It was almost difficult to walk as I made my way down the hall. As if the alien ship that hovered in the sky halfway around the world was superimposed on my vision. I blinked rapidly, breathing deeply, as I walked. “Hey boss?” I slowly pushed open the door to his office, half-entering the room. “Uh… I know this is kinda awkward…but would it be possible to withdraw my resignation letter?”
Jeremy P. Shapiro, Case Western Reserve University
Cold spells often bring climate change deniers out in force on social media, with hashtags like #ClimateHoax and #ClimateScam. Former President Donald Trump often chimes in, repeatedly claiming that each cold snap disproves the existence of global warming.
From a scientific standpoint, these claims of disproof are absurd. Fluctuations in the weather don’t refute clear long-term trends in the climate.
Yet many people believe these claims, and the political result has been reduced willingness to take action to mitigate climate change.
Why are so many people susceptible to this type of disinformation? My field, psychology, can help explain – and help people avoid being misled.
Close examination of the arguments made by climate change deniers reveals the same mistake made over and over again. That mistake is the cognitive error known as black-and-white thinking, also called dichotomous and all-or-none thinking. As I explain in my book “Finding Goldilocks,” black-and-white thinking is a source of dysfunction in mental health, relationships – and politics.
People are often susceptible to it because in many areas of life, dichotomous thinking does something helpful: It simplifies the world.
Binaries are easy to handle because there are only two possibilities to consider. When people face a spectrum of possibilities and nuance, they have to exert more mental effort. But when that spectrum is polarized into pairs of opposites, choices are clear and dramatic.
This mental labor-saving device is practical in many everyday situations, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities – and the climate is complicated.
Sometimes, people divide the spectrum in asymmetric ways, with one side much larger than the other. For example, perfectionists often categorize their work as either perfect or unsatisfactory, so even good and very good outcomes are lumped together with poor ones in the unsatisfactory category. In dichotomous thinking like this, a single exception can tip a person’s view to one side. It’s like a pass/fail grading system in which 100% earns a pass and everything else gets an F.
With a grading system like this, it’s not surprising that opponents of climate action have found ways to reject global warming research, despite the overwhelming evidence.
Here’s how they do it:
Climate change deniers simplify the spectrum of possible scientific consensus into two categories: 100% agreement or no consensus at all. If it’s not one, it’s the other.
A 2021 review of thousands of climate science papers and conference proceedings concluded that over 99% of studies have found that burning fossil fuels warms the planet. That’s not good enough for some skeptics. If they find one contrarian scientist somewhere, they categorize the idea of human-caused global warming as controversial and conclude that there is no basis for action.
Powerful economic interests are at work here: The fossil fuel industry has funded disinformation campaigns for years to create this kind of doubt about climate change, despite knowing that their products cause it and the consequences. Members of Congress have used that disinformation to block or weaken federal policies that could slow climate change.
In another example of black-and-white thinking, deniers argue that if global temperatures are not increasing at a perfectly consistent rate, there is no such thing as global warming.
However, complex variables never change in a uniform way; they wiggle up and down in the short term even when exhibiting long-term trends. Most business data, such as revenues, profits and stock prices, do this too, with short-term fluctuations contained in long-term trends.
Mistaking a cold snap for disproof of climate change is like mistaking a bad month for Apple stock for proof that Apple isn’t a good long-term investment. This error results from homing in on a tiny slice of the graph and ignoring the rest.
Climate change deniers also mistakenly cite correlations below 100% as evidence against human-caused global warming. They triumphantly point out that sunspots and volcanic eruptions also affect the climate, even though evidence shows both have very little influence on long-term temperature rise in comparison to greenhouse gas emissions.
In essence, deniers argue that if fossil fuel burning is not all-important, it’s unimportant. They miss the gray area in between: Greenhouse gases are indeed just one factor warming the planet, but they’re the most important one and the factor humans can influence.
