I am no longer the Humanist of the Year, but have been officially succeeded by the eminent Bill Nye the Science Guy. Hemant has Nye’s acceptance speech — I don’t feel sad at all given the distinguished company I’m in.
It’s a good talk, discussing how we need good stories to communicate science. And Nye talks the talk and walks the walk!
People were apparently rather peeved about Morgan Freeman’s appearance on the Daily Show on Wednesday night (that link is to the whole episode; Freeman appears at about 15 minutes in). He’s narrating a new science show that, in the clip shown, seems to be mainly about physics and cosmology. After talking a bit about the show, they get down to the problematic bit: Stewart asks if scientists know what happened at the beginning of the universe, and Freeman basically says they don’t; that there are different scientists with different ideas, some contentiousness, and some outright ignorance about the details.
This is not offensive. That’s the truth. I hope no one was bothered by that.
I get the sense that what did bother people, though, was that Stewart pressed a bit and asked Freeman what scientists tell him when faced with stuff they don’t know, and here’s how Freeman replied:
Whatever scientists don’t know becomes the god factor.
Again, Freeman is right! This is what happens so often: there are many things we don’t understand, and some people, even some distinguished scientists, are prone to look at the gaps in our knowledge and announce that that is where god lurks. It’s the standard ‘god of the gaps’ logic, and it’s bogus, but it really does happen and there are a lot of scientists who indulge in it. Look at Einstein, who was constantly flinging out god references for all the mysteries of the universe, despite the fact that he was an unbeliever himself.
Now it’s a short clip, a seven minute interview, and of course they don’t get into meanings and implications at all, so Freeman’s interpretation is completely ambiguous. If he’s trying to say our ignorance is evidence for a god, then he’s full of it and we can point and laugh at the movie star floundering out of his depth…but he didn’t say that at all. In the context, I took it as more of an admission that there is still a lot of god of the gaps thinking even in the scientific community, and that’s entirely true.
So don’t get mad at Morgan Freeman just yet. Roll your eyes at the scientists who bleat out “God!” every time they’re baffled by something, instead. Save your scorn for the nonsense of people like Tipler and Davies and even Kaku. They’re the ones feeding mystical fluff into our perception of reality.
These do seem to be a bit polarizing, with a strong I-hate-autotuning camp…I rather like most of them, although this particular example is a bit weak — autotuning doesn’t help much with long passages of tech talk, and this one has it.
It doesn’t help that I’m not that keen on sending manned missions to Mars.
John Timmer has written up a relevant paper on the tactics people use to avoid scientific conclusions. When science doesn’t feed your biases, reject science.
A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term “scientific impotence”—the decision that science can’t actually address the issue at hand properly. It finds evidence that not only supports the scientific impotence model, but suggests that it could be contagious. Once a subject has decided that a given topic is off limits to science, they tend to start applying the same logic to other issues.
Francisco Ayala, I’m looking at you. There are some people who are mighty quick to declare that a whole range of topics are excluded from the domain of science.
Timmer points out another common observation, that denialism seems to encompass an entire syndrome.
…it might explain why doubts about mainstream science seem to travel in packs. For example, the Discovery Institute, famed for hosting a petition that questions our understanding of evolution, has recently taken up climate change as an additional issue (they don’t believe the scientific community on that topic, either). The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine is best known for hosting a petition that questions the scientific consensus on climate change, but the people who run it also promote creationism and question the link between HIV and AIDS.
The DI also has HIV deniers in its midst, too.
A while back, I gave a keynote talk at an evo-devo conference, and one of the things I told them was that public outreach was important, and one tool to get your message out was blogging. Telling that to a mob of working scientists who have other pressing matters occupying them is dangerous, but I also told them of one easy way to spread the word about science: make your students do it, and coopt existing educational frameworks to make it happen. The specific suggestion I made was that graduate student journal clubs should be drafted to make writing a blog entry about that week’s paper a part of the work.
Those of you who haven’t been through the grad student grind may not be familiar with journal clubs, but they’re nearly universal. A general topic is chosen for a term — I’ve been involved with journal clubs as broad as “Neurobiology” and as specific as “Astrobiology and mechanisms of bacterial survival in space”. The group usually meets once a week, and each week one member presents a discussion of a single paper in the field. It’s fun, it hones critical thinking, and forces students to trace ideas through the primary research literature.
