Unscientific America

IF SCIENCE AND OUR CULTURE HAVE COME UNSTUCK, OR IF THEY NEVER properly adhered, we have a serious problem. But it’s also one we need to think about in new ways. In this book we aim to show how science and American society have diverged sharply in the modern era, to describe the present state and consequences of this disconnect, and finally, to propose solutions. First, however, we must dispel some prevalent misconceptions about the real nature of the problem and who is responsible for its existence.

Among many scientists, there have long been groans about the public’s “scientific illiteracy.” The evidence usually consists of various embarrassing survey findings, revealing disastrously poor citizen responses to questions about scientific topics they presumably studied in elementary or high school. (For instance: “Electrons are smaller than atoms, true or false” or “The universe began with a huge explosion, true or false.”) One prominent researcher on the public understanding of science has even found that due to their failure to understand basic scientific terms or the nature of the scientific process, 80 percent of Americans can’t read the New York Times science section. Perhaps the most shocking and oft-cited scientific illiteracy result: Only half of the adult populace knows the earth orbits the sun once per year.

Such dismal findings have given rise to a standard complaint about where the problem lies whenever scientists and our society, or our political system, come into conflict. The blame is said to lie with “the public,” which needs to be more educated, more knowledgeable, better informed. Yet even a cursory examination reveals serious problems with this line of thinking.

To begin with, citizens of other nations don’t fare much better on scientific literacy surveys, and in many cases fare worse. Residents of the European Union, for instance, are less scientifically literate overall than Americans, at least according to one metric for measuring “civic science literacy” across countries. And yet they also appear much more convinced of the reality of global warming and human evolution.

Such complexities call into question whether quizzes about a few canonical “facts” or the nature of the scientific process really tell us much about a society’s outlook on the science issues that matter most. Indeed, it’s doubtful that a baseline level of scientific literacy is remotely adequate for engaging with the science-centered debates that play out regularly in the news media and the political arena. Is the goal to have a public that can dig into complicated scientific disputes and determine who is right or wrong? If so, then let’s remember that many anti-evolutionists and global warming deniers are scientists themselves, couching their claims in sophisticated scientific language and regularly citing published articles in the peer-reviewed literature. To refute their arguments, one often needs Ph.D.-level knowledge. And even then, the task requires considerable research and intellectual labor well beyond the resources or interest of most people.

And the problem grows even more complicated, because sometimes those citizens who put in the most work to understand scientific topics come out the very worst in the end—more severely misinformed than if they were merely ignorant. As Mark Twain put it, “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, it’s that they know so many things that just aren’t so.” Take the army of aggrieved parents nationwide who swear vaccines are the reason their children developed autism and who seem impossible to convince otherwise. Scientific research has soundly refuted this contention, but every time a new study comes out on the subject, the parents and their supporters have a “scientific” answer that allows them to retain their beliefs. Where do they get their “science” from? From the Internet, celebrities, other parents, and a few non-mainstream researchers and doctors who continue to challenge the scientific consensus, all of which forms a self-reinforcing echo chamber of misinformation.

The vacine-autism advocates are scientifically incorrect; there’s little doubt of that at this point. But whether they could be called “ignorant” or “scientifically illiterate” is less clear. After all, they’ve probably done far more independent research about a scientific topic that interests and affects them than most Americans have.

The same goes for other highly informed, and deeply wrong, groups—the global warming deniers, anti-evolutionists, UFO obsessives, and so on. Ignorance isn’t their problem, and neither is a lack of intellectual engagement or motivation. Anyone who has ever discussed global warming on national radio—as Chris has done countless times—can expect to be besieged by callers who don’t accept the prevailing scientific consensus and have obviously done a great deal of research to back up their prejudices. If anything, such individuals want to make a show of their erudition and proceed to rattle off a mind-boggling string of scientific-sounding claims: Global warming isn’t happening on other planets; urban heat islands (cities) thwart global thermometer readings; the atmosphere’s lowest layer, the troposphere, isn’t warming at the rate predicted by climate models; and the like.

Or consider the late Michael Crichton. He was a brilliant science-fiction novelist, screenwriter, and movie producer who backed up his best-selling narratives with considerable scientific research. Yet in his late-life novel State of Fear, he penned a wholly misleading and revisionist attack on the science of global warming. Faced with such people, intellectually driven and empowered as never before by the profusion of “science”—good, bad, and awful—on the Internet, one soon recognizes that the lack of scientific knowledge probably isn’t our main problem.

Almost inevitably, improvements to our educational system are put forward as the primary solution to the problem of scientific illiteracy. It is a lofty goal, of course, and nobody is against improving K-12 science education. But to look to education alone as the silver bullet is to write off as unreachable anyone who has already graduated from the formal educational system. That includes vast stretches of the population, including most voters, our political and cultural leaders, and the gate-keepers of the media.