As increases in global temperatures have become obvious, some climate change skeptics have switched from denying them to reframing them.
Their oft-repeated line, “The climate has always been changing,” typically delivered with an air of patient wisdom, is based on a striking lack of knowledge about the evidence from climate research.
Their reasoning is based on an invalid binary: Either the climate is changing or it’s not, and since it’s always been changing, there is nothing new here and no cause for concern.
However, the current warming is on par with nothing humans have ever seen, and intense warming events in the distant past were planetwide disasters that caused massive extinctions – something we do not want to repeat.
As humanity faces the challenge of global warming, we need to use all our cognitive resources. Recognizing the thinking error at the root of climate change denial could disarm objections to climate research and make science the basis of our efforts to preserve a hospitable environment for our future.
Jeremy P. Shapiro, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychological Sciences, Case Western Reserve University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Joshua Warrick, Penn State; David DeGraff, Penn State, and Monika Joshi, Penn State
Cancer is an evolutionary disease. The same forces that turned dinosaurs into birds turn normal cells into cancer: genetic mutations and traits that confer a survival advantage.
Evolution in animals is largely driven by mutations in the DNA of germ cells – the sperm and egg that fuse to form an embryo. These mutations may confer traits that differ from those of the offspring’s parents such as larger paws, sharper teeth or lighter hair color. If the change is beneficial, like a mutation that lightens the hair of a rabbit living in a snowy climate, the animal is better able to survive, mate and pass on its mutated gene to the next generation. Such changes accumulate over millions of years, eventually turning, for example, dinosaurs into bluebirds.
Cancer arises by these same evolutionary pressures, but at the level of individual cells within a person’s body. Instead of animals fighting for survival in a harsh environment, cells compete for space and nutrients. Because different organs are composed of different kinds of cells, cancers arising from different organs differ from one another in appearance and behavior and in how well they respond to treatment.
We are a team of oncologists, pathologists and translational scientists who work together to study how cancers evolve. We believe that understanding evolution is key to understanding how cancer arises and how to treat it.
Human cells are normally in a constant state of death and renewal. Old cells die and are replaced by new ones. These phases of death and renewal are usually orderly, with cells cooperating in a complex process that provides them with proper nutrition and replaces them at a constant rate, maximizing the overall function of the organ they make up.
Mutations disrupt this orderly process. Changes to the cell’s DNA alter the proteins that comprise the cell’s structure and govern its behavior, sometimes in ways that lead it to duplicate itself faster than its neighbors, resist normal death signals and sequester nutrients for itself.
The immune system attacks and kills mutant cells in most cases. However, if one survives and duplicates itself many times over, it can form a tumor made of multiple mutant cells. These tumor cells continue to reproduce and mutate, evolving until the tumor ultimately gains the ability to spread throughout the body.
Cancer detected at the earliest stages of this evolution can be treated more effectively than cancer at more advanced stages. This observation underlies the effectiveness of cancer screening programs in reducing cancer rates.
For example, colon cancer begins as a polyp, a small tumor on the interior surface of the colon that is harmless on its own but may eventually evolve and gain the ability to invade the colon wall and spread throughout the body. Precancerous polyps are easily removed during colonoscopy screenings, preventing them from evolving to invasive colon cancer.
In general, cancers from different organs look distinct from one another and contain different proteins. This leads to variations in how they behave.
Under the microscope, cancer looks like a distorted and disorganized version of the normal tissue from which it arose. Cancer cells tend to contain the same set of proteins as those in healthy organs, and likewise continue to perform many of the same functions. For example, prostate cancer contains large amounts of androgen receptors, proteins that bind to testosterone and drives cells to grow and survive. Androgen receptors both enable normal prostate function and drive growth of prostate cancer.
Tumors arising in a given organ also tend to have mutations in the same set of genes, even among different patients. For example, around half of patients with melanoma, an aggressive type of skin cancer, have a mutation in the BRAF gene that enhances cell growth and survival. In contrast, BRAF mutations are rare in lung cancer.
