Ode to critical thinking

When I was young and I was starting my university path, I had the privilege to follow the course of one of the brightest and most respected zoologists in Italy, the late Professor Roberto Argano.

I remember every single thing about that course; to start with the opening speech, when he told us to follow our passion to the full extent, not minding the consequences, to focus on knowledge and learning and not on the projection of a potential career. I don’t remember the exact words, but he basically told us that 70 percent of those approaching his course would not find a job in the field and would need to change career path, but if we really had the right passion, we needed to follow it to the full extent or ... we were still in time to change. I decided to stay.

That zoology course and the personality of the person that led it, shaped my mind and my future and it turned out to be the most interesting and rewarding of all my university courses. Three things are most prominent in my mind, but I have fully understood the value of them just now, 30 years later, while working for the Scottish fishing industry and while drowning in the bitterness created by the latest productions of two of the most esteemed personalities and role models in the UK, Sir David Attenborough and Stephen Fry.

The events of the last couple of weeks triggered the first important memory: the last lesson of that amazing course, when Argano introduced us to a very peculiar family of little mammals, describing their anatomy, their feeding habits, the places in the world we could find them, the habitat they would live in, the zoologist that discovered them and so on and so forth. They looked quite strange creatures, but zoology books are full of very “improbable” animals! For us it was just another marvel.

We spent the hour taking notes and making sketches on our notebooks, trying to remember important information that might help us to pass the exam and allowing our young minds to take it all in. At the end of the lesson, he stopped writing on his board, turned to us all and, after staring at us for a moment, proceeded to tell us that all he had taught us in the last hour was a fake.

Taken by surprise, we looked at each other not understanding if he had suddenly gone mad, but then he told us that these creatures were fictional and apparently created by a zoologist as a hoax but, nevertheless, that this last one was the most important lesson of the whole course. He told us that it doesn’t matter how plausible the information we are presented with is, or the authority of the person presenting it to us, we must always apply our critical thinking to it, do research, and verify if what we are told is true (totally or partially) or if it is not.

But I said three things really stuck in my mind, so here we go with the other two:

One is the memory of me, getting upset because he told me I might not belong to the biology world if I wasn’t prepared to section a creature to study its anatomy and understand how it worked; he taught me that I needed to get through the ugly and the uneasy to be sure my knowledge was robust, and I could speak with authority.

The last one was nothing else but a rant he had against a very nice and glossy periodic publication that most of us had a subscription to and that someone had had the audacity to quote during a lesson. The periodical had nice pictures, and it was explaining things in an easy language, but he dismissed it by saying it did not belong to the science community. He then went on by doing a comparison with an ugly, boring, long and complicated publication on the matter, not a picture in sight to catch a breath.

Little I would know at 19 years old that this dichotomy would still affect my life in this job daily. How to explain the ugly and the boring and pretend that people will take that on instead of the nice, the easy and the glossy.

So, I will not go in the details of why Ocean is biased and terribly dangerous, or why Stephen Fry’s misleading and customised ad is created to impress simple minds with the attention span of an Instagram reel; minds that will not care about looking behind the very clever and simplistic presentation of a very complex problem.

I will not embark on the quest of listing all the impacts that any other food production method has on the environment, or the number of creatures that are killed or displaced by agricultural practices, even if they are focused on producing “ethically” acceptable food for entitled vegans. Neither I will spend time on laying out the amount of by-products and waste that come out of any food system.

I won’t even try to estimate the percentage of land in UK and other countries which is still in its natural state and compare it with what we have impacted, modified and exploited to suit our lifestyle.

I will not even start listing the impacts that other factors have on our oceans, like the oil and gas industry, or even the “saviour of the world”, offshore renewable energy. Or more generally I won’t touch on the impact on carbon emissions that our leisure travelling to our nice vacation spots has.

The first reason is why should I, but the most important one is why should you believe me over THEM?

So, I won’t. But what I will do is instead invite you to think, and research, and question WHETHER what you are presented with is true.

Are the wonderful images of the movie or the gruesome splatter of the ad true OR are they easy tools that just satisfy the need for easy answers to very complex questions? As I was told when I was young and curious, please think, question, dissect, analyse, and don’t underestimate the reason and the importance of a complex explanation. Hardly anything in nature is simple, hence anything with do with and to nature can be simplified. Please, give a fair shot to listening to all the voices and only then make up your own mind.

Elena Balestri is SFF Senior Fisheries Policy and Science Manager