2017-06

MB: Yeah. If I had not gone to college,
I might have kept acting and been
happy like that. But I loved going to
UCLA and doing something that was
very challenging academically. I loved
doing research with adolescents with
special needs—that was seven years of
my life. It was exciting to get my Ph.D.
in 2007. But in terms of time to raise
my two sons, the flexible life of an actor
was better than the long hours of a re-
search professor.

NT: Fast-forward to 2010 and The Big often asked, What do you think about The cast of geeky-scientist
Bang Theory. Who would have guessed [the sexy-scientist stereotype of] the characters in the sitcom The
how popular this show would become? white shirt open with the black bra un- Big Bang Theory includes
MB: Not me! I had never seen it before derneath? And you know, I don’t knock neurobiologist Amy Farrah
I auditioned. women or scientists who want to do Fowler (Mayim Bialik) and
that. For me, that’s not the way that I her boyfriend, physicist Shel-
NT: On the show you play Dr. Amy Far- choose to portray women in science. don Cooper (Jim Parsons).
rah Fowler, who’s a neuroscientist. I don’t think that’s the only way to gen-
MB: She’s actually a neurobiologist … erate interest. It might be the only way Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts
but I get to say neuroscience things. to get a certain population of men inter- the television series StarTalk
ested in women in science… But it’s not on National Geographic;
NT: How much of your professional self a personal goal of mine to further that see clips and full episodes
do you bring to your character? notion of women scientists. at natgeotv.com/StarTalk.
MB: Since the job of an actor is to pre- Find his book StarTalk:
sent a character even if you’ve never Part of my advocacy is to try to put a Everything You Ever Need to
been in that profession, I guess I have fresh face, a positive face, and a female Know About Space Travel,
the easiest job—I don’t have to stretch face on these subjects. I think that a lot Sci-Fi, the Human Race,
that far. of women don’t know the kinds of ca- the Universe, and Beyond
reers that are available to them. They wherever books are sold
NT: I try to imagine someone pitching may think what I did when I was in and at shopng.com/startalk.
the show idea to network executives: elementary school and junior high: I
“Let’s have six scientists, and they’ll talk don’t want to be alone in a lab for the
but you won’t know what they’re talking rest of my life, in a nerdy lab coat and
about, and they’ll crack jokes and they’ll ugly glasses.
laugh, but they won’t explain it to you.”
I think it was low-hanging comedic fruit But then I got older and understood.
because no one had tackled it before. Marine biology, working with animals,
MB: For sure. All the shows that I grew working in the environment—all those
up with were about attractive people, things are science. You like engineering?
and who had sex with who on which You want to do coding? Knock yourself
week. Meanwhile, our show is about the out. There are many STEM careers that
people who watch those shows. involve a lot of variety and a lot of cre-
ativity. And that’s what I think we need
NT: Might there ever be room in your to try and communicate to girls as young
show for a female character who’s more as possible.
sexualized—but also a full-on scientist?
MB: We did an episode where the Berna- NT: That was awesome! That’s like the
dette character, a microbiologist, poses whole show right there.
for a “sexy scientist” photo shoot and MB: Thank you. And I didn’t even have
Amy has a very big problem with it. to take my clothes off to do it.

NT: I remember that episode. Your char- 7+,6 ,17(59,(: '5$:1 )520 $ 0$5&+ ǪǨǩǮ STARTALK TAPING,
acter, Amy, sabotages the photo shoot. WAS EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY.
MB: That’s right. When I do advocacy
for STEM careers for young women, I’m

PHOTO: MONTY BRINTON, CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES

| EXPLORE | BASIC INSTINCTS

IN SEARCH OF A
RED-HOT LOVER

By Patricia Edmonds

Of these three hunky monkeys, which
would you say has the most sex appeal?

That’s easier to answer if you’re a
rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)—
or Constance Dubuc, an evolutionary
biologist at the University of Cambridge.

Since 2012 Dubuc and colleagues
from New York University have stud-
ied more than 250 free-ranging rhesus
macaques at a field site in the Caribbean.
The goal: to learn how face color—which
varies from pale pink to deep red in the
species—affects reproductive success.

To isolate color’s role in attraction,
Dubuc showed each rhesus test subject
two photos of faces in different shades of
red. She found that dark red faces appeal
strongly to females and somewhat to
males—and she did so, in part, by track-
ing eye movements. “It’s the same as with
humans,” she says. “If you see someone
attractive in a bar or on the street, your
eyes will linger a little longer.”

Researchers also logged the monkeys’
courtship acts by face color—and found
that dark red–faced males got more
propositions, from more females, than
medium- or pale-colored males did.

In the best measure of reproductive
success—number of offspring—dark
red–faced females outdo paler ones. But
for males, there’s a twist: To get more
couplings, and thus more offspring, they
must have dominance in their group
as well as a dark red face, Dubuc says.
“Color alone wouldn’t be enough.”

RHESUS MACAQUE

HABITAT/RANGE/CONSERVATION STATUS

The nonhuman primates with the big-
gest geographic range, these monkeys
are plentiful and live in varied habitats,
FKLHƄ\ LQ $VLD

OTHER FACTS

Many bird species sport colors that at-
tract mates; rhesus macaques are one
RI WKH IHZ PDPPDO VSHFLHV WKDW GR

PHOTOS: CONSTANCE DUBUC

2017

Honesty 31
may be
the best
policy, but
deception
and
dishonesty
are part
of being
human.

POLYGRAPH PHOTOGRAPHED AT NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION



Learning to lie is
a natural stage in child
development. Kang Lee,
a psychologist at the
University of Toronto,
has explored how
children become more
sophisticated liars
as they age. Darshan
Panesar, a research
assistant, and nine-
year-old Amelia Tong
demonstrate functional
near-infrared spectros-
copy technology, which
Lee uses in his studies.

THE ART FORGER

Lying for self-aggrandizement

Mark Landis, who says he was a failure as a commercial artist, spent nearly three
decades imitating the works of famous painters, including this one in the style of folk
artist William Matthew Prior. Posing as a philanthropist or Jesuit priest, he donated
them to art museums and enjoyed being treated with respect. “I had never experienced
this before, and I wanted it to go on,” he says. “I have no feelings of conscience about
this. When I was exposed and had to stop, I was very sorry.”



BY YUDHIJIT BHATTACHARJEE // PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN WINTERS

IN THE FALL OF 1989 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
WELCOMED INTO ITS FRESHMAN CLASS A
YOUNG MAN NAMED ALEXI SANTANA, WHOSE
LIFE STORY THE ADMISSIONS COMMITTEE HAD

FOUND EXTRAORDINARILY COMPELLING.