The most troubling problem with the standard “scientific illiteracy” argument, however, is this: It has the effect, intended or otherwise, of exempting the smart people—the scientists—from any responsibility for ensuring that our society really does take their knowledge seriously and uses it wisely. It’s an educational problem, they can say, or a problem with the media (which doesn’t cover science accurately or pay it enough attention), and then go back to their labs.

The Pluto saga, which captured vastly more attention than most science news stories ever do and deeply engaged many members of the public, utterly explodes this conceit. There isn’t any obvious “true” or “false” answer to the question of whether Pluto is a planet, and people certainly weren’t ignorant about it. Rather, they were outraged by the sudden, top-down, seemingly arbitrary change by the science world, and they weren’t necessarily wrong to have that reaction.

For all these reasons, scholars working in the field of science and technology studies (STS) have largely discarded the idea that our problems at the science-society interface reduce to a simple matter of scientific illiteracy, traditionally defined. Instead, these thinkers have grown skeptical of what they sometimes call the “deficit model” that has come to dominate many scientists’ and intellectuals’ views of the public—the idea that there’s something lacking in people’s understanding or appreciation of science, and that this in turn explains our predicament.

The “deficit” outlook usually takes a benign form, casting scientists in the role of benevolent tutors to a public starved for knowledge. But it can also turn nastier, morphing into what we might call the “you’re an idiot” model. All too often we find scientists saying things to their peers and colleagues, or even to the press, that sound something like this: “I can’t believe the public is so stupid that it believes X” or “I can’t believe people are so ignorant that they’ll accept Y.” At this point the scientist ceases to be a friendly instructor and becomes a condescending detractor and belittler.

Either way, the “deficit” approach fails to offer effective ways of reaching people with accurate scientific information and making it stick. Members of the public aren’t empty vessels waiting to be filled with science; the refusal to tailor such information to their needs virtually ensures it won’t be received or accepted. And pointing fingers at the public or its surrogates—politicians, journalists, celebrities, and so on—is not only insulting and alienating but discourages reflection about the role scientists might be playing in the equation. Perhaps most troubling, as science-communication scholars have noted, the finger-pointing approach can trigger a vicious circle:

A deficient public cannot be trusted. Mistrust on the part of scientific actors is returned in kind by the public. Negative public attitudes, revealed in large-scale surveys, confirm the assumptions of scientists: a deficient public is not to be trusted.

So although we share with scientists the concern that their work isn’t adequately appreciated or heeded in our culture, this book will not unfold as a litany of all the ways in which the public falls short in its scientific knowledge. Neither will we proceed by exposing all the nonsense that people are regularly fed in place of good science: quack alternative medicine claims, fringe attacks on mainstream environmental research, paranormal obsessions, and the like. We’re more interested in divides and how to bridge them.

That’s not to say, however, that we wish to entirely discard the concept of “scientific illiteracy.” We’d prefer to redefine it, getting past issues of finger-pointing and buck-passing and the misconception that our problems can be reduced to what non-scientists say in response to survey questions.

Luckily, there’s another side to the scientific literacy tradition, one that goes beyond the standard emphasis on factual or theoretical scientific knowledge to stress a third aspect: citizens’ awareness of the importance of science to politics, policy, and our collective future. This dimension has often fallen by the wayside in debates about scientific illiteracy, and yet we believe it is easily the most important.

In this sense, there’s scarcely any doubt that we are scientifically illiterate, and dangerously so. But the problem is with our society as a whole, and we all sink or swim together. It’s not just the fault of the non-scientist public or the educational system: Scientists, who as a group have come to share assumptions, practices, and behaviors that place them at a far remove from their fellow citizens, play a crucial role in this dynamic. To use a classroom analogy, if the students are throwing spitballs and paper airplanes, the teacher is also droning on interminably and barely seems to notice. For this unproductive chaos we all share responsibility, scientists and non-scientists alike.

And anyway, we don’t need average citizens to become robotic memorizers of scientific facts or regular readers of the technical scientific literature. Rather, we need a nation in which science has far more prominence in politics and the media, far more relevance to the life of every American, far more intersections with other walks of life, and ultimately, far more influence where it truly matters—namely, in setting the agenda for the future as far out as we can possibly glimpse it. That would be a scientific America, and its citizens would be as scientifically literate as anyone could reasonably hope for. We will never have a nation that is fully composed of Ph.D.s.

This future-oriented perspective also helps us see why having a society shot through with scientific illiteracy poses such a threat. It leaves us too little attuned to the fundamental advances and dynamics that will inevitably shape the coming decades. The result is our repeated failure as a nation to take forward-looking actions before it’s too late.

Polling data refute this notion outright. Rather than actively disliking science, Americans have at least some positive attitudes toward it. For instance, America’s scientific leaders still enjoy more public confidence than the leaders of any prominent institution other than the military. Still, the vast bulk of Americans cannot even name those scientific leaders they so trust, and that points to the real nature of the difficulty we face.

