NOTES
Chapter 1
3
over $100 billion annually in federal funding: The federal science budget—technically, the “research and development,” or “R&D” budget—is a complicated creature, but allow us to at least provide some sense of scale. In President Bush’s February 2008 budget request for fiscal year 2009, proposed funding for basic and applied research amounted to $57.3 billion in total. However, the larger part of the R&D budget is not for research but for development, and so the total request for both areas combined was $147.4 billion. See American Association for the Advancement of Science, “R&D in the FY 2009 Budget,”
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/fy09.htm.
It’s also illuminating to compare the total federal R&D investment to that being undertaken by private industry. In 2007, industry accounted for two-thirds of total U.S. R&D, or roughly double the total federal investment. For understandable reasons, however, industry focuses far more heavily on development and much less on basic research. Again, see AAAS,
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/guitotal.htm.
3
a million lives per year: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we’ve reduced morbidity by 99 percent or more for the following diseases: smallpox, diphtheria, measles, polio, and rubella. Averaged over the course of the twentieth century, these five diseases killed more than 600,000 people annually. In 2006, they killed fewer than 100. Meanwhile, we’ve also dramatically reduced deaths from the mumps and pertussis, which used to kill upward of 350,000. See Dr. Melinda Wharton, CDC PowerPoint,
http://www.cga.ct.gov/coc/PDFs/immunization/wharton_ppt.pdf.
4 Just 18 percent . . . and even fewer: Mary Woolley and Stacie M. Propst, “Public Attitudes About Health-Related Research,” Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 294, No. 11, September 21, 2005.
4
44 percent of the respondents: Survey on the “State of Science in America,” Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, March 20, 2008. Results available online at
http://www.stateofscience.org. For a more elaborate discussion of findings, see Eric Berger, “Who Are America’s Science Role Models? (It’s Ugly, Folks),” March 21, 2008,
http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2008/03/who_are_america.html.
5 widely denounced for a disdain of science: Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005).
5 his classic 1962 work: Richard Hofstader, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1962).
5 deep-thinking scientist of the first rank: Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
5 Alexis de Tocqueville: For this reading of de Tocqueville, we’re indebted to Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 43.
6 modern vaccine-skeptic movement: January 12, 2009, interview with journalist Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
6
try on information sources: We want to thank Matthew Nisbet for playing a key role in making us think about the problem of media “fragmentation,” which we discuss further in subsequent chapters. There, we have also cited other authors who have outlined the problem, such as Cass Sunstein (in 2001’s
Republic.com) and Princeton University’s Markus Prior.
8
Obama administration could find its hands tied: See, for example, Neal Lane and Leslie Berlowitz, “Where to Spend Our Research Dollars,”
Science Progress, January 22, 2009, in which they note, “once we move beyond crisis-response mode, discretionary funding is likely to be severely constrained,”
http://www.scienceprogress.org/2009/01/where-to-spend-our-research-dollars/.
9
funding for energy innovation was in steep decline: Daniel M. Kammen and Gregory F. Nemet, “The Incredible Shrinking Energy R&D Budget,”
Issues in Science and Technology (Fall 2005),
http://www.issues.org/22.1/index.html.
9 scientific research has been a core driver: National Academy of Sciences, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (Washington: National Academies Press, 2007).
9
failed to keep pace with inflation: See American Association for the Advancement of Science, “Final Stimulus Bill Provides $21.5 Billion for Federal R&D,” February 16, 2009,
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/stim09c.htm.
11 rewrite the nation’s educational curriculum: See John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
11 fire rockets from their backyards: Perhaps ABC’s Good Morning America put it best: Covering the innovative 2008 World Science Festival in New York City, the program remarked that the event organizers aimed to shift science away from the “chalk-dusted fringes” of American life and back into our “cultural center” where it belongs (but does not currently reside). “Science Rocks! The First World Science Festival in New York Is Hoping to Turn Geek Chic,” Good Morning America, June 1, 2008.
12 Snow delivered a famous speech: C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Chapter 2
13 “scientific illiteracy”: For the standard definition of scientific literacy, see a summary in Bauer et al., “What Can We Learn from 25 Years of PUS Survey Research? Liberating and Expanding the Agenda,” Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 16 (2007), pp. 79-95. See also Rüdiger C. Laugksch, “Scientific Literacy: A Conceptual Overview,” Science Education , Vol. 84, No. 1 (December 14, 1999), pp. 71-94. One researcher who has been particularly influential in limning the problem of scientific illiteracy is Jon Miller of Michigan State University. He has proposed a metric called “civic scientific literacy,” combining factual and definitional knowledge of “scientific constructs” with an understanding of the “process or nature of scientific inquiry.” See, for example, Jon D. Miller, “Scientific Literacy: A Conceptual and Empirical Review,” Daedalus, Vol. 112, No. 2 (Spring 1983), pp. 29-48, and Miller, “The Measurement of Civic Scientific Literacy,” Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 7 (1998), pp. 203-223.
13 can’t read the New York Times science section: Jon D. Miller, “Public Understanding of, and Attitudes Toward, Scientific Research: What We Know and What We Need to Know,” Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 13 (2004), pp. 273-294.
14 blame is said to lie with “the public”: In a series of lectures delivered jointly with Chris in 2007 and 2008, and in personal conversations, Matthew Nisbet helpfully highlighted many of the problems with the so-called deficit model critiqued in this chapter. We greatly appreciate his role in helping to bring the scholarly literature on this subject to our attention. In addition, in those lectures Nisbet also singled out for criticism the related “popular science model,” or the idea that popular-science media outlets can adequately educate Americans about science.
14 citizens of other nations: See Jon D. Miller, “The Public Understanding of Science in Europe and the United States,” paper presented at the 2007 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, San Francisco, February 16, 2007.
14 Residents of the European Union: Ibid.
14 As Mark Twain put it: We found this quotation in Paul Offit’s excellent book, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
15 Scientific research has soundly refuted: For the definitive study, see Institute of Medicine, Immunization Safety Review: Vaccines and Autism (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004).
15
Global warming isn’t happening: For the definitive refutations of such nonsense, we recommend the top global warming blog,
http://www.realclimate.org.
16
scholars . . . have largely discarded: Some of the relevant literature was assigned for a daylong “boot camp” about science communication cotaught by Matthew Nisbet and Chris at Caltech in summer 2008. For a list of readings, see
http://sass.caltech.edu/events/boot_camp.shtml.
