heather (34:04): Yes, that's also part of the right thing

Bret (34:05): That is 100% fundamental.

Transcript skips forward several minutes.

Bret (40:26): I have watched these people crash a planet I have become very fond of. And, I have watched utter indifference to the suffering of human beings, a willingness to keep useful medicines away from people who desperately need them, even though that resulted in people's deaths, and that means there are families grieving who didn't need to. The keeping useful medicines away is particularly galling—

Heather (40:56): The destruction of children.

Bret (40:59): The destruction of children, the indifference, the feigned inability to understand the developmental impact of shielding the face with a mask that is not especially effective to protect them from a disease that isn't especially dangerous—

Heather (41:15): I know you're on a roll here, but can I just show this? This was in Nextdoor yesterday or today for our region of Portland: “School parents!! Today the Oregon Health Authority held a public comment hearing on making mask mandates permanent. There were over 335 people on the call and 125+ people spoke and it lasted for over six hours. Not one person spoke for the rule. OHA heard the plea, now it's time for your school boards to hear it. Start emailing your schools to demand that they make masking a choice for parents and stop dehumanizing our children.”

To which one of the responses was: "Keith, wearing a mask dehumanizes a child about as much as them wearing socks or eating a burrito.”

Bret (42:11): I get his point with respect to the socks but a burrito?

Heather (42:15): it's not even f***ing funny, man.

Bret: I’m sorry.

Heather: No, I’m sorry, but it's not funny. These people are doing so much damage to children. We spend a lot of time talking about childhood in our book, in A Hunter-Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century, and we've done it a lot on the show too. But how you could be an adult on this planet and actually really believe that covering a child's face for most of their waking hours in school—which is, given how bad school is now, mostly about social interactions and not about learning anyway—that that could not be having an effect, that cannot be dehumanizing children, how…either this guy is a troll and does not believe this, which I hope, but given the back and forth that then ensues I don't think so. People actually believe this. People actually believe that children having been masked in some places for a year and a half, an academic year and a half, is fine. It's fine.

Bret (43:27): Right. It's incredibly not fine. The question is: okay, it's happened. A huge amount of damage has been done to a generation of children. It won't be undone. There may be things that we can do to reduce the damage but it won't be undone. It's a permanent fact of the way this was approached. On a future podcast I’d like to talk about what actually happened, and why. I think we can infer a great deal about what the pandemic actually was. Of course it was a pandemic there is a pathogen. But it was something else too—

Heather (44:04): There is a pathogen. That doesn't mean there was a pandemic.

Bret (44:09): Well, I don't know.

Heather (44:10): I’m not saying there wasn't a pandemic. But “there is a pathogen therefore there was a pandemic” is not a logical necessity.

Bret (44:19): What I have said is that we had a wave of tyranny riding on COVID, that it used COVID to do other things. The other things are something that we need to become rapidly aware of, because the fact is, this is the kind of excuse that can spring out of nowhere. It can spring out of a lab in some place that you don't know anything about, and suddenly you're dealing with a global phenomenon whether you like it or not.

Heather (44:42): Far less likely to spring out of a cave.

Bret (44:45): Right. They pulled that one over on us. They claimed, and many people believed, that actually this sort of thing was ready to happen any day of the week.

As I argued in my UnHerd piece earlier in the year, actually that's not right. It's much harder for something to leap out of a cave than you think. And this bull**** that people like Daszak like to say about, “oh, the expansion of the human population is putting humans in contact with wildlife more and more…”—that sounds really logical; it's just bull****.

It's bull**** for simple, easy to understand, ecological reasons. No, this wasn't threatening to happen any day of the week. They brought forth the Golem, and then required us to bend to their will in order to address it.

Heather (45:35): And also? He's not an idiot, and he has training as a zoologist, so he knows d*** well it's not true.

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Bret (45:42): Right….But I want to go back to the question about vengeance[1]. Okay so we have a built-in—

Heather (45:52): Because you're a better person than I am in this regard. You can tell that I am having a hard time.

Bret (45:57): Yep, but not a better person. That's not what's going on.

Heather (46:01): You are. The language I was using with you earlier, is that you are better able to find…this is weird language for us but, you're better able to find your Christian self. You're better able to find your forgiveness at the moment.

Bret (46:15): Okay, but let's take the “Christian self” way of describing it: I would argue that the Christian thing, the thing you're referring to, is actually a kind of Enlightenment. It is not inherently Christian. But the place that it is inscribed for the European-derived West is in those particular narratives.

You go from little, tiny bands of closely related people who are aligned by genes, and you start benefiting from collaborating with people who are less and less related to you, and it's actually so much better, that you need new stories to explain why you're doing it, and why you're ignoring relatedness. So you're sort of moving in this direction, and it's compensating for two things—

Heather (47:06): Keeping less and less close track of whether or not you're closely related and…whether or not you raised his barn last week, or was that someone else's barn—

Bret (47:16): Right. It becomes indirect. The point is: I’m going to participate in this thing that raises barns when they need to be raised, and I’m not going to hold back.

Anyway: if we can put a final piece on your claim of better-ness. I do believe that in this particular regard only, I’m actually benefiting from a kind of enlightenment that has to do with just staring at that game theory over and over again, and then it actually changes how you feel.

Once you realize that panic is no good, you can learn not to do it. This is that same thing. What I will argue is that vengeance—the urge to see those people suffer—you will immediately have less of a taste for it when you realize where you heard it last.

Heather (48:06): But the urge to see people suffer is different from not feeling forgiving. And it’s different from something that I have explicitly called for here before, which is a reckoning, in which all of those people actually face themselves in the mirror.

[looks directly into the camera:] Look at yourself, and be honest. And frankly, at the point that you proclaimed to all of the rest of us that you were always this, that, or the other—it will be clear if you have actually been honest with yourself or not. All too often there has been no reckoning.

Bret (48:45): Right, but here's the question. I agree with you the ideal thing is for people to go be honest with themselves, because then what comes out of it is not a defensive reaction in which they forget what they believe, it's an upgrade. If they say “Ah, where did I go wrong? I don't want to do that again. So what was I really sure of, and how did I end up sure of it? And where was my first indication that I had it wrong? Where's the first signpost I missed?”

Heather (49:13): Because if they don't do that, and we do come out of this now, and the narrative collapses, and this northern hemisphere summer actually feels like the summer of 2019, what happens in three years when the next whatever it is happens? These people will not have learned. And it will be worse, and faster.

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Bret (49:31): Not only “these people will not have learned”—the people that we actually know and interact with—but the elites who did this cynically, those people will still be in a position…

Let’s take a parallel example. The financial collapse of 2008 was about a housing bubble. But there's a game, which I have called the bubble game, which just requires you to declare some place for a bubble, so that you can get people in bubble frenzy. You can profit on the way up, and leave them with the thing when it blows up.

Dealing with the housing bubble by focusing on housing is a mistake. You need to focus on the culture of profiting through bubbles. That's the thing to focus on.

So in this case, we had a particular pandemic, and what we need is a general recognition that this was a massive exercise in rent seeking. We have just all been dragged along, kicking and screaming, in a massive exercise of rent seeking that actually transferred a huge amount of well-being.

Recognizing what that was, and not leaving those people in a position to do it again, is fundamental.

But here's what we need to figure out. How should you feel about the prime movers? I’m not in a forgiving mood, and I don't think that the ultimate prime movers were actually engaged in a noble activity that turned out to be in error. There are too many indications that that's not what happened. That said, personally, I don't feel any need for vengeance. What I feel a need for is a complete airing of what happened, and that such people, for example, Fauci, needs to never, ever again be in a position of power over anything important. How do we get there?

Heather (51:33): What are the chances that there's going to be a complete airing?

Bret: Low.

Heather: That's not going to happen. That should happen.

Bret (51:43): People need to understand what the scramble that's coming is about. The point is the scramble. Whether or not we have anything like a complete airing is going to depend on whether or not the people in the middle, who are going to scold both sides, are allowed to get away with that move. That cynical move is going to make it impossible to get to the bottom of what happened. It's going to ensure that we have an outcome like the end of The Big Short reveals from the housing crisis.

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All I’m arguing is that we need to kind of up our game and we need to recognize—

Heather (52:13): Who “we”—all of us?

Bret (52:14): Those of us who are feeling like “okay, the narrative is finally collapsing and people are beginning to wake up in large numbers to things that we've been trying to tell them for a very long time.”

Heather (52:25): So up our game how, and to what end?

Bret (52:26): Whatever the mechanism is, we need people to understand that it is in their own interest to figure out what happened, and figure out what role they played in it, and get to the right side of it as quickly as possible. The rationalizing is what's going to do us in the next time. If we rationalize this time, it's going to cause it to happen again.

