Vol. 25 - Curves bend
The world is warming, species are vanishing, and things look grim. But here's the thing about scary trends: they can change direction. From smallpox to the ozone layer, we've bent curves before.
Late last summer, a former student invited me to give a one-hour talk to her biology students, who were leaving for university the next year. The topic was biodiversity, climate change, and infectious disease.
We covered a lot of ground: the sixth mass extinction, what climate change means for ecosystems, what increased temperatures do when our physiology cannot infinitely buffer us, how many more viruses may start circulating when animals species will move to track their environments.
We talked about where these things will happen. Who pollutes. Who bears the costs. We talked about floods, Lyme disease, COVID, and the causes of the death of Alexander the Great.
But it was, overall, a bit of a downer, and until two days before the due date, I was struggling with the ending. It is irresponsible to stop at a description of how bad things are: as researchers, it is on us to pair this with a vision for what is coming and our place in it. Intellectual rigor is our tool, but neutrality is the enemy.
And so I decided to end my talk on a simple idea: curves bend.
We talked about the ozone layer, the discoveries of vaccines and antibiotics, the eradication of smallpox and rinderpest, and the surprising result that measures meant to protect us against COVID-19 led to the disappearance of some influenza genotypes.
I did not approach this in a Factfulness style, wherein if things are better in aggregate, then things are better period. I find this approach distasteful, and I am genuinely afraid that it leads to discounting the situations in which things are, at the individual, atomic level, much worse.
Instead, we discussed the reasons why curves bend.
A common feature is that they do not bend on their own. Whether they bend through a happy accident (Fleming failing to properly close a growth medium dish with bacterial cultures), curiosity and a willingness to write things down (Snow mapping the cholera cases around the Broad Street pump), or a concerted global effort, the momentum needed to bend the curve start earlier.
It starts when we have enough.
When someone realizes that the status quo is atrocious, and must be changed.
That curves describing mass mortality and global environmental collapse bend at all is proof that we are still willing to take Hume’s sledgehammer to the is-ought dichotomy.
The world is warming (and it ought not to). Species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate (and they ought not to). The benefit of vaccines is not shared equitably around the world (and it ought to).
The way to make these curves bend is to realize that the way the world is, is not the way it ought to be: we are justified in making these prescriptive statements based on descriptive ones.
Curves bend. When we demand they do.