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The Current Transcript for January 4, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

We monitor bear jams or traffic jams that arise roadside in the national park here. And we also do a lot of bear education and talk to people about how to view responsibly.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: From bear jams to idling by the elk, it is a jungle out there when nature is at the roadside and human critters have cameras. So now that Parks Canada is offering free passes for four seasons of sesquicentennial celebrations, some conservationists worry it'll lead to too many tourists trampling on the very nature we need to preserve. Others say this will encourage a new appreciation of nature that will guarantee our national parks a future. Hear the arguments in just a moment. And if you're ready for an argument that just might make you think differently, how is this?

SOUNDCLIP

I'm writing a book on empathy and I'm arguing against it. I’m arguing that empathy is fundamentally—from a moral standpoint—a bad thing. It makes the world worse.

AMT: That's right. Stop putting yourself in other people's shoes so you can feel their pain. Paul Bloom says follow your head, not your heart. The case for rational compassion in half an hour. Let's just stay with turning things over and disrupting your status quo view of the world. Today we'll introduce you to a scientist named Ford Doolittle.

SOUNDCLIP

If you really want to disrupt science, you actually throw out an idea that changes the whole way we interpret entire branches of science. Ford’s had an entire career of again and again and again changing the way people think about things.

AMT: Well, that's a former student who was so inspired to see things differently that he was part of a team that started asking different questions about what they were seeing in the microscope. And in the process, they identified an organism that may be the most prolific predator on the planet. We'll tell you about the professor and the predator in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Parks Canada's free entry raises ecological impact concerns

Guests: Ben Gadd, Faisal Moola

SOUNDCLIP

[Sounds: Birds chirping]

Actually, I didn’t come in Syria before. But this is my first come in Canada. It's good if you have a break from the noise in the city. That's the best thing I ever tried. Actually. I like it so much.

[Sound: Drumming, clapping and chanting]

AMT: Well, that's how it sounded last July when a group of Syrian refugees in Canada had their first visit to a national park. They were in Kejimkujik National Park in Nova Scotia and the experience was captured by a marketing company, “A for Adventure”. Bringing in new visitors is exactly what Parks Canada hopes to achieve this year by offering free Parks Canada 2017 Discovery Passes. The passes are being issued to coincide with Canada's 150th birthday and they give Canadians and international visitors alike free access to all national parks. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to take advantage of the offer. But some conservationists believe all that free access could come at too high a price for the park's wildlife and natural habitats. Ben Gadd is one of them. He's a retired tour guide. He's the author of 10 books on the Rockies, including Handbook of the Canadian Rockies. And Ben Gadd joins us from our Calgary studio. Hi.

BEN GADD: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: So how did you react when you first heard Parks Canada was offering free access to all national parks in 2017?

BEN GADD: Well, I got to tell you—I think it's a great idea to not have to pay to go in to your national parks. For 30 years I've been going around saying why are we paying at the gate, we Canadians, to get into a national park we already own? You know? And why discriminate on the basis of ability to pay? The fees keep going up. So my first response was hey, this sounds great.

AMT: And your second response?

BEN GADD: Well then, my long adventure with Parks Canada kind of kicked in. I mean Jasper resident for 29 years and a park watcher since 1970 and so on. The problem, Anna Maria, is that Parks Canada does not seem to be ready for this. The agency is just perennially underfunded, understaffed. The infrastructure is run down. And we already see—especially on long weekends in the summer—these huge traffic jams in Banff, Lake Louise, where people are spending like an hour to get from the hot springs in Banff back down to town. Things are not running well enough now to take this big influx of people into account. This is my worry.

AMT: Okay. So it’s not—it's great that they can get in there but there isn't the infrastructure once they're there.

BEN GADD: Yeah and enough people on the ground. I mean here you are driving along the Icefields Parkway and it'll be bumper to bumper in places next summer between Lake Louise and Jasper. The most beautiful road in the world, you know? It's going to be really busy. And here comes a bear steps out of the woods and all of a sudden, you've got like 40 cars, sometimes more, all pulling over. We need a park warden right there right now to just keep everybody safe, including the animal which can panic and run out into traffic. It's things like this that worry me.

AMT: Don’t you have a saying, “a fed bear is a dead bear”?

BEN GADD: Absolutely. First warden to speak to us when I became a park interpreter in Jasper in 1982, said now there is one thing you've all got to know. A fed bear is a dead bear. If you leave an apple pie out on the picnic table and a bear gets it, that same bear will be back every night at the same time at the same table for a week or two expecting more and unfortunately the problem is often that bear winds up dead. It gets shot because it's becoming a problem.

AMT: And also I guess if people do stop and view animals, there's a lot of fencing along some of the highways, is there not, through there to keep the animals sort of off the roads?

BEN GADD: Yeah. That's a good point. Trans-Canada Highway through Banff National Park is fenced off and the large animals—occasionally you know a tree falls and knocks part of the fence down or a bear just climbs over. But in any event, they have trouble getting out there. Highway 16 though, through Jasper National Park—which is also a pretty busy highway in the summer—is not fenced and these beautiful big horn sheep, you know these iconic animals of Canada, get hit by cars there. More traffic means more animals getting hit and the small animals, they can get right through the fence. You know all those little rodents and bunnies and weasels and things, they just get squashed. So more traffic equals more environmental impact of all kinds in the national park.

AMT: You made the point that there aren't enough people. Is this cutbacks in terms of like park staff?

BEN GADD: Park staff has been perennially cut back. As the population grows, visitation goes up. You have to have more wardens. You have to have more people just keeping the outhouses clean in order to make these parks really pleasant places to visit and to protect the wildlife as well. And the hiring has just not kept up. Furthermore, the wardens who can actually make arrests and do this kind of thing—any park warden used to be able to do that. But now, the wardens are divided into these enforcement wardens who actually carry guns and then lots of wardens who are kind of, I guess the derogative would be fish cops, who spend a lot of time doing good things but they're not able to really, really come down quickly and enforce the law. And you get a lot of people come in from countries where they don't have national parks like ours. They don't have the Canadian ethic about things like trash. They feed the wildlife. They leave the apple pie out on the picnic table and we've got to educate these folks.

AMT: So what would mitigate your concerns?

BEN GADD: I'd like to see Parks Canada pony up with a big budget increase this summer and I don't believe that any money and certainly not much has been set aside for this coming influx. So they can bring in a lot more people, get them trained up, get them out there. You need park interpreters out there. When the bear jam arrive, you need somebody there to help direct traffic and it’d be great to have somebody there explaining you know about this whole thing. So we need lots of folks and they've got to be trained in an awful hurry and I'm just afraid it isn't going to happen.

AMT: So you are not actually—are you saying that it would be great to have like a lot of visitors coming to the parks, you just need a better way to deal with them? You don't want people—like you don't want them rationed in how many can go into the parks.

BEN GADD: I wish it were true that the parks could absorb everyone who wants to go there. Remember there's a lot of tourism industry pressure to bring more and more people to the parks and Parks Canada has been labouring under this you know certain per cent increase every year that the government—Harper government especially—wanted. No. I think the parks have lots and lots of people in them. We don't need more people there. But if they're gonna come—and of course as the population grows, they are going to arrive—then we really have to be ready for them. That's the point I'm trying to make.