Heather (52:53): But that does require a reckoning, right? That does require looking at yourself and saying, “yeah actually, three months ago I was in a different place.”

Bret (53:00): Yeah but, in order to get people to do that, they need to know that there's a hug on the other side of it. That if you do that frightening exercise, that you can come back.

There are bad people, and the reason that we punish bad people is so that others will not do what they did, or that they won't do it again.

Truth and reconciliation is a process invented to take this situation and say “Look, if we play the game out, if we go after you and try to punish you for what you did, then you will resist, and you will probably win, and we'll never even find out what it was. We need to know what it was in order to prevent it from happening [again].

We will trade you something like amnesty for honesty. That's a good trade, believe it or not. We need to figure out what that looks like here, in order that we can get to the bottom of this, because the bottom of this is pretty, pretty ugly. We need to know what happened.

Heather (54:10): Well, I think you're talking about two different levels. I think the level at which I am most tormented at the moment is the people who are actually driving policy in any way, but the people who were helping facilitate the public messaging, through media and social media presence. Those people are capable of being very squidgy about what it is that they're claiming now, and then, and before, and in the future, a sort of weaseling out of things. It’s seeing into the very near future, seeing the weaseling, and the requests for hugs…

Well, I’m not f****ing hugging you [until you] stop being a weasel. You need to stop being a weasel first.

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I’m not hugging you until you stop being a weasel.

[1] We had a discussion of vengeance between ~34 – 40 minutes in the original livestream.

These two pieces—mine on outright fraud, Dr. Kim’s on more subtle pollution of the scientific literature—reflect problems in the state of science that far predate Covid. But then Covid arrived, and revealed all sorts of new issues.

The last two and a half years have been surprising, to put it mildly. A pandemic. Authoritarianism in places that we thought were fonts of democracy. Mass formation. People betraying their most cherished and foundational beliefs, while proudly proclaiming that they were, are, and shall forever remain the good guys. Others looking away ashamed, if they admit it to themselves, ashamed as the realization dawns on them that yes, they’ve been had, but worse than that? When they were at their most confused and compliant, they threw the courageous under the bus.

One thing that has become all too clear since early 2020 is that most smart and educated people have no experience with or understanding of science. By this I don’t mean that they don’t understand the Krebs cycle or thermodynamics, or that they have never run a PCR. The vast majority of us don’t, and haven’t. But grokking science sufficiently that you understand how claims are made and assessed, and can see where the loopholes exist, should be mandatory for anyone who thinks that they are smart and educated. And yet, while nobody at a fancy cocktail party would admit to being illiterate, people will proudly proclaim their innumeracy. There’s no comparable word for it, but the fancy party goers similarly reveal their failure to understand science when they make pronouncements like “Follow the Science!”

Here is a slight caricature of thinking I have heard in the past two years from people, intellectuals mostly, who believe themselves to be critical thinkers who bring a skeptical eye to all that they assess:

• Intellectual: I believe in the importance and value of the category of things called X.

• Entity: Hey! Here’s a new product that we like to call X. Try it. You’d be a fool not to.

• Intellectual: That’s the one for me! Anyone who doesn’t accept this newly branded X is clearly anti-X in all of its forms. My work here is done.

• Entity: So too is mine.

Specifically and most frequently, I have heard this formulation trotted out where X = Covid vaccines. It seems that as soon as this new product was called a vaccine, that’s all it took for a whole suite of intellectuals to say “welllll it’s quite obvious really, if you don’t take this vaccine, then you’re an anti-vaxxer.” Is it really so difficult to see that slapping a label on something doesn’t inherently make the label true? It’s just as absurd and anti-scientific to say “trust all treatments labeled X” as it is to insist that we “believe all women” (or black people or Latvians or democrats or whatever).

An intellectual who follows the authorities in all things scientific and medical may be unlikely to put up a yard sign that proclaims “In this house, we believe that science is real,” but only for snobbish reasons. They just know, in their heart of hearts, that science is real, and that they don’t need to put up a sign to prove it. And yet, in the houses of these intellectuals, they may think that they believe that science is real, but there’s nothing in their assessment of sciencish authorities that suggests that they have any idea what it means to think scientifically.

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I had occasion, this week, to reflect on a conversation that I had in 2017 with a smart young woman. This was a woman with no background in science, but plenty educated, a woman who was sensitive to the concerns of the social justice crowd, sufficiently that she felt it incumbent to argue that science was a patriarchal mess. This conversation took place in the immediate aftermath of the “google memo” penned by James Damore, in which Damore argued, correctly, that women have agency and are not identical to men. Women will, therefore (Damore’s argument continued) be likely to make decisions that are not identical to those that men make, and this might manifest in things like the highly skewed ratio of men to women among software engineers. This highly skewed ratio, he argued, is not inherently evidence of bigotry1. For this he was, of course, called a bigot. And so it goes2.

The conversation that I had with the young woman, however, did not, unlike the public discourse on the topic, go off the rails. She was curious about my take on women in science, having heard me talk about the evolution of sex and sex differences, and how the downstream effects manifest in various cultural contexts. She wanted to know if I thought that it didn’t matter that women were underrepresented in so many scientific domains. First, I explained that, in WEIRD countries in the early 21st century, the idea that women are broadly underrepresented in academic science and medicine is not true. It has been true in the past, of course. And women are still in the minority in engineering and math, for instance. But look to the fields with a focus on people or other organisms—e.g. medicine, veterinary science, organismal biology—and find a skew towards women. This fits, of course, with the research finding that, on average, men are more interested in things, while women are more interested in people3.

All of that aside, however, the young woman’s question weighed heavily on her: Do I think that representation in science matters? Shouldn’t science—and all fields—reflect the same demographic makeup as the population?

The point that I made to the young woman that got her attention was this:

Diversity among scientists does matter, but not for the reasons that you think.

Diversity in science does not matter because it will change what answers will be generated to existing scientific questions. The scientific process, employed correctly, should allow any appropriately skilled person to get the same answer to a given question as anyone else. Regardless of the demographics of the scientists doing the work, the result should be the same.

Where diversity does matter is in which questions get asked. Different people, with different life histories and demographics and interests, will ask different questions. Science generally doesn’t answer the questions that don’t get asked. Often, the most important questions have been missed at first, for they were thought obvious, or ignorant, or uninteresting.

In their 1938 book, The Evolution of Physics, co-authors Albert Einstein and Léopold Infeld wrote:

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.

Insight comes in many forms. The greater the diversity represented among those engaging in scientific thinking and research, the better. That doesn’t mean that it ought be a central goal. And it certainly doesn’t mean that people from different lineages or with different chromosomes are expected to come up with different answers to the same scientific questions. But insight might well vary with background. And all good scientific endeavours ought prize insight.

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution.

Let’s not jump right to the solutions—the methods, the tools, the tech—before we fully understand the landscape that we are in. Let’s allow everyone in on the conversation and the process who wants in. But let us question mightily those who claim the right to entry based on immutable qualities rather than on the quality of their thinking, or those who #FollowTheScientism and think that being in lockstep is somehow compatible with scientific inquiry. And let’s stop at the door those who would merely destroy or critique. Tearing things down is easy. Building lasting structures that both work and enhance human flourishing—that is a far harder task. We should stop giving so much of our attention to those who merely know how to divide and destroy, and consider instead the observations of those who are trying to create, discover, and build.

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The researcher, at a remote field site, the passage of time seeming more fluid the longer he is there, often has nobody watching over him, either. He needs to get the experiments done, the data entered, the analyses completed.

Science is hypothesis-driven. We do not decide on truth, or assign it. We test ideas, and in so doing, work to discover what is true. The scientific method is extraordinarily powerful, but inelegant. While we can use it to approach an ever greater approximation of the truth, we can never be assured of getting there, nor of knowing for sure if we have arrived.

Science is hypothesis-driven, but science is also done by people, who are, remember, only human.

Science relies on the honor and trustiworthness of its practitioners. For all of its ability to correct error, science cannot solve the problem of human vanity and frailty. Alone in the lab, at the computer, or in the field—who is to say whether you actually did the work that you said you did? Reality can out you—is the work that you did replicable? But the incentive structure of modern science rarely leaves time for replication studies, so you might get away with it, if nobody bothers to check. If you are the sort of person who is easily swayed by social accolades or money, who values those things over discovery and truth, you may find yourself betraying scientific ideals. Of this, we have far too many modern examples.

“Science is hypothesis-driven,” affirms Raymond Tesi, MD, the CEO of the biotech firm INMune Bio. Tesi was prompted to point out the obvious in response to the revelation that some Alzheimer’s research from 20061 was almost certainly fraudulent. The research in question claims that a specific protein is responsible for memory loss, but the data, it seems, were likely fabricated. The “molecule-as-culprit” model of Alzheimer’s would appear to be an honest error, at best. It’s 16 years later now, and that finding first spurred fantastic publicity and enthusiasm, from which followed massive funding from granting agencies. The public is now in for a great disappointment, many more people have succumbed to Alzheimer’s, and both that money and the efforts of many scientists who were compelled by the fraudulent research could have been far better spent on more worthy scientific endeavors.

