Hubris and its rewards

The dust is beginning to settle but it's unclear what the outlook is. We had an unexpected outcome to the general election in 2015. Then we had the Brexit result. That was closely followed by the Trump election in the US. Now punditry has taken  another kicking in Thursday's general election. Even at the end of the campaign the received wisdom pointed to a clear Conservative victory. Things hadn't entirely gone their way, but an overall majority, probably increased from what they achieved in 2015, was still expected. Then came the exit poll. We were back in hung parliament territory with no party holding an overall majority. And that's how it panned out.

It turned out that policy discussion trumped personal attacks, the young turned up and voted, and the campaign mattered. To a certain degree earnestness, consistency and principles, almost overthrew cynicism, cash, messaging and manipulation.

To an ordinary voter (ie me), it looks as though the Tories simply thought they had it in the bag and concluded they didn't have to try too hard. They didn't provide a clear and properly costed explanation of what they wanted to do, why they wanted to do it, and how they wanted to do it. They went with soundbites and slogans (remember "strong and stable"?). At least Labour had a stab at a proper manifesto. They had a go at the numbers. They attacked the Government's record and proposed a clear alternative. But instead of engagement we got evasion. The Prime Minister's no-show at the leader's debate, while completely understandable, came to symbolise that evasion. And her performance at the leaders' question time was at times patronising. I can only assume the Tories thought that the election was done and dusted; all they had to do was keep their heads down (or hidden away), not make mistakes, and all would be well. But then came the mistakes with important policies poorly constructed and explained, and in one case quickly amended mid-campaign.

On the opposition side there were ideas to be critiqued and attacked. There was a record (although not a government record) to be scrutinised, and criticised without smears. But they just didn't engage. They were determined to play the man and not the ball, and tried to reduce the whole game not so much to a game of two halves, but a game of two centre-halves. The British parliamentary system is a team game. But the Tories reduced it to I, me, my. And the I in question proved to be less capable than a lot of us had thought. Why? How?

Hubris is that form of pride that contains the seeds of its own downfall. Not all pride leads to a downfall, but hubris does. Its the claim of the boxer to be the greatest before he's felled by an uppercut in the fifth round. It's the cynicism of the politician, who's already moving on to "more important matters" before a vote is counted. Post Brexit, post Trump, you'd think they would have learned their lesson. Apparently not.

Actually the issues facing the electorate at this election were complex and profound. They were hardly aired at all. We were badly served. The result is a weakened government with an unclear mandate. But, if the politicians learn that ideas and worked out policy, explained in grown up terms, are what the electorate is after, then it won't have been a complete waste.

It is all a reminder (again) of the wider world and bigger issues, that life throws up. The judgements to be made and the evidence to be considered in deciding whether to place my "x" against a name, and which name to place it against, were quite different to what I do in my day job. But what is equally true is that it's into exactly this kind of situation that Scripture speaks. From the messiness of human lives lived out as worked examples, some good, some bad, lessons are to be learned. And from the God who ultimately creates and sustains those lives, and who calls us to live them in a particular way, the standard is set. And He has been crystal clear on the subject of hubris: "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble".

Of peacock tears, cows and global warming

First of all, a potential fake news alert. A story concerning retiring judge Mahesh Chandra Sharma of the Rajasthan State High Court went viral this week. Some of the reported quotations attributed to said judge follow:

“The peacock is a lifelong celibate. It never has sex with the peahen. The peahen gets pregnant after swallowing the tears of the peacock.”

 “(Mother cow) is the only animal that inhales as well as exhales oxygen.”

 “Cow urine has the miraculous property of destroying any kind of germs. It provides strength to mind and heart. It stops ageing,” he said, adding that its horns “acquire cosmic energy“.

 “Houses plastered with cow dung are safe from radio waves.”