AMT: And how does management here of our parks compare to other countries? What do they do in the US with their national parks?

BEN GADD: The US park system is fairly similar. You know the cutbacks that we experienced were the same problem down there under the Bush administration and so on. What happens in the US tends to happen here later of course, like everything else. I remember going to Yosemite Valley in 1979 and was surprised to discover that I could park the car in a parking lot down in the main part of the place of the park. Everybody visits you know the big cliffs in view and all that. I could park the car and ride a shuttle bus all through this very crowded area and it was possible to drive a car through but it was crowded with traffic and the shuttle bus just went. This was an example of what should be done here to get people up and down to the hot springs in Banff. We need a shuttle bus service but there's none. At Lake Louise, there has been an experimental pilot program with shuttling people up to the lake and up to Moraine Lake, which is a terribly crowded spot in the summer. And I'm really glad to see that but it's not operating often enough and it doesn't operate in midweek and I haven't heard that Parks Canada is really going to put on more buses and make this a full time deal all summer and they need to.

AMT: So you're really looking at the need to balance the visitors with nature.

BEN GADD: You know you never balance humans against nature. Whenever humans come up into conflict with nature, you know who wins. All of these people starting off on say, the little hike up to Moraine Lake, there's wildlife there but it has to be the sort of wildlife that can get along with humans and you're not going to find the sensitive species around. So the main environmental thing that I'm worried about is the animals being pushed farther off into the bush. That kind of thing.

AMT: Okay. Well, Ben Gadd, thanks for sharing your concerns with us.

BEN GADD: You're welcome.

AMT: That is Ben Gadd, retired tour guide. He's also the author of 10 books on the Rockies, including Handbook of the Canadian Rockies. He joined us from Calgary.

SOUNDCLIP

I was probably eight or nine and I went with my mom and my dad and my brother. And we rented three canoes and we got all sorts of gear packed up in backpacks and kind of special bags that were waterproof. And my dad charted a course on a map. We did a nice loop with about three or four portages. It was really exciting because I had never been in a canoe before. So when we loaded up the canoe and we set it in the water, I was a little bit wobbly trying to figure out how to paddle but my dad taught me how to properly j-stroke. And we took off. And before I knew it, the cars were behind us and it felt like civilization disappeared and we just went into this complete wilderness. It was completely silent. It was remote. It was peaceful. There was no cell phone reception. No cars. No sound of anything except the stillness and the quiet and the paddles just kind of dipping in the water.

[Sound: Water lapping]

[Sound: Loon]

AMT: Okay, we added that—the ubiquitous call of the loon. That's Kimberly Lochhead describing her first trip to Algonquin Provincial Park with her family—a visit that sparked her lifelong love for parks in Canada. For many Canadians, the first taste of nature leaves a lasting impression—just one reason why my next guest is celebrating the free entry to national parks in 2017. Faisal Moola is the director general for Ontario and northern Canada for the David Suzuki Foundation. He's an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Forestry at the University of Toronto and an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University and he's in our Toronto studio. Hello.

FAISAL MOOLA: Hi. Good morning.

AMT: What are you thinking as you were listening?

FAISAL MOOLA: Oh, it just warms my heart. It's such a fantastic introduction to nature and I think it's so important that all Canadians have that seminal experience with nature. You know despite the fact that we are a vast country of mountains, forests and ice, Canada is truly an urban country. Over 82 per cent of us actually now live in cities and suburbs and we're increasingly becoming disconnected from the biological richness that this country is blessed with. And so this effort by Parks Canada to really connect Canadians with nature, I think is something that should be celebrated. No question about it. There are some concerns about how it's going to be managed, but this is a really good news story.

AMT: What's it like in your classes? I mean you teach this stuff. What kind of experience do your students have with nature?

FAISAL MOOLA: Yeah. So I've been teaching at the University of Toronto now for well over a decade. And you know many of my students reflect the ethnic diversity of this country. I have a lot of new immigrants in my classes. I have a lot of Syrian refugees actually that are in my classes and I teach environmental policy. What I find increasingly ironic is that I'm teaching the next generation of environmental leaders. Many of these people are going to end up being in leadership positions in the environmental movement. They're going to end up being decision makers in Parks Canada, in the federal government, and yet they've never actually had any seminal experience with nature. You know every year at the end of term, I ask people what are you gonna do this summer? And it used to be that people would go out and they'd say I'm going to tree plant for the summer. I'm going to go spend time with my family in the national parks. Increasingly that's not what people are doing. They're increasingly spending screen time over green time. And my colleagues at the University of Toronto and myself and other researchers are saying that this is actually having a detrimental impact on Canadians not just in terms of our physical health, but also our mental well-being as well.

AMT: And what role did national parks play in developing your relationship with Canadian nature?

FAISAL MOOLA: So I had a very interesting relationship. My parents were immigrants to Canada. They came as political dissidents from South Africa. My father was a senior member of the African National Congress with Nelson Mandela. At some point—I have a very vivid memory—my dad came to the conclusion that we were never going to go back to South Africa. It was just too dangerous for him to return. So he made the decision that we were actually going to discover Canada and we were going to do this was that we were going to take a road trip—an epic road trip—from Toronto to Tuktoyaktuk. Now you can’t actually drive to Tuktoyaktuk, we discovered.

AMT: You didn't know that.

FAISAL MOOLA: We didn't know that. We got pretty far along the Dempster Highway. We got all the way up into Kluane National Park. But the point is, is that we visited national and provincial parks all along the way. It was the first time that I saw a bear. It was the first time that I learnt how to make a camp fire. It was the first time that I learnt about the great Louis Riel and the Metis nation through visiting the national historic site at Batoche in Saskatchewan. And there is no question about it—it was those experiences that led me to become an environmentalist and also led me to become a scientist in ecology.

AMT: How old were you when that road trip happened?

FAISAL MOOLA: So I would have been very, very young. It was sort of in my early, early teens. I would have been about 12 or 13 years old. Yeah.

AMT: And that's the thing. That's what turned you. That’s what gave you the passion.

FAISAL MOOLA: It’s so true. And you know many of my colleagues in the university you know have sort of similar experiences. We need to have these experiences with nature. It’s through these experiences with nature. It’s through seeing wildlife. It's through spending time. Really seeing the night sky for example. It's through these experiences that we fall in love with nature and if we fall in love with nature, we're going to be much more willing to actually fight for nature, to actually advocate for the very policies that your earlier guest spoke for—to protect wilderness and to protect wildlife. And I'm increasingly concerned that Canadians are disconnected from this natural heritage that we're blessed with.

AMT: So Ben Gadd worries there's not enough infrastructure in place to support this idea of all the free passes. What do you think?

FAISAL MOOLA: I share many of the concerns that Ben has, but I think we also have to be clear here. The threats to the national park system are not going to be the temporary increase in visitors in 2017. The threats to the national park system are the impacts of climate change, the unbelievable amount infrastructure and development that's happening within and on the borders of the national parks and the fact that the national parks agency has never recovered from brutal budget cuts that happened in 2012 that resulted in a 31 per cent decline in the number of scientists that are working in the national park system. You know those are true threats to the national parks system and they need to be addressed through policy. I do have faith. I've spent a lot of time in the national parks. I worked in Parks Canada. My PhD was in Kejimkujik National Park. I do have a lot of faith in the Parks Canada and their managers and their park interpreters that they will be able to manage the Canadians that are going to be coming to the national parks. But this is a wonderful opportunity and I think it should be celebrated, especially by advocates for nature. I think we're going to have a society that's going to be really changed at the end of 2017 through this opportunity to really discover the national park system.