He had barely received any formal schooling. He THE HISTORY OF HUMANKIND is strewn with
had spent his adolescence almost entirely on his crafty and seasoned liars like Hogue. Many are
own, living outdoors in Utah, where he’d herded criminals who spin lies and weave deceptions
cattle, raised sheep, and read philosophy. Run- to gain unjust rewards—as the financier Bernie
ning in the Mojave Desert, he had trained himself Madoff did for years, duping investors out of bil-
to be a distance runner. lions of dollars until his Ponzi scheme collapsed.
Some are politicians who lie to come to power or
Santana quickly became something of a star cling to it, as Richard Nixon famously did when
on campus. Academically too he did well, earn- he denied any role in the Watergate scandal.
ing A’s in nearly every course. His reserved man-
ner and unusual background suffused him with Sometimes people lie to inflate their image—a
an enigmatic appeal. When a suite mate asked motivation that might best explain President
Santana how his bed always seemed to be per- Donald Trump’s demonstrably false assertion
fectly made, he answered that he slept on the that his Inauguration crowd was bigger than Pres-
floor. It seemed perfectly logical that someone ident Barack Obama’s first one. People lie to cover
who had spent much of his life sleeping outdoors up bad behavior, as American swimmer Ryan
would have no fondness for a bed. Lochte did during the 2016 Summer Olympics by
claiming to have been robbed at gunpoint at a gas
Except that Santana’s story was a lie. About 18 station when, in fact, he and his teammates,
months after he enrolled, a woman recognized drunk after a party, had been confronted by
him as somebody she’d known as Jay Hunts- armed security guards after damaging property.
man at Palo Alto High School in California six Even academic science—a world largely inhabit-
years earlier. But even that wasn’t his real name. ed by people devoted to the pursuit of truth—has
Princeton officials eventually learned that he was been shown to contain a rogue’s gallery of deceiv-
actually James Hogue, a 31-year-old who had ers, such as physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, whose
served a prison sentence in Utah for possession purported breakthroughs in molecular semicon-
of stolen tools and bike parts. He was taken away ductor research proved to be fraudulent.
from Princeton in handcuffs.
These liars earned notoriety because of how
In the years since, Hogue has been arrested egregious, brazen, or damaging their falsehoods
several times on theft charges. In November, were. But their deceit doesn’t make them as
when he was arrested for stealing in Aspen, Colo- much of an aberration as we might think. The
rado, he tried to pass himself off as someone else.

36 NAT I O NA L G E O G R A P H I C • J U N E 2017

THE CHAMP

Lying for fun
Jacob Hall’s desire
to become a superhero
inspired a tall tale
that won him the West
Virginia’s Biggest Liar
award and a golden
shovel at last year’s
Vandalia Gathering,
a folk festival in
Charleston. “My stories
would be pretty boring
without deception,”
says Hall, who intends
to spin yarns “for the rest
of my life, if you can
believe that.”

WHY WE LIE 37

lies that impostors, swindlers, and boasting order to get somebody’s money or wealth than to
politicians tell merely sit at the apex of a pyra- hit them over the head or rob a bank.”
mid of untruths that have characterized human
behavior for eons. As lying has come to be recognized as a deeply
ingrained human trait, social science research-
Lying, it turns out, is something that most of ers and neuroscientists have sought to illuminate
us are very adept at. We lie with ease, in ways big the nature and roots of the behavior. How and
and small, to strangers, co-workers, friends, and when do we learn to lie? What are the psycho-
loved ones. Our capacity for dishonesty is as fun- logical and neurobiological underpinnings of
damental to us as our need to trust others, which dishonesty? Where do most of us draw the line?
ironically makes us terrible at detecting lies. Researchers are learning that we’re prone to be-
Being deceitful is woven into our very fabric, so lieve some lies even when they’re unambiguous-
much so that it would be truthful to say that to ly contradicted by clear evidence. These insights
lie is human. suggest that our proclivity for deceiving others,
and our vulnerability to being deceived, are es-
The ubiquity of lying was first documented pecially consequential in the age of social media.
systematically by Bella DePaulo, a social psy- Our ability as a society to separate truth from lies
chologist at the University of California, Santa is under unprecedented threat.
Barbara. Two decades ago DePaulo and her col-
leagues asked 147 adults to jot down for a week WHEN I WAS IN THIRD GRADE, one of my class-
every instance they tried to mislead someone. mates brought a sheet of racing car stickers to
The researchers found that the subjects lied on school to show off. The stickers were dazzling. I
average one or two times a day. Most of these wanted them so badly that I stayed back during
untruths were innocuous, intended to hide one’s gym class and transferred the sheet out of the
inadequacies or to protect the feelings of others. classmate’s backpack into mine. When the stu-
Some lies were excuses—one subject blamed the dents returned, my heart was racing. Panicking
failure to take out the garbage on not knowing that I would be found out, I thought up a preemp-
where it needed to go. Yet other lies—such as a tive lie. I told the teacher that two teenagers had
claim of being a diplomat’s son—were aimed at shown up on a motorbike, entered the classroom,
presenting a false image. While these were mi- rifled through backpacks, and left with the stick-
nor transgressions, a later study by DePaulo and ers. As you might expect, this fib collapsed at the
other colleagues involving a similar sample indi- gentlest probing, and I reluctantly returned what
cated that most people have, at some point, told I had pilfered.
one or more “serious lies”—hiding an affair from
a spouse, for example, or making false claims on My naive lying—I got better, trust me—was
a college application. matched by my gullibility in sixth grade, when
a friend told me that his family owned a flying
That human beings should universally pos- capsule that could transport us anywhere in the
sess a talent for deceiving one another shouldn’t world. Preparing to travel on this craft, I asked my
surprise us. Researchers speculate that lying as parents if they could pack me a few meals for the
a behavior arose not long after the emergence journey. Even when my older brother snickered,
of language. The ability to manipulate others I refused to disbelieve my friend’s claim, and it
without using physical force likely conferred an was left to my friend’s father to finally convince
advantage in the competition for resources and me that I’d been duped.
mates, akin to the evolution of deceptive strate-
gies in the animal kingdom, such as camouflage. These lies that my friend and I told were noth-
“Lying is so easy compared to other ways of gain- ing out of the ordinary for kids our age. Like
ing power,” notes Sissela Bok, an ethicist at Har- learning to walk and talk, lying is something of
vard University who’s one of the most prominent a developmental milestone. While parents often
thinkers on the subject. “It’s much easier to lie in find their children’s lies troubling—for they signal

38 NAT I O NA L G E O G R A P H I C • J U N E 2017

Personal 22% 16% Economic
transgression advantage
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BENDING THE TRUTH

“The truth comes naturally,” says psychologist Bruno Verschuere, “but lying takes effort and a sharp,
flexible mind.” Lying is a part of the developmental process, like walking and talking. Children learn to
lie between ages two and five, and lie the most when they are testing their independence.

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59%

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Over a 24-hour period

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THE IMPERSONATOR

Lying for personal gain
Frank Abagnale, Jr., is now a highly regarded security consultant, but his brazen
deceptions earlier in life inspired the 2002 movie Catch Me if You Can. Leonardo
DiCaprio played Abagnale, who ran away from home at 16 and learned to survive by his
wits, becoming a check forger, con man, and impostor. “I had to be creative in order
to survive,” he says. “I do and will continue to regret it for the rest of my life.” Abagnale
masqueraded as a pilot, a pediatrician, and an attorney with a Harvard law degree.

40 NAT I O NA L G E O G R A P H I C • J U N E 2017

THE SECRET AGENT

Lying for country

Valerie Plame, a former CIA agent, worked undercover for two decades. In 2003 her
cover was blown and her clandestine career ended when Bush Administration officials
leaked her name to a newspaper columnist. She and her husband say it was done in
retribution for his claim that the White House had exaggerated intelligence to justify the
invasion of Iraq. What lesson did she take away from her years as a spy? “Most people,”
she says, “are more than willing to talk about themselves.”