The reporting of these comments provoked a bit of an international media storm, well divorced from the initial context. The judge was hearing a case involving the care of cows in government shelters. Not a big issue you might think. But you would only think that if you were not an Indian Hindu, to whom cows, their status and treatment, matter a whole lot more than to your average Westerner. While as far as I can see the judge exists and said these things, a bit of care still has to be taken in interpreting the comments. After all, the original judgement was handed down in Hindi. That said, and taking them at face value, it’s a reminder that there are people and places that have been bypassed by a couple of centuries of scientific progress.

Ignorance is neither innocent nor harmless. It also has a close cousin – denialism. Particularly within healthcare and medicine, there are a number of denial movements which have either cost, are costing or will cost lives. HIV denialism took root in South Africa for a while, and with political support from former president Thabo Mbeki, delayed the introduction of antiretroviral treatment. According to a study by Chigwedere et al (2008)¹, that delay may have cost 300,000 lives. Currently, lives are being lost because of the activity of the anti-vaccines movement. Parents are being persuaded not to have their children vaccinated, whether against measles in the US and Europe, or polio in Africa and parts of the sub-continent, in the face of scientific evidence and consensus. This all takes on a further worrying complexion when the deniers team up with purveyors of snake oil and sugar water, and seek to provide “alternative” remedies, usually at a profit. Like alternative facts, alternative remedies rarely have any positive effects.

In the West what is interesting is that this decline in the public traction that scientific evidence seems to have, at least in some quarters, parallels the decline in the influence of Biblical Christianity, or more particularly the values that flow from it. Arguments have raged for a while about the influence of these values on the rise of science. For all that the conflict metaphor has come to dominate at least the popular conception of the relationship between science and Christianity, it was in “Christian” Europe that the modern scientific enterprise emerged, having faltered in the Muslim world after a good start. Among others Hooykaas² claimed that this was no accident. Perhaps we’re now in a position to begin observing what happens as nature becomes remythologised (seemingly a problem in Rajasthan) and a personal commitment to truth is devalued.

In addition, this week saw international ructions as result of President Trump announcing that the US would pull out of the Paris climate change agreement. This is further evidence of the success of a denial movement, partly motivated by commercial and industrial interests. Again there’s a weight of scientific evidence to be processed, not all of which is unequivocal. Few of us have either the expertise, the time or the inclination to examine the evidence for ourselves and therefore remain relatively ignorant of it. And there’s a small, but apparently influential group of dissidents, who reject both the scientific and the current political consensus. They cite alternative evidence, or provide alternative interpretations of the evidence. And of course, given our relative ignorance, we can fall prey to their efforts. Sometimes, we’re happy to cooperate in this if it supports our prejudices, or looks like it’s in our local, personal, narrow economic self-interest.

Of course, even if the science were 100% clear on one side of the argument (it’s probably more like 95%), in areas where political action is required, there are other considerations that have to come into play. History, economics, fairness and more besides go into making political decisions. That said, the evidence that humanity is warming the planet in a damaging way, while complicated, is fairly compelling.  If the consensus is wrong, then lots of money will be spent to achieve ends that while probably useful we could equally well live without. But if the consensus is right, but proper action is undermined by the deniers, then the consequences will be catastrophic in some places, grim in many others and expensive everywhere. But of course, because the consequences will unfold over a long period of time, the deniers will be long gone.

Maybe the truth of the matter is that ignorance is never bliss. But the only alternative is hard work educating the next generation and for that matter hard work informing ourselves.

1.       Chigwedere P et al (2008) Estimating the lost benefits of antiretroviral drug use in South Africa. J. Acquir Immune Defic Syndr 49(4):410-5. [Link]

2.       Hooykaas R (1972) Religion and the rise of modern science. Scottish Academic Press.

A chasm … that cannot be bridged?

These days, not being a cosmologist, materials scientist or molecular biologist, the only bits of “Nature” I read with any expectation of understanding are the editorial, news and comments sections (although this blog post points to an exception). Commenting on a planned meeting between a group of families affected by Huntington’s disease and the Pope, the following sentence from this week’s editorial caught my eye: “There is a chasm between religion and science that cannot be bridged”. And it was further stated that it is the Vatican’s traditional philosophy that “the scientific method cannot deliver the full truth about the world” (Nature Editorial, 18^th May 2017, 545:265). Hmm. Where to start?