It’s not that most Americans despise science. Rather, they’re too uninvolved; they don’t have science on the radar most of the time. When directly asked in surveys, members of the public express considerable interest in learning about new scientific discoveries. Yet clever pollsters have been able to tease out that these respondents are far more interested in other things. According to the National Science Foundation, only 15 percent of the public follows science news “very closely,” meaning that science ranks behind ten other news subjects, including crime, sports, and religion, in its ability to hold people’s interest. (Science’s ranking vis-à-vis other news topics has been slipping of late, and declining treatment of science in the news media reflects as much.)

We fully concede that it could be worse: Americans could actively hate science. But the public’s highly superficial degree of appreciation, forgotten at a moment’s notice, won’t suffice for what we face as a nation. The failure to recognize the importance of science now will hurt us in the decades ahead, especially economically, and will leave us unprepared for the controversies and challenges already on our doorstep. Meanwhile, disengagement from the vibrant world of science leaves our citizens all too susceptible to rampant misinformation, inaccurate anti-scientist stereotypes (the socially challenged geek, the arrogant madman), and the anti-intellectual tendencies that have plagued our national character for too long.

And yet recognizing that matters are far from hopeless should be strongly empowering: We can do better. As the great historian Richard Hofstadter explained, during different periods Americans have lurched closer toward, and further away from, strong anti-intellectualism. The transition from the Bush to the Obama administration represents a perfect example. Similarly, the public seems capable of going either way on matters of science, and we can certainly move people toward a broader acceptance and appreciation of its centrality to the future. Yet we must recognize that many forces stand arrayed against this necessary project, perhaps most centrally, the ongoing convulsions in the modern media. And thus far the science world and its allies have not taken adequate steps to counter them.

So what can be done? The first step is to understand our history and unravel how we reached a point where America’s scientists dazzle the world, yet at home encounter a public that too often shrugs its shoulders. To that end, the first section of this book traces the rise and relative decline of science’s political and cultural standing in the United States since World War II, with a central focus on the troubled and often halting attempts by scientists to reach out to the broader public and the changing societal factors (such as the transformation of politics and the media) that have made this prospect increasingly difficult. Going over this ground will help us shift away from a blame-oriented analysis of the science-society gap—which targets the public, the media, the politicians, or the educational system—toward something more fruitful.

But if we’re discarding the “deficit model,” what can take its place? Historical awareness can help us here as well. C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” argument has great potential to reinvigorate our discussions of the science-society disconnect in America and shift us away from the problems inherent in deficit thinking. Approaching our science-society problems through Snow’s “mutual incomprehension” framework does not require casting anyone in the role of superior or inferior, smarter or dumber.

If it is to serve this purpose, however, Snow’s argument will first require a few renovations. In his era in Britain, the culture of arts and letters enjoyed preeminence; science, by contrast, was the underdog. Now things have flipped, at least within the academic arena, even as that arena has become conspicuously less influential overall. So when we discuss Snow’s ideas today, we must go beyond simply lamenting a divide between scientists and humanists. Yet the core of Snow’s concern—that science isn’t being translated broadly enough into societal and political relevance, and that this has something to do with too much specialization and compartmentalization of knowledge—remains as valid as it ever was. The same goes for the “two cultures” concept, so long as we’re willing to perform some simple multiplication.

Today in the United States we find science walled off, in a classic Snowean sense, from not one but many “cultures” that, together, powerfully shape the course of our thinking—most notably political culture, media culture, entertainment culture, and religious culture. The second section of this book will therefore discuss these four major rifts in sequence and begin to propose ways of bridging them. That’s not to say the science-humanities divide that so worried Snow has gone away; it hasn’t. However, its importance has been dwarfed by divides between science and sectors that aren’t really even part of the academy at all. This development poses new and very different challenges to scientists, who tend to be most at home in a university setting (even if they don’t always see eye to eye with their fellow scholars).

If our analysis is correct, it follows that the problem really isn’t that Americans cannot recite enough scientific facts or that the smart people are mobbed by idiots, but rather that we have far too many unhealthy disconnects between different types of talented, intellectually motivated leaders and thinkers. There are too few collaborations between scientists and journalists, screenwriters, politicians, and religious leaders. The goal must be to remake our educational system and our cultures, both scientific and popular, to generate much more interplay among different kinds of talent and expertise. At the same time, we must rouse the people who care about science and inspire them to reach out to other parts of society, and to the public as a whole, in order to openly engage rather than criticize or blame.

To that end, we must stoke an ongoing cultural change at the nation’s leading scientific institutions and universities. Even as they train the next generation of scientists to help keep us competitive in the global economy, these centers of science must reward endeavors that they have undervalued for far too long: public outreach, communication, and reuniting the “two cultures” through true interdisciplinary education (which must go far beyond exploring, say, the intersections between biology and chemistry). The final section of this book therefore looks to the changing media environment and changing university culture to explore how we can ring in the reforms, as well as the new movements and attitudes, that we’re going to need. The ultimate solution may require nothing short of redefining the role of the scientist in today’s society. But if that will make the society itself more scientifically engaged, surely it would be worth it.