“So, Kansas is flatter than a pancake,” said I. M. Wright, an old friend and curmudgeon, as we ground our bicycles up Palmyra Hill to Baldwin. “I can’t believe those scientists from Southwest Texas State and Arizona State spent months measuring an IHOP pancake to tell us Kansas is flat. A half-hour on I-70 would have done the trick.”

“Course,” he panted, “it’s not a surprise. West Texas is flat. Arizona is flat. And as we all can plainly see, THE ENTIRE EARTH IS FLATTER THAN A PANCAKE! The Flat Earth Society has been saying so for years, fighting the Big Scientific Conspiracy and its Spherical Earth Theory. The Earth is a squashed pentagon — flat with five sides.”

“So,” I countered, “how are the continents and oceans arranged on our flat Earth?”

“Well, on the topside, Europe is in the middle, the mountains and other continents are scattered around the edges, and part of Africa is dangling over the side. Oceans lap against the edges and spill over in places. Planes, trains, ships and automobiles that stray too close to the edge are pulled off by fierce eddy currents and trapped on the underside.”

“Hey!” I said. “So that’s where Jimmy Hoffa has been hiding all these years, and where Saddam and bin Laden are heading.”

“Very funny, Krishtalka. Keep your day job.”

“OK,” I said, taking the gloves off. “What about gravity?”

“Doesn’t exist. Part of the Big Scientific Conspiracy. It’s inertia that keeps us from falling off the Earth.”

“What about photographs from the Moon of a round Earth?”

“Fake. Ditto the so-called moon landings, which were filmed in Arizona, probably near the IHOP restaurant that made the pancake that had more topography than Kansas.”

“What about night and day? Doesn’t that prove the Earth is round?”

“Hogwash! The Earth is fixed at the center of the solar system and the universe. Every 24 hours, the sun circles over the topside of the flat Earth, then the underside, then back to topside. Presto, day and night.”

I dived off the edge of I.M.’s flat Earth. “Has the Big Science Conspiracy foisted other so-called truths on us?”

“You bet, and you biology types ought to know. Evolution tops this list. No one has ever witnessed an animal or plant or bacterium evolving into another. Case closed.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Yeah. This hysteria about biodiversity and extinction.”

“Wait,” I broke in. “There’s good evidence that the world’s animals and plants are disappearing at a phenomenal rate. Can you imagine the impact on agriculture, on natural resources and food supplies, on the ability of ecosystems to keep our air, water and soil clean enough for human use?”

“Bah! Statistical hogwash. Krishtalka, you know what they say on the street about statistics? Lies, damned lies, and statistics. At universities, it’s more bookish: Statistics is fiction in its most uninteresting form. Sure, we’ve lost the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, but most people never even knew they were once here and don’t miss them now that they’re gone.”

He was on a roll. “OK, we might lose the California Condor, gorillas, black rhinos, tigers, some whales, coral reefs and a bunch of other species on the endangered list. So what? Lots of plants and animals have become extinct throughout Earth’s history. Dinosaurs? Gone. Mastodons and mammoths? Gone. Neanderthals? Gone.

Before I could answer, he plowed on.

“Then there’s global warming. Sure, it’s gotten a few degrees hotter during the past 100 years. So what? Temperatures have been rising and falling since time immemorial. Heck, 50 million years ago Kansas was a tropical rain forest, hotter than Costa Rica. Are humans causing global warming now? There’s no direct proof, just circumstantial correlation: ozone, CO2, glaciers melting too fast, plants flowering too early, birds migrating too soon. Well, a correlation is not a cause. Anyway…”

“Whoa!” I interrupted. “Past extinctions and climate change happened at much slower rates, over hundreds of thousands and millions of years, not during one century. Global warming today will devastate polar and temperate regions. Alaska has gotten 5 degrees hotter year-round since the 1960s, and 8 degrees warmer in winter, making glaciers melt, permafrost thaw, forests die, roads collapse and ecosystems shift.

“Face it, I.M., human society must have environmental stability to survive. We’re too settled and technological to risk massive environmental shifts. Can you imagine the consequences to cities and towns, food and water supplies, industries, communication systems and human health of substantial geographic shifts in the agricultural belt or watersheds? Or of the wholesale loss of forests and grasslands? Or of melting ice caps, flooded coasts, dying oceans and hordes of alien disease pests coming in from other continents? In the long view, aren’t environmental quality and stability vital to economic growth and national security?”

“Well,” he gasped at the top of Palmyra, “you might have a point there. Good luck convincing the crowds. Trouble is, people want to believe the facts that match their prejudices, science and evidence be damned. Especially if the evidence threatens personal comfort. As you might have guessed, I find a flat Earth comforting.”

— Leonard Krishtalka is director of the Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center at Kansas University.