16 the “deficit model”: For further familiarizing us with the problems inherent in deficit thinking, we’d like to thank David Guston and Naomi Oreskes.
17 “you’re an idiot”: In Randy Olson’s excellent documentary Flock of Dodos, a pro-evolution scientist uses exactly these words in describing how to respond to the “intelligent design” movement: “I think people have to stand up and say, you know, you’re an idiot.”
17 “A deficient public cannot be trusted”: Bauer et al., “What Can We Learn from 25 Years of PUS Survey Research?”
18 the importance of science to politics, policy, and our collective future: Or as Michigan State’s Jon Miller put it in an influential article: “awareness of the impact of science and technology on society and the policy choices that must inevitably emerge.” Jon D. Miller, “Scientific Literacy: A Conceptual and Empirical Review,” Daedalus, Vol. 112, No. 2 (Spring 1983), pp. 29-48.
19 Science’s ranking vis-à-vis other news topics: Ibid.
19
highly superficial degree of appreciation: To make sense of the public’s seemingly contradictory sentiments about science, we like a recent comment by University of Chicago physicist Michael Turner, who remarked that the appreciation of science in this country is “a mile wide and a nanometer thick.” Aspen Institute, “Science and the Public Sphere,” 2007,
http://fora.tv/2007/07/03/Science_and_the_Public_Sphere.
21 superior or inferior, smarter or dumber: To be sure, in Snow’s original formulation, he bore down considerably harder on the literary types, remarking at one point that whereas scientists have “the future in their bones,” the literati respond by “wishing the future did not exist.” But at base he painted a deeply resonant picture of two groups of very smart but atomized people, pulled apart by vastly different assumptions.
21 Now things have flipped: By 1989, the distinguished scholar of Victorian literature Gillian Beer could remark that although “salient perhaps at the time,” Snow’s complaints “seem to treat remotely of a dwindling class of literateurs, not our main problem now.” See Gillian Beer, “Translation or Transformation? The Relations of Literature and Science,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 44, No. 1 (January 1990), pp. 81-99.
21 has become conspicuously less influential: Since Snow’s time, we have also seen many other academic changes, including a great expansion of the disciplines (and increased specialization within them) and a huge growth of the social sciences. For more on academic change over the past several decades, see Stefan Collini’s introduction to The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
21 not one but many “cultures”: One might perhaps add other “cultures” as well to this analysis; for instance, scientific culture and legal culture don’t mesh particularly well. Although our analysis is not completely exhaustive, then, we believe our focus on political, media, entertainment, and religious culture does go a long way toward capturing the most important disconnects.
Chapter 3
25 “exhibited as lions”: Quoted in Daniel Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science: An Inquiry into the Relationship Between Science and Government in the United States (1967; New York: Plume Books, 1971 [paperback]), p. 95.
25 swept up in the national mission: As the science historian Steven Shapin observes, “During the war itself, mobilized scientists were generally too busy to reflect on what was happening, and, if they were not too busy, security considerations prevented any such public reflections. Subsequently, they struggled to make sense of their experiences. Some felt badly about what they had done; others said they experienced no guilt whatever. But all American scientists now enjoyed the fruits of wartime military labors in the form of vastly increased governmental and industrial funds; enhanced access to what C.P. Snow came to call the ‘corridors of power’; a hugely expanded job-market for academic, industrial, and government scientists; and heightened public respect for scientists’ power. Scientists had never before possessed such authority, largesse, civic responsibility, and obligations. By free choice or not, some scientists now lived the vita activa, and, while there were still consequential worries about the extent to which they were indeed ‘normal citizens,’ they had never been more integrated into the civic sphere.” The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 65.
25
“Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland”: See
Science: The Endless Frontier, A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945,
http://www.nsf.gov/about/history/vbush1945.htm. Correspondence between Roosevelt and Bush included.
26 Independent entrepreneurs: See Bruce L. R. Smith, American Science Policy Since World War II (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990).
26 European scientists: Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science, Chap. 3, “When Science Was an Orphan.”
26 14 percent per year: This figure is in constant dollars. See Smith, American Science Policy Since World War II, p. 39.
27 “they will have won the solar system”: Quoted in Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999 [paperback]), p. 114.
27 grown to $12.2 billion: Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science, p. 8.
27 science-intensive curricula: For the history of scientists’ makeover of the educational curriculum, see John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
27 swept into the public schools: This was when the teaching of evolution became prominent in American public education, setting the stage for many later battles.
28 “the most important occupational group”: C. P. Snow, “The Moral Un-Neutrality of Science,” lecture delivered in 1960 and published in Science , Vol. 133, No. 3448, pp. 255-262, January 27, 1961.
28 nonmilitary science funding fell: See American Association for the Advancement of Science, Trends in Nondefense R&D by Function, FY 1953-2009, based on Budget of the U.S. Government FY 2009. Our thanks go to Kei Koizumi for providing this information.
28 the prominence of the scientific elite in advising our leaders: As science journalist Daniel Greenberg remarked in 1970, though scientists may have been able to “ride a crest of Cold War concern,” more recently there had been a “striking . . . decline of the scientific community’s influence in Washington.” The Politics of Pure Science, pp. xviii-xix.
29 new mood of “questioning authority”: One book contributed massively to the questioning of science in this period: science historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Today, when Kuhn’s insights have been thoroughly worked over and make sense to many working scientists, it’s hard to read the book as a fundamental assault upon the scientific process or way of knowing. But it certainly did undermine some naive claims about science’s strict objectivity, such as the always dubious notion that scientists are mere fact machines rather than human beings with wants, beliefs, personal commitments, pet ideas. Surveying the history of science, Kuhn found that the growth of knowledge doesn’t seem to proceed in a linear fashion, through the steady accumulation of facts about the world. Rather, it occurs in sudden “revolutions” or “paradigm shifts,” in which one scientist or group of scientists breaks away from an old regime or way of thinking, unable to accept it any longer. In the process, the renegades often face powerful resistance from defenders of the older “paradigm”—defenders who themselves are often the older scientists in sheer years. Kuhn’s argument, bringing out the role of more subjective factors within the scientific process, seemed to help knock science off its pedestal.
29 status of the presidential science adviser: For the history of presidential science advising see Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
29 Nixon fired his science advisers outright: Institutionalized presidential science advice would return under President Gerald Ford, but more controversies ensued in the Reagan administration, when adviser George Keyworth came under intense criticism from scientists after staunchly supporting Reagan’s Star Wars program.