AMT: And of course it's the fees into the park, the campsite fees, all of those continue but it's the actual park entry fees that are free.

FAISAL MOOLA: Exactly. Exactly. I think the assurance that I want to give Canadians is that there are a lot of management policies and practices that are happening in the parks to help manage and mitigate the growing footprint that we have in the national parks. I don't want to diminish the fact that there are concerns. I mean the one animal that I think that most people are concerned about are grizzly bears and you know nearly a dozen grizzly bears have been killed since 2000 in the mountain national parks as a consequence of collisions with cars and trains and such. Far fewer grizzly bears are being killed today than in the past because of the mitigation efforts of Parks Canada and their partners. So that is something that we definitely have to be concerned about. But I think we need to step back and realize how wonderful this opportunity is going to be for Canadians to rediscover the national park system.

AMT: Is there anything Canada could be learning from other countries in how they deal with their national parks?

FAISAL MOOLA: I think that some of the things that Ben talked about are really, really clever, in terms of how to manage the number of people that are going to be coming into the parks and definitely this idea of shuttle buses rather than having you know long convoys of cars going through the national park system. But at the same time, I also hope that this begins to kick off a conversation between Canadians and our politicians about our natural heritage systems. As I said, the greatest threats to the national park system are not actually the visitors. The greatest threats are the impacts of climate change, the fact that there is infrastructure—there are oil pipelines that go through many of our national parks. The fact that there is growing development pressures. Those are the real threats to the national park system. So let's hope that in addition to people experiencing the parks, that people will now become advocates for those national parks as well.

AMT: And it's not solely new Canadians who will take advantage then. It will be Canadians who just maybe will look at it differently because now we're all talking about it. We might think oh, maybe we should go there too.

FAISAL MOOLA: Exactly. Exactly. I think that this is a great opportunity for Canadians to really celebrate the natural heritage that our country is blessed with and not just the national parks, the national historic sites for example as well, which are also really, really important. I think that at the end of the year, you're going to have a constituency of Canadians that will have a much better understanding of nature through actually experiencing nature firsthand and that is something really, really important.

AMT: And of course that makes a better understanding of Canada as a whole.

FAISAL MOOLA: Exactly.

AMT: Okay. Thanks for coming in.

FAISAL MOOLA: Thank you very much.

AMT: That is Faisal Moola. He's the director general for Ontario and northern Canada for the David Suzuki Foundation. He's an adjunct professor of forestry studies at the University of Toronto and adjunct professor of environmental studies at York University. He's with me in our Toronto studio. Now we did reach out to Parks Canada. A spokesperson sent us a statement and I'll read it in part. I'm quoting here: “It's important to note that Parks Canada is committed to protecting the ecological integrity of national parks while providing meaningful, high-quality experiences for visitors.” It goes on to say, “The agency has successfully managed this balance for over 100 years. Parks Canada wants to ensure the best possible visitor experience for people coming to Canada's national parks and as many tools at its disposal to effectively manage increased visitation.” That's the end of the quote. Well, we want to hear from you. Tell us your favorite national park stories and send us your best photos taken inside a national park in Canada. Tweet us. We are @thecurrentCBC. Post on this story on our Facebook page or e-mail us by clicking on contact: www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. And stay with us. The news is next.

[Music: Sting]

AMT: And then we're asking why empathy may be overrated. We're going to hear from a psychologist who says the essential trait for politicians and leaders—one we likely try to cultivate in ourselves—may actually lead us into trouble in the end. He’s going to tell you to stop feeling his pain. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Against Empathy: Yale psychology professor says too much emotion leads to bad moral decisions

Guests: Paul Bloom

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, scientists in BC scouring the ocean may have identified the earth's most prolific predator and it's no great white. In fact, it's only a single celled beast but it's everywhere. That discovery has been a major disruption for the way we think of our oceans. The science of disruption in half an hour. But first, disrupting some age-old advice about empathy and decision making.

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: The Disruptors theme]

VOICE 1: Bill has a true empathy for people who are working class. Hillary ain’t Bill. She does not have that empathy.

VOICE 2: Seventy-five per cent of Canadians said yes. You know Justin Trudeau, no doubt about it as likable. Other key factors: you know empathy’s an important attribute in politics. We want politicians who understand our problems, who get it. Forty-seven per cent of Canadians agree that he understands the problems facing Canada.

VOICE 3: I think though, he has tremendous empathy as well and I think that's a side people don't really see. My whole life, I've watched as he's ripped stories out of newspapers that he's read about something that's happened to somebody or put in a situation where they don't have the power to effect change and they were unfairly put there. And he'll actually proactively reach out to that person, bring them into the office and help them.

AMT: Well, it seems almost to go without saying these days that in order to be a successful politician, you need to have empathy in spades. You just heard Ivanka Trump underlining her father President-elect Donald Trump's empathetic attributes. Before that, it was pollster David Coletto praising Justin Trudeau’s, and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee acknowledging Bill Clinton's empathy. Finally, here is US President Barack Obama on the importance of empathy for making real progress on important social issues.

SOUNDCLIP

If we hope to meet the moral test of our times, if we hope to eradicate child poverty or AIDS, then I think that we're going to have to talk more about the empathy deficit. The ability to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes. To see the world through somebody else's eyes. The mother who can’t insure her child or the steel worker who's been laid off. The family who lost the entire life they built together when the storm came to town.

AMT: Well, that call for greater empathy sounds convincing but what if an empathy deficit isn't the problem but rather an overabundance of empathy? It is an unorthodox idea but one that Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom is exploring in a new book. He is with us today as part of our project The Disruptors, to make the case that it is time to rethink empathy. His book is Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Paul Bloom joins us from New Haven, Connecticut. Hello.

PAUL BLOOM: Hey. Thanks for having me on.

AMT: You are against empathy?

PAUL BLOOM: I am. And a lot depends on what you mean by empathy. So if being against empathy, people take it like being against kittens, it seems like a crazy view. And if what you think about empathy is just in general being kind and compassionate and loving, it would be crazy. I'm not against that. The case of empathy, the sort of empathy I am against—and actually Obama nicely described it—is putting yourself in other people's shoes, feeling their suffering, feeling their pain. This is very appealing to us. It feels great. But given the nature of our minds, it leads us to biased decisions, to innumerate decisions and often to cruel decisions. I think we're much better off when we use reason plus a more distant compassion.

AMT: Okay. And just let's explore the definition a little more then. So compassion or caring, how is that different from empathy?

PAUL BLOOM: So compassion is when you value other people, when you want them to thrive, when you love them. And without that, we would never do anything. Even if we knew the right thing to do, we'd never be motivated to do it. Compassion is necessary to being a good person. But empathy gets you into their heads. You feel what they're feeling. You share their suffering. And unfortunately if you feel empathy for somebody among other things, you're likely if you're a helper to be burned out, to be exhausted. It focuses you on a short term rather than long term. You feel more of it towards people who look like you than who don't look like you. There's a lot of experiments looking at empathy and compassion, finding that not only did it activate different parts of the brain, that when you feel compassion, you're actually better able to help. You enjoy helping because you're not suffering along with people. And a lot of people in helping professions—doctors or therapists or first responders—if they have too much empathy, they have to drop out. They get burned out. The best people care about others but they don't feel their pain.