More cryptic a problem, but no less important, is that focusing on a molecule as the enemy of human memory allowed for all of the usual reductionist science machinery to whirr into gear. The reductionist approach to understanding the universe loves a good molecule-as-culprit story. A molecule can likely be stopped in its tracks, if only the right combination of skill, money, and perseverance is thrown at the R&D project. Recognizing instead that there are many contexts in which that molecule exists—physiological, developmental, environmental—and that trade-offs are inescapable—well, these are messy, inconvenient considerations, so let’s not think about them, shall we?

The Department of Justice is now investigating the Alzheimer’s story, but how many more cases like this are still invisible to the public, indeed to all of science? Invisible to all except for the perpetrators of fraud, that is.

The practice of science, once understood to be messy but extraordinarily powerful, the best route we have to revealing what is true in the universe, has become instead a social game, one in which the rewards are more about status and wealth than they are about insight. Increasingly, the game has been gamed.

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In another current case of scientific misconduct, a “star marine ecologist” named Danielle Dixson is being investigated. Much of her foundational work on the effects of ocean acidification on fish behavior were found to be suspect at best, and almost certainly fabricated. Her research found, among other things, that fish living in acidified waters were more likely to navigate towards chemicals emitted by their predators2. Fish behavior thus altered would, of course, have cascading effects on the entire ecosystem in which they live. Problem is, attempts to replicate the work have failed3, and there are many red flags in the data that suggest that at least much of it was fabricated.

This, like the fraudulent Alzheimer’s research, is bad for everyone and everything, except for the researchers on the rise.

Everything in this case includes our beautiful blue planet, as people prone to doubt our planetary environmental catastrophe will use this fabrication of data as evidence that one would need to fabricate data in order to find evidence of environmental devastation. (One does not.)

Everything also includes public assessment of and trust in scientists and the scientific process. When “science” replaces “god” in people’s understanding of the universe, many among the non-scientists will simply accept anything that arrives under the banner of science, and some among the so-called scientists will use it as a place to hide. You can trust me, I am the voice of science4.

And, in the case of this alleged “star marine ecologist,” the fraud being bad for everyone includes women. This is not because the fraud is a woman. Women, remember, are human—just as capable of fraud (if likely to engage in it somewhat differently) as men. No, the reason that this particular case of fraud is bad for women is that the disgraced researcher’s lawyer is using the researcher’s womanhood as a shield, calling her a “brilliant, hard-working female scientist.” Female has no place here. It’s irrelevant. Claims have been made that the very fact of her work being checked—and found seriously wanting—is tantamount to bullying, because we all know that female scientists get bullied by male scientists, right? This is like a bad magic act—whatever you do, don’t look at the fake science—and is beyond egregious.

If Dixson were actually brilliant and hard-working, and not engaging in scientific fraud, this would not be happening to her. It has nothing to do with her being a woman.

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How shall we identify who is doing worthy science? Not with quotas and authoritarian-box-ticking, this much is certain. I and others have said much about this, but here is an observation from physicist David Deutsch:

A couple of years ago I spoke to a member of the panel that awarded me my first research grant on quantum computers (1985). He said it was a close-run thing. I asked if I'd have got it under today's criteria. He said: no chance; basically I could tick none of the boxes.

Deutsch continues: “committees are inherently biased against novel research directions.”

With the rise of committees who make funding decisions, especially committees full of people who are more interested in your immutable characteristics than in your ideas, we have the end of innovation. Here we have the end of science.

Those engaged in the social and financial gamification of science will say,

Trust me, but under no circumstances look at the man behind the curtain.

Believe me, and if you don’t like what I’m saying, either you’ve misunderstood, or maybe I wasn’t being clear in my language, but seriously, we all know that I’m good and honorable and valuable, and isn’t that worth something?

So what if I made up some data?

Lied about doing science?

Betrayed my own stated morals and values?

Once a person has attained a level of success, has had their work acknowledged as good and honorable and valuable, the assumption becomes, ever more with each passing accolade and publication, that their work is now and shall forever be good and honorable and valuable. This is part of what makes it easier to maintain a position than to break into a field. Part of why those with inherited wealth and access to social opportunities have an easier time being successful, than those who are creating their success from scratch. It is one of the many tragic errors of pseudo-scientific “social Darwinism5,” the idea that because you are successful, you deserve to be successful.

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Self-deception is a powerful force. As evolutionary biologist Bob Trivers has written about extensively (including here6, and here7; I recommend both), if you are engaged in deception, it is far easier to be good at the job if you fool yourself first.

Said the now disgraced marine ecologist in a May 2021 article in Science, “The data was collected with integrity. I mean, I preach that to my students.”

Said the even more fully disgraced spider biologist, Jonathan Pruitt, as allegations and then evidence of his fraudulent research came to light at breakneck speed in January 2020, "Each morning when I woke up, there was a different anonymous email taking issue with a different dataset and a different paper.…Do they think I was just copying and pasting a spreadsheet? I don't think I would do that."

As it turns out, the evidence is now overwhelming that this is exactly what Pruitt did—not once, not twice, but consistently. He has left academia, including a prestigious research chair; many of his papers have been retracted; and his PhD thesis has been withdrawn. His lies and self-absorption hardly affected only himself, though—all of his former collaborators are now under a cloud of suspicion, which affects their own careers, although none of them, so far as I am aware, are guity of or even accused of scientific fraud8.

If we assume that people who go into science are likely to have at least average intelligence and ability to get things done, it follows that some of these people—whom I am avoiding calling “scientists,” for many of them do not deserve the title—will also have at least average ability to cover their own tracks, even from themselves. Preaching the careful collection of data to your students when you yourself are engaged in data fraud, being astonished at the possibility that you would fabricate data in exactly the way that you have actually engaged in—these are more than embarrassing anecdotes, they are telling. Here, once again, is the ascent of social reality over actual reality9. If I believe it, and if I can compel you of my belief, than surely that is good enough? Surely what is actually true about the universe matters less than my reputation in it?

The catch, of course, is that people tend to believe their own press. If I understand my work to be good and honorable and valuable, and some in my audience are telling me that it is not, they must be wrong. But the future does not always look like the past, and the quality of past work is no guarantee of the future. Furthermore, if you succumbed to some devilish temptation, and cheated, and nobody caught you, the whole edifice is a sham. It’s Potemkin science, facilitated by a Potemkin reputation.

“Believe me, because others have believed me in the past” is not a compelling argument. Nor is “Take me seriously, for I am a serious person.”

Instead, what this feels like, increasingly, is the Wizard of Oz. Under no circumstances should you look behind the curtain. The making of this modern scientific edifice—of Big Science, if you will—is worse yet than the making of sausages, or the law. Central to its very being is that science contains the ability to self-correct. If error discovery and correction is a primary goal of science, but Big Science is more interested in profits and reputations, then it seems that science and Big Science have parted ways. Recent cases of fraud are but the tip of a very large iceberg.

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Faith is an uninvestigated acceptance of that which is handed down by an authority.

Cynicism is an uninvestigated rejection of that which is handed down by an authority.

Skepticism is an openness to the possibility that the authority might be right, and they might be wrong.

During Covid, many people simply trusted the authorities from the beginning—the NIH and the CDC, for instance. Even as the track record of said authorities got worse and worse, the Covid faithful stuck to their guns. If Fauci said that this was a naturally occurring virus, or if Walensky said the vaccines would protect against infection and transmission, or if a trusted doctor said that early treatment of the disease was impossible with preexisting drugs, the Covid faithful believed it. That’s what it is to take something on faith: you find your authority, and you let them do your thinking for you. Countervailing evidence does not dissuade the faithful.

Also during Covid, some people simply distrusted the authorities from the beginning. While the NIH and the CDC had variable success in the beginning, the Covid cynical never wavered: nothing the authorities said could be true. That’s what it is to be cynical: you identify the authorities, and you believe nothing that they say, regardless of whether their track record improves. Countervailing evidence does not dissuade the cynical.

Finally, during Covid, some people had the expectation that the authorities were trying to do right by us, but that errors occur, and that all conclusions brought forth by them warranted investigation. Other people had the expectation that the authorities were not trying to do right by us, but that we still might get good health policy from them, or reliable data. Over time, many of the Covid skeptics came to have less trust in and respect for the authorities who were making policy; the track record of the authorities was remarkably consistent, in the wrong direction. But the Covid skeptical remain open to new hypotheses, new interpretations, and new conclusions. Countervailing evidence persuades the skeptical.