30 “What the pure scientist basically wants”: Quoted in Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science, p. xvii.
30 “Modern science not only is inscrutable”: Ibid., p. 35.
30 scientific journals numbered: Figures from B. V. Lewenstein, “Science Books Since World War II,” in D. P. Nord, M. Schudson, and J. Rubin, eds., The Enduring Book: Publishing in Post-War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in press 2009).
31 “outside of our own competence”: Stephen Jay Gould, “Take Another Look,” Science, Vol. 286, No. 5441, p. 899, October 29, 1999.
31 came into question: By 1990, Brookings Institution scholar Bruce L. R. Smith could describe the change that had occurred since the post-Sputnik days thusly: “Society’s support for science had been based on the assumption that progress in the various scientific disciplines would ultimately lay the foundation for a better life for all Americans. Social improvements of all kinds would follow when the nation’s collective intelligence was brought to bear on the most pressing problems. But as Americans lost confidence in this premise, as their optimism about the future became tinged with pessimism, the foundations of society’s support for science—and scientists’ faith in themselves—eroded.” Smith, American Science Policy Since World War II, p. 77.
31 scientists did relatively little to counter the trend: Not that it went unnoticed. In a 1971 speech, William Bevan, a psychologist then serving as executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, remarked to his colleagues, “Our emphasis on excellence in individual performance has fostered a psychology of elitism that has made both our enterprise and our body of knowledge esoteric and increasingly inaccessible to the layman at all levels of society.” Quoted in Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, Michael M. Sokal, and Bruce V. Lewenstein, The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 139-140.
31 some attempts to reach out: In 1951, for instance, the American Association for the Advancement of Science designed an ambitious plan to tackle “the broader external problem of the relation of science to society,” and thereby make science “better understood by government officials, by businessmen, and indeed by all the people.” Scientists felt in a very evangelical mood in those days; but over the next several decades, the AAAS would struggle with how to pursue its outreach goals, amid internal clashes over strategy. See Bruce Lewenstein, “The Meaning of ‘Public Understanding of Science’ in the United States After World War II,” Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 1 (1992), pp. 45-68.
31 “we said quite the other thing”: Quoted in Jim Hartz and Rick Chappell, Worlds Apart: How the Distance Between Science and Journalism Threatens America’s Future, 1997, First Amendment Center, Freedom Forum, p. 9.
32 fairly flagrant “deficit” assumptions: Given the chance to rewrite physics education, for example, the scientific elite from MIT and elsewhere more or less banished from the curriculum the standard technological applications and examples that made physics relevant to everyday life. They didn’t want students confusing “basic science” with technology; rather, they wanted to teach the most rigorous, cutting-edge science: The science they themselves were doing. The hard stuff. They aimed for nothing less than to use the schools to produce “the rational man,” meaning citizens who would think about science much in the way scientists themselves did. It was a noble—and yet perhaps not exactly realistic—endeavor. For more details, see John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
32
students’ science test scores remained “
stagnant”: National Academy of Sciences,
America’s Lab Report: Investigations into High School Science (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005), quote from p. 1,
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11311.
32 In one contemporary survey: See Lewenstein, “The Meaning of ‘Public Understanding of Science.’”
32 It was never clear how popular “popular science” could actually become: For a more detailed overview of these efforts and their problematic nature, see ibid.
32 “preaching to the converted”: Ibid.
33 Carl Sagan: For the details of Sagan’s life related in these pages we have drawn upon two biographies, Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999 [paperback]), and William Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos (New York: Henry Holt, 1999). Further specific references follow.
33 the true goad toward celebrity: Frederic Golden, “The Cosmic Explainer,” Time, October 20, 1980.
33 “the greatest media work in popular science of all time”: Quoted in Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life, p. 378.
33 an estimated 500 million viewers: The figure is from ibid., p. xiv.
33 roughly twice per year over the span of more than a decade: The figure is from ibid., p. 264. Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, agrees, p. 261.
34 resisted academic specialization: Davidson writes, “Sagan was the multidisciplinary scholar par excellence, the Renaissance man so uncommon in the age of specialization, of industrialized academia, where the divisions of labor are as real as in Henry Ford’s factories.” Carl Sagan: A Life, p. 41.
34
imply for our religious faith: On this last and most explosive of points, Sagan took a wise line. He remained personally skeptical of religious belief and subjected the arguments for the existence of God to strong scrutiny, finding them wanting (see Carl Sagan,
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, ed. Ann Druyan [New York: Penguin, 2006]). But at the same time he managed to be both inoffensive and tolerant. In 1984, he traveled to the Vatican to meet with Pope John Paul II and discuss the threat of “nuclear winter,” Sagan’s theory about the possibly apocalyptic consequences of nuclear war that so enraged the Reagan administration. Especially late in life, Sagan the unbeliever realized there was much to be gained by stressing the elements that science and religion have in common and arguing that the two can work together—the only stance, ultimately, that will help science integrate itself into a pluralistic society like our own. See also Matthew Nisbet, “Sagan: Framing Shared Values Between Science and Religion,” September 18, 2007,
http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science/2007/09/carl_sagan_on_framing_the_shar.php.
34 “the awe of science overcame the indifference to it”: Frederic Golden, “The Cosmic Explainer,” Time, October 20, 1980.
34 a rejuvenated popular-science movement: Bruce V. Lewenstein, “Was There Really a Popular Science ‘Boom’?” Science, Technology and Human Values, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Spring 1987), pp. 29-41. The next several paragraphs are indebted to Lewenstein’s insightful research on the popular science “boom,” and its later “bust.”
34 “the general interest magazines of a new age”: Quoted in ibid.
35 leaders of the scientific community also deserved a share of the blame: Allegedly, they had failed to support the popular-science initiatives of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, these were in large part initiated by journalists, not sparked by scientists or their institutions. See ibid.
35 “more important things to do”: Quoted in ibid.
35 a nationwide survey of researchers: Sharon Dunwoody and Michael Ryan, “Scientific Barriers to the Popularization of Science in the Mass Media,” Journal of Communication, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter 1985), pp. 26-42. The interviewees also agreed that standard scientific training did not adequately prepare scientific acolytes to engage with the media.
