Pandemic fatigue is beginning to grind. Amidst yet another pandemic wave cresting in America and in Europe, we have to ask ourselves what's going on, now that vaccines are becoming available. Americans are justly proud of living in a country where personal choices—political, religious, sexual—are supposedly free. I write "supposedly" because clearly there is widespread prejudice and judgement of others and their choices. Acceptance of differences and open-mindedness is still on the to-do list for many. Still, at least we don't have army tanks rolling down the streets when people demonstrate their political or social views. Not usually anyway. For comparison, look at what's happening in Myanmar.
What puzzles me is what could be called the ditching of privilege. I look, for example, at the situation in Brazil, where I was born and grew up. A huge shortage of vaccines and a government that has consistently downplayed the science has resulted in massive fatalities. People are clamoring for help while hospitals are nearing capacity. In the U.S., vaccines are becoming widely available for younger sectors of the population. In two to three months, we could reach herd immunity and life could be close to normal again. Yet, many are choosing not to take the vaccine or to wear masks. "It is my choice and no government should mess with it!" This kind of choice illustrates a confusing conflict between personal freedom and civic duty. When should you sacrifice your personal choices and views for the benefit of your family, community, and ultimately, country?
The choice to get a vaccine and to wear a mask is an expression of your freedom to be a moral citizen and to protect your family, community, and country.
I'm going to take a detour here and go back to another time when a group of individuals had to face a very difficult choice between personal views and civic duty. In 1941, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor prompted the US to join the Allies in the war against Germany and Japan. Two years earlier, on 2-August-1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt sounding the alarm of a very possible Nazi nuclear bomb. "In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America," Einstein wrote.
Now, Einstein was an outspoken pacifist, as were many of the physicists then working to understand nuclear chain reactions. When the Manhattan Project to build a U.S. atomic bomb started for real in 1942, the main worry and motivation for the group of scientists working in secrecy at Los Alamos was the fear of Hitler with a nuclear bomb in his hands. A split happened within the group. Some scientists pushed the moral worries of building a weapon of mass destruction aside and undertook the formidable technical challenge as another tough scientific problem to figure out. Others, however, had serious moral qualms in participating in the project, knowing very well what the social and political consequences would be. Still, they pushed their personal views aside and worked to build the bomb. The fear of a Nazi threat and the sense of civic duty, the need to protect their country, their community, their families, and their values took center stage, superseding their personal choice.
Choosing to place community and love for the nation over personal gain or values is what German social psychologist and humanistic philosopher Erich Fromm called "freedom to," as opposed to "freedom from." Fromm argued that the course of civilization and industrialization led citizens to an ever-growing process of individuation—the realization of your aloneness as an individual in a large society— where the weight of choosing for oneself became a heavy emotional burden. People that once saw themselves protected by their communities and religious faith were now set adrift by the very progress of democracy and capitalism. Freedom came with a heavy emotional cost. The consequence was the rise of fascist authoritarian governments that effectively chose for the individuals, giving them a sense of relief from the burden of choice.
Most people focus their battles in the "freedom from" category, confused between their individual freedom and their duties to community and country. The scientists that chose to continue working on the bomb against their personal values did so because they were not focusing on their individual choices above all others. They understood that the damage from the outside threat—a Nazi bomb—would have a devastating effect for their lives, families, communities, and country. So, they chose to work on the bomb to protect their freedom.
Let's apply this lesson to vaccines and mask-wearing. At face value, these seem to be personal choices. And if you see them as personal choices then you conclude that any action against your personal choice is a threat to your freedom from government control. But that's a fundamental mistake. The choice to get a vaccine and to wear a mask is an expression of your freedom to be a moral citizen and to protect your family, community, and country. The virus is the outside threat that has already compromised everyone's way of life, caused immense loss and pain, and wreaked havoc with the economy across the globe. By doing something for your family, community, and country you exercise your freedom to protect what's dear to you. This is what an act of love is.