PRESIDENTIAL the beginning of a loss of innocence—Kang Lee, a
UNTRUTHS psychologist at the University of Toronto, sees the
emergence of the behavior in toddlers as a reas-
Watergate set the bar suring sign that their cognitive growth is on track.
for presidential lies
when Nixon insisted To study lying in children, Lee and his col-
he played no role. leagues use a simple experiment. They ask kids
to guess the identity of toys hidden from their
ON THE MORNING of June 17, 1972, view, based on an audio clue. For the first few
five men were arrested after breaking toys, the clue is obvious—a bark for a dog, a
into the Democratic National Committee meow for a cat—and the children answer easily.
headquarters in the Watergate building Then the sound played has nothing to do with
in Washington, D.C. The media, led by the toy. “So you play Beethoven, but the toy’s a
Washington Post reporters Bob Wood- car,” Lee explains. The experimenter leaves the
ward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly pur- room on the pretext of taking a phone call—a lie
sued the story, exposing wiretaps, secret for the sake of science—and asks the child not
documents, and hush money. President to peek at the toy. Returning, the experimenter
Richard Nixon denied involvement asks the child for the answer, following up with
in the scandal, declaring, “I am not the question: “Did you peek or not?”
a crook,” in a nationally televised press
conference. But the White House cover- Most children can’t resist peeking, Lee and his
up failed. Faced with almost certain researchers have found by monitoring hidden
impeachment, Nixon resigned from his cameras. The percentage of the children who
second term in office on August 9, 1974. peek and then lie about it depends on their age.
Among two-year-old transgressors, only 30 per-
OTHER FAMOUS FIBS cent are untruthful. Among three-year-olds, 50
DONALD TRUMP: “I won the popular percent lie. And by eight, about 80 percent claim
vote if you deduct the millions of people they didn’t peek.
who voted illegally.”
The president—who won the Electoral Kids also get better at lying as they get older.
College but lost the popular vote—has In guessing the toy that they secretly looked at,
kept fact-checkers busy with his steady three- and four-year-olds typically blurt out the
tweets, many provably untrue. There’s right answer, without realizing that this reveals
no evidence of significant voter fraud. their transgression and lying. At seven or eight,
BILL CLINTON: “I did not have sexual kids learn to mask their lying by deliberately giv-
relations with that woman.” ing a wrong answer or trying to make their an-
Clinton’s initial denial in early 1998 swer seem like a reasoned guess.
was subsequently proved false by
the discovery of his DNA in a stain on Five- and six-year-old kids fall in between.
intern Monica Lewinsky’s dress. In one study Lee used Barney the dinosaur as
the toy. A five-year-old girl who denied having
$57 %< 7,0 0&'21$*+ 7(;7 %< &/$8',$ .$/% looked at the toy, which was hidden under a
cloth, told Lee she wanted to feel it before guess-
ing. “So she puts her hand underneath the cloth,
closes her eyes, and says, ‘Ah, I know it’s Barney,’”
Lee recounts. “I ask, ‘Why?’ She says, ‘Because it
feels purple.’”

What drives this increase in lying sophisti-
cation is the development of a child’s ability to
put himself or herself in someone else’s shoes.
Known as theory of mind, this is the facility we
acquire for understanding the beliefs, inten-
tions, and knowledge of others. Also fundamen-
tal to lying is the brain’s executive function: the
abilities required for planning, attention, and
self-control. The two-year-olds who lied in Lee’s

experiments performed better on tests of theory SCANDALS IN
of mind and executive function than those who SPORTS
didn’t. Even at 16, kids who were proficient liars
outperformed poor liars. On the other hand, kids The White Sox
on the autism spectrum—known to be delayed shocked the nation
in developing a robust theory of mind—are not when they threw
very good at lying. the World Series.

ON A RECENT MORNING, I took an Uber to vis- NEARLY A CENTURY AGO, some mem-
it Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University bers of the Chicago White Sox baseball
and one of the world’s foremost experts on lying. team accepted a bribe—as much as
The inside of the car, though neat, had a strong $100,000 (about $1.4 million today)—to
odor of sweaty socks, and the driver, though deliberately lose the 1919 World Series to
courteous, had trouble finding her way. When the Cincinnati Reds. Suspicions arose in
we finally got there, she asked me smilingly if I the first game after uncharacteristically
would give her a five-star rating. “Sure,” I replied. sloppy pitching by the White Sox, who
Later, I gave her three stars. I assuaged my guilt were heavily favored to win. “I don’t
by telling myself that it was better not to mislead know why I did it,” pitcher Eddie Cicotte
thousands of Uber riders. testified before a grand jury. “I must
have been crazy.” He and seven other
Ariely became fascinated with dishonesty players, including “Shoeless” Joe Jack-
about 15 years ago. Looking through a magazine son, were indicted on nine counts of
on a long-distance flight, he came across a men- conspiracy but acquitted by a jury. They
tal aptitude test. He answered the first question were banned from the game for life.
and flipped to the key in the back to see if he got
it right. He found himself taking a quick glance OTHER FAMOUS FIBS
at the answer to the next question. Continuing LANCE ARMSTRONG: “I’ve said it
in this vein through the entire test, Ariely, not for longer than seven years. I have
surprisingly, scored very well. “When I finished, never doped.”
I thought—I cheated myself,” he says. “Presum- As he had many times, the seven-time
ably, I wanted to know how smart I am, but I Tour de France winner lied to CNN’s
also wanted to prove I’m this smart to myself.” Larry King in 2005. Stripped of his titles,
The experience led Ariely to develop a lifelong in 2013 he admitted to having cheated.
interest in the study of lying and other forms
of dishonesty. ROSIE RUIZ: “I ran the race.
I really did.”
In experiments he and his colleagues have run Crowned the female winner of the 1980
on college campuses and elsewhere, volunteers Boston Marathon even though she bare-
are given a test with 20 simple math problems. ly broke a sweat, Ruiz denied cheating.
They must solve as many as they can in five Her title was revoked after evidence
minutes and are paid based on how many they showed she hadn’t run the full course.
get right. They are told to drop the sheet into
a shredder before reporting the number they
solved correctly. But the sheets don’t actually get
shredded. A lot of volunteers lie, as it turns out.
On average, volunteers report having solved six
matrices, when it was really more like four. The
results are similar across different cultures. Most
of us lie, but only a little.

The question Ariely finds interesting is not
why so many lie, but rather why they don’t lie a
lot more. Even when the amount of money of-
fered for correct answers is raised significant-
ly, the volunteers don’t increase their level of

THE CON ARTISTS

Lying to entertain

Apollo Robbins and Ava Do, who are married and business partners, use sleight of hand
to entertain and educate. Robbins is an astonishingly agile pickpocket, perhaps best
known for emptying the pockets of some Secret Service agents on a presidential detail.
Do is a magician who has studied psychobiology. “We think of deception as the intent
to distort someone’s perception of reality,” they say. “It is an impartial tool that can be
used for good or bad, to inform or mislead.”

THE CARD SHARK

Lying for strategic advantage

Raking in more than $32 million in tournament prizes, Daniel Negreanu has won more
money than anyone in poker history. The Canadian-born superstar, who moved to Las
Vegas 20 years ago, has traveled the world as an ambassador of the game and appeared on
countless televised shows. “If you want to win at poker,” he says, “deception is absolutely
necessary.” The trouble comes, he says, when players spend so much time deceiving
competitors that “it infiltrates their personal life.”