35 a “societal cockfight”: Daniel Yankelovich, “Changing Public Attitudes to Science and the Quality of Life: Edited Excerpts from a Seminar,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, Vol. 7, No. 39 (Spring 1982), pp. 23-29. Americans, explained Yankelovich, were losing faith in the proposition that had made science so central to their identities following World War II—that it would solve society’s problems, generate economic growth, spur progress through technology. Just 52 percent of the public now believed this, according to Yankelovich, and the doctrine was much more trusted by the old than the young. At the same time, he added, “cultural changes born in the 1960s and 1970s” were provoking a “fierce reaction” from the more conservative elements of society, which were now organized into groups like Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Highlighting the budding fight over the teaching of evolution—which would reach the Supreme Court in 1987—Yankelovich warned that “science and technology will not be permitted to stand aloof from this values controversy. On the contrary, they will be plunged into the middle of it.”
35 worrying loudly about the gap: Daniel Yankelovich, “Science and the Public Process: Why the Gap Must Close,” Issues in Science and Technology (Fall 1984), pp. 6-12. The science community, Yankelovich argued, had brokered a “social contract” with the American public and policy makers that garnered for it “creative isolation” to pursue research—surely a very advantageous and desirable arrangement. Yet this had led to a situation in which the technological sophistication of science was coming to vastly outstrip the public’s ability to grapple with complex problems, especially those having a scientific component—issues ranging from acid rain to arms control. Yankelovich therefore called for “upgrading the political literacy of scientists as a prerequisite for two-way communication” with policy makers and the public, and he added that this should happen even if to some extent it impeded “the progress of scientific accomplishment.”
36 “better education in our schools”: Quoted in Lewenstein, “Was There Really a Popular Science ‘Boom’?”
36 the case for retreat: Leon E. Trachtman, “The Public Understanding of Science Effort: A Critique,” Science, Technology and Human Values, Vol. 6, No. 36 (Summer 1981), pp. 10-15.
36 declining scientific credibility with the public: This is precisely what we see so often today, especially in the coverage of medical and health issues: One tentative epidemiological study says drink coffee (or something similar), another finds the opposite, and people get very angry at science for confusing them and wreaking havoc with their diets.
37 smiling on creationism: Reagan had already humored the creationists on the campaign trail, and upon taking office appointed a presidential science adviser—a Ph.D.—who did the same before Congress. See Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2006 [paperback]), p. 36.
37 Reagan’s policy . . . went forward anyway: For a full account, see William Broad, Teller’s War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
37 an anti-SDI petition: This episode is related in Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life, p. 358.
38 target of attacks from William F. Buckley: See ibid., pp. 371-372.
38 newly formed conservative think tank: For more on the history of the George C. Marshall Institute, see Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, “Challenging Knowledge: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War,” in Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 55-89. For a further discussion, see Oreskes and Conway, Fighting Facts (New York: Bloomsbury Press, in press 2009).
38 Nevada nuclear test site: See Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life, p. 376.
38 thawing of relations with the Soviet Union: For Sagan’s political influence in the Soviet Union and in the United States, see Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, pp. 318-319.
38 top outlets for sowing doubts: Again, see Oreskes and Conway, “Challenging Knowledge: How Climate Science Became a Victim of the Cold War.”
39 1996 Telecommunications Act: See Common Cause, online report, “The Fallout from the Telecommunications Act of 1996: Unintended Consequences and Lessons Learned,” 2005.
39 a nasty letter: See Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life, pp. 202-203.
39 “Quite a few scientists in those days”: Quoted in ibid., p. 203.
39 History repeated itself in 1992: For Sagan’s spurning by the National Academy of Sciences see ibid., pp. 389-392, and Poundstone, Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, pp. 355-357. This section draws upon both sources as well as other reports.
39
distinction in original scientific research: Scientists can and do differ on whether Sagan’s published work was “enough” for NAS membership (a somewhat subjective determination). For a strong argument, based on Sagan’s curriculum vitae, that he deserved membership, see Michael Shermer’s account in
The Borderlands of Science,
http://www.michaelshermer.com/borderlands-of-science/excerpt/.
39 Sagan’s nomination proved divisive: See Faye Flam, “What Should It Take to Join Science’s Most Exclusive Club?” Science, Vol. 256, May 15 (1992), who noted: “Members of the academy are sworn to secrecy on the details of how the new candidates are inducted, but insiders made it clear that this was one of several historical cases in which the debate over a nominee grew to involve the entire membership after achieving consensus in a nominee’s own discipline.”
40 In their treatment of Sagan: Although Sagan lost his bid for academy membership, two years later he did receive the National Academies’ Public Welfare medal. Still, this stunning slight to the most famous scientist in America sent a clear signal about how some in the scientific community regarded those accused of being mere “popularizers.” We want to be clear that our criticism here is not directed at all of science—after all, roughly half of the academy members did vote in Sagan’s favor. It’s the other half that worries us.
Chapter 4
41 science books seemed to be breaking through: Our discussion of the popular-science book publishing phenomenon is indebted to B. V. Lewenstein, “Science Books Since World War II,” in D. P. Nord, M. Schudson, and J. Rubin, eds., The Enduring Book: Publishing in Post-War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, in press 2009).
41
paranormalist schlock was filling the airwaves: See Matthew Nisbet, “Back from Outer Space: With the End of
The X-Files, the 1990s Infatuation with UFOs May Be Dwindling. Will Psychics Take Their Place?”
American Prospect Online, May 24, 2002,
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=back_from_outer_space. See also his later comment: “According to the data, cultural fascination with UFOs reached a historic peak in 1996, and remained at an all-time high in 1997. The trend was boosted by the fiftieth anniversary of the alleged UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, and the popularity of entertainment products such as
Independence Day and
The X-Files. However, attention to aliens plummeted in 1999, and has yet to recover significantly. . . . Media fascination with psychics follows a similar trend. This topic peaked in popular culture at a historic high in 1999 and 2000, and then sharply declined in 2001.” Nisbet, “Cultural Indicators of the Paranormal: Tracking the Media/Belief Nexus,”
Skeptical Inquirer Online, March 22, 2006,
http://www.csi-cop.org/scienceandmedia/indicators/.
42 all these big toys: For the death of the Superconducting Super Collider and science’s forays with the Gingrich budget cutters, see Daniel Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
42 Newt Gingrich’s Republicans: See Chris Mooney, “Defenseless Against the Dumb,” in The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2005), Chap. 5, for a discussion of the Gingrich Republicans and the dismantling of congressional science advice.