Anyway, you can see how easily that would adapt to science blogging. Just have your student presenter be responsible for writing up a basic summary of the paper to be posted to the web ahead of time — they’re already doing all the work, they’ve made notes on the paper, it’s an easy step to take…and it adds an outreach and communication component to an existing educational responsibility. It’s win-win all around. If you’re faculty running a journal club at your university, think about doing it next term — it adds to the flowering of accessible summaries of key research papers.
Want an example? Here’s one from the evo-devo group at the University of Oregon, on Evolution, Development, and Genomics. It contains everything you need, references, links to sources, and good summaries of research — and it all spins out organically from something grad students everywhere do all the time. The only thing it’s really missing now is active comments from outsiders, and that’s one concern … when we’re all doing this, it’s going to be hard to get the readership for any one journal club blog to get good feedback. The important thing, though, is that the information is out there.
One thing I can do to help is link to some of these sorts of blogs. If any of you are going to be trying this next fall, send me a link to your public journal club page, and I’ll put together a listing and post it at the start of the school year (don’t send it to me now, it’ll get lost — contact me in August). Also, and even more importantly, get your blog registered with Research Blogging, which is an excellent central aggregator of exactly the kinds of articles a journal club blog will be churning out.
Somebody ought to publish this 15 page comic about the anti-vaccination movement…and send it around to pediatricians’ waiting rooms.
The advocates of accommodationism and apologetics at Biologos have a new article up claiming that scientists ought not to advocate for science — we’re supposed to emphasize uncertainty. That’s lame; it feeds into the sterile stereotype of the scientist as some kind of dispassionate drone with little enthusiasm for ideas. As Jerry Coyne explains, it’s also hypocritical of a site that promotes religion without hesitation to be arguing that scientists should be more ambiguous.
That’s all we need, is for science to be made more boring, dry, and ambiguous. You’d almost think the Templetonites over there want to sabotage science education.
At last, some research in communicating evolution that I can agree with, because it corresponds to my prior experience and biases! Which is exactly the wrong reason to agree with it, of course, but it’s a start, and with some significant reservations, is an interesting foundation to argue over.
Here’s the abstract. It’s a paper describing general strategies for winning over participants in public debates about science, which basically says, in terms more familiar to us, that waffling accommodationists are losers.
Public debates driven by incomplete scientific data where nobody can claim absolute certainty, due to current state of scientific knowledge, are studied. The cases of evolution theory, global warming and H1N1 pandemic influenza are investigated. The first two are of controversial impact while the third is more neutral and resolved. To adopt a cautious balanced attitude based on clear but inconclusive data appears to be a lose-out strategy. In contrast overstating arguments with wrong claims which cannot be scientifically refuted appear to be necessary but not sufficient to eventually win a public debate. The underlying key mechanism of these puzzling and unfortunate conclusions are identified using the Galam sequential probabilistic model of opinion dynamics. It reveals that the existence of inflexible agents and their respective proportions are the instrumental parameters to determine the faith of incomplete scientific data public debates. Acting on one’s own inflexible proportion modifies the topology of the flow diagram, which in turn can make irrelevant initial supports. On the contrary focusing on open-minded agents may be useless given some topologies. When the evidence is not as strong as claimed, the inflexibles rather than the data are found to drive the opinion of the population. The results shed a new but disturbing light on designing adequate strategies to win a public debate.
So when you’ve got an argument going, and one side has the evidence but the other side has an inflexible certainty that the evidence is wrong, the inflexibles tend to distort the normal process of weighing the evidence and drawing reasonable conclusions — they suck in more uncommitted participants (called ‘floaters’) to their way of thinking, generating more inflexibles, strengthing the position of the anti-science side, leading to greater attraction to being wrong. The counter-strategy, suggested later in the paper, is to ‘get more inflexibles’ — winning over floaters so they drift over to your side has little long-term impact, it’s far better to build a larger army of forceful advocates for your position.
Now for the reservations, though. This isn’t real social science: dig into the paper deeper and you discover it is entirely theoretical, based on a mathematical model of human behavior. Hmmm. It’s all well and good to say that a population of autonomous agents with properties X, Y, and Z will behave in a particular way in a simulation, but, well, people tend to be very messy beings. I don’t have a background in this field to be able to say whether the model has good empirical support or not, so I’m not going to be able to say that the Pharyngula model for arguing over evolution, that is, by unreserved and loud advocacy that steamrollers the opposition as much as possible, has been proven to be correct.
But that’s what this paper says I should do anyway! If I want to persuade, it’s best to avoid those fuzzy little tentative words, go gung ho for the answer you want. Which in a lot of ways is undesirable, actually.