AMT: So what do you see as the problem of linking empathy to moral decision making?

PAUL BLOOM: So empathy has several problems. One is that it's biased. There are studies from the laboratory but you can tell from everyday life that people you feel empathy for tend to be people from your own group. They tend to be people who look like you, who are your same skin colour. Racist biases show up tremendously in who we feel empathy for. And empathy drives us towards the attractive, towards the safe. It's a lot easier to feel empathy from an adorable child—an adorable white child—than some scary man who might be a homeless man or might disgust you in some way, to the extent that we could recognize that how somebody looks shouldn't matter for how valuable their life is. We’re transcending empathy.

AMT: So in other words—

[Crosstalk]

PAUL BLOOM: Empathy is—

AMT: Oh, sorry. So you're basically saying it shouldn't be about us. It's not about that “I feel your pain, ergo your pain is important.”

PAUL BLOOM: That's exactly right. You should step back and figure out what's the best thing to do? What will make the most people happy? If I'm with a kid or with a friend, what will make them happy in the long run? But the immediate grip, the temptation of empathy, says make the problem go away for this person right away. And who the person is depends on what they look like and what they seem like. Because of this, empathy is also innumerate. So we care more about one person than 100 people. And because you could empathize with one but you can’t empathize with multitudes. It's because of empathy that people care more about a little girl stuck in a well than they do about climate change.

AMT: Hmm. What about the idea of false sympathy then, like our need to feel pain? We see people reacting with real emotion to other people's tragedies. Sometimes it's almost as if they're trying to take ownership of other people's grief.

PAUL BLOOM: So empathy in that sense runs the risk of being selfish. There are many real world cases where empathy drives people to do things that actually make the world worse. There is a lot of people involved in foreign aid point out that many people send canned foods when there is a crisis and that could be good, but pretty soon they have enough canned foods and then the extra canned foods that people send become overwhelming and provide a health concern and they have to store it and they tell people to stop. And it makes sense to me that people might think this is a good thing and want to do the right thing. But what always astonishes me is that some people, when they're told to stop sending stuff, insist on sending it. It's as if it's an itch they just demand to scratch. I live in Connecticut and many years ago, there was a massacre in Newtown. Sandy Hook Elementary School.

AMT: Right. So many young children killed.

PAUL BLOOM: Twenty children. It was a horrific, horrific event. And so people sent teddy bears and soft toys to the town. And very quickly, the town said stop. You are not helping us. You are making things worse. We have to hire a warehouse for all the crap you're sending us. And people refused to stop. People who had this empathic connection. And it's just a simple example of the difference between wanting to make the world a better place and really helping people versus feeling empathy and wanting to scratch that itch.

AMT: Hmm. The idea of sending stuffed toys to people who've just lost 20 children doesn't seem—there's a disconnect there, huh?

PAUL BLOOM: There's a disconnect and also the town itself where the tragedy happened is a relatively rich town. There's a lot of places not far from me that are very poor and could really do with people's generosity. But empathy doesn't work that way. Empathy doesn't calculate where can I do the most good? Empathy calculates you know who's the prettiest face who's making me cry? And so even though it's almost inevitably well-intentioned, it often doesn't help and it often makes the world worse.

AMT: In fact, you actually in writing about Newtown, you talk about the fact that some in the year of Sandy Hook, more schoolchildren were murdered in one US city—Chicago—than were murdered in Newtown.

PAUL BLOOM: That's right. The sort of cases that capture our attention—I think of American examples, I’m sure there’s plenty of Canadian examples—often involve adorable children who look like us in our neighbourhoods. Maybe a kidnapping, maybe an assault. And we’re curiously blind to larger scale problems that affect so many more. And the thing about it is Sandy Hook was kids who look like us. It could have been my children. The teenage children shot in Chicago don't look much like me. They don't capture my attention. And when I could think of things morally, I have to recognize that the crisis in Chicago was actually far worse than Newtown, yet it doesn't feel that way. I mean in general, we tend to be tremendously focused on mass shootings, even though mass shootings are, in the States, about 0.1 per cent of gun homicides. That is if I could snap my fingers and make it so there's never a mass shooting in United States again, nobody will ever notice because it's equal to the sort of statistical rounding error. And yet it feels so intensely important. And here’s when empathy is leading us astray and often leading to bad and often cruel policies.

AMT: And so these are the link you're talking about, between empathy and our own prejudices as well then.

PAUL BLOOM: Exactly. I think if you want to be fair and moral policymakers as well as individuals, what we have to do is recognize that empathy is horribly biased and often corrosive to us and we do have alternatives. We can make our decisions as to what to do based on our considered judgments of what would make the world a better place. We could care about people and feel compassion and warmth for them without getting into this vicarious suffering that leads us astray.

AMT: Well, I've got some other examples I want to run by you then. When it comes to news events far from home, we all remember iconic images such as that of the body of three-year-old Syrian Alan Kurdi, washed up on the Mediterranean shore. Five-year-old Omran Daqneesh covered in blood after an airstrike in Syria. How does empathy colour—how do we react to these news stories?

PAUL BLOOM: So I have mixed feelings about these. In both of those examples, when the photographs came out, there were a spike in donations to the Red Cross. So to some extent, I wouldn't deny that our emotional reaction did good. It caused people to do something which makes the world a better place. But when I see these images of suffering victims, particularly suffering victims of violence, it makes me worry about the connection between empathy and war and the connection is very tight. Typically when we see somebody suffer, our natural inclination is to make the person who caused that suffering pay. And so for every war that our country has been in, typically the government points to suffering victims as a catalyst to violence. This certainly happened in the war in Iraq. If we go to war against ISIS, we're going to see more and more pictures of people being beheaded. And because our empathy leads us to a sort of punitive response. Now sometimes war can be justified, but empathy tilts the scale too much in favour of violence. It makes us want to immediately strike back and we're blind to the future consequences because empathy is very short-sighted.

AMT: At the same time, people would argue: you look at the destruction of Aleppo, you look at the suffering in Syria and Western nations have done little and there is an argument that there wasn't enough empathy. Or are we using the wrong word?

PAUL BLOOM: Well, I think it's definitely true that countries in the West bear a great responsibility to what's been happening there and that we have the resources and we should try to help. But empathy leads us astray even in that case. I've lost count of how many people I've heard say we have to do something militarily. We basically have to bomb some people. We have to strike. And when you ask them so how would that make the world a better place? Are you sure that's going to not kill more people than it helps? They'll tell you about the pictures. They’ll show you the videos. They'll talk about their deep feelings. And I worry that cases like Aleppo right now make us a little bit crazy. They make us step away from rational decision making and they make us engage in actions without thinking carefully about what actions will make the world better.

AMT: It's interesting. I remember being at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer and everybody selling buttons outside the convention and one of the popular buttons was “Bomb ISIS”. So again, it was that idea, like get revenge. But I want to go back to like the little boy Alan Kurdi because in Canada, one could argue that image and then the subsequent reaction of the then immigration minister actually turned an election and led to the Canadian immigration policy of bringing more Syrians into this country by the Trudeau government.