42 “
I have a foreboding”: Carl Sagan,
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), p. 25. A similar tone leaped from the literature of one subculture of the scientific community, the skeptic movement, where the sense of alarm over a slew of fads that were deemed irrational—ranging from alternative medicine, to all kinds of New Ageism, to the aforementioned wave of psychics and UFO obsessives—had created a near-siege mentality by the late 1990s. See
Skeptical Inquirer magazine, whose archives can be read at
http://www.csicop.org/si/online.html.
43 the “only news”: See Peter Catalano, “A Dose of Reality Emerges in LA,” Los Angeles Times, November 28, 1991.
43
a “third culture”: The phrase “third culture” originally came from C. P. Snow. In a 1963 essay, Snow suggested that a new caste of thinkers might be emerging to bridge the gulf that so troubled him, a group we might best recognize today as social scientists. See “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” reprinted in C. P. Snow,
The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). In his own use of the term “third culture,” however, Brockman admitted he was improvising, borrowing only loosely from Snow. In the 1990s, Brockman wrote, “literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists.” Rather, “scientists are communicating directly with the general public.” Brockman,
The Third Culture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
But to borrow an infamous 1990s expression, it depends on what the meaning of “general public” is. Science book buyers clearly numbered more than enough to make the enterprise profitable. The same is true of right-wing book buyers—just ask the conservative Regnery Publishing. Saying science books sell well, however, is far different from saying they reached a truly mass public, or even that their readership in any way constituted a representative sample of America’s nearly 300 million citizens. (Conversation with Matthew Nisbet, August 2008.)
Still, Brockman was right that the 1990s represented a kind of golden age for popular book writing on science, works that forged a culture of enthusiastic, science-loving readers. We should know, because we’re part of that culture. We grew up reading those works—especially those by Gould and Dawkins—and drew inspiration from them in much the same way scientists (and science-ists) from the generation preceding ours drew inspiration from Sagan. A decade or more later, we still talk knowingly about Dawkins’s “selfish genes” and “memes,” and Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria.” We know the shared language and use it almost unthinkingly—and to quote C. P. Snow, “that is what a culture means.”
It’s not easy, then, for us to knock the “third culture.” Peering back now, though, it’s possible to see negatives as well, at least among individual writers.
43 “The third culture consists of ”: Brockman, The Third Culture.
44 “virus of the mind”: Richard Dawkins, “Viruses of the Mind,” in Bo Dalhbom, ed., Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993).
44 “universal acid”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).
45
colleagues across the quadrangle: Reading
The Third Culture today, you can’t miss a kind of animus against the “other side” much like that which C. P. Snow described among literary intellectuals decades earlier. To quote Nobel laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann from that book: “Unfortunately, there are people in the arts and humanities—conceivably, even in some of the social sciences—who are proud of knowing very little about science and technology, or about mathematics. The opposite phenomenon is very rare. You may occasionally find a scientist who is ignorant of Shakespeare, but you will never find a scientist who is
proud of being ignorant of Shakespeare.”
The Third Culture, p. 22.
No wonder science journalist Jonah Lehrer, author of the culture-crossing 2007 book Proust Was a Neuroscientist—which relates how a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and writers appear to have anticipated some discoveries of modern neuroscience—didn’t want to be associated with the “third culture” and noted its “serious limitations.” Many of its luminaries, he wrote, are “extremely antagonistic toward everything that isn’t scientific.” Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), pp. 191-192.
The late Stephen Jay Gould, perhaps the most tolerant of the third culturists toward the separate “magisteria” of religion and the humanities (as he called them), also detested the tone of scientific superiority. “In our increasingly complex and confusing world,” wrote Gould in a posthumously published book, “we need all the help we can get from each distinct domain of our emotional and intellectual being . . . Quilting a diverse collection of separate patches into a beautiful and integrated coat of many colors, a garment called wisdom . . . sure beats defeating or engulfing as a metaphor for appropriate interaction.” Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities (New York: Harmony Books, 2003), p. 19.
45
“postmodernism”: One of the biggest problems with the Science Wars was the apparent reduction of all of the humanities to this vague category. The sociological, historical, philosophical, and cultural study of science is a very worthwhile endeavor. If scholars engaged in such research sometimes take a stance of agnosticism toward the truth claims of science—or consider historic writings in social context, with an emphasis on revealing implications of language—perhaps that’s simply their way of remaining detached from the subject they’re studying. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that these scholars are “anti-science” or absolute relativists, to the extent of thinking that bedrock scientific concepts like gravity are a mere matter of opinion. It’s doubtful that anyone beyond a few academic dilettantes and provocateurs ever really believed this. Stanley Aronowitz, founding editor of
Social Text and an oft-attacked personage in the Science Wars, has himself written that “the critical theory of science does not refute the results of scientific discoveries since, say, the Copernican revolution or since Galileo’s development of the telescope.” Aronowitz, “The Politics of the Science Wars,” in Andrew Ross, ed.,
Science Wars (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
When it comes to the field of science and technology studies (STS), in fact, much scholarly work in the area lends itself not to left-wing attacks on science but rather to defenses of science from forms of abuse prevalent on the political right. To cite just one example, leading science-studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff ’s 1990 book, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisers as Policymakers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), presents a potent critique of demands for unreasonable levels of scientific certainty before political decisions can be made, especially when it comes to protecting public health and the environment.
45 first major fusillade in the so-called Science Wars: Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
45 “not enemies but friends”: Ibid., p. 2.
46 “dominant mode of thinking about science”: Ibid., p. 4.
46 “intellectual dereliction”: Ibid., p. 239.
46 “hiring, firing, and promotion”: Ibid., p. 255.
46 ivory-tower war chant: The famed adage from Columbia University political scientist Wallace Sayre is irresistible here: “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.”
46 Alan Sokal: For the original paper submitted to Social Text, and Sokal’s explanation and further musings, see Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
47 “physical ‘reality’”: Sokal, Beyond the Hoax, p. 9.
47 front page of the New York Times: Janny Scott, “Postmodern Gravity Deconstructed, Slyly,” New York Times, May 18, 1996.
47 next sally came in 1998: Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
47 “partly fuse”: For a powerful critique of the Wilsonian project, see D. Graham Burnett, “A Dream of Reason” (review of Consilience), American Scholar, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Summer 1998).
