I don't think I need to explain to most DKos readers why scientific literacy is important, or that it is sadly lacking in this country. So I won't. With your assumed permission I will take it as granted.
So now that we have all agreed on that, WHY is scientific literacy so elusive in this corner of the globe? And, quite frankly, in most parts of the world. We have known it is important for quite a while, and we don't seem to be making major strides toward correcting it.
After the jump I lay out some of what I see as the major barriers to the understanding of science in our country, focusing on evolution, the field in which I work and teach. I haven't put these in any particular order. Feel free to rank them yourself.
- Scientist talk funny.
In college, when I first started reading the biology journals, I couldn't figure out why most of the writing was so stilted and painful to read. I had the distinct impression the scientists writing these journals were just trying to impress the other scientists with how scientist-like they could talk. Years and degrees later, and having slogged through thousands of such papers, I can comprehend and evaluate such papers with no undue effort, but the writing still pisses me off. Scientific language does have to be different than normal English. One of the wonderful things about English is how creative it lets us be. Everything has shades of meaning. Puns, entendre and innuendo drip from every clause. Science can't allow that. When a scientist writes science, she has to be sure everyone else knows exactly what definition of each word is being used. If there is any doubt, she should give a specific definition or cite the paper in which the definition was given. The word theory means something very different to a biologist than a philosopher, and one can't just use the philosopher's meaning in a scientific paper. Science is at its core not just the precise examination of and reasoning about the real world, but also the precise communication of every step of the process to those who wish to evaluate or learn from it. This cannot be done in a language as fluffy as vernacular English.
That said, many scientists are terrible writers. They write to get as much information as precisely as possible into the space the journal has given them, and readability be damned. Most graduate science programs don't require any training as a writer.
Of course, most scientists also do a terrible job of popularization. They not only write scientific papers that are opaque to the non-specialist, they shun reporters (who make their crisp precise science all fluffy and approximate) don't write for a popular audience and can't stop talking scientese.
- Most people don't know a scientist
Raise your hand if you know a working scientist well enough to feel like you grok what they do. Wow, I see a lot of hands. This is not a typical crowd. If I asked that question on most blogs, they wouldn't even know the word grok.
Scientists are not in every town the way teachers or drug dealers are. A lot of people have never seen a scientist at work. We are concentrated around labs and universities. There are maybe eight thousand of us here in Berkeley, more than in many states. How are people to understand what scientist do if they never see scientist doing it?
- Too few science teachers, with too little understanding of science.
We don't value teachers all that much in this country. Most people who have a science degree and really understand what they learned can make a lot more, and be a lot more respected, in a wide range of jobs other than teaching. Until we value our teachers more, and reflect that in their pay, too many kids will be learning science from the gym teacher who hurt his back.
- Science makes poor rhetoric.
Many people see "survival of the fittest" as being synonymous with "evolution." "Survival of the fittest" is a great slogan for those who think the strong should be able to crush the weak, but it really only describes a tiny fraction of what evolution is.
Darwin preferred the term natural selection. Anyone who has read even the first few chapters of "Origin of Species" knows that he starts out talking at great length about how breeders of dogs and pigeon select those individuals which most closely approximate the set of traits they are trying to achieve, and then allow only those individuals to breed. Over the course of generations we get all the dog breeds and fancy pigeons in the world. This is what he called artificial selection. He then proposed that simply because there are more individuals of every species being born than the Earth can possibly support, the vast majority of individuals of every species must die before reproducing, such that only a small fraction survive and reproduce. So which ones survive and which don't? In part this is chance, and in part those with the traits most advantageous in their particular environment are more likely to survive. And, as the offspring are usually like the parents, more of the next generation will have the advantageous traits than in the previous generation. By analogy with artificial selection, Darwin called this Natural Selection. But wait, if all the ones who didn't have the advantageous trait died off, doesn't evolution end there? This is where mutation comes into it. Mutations happen all the time. Every individual in the world is a mutant. Yes, you are a mutant. So why don't we all have three heads and fire shooting out of our eyes?