PAUL BLOOM: Again, I don't doubt that an empathic appeal can make the world better, just like a racist appeal sometimes can make the world better. You appeal to—you say vote for the white candidate because he's white and it turns out he's the better candidate. Well there. You've used racism to make the world a better place. And empathy often works that way. Often our concern drives us to something that turns out to be to be right. But for every case like that, I can give you a dozen cases where empathy for somebody’s suffering led to a mistake. An American example of this was many years ago when Michael Dukakis was running for president, he came under fire for his furlough program, where a black criminal, Willie Horton, was released and raped somebody. And America had tremendous empathic feelings for the victim of the rape and immense hatred towards the man who did it. And this swayed the presidential election. Dukakis was viewed as incompetent and so on. Even though it turned out that this furlough program was actually making the world better. It was causing fewer murders, fewer rapes, fewer assaults. And so if you want to, you could take these dramatic pictures and there's all sorts of cases where they motivate us to do things which are actually terrible. Donald Trump provides a particularly vivid example of this because he exploited empathy with great artistry through his campaign, evoking empathy for the victims of crimes by immigrants and by Muslims, and using our empathy to motivate hatred and anger towards those groups. So you know when people think that empathy is this warm and fuzzy thing that makes us give to charity, I like to give them a reminder of the American politician who uses it the most is Donald Trump.

AMT: Okay. And you've said actually, it's an overabundance of empathy that is the problem there then.

PAUL BLOOM: I think it is. I think the question of immigration in the United States—how many immigrants should we accept, what policies should be—should be based largely on numbers. There's definitely moral questions and there's also factual questions like do immigrants actually commit more crimes? An answer is no, actually.

AMT: Well, I'm going to pick up on this because I have a clip I want you to hear. I did an interview in December about undocumented migrants in the United States and this is a clip of Hans a von Spakovsky. He's a senior legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation. He was defending President-elect Donald Trump's proposal to cut funding to those cities—so-called sanctuary cities—that are pledging not to enforce federal laws on undocumented migrants. Listen to this exchange.

SOUNDCLIP

HANS A VON SPAKOVSKY: There are four individuals in San Francisco that we could talk about directly who are dead because of San Francisco's sanctuary policies. A father and his two teenage sons were killed by a member of the MS-13 gang who had committed two prior felonies in San Francisco. He was released back because of the sanctuary policies.

AMT: Okay. I'm not going to have you run through every case for me. Statistically, doesn't it show that some American citizens actually still kill more people than any undocumented immigrant?

HANS A VON SPAKOVSKY: The point is that these felons and the crimes they committed, those crimes would not be committed if they were not in the country. So the frequency or rate, that is not important.

AMT: How do you respond to what he was arguing there, Paul Bloom?

PAUL BLOOM: I have to say I take your side on this. The word statistically warms my heart because that's how we should deal with these moral issues. The fact that some immigrants kill people is terrible but bad things are always going to happen and for any policy of any scope, there's going to be people who suffer. And that's just—it's not a fair way to argue. If I wanted to argue in favour of gun rights—everybody should have a gun—I could tell you a story of some woman who was assaulted because she lacked the gun that would defend her. If I want to argue that some health care program is terrible, I'll tell you a story about somebody who suffers from it. And there are always stories like this. But it's a lousy way to govern policy because what you really want to do—and this is why the person you're talking with missed the point—you really want to ask: so on balance, how much harm does it have, does it cause to have these immigrants in our country and how much benefit? So don't tell me about this person did that, this person did that. Give me some numbers—because we’re talking about millions of people here—give me some numbers. Does it help jobs? Does it hinder jobs? And the numbers will help us decide in a way that's ultimately fair and rational and compassionate. But empathy feeds off anecdotes. And the problem is unscrupulous people always have anecdotes to hand over.

AMT: In fact, what I've noticed is that anybody who's media trained now—and you can spot media trained people—will right away go to an anecdote.

PAUL BLOOM: That’s right.

AMT: And they'll say, “That reminds me of Paul” and then they’ll tell you a story. Politicians do it all the time. Other people do it all the time. It's actually something that media trainers have in their arsenal: go to the anecdote.

PAUL BLOOM: Politicians are addicted to that, particularly when the facts aren’t on their side. If you want to say look, oh, Obamacare should be abolished. Let me tell you a story about a little girl. And then you know there's always a story about a little girl on both sides. There is no case, no interesting political argument about immigration, affirmative action, gun control, abortion, where you can’t say, “Let me tell you a story.” And because these stories are a dime a dozen, they're useless as a way of making moral decisions. They are simply acts of persuasion.

AMT: Well, it's interesting because you know as a journalist I do this. You know we get to a bigger story through the prism of one person's experience. Ideally, we're also using statistics to say this is emblematic. But I do this. We look for the heartbeat of a story. Am I wrong to do that?

PAUL BLOOM: If I suggested you stop and you were crazy enough to take my advice, you’d be out of business. People love stories and no one is going to hear you know a 30-minute piece where you outline okay, here's some data from here. Here's some data from here. Stories humanize. They capture our attention. We're storytelling creatures. But—

AMT: But we need context is what you're saying.

PAUL BLOOM: We need context as well. It is perfectly fine to say, “Here's a story about a little girl who was killed at the hands of an illegal immigrant.” But now, let's ask the question: how often does this happen? How often you know how many times have illegal immigrants saved lives? Let's get the balance here. The stories are—they’re never going to go away and they always add flavour but they have to be a beginning. They have to be a sort of a spice you put on something. They can't be the body. They can't be the meat.

AMT: So how would you get us to push rational compassion to the forefront of our everyday lives?

PAUL BLOOM: So there's different answers to that. I think from our everyday lives, simply working harder at recognizing that what feels right and what is right are different things, is an important moral leap. We sometimes do that in other domains. So many people find certain sex acts repugnant, but they think hard and they say okay, this does not turn me on. This kind of grosses me out. But nobody seems hurt by it. So there's no reason to punish people for doing it. And I think we do that for empathy too. We say I'm really drawn towards this cute little girl. I want to give her all my money and not give my money to the scary black people in Africa. But we can step back and say is that the right thing to do or does that just reflect a certain bias? There are practices we can do to make us more compassionate and less empathic. In my book I discuss mindfulness meditation and how that often actually lowers empathy and makes us kinder. And then as a society, I'd like to see a cultural change. So right now in both of our countries, overt appeals to racism are just taboo. Even our worst politicians very rarely just go there. They may dog whistle. They might signal. But they don't say look, you know you've got to do this because it'll help the whites and punish the blacks. That doesn't happen. I'd like to see—because people won't stand for it. Now I’d like to see a similar thing with regard to empathic appeals, where when a politician is asked why do you support this policy? And they say well, let me tell you a story of a little girl that people boo. People say we're not children. Don't throw that at us. Let's hear the real arguments.

AMT: Okay. Interesting. Boo the politicians and kittens. [laughs] See, I'm bringing it right back to the anecdote. You do like kittens, don't you?

PAUL BLOOM: I love kittens. My next book to atone will be in favour of kittens.

AMT: But the point you're making is that we can't solely feel someone's pain and put it on and that we need to focus. We need to actually look at the fact behind what's going on so that we can make better decisions down the road.