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I have, during Covid, sometimes been called a contrarian, even by friends. It has been invoked by way of defending me, even, as if to be a contrarian were a cute personality quirk, or even a positive one. But when I map “contrarian” on to the framework above—cynic, skeptic, or faithful—to be a contrarian is clearly to be in the domain of the cynic. A contrarian simply disagrees. A contrarian may well avoid making eye contact with any evidence that doesn’t suit them, so as to be assured that their “everything the authorities say is wrong” worldview can persist.

I am not a contrarian (and yes, I framed the statement that way on purpose). I am a scientist. Scientists should be neither faithful nor cynical. Scientists are skeptics. Scientists do not accept what authorities say simply because the authorities have said it. Scientists do not accept what anyone says simply because a particular person or institution has said it. Some scientists question absolutely everything that comes their way, but most choose their issues somewhat carefully. Their battles, if you will.

During Covid, many people who would normally approach the world with skepticism, with a scientific eye, chose the path of faith instead. At one level, that is acceptable. If you feel that you do not know enough to assess what is being said by the authorities—especially if you have a long-standing, personal relationship with, for instance, a doctor whom you trust—perhaps you have long-since decided that, on medical issues, you trust your doctor. You do not do your own research.

But if you have done this, you should recognize that actively choosing not to do your own research puts you in the territory of the faithful (or the cynical). Add to this that it has largely been the Covid faithful who have attacked the Covid skeptics—the ones who have been trying to do their own research. Among the Covid faithful who have themselves been skeptics in other areas of their lives, the attack has been particularly ironic. The Covid faithful often attack the Covid skeptics for not following the science.

Science is not a result to be followed. Science is a process to be undertaken, by which—over time, in fits and starts, with no promise of a linear progression—a better fit with reality is arrived at. When advised to #FollowTheScience during Covid, we have often been handed a consensus position that was arrived at out of view of the public, generally with no sharing of process or data, and therefore with no ability to vet the results.

Rapid consensus on complex issues like vaccine safety and efficacy is inherently suspect. Consensus is not arrived at so quickly, or so completely. Coercion is. Coercion is anti-scientific. So is faith. If you have arrived at your conclusions by trusting an authority, acknowledge the role that faith has played in your understanding of where we are, and stop attacking the skeptical.

Those of us who kept our scientific heads about us during this time have been vilified. Some of those vilifying us never made any claims to being scientists. Others vilifying us are themselves credentialed and recognized as scientists, and yet they stand strong among the ranks of the Covid faithful. I would encourage the scientists and doctors among the Covid faithful to consider that, having adopted this new faith, you may well be running counter to everything that you believe that you stand for.

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1. A problem is recognized.

2. One of many possible solutions is advanced.

3. Those who resist said solution are understood to be denying that the problem exists.

Two modern instantiations of this phenomenon surround Covid and racism.

Covid

1. Problem: Covid is a real threat to human health and well-being.

2. Proposed Solution: Newly developed mRNA vaccines are the way forward to address the Covid pandemic.

3. Conclusion: If you are skeptical of the safety or efficacy of the mRNA vaccines, you are denying that Covid is a real threat to human health.

The more sane and accurate interpretation is that mandating a single, newly developed and experimental solution for a complex problem will cause many—including in the scientific and medical communities—to resist that solution, without the resistors ever denying that Covid is a real and abiding threat.

I experienced this first-hand in late May of 2021, when I took my then 15-year-old son to the pediatrician, to obtain the physical exam required by his Summer camp. Earlier the same month, the FDA had authorized Pfizer’s mRNA Covid vaccines for use in 12 – 15 year olds. Boys and young men were already suspected to be at higher risk for myocarditis from these vaccines (a fact that has since been documented2), and children and young people of both sexes were then and are still widely recognized to be at low risk from Covid3. Covid is a strongly age-stratified disease: the older you are, the greater your risk. For young people with no comorbidities, and especially for young men, the risks from the vaccine seemed to me—and to many others4—to outweigh the benefits.

My son’s pediatrician saw it differently. He concluded—as per point 3, above—that by refusing to have my son vaccinated against Covid, I was revealing my belief that Covid was not real or, if real, not particularly dangerous. This, I should not have to say, was a preposterous and anti-scientific conclusion for him to come to. We have not returned to his office.

Racism

1. Problem: Racism is not merely an historical problem, but continues to negatively affect the lives of people of color.

2. Proposed Solution: The Black Lives Matter movement is the way forward to address enduring racism.

3. Conclusion: If you are skeptical of the wisdom or efficacy of BLM, its policies, or its actions, you are denying that racism is a real threat to human health and well-being5.

The more sane and accurate interpretation is that BLM is an activist group with a very particular take, including being explicitly anti-family6, and which is, in the same vein as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion offices and officers, dedicated to the belief that people of color are perpetual victims, and white people are perpetual aggressors (and racists). Black Lives Matter demands homogeneity in thought, I posit, and is divisive by its very nature.

I saw the use of this rhetorical tactic regarding BLM for the first time in 2016, while still a professor at The Evergreen State College in Washington state. On April 19 of that year, flyers were found posted a few places around campus which raised questions about the degree to which Black Lives Matter truly values all black lives. The flyers showed, for instance, a photograph of a black man in a military/police uniform7, and asked, “tell me again whose life mattered?” In response, Evergreen staff promptly “removed the flyers and scanned buildings for additional flyers,” the “Bias Incident Response Team…concluded that the content of the flyers was biased…against people of color,” and the college asked for help identifying who was responsible for posting the flyers. Furthermore, in a document posted later that month, Evergreen’s “Bias Incident Response Team” argued the following: “Messages that are one-dimensional, presented as propaganda, and question the legitimacy of a social movement advocating for social justice for black people in the United States, convey bias against people of color.”

The Bias Incident Response Team’s response continues, “These flyers convey a message of opposition toward the Black Lives Matter movement….Black Lives Matter is a movement drawing attention to racism and violence toward a community of people that has historically been oppressed, marginalized, and discriminated against throughout U.S. history. Messages such as the one on these flyers diminish the disparities experienced by people of color.”8

In other words: If you disagree with our solution to the problem, you are not only denying the existence of the problem, you are actually making it worse.

What to call this rhetorical maneuver?

The Fallacy of Equal Knowledge

The wise and insightful Dr. Ilana Redstone, a sociologist whom I recently had the good fortune to meet for the second time, has coined the term, “the fallacy of equal knowledge.” This is also the name of an essay she published in City Journal in January of this year. Her description of the problem is not a precise match for mine, but it is so close, and she has well named it, such that I think that slightly forcing my formulation into hers makes sense. The fallacy of equal knowledge is the often “unstated assumption that if we all had the same information, we’d all agree.”

Here is an extended quotation from her excellent piece:

The difficulty of talking across political divides owes much to this assumption. I saw a clear example of it in the fall of 2020, while teaching a course in social problems. It was the semester following a summer of nationwide protests on the issue of race and policing. For weeks, my students and I had been discussing social ills from various perspectives, gradually building up trust. At one point, we found ourselves talking about law enforcement.

Given the timing of the course and the events of recent months, the death of George Floyd was on many people’s minds. Over the course of our discussion, I asked the class if they thought a reasonable person could view his killing solely through the lens of bad policing, not race. The poll I conducted suggested that about 60 percent said yes, they thought that this was possible.

I was surprised by their openness to this idea. But as the discussion unfolded, it became clear that several people in that group of 60 percent had something else in mind. Many assumed that an otherwise reasonable person could only hold this view if they didn’t yet understand that the reality of racism made it important—even necessary—to see Floyd’s death through a racial lens. This point is controversial, even within the black community, but the students assumed that, once informed, such a person would change his mind.

I ran the poll again. This time, I asked: could a reasonable person, with the same information you have, perceive the killing of George Floyd solely through the lens of bad policing and be unsure about whether it should also be seen through the lens of race? This time, the share of students answering yes dropped to 30 percent.

I encourage you, my audience, to read Dr. Redstone’s essay in its entirety9, and to think about where, in your own lives, you may be falling prey to the fallacy of equal knowledge, and to being overly certain that, on one topic or another, yours is the only viable position. As Redstone argues later in the same piece, “ignorance” is an explanation too often offered for differing views on topics as diverse as affirmative action, why we are seeing a rise in children identifying as trans, and Covid vaccine mandates. Sometimes people are simply ignorant. Often, however, that conclusion is just an easy out, and reflects a failure to actually engage the issues.

On some topics, there is only one viable solution. But especially when a simple solution is presented early in discussion of a complex topic, and is presented with certainty and authority—it is quite likely that the simple and absolute solution is not the best one.

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Find more of Ilana Redstone’s written work here, learn about her consulting here, and follow her on twitter here.

