This morning I was listening to the Minnesota Public Radio Midmorning podcast. In particular, I was listening to a discussion of the topic “New polls indicates a dim view of U.S. scientific achievement” (listen to it here). The short of it is, there is a new poll that found (surprise!) the vast majority of scientists (97%) accept that life evolved over time from a shared common ancestor but only 61% of the general public believes the same. On the topic of global warming, the divide is even greater. 84% of scientists are convinced that global warming is real and caused by human activity but only 49% of the public agrees.
Nothing new here, really. American’s love them some science when it can bring them high-definition Dancing With the Stars or omega-3 enhanced Twinkies or Internet nudity, but if them scientists say something inconvenient or out of line with the dogma somebody learned at their daddy’s knee, well, they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about, or it’s just a matter of opinion and nobody really knows, right?
Sigh… So, why bother writing about this at all? I mean, whoop-de-doo, people would rather cling to cherished beliefs than learn. Big deal. That’s not really the part I want to write about. It’s more the proposed solution they were discussing on the show. The solution they were pitching, I kid you not, was that scientists maybe need to learn to communicate better.
Seriously? The problem is that scientists are lousy communicators? Really?
Allow me to illustrate, if I may, why I see this as a wee bit misguided.
Let’s say that you are a parent and you want to teach your five year old why the sky is blue. They ask and you explain how light gets bent when it comes through the air and makes it look blue. They have a hard time grasping the concept of light being bent and changing color, but you tell them it’s like a rainbow, and they believe you. You’ve probably communicated the basic concept well enough and in the absence of anybody else undoing your effort at education, your child will grow up believing this, refining that belief as they age and gain a subtler grasp of how the physical world works. Now, let’s throw in a monkey wrench. You tell your child this but one of their friends tells them that science is wrong, that the sky is blue because it’s God’s favorite color or because there are oceans above the clouds that are blue and that’s also where rain comes from. Your child now maybe isn’t so sure which answer is correct. The problem isn’t that you communicated poorly, it’s that somebody else gave your child false information and muddied the picture for her.
The work of science isn’t done in a vacuum and neither is science education. Scientists write excellent and very readable and understandable books all the time, television shows like Nature and Nova constantly inform and educate. There are whole channels devoted to elucidating even the most mind-boggling of scientific discoveries. But, there is also a concerted effort to undermine all of this. Organizations like Answers in Genesis and The Discovery Institute work around the clock to appear “sciencey”, to spread disinformation, to distort and counter actual science with propaganda, logical fallacies, and flat out lies, almost exclusively in the name of Christianity. They produce heavy handed propaganda like Expelled to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), equating science with fascism, nazism, immorality and (gasp!) atheism with nary a true fact at their command. They don’t need facts, they just need rationalizations and emotions because they understand that this is enough for most people. Scientists need reasons and evidence before they’ll believe something, but the general public just needs a set of excuses for them to hold on to what they already believe to be true and there are large and well-funded groups working ceaselessly to manufacture the rationalizations they need.
Let’s take a look at The Discovery Institute, shall we? They are the latest and greatest propaganda machine for the creationist movement, and boy are they ever making inroads. I was blown away when I was reading some of the newer Watchtower Society publications and found them quoting Intelligent Design proponents like Michael Behe to support their contention that human beings have only existed for about 6,000 years. Behe doesn’t believe that. He accepts that all life on earth evolved via descent with modification over the course of billions of years. Why would they quote him then? Because he also puts forth the (thoroughly discredited) notion of “irreducible complexity”, which he claims proves that some external intelligence must have mucked around in the evolutionary process at some point. Never mind that he has yet to provide an example of an irreducibly complex biological system (at least, no examples that haven’t been debunked), it’s the concept that matters. Somebody who wants to believe that evolution is impossible simply needs to hear that some biological structures are too complex to evolve. They can then feel justified in filling in the blanks with whatever they happen to believe without looking too deeply into the evidence. After all, Behe is a scientist, right?
When marketing doubt and uncertainty, it is only necessary that one comes up with something that sounds plausible on the surface because that will satisfy most of the people who ever consider the topic. A sound reason is not required, just something that scratches the itch in somebody’s mind, makes them feel justified in holding their present view, and lets them get back to thinking about the rest of their lives. The entire creationist/ID movement is based on developing arguments that appear sound and then presenting them in the most carefully chosen language possible so that people can continue to doubt science. If you don’t like the term propaganda, how about marketing? They market the idea that there is controversy in the scientific community, that there is a conspiracy among atheist intellectuals to attack faith, and they provide seemingly valid points of contention. What they don’t do is correct their claims when those claims are debunked by actual science. They just keep repeating them, knowing full well that they can accomplish their goals by stubborn repetition, evidence be damned.
If somebody already believes that they know why evolution is a crock, why would they bother to actually read a book about it or listen to reasons why 97% of scientists accept it as a fact? For the majority, the answer is clear. They won’t. They have better things to do with their time.
Unfortunately for the future of science education in this country, propaganda is more effective than evidence, no matter how well presented the evidence may be. A sound bite is more persuasive than a tome like Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale or Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful. There is no propaganda machine working against computer science, or rocket science, only against the biological and (recently) climate sciences. It is no wonder that these are the areas where people doubt. The correlation is plain.
To anybody who ever reads this blog and wonders about any of these things, I have only the following advice. Consider the source of whatever you read and if you think there is a controversy, please, for goodness sake, examine both sides from sources allied with each. If you read Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, then read a book that critically examines it, or better yet, a book from somebody who represents the other side of the argument. You will find that the propagandists leave out essential information, misrepresent things, and raise arguments that have been answered again and again and again. The truth is out there, if only people were willing to look at it. Until American’s start doing that, no amount of improvement of the communications skills of scientists will change anything.