Global warming is on track to drive lots of changes in the future. At the darkest end of the spectrum of possibilities is no future at all. That doesn't mean that humanity goes extinct, but it does mean the big project of civilization we've been working on since the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago might collapse. Given that scary possibility, it's an opportune moment to look at that project with a critical eye. Yes, we have accomplished so much since we first domesticated ourselves by farming (e.g., villages, cities, empires, law, science, etc.). But is modern life worth it?
In other words, was the Agricultural Revolution a good idea?
For context, Homo sapiens appeared as a separated species about 300,000 years ago. During our entire tenure, the Earth has been undergoing a series of Ice Ages, long periods of intense glaciation where the planet was cold and dry (there is a lot of water in ice), followed by shorter interglacial periods that were warm and moist. Throughout most of those 300 millennia, human beings existed as bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. It was only after the ice melted at the beginning of the current interglacial period (a geologic epoch called the Holocene) that we humans invented a new way of being human: farming. It was indeed a revolution, changing every aspect of being human, from how many people we might see in our lifetimes to how we spent those lifetimes.
The usual way the Agricultural Revolution gets characterized is a glorious triumph. Consider this telling of the tale.
Humans once subsisted by hunting and gathering, foraging for available food wherever it could be found. These early peoples necessarily moved frequently, as food sources changed, became scarce or moved in the case of animals. This left little time to pursue anything other than survival and a peripatetic lifestyle. Human society changed dramatically … when agriculture began… With a settled lifestyle, other pursuits flourished, essentially beginning modern civilization.
Hooray! Thanks to farming we could invent museums and concert halls and sports stadiums and then go visit them with all our free time.
The problem with this narrative, according to some writers and scholars like Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari is that while the Agricultural Revolution may have been good for the species by turning surplus food into exponential population growth, it was terrible for individuals, that is, you and me.
Hunter-gatherers worked about five hours per day
Consider this. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once estimated that the average hunter-gatherer spent about five hours a day working at, well, hunting and gathering. That's because nature was actually pretty plentiful. It didn't take that long to gather what was needed. (Gathering was actually a much more important food source than hunting.) The rest of the day was probably spent hanging out and gossiping as people are wont to do. If nature locally stopped being abundant, the tribe just moved on. Also, hunter-gatherers appear to have lived in remarkably horizontal societies in terms of power and wealth. No one was super-rich and no one was super-poor. Goods were distributed relatively equally, which is why Sahlins called hunter-gatherers the "original affluent society."
Stationary farmers, on the other hand, had to work long, backbreaking days. They literally had to tear up the ground to plant seeds and then tear it up again digging irrigation trenches that brought water to those seeds. And if it doesn't rain enough, everyone starves. If it rains too much, everyone starves. And on top of it all, the societies that emerge from farming end up being wildly hierarchical with all kinds of kings and emperors and dudes-on-top who somehow end up with the vast majority of surplus wealth generated by all the backbreaking, tearing-up-the-ground work.
Did we domesticate wheat, or did wheat domesticate us?
So how did this happen? How did the change occur, and why did anyone volunteer for the switch? One possibility is that it was a trap.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari sees human beings getting domesticated in a long process that closed doors behind it. During periods of good climate, some hunter-gatherers began staying near wild wheat outcroppings to harvest the cereal. Processing the grains inadvertently spread the plant around, producing more wheat next season. More wheat led to people staying longer each season. Eventually, seasonal camps became villages with granaries that led to surpluses, which in turn let people have a few more children.
So farming required far more work, but it allowed for more children. In good times, this cycle worked out fine and populations rose. But four or five generations later, the climate shifted a little, and now those hungry mouths require even more fields to be cleared and irrigation ditches to be dug. The reliance on a single food source, rather than multiple sources, also leaves more prone to famine and disease. But by the time anyone gets around to thinking, "Maybe this farming thing was a bad idea," it's too late. There's no living memory of another way of life. The trap has been sprung. We had gotten caught by our own desire for the "luxury" of owning some surplus food. For some anthropologists like Samual Bowles, it was the idea of ownership itself that trapped us.