Let’s start with the assertion of the existence of this unbridgeable chasm. Note that it is an assertion rather than the conclusion of a carefully constructed argument, or a hypothesis supported by any kind of evidence. It is not an assertion that would be have been supported by pioneers like Kepler, Newton, Boyle or Faraday or for that matter contemporary scientists such as Francis Collins, John Gurdon or Bill Newsome (do a web search on the names if they’re unfamiliar). Now of course all of these folk could be just plain wrong. The fact that they are likely to reject a proposition does not make it untrue. But with all due respect to the Nature leader writer who asserted the existence of the chasm in the first place, she (or he), while having a background in science is unlikely to have the experience and insight of those listed above. For my own part, I don’t claim any great insight either. But I am a scientist and I don’t accept that such a chasm either must exist, or does exist in any meaningful way.

What is probably rearing its head here is the conflict metaphor for the relationship between science and religion. This is the notion that science and religion compete for the same explanatory territory, but do so in fundamentally different ways, with different conclusions and therefore inevitable conflict. It’s a fight with a winner and a loser. Actually, some claim that the fight concluded some time ago, with science the clear winner, and the obscurantist forces of religion decisively routed and driven from the field. These notions, while they have been around for a while, are more recent than you might think.  Colin Russel, the historian of science, argues that the conflict metaphor was pushed as part of deliberate campaign by the likes of T.H Huxley in the second half of the 19^th Century (see Russell's excellent “Cross-currents” for a discussion). Huxley, along with a relatively small group of fellow belligerents interpreted the history of science up to that point as a fight with religion; since then others have happily promulgated the same view. But both in Huxley’s own day, and today, this was only one way to see the relationship between religion and science.

Science has actually often attracted those who are committed to God’s revelation in His book (the Bible), who also wish to study his handiwork in the created order using science as a tool. There are occasionally tensions between the two, but by and large the book of God’s words, and the book of God’s works complement each other. Indeed there is often an interplay between the two. And where the tensions look more like contradictions, these are often to do with the fallibility of our science or our theology. Interestingly, from the outside, the tensions often look a lot worse than they are. So an atheist scientist, with no great interest in Scripture, might misquote and misapply Scripture to claim a major problem where none exists. It is equally possible to conceive of scientifically uneducated and uninterested believers claiming that some scientific discovery has to be rejected because of an apparent contradiction with the Bible. In both cases, a proper understanding of both the Scripture and the Science often dissolves the “contradiction”. So where is the chasm? There isn’t one.

Occasionally those who are scientists and believers (while I mainly mean Christian believers, the same applies to others) are accused of thinking in one way in the lab and in another way at worship and of keeping these two areas of thought separate.  And I don’t deny that I’ve come across this phenomenon, although not for a while, and not usually on the part of professional scientists. But it’s neither necessary, nor is it particularly healthy; and I reckon this it’s not sustainable in the longer term. I’m the same person whether I’m trying to work out why we get multimodal distributions of fast eye movement latency (the subject of a paper that I hope will appear soon) or why Jonah so misunderstood the God who called him to go and preach in Nineveh. Rationality is required in both cases to make progress. If pushed, and you asked me which of these two puzzles is most important to me, I’d say the later. But for the following reason:  science is what I do; my faith is about who I am. As a professional scientist, one day I’ll retire and put away my eye tracker. But I won’t be retiring as a Christian. This is why my faith (by which I mean the content of belief rather than the act of believing) is more important to me than my science. And the science is for now; faith is for eternity.