IDENTITY cheating. “Here we give people a chance to steal
THEFT lots of money, and people cheat only a little bit.
So something stops us—most of us—from not
Many made claims to lying all the way,” Ariely says. The reason, ac-
be the grand duchess cording to him, is that we want to see ourselves
of Russia, but all of as honest, because we have, to some degree, in-
them were frauds. ternalized honesty as a value taught to us by soci-
ety. Which is why, unless one is a sociopath, most
IT WAS A GRUESOME CRIME: In 1918 of us place limits on how much we are willing to
Bolshevik revolutionaries executed lie. How far most of us are willing to go—Ariely
Russian tsar Nicholas II, the empress, and others have shown—is determined by social
and their five children. But did Anas- norms arrived at through unspoken consensus,
tasia, the youngest daughter, escape? like the tacit acceptability of taking a few pencils
Several impersonators exploited this home from the office supply cabinet.
hope, most famously Anna Anderson,
an Anastasia look-alike who filed an PATRICK COUWENBERG’S STAFF and fellow
unsuccessful suit in 1938 to try to prove judges in the Los Angeles County Superior Court
her identity—and claim an inheritance. believed he was an American hero. By his ac-
Anderson, who had supporters as well count, he had been awarded a Purple Heart in
as detractors, died in 1984. A post- Vietnam. He’d participated in covert operations
humous DNA test found she was unre- for the Central Intelligence Agency. The judge
lated to the Romanovs and appeared to boasted of an impressive educational back-
confirm she was a Polish factory worker ground as well—an undergraduate degree in
named Franziska Schanzkowska. physics and a master’s degree in psychology.
None of it was true. When confronted, Couwen-
OTHER FAMOUS FIBS berg’s defense was to blame a condition called
JOAN LOWELL: “Any damn fool can be pseudologia fantastica, a tendency to tell stories
accurate—and dull.” containing facts interwoven with fantasy. The
Lowell famously fabricated her best- argument didn’t save him from being removed
selling 1929 memoir, The Cradle of from the bench in 2001.
the Deep, about childhood adventures
aboard a schooner with her sea There appears to be no agreement among psy-
captain father. chiatrists about the relationship between mental
health and lying, even though people with cer-
HAN VAN MEEGEREN: “It was awfully tain psychiatric disorders seem to exhibit specific
hard work.” lying behaviors. Sociopathic individuals—those
The modestly talented 20th-century diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder—
Dutch artist pocketed millions of dol- tend to tell manipulative lies, while narcissists
lars for his forged Vermeer paintings, may tell falsehoods to boost their image.
which he baked in an oven to make
the fresh paint look centuries old. But is there anything unique about the brains
of individuals who lie more than others? In 2005
psychologist Yaling Yang and her colleagues
compared the brain scans of three groups: 12
adults with a history of repeated lying, 16 who
met the criteria for antisocial personality disor-
der but were not frequent liars, and 21 who were
neither antisocial nor had a lying habit. The
researchers found that the liars had at least 20
percent more neural fibers by volume in their
prefrontal cortices, suggesting that habitual liars
have greater connectivity within their brains. It’s
possible this predisposes them to lying because
they can think up lies more readily than others,

or it might be the result of repeated lying. HOODWINKING
Psychologists Nobuhito Abe at Kyoto Univer- FOR MONEY

sity and Joshua Greene at Harvard University A famous swindler
scanned the brains of subjects using functional lends his name to
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found a fraudulent scheme
that those who acted dishonestly showed great- that still endures.
er activation in the nucleus accumbens—a struc-
ture in the basal forebrain that plays a key role IN 1919 ITALIAN IMMIGRANT Charles
in reward processing. “The more excited your Ponzi built a pyramid scheme around
reward system gets at the possibility of getting international postal reply coupons.
money—even in a perfectly honest context—the Ponzi, who brought in $250,000 a day
more likely you are to cheat,” explains Greene. In at the peak of his scheme (about three
other words, greed may increase one’s predispo- million dollars today), conned investors
sition to lying. into sending him millions of dollars,
promising eye-popping returns. Ponzi’s
One lie can lead to another and another, as scam—paying one investor with money
evidenced by the smooth, remorseless lying of from others—unraveled in August 1920,
serial con men such as Hogue. An experiment when he was charged with 86 counts of
by Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist at University mail fraud. In 2008 modern-day Ponzi
College London, and colleagues showed how the schemer Bernie Madoff was arrested
brain becomes inured to the stress or emotional after bilking investors—including Ste-
discomfort that happens when we lie, making it ven Spielberg, Sandy Koufax, Zsa Zsa
easier to tell the next fib. In the fMRI scans of the Gabor, and Elie Wiesel—out of billions.
participants, the team focused on the amygdala,
a region that is involved in processing emotions. OTHER FAMOUS FIBS
The researchers found that the amygdala’s re- CASSIE CHADWICK: “Oh, let me go,
sponse to lies got progressively weaker with each let me go. I’m not guilty, I tell you.
lie, even as the lies got bigger. “Perhaps engaging Let me go!”
in small acts of deception can lead to bigger acts Chadwick maintained her innocence
of deception,” she says. in 1905 after defrauding banks out
of millions of dollars, claiming to be
MUCH OF THE KNOWLEDGE we use to navigate Andrew Carnegie’s daughter.
the world comes from what others have told us.
Without the implicit trust that we place in human JAMES W. JOHNSTON: “Cigarette
communication, we would be paralyzed as indi- smoking is no more ‘addictive’ than
viduals and cease to have social relationships. coffee, tea or Twinkies.”
“We get so much from believing, and there’s R. J. Reynolds CEO’s written testimony
relatively little harm when we occasionally get for a 1994 congressional hearing denied
duped,” says Tim Levine, a psychologist at the what the tobacco industry had known
University of Alabama at Birmingham, who calls for decades: Nicotine is addictive.
this idea the truth default theory.

Being hardwired to be trusting makes us in-
trinsically gullible. “If you say to someone, ‘I am a
pilot,’ they are not sitting there thinking: ‘Maybe
he’s not a pilot. Why would he say he’s a pilot?’
They don’t think that way,” says Frank Abagnale,
Jr., a security consultant whose cons as a young
man, including forging checks and imperson-
ating an airline pilot, inspired the 2002 movie
Catch Me if You Can. “This is why scams work,
because when the phone rings and the caller ID
says it’s the Internal Revenue Service, people au-
tomatically believe it is the IRS. They don’t realize

THE PRANKSTER

Lying to tell stories

Some of the Internet’s most viral videos and photographs have been staged by
a secretive artist known as Zardulu, who rarely reveals the fabrications. “Like all
myths,” Zardulu says, “mine are established to engender a sense of wonder about
the world, to counter our perceived mastery and understanding of it.” Zardulu
appears wearing a ram’s head, symbolizing a journey into the unconscious mind,
while the hierophant, an interpreter of mysteries, represents the shadow self.

THE FABULIST

Lying for professional gain

Jayson Blair is a life coach, seeking to help people define and achieve their goals. Before
that, he was a fast-rising New York Times reporter whose career imploded in 2003 when
he was discovered to have fabricated and plagiarized material in dozens of articles. “My
world went from one in which I covered the deception of others to being the one doing
the deception,” he says, “and eventually, searching for answers to questions about why
I lied and why others do so as well.”

