Editorial Volume 14

Dear Reader, “Are we nuts?“ asked recently one of my favourite bloggers. She was referring to human behaviour that contravened the actor’s own explicit interests, as routinely reported in a cross-section of the average daily news. Her deceivingly simple question can be interpreted at the individual level (e.g. junk food) and the collective levels (e.g. gun use), applied to the short or longer term, to human nature as it manifested historically or to human behaviour at the present time. Her question could also have been directed at events not usually covered by the mainstream media, such as ecology and population issues, or the fact that the world’s most powerful country is now governed by a kakistocracy [1,2]. But even without singling out its worst offenders, collective policies around the world show a deplorable lack of scientific reason[3].