This brings me to one of the important distinctions between science and (Christian) faith. John Polkinghorne (originally a particle physicist, but who then trained for the ministry and became a theologian) wrote “Many scientists are both wistful and wary in their attitude towards religion. They can see that science’s story is not sufficient by itself to give a satisfying account of the multi-layered reality of the world (Theology in the Context of Science, p84)”. Science’s success stems from carving off bits of the universe that it can get to grips with. But it is a mistake to insist that this is all there is, or that this is the only kind of stuff that matters. It’s folly to believe that scientific explanations are the only ones that a true or valid. While a pigment chemist and colour psychophysicist could legitimately tell you a lot of interesting things about the Mona Lisa, that’s not all there is to say on the subject. And not all of the pertinent information you would need to “understand” the Mona Lisa  is scientific information.

So it’s not just the Vatican that thinks that the scientific method can’t deliver the “full truth” about the world. There are many scientists, including many non-religious ones, who believe this too. Certainly, this one does.  

Anarchy, order, science and (yes) Christianity…

I learned something today I would never have guessed: there's a thing called the “Informal Federation of Anarchists”. Who would have thought? Anarchists need organisation; apparently anarchy has its limits! They might rail against society, hierarchy, order, rules and the rest, but it turns out they’ve formed their own society (of sorts), and probably even have an implicit, if not an explicit, hierarchy. They have an order, and they consider some things to be acceptable, and some things not to be. They set boundaries, and have rules that you contravene at your peril. Indeed, I learned about the Informal Federation of Anarchists in a news story reporting that they had claimed to be behind the vadalisation of a car belonging to a person they accused of being a “snitch”. This is apparently behaviour beyond the pale, warranting action. A line had been crossed that they had drawn. Thus they have at least one rule (“snitching is bad”), and had taken action to enforce it. They don’t want no order, just not the kind of order they object to. Anarchism isn’t necessarily anarchy it would seem.

None of this is really such a great surprise, because the universe in which we find ourselves is ordered. Order is woven into its fabric, and into the fabric of every human being. It’s so much a part of us that we find it difficult to conceive of a different state of affairs. Mind you, the big advantage this brings is that because of this order, and because we are attuned to it, the universe and what it contains can be understood. It is knowable. And once we know enough we can manipulate and control it (at least in part) and make things more pleasant for ourselves. This is formalised in science, but it’s actually something we depend on every day. It allows us to make predictions and plans. It allows us to ignore whole swathes of regularity, and just concentrate on tricky and important decisions and alternatives. If we have to think carefully about everything we do, then we’d probably run out of processing capacity. As it is, we’ve got brain power to spare.

We take all this so much from granted that we rarely, if ever, think about it. Why are things like this, and not like something else? And what proof do we have that it really is like it is, has always been this way, and always will be? For a long time these were all non-questions. But some began to be troubled that we took so much on, well, faith. We just trusted that the sun would rise in the morning, we didn’t look for proof. Such rules as we did come up with to explain many of the regularities (like Newton’s laws) were descriptive. The processes which were used to establish such explanations seemed also to rest of foundations that were still implicitly about trust. Like trusting that things operated the same way everywhere (the principle of the uniformity of nature). They were not themselves provable.

It dawned on cosmologists and others that things have to be really finely tuned to allow life as we know it, including this kind of ordered life in an ordered universe. And it’s worth remembering that before that point it was rather assumed that life as we know it would exist in lots of places. All you needed was a planet rather than a star. Then it was noticed that said planet would have to be a certain distance from a certain kind of star. Then it turned out it would have to have a particular cosmological history and composition. And right down to the finest details of certain physical constants, things need to be tuned just so. It turned out that all of this had occurred; everything had been tuned up in one place, our little corner of the universe. But why?