PAUL BLOOM: Yes. And the broader point is don't listen to your heart. Your moral feelings, your emotions have been shaped by natural selection but they’ve been shaped to favour your own. They've been shaped in ways that are a mismatch with your contemplative moral feelings. If you want to be a good person, a good parent, a good spouse, a good policymaker, listen to your head instead.

AMT: Paul Bloom, thanks for your thoughts.

PAUL BLOOM: Thank you so much for having me.

AMT: Paul Bloom is a psychology professor at Yale University. His book is called Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. He joined us from New Haven, Connecticut. Let us know what you're thinking as you listen to him. You can tweet us. We’re @thecurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. If you're joining us partway through, you can download the podcast or listen right online.

[Music: Sting]

AMT: And stay with us. In our next half hour, a disruptive discovery of the world's most prolific predator. It's in an ocean near you. Don't worry, it's microscopic. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Researchers uncover what may be the ocean's most prolific predator

Guests: Patrick Keeling, Ford Doolittle

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

[Music: The Disruptors theme]

AMT: That's right, we're still disrupting and for this next installment from our ongoing project, The Disruptors, we are venturing into a field that is always ripe for a fresh disruption. In science, there are new discoveries every day. Some are big ideas that disrupt entire ways of thinking and we'll hear a bit more about those in a few moments. But first, sometimes the discovery of something very small can disrupt the way we see entire oceans and ecosystems. That's exactly what happened this past November when researchers at the University of British Columbia revealed they captured some elusive single-celled creatures from the ocean. And not just any creatures, they may be small but they pack quite a punch. They are potentially the most prolific predators on our planet. Patrick Keeling was involved in that research. He is an evolutionary microbiologist and a professor in botany and he's joining us from Vancouver. Hello.

PATRICK KEELING: Hello. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Well, what are these creatures? What do they look like? How small are they?

PATRICK KEELING: Well, they're very small. That's one of the reasons we didn't know about them. But by standards in the microbial world, they're actually sort of medium-sized. They're 20 or 30 millionths of a metre long and they're small little guys that swim around with these two projections called flagella that help them swim through the water and they hunt down other microbial cells and eat them in probably very large numbers.

AMT: What do you call them?

PATRICK KEELING: They're called diplonemids. We've known about this group for quite a while as a group. We knew they existed. But it was only recently that anyone paid much attention to them because we didn't know that they were very abundant or ecologically significant. They were more of an evolutionary curiosity. And what happened was about a few years ago, a French group carried out a very large survey of marine diversity. And they just happened to look at marine diversity using a slightly different tool. And all of a sudden, these things that we had been overlooking for decades appeared in huge numbers. And so, we followed that up by wanting to go out and find the actual cells instead of just a sequence of a single molecule. We wanted to see what they look like. Capture a cell, look at it, take pictures of it, watch it under the microscope and hopefully sequence a big chunk of its genome. So we did this by going out to sea and taking water directly out of the deep sea and picking single cells up on a heaving ship under the microscope. It was challenging work.

AMT: So how does the size and complexity of a diplonemid made compare to other tiny life forms?

PATRICK KEELING: Well, most of us are familiar with bacteria and viruses, which are relatively simple and very small. These are actually large complex cells in the case of the microbial world. They're like our cells. They have a nucleus and they have structures that are similar to our cells. But they're still single cell life forms. They’re very tiny but extraordinarily complex.

AMT: And how common?

PATRICK KEELING: Well, it's sort of hard to say because it's early days yet, but if you pick up water from the ocean and just look at things, they’re so small it's hard to tell them apart. So what ecologists do is they take vast quantities of water from the ocean, they filter it down and they start sequencing a particular gene from what organisms lived in that water. And then looking at how abundant the genes from different kinds of organisms are. And if you do that—this was the big surprise, was that these things are present—millions and millions of them in small volumes of water. So getting a whole census of the ocean is impossible. There's too much diversity. And these things tend to live in deep water which is hard to get at. So right now, it would be hard to say. All we can say is that other groups of organisms that we thought were the most abundant predators in the ocean, it turns out that a single species of these diplonemids is far more abundant than an entire kingdom that we previously thought was abundant.

AMT: That's so exciting, isn't it?

PATRICK KEELING: This isn't the first time this has happened, strangely. There's been a few cases in the past not too long ago, where a very abundant organism we didn't even know it existed. So the most abundant organism on the planet is probably a bacteria called Prochlorococcus and it was only discovered 20 years ago.

AMT: There was just that—people didn't know what to look for. When you shift what you're looking for, suddenly it's everywhere.

PATRICK KEELING: And that's one of the important things about this, is actually capturing photographs because the next step in this research would be to get them into culture so you can study how they function in the lab. But to get something into culture without knowing what it looks like is obviously challenging. So by having photographs of them, we could go back to people who are experts in cultivation and say here's what you're looking for and they were very surprised because they had a different idea of what they would be looking for in their heads until they actually saw them.

AMT: So what role does this creature play in the ecosystem?

PATRICK KEELING: Well, microbial life tends to be at the basis of the ecosystem and so it tends to form the foundation for every ecosystem on the planet. In this particular instance, these are things that are eating other microbes, so they’re sort of, you can imagine like one step up in the network of things eating other things. So they're probably eating a lot of bacteria. And one of the things we learned is they're also eating larger, more complex cells. They're probably eating a lot of photosynthetic things that are soaking up light and turning it into chemical energy in the ocean. So these are an important step in that whole process where they take that primary production and they move it into the food web where ultimately it works its way up to things that we're more familiar with.

AMT: And this is—you say this is like the biggest predator.

PATRICK KEELING: Well, not the biggest. It’s one of the smallest.

AMT: Well, I mean I guess in numbers.

PATRICK KEELING: Yeah. Based on the information we have right now, if you counted up organisms in the ocean that are preying on other organisms, these are the most abundant.

AMT: So why is it important to understand the ocean at the microbial level?

PATRICK KEELING: Well, the ocean is very important to the whole planet. We all have some idea about this. It’s sometimes referred to as the lungs of the planet. I'd say it's also the liver and the pancreas and everything else because it's where most of the major chemical reactions that sort of change the atmosphere and the oceans themselves and even the land are taking place. To give you an idea, we're all familiar with photosynthesis and rainforests and tundra and boreal forests and so forth. But actually half of the photosynthesis on the planet takes place in the ocean and virtually all of that is being done by microbes plus all of the other important nutrient cycles—nitrogen, iron, sulfur—they're all being carried out by these microbial webs. So right now, this is changing. We know the climate is changing and it's changing the population of things that are in the ocean and it’s changing what they do. And these systems are what's keeping us alive. And so, it's very important that we understand how they work before we can understand how they're changing and then what those changes are going to mean to us. Very small differences in a microbial ecosystem could profoundly impact the life that we're more familiar with. But right now, it's like we have this complicated machine and we don't really know how it works or what the parts are that make it up.

AMT: So when we think about ocean life, we think about the large creatures we can see and we think about how they might be vulnerable to changes. But it's perhaps the smaller ones at the very beginning of that food chain.

PATRICK KEELING: Well, absolutely. If you think about an ecosystem being sort of like a pyramid—which isn't really true, but if you just think about it for a second—if you take the foundations of that out, the whole thing collapses or if you knock the top off, it has a slightly different top. I'm not saying that whales and polar bears and whatnot aren't important. I love the natural world and I think all these things are important. But what really worries me is changes at the very base of an ecosystem that then work their way right through the whole system and screw the whole machine up. Those are the ones that we should be paying the most attention to because those are the ones that are going to have the worst, most catastrophic impacts.