What If We’re Wrong was invited by Areo for their free speech extravaganza last Spring. Discussions about free speech often leave me unimpressed, as, wearing my scientist hat, I have always thought that our inability to know what is true is one of the most fundamental issues. Yet in the moment—the here and now, which is inherently peopled by those who lack perspective and humility, who are certain that they are right, and in possession of complete and unwavering truth—this fact is often ignored, or even mocked.

We live in the era of big-S Science. Big-S Science is funded by powerful organizations—both public and private—and used for political ends by different powerful organizations—both public and private. Big-S Science is often conclusion-driven, rather than hypothesis-driven. Big-S Science has an interest in having its conclusions simply accepted, its policies complied with, its inner workings simultaneously ignored and trusted by an unwitting populace. Big-S Science would really rather that the citizenry not be capable of assessing any of its claims.

Luckily for Big-S Science, many Westerners, at any rate, seem to have abdicated responsibility for doing any scientific thinking for ourselves. It is almost a point of honor among many of the erudite class, the coastal elites, the liberal intelligentsia, that they can’t really do math.

Nobody admits proudly to being illiterate, but innumerate? Isn’t that cute. Even Barbie says that math is hard! And really aren’t we all innumerate, kind of? Well no. We’re not. Only a tiny fraction of people on Earth does such advanced math that the rest of us can’t keep up, but basic numeracy should be an expectation of being an adult. So, too, should basic scientific literacy (for lack of a more elegant term) be an expectation of being an adult.

Children are born curious, and by the time they can string a few words together, are asking about the meaning of all manner of things. Not only do they ask, but they observe, and they try (and they try again), and they experiment. It is not the lack of lab coats and glassware that renders most of them non-scientists by the time they reach the end of high school. Rather, it is active, persistent training in not asking unexpected questions, not making careful and repeated observations, and not questioning accepted dogma, which makes most young people into quiescent, meek young adults—who become quiescent and meek middle-aged and old adults—who accept what authorities say.

This, I should not have to spell out, is the antithesis of science. Compliance is anti-scientific. Yet authorities have managed to convince a whole population that compliance with authorities is scientific, and that #FollowTheScience is somehow a scientific final word on the situation, whatever it may be. But the data and analysis being “followed” are so often hidden and, oopsie, also turn out to be changing all the time. We can’t “fact check” the claims made by #FollowTheScience authoritarians, either, because we are being denied access to the actual data in most cases, or the claims are based on such vague arm-waving that we can’t even know what to try to assess and falsify, because what is being claimed anyway?

What, indeed, is the head of the CDC talking about1 when she suggests that she was excited “when the CNN feed came…that [the vaccine] was 95% effective”? Was the CDC getting its scientific understanding of a global pandemic and how best to address it from…CNN? Much as fact checkers aren’t scientists, neither is CNN staffed by scientists. Nor is CNN the arbiter of scientific truth.

Wolensky continues: “So many of us wanted [the vaccine] to be helpful. So many of us wanted to say that this was our ticket out, now we’re done.” An emotional desire—for a magic bullet that allows a way out of a pandemic—in no way resembles scientific evidence. This has been the nature of our authorities for the last two years. Wolensky further claims that “nobody said…what if [the vaccine is] not as potent against the next variant,” but basic evolutionary thinking predicts that as a pathogen evolves, the vaccine that targets the original form will become less effective. If the head of the CDC reports that “nobody” voiced such a basic biological principle, whose hands are we in?  People making claims like these should never have authority over anything that matters, ever again.

Neither a news organization, nor appeals to emotion, are arbiters of scientific truth. Rather, the scientific method, iterated over time, which results in increasing predictive power, is the arbiter of scientific truth. Science can’t be done by fiat, or consensus, or mandates, or violence. You can shut people down, to be sure, but that doesn’t make you right.

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Many orthodoxies sprang up in the Age of Covid: SARS-CoV2 has a purely zoonotic origin; the mRNA vaccines are safe and effective (a truism somehow gleaned after mere months of development and trials); and early treatment by any but the most expensive and newly generated drugs is surely a scam. Drugs with long safety records and promising clinical and research results in the early treatment of Covid—most notably Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin—were dismissed out of hand, sometimes taking down the reputations and careers of those staunch enough to insist: no, really, we could be saving lives, and opening the economy, but instead we’re playing footsie with pharma and pretending that the best thing to do if you get Covid is to go home and wait. Wait until you get better, or are so sick that you need to be admitted to the hospital, at which point it may be too late to help you.

The death and devastation directly attributable to these orthodoxies is unquantifiable. The many millions of people who adopted the orthodoxies, however, who piled on, taking comfort in being on the side of “science”—but who were actually merely on the side of the mob—at the very least those people need to answer to themselves, look themselves in the mirror, and ask: what have I done?

Some of us kept talking about what we could know, what we couldn’t know, and what we thought based on the evidence that we could see. For this we were pilloried, and mocked, and worse. We were engaging in scientific approaches to a question that proved not just remarkably complex, but in which substantial aspects of the story were being actively kept from us. Watch this2, and read this3, and tell me that big-S Science and perverse incentives didn’t create false scientific consensus, and drive demonstrably bad and dangerous policy, for the last two years. Substantial aspects of a story we need to know have been actively kept from all of us.

Would that we didn’t have a corrupt and captured system of higher education in which no, not just the humanities and social sciences are increasingly confused by the post-modernist inspired incursions by Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), but so too are the sciences. Worse than that, though, as I have spoken and written about elsewhere (e.g. at Oxford in 2019; in The Spectator World in 2021), science was already failing before the DEI revolution came along. It is an unfortunate fact that most people in “science” are actually largely trained to go along, to get on a conveyor belt and go through the motions and collect the goodies of academia—the degrees, the grants, the postdocs, the grants, the tenure track job, the grants, the accolades, the grants. Etcetera.

If you are inclined to “go along,” you don’t belong in science. If you are inclined to bark at people to #FollowTheScience, you don’t belong in science. If you are inclined to say things like “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science,” as Fauci did in June of 2021, you have revealed yourself as a petty tyrant—or, in his case, not petty at all, more’s the pity for all of us—and as the very antithesis of science.

Without further ado, then, here is this piece from May 2021, unaltered, although I would write it somewhat differently today. This is in part because I no longer see any evidence for most masks being an effective tool against this virus. More saliently, though, I might be even more direct now, because while at the time I was trying to speak just at the edge of what people could hear—to be at the edge of the Overton window, still viewable from those inside—as it turns out, I’m not sure that anyone who needed to hear it did, and we continue to need the message now more than ever.

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What If We’re Wrong

What if the Earth isn’t the centre of everything? What if the ancestors of humans once looked like monkeys, or were single-celled organisms? What if the continents move?

These questions were once beyond the pale. They were not to be discussed in polite society, were outside the frame of the Overton window. None of that made them untrue, however, or unimportant.

Every idea that we now understand to be true was first realized by a human mind, unknown to anyone else. Before that moment, nobody in our species had had the thought. Our lack of knowledge limited us. And yet before any human had the thought, it was nevertheless true. Some person first conceived the idea, thought on it for a while, honed it, shaped it, and then shared it. Maybe the first person they shared it with thought it was a terrific idea. More likely, they thought the originator was wrong, maybe engaged in crazy talk. For a while, the idea may have even been considered dangerous, worthy of contempt and scorn. And for a long time thereafter, that idea—one that, in retrospect, we understand to be fundamental—was at the very least considered outside the range of acceptable and accepted thought. It was heterodox.

Galileo might have had a few things to say about that.

Orthodoxy and heterodoxy—apparent opposites pulling against one another from across a gap that can seem impassable—in fact rely on and thrive with one another. Orthodoxy is effective at times of stasis, when what is to come looks very much like what came before, and when what we believe to be true is in fact true. Too much orthodoxy, though, and we become stale and stagnant. Heterodoxy injects new ideas into a system, and is necessary any time the world is changing, and the future has little chance of looking like the past. Too much heterodoxy, however, and we become frenzied and chaotic.

Regardless of what is most needed in the world at any given moment—regardless of whether the conditions call for more orthodoxy or more heterodoxy—there always needs to be an avenue for discussion. Both orthodox and heterodox ideas always need to be publicly discussable. Otherwise, whoever holds the most power when censorship begins—at the point at which people begin hiding their thoughts and conversations—will gain ever more power. The powerful will shape the governing orthodoxy—and it will always be an orthodoxy, even if its central ideas were heterodox just yesterday—and will crack down ever harder on those who dissent.

The argument, of course, is not that all instances of dissent are necessary, or valuable, or reasonable. Angry, deceitful and dangerous words, actions and regimes have emerged from dissent countless times throughout history. But dissent in and of itself is utterly necessary. Instances of ill-considered dissent are too often trotted out as proof that dissent itself is dangerous, but this is poor logic, and often obscures other motives.