48
scientific land grab: Among Wilson’s most prominent critics was fellow third culturist and Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, who objected that some complex phenomena (and fields) will never “reduce” to simpler explanations. A perfect example is ethics, an arena in which the last thing we want is to be tied to physics via our biology. True, one can survey practices that human societies have tolerated or welcomed, and then link some of those to biological underpinnings, but there will always have to be a non-scientific moral judgment about what’s right and wrong.
And Gould launched other critiques: Unexpected “emergent” properties in complex systems could never be predicted from simpler components, and moreover, “contingency” in a historical sense—chance occurrences that have a large effect in, say, the course of evolution—also thwarts the Wilsonian program.
Beyond any intellectual merits, Gould also argued that Wilson was being insensitive or even a tad insulting to other disciplines. He demonstrated “an undiminished belief in the superiority of science, and a devaluing based on misunderstanding the aims and definitions pursued by other forms of knowledge and inquiry—an assumption that cannot forge the kind of allegiances he presumably hopes to establish with scholars in the humanities.” See Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, p. 217.
48 ultimately irrelevant: Not surprisingly, Gould also saw the Science Wars as unproductive, exaggerated, and unhelpful. He added this hardly reassuring gloss: “Tell most scientists about the ‘science wars’—and I have tried this experiment at least fifty times—and they will stare back at you in utter disbelief. They have never encountered such a thing, never read anything about it, and don’t care to interrupt their work to find out. Oh yes, the occasional savvy scientist who pals around in urban intellectual circles may engage the ‘wars’ and get pissed off . . . But most of my colleagues know nothing at all about the war being supposedly conducted in (or against) their name.” Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox, p. 102.
48 “that zeitgeist is unrecognizable”: Sokal, Beyond the Hoax, p. xv.
48 the real enemy at the gate: So then why, at a time of attacks on science in Congress, did some scientists instead see the enemy within their own academic ranks? The late New York University sociologist of science Dorothy Nelkin had an interesting reading of the phenomenon. Noting that “normally, scientists are slow to respond to political pressures,” she remarked that in contrast, the Science Wars had been swift and characterized by great intensity and vituperation. The attacks on the left-wing critics of science, she suggested, might thus be considered a form of scapegoating, one with its roots in the declining influence of science as the cold war came to a close and public scrutiny and skepticism increased. In this challenging context, some more traditionally minded scientists wanted to return to the days when no one questioned them and everyone loved them, and so strolled across the quadrangle and lashed out at their most proximate critics. Yet not only could they not unstir what the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had stirred, but the endeavor was fundamentally misled. Nelkin noted: “There are many threats to scientific rationality these days—from religious fundamentalists, right-wing politicians, nativists, and other antiliberal forces. Attacking fellow academics is, of course, easier, but it is grossly misdirected. It is strategically misguided as well. . . . At a time when academic institutions are generally under siege, dividing the academy into warring factions in this way is extraordinarily counterproductive.” Nelkin, “The Science Wars: Responses to a Marriage Failed,” in Ross, ed., Science Wars.
48 1996 Telecommunications Act: Our discussion draws on a report by Common Cause, “The Fallout from the Telecommunications Act of 1996: Unintended Consequences and Lessons Learned,” 2005; and on Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
50 “the attack on science has always been our game”: Robert Wilson, “Reason in the Sun,” American Scholar, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Summer 2005), p. 4.
Chapter 5
53 a grassroots initiative called ScienceDebate2008: We described the initiative in S. Kirshenbaum, C. Mooney, S. L. Otto, et al., “Science and the Candidates,” Science, Vol. 320, No. 5873, p. 182, April 11, 2008. See also Shawn Lawrence Otto and Sheril Kirshenbaum, “Science on the Campaign Trail,” Issues in Science and Technology (Winter 2009), pp. 27-28.
53 Science matters: The official ScienceDebate2008 statement wasn’t quite so simple. It was the following: “Given the many urgent scientific and technological challenges facing America and the rest of the world, the increasing need for accurate scientific information in political decision making, and the vital role scientific innovation plays in spurring economic growth and competitiveness, we call for a public debate in which the U.S. presidential candidates share their views on the issues of The Environment, Health and Medicine, and Science and Technology Policy.”
54 falling behind in science and innovation: National Academy of Sciences, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007).
54 ScienceDebate2008 found its invitation declined: For more details, see Otto and Kirshenbaum, “Science on the Campaign Trail.”
55 leader who shows a deep appreciation of science: During the campaign, Obama began ramping up his science-policy capacity at around the same time he answered the fourteen questions posed by Science Debate2008. Those answers—including a pledge to restore science funding, address climate change and spur renewable energy investments, and reverse the Bush administration’s executive order limiting federal funding for embryonic stem cell research—drew great applause from the scientific community, and before long an unprecedented number of Nobel laureate endorsements. Obama also released the list of science advisers who had drafted his responses. It was an impressive group whose membership included former Clinton administration National Institutes of Health director and Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, former American Association for the Advancement of Science president Gilbert Ommen, and recent Nobel laureate Peter Agre; they strongly suggested that an Obama administration would take scientific advice very seriously. In an early October 2008 letter to the National Academy of Sciences, Obama further assured the scientific community that he would quickly appoint a presidential science adviser to take with him to Washington.
56 “[They] were terrified”: Shawn Otto, e-mail communication, January 14, 2009.
56 a strategy of studied political detachment: One exception proves the rule: During the 1964 election, a group of scientists dubbed Scientists and Engineers for Johnson-Humphrey helped damage the campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater considerably by denouncing his dangerous tone of nuclear aggression, charges that drew widespread attention at the time. However, the group fell apart afterward. See Daniel S. Greenberg, Science, Money, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
57
Scientists look at the world and see order: See Daniel Yankelovich, “Winning Greater Influence for Science,”
Issues in Science and Technology (Summer 2003),
http://www.issues.org/19.4/yankelovich.html. In the essay, Yankelovich outlines the “profound difference in worldviews” that separates scientists from the rest of our society—and by extension, from the politicians it elects. This section draws upon and expands Yankelovich’s delineation of the “difference in worldviews.”
59 only 8 percent of elected officials: Susanne B. Haga, “Congress Needs Scientific Schooling,” Detroit Free Press, January 28, 2009.
59
scientists and politicians regularly reenact the problem of the “two cultures”: The conservative Canadian politician Preston Manning has observed that scientists and politicians are as “ships passing or colliding in the night.” See Manning, “Communicating Effectively with Politicians,” speech delivered June 8, 2007,
http://www.manningcentre.ca/en/news_article/43.