AMT: Well, the federal government has promised to rewrite the Federal Fisheries Act. How can legislation be worded so that it protects even the things we don't yet know or fully understand in our oceans?

PATRICK KEELING: Well, that's a fascinating question. And when I teach this to undergraduates, one of the questions I ask them is if you look at the entire UN red list of protected species, there’s you know tens of thousands of species that are protected at different levels. Try to guess how many of those are not animals and plants. And the answer is I think it's about 20. But those ones are all macroscopic as well, lichens or things like that. So it's a preposterous notion that there isn't a single important microbe that is endangered on the planet right now. But we have no way of dealing with that because our concept of biodiversity is almost entirely restricted to things that we can see and touch and feel. That's how we evolve. That's how we interact with the natural world. Microbes are very abstract but it doesn't mean they're not important and it doesn't mean that our lives don't depend on them.

AMT: And so how vulnerable is this creature to climate change?

PATRICK KEELING: We would have no idea. The microbial ecosystems in general will survive almost anything that we can do to them in some form. But they will change and that change might impact us more than it impacts them. So I'm not saying that diplonemids are going to go extinct. They almost certainly won't, do to our activity. But if the whole ecosystem shifts in some way that affects larger organisms down the line, that could have bad impacts for us.

AMT: So if we see it through that prism, it becomes a little more acute.

PATRICK KEELING: Well, I grew up as an evolutionary biologist and it's only in the last 10 years or so that I started to work with ecologists which has been a fascinating experience for me intellectually, but it's also actually made me a little bit more alarmed about the state of the world because when you hang out with microbial ecologists and they start talking about how the oceans change and when you really start to understand what that means, it's a little bit scary. But to me, the fact that you know a fairly small group can go out in the ocean and find such an abundant organism for the first time in this day and age, points out to me that we need more exploration. We can't just sit back and think well, we have all the major questions. Now let's start answering them. We need to go out and actually look for some more major questions because the truth is we don't really know what they are yet.

AMT: So if we're going to talk about who's looking at ideas in science that maybe make us think a little differently, before I let you go, I'm going to ask you to help me introduce my next guest: Ford Doolittle, a fellow scientist. I understand you did your PhD under him at Dalhousie University.

PATRICK KEELING: Yes, that's right. I did.

AMT: Would you call him a disruptor?

PATRICK KEELING: Absolutely. Both personally and for science at large. A few years ago, someone challenged me to say what was so special about Ford and his work? And off the top of my head, what came to mind immediately was that like for instance, you know our recent work on the diplonemids was interesting and useful, but we were discovering something that was already there to be found. Anyone could have found it. But what I really like about Ford is that he's actually famous for ideas rather than just discoveries. So he's thinking of things in a way that no one else is really thinking about. And if you really want to disrupt science, you actually throw out an idea that changes the whole way we interpret entire branches of science. That's what for me, that's what makes Ford's work so special.

AMT: And what would you point to as a good example of him challenging the status quo in science?

PATRICK KEELING: Well, I guess that's the second thing is that Ford didn't just do this once. Ford's had an entire career of again and again and again changing the way people think about things. I'm relatively young, so in my career, probably the most dramatic effect in the way that we think has got to do with the tree of life. So many years ago, it became clear that genes were moving around between organisms that weren't related. Probably the most familiar to people is the transfer of genes that confer a resistance to antibiotics between different bacteria. And so the gene for resistance can move from bacteria to bacteria. And this is obviously a really big problem for medicine because we'd like to be able to use these drugs, but the resistance evolves so fast because it can jump from cell to cell. What we didn't realize at first is that this is actually true of many, many genes and not just the ones that are quite so obvious to us. So lots of genes conferring all sorts of functions are flowing back and forth between different species of bacteria all the time. And one of the things that Ford started to point out was that if all the genes in a genome of an organism have had different evolutionary histories, then we have to rethink our whole concept of a tree of life or what does the tree of life actually mean?

AMT: This is the Darwinian tree of life that’s trying to explain—just remind us what the tree of life is.

PATRICK KEELING: The tree of life explains the relationships between all living things. So the concept is that you can trace back all species on the planet through a branching pattern back to a single common ancestor some time billions of years ago. And it’s been a powerful metaphor for how evolutionary biologists think about the relationships between organisms and how evolutionary processes take place.

AMT: And Ford Doolittle talked about some of these branches actually turning back on themselves, right, more like a web.

PATRICK KEELING: Yeah. So if you imagine the tree of life with a whole bunch of branches grafted from one to the other, or some parts of branches grafted around, if you think about that process going on again and again and again over time, then it becomes more like a network than a tree.

AMT: Was he ahead of his time in seeing this?

PATRICK KEELING: Oh, I believe so, yeah. Well, I mean we were just coming to grips with working out what the tree looked like about the time that I was doing my PhD. There was a lot of arguing about how this branch was related to that branch and so forth. And it's not to say that all of that arguing was totally meaningless but the concept that we were you know thinking a little bit too narrowly about this problem and how those disagreements translated back into real biology was a real eye opener.

AMT: Well, that's a great introduction. So I'll say goodbye to you and say hello to him.

PATRICK KEELING: Alright.

AMT: Patrick Keeling, evolutionary microbiologist at the University of British Columbia. He's the director of a program in microbial diversity that is funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and he joined us from Vancouver. And we probably don't need much more of an introduction. Ford Doolittle is a molecular evolutionist and a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He was awarded the one million dollar Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering in 2013. At that time, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada called him one of the world's top molecular geneticists. And as you heard from our last guest, Ford Doolittle has a reputation for being a disruptor. He's in Halifax. Hello.

FORD DOOLITTLE: Hello.

AMT: How does that label sit with you? Would you call yourself a disruptor?

FORD DOOLITTLE: Well, I was thinking about that. I don't like to think of myself as a disruptor, especially since we have a large disruptor south of the border who I don’t want to identify with. But I would say I'm more like a member of the loyal opposition. I do want to try to resist the main trends of thought when I think that those are at fault. But I am very much part of the enterprise. I'm a very loyal scientist in that sense. But I guess I am loyal opposition.

AMT: But you want people to think.

FORD DOOLITTLE: Exactly. I think there's not enough thinking going on even within very scientific disciplines where we're vulnerable to bandwagons and we're not really critical enough. I think we're what's called verificationists rather than falsificationists. We keep looking for further reasons to believe what we already believe rather than looking for reasons to doubt what it is that we believe, which is what I think scientists should be primarily doing.

AMT: So when was the first time you realized you might upset someone's way of thinking or upset their apple cart with something you were about to publish?

FORD DOOLITTLE: Well, it was probably the selfish DNA papers that were the most disruptive, I guess.

AMT: So DNA is the blueprint for making a living thing. What was your idea about selfish DNA?