HOAXES FOR that someone could manipulate the caller ID.”
E N T E R TA I N M E N T Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the Univer-

A gifted showman, sity of Massachusetts, calls that the liar’s advan-
P. T. Barnum tage. “People are not expecting lies, people are
exploited the public’s not searching for lies,” he says, “and a lot of the
desire to be amazed. time, people want to hear what they are hearing.”
We put up little resistance to the deceptions that
AT HIS FIRST SPECTACLE, in 1835, please us and comfort us—be it false praise or the
showman Phineas Taylor Barnum tout- promise of impossibly high investment returns.
ed Joice Heth as George Washington’s When we are fed falsehoods by people who have
161-year-old nursemaid. Crowds came wealth, power, and status, they appear to be even
gawking to see “the greatest natural & easier to swallow, as evidenced by the media’s
national curiosity in the world.” Bar- credulous reporting of Lochte’s robbery claim,
num profited from the public’s hunger which unraveled shortly thereafter.
for entertainment by planting embel-
lishments and lies in newspapers. His Researchers have shown that we are especially
fabrication about Heth blew up after prone to accepting lies that affirm our worldview.
her death, when an autopsy found her Memes that claim Obama was not born in the
to be no more than 80 years old. Bar- United States, deny climate change, accuse the
num’s flair for fake news culminated U.S. government of masterminding the terrorist
when, in ill health, he arranged for strikes of September 11, 2001, and spread other
the publication of his own obituary “alternative facts,” as a Trump adviser called his
so he could read it before he died. Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the
Internet and social media because of this vulner-
OTHER FAMOUS FIBS ability. Debunking them does not demolish their
URBAN LEGEND: “Paul is dead.” power, because people assess the evidence pre-
Paul McCartney’s rumored death in a sented to them through a framework of preexist-
1966 car crash sent Beatles fans hunting ing beliefs and prejudices, says George Lakoff, a
for clues in the band’s albums, includ- cognitive linguist at the University of California,
ing the 1969 release, Abbey Road. Berkeley. “If a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into
your frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore
ORSON WELLES: “I can’t imagine it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it—or attack it
an invasion from Mars would find if it’s threatening.”
ready acceptance.”
On October 30, 1938, CBS Radio A recent study led by Briony Swire-Thompson,
broadcast The War of the Worlds, a doctoral candidate in cognitive psychology
a feigned account about aliens landing at the University of Western Australia, docu-
in New Jersey. Some listeners panicked, ments the ineffectiveness of evidence-based
but Welles, who narrated it, expressed information in refuting incorrect beliefs. In 2015
surprise that many had fallen for it. Swire-Thompson and her colleagues presented
about 2,000 adult Americans with one of two
statements: “Vaccines cause autism” or “Donald
Trump said that vaccines cause autism.” (Trump
has repeatedly suggested there’s a link, despite
the lack of scientific evidence for it.)

Not surprisingly, participants who were
Trump supporters showed a decidedly stronger
belief in the misinformation when it had Trump’s
name attached to it. Afterward the participants
were given a short explanation—citing a large-
scale study—for why the vaccine-autism link was
false, and they were asked to reevaluate their be-
lief in it. The participants—across the political
spectrum—now accepted that the statements

claiming the link were untrue, but testing them SCIENTIFIC
again a week later showed that their belief in the FALSEHOODS
misinformation had bounced back to nearly the
same level. Piltdown man,
a clever fabrication
Other studies have shown that evidence under- of a human ancestor,
mining lies may in fact strengthen belief in them. created a sensation.
“People are likely to think that familiar informa-
tion is true. So any time you retract it, you run the IN 1912 FOSSIL ENTHUSIAST Charles
risk of making it more familiar, which makes that Dawson and his collaborator Arthur
retraction actually less effective, ironically, over Smith Woodward, a geologist at the
the long term,” says Swire-Thompson. British Natural History Museum, an-
nounced the unearthing of humanlike
I experienced this phenomenon firsthand not skull fragments and an apelike jawbone
long after I spoke to Swire-Thompson. When a from a gravel pit near Piltdown, Eng-
friend sent me a link to an article ranking the land. Just a few years earlier, Dawson
10 most corrupt political parties in the world, I had written to Smith Woodward, saying
promptly posted it to a WhatsApp group of about he was “waiting for the big ‘find.’” But
a hundred high school friends from India. The Piltdown man, initially hailed as the
reason for my enthusiasm was that the fourth missing link connecting ape to human,
spot in the ranking was held by India’s Congress was a fraud: The bones were stained to
Party, which in recent decades has been implicat- resemble ancient fossils, and the teeth,
ed in numerous corruption scandals. I chortled from an orangutan, had been filed
with glee because I’m not a fan of the party. down to appear human.

But shortly after sharing the article, I dis- OTHER FAMOUS FIBS
covered that the ranking, which included par- HWANG WOO-SUK: “I created an illu-
ties from Russia, Pakistan, China, and Uganda, sion and made it look as if it were real.
wasn’t based on any metrics. It had been done by I was drunk in the bubble I created.”
a site called BBC Newspoint, which sounded like The South Korean scientist claimed
a credible source. But I found out that it had no in 2004 that he had created a stem cell
connection to the British Broadcasting Corpora- line from the world’s first cloned hu-
tion. I posted an apology to the group, noting that man embryo. His data were fabricated.
the article was in all likelihood fake news.
MARMADUKE WETHERELL: “We’ll
That didn’t stop others from reposting the give them their monster.”
article to the group several times over the next The British filmmaker had his stepson
day. I realized that the correction I’d posted had build a Loch Ness monster out of a toy
not had any effect. Many of my friends—because submarine, using wood-plastic compos-
they shared my antipathy toward the Congress ite for the head, which appeared in an
Party—were convinced the ranking was true, and infamous faked 1934 photograph.
every time they shared it, they were unwittingly,
or perhaps knowingly, nudging it toward legiti-
macy. Countering it with fact would be in vain.

What then might be the best way to impede
the fleet-footed advance of untruths into our col-
lective lives? The answer isn’t clear. Technology
has opened up a new frontier for deceit, adding a
21st-century twist to the age-old conflict between

our lying and trusting selves. j

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52

Life in the
Balance

A warming planet threatens
the Galápagos species that
inspired Darwin’s theory of
natural selection.

