2005 Essays

Optimizing the Human Response to Natural Evil

Pollack, Robert

The question these slides raise is, simply put, why do people act so poorly when confronted with the Natural Evil of such a disaster as Katrina, whether by denial as in the case of the paralytic response to forecasts of the time and place of landfall, or by actual self-destructive acts, as in the thousands of decisions to put valuable in a hurricane’s path? I am not a psychiatrist, nor a sage of any religion, but only a biologist with a religious commitment of my own, so I will give you my answer in just those terms.