59 “game theory” research involves sports: This anecdote is reported in Cornelia Dean, “Physicists in Congress Calculate Their Influence,” New York Times, June 10, 2008.
61 “source-oriented communicators” and “receiver-oriented communicators”: Manning, “Communicating Effectively with Politicians.”
62 contributed scientific language: The snippet written by Sagan in Carter’s 1981 farewell address was a visionary passage remarking that “the same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space. From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is—a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have. We see no barriers of race or religion or country.” This episode is related in Keay Davidson, Carl Sagan: A Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), p. 354.
64 “I made a last ditch pitch”: Shawn Otto, e-mail communication, January 14, 2009.
65 Obama campaign broke the ice: Again, see Otto and Kirshenbaum, “Science on the Campaign Trail.”
65
The field is wide open: In pursuing these further strategies, scientists may first have to become reconciled to the fact that if they really want to bring about political change, then at least in some cases they will have to start playing the reward-and-punishment game, just like everyone else does. So far, scientists have shied from direct electoral engagement, and for a bevy of understandable reasons. Yet it’s clear that by identifying scientists with political talents, training and supporting them, and ultimately electing more of them to Congress, science and its supporters could have a beneficial influence on the entire institution.
At present, for instance, Congress’s three physicists—Rush Holt (D-NJ), Vernon Ehlers (R-MI), and Bill Foster (D-IL)—are strangers in a strange land. But if such congressional scientists were more numerous, who can doubt that their expertise would filter into decision making far more widely, slowly changing the anti-science culture of the Congress?
It’s not merely that we need more congressional scientists; we need more legislators who take science seriously, regardless of background or party affiliation. Some of the greatest friends of science in Congress have been non-scientists: longtime Republican House Science Committee chair Sherwood Boehlert, for instance, or Democratic representative Henry Waxman, who unearthed many of the Bush administration’s most egregious science-related abuses.
To increase the number of people like this, it will first be essential to have a comprehensive data set on the science policy positions of all elected representatives, so that their stands on core scientific issues can be identified and rated. This is an approach already employed by numerous interests groups, ranging from the Christian Coalition to the League of Conservation Voters. The experiment has been tried for science as well: In 1996, a group called Science Watch organized a system to rate members of Congress based on their science-related performance. However, when the scorecard emerged, Democrats generally earned considerably higher ratings than Republicans, leading—all too predictably—to charges of politicizing science. Rather than carrying on unintimidated, the science community retreated; no further scorecards from Science Watch were forthcoming.
The enemies and cultural competitors of science have shown few such compunctions. For example, as has now been well documented, fossil-fuel interests for many years adopted a strategy not unlike that of the tobacco industry, sponsoring a sweeping campaign to sow doubts about the linkage between human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and rising global temperatures. And their cause was abetted by sympathetic legislators like Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe, who in 2003 dubbed global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Yet with some exceptions, American scientists have been responding to such assaults with one (or both) hands tied behind their backs.
How can we increase the number of legislators who take science seriously? Expanding the ScienceDebate experiment to a wide range of Senate and House races would help. The more science gets injected into elections, the more we’ll know what kinds of representatives we’re getting when it comes to science policy.
But more could be done. Through the formation of auxiliary groups, those who care about science could directly take on politicians with the most outrageous anti-science stances, such as Inhofe. They could also organize to elect better candidates—including more scientists—to public office and make sure that representatives know there are consequences for attacking scientists and undermining scientific knowledge.
We’re not advocating new or foreign strategies; we’re just describing what everyone who wants to be politically influential actually does.
In fact, it’s possible to go further. Why not form a nonpartisan science political action committee, or PAC, devoted to funding candidates who are either scientists themselves or who make science a strong priority and have good records on science issues? With adequate funding, the PAC might select, say, five or ten members or candidates to support each election cycle. If there’s a desire to be really aggressive (and we have mixed feelings about this strategy), it could also target science “bad guys”—climate change deniers, officials who promote manufactured scientific controversies, anti-evolutionists, and the like—who deserve to be un-elected and give campaign funds to their opponents.
Some might argue that in taking such actions, science would be sacrificing its objectivity. Certainly this would represent a new level of political mobilization, with associated risks. Yet there’s no doubt the PAC concept has been proven successful at influencing policy. Consider a group like Ocean Champions—a 501(c)(4) organization with a connected political action committee, dubbed Ocean Champions PAC. It’s the first such national organization focused solely on preserving the oceans and oceanic wildlife, and it has been markedly successful so far.
The strategy of the group has been simple: Develop a broad, bipartisan base of supporters to cultivate political champions for ocean conservation in the U.S. Congress and in key states. In other words, the group aims to build the political capital necessary to ensure healthy oceans. This requires policy change, so Ocean Champions provides direct contributions to candidates, mobilizes voters, and lobbies. By studying the most effective special-interest groups, the group identified eight hall-marks of success, and not surprisingly, electoral involvement headlines the list. In this PAC model, pro-ocean members of Congress benefit from funding, votes, and good media coverage back home, while Ocean Champions is afforded a better relationship with the members in offices they support. Everyone—especially the oceans—wins.
PACs are the brass knuckles side of politics: They should only be used to support the greatest science champions or to attack the worst enemies, and should be organized by wealthy individuals rather than by broad scientific institutions, which will rightly want to maintain more distance between themselves and direct electioneering. But there’s no avoiding the reality that for scientific information to have its maximal impact, scientists must understand what motivates those in the policy world to act. They must speak the language of politics, know its rules, and adapt to the culture of Congress, including, in some cases, being willing to fight hard when there are no other choices.
There’s every reason to believe that science can become much more influential in politics—and if we’re going to get the science-related policies we need in the future on the science-related problems that matter most, then it must. Moreover, the ScienceDebate initiative has already demonstrated that scientists are able to organize themselves politically, at least behind the prospect of a science policy debate.
Some of the steps we’ve outlined in this note go further, and not all scientists will want to embrace them. But if we spur the science community as a whole toward greater political outreach, starting with Science Debate and building from there, different actors can set their own comfort levels. Most important is to have the motivation, the sense of momentum—the “yes, we can” conviction that it’s time for those who care about science to make a difference, and the recognition that you can’t do so without taking any risks.
65 let’s give the last word to Otto: Shawn Otto, e-mail communication, January 14, 2009.