Of course, if you could ask the species Homo sapiens if this was a good deal, like the wild wheat plants of yore, the answer would be a definitive yes! So many more people. So much advancement in technology and so many peaks reached in culture. But for you and me as individuals, in terms of how we get to spend our days or our entire lives, maybe the answer is not so clear. Yes, I do love my modern medicine and video games and air travel. But living in a world of deep connections with nature and with others that included a lot of time not working for a boss, that sounds nice too.
So, what do you think? Was the trade-off worth it? Or was it a trap?
Andrew Wakefield's 1998 study linking vaccines with autism was riddled with holes. All 12 children involved were handpicked, which is antithetical to clinical research. The now-deregistered physician falsified results. Wakefield used microscopic-level stains to make his case; a more reliable molecular method found no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism.
Add to this the fact that parents of study subjects, some with their own agendas (such as litigation), kept changing the timeline of their child's conditions. During all this time when Wakefield was raging against the vaccine, he filed for two patents on single measles shots. It was a money play from day one.
Twenty-three years later, the vaccine-autism myth remains in circulation despite decades of contrary evidence. Six years after the study was published, 10 of the 13 authors of their paper retracted their findings. It took The Lancet a few more years; in 2010 the publication finally retracted the paper. Journalist Brian Deer documented Wakefield's scam for years. Still, the lie persists.
Science's replication crisis is well-known. But the research community is suffering from another serious problem, one ill-fated for the social media age: the retraction crisis.Will America’s disregard for science be the end of its reign? | Big Think
As science journalist (and former marine biologist) Fanni Daniella Szakal recently pointed out, retracted papers are still being cited and used as gospel even when—sometimes it seems especially when—data are intentionally fabricated. Currently, roughly four retractions occur per 10,000 publications, with the highest percentages being in medicine, life sciences, and chemistry journals.
That overall number might not seem high yet those retracted studies have an outsized influence. Wakefield claiming the MMR vaccine causes autism as a ruse to patent his own vaccine is the most infamous example, but there are others.
- A 2005 paper touting omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids as having anti-inflammatory effects was retracted in 2008 after it was discovered that one author intentionally falsified data. After 2008, however, 96 percent of papers that cited the study never mentioned that it had been retracted.
- German anesthesiologist Joachim Boldt has a whopping 103 retractions credited to his name. Considered the greatest fraud in medicine since Wakefield, his studies, including influential work on the role of hydroxyethyl starch, continues to be cited today.
- Two COVID-19 studies published in reputable journals were retracted after their findings were deemed to be suspect. The researchers relied on a combination of big data and AI to replace randomized controlled clinical trials, leading to false results. Still, the retracted papers were cited in other prestigious journals and have been, in part, seized upon by anti-vaxxers that point to a nefarious medical industry trying to confuse us with conflicting evidence.
Gastroenterologist Dr Andrew Wakefield arrives with his wife Carmel flanked by supporters on July 16, 2007 in London, England.
Credit: Daniel Berehulak via Getty Images
As Szakal notes, a solid grasp of science matters considering research drives policy and healthcare decisions. We can't possibly expect every paper to get it right, but unfortunately, we also have to factor in biased researchers pushing forward their agendas. While the publication of such research is troublesome, Szakal takes particular issue with the authors and publications that continue to cite them after they've been retracted.
More than just a critique, however, Szakal suggests a path forward.
"In each and every publication, author guidelines should include that the author is needed to check all citations for possible retractions. Today numerous citation software are available to do this with ease; such as Zotero, scite.ai, and RedacTek alert users for any retracted papers in the reference list. As well as more care from authors, preventing post-retraction citations is a responsibility of publishers too. Along with double-checking the reference list of papers to be published, they should also make sure that retraction notices appear on all platforms where the study is available."
The past year has proven how dangerous scientific misinformation (and, even more disturbingly, disinformation) is to public health measures. The frantic urgency of social media platforms and the speed with which we consume headlines without reading articles makes teaching good science even more daunting. At the very least, we need the gatekeepers to take more responsibility for their publication process. Being the first to break bad science is way more socially damaging than being the tenth to publish science worth repeating.
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Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