Well it could all just be an entirely accidental series of coincidences. And that this is all so highly improbable that it has only happened in one place over one period time. So even if you could find some places where some things happed (like a planet with the right kind of orbit around the right kind of star), other things would not be right for life (either any form of life, or the kind of life we’re used to). Try as we might, life is so improbable, that it has only developed in one place (this is the sort of thing the eponymous Professor Dawkins has suggested). There is an alternative. Suppose that there is a God, who is a God of order, who brings into being a universe that reflects His character (this too is not a notion original to me). He continually acts to sustain that order both in the physical realm and beyond (eg in the social and moral realms). Such a God need not necessarily be knowable in and of Himself. But His activity would leave indelible fingerprints on the Universe. It would have that character of order and knowability. But precisely because it is knowable, He would therefore be knowable in at least some ways. At least we would know about Him. But it also strikes me as reasonable to expect that He might actually want to provide additional means such that He might not just be knowable in this passive and distant sense, but to be known. He might reveal something about Himself, so He could be known in the sense of relationship.

It turns out that order may be really significant. The Informal Federation of Anarchists tells us something pretty basic about me, you and the Universe we find ourselves in.

Easter Blog

A while ago I noted the propensity of scientists to comment outwith their area of expertise. We'll, I’m sticking very deliberately to an area within my expertise. I'm going to comment, as a professional scientist, on Easter - or at least one of the seminal events that gave rise to what we refer to as Easter. This might strike many as bit odd. After all Easter is a religious commemoration of certain alleged events that are claimed to have occurred sometime in the first century in the Middle East. History, with a bit of theology thrown in for good measure. But what can it have to do with science? And then there’s the central claim of Easter; the entirely implausible claim, that a dead man came back to life. Science proves that such things are impossible right?

Wrong. Science will always struggle to deal with unique events. The methods we usually apply, repeated observation, manipulation and measurement, are not appropriate. Aha the sceptic cries, what about the big bang? Clearly unique, yet also within the purvue of science. But the big bang is a hypothesis. It's currently the best explanation for current observations (for example the expanding universe around us cosmic background radiation). There might be parallels here between the resurrection of Jesus and currently observable events, but they're not quite the same.

That said, the need in science to collect and analyse data and to weigh evidence, can be applied to Easter, with the caveat that the tools employed will be those appropriate to the type of evidence available. So, given that much of the evidence is in the form of literature, the tools will be literary. If there's relevant archaeological evidence, the tools of archaeology will be used. Not surprisingly in the case of an event of central importance to saints and sceptics this kind of thing has been done extensively. Just do a Web search.

But surely someone rising from the dead is just not believable? But why not? Not believable and impossible (particularly scientifically impossible) are different types of claims. My view is that belief (and unbelief) in the resurrection of Jesus is not primarily about evidence, and it never has been. It's about will. There’s plenty of evidence. But any amount of evidence will only take anyone a certain distance.  Easter is not really about whether a given body is dead or alive, but whether a particular person is known or not. Apologetics is fine, and a worthy exercise. I indulge (am indulging?) in it myself. But it's a starting point not a destination. For the Christian (at least for this Christian) it's an obstacle clearing exercise so that the real discussion can begin. And the real discussion isn't about facts, truth, proof, argument and the rest; it's about a person whom I know. A person with whom I have a relationship just as surely as I have a relationship with my wife and weans. A person to whom I can introduce others. And here's where my other area of expertise comes into play.

I am a scientist, that's my profession. But as a person (and all scientists are also people) I have experience of relationships.  There are some people I know about and there are others I know. I know about Einstein. I know a bit more about Sherrington. But I never met either of these distinguished scientists, both of whom died before I was born. But I make this claim: I know Jesus. Of course, if like Einstein and Sherrington Jesus only died, then I am deluded. And indeed He did die in antiquity. But my claim and the testimony of my experience is that He's not dead now. I know Him.

To be clear I came to know Him long before I weighed up the evidence supporting the fact of His resurrection. And the sceptic would be right to point out that this means that there's likely to be a big risk of bias when I examine the evidence for the resurrection. But then the sceptic would have to accept the risk of bias in the opposite diction on their part. However, this does not mean that either of us is incapable of examining the evidence, and doing so fairly. It just means that we have to work at it. In my case, having considered the evidence carefully, apart from my experience of knowing the person who some claim is dead, buried and decayed, I have found the evidence entirely convincing. However, I can conceive of a situation where overwhelming evidence that counted against the resurrection might come to light and I would have to re-evaluate my position. This would be a big problem. I would have to conclude that for a long time I have been deluded. That I have been fooling myself and fundamentally misunderstanding (and misrepresenting) pertinent facts. But I accept that this is not impossible. Is the sceptic prepared to make the same commitment from their side?