It is naïve to imagine that—living as we do within the constraints of the moment—we can see into the future with such clarity that those who would decide what speech is and is not acceptable are in a good position to know what is actually true. Many of Galileo’s interlocutors did not know what was true, yet they certainly believed that they did. (Some of his interlocutors—like many of those who would tamp down dissent—were presumably not driven by belief, but merely by a wish to shore up their power.) Too many would make themselves judge, jury and executioner of certain concepts and conversations, while claiming to be the sole proprietors of truth. They are engaging in a grand narcissism: they imagine themselves as, for the first time in history, able to see everything. It is akin to declaring themselves God.

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What if SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab? What if there are long-term effects of mRNA vaccines? What if Ivermectin is a safe and effective prophylaxis against, and treatment for, COVID-19?

Unlike the questions that began this essay, the answers to these questions are not yet resolved. But the very posing of them has been considered—again—beyond the pale, unacceptable in polite company, outside the Overton window. Those of us who asked them, throughout 2020 and well into 2021, have been called conspiracy theorists, and worse. Our intentions have been questioned. We have been told to keep quiet. Some have self-censored, and others have been brought to heel by Big Tech. The powers that be at Google, for instance, had an official policy as of May 2021 which includes this line: “YouTube doesn’t allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts local health authorities’ or the World Health Organization’s (WHO) medical information about COVID-19.”

This policy fundamentally misunderstands science. Local health authorities and the WHO can be wrong, as can we all. Being wrong is no crime (although prevaricating to further your own agenda when lives are on the line is tantamount to one). Shutting down the voices of those who question your conclusions—while not criminal—is antithetical to science.

On Leap Day of 2020, in a tweet that remained up for months but has now been deleted, the US Surgeon General was dismissive of those who thought that masks were a useful tool in preventing the spread of COVID-19, chiding: “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” The US Surgeon General has since reversed course and we know that its line, as of Leap Day 2020, was based on politics rather than science. Our understanding of the subtleties of airborne vs. aerosol transmission may even cause a re-evaluation of mask policy in the near term—re-evaluating what we understand is to be expected, as new data come in.

What’s a thinking person to do?

Additionally, there has been clear evidence since Spring 2020 that outdoor transmission of Covid is incredibly rare, yet public policy has barely begun to catch up to this reality in Spring 2021. Meanwhile, those of us who have been masking indoors in public spaces longer than almost anyone else, but have not worn masks outdoors, have been glowered at, and sometimes yelled at, for being irresponsible. We are accused of not following the science, when in fact we are doing exactly what the actual science suggests.

When scientific thinking and a careful analysis of the scientific literature leads to a different conclusion than the declarations of the authorities, what path does #followthescience suggest? Science does not operate by authority, but #followthescience is being used as a bludgeon to silence people into compliance. Freedom of expression is required if science is to function. Those who are engaging in silencing are doing neither science, nor humanity, any favours.

YouTube’s official “COVID-19 medical misinformation policy” further prohibits any claims that Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19. This despite abundant evidence that Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19, including from countries where it was already in widespread prophylactic use against other pathogens.

If the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating COVID-19, suggested by many peer-reviewed scientific papers, is borne out, YouTube will be revealed to have been playing a very dangerous game indeed. How much health—individual and economic—will be sacrificed globally on this altar? It’s censorship in science’s clothing. Look closely, and you will find that this has little to do with science. A censor wearing a lab coat is still a censor, and censorship is fundamentally incompatible with science.

Furthermore, even if Ivermectin proves to be little help against COVID-19, the game being played by those who stand opposed to free expression is still dangerous. Policies like that of YouTube, which quash discussion and silence debate, pretend to be pro-science, but they are the opposite. This is a new orthodoxy stamping out heterodoxy, yet again.

We need freedom of expression because what we currently believe is true, just or moral may change. We might be wrong. In light of history, to imagine elsewise is the height of hubris.

We used to know this at a societal level. In fact, we used to teach this to our children.

I am reminded of a book that I had growing up, which I read to my own children when they were small. It was from a series called “Value Tales,” which told the stories of famous people so as to illustrate the particular values they personified. I had The Value of Determination, which was about Helen Keller, and The Value of Adventure, about Sacagawea, but the one that is pertinent to the present discussion is The Value of Believing in Yourself, about Louis Pasteur.

In this children’s book, first published in 1975, we are told that Louis Pasteur, in the days before he was renowned, would walk in the park, pondering the nature of the “invisible enemy … the Rabies germs,” in order to find a way to kill them.

But Pasteur’s idea was not compelling to his contemporaries. We are shown children pointing fingers at him and mocking him, and adults yelling at him that what he attempted was impossible. Pasteur soldiered on, though, and we are all the beneficiaries of that.

The bulk of the book takes us through Pasteur’s remarkable and humanity-changing creation of a rabies vaccine. From the vantage point of more than 130 years on, we know that he was successful. At the end of the book, we are returned to those children who mocked Pasteur when he was the only person who believed in what he was attempting to do. With a lack of self-awareness that is characteristic of children, we find them adoring Pasteur for his success. Pasteur cautions them that what kept him going was his belief in himself—even on those days and with those ideas that didn’t succeed. The lack of self-awareness that will be evidenced by adults today, as positions they once scorned or ignored become visible and viable, will no doubt be comparable.

For every Pasteur, there must be thousands of people who have had an idea that didn’t pan out, as well as countless others whose ideas were good, but never got traction. Science depends on the tenacity of the person with the new idea, even when others take pleasure in mocking it. And if science depends on individuals with tenacity, then society depends on all conversations being possible. The adults who mocked Pasteur before he was successful in creating a rabies vaccine were simultaneously small-minded and arrogant. On the basis that he lacked the appropriate credentials, many medical doctors of the time scorned Pasteur and his work. Pasteur’s contemporaries imagined that the current consensus was all there would ever be to know.

What if we’re not right, though, just as they were not? The scientific process, and having an ever more accurate and refined understanding of our world, both depend on the ability to present explanations for observed phenomena that turn out to be wrong. In the modern era—when the crowd is not just madding but has the capacity to be anonymous and thus avoid any repercussions—many adults are happy to play the schoolyard bully, taunting those whose ideas run even slightly counter to the accepted orthodoxy.

Science functions best when all hypotheses are on the table. Some will be easily dismissed. Others will prove recalcitrant to falsification, even if we eventually come to understand that they are not true. But what science needs, above all else, is the freedom to discuss the possibilities. Without that, there will be no new discoveries. What are today’s equivalents of the heliocentric model of the solar system, evolution by natural selection and plate tectonics? Nobody can be certain. And those who claim certainty on such matters should never have control of who gets to speak, or of what they say when they do.

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Link is to Ivermectin Part 3: The People Behind the Curtain, by Phil Harper. This is paywalled, but excruciatingly revealing of some of the lies that were behind the takedown of Ivermectin, including the “shadow author” mentioned in “A Letter to Andrew Hill.”

It was our first morning in Ecuador, ever. Bret and I, with our two boys, then aged 9 and 7, had flown in the evening before, and come straight to Maquipucuna, a giant reserve of mostly cloud forest that climbs high into the Andes. It is home to the elusive spectacled bear, which comes downslope to feast on avocados when they are ripe. We never did see any spectacled bears. Having woken up to crimson-rumped toucanets outside our rustic cabin, we had then seen impossibly beautiful tanagers as the sun rose. We were the only human visitors at the reserve. And now, on a hike not far from the cabin, Bret had come running back to find the rest of us. Gesturing silently, he beckoned us to follow. What had he found?

Cautiously, quietly, we followed him down the trail. He stopped, finger to lips, turned, and pointed up to an understory tree just off the trail. We saw…a sloth hanging near the terminal end of a branch that wasn’t too sturdy. A sloth! And wait…some thing else? Some things else…dark and menacing, slowly advancing on the sloth.

What am I seeing?

We stood there, transfixed, watching, as our eyes and brains began to resolve what we were seeing.

In the study of animal behavior, one of the most difficult things for many people is learning how to observe without interpreting what they are seeing. Even the language that we use to describe what we see is often overlaid with interpretation: Territoriality. Mating display. Anti-predator tactics.

Categories are useful, but also constraining. When walking into a system that is new to us, it can be more effective to be naïve to what others have thought, at least at first. If you are already certain of what the solution set of possibilities looks like, you lose some of what it is to be human. You lose awe. You lose serendipity and the ability to be surprised. And you lose access to truth, because the only way you will see what is true is if it is already a match for what you thought beforehand. This is a path that therefore cannot grow your understanding. It is, de facto, stagnation.

