by Bill Nye
The principle applies to other pressing issues. We cannot confine all unvaccinated people to quarantine at their homes until they are vaccinated. Instead, we have to manage the problem from the bottom up and with the orthogonal flow of time. The same holds true for your own individual contributions to the great solutions of the world’s great problems. I admit that I, too, sometimes get whelmed (somewhat short of overwhelmed) by all the tasks ahead. But then I recall the pyramid of design, shift my perspective, think of it as a stack of tasks, and assign urgency to move from the design vertex to the finished product at the top.
When it comes to the task of procurement, be it groceries or laboratory glassware, I am continually making lists of items to shop for. It is a small and eminently manageable problem. Within each list is an implied sense of priority. There are groceries that must be purchased today, or I’ll have nothing to eat for dinner. There are grocery store items that aren’t edible, like paper towels and laundry detergent. Then, there are items to be acquired from the hardware store or online—important but less urgent. Each item is nested or placed according to not only where it will be acquired but when, both when I’ll find it as I route myself through the store and when I may really need it. It’s a small exercise that simplifies my shopping and ultimately reminds me of how a nerd like me accomplishes anything. I do all this without thinking, and I’m sure you do, too. You already have an instinct for everyday measured urgency. All you have to do is learn to scale it up and apply it to tasks that you probably don’t think about that way—yet.
The key to the pyramid and the orthogonal time coordinates is that we nerds can break any task, tiny or huge, into what I might call tasklettes. In the context of the auto industry, I summarized the four levels of the upside-down pyramid as design, procurement, construction, marketing. For evaluating measured response and measured urgency, we need to reinterpret the levels more explicitly in terms of time.
■Identify the problem (e.g., we need water for a village or valley).
■Design a solution (e.g., we need a properly placed dam).
■Procure the support and the resources (e.g., get the local government and the villagers to embrace the idea and buy the concrete, rebar, and penstock actuators).
■Get it done (e.g., build the dam).
This list is very much like the upside-down design pyramid. It starts with nerds seeing the problem in a scientific or technical way, and it often means doing all four of these things in overlapping sequence, like a world-changing plate spinner. In order to build the dam, you have to have support of the people. You also need the people to see a dam as a solution to their water and agricultural needs. And ultimately, you sure as hell need the people to build the damn dam thing. You can always start by evaluating whether the action you want to take, or the cause you want to support, has cleared the first two levels. Does it address a specific problem? Does it describe a specific solution? If so, it can move up the hierarchy of urgency. (Arguing with strangers on social media is never, ever going to get past these filters. If you have that inclination, do something else immediately.) For any project that aims to address the higher levels, see if it has already completed the first two. If not, you are dealing with an overreaction, a premature attempt to build results without putting in the difficult foundation work.
Fundamentally, we have to embrace the idea that all our tasks, even the most enormous ones—addressing climate change, providing clean water, supplying reliable renewable electricity, and opening access to electronic information for all—can get done by breaking them down into manageable taskettes and filtering them orthogonally, by urgency. That is the way that good impulses turn into workable policies and life-changing projects. Nerds have to lead, to show the world what we can accomplish when we set the right goals, equip ourselves with the right information, and act on the right measured rhythm. And if we make some mistakes along the way, well, nerds have a great system for dealing with those, as well. Read on!
CHAPTER 20
A Mind Is a Wonderful Thing to Change
In 1987, Carl Sagan was addressing a meeting of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry when he said something that has stuck with me over the years: “In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
Changing your mind. What a powerful idea! The possibility of change is essential to maintaining an honest, open view of reality. If you truly want to apply the nerd standards and find the best solutions, you have to be ready to give up a flawed position in response to new evidence. That principle is so simple to praise yet so difficult to practice. Whether because of pride, ego, or some hard-wired ancient instinct, we connect changing opinions with being wrong and thereby being weak. But here’s the thing: If you want to be right all the time, sometimes you’re going to have to update your views. You know it. I definitely know it, because I recently changed my mind about a big scientific idea—and I did it in a very public way.
In the first edition of my 2014 book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, I have a chapter about GMOs. At the time, my attitude toward them was not very positive, though not for the most common reasons. I had no reason to doubt that modified foods were and are safe to eat. Researchers have fed engineered corn and soybeans to lab rats and monitored their well-being. Not to creep you out, but researchers perform careful autopsies to see if the animals suffered from unusual rates of tumors or other medical anomalies. Those tests have revealed no evidence of harm from eating genetically modified foods—none. So I’ve long been confident that people won’t suffer any harm, either. No, I was concerned about the unpredictable effect of GMOs on ecosystems.
My skepticism was rooted in ideas I’ve been thinking about since that first Earth Day in 1970, when I became aware of how easily humans can upset the balance of nature. This was the era of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us. Rachel Carson was a very influential marine biologist; these two books were bestsellers and are still discussed today. Whatever you or historians may think of Carson in retrospect, in the 1960s she had an important cautionary message about poisoning our environment. I took her deeply cautionary message seriously. Since we cannot know exactly how our actions are going to affect the environment, I reasoned, we need to be extremely careful about introducing any major change. That caution certainly seemed to apply to the widespread planting of genetically modified crops. I was worried about unintended consequences.