Two marine iguanas seem unfazed by the
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By Christopher Solomon
Photographs by Thomas P. Peschak

J on Witman checks his air gauge, long-term average.) Witman, who has explored
adjusts his flippers, and falls back- nearshore ecosystems from Easter Island to the
ward into the Pacific. Nearby, the Gulf of Maine for 40 years, fears that this bleached
ocean throws itself against Isla coral could augur an explosion of bleaching—as
Beagle, one of a hundred-plus well as other dramatic changes throughout the
rocks, pinnacles, and islands that environment here—in the years to come.
form the Galápagos archipelago, a
province of Ecuador that straddles the Equator. THE GALÁPAGOS ARE A STRETCH of 13 major
Rebuffed, the sea retreats in a white flag of foam. islands that live as much in myth as on the
map—a finch-crowded Brigadoon where Darwin
On a shelf above the spray, blue-footed boobies arrived in 1835 and began to make observations
dance with the awkwardness of teens at a junior that eventually would show him, and us, how
high prom. Below them on the rocks, an argument life on Earth evolves. His Origin of Species would
breaks out between two Galápagos sea lions. The inform “almost every component in modern
scene could have looked and sounded the same man’s belief system,” wrote evolutionary biolo-
when Charles Darwin sailed here almost two gist Ernst Mayr.
centuries ago. These creatures, fine-tuned to life
on harsh isles, seemingly can weather anything, As isolated as they may seem, the Galápagos
even time itself. aren’t immune to the impacts of modern life:
Climate change is coming to the cradle of evo-
Suddenly Witman breaks the surface. “It’s be- lutionary theory. Iconic species such as tortois-
ginning,” he tells me with a grimace. es, finches, boobies, and marine iguanas could
suffer. The famed ecosystems that taught the
He grabs his video camera from the dive boat world about natural selection may teach us a
and disappears underwater again. I plunge in lesson yet again, offering us insights into what’s
after him. At 15 feet below the surface, Witman in store elsewhere. The Galápagos, says Witman,
points me to a lobe coral, Porites lobata. It should “are a fabulous laboratory for studying species’
resemble a mustard green pagoda, but instead it responses to climate change.”
glows white against the seafloor’s bubblegum
pinks and AstroTurf greens. This coral is bleach- Before they were the Galápagos, they were
ing, a reaction to excessively warm water. Soon Las Encantadas—“the enchanted ones”—warty
it will be dead. islands laced with foam, flowing lava, and odd
animals. “Man and wolf alike disown them,”
At spots such as Isla Beagle, Witman and his wrote Herman Melville. “The chief sound of life
crew are on the lookout for change. They’ve had here is a hiss.”
no trouble finding it. They’re taking the tem-
perature of this seafloor community—literally Whalers tossed those hissing tortoises into
and figuratively. During 2016’s El Niño, the most their ships’ holds for food, filled water casks, and
intense climatic event here in two decades, the sailed on. They were right about the strangeness:
temperatures at his dive spots reached a peak Cut off from mainland South America by about
of 88°F. (Overall, water temperatures in the 600 miles of water, nature here ran wild. Among
Galápagos region were more than 4°F above their

58 NAT I O NA L G E O G R A P H I C • J U N E 2017

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the animals that made the voyage to the islands which can dissolve the carbonate skeletons
from the mainland, few survived. Those that did of corals and mollusks, perhaps upending the
evolved into different forms by adapting to the ocean’s food web.
conditions on each island. Those that could not
adapt vanished into extinction. Meanwhile, Witman and his team expect the
bleaching of corals they’re seeing around the
But there are other changes happening here islands to increase as a result of ultrawarm wa-
now—not just the evolutionary kind. Few places ter caused by El Niños. A tropical ocean without
on Earth give scientists front-row seats to watch these reefs is like a city without high-rises: With
ecosystems shocked so drastically, sometimes some of their homes gone, fish and other marine
repeatedly, in such a short time. life that rely on corals have fewer shelters and
places to eat. A rich ecosystem grows poorer, and
Now, as the globe warms, Witman, of Brown then it won’t weather shocks as well, including
University, and other scientists are trying to un- further shocks from climate change. Making mat-
derstand what the future will look like here. Per- ters worse, the islands are under pressure from a
haps nowhere else on Earth is the cycle of life and growing population—some 25,000 residents plus
death driven so dramatically by climatic events a crush of about 220,000 tourists a year.
known as El Niños and La Niñas, when chang-
es in temperature, rainfall, and ocean currents So far the animals and plants of the Galápagos

Before they were the Galápagos, they were Las
Encantadas, “the enchanted ones,” warty islands
laced with foam, flowing lava, and odd animals.

force striking fluctuations in weather and food have managed to survive this precarious balance.
availability, both on land and in the sea. And But the insults may be coming too fast and from
the influence of climate change is predicted too many angles to give them a chance to adapt.
to increase the rate of El Niños that come with
intense rainfall from about once every 20 years to ANCHORED IN A CURL of cove fit for a honey-
once every decade. moon brochure, Witman tugs a frayed wet suit
over his striped surf trunks. Tan and fit from a
Models also project that the ocean near the lifetime of diving, Witman leads his crew of three
Equator will warm slightly faster than the rest of the divers back to the seafloor. One diver clutches a
tropical Pacific, according to Andrew Wittenberg, waterproof clipboard and peers among crevices
a physical scientist with the National Oceanic like an overzealous census taker, counting pen-
and Atmospheric Administration. Sea levels are cil urchins. Witman’s doctoral student, Robert
predicted to rise too: 22 to 30 inches by 2100 un- Lamb, retrieves video cameras that had been left
der some projections. Scientists also think that to document the behavior of passing residents
warming waters during the cool season could such as Panamic sergeant majors and Mexican
reduce the garúa, the dense fog that has blanket- hogfish. Witman moves along the bottom, film-
ed the Galápagos’ junglelike highlands for some ing methodically. Playful sea lions lighten the
48,000 years. That could be catastrophic for life scene by biting the divers’ survey tape as if it
that depends on moisture from the fog. Also, as were dental floss.
the world’s oceans continue to absorb carbon
dioxide produced by humans, the Galápagos are For the past 18 years Witman has visited the
considered a hot spot for ocean acidification, same dozen spots biannually to study how the

60 NAT I O NA L G E O G R A P H I C • J U N E 2017

Isla Wolf

NORTH The Galápagos
AMERICA Bellwether

Isla Darwin MAP ECUADOR The islands that helped unlock the secrets of evolution
25 miles NW AREA SOUTH may face intense El Niños more frequently as the
PACIFIC AMERICA climate changes. Increased temperatures and rainfall,
Roca OCEAN plus potential sea-level rise, would create a host of
Redonda stresses. Could species adapt, or would they disappear?

Isla Pinta Isla Marchena Marchena

2,133 ft Canal
650 m

Canal de Pinta

1,125 ft de Isla Genovesa
343 m

Equatorial Undercurrent (source of upwelling) PACIFIC OCEAN

Volcán Wolf High-altitude
5,600 ft dry area
1,707 m EQUATOR

Bahía Banks Volcán Darwin 2,974 ft Isla Santiago GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS
Canal de Santa Fe4,600 ft906 m(San Salvador)
1,402 m (A R C H I P I É L A G O D E C O L Ó N)

Volcán Canal Isab CSaannaSl adlevador ECUADOR
La Cumbre I. Beagle
4,843 ft Volcán ela I. Rábida Isla Seymour
1,476 m Alcedo Isla Baltra
3,710 ft
1,131 m

Isla Fernandina 2,835 ft

Bahía I. Pinzón 864 m Isla Santa Cruz
Elizabeth

Isla Isabela Charles Darwin
Research Station
Volcán Sierra Negra
3,688 ft Puerto
1,124 m Ayora
Isla 2,395 ft
Cerro Azul Santa Fe 730 m
5,541 ft Puerto
1,689 m Puerto Villamil Baquerizo Isla San Cristóbal

-600 Moreno

Isla Tortuga

Coral reef -9,0-060-,30,00000 2,100 ft
640 m
0 mi 20 Puerto Isla Española
Velasco
0 km 20 675 ft
Ibarra Isla Floreana 206 m

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little freshwater, endemic species like land iguanas that must regulate land iguana
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Equatorial Undercurrent wells up from the sends sea lions farther for food. sea lion
deep, feeding ocean-dependent species. Abandoned pups usually die.

