The Trouble With Communicating Science

Chris Mooney of the Washington Post has an article on why science is such a hard sell. Using "climategate" as a backdrop, he writes:

The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

The problem here is two-fold. First, while there may, in fact, be a general consensus on global warming, these scientists behaved badly. There has been way too much documentation to suggest otherwise. That is what tarnished their reputation. Second, even if they hadn't behaved badly, the general public does have a dismal understanding of science, be it global warming, gravity or evolution. Mooney is correct about this.

According to Mooney, scientists have simply gotten to the point where they don't talk to the media or publicly debate their ideas because of this lack of understanding. This is certainly true within the creation/evolution debate, where creationists will often bring in buses of supporters to a debate, often overwhelming the scientist involved. The media is usually oblivious to this tilt. He continues:

They [scientists] no longer have that luxury. After all, global-warming skeptics suffer no such compunctions. What's more, amid the current upheaval in the media industry, the traditional science journalists who have long sought to bridge the gap between scientists and the public are losing their jobs en masse. As New York Times science writer Natalie Angier recently observed, her profession is "basically going out of existence." If scientists don't take a central communications role, nobody else with the same expertise and credibility will do it for them.

Daily, the Discovery Institute puts out editorials and bulletins attacking "Darwinists" despite the fact that no evolutionary biologists refers to themselves that way. To the DI, this is unimportant. The message is more important than the details. Kirk Cameron, under the auspices of Living Waters, has no formal training in biology yet feels qualified and compelled to shout from the rooftops that evolution is wrong.

Mooney states, correctly, that part of the problem could be solved if scientists who were also believers stood up and said something:

"Many Christians, including fundamentalists, can accept evolution as long as it is not attached to the view that life has no purpose," Karl Giberson, a Christian physicist and the author of "Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution," told me recently. "Human life has value, and any scientific theory that even appears to deny this central religious affirmation will alienate people of faith and create opportunity for those who would rally believers against evolution."

In other words, what's needed is less "pure science" on its own -- although of course scientists must continue to speak in scientifically accurate terms -- and more engagement with the concerns of nonscientific audiences. In response to that argument, many researchers will say: "Why target us? We're the good guys. And if we become more media savvy, we'll risk our credibility."

As long as the evolution debate is seen in moral and religious terms, the science will always be of secondary importance and scientists will succeed in getting the message across to no one. The other problem is that in any given conversation about the debate, how does the average scientist get someone up to speed on the concepts of allopatric speciation, homology, systematics, adaptive radiation and evolutionary development, just to name a few? Such concepts are central to evolutionary theory and most evolutionary biologists use them daily. John Q. Public has no idea what they mean and is somewhat disinclined to learn.

There is also the vociferous anti-evolution camp that either try to tear down the science in any way they can (sometimes dishonestly) or claim that believing in such things will lead to every imaginable sin and Hell. Creationist Todd Wood writes:

As a point of application, I think modern creationists would be much better served if we stopped coddling their every doubt and fear with new "evidence for creation" and instead helped to wean them off evidence altogether. A truly close Christian walk with Jesus should render evidence irrelevant. This is where we really want to be, not buffeted about by the wind and waves but confidently walking through the storm with our eyes fixed unwaveringly on Christ.

SLAM!! The mind of every scientist (including me) just slammed shut. Such a perspective is absolutely antithetical to scientists who view their task as studying and identifying the wonders of creation. Indeed, such a perspective is, even for Christians who are scientists, absurd. The universe IS God's creation. If it tells us something we don't like, are we simply to ignore it? That isn't science, it is pure religion, and your average scientist will accept the science and throw out the religion as being not worthy of his or her time. We cannot hope to reach people out there if we cannot portray science correctly and in such a way that it does not attack people's religious or moral values.

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Climategate, Meet IDgate!

A story by Barbara Hollingsworth in the Washington Examiner likens the current negative response to global warming scepticism to that of scientist trying to promote ID. She writes:

More than 800 Ph.D.-level scientists around the world are seriously considering ID to explain the origin of life, but you'd never know it. Most do so clandestinely for fear of being ostracized by their peers or even forced out of their academic positions.

Some have secretly contacted the Discovery Institute (www.discoverinstitute.org) after researching ID, Stephen C. Meyer, author of "Signature in the Cell" -- now in its fifth printing and one of Amazon.com's top 10 science titles -- recently told me over lunch.

Others, like Cold War dissidents making furtive contact with the West, arrange discreet meetings to discuss what "evolutionary biologists don't want to talk about, the origins of the information in the digital code of DNA necessary to produce life."

There is a fundamental flaw in this analogy: different climate models are testable and some have, indeed, been shown to support, on some level, a cooling trend. That is quite different from support for ID which exists in the form of negative evidence. Arguments for ID stem from trying to show the improbability of evolution to explain biodiversity. For example:

When former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe computed the chances that the four amino acids that form DNA could self-arrange themselves into just one functional protein, he found it was 1:10164 -- or less than the odds of finding one marked subatomic particle in the entire observable universe.

This suffers from the same logic that plagued Michael Behe in his recent books The Edge of Evolution and Darwin's Black Box. Namely, that all of the mutations that "self arranged" did so all at once. No model of early life assumes that and all of the available evidence suggests that this is exactly what did not happen. The mutations came about over time and individually.

The other problem with this idea is that it is a post hoc argument. That same logic could apply to any given event on any given day that includes a large group of people. What are the odds that all of the decisions that each person had made over the course of their lives led them to be at that same spot at the same time? The probabilities are infinitesimally small. Yet there they all are. I thought about that as I waited for Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford and Phil Collins to take the stage at the Genesis concert I attended in 2007. There were almost 100 k people there, each with a lifetime of decisions behind them.

Then the wheels come completely off:

"The actual evidence shows that major features of the fossil record are an embarrassment to Darwinian evolution; that early development in vertebrate embryos is more consistent with separate origins than with common ancestry; that non-coding DNA is fully functional, contrary to neo-Darwinian predictions; and that natural selection can accomplish nothing more than artificial selection -- which is to say, minor changes within existing species," writes Discovery Institute senior fellow Jonathan Wells, who has two Ph.D.s from the University of California at Berkeley in molecular and cell biology. "Faced with such evidence, any other scientific theory would probably have been abandoned long ago. Judged by the normal criteria of empirical science, Darwinism is false."

And all credibility goes out the window. There is very good evidence for evolution in the fossil record (how many times do I have to say this?). If people like Wells don't want to believe in evolution, that is fine, but to say that the fossil record is an embarrassment to "Darwinian evolution" is flat-out false. It gets more false every year!

These, to me, are the principle reasons that ID doesn't get taken seriously. The mathematical models don't address biological reality, they have no testable models, and nobody at the DI seems to know anything about the fossil record. Where is the science?

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