I conjured a scenario in which scientists engineered a plant that is resistant to a certain pest caterpillar, for example. The modified version of the plant might make a protein that the caterpillar finds toxic; this is very close to how a real crop called Bt corn works. (It’s named for Bacillus thuringiensis.) As a result, the caterpillar and butterfly population goes way down around the farmland where people are planting the new, resistant crop. All well and good, except what if there is a bat that relies on those butterflies for food along its nightly flight path? When the butterflies go away, the bats change their behavior. Maybe some of them starve. Either way, they no longer reach their preferred destination: a nearby lake where they normally eat vast numbers of mosquitoes. Then the mosquito population at the lake goes wild, and those mosquitoes then spread diseases to humans and animals all around the region.
It’s not an unrealistic scenario. These kinds of ecological domino effects happen all the time in nature. My argument was that you cannot know any organism well enough to anticipate the consequences. It gave me pause.
I was also struck by the compelling idea that we already have enough food to feed everyone in the world, even without genetically modified (GM) crops. The problem is food
distribution rather than supply. Meanwhile, I was watching all this public controversy over genetically modified foods. A lot of people don’t want to eat them. Some farmers were upset about intellectual property rights—about who owns seeds that are uniquely engineered to fight thrips or corn borers or caterpillars or some other pests. So I reasoned, maybe we don’t need GM foods and don’t need to spend government dollars issuing patents and defending the legal rights of corporations that want to create them. I deliberated over these points with my esteemed book editor Corey Powell, thought through my argument, and wrote all about it in Undeniable.
Then some things happened that made me start to rethink my position. In December 2014, I went to a public debate about genetically modified food in New York City. It was just a few weeks after my book had come out, and I was surprised by what I heard. On the skeptical, anti-GMO side was Margaret (Mardi) Mellon from the Center for Food Safety. I had met Mardi a few years before, when she was the agriculture policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Her argument centered on sustainability: GM crops, she claimed, have not cut the use of insecticide and have only increased the use of herbicides. Mardi raised some interesting questions, to be sure. But my impression was that her arguments were overwhelmed by the responses from Robb Fraley, the chief technology officer at Monsanto. He’s one of the guys who invented plants engineered to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate, and I was impressed both by his technical expertise and his obvious environmental concern. Afterward I spoke further with both Mardi and Robb. I wanted to process all this new information.
Robb invited me to Monsanto to see what they do there. I paid my own way and headed to St. Louis. I put a lot of questions directly to the Monsanto researchers, and I found their answers highly persuasive. I tried my best to put emotions and assumptions aside and to gather as much high-quality information as I could about the true potential of genetically modified foods. Along the way, I learned some surprising things. Using modern gene-sequencing machines, they can know every gene in a plant’s DNA within about 10 minutes. They can assay both the natural and the engineered genes and then determine exactly how those genes will behave and interact with other organisms (like insect pests) once the plant is out in the field.
Robb showed me how careful the Monsanto agronomists are when they raise their modified test crops—first in greenhouses, then in controlled refuges—and the discipline with which they plant and monitor those test crops. I found the level of specificity remarkable and satisfying; I realized that there was far less uncertainty in the process than I had believed. Robb and the staff of scientists at Monsanto also made the compelling point that all farming is unnatural. Farms would not exist without humans pushing around plows and tills and, more recently, spraying herbicides and pesticides. We’ve been altering crops through careful breeding for thousands of years. There are no “natural” farms and there are no “wild” crops. We can plant and harvest GMO crops, or we can plant and harvest other crops that we’ve created using traditional techniques, without these high-tech modifications. Either way, our farms are—from nature’s point of view (if she has one)—inherently artificial.
I ended up rewriting that chapter in Undeniable for the paperback edition. In the new version, I concluded that my concerns about the ecosystem were a manageable problem and that genetically modified foods could be an important part of the future food supply. I kept myself honestly open to new information and . . . I changed my mind.
I achieved a fuller understanding of what the modification techniques actually do. The scientists at Monsanto and the other companies and labs have found ways to incorporate genes that enable plants to create proteins that are normally found in soil bacteria. One of these proteins targets a common pest, the larval form (caterpillar) of the European corn borer. If the caterpillar eats the modified corn, that protein accumulates and crystalizes in the caterpillar’s stomach. The pest dies. Corn borers never eat soil bacteria, but after the scientists are done, the borers cannot eat the corn, either. The corn has been modified to make the same deadly-to-caterpillars protein. Since the caterpillars can no longer eat the corn plants, they go looking someplace else for food and leave the farm field alone. That’s good.