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ART: MATTHEW TWOMBLY. SOURCES: CHARLES DARWIN FOUNDATION;

MANDY TRUEMAN, CHARLES DARWIN UNIVERSITY, AUSTRALIA

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communities that live on and around the sea- nutrients from the deep and also causes the pool
floor—sponges, corals, barnacles, fish—inter- of warm water in the western Pacific to expand
act. The Galápagos have some of the planet’s toward the Galápagos. The conveyor belt nearly
healthiest tropical marine systems. The coral shuts down. The buffet closes. Marine life suffers
communities are thickets of biodiversity. “It’s dramatically. Some creatures may stop breeding;
like a bush on land,” Witman says, but instead some even starve.
of birds, the corals harbor symbiotic crabs and
snails, as well as fish. Some populations still haven’t recovered
from an extreme 1982-83 El Niño. The Galápagos
One reason the Galápagos are unique and so damselfish is now believed to have gone extinct
diverse—the reason, for instance, that penguins because of that event. Meanwhile, fortunes are of-
can share a beach with flamingos—is that four ten flipped on land, where El Niño usually brings
main ocean currents of varying temperatures drenching, life-giving rains to the desert isles.
bathe the islands. The deep, cold Equatorial
Undercurrent, which travels about 8,000 miles La Niña overturns everything. Marine life
across the Pacific, slams into the islands, upwells, prospers while terrestrial life languishes. Wit-
and swirls around them, bringing to the surface man likens the natural, repeated cycle to a roller
nutrients that fertilize phytoplankton. This in coaster: Deprivation. Recovery. Abundance. Re-
turn fuels the rest of the marine food web. Ev- peat. During Witman’s watch the Galápagos have
erything is built upon this conveyor belt. experienced three major El Niños. In 2016 the
warm waters led to reduced amounts of the algae
During El Niño the trade winds slacken. the larger marine iguanas forage for in the sea.
This weakens the upwelling of cold water and
Witman’s question is this: If waters here are

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generally growing warmer, and if intense El Niños The food web in the Galápagos already is being
become more frequent, will the bad times ham- transformed by an array of factors to the point
mer the seafloor communities so hard that they that some animals are having trouble adapting.
won’t recover during the good times? And if so, The islands’ population of blue-footed boobies
will these communities turn into something else? has fallen by about half since 1997. Scientists
think they know why: The Galápagos’ sardines
After the dive, to fortify his point, Witman started to become rare (the reasons are not clear)
shows me a snapshot of the coral on the seafloor in the diets of several predators around the same
below. “Normally this would be pink,” he says. time. The boobies switched mostly to eating fly-
Instead it looks like a badly poured layer of con- ing fish—which are harder to catch as they swim
crete. The coralline algae, which form a crucial and are less nutritious. It’s like going from all-
crust on which the rest of the community is built, you-can-eat steak to prison rations, says Dave
have disappeared. Why? Witman suspects that Anderson, a Wake Forest University biology pro-
the warmer seas of the recent El Niño goosed the fessor. Blue-foots often don’t raise young when
metabolism of pencil urchins that graze on the they’re not eating well.
algae, so they’ve mowed down the bedrock crust
at many sites. Could the loss of species diversity lead to a
downward ecological spiral? “With fewer species,”
Meanwhile, black-striped salema and creole- Witman says, “you have less resilience to threats.”
fish—once abundant plankton-eaters that provide
food for sharks, sea lions, and other top preda- ONE DAY IN MARCH 2016 ecologist Fredy Cabre-
tors—“have become uncommonly scarce during ra and I stride through a dim highland forest on
this strong El Niño,” Lamb says.

LIFE IN THE BALANCE 65



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Isla Santa Cruz, the most populous island, home Jäger, however, sees a world of wounds. Jäger
to about 15,000 people. Cabrera wears dirty blue is a restoration ecologist with the Charles Dar-
jeans, a shy smile, and a T-shirt with a tortoise win Foundation, overseeing terrestrial invasive
over his heart. We pass a boulder that issues a plant and animal species. Since the islands were
resigned hiss and retracts its head. We soon pass discovered, in 1535, humans have brought many
another boulder, then another. Giant tortoises alien species—some intentionally, like goats,
seem to be everywhere. pigs, cats, and both ornamental and food plants,
to name a few. Others, such as rodents, insects,
Farther down, near the arid lowlands, Cabre- and weedy plants, have been introduced acci-
ra steps off the trail, removes a stiff wire grate dentally. Some of these, like the blackberry, have
from the ground, and begins to dig. Ten inches become invasive.
down he taps a buried cue ball. “There’s a bad
egg,” Cabrera says in Spanish. Meticulously Now the Galápagos, Jäger says, are home to
he excavates the nest. A wire barricade against more than 1,430 introduced species, including
predators wasn’t enough to save these eggs. “Six nearly 800 plants. Many don’t cause problems,
out of eight are broken,” Cabrera, an investigator but some do. Invasive species are considered
with the Galápagos Tortoise Movement Ecology the greatest threat to the Galápagos and are one
Programme, says. “Given those rains, that’s not reason why UNESCO, in 2007, listed this place as
unusual.” In January 2016, soon after the start of a “world heritage in danger.”
El Niño, damaging rains pounded the archipel-
ago and inundated this patch of forest, causing A friendly tour guide with a sober topic, Jäger
many eggs to decay and crack. points out Cinchona pubescens, or red quinine
trees, one of the hundred most invasive species in
Then there’s the temperature question: For the world. In the highest zone of Isla Santa Cruz,
many reptiles, “if you are incubated at relative- Cinchona shades and reduces native plants and,
ly cool temperatures, you’re more likely to be a by changing plant-community structures, hurts
male, and if you are incubated at relatively high endemic birds such as the Galápagos petrel, a
temperatures, you’re more likely to be a female,” seabird with the unusual habit of burrowing into
says Stephen Blake, the program’s coordinator. the ground as much as six feet to nest.
“If climate change leads to generally warmer
sand, you may suddenly find that the sex ratio is Walking on, she notes brakes of invasive black-
skewed dramatically toward females.” Scientists berries in the forest. Scalesia forests provide
in several places around the globe, including the homes to entire communities of orchids, moss-
Great Barrier Reef and the Cabo Verde islands, are es, and birds. Just one percent of these forests,
starting to see this phenomenon in sea turtles. razed for agriculture four decades ago (they are
now protected), remain on Santa Cruz. Where
Failure to take pressure off the Galápagos’ flora blackberry has invaded the remaining forest,
and fauna could kill the booby that laid the gold- it smothers the ground and prevents seedlings
en egg: Of the seven animal species that tourists from rising and finches from nesting.
rank most important to their visit—tortoises,
sea turtles, marine and land iguanas, penguins, If the future here is indeed wetter, all vegeta-
blue-footed boobies, and sea lions—all are ex- tion may benefit, “but it’s likely that the invasive
pected to decline because of climate change, species will really take off,” Jäger says, in part be-
according to a 2011 vulnerability assessment by cause they are more flexible than the plants that
Conservation International and WWF. are highly specialized to survive Galápagos life.