Picture it this way. Your genes are like a recipe, for making you, in a recipe book. We come along and change one character randomly, somewhere in the book. If it is on a page that does not have the recipe for you (your DNA that doesn't actually code for anything), you come out crisp and delicious anyway. Even if it is a character on the page that codes for you, there is a good chance we just get a slight misspelling, no big deal. But occasionally, there will be a change that makes a difference. "3 Tbsp baking soda" becomes "9 Tbsp baking soda." The recipe is ruined, you die in utero. But occasionally, very occasionally, once every billion times someone recopies the recipe book, they make a great change. They purely randomly substitute whole wheat flour for wheat flour, and you come out of the oven better than ever. And the chef thinks you are just the best thing since sliced bread, and makes lots of copies of you and pretty soon every body is making whole wheat you. At least everyone who likes whole wheat.
To be entirely clear, in evolution the only chef is natural selection itself. Natural selection does not taste each mutation and decide which are good and copy them. Natural selection is agentless. And that is one factor that makes it so hard for people to accept. Saying "God did it, praise him" is much better rhetoric than saying, "well you see there is this multistep process involving selection and mutation that makes creatures that seem beautifully designed, and they have been selected to be that way, but there is no one doing the selection." And yes, everything I have said here is a vast over simplification, but even what I have said is far too long and complex to make a good talking point.
- People don't like science to contradict their notions.
Even among the highly informed and thoughtful readership at DailyKos, there have been quite a few objections, from both the right and the left, to statements I have made that are not at all in controversy among scientists. I won't go into great detail, we can all think of examples. We all have biases and frames of reference, and good science doesn't care if it steps on a few toes or bruises a few egos. If the goal of science was to reconfirm our notions, and make us feel more comfortable with who we already are, that would be called religion. Science is useful specifically because it forces us to change our understanding of the world, and people hate that.
- There are nefarious forces at work.
"Our product is doubt."
Tobacco Institute Internal Memo
There are powerful vested interests who would lose their vests if the American public understood science. ExxonMobile funds efforts to confuse the public about climatology. Televangelists fund writers to claim to be scientists who have rejected evolution. Monsanto funds smear campaigns against researchers who question the safetly of RoundUp. I could make a long list. You are all familiar.
- The world is full of charlatans.
In mediaeval Europe, there was a whole industry of people going around claiming to be holy people, asking for donations. Now we call them televangelists. But as more and more of the public has come to believe science without understanding it, charlatans can now sell their delivered truth in the guise of science. Slap some big words and few statistical tests on there and yer good to go.
This has two serious drawbacks. First, it makes it necessary to investigate the integrity of everyone who makes a scientific claim, and more seriously, it spreads misinformation. Charlatans choose emotionally appealing, easy to understand scientific lies to tell. They have an easy time convincing people to choose their convenient lie over the inconvenient truths (sorry Al.)
I came upon this handy list on the National Science foundation website http://www.nsf.gov/... :
Furthermore, a group of judges recently asked renowned physics professor Robert L. Park for guidance on how to recognize questionable scientific claims. The author of a landmark book on the subject, Park came up with "seven warning signs" that a scientific claim is probably bogus (Park 2003):
1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media (thus bypassing the peer review process by denying other scientists the opportunity to determine the validity of the claim).
2. The discoverer claims that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work. (The mainstream science community may be deemed part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government.)
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
4. The evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
None of these things is a sure indication one way or the other. Darwin and Einstein both worked largely in isolation. Galileo, Einstein and Newton all proposed new laws of nature. Number three is more common in physics and chemistry than in biology. I would say number one is the most important for our purposes. The "intelligent design" people have issued several thousand times as many contentions to popular audiences as they have published in the peer reviewed literature.
I would add an eighth item, the discoverer is funded by a corporation and discovers that that corporation's product is safe and effective.
- People don't need to understand science to get from day to day.
We don't come to their houses and torture them into thinking critically. They don't lose their jobs for failing to understand evolution. Their houses don't get flooded because they reject the possibility of global warming (well not most of the time, yet).
This is not to say that it is not personally advantageous in many ways to be scientifically literate, but it is not used day to day by most people.
- The traditional media get it all wrong.
Science journalists by and large have little scientific training. And they are writing for an audience that does care what the 95% uncertainty intervals are.
Movies and TV shows, even "nature shows" are generally written and produced by non-scientists. I have students who are shocked to learn that X-Men is not a good model for understanding evolution.
Science textbooks used in our public schools are generally put together by publishing companies who give non-scientists a list of scientific facts that are supposed to be in the book and tell them to make a textbook. The list of facts is compiled by a non-scientist political appointee based on recommendations of committees of scientists and political appointees. Your child's science textbook, with a very few exceptions, is wildly inaccurate.
I could go on, but I won't. Feel free to propose your own reasons in the comments section.