But all this talk of evidence is again kind of missing the point about this being personal. I (the person who is also the scientist) know (rather than simply know about) Jesus. The same Jesus who, as we reflected on Good Friday, died on a cross, was alive a few days later, and is alive and knowable today. And I personally know Him. I don’t think I’m deluded (although I suppose that’s what a lot of deluded people say!). I think that my experience of Him is complemented by the objective evidence (ie by evidence separate from my experience), and by the experience of others both through history and now. Indeed, my experience now counts, along with the experience and witness of many others, as further evidence. Now it still might not be persuasive enough to counter the intuition and observation that normally dead people do not come back from the dead, do not walk, talk, cook breakfasts, eat fish and so on. But none of this has any logical traction on the fact that Jesus is alive, did all of these things, and is knowable today.

I know because I know Him.

Alt-facts, fake news and agnotology for beginners

I suppose like many “experts” and not a few scientists, I’ve been troubled by the apparently recent rise of alternative facts, fake news and the like. Of course it’s only apparent (rather than real) and it’s ancient not recent (see Matt 28:11-15). I’ve already discussed why the notion that complex issues are simple and that all that is needed is a dispassionate collection and analysis of facts is problematic. However, on further reflection it turns out that it’s naïve as well. In part, my reflections were stimulated by an excellent article by Tim Harford, the FT’s  Undercover Economist (“The problem with facts”; unfortunately this is behind the FT’s paywall so you won’t be able to read it without a subscription, but see this). He discusses at length how big tobacco combatted a whole slew of facts showing that their product was killing people in their thousands if not millions. They managed to delay by decades any kind of serious reckoning that would east into their profits. Sixty years on from when the evidence that smoking kills began to mount, they are still turning a pretty profit. It turns out that it’s the tobacco playbook that the likes of the Trump and Brexit campaigns have been following either intuitively or explicitly.

So how do you combat inconvenient but true facts? To quote Harford about the indisputable facts from unquestionable sources on smoking: “The indisputable facts were disputed. The unquestionable sources were questioned”. The aim? To manufacture, encourage and maintain ignorance rather than knowledge and truth, an exercise Robert Proctor, a Stanford historian, has called “agnotology”. In fact, last May, during the election campaign, then president Obama spotted this and commented on it in a speech delivered at Rutgers University. He pointed out that ignorance is not a virtue. Clearly, however, as a tactic it’s pretty effective. Look what happened come last November. It turns out that ignorance is in the interest of some people, and that truth is not an unalloyed good. So make an issue sound as complicated as you can, with certainly more than one side and preferably more than two. Question the motives of those whose facts you don’t like and give them motives if they don’t apparently have any. Destroy the notion of the seeker after truth for truth’s sake. 

Of course the problem is, and this is why these tactics are so potentially powerful, that we live in a messy world in which many issues are complicated and motives mixed. Put this together with the observation that genuine facts are tricky things to find and trickier to deal with effectively, and you begin to understand the problem. And then of course (and this is why I was being naïve) clearly there are those (like of big tobacco) whose motives are very decidedly less than pure (profit over lives). The answer can’t just be more facts, although if repeating non-facts (ie lies) gives them a deal of credibility, then repeating facts and finding new and relevant ones must count for something. It has to be a more subtle analysis that sifts the facts, looks at the sources, weighs competing motives and judges the relative importance of different outcomes.