When I taught Animal Behavior, one of the things that I had my students do was conduct a complete piece of research from beginning to end. In summary, that meant the following (this is from one of my syllabi):

Collaborative Field Research Projects

You and one or more partners are going to do empirical field science, a project which you will imagine, research, design, implement, analyze, interpret, and present, from start to finish:

1.     Imagine: What are you interested in? Are you driven to study a particular organism (e.g., the pileated woodpecker)? Or a particular question (e.g., seasonal territoriality)? Figure it out, and pick a topic. Specifically—what is your hypothesis? What question are you trying to answer?

2.     Research: Now that you have a topic, what is known about it already? You will be producing a scientific paper at the end of this, which requires a “literature review” of the topic that you have done research on. Your library research will likely be ongoing as you discover new things about the system you are studying, but before you begin field work, you should be able to write an outline of the Introduction section (barring unforeseen changes in your topic as you embark on field work).

3.     Design: Now that you know a fair bit about what has already been done on your topic, hone your hypotheses. Come up with as many alternative hypotheses as you can to explain the pattern, or question, that you are trying to answer (alternately, you might learn even more if you attempt to generate your list of alternative hypotheses in advance of searching the literature for what the “experts” think). Derive the predictions that must follow from those hypotheses. Now figure out what test (be it experimental or purely observational) would enable you to distinguish between the hypotheses (check in with me and your Measuring Behaviour book frequently to help you with this step). Can you implement this test? Is it feasible and practical? If yes, you’re ready for the next step.

4.     Implement: The field work. You’ve got a set of hypotheses, you know what we (scientists) already think is known about your topic, you’ve designed a test to answer your question—now get out there and start collecting data! Be prepared for roadblocks, and for nothing to be done as quickly as you were hoping for.

5.     Analyze: Once you’ve got all of your data, you need to do something with it. This will involve statistical analysis. Our statistics workshops will familiarize you both with the power and meaning of statistics, and with some statistical software.

6.     Interpret: You’ve got analyzed results, but what do they mean? How do they fit into the context of what is already known about this system? About these sorts of questions generally? About evolution, ecology, or animal behavior at large? What has your study added to our knowledge? Is it another brick in the wall of knowledge (as most research is), or have you discovered something truly new and different? What is the most exciting (yet rigorous and honest) meaning that your data could have? This is where you tie theory together with your data, and you make them sing. This is also the step most likely to be forgotten in the last-minute scramble to complete your research—but it’s exciting and creative and allows you to push your scientific limits, so don’t give this short shrift.

7.     Present: Every research group will both give a talk, and write a scholarly paper.

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All of this is challenging—every single step. Research rarely proceeds linearly, even with the best planning, work ethic, and execution. Evergreen’s educational model of full-time programs provided a tremendous gift, in that I could teach all of this, including evolutionary theory and behavioral ecology and philosophy of science and statistics and field methods, and do field trips, and really get to know the students, and so much more. For nearly every student, some different aspect of the curriculum that I built was what grabbed them most, and made a lasting impact. But the place that people most often got tripped up, at least in these research projects, was more universal. Perhaps because it seems like the easiest but really is not, the most challenging for so many was in step 4, specifically the field work—the implementation of the hypothesis test, which in animal behavior very often involves carefully designed observations rather than experiments. Making observations of what animals are actually doing proved the most difficult for many people.

People who like animals often romanticize the study of animal behavior. Some of us do indeed love it. But for many others, it turns out to be tedious and boring. Why would you resist a conclusion that you just know is true, and instead sit there writing down a “1” every time the bird feeds or vocalizes or whatever. It requires a kind of patience that I think can be inculcated in anyone, but I am also certain now, having led many classes of students through this, that for some people, it’s just not playing to their strengths. It’s not the best use of their time.

That said: everyone can and should learn to be a better observer. Not everyone can or should learn to be an animal behaviorist. But observing your world carefully, becoming aware of your own bias, of your own previously held beliefs and how they limit what you can see—it’s utterly necessary if you are to have independence of thought. And if you don’t have independence of thought, what do you have?

Back in Maquipucuna, on that bright cool June morning, we stood still for a long time watching that tree. It was long enough to determine that what we were seeing was a tayra…no, two tayras, attacking a three-toed sloth.

Most Americans—and most Ecuadorans—would not, if they saw such a thing, know what to call it. Most people, never having even heard of a tayra, would have had to work harder than we did to make sense of what they were seeing—dark, sleek and slinky; rapacious and focused and sharp; an animal—or wait, it’s two animals—going on the offensive against a sloth.

Our backgrounds helped us more easily interpret what we were seeing. We had a decent sense of what species of mammals were a possibility in this place, and by process of elimination arrived at “tayra” (Eira barbara). Tayras are in the weasel family (Mustelidae). This helps explain where they get that dark, sleek, and slinky form. Tayras are agile and well capable in trees, territorial and willing to fight. And sometimes, apparently, they hunt sloths.

Tayras seem unusual for weasels—bigger than you might expect, for instance—until you realize how many other species of mustelids there are. Mustelids include yes, weasels, but also ferrets and minks and stoats; pine martens and sables and fishers; otters of all stripes; wolverines; badgers and honey badgers and even ferret-badgers, which you may know from the laughable proposition that frozen ferret-badger steaks were the source of SARS-CoV2 and therefore to blame for the pandemic that we are all still slogging through.

Like all mammalian predators, tayras are reclusive, and hard to see. Bret had seen them a few times in Panama before, on Barro Colorado Island, and I had been with him there once when we had watched two scamper by. Since then, I have seen just one more, in the Amazon. It was running down a tree head first before disappearing into the underbrush.

But these tayras were not fleeing. They were fierce and unrelenting. They had the sloth trapped at the end of a limb. Sloths fall from trees, and often do fine, but if this sloth had fallen under these conditions, those tayras would likely have been on it quickly.

This was a three-toed sloth, which comes armed with giant claws. The sloth was defending himself (herself? We do not know) valiantly. The battle went on for a long time, and it was not clear which side would win. The sloth became visibly bloodied, but the tayras were so dark that we would not have seen wounds on them. The sloth did not seem to be faring well.

At some point, despite our attempts to be as silent and invisible as possible, the tayras noticed us. They looked at us long and hard, their deep dark eyes trained on us, and then left. The sloth remained, hanging on the tree branch, bloodied. Soon thereafter we were called by forces that perhaps we should have ignored, back to breakfast at the lodge. We went.

After coffee and babaco and other Ecuadoran delicacies, we went back to the tree where the tayras and sloth had been. All was quiet. There was nobody there, and no evidence of a battle just an hour before. We do not know what happened after we left. What we know is that we saw something extraordinary, something wholly unexpected even by the naturalist guides who live in or near Maquipucuna. And that something extraordinary, which we had not previously imagined, adds both to our understanding of the world, and of our awe in it.

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Welcome to my newest project: Natural Selections. My intention with this newsletter is to speak as truly and freely as I am able, and to carry no water for the censors. Also to have fun, to educate and illuminate, to show and tell and learn. Please join me!

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The Covid pandemic has brought so much into sharp relief.

Many of our critical supply lines are fragile; there are race and class discrepancies in the distribution of medical and social services; and political divisions make for an ever wider gulf between “us” and “them”—almost no matter who you view as us, and who as them. Closer in, we have witnessed the hunger that humans have for real interaction with other humans, and we know for sure that video calls are not a sufficient replacement. We also know that outside is good for every part of us, mind, body, and soul. This is always true, but especially during a pandemic caused by a virus that is very poor at transmitting outside. And we have seen that the authorities—government officials, journalists at legacy institutions, and fact checkers hired by big tech companies—appear to be so worried that the masses are going to make bad decisions, that they feel compelled to keep information from us, giving us only conclusions. We are told that nodding along in agreement with those conclusions, and acting accordingly, is to #FollowTheScience.

The problem with this is that being complacent, and taking authorities at their word, is the antithesis of science. Fact-checkers may sound authoritative, but they are neither scientists, nor qualified to assess what is, or is not, credible.

Not wanting to be outed as anti-scientific lugheads with soup for brains, however, many of us have been lulled into obedience by a rhetorical trick. For that is what it is: #FollowTheScience is a rhetorical trick. It’s a political move. And science never flourishes when it is in the grip of politics.

The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, a normally dry and staid peer-reviewed scientific journal, recently published a missive from Anna Krylov PhD, a chemist who came of age in the USSR. As she argues in the piece, “Simply put, we should evaluate, reward, and acknowledge scientific contributions strictly on the basis of their intellectual merit and not on the basis of personal traits of the scientists or a current political agenda.” This should be obvious, and yet at the moment, it warrants stating in a scientific journal. Too often, now, fact-checkers seem driven by the latter.