The results shed a new but disturbing light on Designing adequate strategies to eventually win public debates. To produce inflexibles in one’s own side is thus critical to win a public argument whatever the rigor cost and the associated epistemological paradoxes. At odds, to focus on convincing open-minded agents is useless. In summary, when the scientific evidence is not as strong as claimed, the inflexibles rather than the data are found to drive the collective opinion of the population. Consequences on Designing adequate strategies to win a public debate are discussed.
OK. We need more positive inflexibles. Got it. (Oh, and by the way, the paper has an annoying trait of capitalizing “Design” wherever it occurs. Don’t know why, it may just be grep run amuck.)
However, I have another reservation. What’s this “when the scientific evidence is not as strong as claimed” business? The author has his own peculiar blindspot, where he thinks biologists have been overstating the evidence for evolution. That isn’t true at all.
However the major outcome of our modeling is to confirm the rightness in overstating the validity of Darwin theory to oppose Intelligent Design in terms of success in the public debate. Afterwards our results suggest that in case opponents to Intelligent Design had been more circumspect about the “status” of Darwin theory, they would have lost the public debate. It is a somehow disturbing hypothesis with an embarrassing result for an honest scientist.
Except, no, we have not been insufficienctly circumspect at all. The evidence for evolution really is overwhelmingly in its favor. It isn’t proven in a mathematical sense, there is no illusion that we have accounted for every single possible mechanism, and there is still active exploration of all the details, but there is no doubt anywhere sensible that evolution, that populations change over time driven by natural processes, and that all life on earth shares a common ancestry, is a fact, amply confirmed and tested.
There’s nothing to be embarrassed about open advocacy of a well-demonstrated scientific position at all, and no one is hiding the interesting controversies within the boundaries of that truth. What this really is about is good debating strategies. You do not open a discussion by saying, “Well, we aren’t certain about the relative contributions of chance and selection, and maybe chemical properties dictate some of the outcomes of biological processes, but we’re pretty certain evolution happens.” That puts all the emphasis on doubt. No, you start by saying positively that “Evolution happens, period.” Then you can discuss, if necessary, the ragged edges of the science. The important point, though, is the reality of that core idea, and you have to realize that in many arguments with creationists, it’s not the ragged edges they’re talking about — it’s precisely that scientifically indisputable central fact.
No compromise of the science is required, only a recognition of the actual point being discussed. Where scientists are often handicapped is that they don’t recognized the depth of the denial on the other side, and that their opponents really are happily butting their heads against the rock hard foundation of the science. We tend to assume the creationists can’t really be that stupid, and figure they must have some legitimate complaint about some aspect of evolution with which we can sympathize. They don’t. They really are that nuts.
(via Ben Goldacre)
We haven’t fired up the framing wars in a while, fortunately, but I just have to point you to this interview with Frank Luntz, the Republican Party’s favorite spin doctor. “Communications Specialist” apparently means simply being able to lie persuasively to the public — it’s the antithesis of what scientists should want to do.
The Ask a Biologist site has been relaunched and revamped, and it’s the perfect place for teachers and parents to send kids with difficult questions about biology. It’s really easy: just go to the site, click on the “ask” button, and type in a question…and with a little patience, eventually a qualified expert will try to answer it. Give it a try!
askabiologist.org.uk is back, bigger and better, to answer your questions about all things biological. We are a group of over 60 professional biologists; Ph.D. students, Post-docs, lecturers and professors, who volunteer to give their time to answer your questions. We have been around now for about 4 years now, and the site will get a brand new feel, the main thing will be that we will have increased ‘user-friendliness’ whereby people will be able to upload a photo of ‘the green insect that is really interested in fallen fruit’. We are here to answer childrens’ question about the natural world, and with biologists and palaeontologists with interests in many different areas, from insects and worms, to dinosaurs and birds, or trees and other plants, to embryos and evolution, and much more besides, we can help!
If you are a parent or a teacher who does not know the answer to a question, give us a go, we might be able to help. In fact, if you have a question, it does not matter how old you are, why not see if we can help. Answering your questions is the main thing that we do, but we also have a new blog section, where we will post exciting science stories. We also have our ‘labcoat essays’ where you can find out what we do as biologists, and we have the archive of all of the questions that we have answered since we began. Another new feature is that now you have the ability to respond to the answer we give to your questions. The only thing that we DO NOT DO, is answer your homework! Obviously there is a difference between the homework of a primary/elementary school child and that of a secondary school and college pupil, but as a rule, if it’s your homework, you have to do it yourself.