This all takes time and effort. But maybe for democracy to function, that’s what as citizens we have to do. Investigate, collate, triangulate, think, judge. Perhaps this is not something we are prepared to do. Could it be that in complacency most of us would rather stick to narrow sources of information (our favourite web site, like-thinking friends on social media, a single newspaper or tv channel), be told what to think, be credulous about what we’re told, allow ourselves to believe alt-facts we find convenient? If democracy ceases to function, we’re heading towards something less palatable.  In this and other domains it’s time to “be adults in our thinking” (1 Cor 14:20).

A bit of Trumpian perspective

Pundits have been having a bad time. They've been badly beaten up by the people. It’s been a bad time for experts too. Ignored and even mocked. Leading up to the EU referendum in the UK, we were told that Brexit would cost us all money. It would cost jobs. There would be political, educational and cultural costs. A majority ignored the advice. Some didn't believe if. Some didn't want too. Some wilfully listened to different voices that made carefully calibrated and worded, deniable, non-promises. We embarked on an uncertain course to an uncertain destination.

I remember waking with a palpable sense of déjà vu to something else that was scarcely believable right up to the moment it actually happened. One Donald Trump won the US Presidential election. The insurgency that wasn’t really, won again. A rich insider persuaded enough voters in the US (although not a majority) that he was an outsider like them, and that he would be their man if they elected him. Post-inauguration something approaching chaos has ensued, despite claims by the President to the contrary. The “Muslim ban” that wasn’t has been stymied by the courts. He claims that his executive order was good and its implementation smooth, but that the administration had encountered a “bad court”. Courts matter in the US. There will probably, eventually, be a more conservative Supreme Court. But even then, President Trump will have no control over Justices once raised to the Supreme Court. Given that reality has a way of reasserting itself over fantasy, it remains to be seen what the effects of a more conservative court will be. And what happens when the “Mexican” wall doesn’t appear? Or when a combination of tax cuts and infrastructure spending either doesn’t happen or does happen and cripples the economy? An uncertain course is unfolding towards an uncertain destination. And how will we know what’s going on? Bad news is likely to be constantly derided as fake news. And meanwhile it looks like real fake news will be used to distract and confuse.

What has any of this got do with science? Well, it's never nice to see facts trashed and experts ignored. Mind you for the sake of full disclosure I should admit that write from the perspective of an expert (if only in eye movement control). During the US presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton said in her stump speech that she 'believed science'. At the time she was referring to issues around climate change. But this was a risky thing to do politically. It probably contributed in a small way to her democratic demise. It suited quite a lot of voters to discount the science of climate change (complicated and nuanced) in favour of the much simpler idea that their jobs and standard of living, at least over the short term, were much more important. She was also drawing a contrast with someone who claimed to know better experts, whether generals, economists or yes, scientists. And with someone whose connection with anything resembling reality appears, at least on the basis of his public pronouncements, to be tenuous. Given the Trump presidential campaign, and the early weeks of the Administration, given the misinformation on a heroic scale, insults and fantasy we’re hearing and seeing, things are not looking good.

But facts matter, there is a reality that can be usefully contrasted with fantasy. You can get away with voting for comforting fantasy for a while. There are circumstances, after all, in which it is possible to deny the reality of gravity for a little while. But in the end the reality reasserts itself. Get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and the end result is unlikely to be pretty.

As an aside it’s interesting (and humbling) to note that a reality TV star and shady businessman, has had more effect on the world, than most scientists toiling away diligently will ever have. Time will tell whether the effects are good or bad. But it’s a reminder that science the institution is limited in its influence and heavily dependent on other institutions, including cultural and political institutions. Before my science chums get sneery about the 'ordinary' folk and their choices, it's worth remembering that those are the folk science serves. And they are also the folk that, at least in the UK, fund most science via their taxes. Science has its realm, and is spectacularly successful at dealing with certain kinds of questions. But they are not the only questions that bother people, and indeed may not even be the most important ones. Whether I should vote to leave the EU, or vote for a Trump or Clinton, or beyond that how I should live, science is only part, maybe just a small part, of the picture.