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In this newsletter, I will be writing about science in all of its messy glory. That means sometimes getting into the weeds on the scientific process, which requires an assessment of all the possible hypotheses that may explain an observable pattern. Whatever has become the orthodoxy, the conventional wisdom—especially if it was arrived at rapidly and under cover of darkness—is up for discussion. This tension between “settled” wisdom and rigorous challenge is the way that human knowledge progresses, that we become better than we were before. We suppress the challenge at our peril.

I have my predilections and interests, of course, my lens for exploring reality and challenging dogma. I am an evolutionary biologist, so in this newsletter, all things evolutionary are on the table.

Were the landscapes of North America engineered by beavers, before humans ever arrived? Why are there left-handers? Are men and women doomed to an endless tug-of-war over power and style, or can we, in the immortal but differently aimed words of Rodney King, learn to get along? Or even better, learn to understand and build on each other’s strengths and weaknesses?

And, as I wrote in a recent piece in Areo: “What if SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab? What if there are long-term effects of mRNA vaccines? What if Ivermectin is a safe and effective prophylaxis against, and treatment for, COVID-19?”

In newsletters throughout the year—every Tuesday, and sometimes more frequently than that—I will indeed be writing about beavers and handedness, relationships and the virus we now know as SARS-CoV2. Also parrots and elephants, the Amazon rainforest and coral reefs, brains and sex and love and parenting and childhood and food and more. It’s all evolutionary, so I have a take.

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Smack dab in the middle of the 20th century, iconic scientist Enrico Fermi was discussing the possibility of extra-terrestrial life with other luminaries, when he posed this question: “Where is everybody?” The everybody that he referred to was, of course, alien life, specifically “communicating civilizations,” which is that subset of alien life that could and would choose to make contact. Just three of the factors influencing the probability of communicating civilizations are the rate of star formation in the galaxy, the fraction of stars that have planets, and the fraction of planets on which intelligent life develops. When all of the relevant probabilities are assessed together, it seems that we should have met some aliens by now. This is the Fermi Paradox.

Some of the many solutions proposed to the Fermi Paradox have included that planets capable of supporting life are more rare than we think; that intelligent aliens would inevitably drive themselves extinct, through technological hubris or accident; and that intelligent aliens are in fact among us, they just don’t want us to know (this book offers 75 solutions to the Fermi Paradox, and I recommend it).

I propose that another resolution of the Fermi paradox is this: as a world becomes more populous and complicated, fact checkers replace scientists as arbiters of truth. The population thus forgets what science is (or they never learned it), leaving that world bereft of the ability to innovate and discern truth. People in that world will find their horizons shrinking, quite literally, and will never find themselves out among the stars.

PolitiFact—which has partnered with Facebook to be their fact-checking arm—has a six-tier rating system for their truth-o-meter. The most egregious rating, the one that they say they only deliver to the least true statements, is “pants on fire.” This is described as being applied to something that “is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.” Indeed, “pants on fire” connotes something worse than a complete untruth—it suggests a lie. Liar, liar, pants on fire, goes the childhood taunt. Those statements earning a “pants on fire!” rating by PolitiFact must be pretty awful—and so must be the people saying such things!

Well, guess what: That’s not how science works. But then, PolitiFact is not a scientific organization. Any organization that conflates the veracity of a statement, with the intention of a person making the statement, as PolitiFact does with its Pants on Fire! rating, is not even pretending to hide its anti-scientific bent. Here’s one example of where they applied this rating: to the lab leak hypothesis, in September of 2020. Of the possibility that SARS-CoV2 leaked from a lab, PolitiFact wrote, “The claim is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” The scientific evidence has not changed since then, but the political winds have, and by May of 2021 PolitiFact had changed their minds, saying in an editor’s note that they have removed this fact-check from their database, as the claim is now understood to be “more widely disputed.” You don’t say.

PolitiFact also relies heavily on constructions like “Experts say there is no evidence that…” as if this is a compelling argument—as if experts can’t be wrong. Any of us can be wrong, regardless of credential. PolitiFact gave a “false” rating (one step up from “pants on fire”) to a claim made by my husband, Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, and Robert Malone, who is the inventor of the technology platform on which mRNA vaccines are built. Weinstein and Malone said that the spike protein of SARS-CoV2 is itself cytotoxic. The evidence for the spike protein being toxic is plentiful, including in this paper, published in the scientific journal Circulation Research in March of this year, titled SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Impairs Endothelial Function via Downregulation of ACE 2. About this research, the Salk Institute writes, the researchers “showed that the spike protein damaged the cells”. 

In direct conflict with this published research, PolitiFact says merely that “vaccine experts say there is no evidence that the spike protein is toxic or cytotoxic.”

Which experts? On what basis? Are we to believe that PolitiFact has a supply of magical, omniscient experts who are both freed from the usual rules of scientific conduct—leaving all hypotheses on the table, sharing what they know, assessing the hypotheses in a fair and measured manner—and utterly infallible?

If so, I’d like to get me some of those experts.

Of course, such experts are as real as rainbow unicorns and lizard people. They represent the fantasies—unwitting, perhaps, but fantasies nonetheless—of authorities who would hand down decisions to a populace whom they don’t imagine are smart enough to think for ourselves.

Discussion of all the possibilities is a fundamental requirement of science. It is, in fact, and not coincidentally, also a requirement of a free society. In the United States, our First Amendment serves to ensure that conventional wisdom is constantly under scrutiny. The guarantee of a voice for the masses is meant to stand as a bulkhead against the tyranny of the powerful, but in the era of Big Tech our protections are being eroded.  We find ourselves cornered, with the scientific method and the United States Bill of Rights up against fact checkers on platforms that have come to dominate public discourse. It is easier to go with the pre-digested and pre-vetted answers. It is easier to keep to the socially acceptable script. But as in so many things, the easy way is not the best way.

Science needs to be a public process. This does not look like scientific conclusions being arrived at behind closed doors and announced to the public with much fanfare. Rather, the scientific process itself belongs in the public domain. A privatized and elitist model of science is both profoundly weaker, and more vulnerable to manipulation, than a fully transparent and public approach.

Another true thing is that there is no crystal ball that tells us which topics are critical now, and which ones aren’t. Covid obviously looms large right now, as it should. But I will argue that the societal implications of how men and women differ in our historical manifestations of competition and hierarchy are immense, and few people are discussing them. Furthermore, no fact-checker is bothering to censor such claims, at least for now. 

By comparison, the utterly unremarkable claim that sexual reproduction in our lineage involves two and only two sexes—which is backed up by at least 500 million uninterrupted years of evolution—is one that, amazingly, might draw the attention of fact-checkers in our current moment. The particular issues that fact-checkers censor, therefore, is another view in to how narrow our understanding of our place in time and space is. We live in but one moment in a very long human trajectory. Most of us would prefer that humans continue on, in an actually sustainable way, on this beautiful planet of ours for a very long time indeed. The short time horizon of “here and now” limits so many things.

#FollowTheScience is an anti-scientific rhetorical move, and fact-checkers are doing the work of an ideology, which is also anti-scientific. If you’re going to “fact-check” things out of existence, at least be transparent about what you are doing. This is not virtue or goodness, or indeed science or inquiry that you are standing up for. In all cases, it is quite the opposite. In science, uncertainty is a virtue, but fact-checkers would cleanse the world of uncertainty—or rather, tuck it safely out of view.

So from a scientist, to the fact-checkers out there, allow me to extend my hand in introduction. I see you; presumably you see me. Science does not progress by fiat, so know that when you shut down discussion because the ideas are considered transgressive, what you are doing is following orders. The world is now well aware that “I was just following orders” is a poor defense. And even if those orders are well-intentioned, you are definitely getting in the way of science. 

Fact-checkers are not scientists. What they are, far too often, is censors. Science and scientists are being censored, and science cannot flourish when it is censored. Censorship can be understood through the lens of evolution—it is a kind of resource guarding, a not so subtle form of competition. The powerful—and the actual censors who do their bidding—compete in part by compelling disagreement among the rest of us. When we allow censorship, therefore, we are making the job of those who would control us easier. We are doing their work for them.

My intention with this newsletter is to speak as truly and freely as I am able, and to carry no water for the censors. 

Let us learn some of the lessons that the pandemic has brought into sharp relief. Let us make our supply chains anti-fragile, and reduce inequalities in access and opportunity to key services. Let us interact in real time, with real people, as much as possible, rather than hiding behind screens—which will also help heal some of our political divisions. Let us remember that we are all more similar than we are different, and have much to learn from one another. Let us spend as much time outside as possible. And let us follow our curiosity, and our analytical and logical brains, towards a broader understanding of the world we live in, rather than a narrowly defined arena which has been brought to us by sponsors we did not choose, and should not want. 

Come with me on this journey, as we actually follow some science.

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