ON ANOTHER HOT MORNING in the highlands, ACROSS THE ARCHIPELAGO a skiff nudges
about 2,000 feet above the sea, Heinke Jäger ashore on a remote black-sand beach on Isla Isa-
follows a tourist group toward a grove of Scale- bela, the Galápagos’ largest island. Francesca
sia trees. To the tourists nothing seems amiss. Cunninghame steps over the rocking gunwale. In
her hands she holds a cage draped in black cloth.

68 NAT I O NA L G E O G R A P H I C • J U N E 2017

Her cargo: members of one of the world’s rarest aviary doors. Cunninghame opens the cages and
bird species. Cunninghame is taking them home. gently removes 15 chicks one by one. Just four to
eight weeks old and sooty in color, they seem less
The famed finches of the Galápagos, known birds than puffs of cigar smoke.
as Darwin’s finches—there are 18 recognized
species (genetic studies are under way, and new Within minutes three chicks stand on the rim
species will likely be identified)—hold a prized, of their feeding dish, talking with their mouths
if erroneous, place in the popular imagination as full. For the next six weeks Cunninghame and
the linchpin of Darwin’s understanding of evolu- others will remain here to release them gradual-
tion. In truth Darwin didn’t identify the islands ly into the wild and conduct other research. Had
where he collected finches and only realized they not collected and nurtured the season’s first
his blunder upon returning home to Shrews- chicks and eggs, the birds all likely would have
bury, England. So mockingbirds added to his died, she says. For the past four years, research-
later understanding of how one species might ers with the Charles Darwin Foundation—in
replace another through natural selection. partnership with the Galápagos National Park
Directorate and in collaboration with San Diego
One of Darwin’s finches is the mangrove finch, Zoo Global and Durrell Wildlife Conservation
which today lives in just two isolated patches Trust—have worked to boost the population.
(totaling about 74 acres) of forest here. Invaders

Insults to the plants and animals of the Galápagos
may be coming too fast and from too many angles
to give them a chance to adapt.

already have found them—egg-eating rats and Cunninghame still worries. “Any change, or
Philornis, a relative of the housefly that invades increase in sea level, could potentially destroy
nests and has likely contributed to the local this forest,” she says. Mangrove finches prefer to
extinction of a warbler finch on Isla Floreana. nest in black and white mangroves that are buff-
Philornis larvae in nests increase in years of high ered a bit from the open sea. It’s unclear how well
rainfall according to one study, which could sug- they would adapt if those forests vanished.
gest more problems to come. Many land birds
here are a bit like Goldilocks, preferring neither Cunninghame is more than three months preg-
too little rain nor too much: Another recent study nant and feeling a bit unwell, so she lies down
found that heavy rainfall led to decreased surviv- on the floor of the aviary and watches the fledg-
al of fledglings. Today fewer than 20 breeding lings. She laughs when the birds bicker, and then
pairs of mangrove finches remain. smiles. Something heavy seems lifted from her.
“They’re back where they should be,” she says.
Carrying her precious load, Cunninghame
walks barefoot across the burning sand and There is a lot more work to do. For a few min-
into a forest of tall mangroves. The light fades. utes, though, Cunninghame lies in the dappled
The air cools. We walk deeper. A small wooden light and listens to the little birds. For a moment
aviary appears. It’s raised above the forest floor
and contains three screened chambers joined it’s the sound of victory. j
together that keep out predators. Inside, Cun-
ninghame and her three assistants set to work &KULVWRSKHU 6RORPRQ is a science writer based in
laying out breakfast for the birds. They shut the Seattle and a contributing editor at Outside magazine.
7KRPDV 3 3HVFKDN photographed the Seychelles for
the March 2016 issue of National Geographic.

LIFE IN THE BALANCE 69

70

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The Perils of Pale
Models with albinism are popular in fashion, but around the world
people with the condition face scorn, health problems, and savage attacks.

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By Susan Ager
Photographs by Stephanie Sinclair

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His father, visiting for the first time in two years, His own skin is ivory white, his close-shaven
pulls out a white handkerchief. In the shade of a hair pale orange, his eyesight weak. People like
lone tree in the center of a Tanzanian schoolyard, him have long been feared and scorned in sub-
the man reaches over to cradle his son’s head and Saharan Africa, even by their families. Now
dab his eyes because the boy can no longer dry they’re being attacked. Some witch doctors claim
his own tears. their body parts, made into potions, powders, or
charms, can bring wealth and success.
Emmanuel Festo, who is 15 years old, has spent
much of his life learning to live with what he lost Detailed, gruesome records are kept by Under
one night when he was six. Four men with ma- the Same Sun, a nonprofit organization working to
chetes hacked off most of his left arm, most of the end discrimination against those with albinism.
fingers on his right hand, part of his jaw, and four Since the 1990s, in 27 African countries, at least
front teeth, intending to sell them. Emma, as he’s 190 people have been killed and 300 attacked,
known, is now a top student at a private boarding most since 2008. The epicenter of this crime wave,
school. Although he stutters, he’s healthy and which includes the robbing of graves, is Tanzania.
strong, and he has friends. He’s also an artist,
drawing soccer players and Spider-Man and, for Almost a decade ago, when these attacks first
me, a detailed map of his country, by heart, using drew widespread attention, Tanzanian officials
his cheek, chin, and shoulder to steer his markers. rounded up many kids with albinism and, for
their safety, sent them to rudimentary schools
Emma was born with albinism, a recessive intended for blind and other disabled children.
trait he inherited from his dark-skinned parents. Many remain, living in squalid conditions. Until

76 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C • J U N E 2 0 1 7

2012 Emma shared a bunk bed with three boys at face as if she’s about to let loose with a terrific
one of these government centers. punch line. “They set him free!” she shouts. “He’s
back in the village.” Because of her weak eyesight,
Emma tells me he loves his new school near she adds, “the judge said I couldn’t identify him.
Mwanza, where he has a bunk to himself. When But we had lived near that guy for more than 10
I ask him about today’s challenges, he says the years. I could identify him easily.”
kids mock his broken teeth. Then he makes a
simple, heartbreaking confession: “Going to the She is dependent on a young helper who
toilet. My friend helps, but sometimes he doesn’t makes change for customers, and a full-time
give me toilet tissue, or just a small piece, and it’s caregiver who cooks and feeds her, dresses and
not enough for me.” undresses her, and washes her in a manner most
people never want to need. Yet in other ways,
Five hundred miles away in Dar es Salaam, she’s independent, reading her Bible by using
Tanzania’s biggest city, Mariamu Staford under- her tongue and chin to turn the pages. And she
stands what Emma faces. She lost both arms at 25 brags to me that she can text on her cell. I watch
but at 33 runs a small shop selling water and soft in amazement as she nudges the phone into
drinks. Her smile fills her round face, her toenails place on a small table and then leans forward as
are painted red and blue, and she glows in a shiny if to kiss it. Instead she’s typing with her teeth,
green dress. Its sleeves hang limp at her sides. which sounds like a hen pecking at the ground.
“Bwana Yesu asifiwe,” she has written in Swahili.
Two of her attackers were released, and one “Lord Jesus be praised.”
died before trial. When I ask about the fourth—a
neighbor—she closes her eyes and squinches her

THE PERILS OF PALE 77