Cancers also differ in the number of mutations they contain, and this number is strongly associated with the organ from which they arise. The prevalence of mutations is also influenced by mutations in genes that control DNA repair. For example, thyroid cancers typically have a low number of mutations while colon cancers have many mutations, a number that is increased dramatically in tumors that have lost genes involved in DNA repair.
Because of these substantial differences in proteins and mutations, tumors from different organs respond differently to treatment. For example, the majority of patients with testicular cancer can be cured with traditional chemotherapy combined with surgery. However, thyroid cancer and melanoma respond minimally to chemotherapy and require different approaches. Radioactive iodine can only be used to treat thyroid cancer because only thyroid cells take up iodine as part of their usual function.
Tumors that contain a large number of mutations often respond well to immunotherapies that help the patient’s immune system attack cancer cells. This is because the immune system sees tumors with more mutations as more foreign and thus mounts a greater response against them. For example, melanoma and bladder and lung cancers respond well to immunotherapy, particularly those that have lost DNA repair function. In contrast, prostate cancer, which often harbors a low number of mutations, has typically responded poorly to immunotherapies.
Treatment can also push cancer to evolve further, gaining advantageous mutations that help them survive and resist therapy.
For example, a subset of lung cancers is driven by mutation in a gene called EGFR. These are treated with a group of drugs that block the protein the mutant EGFR gene encodes for, slowing the cancer’s growth. Lung cancers treated with these drugs often develop a new EGFR mutation called T790M that confers resistance to most EGFR inhibitors. However, researchers have developed another drug that inhibits proteins with T790M and other EGFR mutations more broadly, improving survival for patients with these types of lung cancers.
Similarly, metastatic prostate cancer is often treated with drugs that block androgen receptors, because it depends on them for growth and survival. Over time, the tumors evolve in response to these drugs and develop mutations that change the androgen receptor, massively increase the amount of androgen receptor they produce or, in some cases, completely change their appearance and protein content so they no longer rely on androgen receptors to survive. In these instances, patients require different therapies to overcome resistance.
The fight against cancer is a fight against evolution, the fundamental process that has driven life on Earth since time immemorial. This is not an easy fight, but medicine has made tremendous progress.
Deaths from cancer in the U.S. have declined since the early 1990s. Much of this is attributable to cancer screening programs and recently developed, more effective drugs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved 332 new drug treatments for cancer between 2009 and 2020. More new drugs are on the way.
Joshua Warrick, Associate Professor of Pathology, Penn State; David DeGraff, Associate Professor of Pathology, Penn State, and Monika Joshi, Associate Professor of Hematology and Oncology, Penn State
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
First uttered by Christopher Pike in “The Cage,” the order to engage has been used by many officers, Starfleet and otherwise, over multiple centuries. (No special catchphrases required.) While not intended to be comprehensive, this engaging compilation covers the period from TOS to Enterprise.
Think superherodom is all about buff men and women with superpowers in the prime of their lives? Think again! Introducing the badass grandmas of the Gotham Grannies Gang! Created by illustrator and photographer Susanne Krauss, the artist describes her work as “exploring the limitless possibilities of creativity by capturing the world through the lens and transforming it with AI.”
Of course, a gang of superhero grandmothers would be nothing without a villain!
I just love the positive vibe and wholesomeness of Susanne’s work! Be sure to check out the rest of her amazing series in the picture gallery below!
This is a gang that doesn’t want to deal with individual villains. These girls have realized what it’s all about: If we want to change the world, we don’t have to punch fictional criminals in the face, but rather actively stand up for disadvantaged individuals. Often, there are women and children who are at the forefront of these individuals. The Goodham Grannies want to change that. They are an organization of globally connected women who officially live in nursing homes, but have banded together in a secret organization that meets whenever caregivers aren’t looking.
[Source: @last_place_comics]
[Source: @Danbydraws]