FORD DOOLITTLE: Well, the idea was that—it was based on some facts. It was known for some time that we had more DNA than we needed or that we seemed to need. Some organisms seemed to have a huge amount of DNA more than could be accounted for by what we thought was the size of the genes. So back in the seventies, people started to call this junk DNA. Then in the 1980s, we began to realize that some of this junk comprised what are called transportable elements or jumping genes, pieces of DNA that can make extra copies of themselves and deposit those copies elsewhere in the same chromosomes or different chromosomes in the same organisms. And that many animals’ genomes are made up of thousands and millions of copies of basically the same sequences. So in some ways, it was obvious to me that what's happening is these jumping genes are depositing copies of themselves elsewhere in the genome and furthermore, the thing that wasn't obvious to other people, I guess, was that natural selection would impinge upon that process and select for jumping genes, which were better at jumping and making more copies of themselves just as we might select for parasites within an organism. So that these are essentially parasitic DNA or as we call them, selfish DNAs.

AMT: They're extraneous, in other words.

FORD DOOLITTLE: Yes and I mean they have their own evolutionary agenda. They are subject to natural selection but they are at a level lower than that of the organism in which they live. And the ideal selfish DNA doesn't do any harm to the organism, it just does its own thing and spreads within the organisms because every time a zygote is formed, they hop onto the uncontaminated chromosomes from the other parent.

AMT: But that was something that scientists were deeply attached to another view of what our DNA would be doing, right? That every scrap would serve a useful purpose.

FORD DOOLITTLE: Yes. Well, there have always been, I think, two kind of philosophies in biology. One is what's called the adaptationism or an extreme case, panadaptationism, where you believe that everything that an organism is or does has been honed by natural selection to near perfection. That's something that's obviously not the case when you consider that we have to wear glasses and we have sore backs all the time. But nevertheless, that's the sort of belief that almost everything can be accounted for by natural selection. The other school of thought to which I belong and which is probably still the minority is that stuff happens. There's a lot of accidental consequences or accidental happenings in evolution that are reflected in our genomes and in our biology. Much of our biology is probably needlessly complex because of this kind of evolutionary process.

AMT: You have said we forget how much biology is just history, so we expect it all to make sense.

FORD DOOLITTLE: I mean by that it's not very law-like. A lot of stuff does just happen. So that to explain the properties of an organism, to some extent it’s adapted. Panadaptation is so right. You can explain many of its features because of how they helped its ancestors’ progeny have more progeny. But many of its features have to do with just what was the nature of those ancestors and what was available to be co-opted for some evolutionary purpose at the time? So there's a lot of contingency, a lot of things that just sort of happen in evolution and it's the same as far as I know in human history. I mean I think that historians have, a while back, given up looking for meta-narratives in history and gotten much more into the details of what particular things have happened. And I think there's a lot of what particular things have happened that describe any particular biological situation. That might not be clear, but contingency is a major force in the history of organisms. I mean biology is basically the history of organisms.

AMT: So was there something akin to like a religious belief that was underlying the idea that all the DNA, all our DNA was useful or is useful? A notion that evolution and history are progressing towards sort of an evolutionary promised land?

FORD DOOLITTLE: Yes. Well, I think there is something like that. I mean I don't—it would be very hard and very interesting for a historian of science to try to trace that linkage but certainly before Darwin, you know natural theologians would admire the perfection of organisms because they were made by God. And I think what we need to do is to start moving ourselves away from the notion that we have a unitary theory of evolution and instead recognize that what we have is a kind of an explanatory toolkit, by which I mean the theory of evolution is simply that we can explain the presence of diversity and adaptiveness of living organisms in terms of processes that we currently pretty well understand, in terms of genetics and ecology, and then extrapolating those processes back over four billion years. That's enough to explain everything we know. But there are many different processes.

AMT: When did you first fall in love with science?

FORD DOOLITTLE: It wasn’t actually really until high school, I guess. My best friend in high school was the son of a quite famous molecular biologist at the University of Illinois where I grew up and he got me a job washing glassware in his father's lab in the summer times. And I found it a fascinating place. I mean it had this kind of atmosphere of an emergency ward where people would rush in screaming about this latest result and they would be working round the clock and it was just a very exciting place. And in those days, there were some really exciting questions like what is a gene? How does a gene work? How are genes controlled? I mean basic questions that we didn't know the answers to. I very soon got the impression—which I still have and which I do believe I've imparted on my students—and that's what I'm perhaps proudest of, is that science is you know a very important human activity. It's something that our species should engage in for its own sake but it's you know it’s worth living for.

AMT: And when did you decide that you should turn it on its head? That you should question? Where did that come from?

FORD DOOLITTLE: Well, in some ways I think it's just a normal scientific activity. I mean you know when somebody proposes an experiment, you want to say well, what are going to be your controls here? How are you going to show that when you get the result you expect that it proves what you mean rather than something else that it might prove? So I think looking for alternative explanations for a given result is part of the core of science. But I think we often don't do that enough. And so I guess I have seen it as my job to try to look for other possible explanations for results, not at the micro level but sort of more of the larger interpretive level.

AMT: So is it the political climate that sort of has shifted scientific thinking and research into what you talk about—just people wanting to verify as opposed to wanting to—

FORD DOOLITTLE: Yes. I think that's true. I mean I think I'm not particularly fond of the way science is done these days. There’s a rather too much strategic planning and rather too much emphasis on translational research of the kind that you know that emphasis would not have funded Patrick's work. And I think that's kind of antithetical to the way science should best work and it does tend to mean that you know if you're going to get funded to do research, you have to hype what you do in terms of how it will advance what pretty much everybody thinks is the direction of the field because otherwise, they're not going to fund you because they'll regard you as a disruptor, I guess. Certainly, when I was Patrick’s age, you could pretty much write your grant saying this is an important question and I want to find out the answer. And that's all you really had to say. Nowadays, you have to justify it by other economic or other criteria and it tends to—the way funding is going, it tends to be more and more top-down directed, strategic-focused research around specific problems, and the trouble is that it brings in a whole different skill set. It means that your people skills are more important than your intellectual skills in some respects and it also means that people who may not actually understand the science very well are in the position of having to decide what science should and should not be done.

AMT: What's the danger if we go further down the path that we're on now then?

FORD DOOLITTLE: Well, I mean I think one thing that it will probably do is discourage the best and the brightest from going into science in the first place. I've always kind of thought that scientists are motivated by two things. One is that you actually do want to discover something about the world out there. But do you want to be known to be the person who discovered that thing about the world out there? I think there's an ego involved. They certainly—I have that. And I think the more we have governmentally managed top-down structured research programs, scientists simply become employees for those programs and the really creative people will perhaps go into the arts or something.

AMT: Ford Doolittle, thank you.

FORD DOOLITTLE: Goodbye and it was a great pleasure talking to you, and nice to hear from Patrick.

AMT: That is Ford Doolittle, professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q. Guest Host Chris dela Torre talks to Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones about his candid new memoir. It's called Lonely Boy. It's about how he survived abuse, addiction and playing in punk’s most notorious band. Remember you can always take The Current with you. Just go on the CBC Radio app. You can find that free at the App Store or on Google Play. And we were talking about free admission to Canada's national parks at the start of this program—free admission all year in 2017. We want to end things with some music inspired by one national park. This is Victoria, BC singer-songwriter Aidan Knight’s song, “Jasper”. This version was recorded with musician Dan Mangan on location in the Rocky Mountains. You can hear them there. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Music: “Jasper” – Aidan Knight]

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January 4, 2017 full episode transcript

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