"You've heard about some of these pet projects, they don't really make a whole lot of sense and sometimes dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not."
Governor Sarah Palin, October 27th, 2008.

Sarah Palin is on the stump, rousing the faithful in support of the causes, the values and the world picture for which she and true Republicans everywhere stand. She is against big government because this means high taxes squandered on projects that bring no conceivable benefit to anyone apart from those who are paid out of those taxes. An example occurs to her: fruit fly research in Paris (adding, 'France', in case her audience may have thought she was talking about Paris Texas or Paris Hilton). Pause for audience laughter. And then she adds (and you can almost see the famous wink, though it is not there on the video), "I kid you not."

There is probably little point in explaining to someone who (so the story goes) thinks that 'Africa' is a country, that she could not have chosen a less telling example. Research on fruit flies – which has been conducted for over a century, and not just in Paris, France – has been an enormously fertile source of knowledge and insights. It has cast light on mutations, on evolution, on the expression of genes and the interaction between genes and the environment, and in my own field, on the mechanisms of ageing. As Adam Rutherford of the Guardian pointed out, the fruit fly is on a par with the mouse as the founding model organism for the field of genetics. It is more useful to instead reflect on the phenomenon of 'knowingness' and other shallows in our consciousness, to which we are all prone. For Palin's confident howler is a perfect illustration of the connexion between knowingness and lack of knowledge: the less you know, the less you will be aware of your ignorance. The familiar metaphor is that the wider the circle of our knowledge, the greater its contact with the unknown, and the more oppressive our feeling of cognitive inadequacy. By contrast, a small mind finds a small world to match it, and the smaller the mind the more it feels it has the world sussed.