Still, killer proteins sound a bit scary. Here’s an important thing to know. Organic farmers spray their crop plants with a liquid form of the exact same protein, Bacillus thuringiensis (that’s Bt) toxin. It’s an organic pesticide in the sense that it is made by a naturally occurring organism. The only difference between what the organic farmer and GMO farmer are doing is that the former is spraying the chemical onto the plants rather than having the plants make it themselves. The modified plant is better at resisting the corn borer, and it requires less spraying. The protein gets into every part of the plant, but it does not affect us. The corn borers, on the other hand, are more than a little bothered by it; it kills them. Look, I’m over 60 years old. I’ve eaten popcorn every day, sometimes twice a day, for most of the past 2 decades that corn has been genetically modified. I can’t be sure when you might be reading this book, but it’s likely that I popped myself some popcorn last night. I’m not concerned about the GMOs, and I’m comforted by the idea that the kernels were exposed to the lower amount of chemicals.
Another extremely successful genetic modification creates crops that are impervious to glyphosate, a serious-business herbicide. Glyphosate is better known by its brand name, Roundup, a name that people love to hate. Roundup is amazingly effective when it comes to killing plants. When it was invented, two things happened: 1) Everybody was afraid of it, and 2) everybody started using it. Farmers, gardeners, homeowners, everybody uses Roundup because it is so good at killing weeds. But if you put the right gene in your crops—soybeans, cotton, corn—you can use Roundup to kill the weeds without hurting the crops. The resistance gene was first isolated in petunias, of all organisms. It’s amazing. Farmers who plant these “Roundup Ready” crops do a good bit of spraying to get rid of the surrounding weeds. But without Roundup Ready crops they’d be spraying some herbicide anyway, and they’d be doing a lot more tilling: turning the weeds over to kill them by exposing their roots to sunshine. Farmers need to control weeds somehow, and glyphosate has proven to be a boon.
Scientists who work on genetically modified crops claim that spraying Roundup is actually better for the environment than traditional weed-control methods. Their explanation is that tilling dries out the soil and kills off a lot of the natural soil ecosystem. They also assert that, unlike traditional herbicides, glyphosate breaks down quickly in the environment. It completely disappears after a few weeks. I try hard not to accept bold statements like that without some verification, so I took a look at the peer-reviewed literature. I’ve read papers and I’m satisfied that it’s true. The genetic diversity of microbes and multi cellular soil species (worms, insects, larval insects) is much higher in Roundup-treated crop fields than in tilled fields. And glyphosate compounds are a type of salt that does indeed chemically decompose. In that important sense, at least, the Roundup fields are healthier than untreated, organic, tilled fields. That’s a consequence I hadn’t anticipated, in a good way. These features of GMO farming also helped change my mind.
Even with all this encouraging information, I still had a couple of concerns gnawing (corn-boring?) at me. In my earlier hypothetical scenario, I described a hypothetical species of bats that wouldn’t have enough butterflies to eat because of the introduction of GM crops. Something kind of like the first step of that story really has been happening. In spraying their modified crops with Roundup, farmers have been killing off a lot of milkweed plants, common weeds that grow on and around farms. Monarch butterflies lay their eggs on milkweeds, and when the larvae hatch, they feed on milkweed leaves—and milkweed only. It turns out that milkweed cannot tolerate even a little bit of glyphosate. So, farmers spray their fields; milkweed goes away; monarchs lose their habitat. Roundup Ready plants are part of the reason why the monarch population has dropped by
up to 80 percent in recent years. It’s a textbook example of unintended consequences.
But there’s good news. The monarch population is bouncing back. At an April 2015 meeting in Minneapolis called the “Monarch Venture,” a group of ecologists, activists, and businesspeople got together to address the plight of the monarchs. I went there and listened all day. What was most exciting was that everyone attending the event seemed to be there to listen, too. The hippies and the corporate pigs talked to one another, like open-minded nerds, and they found common ground. They got together and created a plan based on the best science they had. They agreed that farmers would leave refuges of milkweed along monarch “flyways,” natural highways in the sky where the wind blows south to north, aiding monarchs and birds in their annual migrations. The “Venturers” space the milkweed refuges close enough to one another to sustain migrating monarchs. Last year, the monarch butterfly population wintering in Mexico was nearly four times what it had been the year before. Good weather undoubtedly helped, but it’s encouraging nevertheless.
At the end of all my investigations, I also did an internal reality check. Was I swayed by all the attention I got from the folks at Monsanto? I really don’t think so. I watched carefully. Everything I saw at Monsanto, and everything I learned doing a lot of additional research, tells me that the people there genuinely are trying to help farmers improve their yield. Of course they are trying to make money in the process. So are farmers. So is the guy at the organic fruit stand. Financial incentive doesn’t tell you who is right and who is wrong. The meaningful way to approach the issue is broadly, openly, honestly, with everything all at once. And that is how I changed my mind.
When I wrote my new chapter and announced that I had rethought my position on genetically modified crops, the scientific community was excited. I still get emails about it. A few researchers were specifically pleased to have me as an ally in promoting the benefits of GM foods. Many more wrote to tell me how cool they thought it was that Bill Nye changed his mind based on a reconsideration of the scientific evidence. They loved seeing that change is really possible.