Chapter 6
67 “all the way up to the executive editor”: Interview with Rick Weiss, July 21, 2008.
67
pulled off the beat: As this book went to press, we learned not only of the (at least temporary) reemergence of the
Post science page, but also of a new reorganization of the remaining
Post science-coverage capacity under a single editor. See Cristine Russell, “Washington Post Pools Its Resources,”
Columbia Journalism Review (The Observatory), March 6, 2009,
http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/washington_post_pools_its_reso.php.
68 as their business model collapses: For a comprehensive overview of the problem of the newspaper today, see Paul Starr, “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption),” New Republic, March 4, 2009.
68 As for books, they’re out, too: And still, that’s not all. Some newspapers are going under entirely. And other suffering or vanishing areas of coverage include regional reporting—especially in a government watchdog capacity—and the arts, including music criticism and theater reviews. See Starr, “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers.”
69 exercise and fitness: Ibid.
69 members of the National Association of Science Writers: Russell, “Covering Controversial Science.”
70 scientists and journalists had problems connecting: This chapter covers the broad reasons that scientists and journalists don’t necessarily get along. For a wonderfully helpful guide that advises scientists on how to interact with the press, see Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman, A Scientist’s Guide to Talking with the Media: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
70 have long operated as “two cultures”: We’re hardly the first to use this analogy; see, for example, ibid., p. 1. But we can affirm that the divide between scientists and journalists is a textbook Snowean phenomenon in which two intellectually driven groups share very different core assumptions and practices, which in turn make their interactions tense or even perilous. In fact, the science-media divide is a fairly direct modern descendant of the one Snow fretted about, characterized by scientists thinking like scientists and writers thinking like writers.
70 set the broader media agenda: As noted in Michael Weigold, “Communicating Science: A Review of the Literature,” Science Communication, Vol. 23, No. 2 (December 2001), pp. 164-193.
70
only about 1 percent of front-page stories: Project for Excellence in Journalism, “How Different Is Murdoch’s New
Wall Street Journal ?” April 23, 2008,
http://journalism.org/node/10769.
70
scientists disapprove: We should concede that not every survey of scientists’ views of the media paints a completely dire picture. Consider a 2005-2006 poll of 1,354 stem cell researchers and epidemiologists in the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The survey found that 46 percent of respondents felt their media encounters had had a “mostly positive” impact on their scientific careers; just 3 percent felt the impact to have been “mostly negative.” In addition, 57 percent of respondents were “mostly pleased” by their most recent media experience. The study is Hans Peter Peters et al., “Interactions with the Mass Media,”
Science, Vol. 321, July 11, 2008.
Still, scientists’ trepidations about the media persist: Even among these more optimistic scientists, nine in ten still worried about the “risk of incorrect quotation” in journalistic stories and eight in ten fretted about the “unpredictability of journalists.” Our impression after interacting with many scientists is similar: When it comes to the media, above all they seem deathly afraid of being misquoted, misrepresented, or baited into conflicts with colleagues. There are reputations at stake, and after a negative encounter with a haphazard journalist, the scientist never forgets.
70 2004 survey of the members of the Union of Concerned Scientists: Hayes and Grossman, A Scientist’s Guide to Talking with the Media, p. 2.
71 Darwin “was hardly even a scientist”: Malcolm Jones, “Who Was More Important: Lincoln or Darwin?” Newsweek, July 7-14, 2008. This stereotype of the pocket-protector-armed scientist, with flaring eyebrows, little sense of how to stay in touch with the rest of the world, and little interest in doing so, seems highly prevalent among political and general-interest journalists in particular. In a 1997 Freedom Forum report, 62 percent of the journalists interviewed for the study agreed that scientists are “so intellectual and immersed in their own jargon that they can’t communicate with journalists or the public.” Jim Hartz and Rick Chappell, “Worlds Apart: How the Distance Between Science and Journalism Threatens America’s Future,” First Amendment Center, Freedom Forum, 1997.
71 “In the newsrooms I know”: Andrew Revkin, “Climate Change as News: Challenges in Communicating Environmental Science,” in J. C. Di-Mento and P. M. Doughman, eds., Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children, and Our Grandchildren (Boston: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 139-160.
71 journalists . . . often pounce on some “hot” result: See Susan Dentzer, “Communicating Medical News—Pitfalls of Health Care Journalism,” New England Journal of Medicine (Perspective), Vol. 60, No. 1, January 1, 2009.
71 the public can experience media “whiplash”: See Andrew Revkin, “Climate Experts Tussle over Details: Public Gets Whiplash,” New York Times, July 29, 2008.
71 Should you drink more coffee, or less: See Nicholas Bakalar, “Coffee as a Health Drink? Studies Find Some Benefits,” New York Times, August 15, 2006.
71 media reports have provided contradictory answers: In fact, it has been seriously suggested that most published scientific research findings are false—a finding that, if true, would certainly explain much science journalism whiplash. See John P. A. Ioannidis, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” PLoS Medicine, Vol. 2, No. 8 (August 2005), pp. 696-701.
71 angles or frames: As noted in Weigold, “Communicating Science,” pp. 164-193.
72
the notion of “balance”: For a further deconstruction of media “balance,” see Chris Mooney, “Blinded by Science: How ‘Balanced’ Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality,”
Columbia Journalism Review (November-December 2004),
http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.asp.
72 the few remaining global warming “skeptics”: For media “balance” on the climate issue and its pernicious consequences, see Max Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, “Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press,” Global Environmental Change, Vol. 14 (2004), pp. 125-136. Later, Max Boykoff found that the “balance” problem in U.S. media coverage of climate change had significantly improved. See his “Flogging a Dead Norm? Newspaper Coverage of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the United States and United Kingdom from 2003 to 2006,” AREA, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2007), pp. 1-12.
73
2001 survey of 744 Dutch scientists: See Jaap Willems, “Bringing Down the Barriers: Public Communication Should Be Part of Common Scientific Practice,”
Nature, Vol. 422, April 3, 2003, p. 470. For survey results in detail, see
http://www.bio.vu.nl/WillemsinNature.pdf.
73 No self-respecting journalist would agree to this: The scientists in question seem to expect that journalists will practice the kind of high-level quality control that exists in scientific journals, which generally have very slow turnaround times. But journalism isn’t science, and shouldn’t be—and any scientist who demands such practices is making an error of category.
73
a low priority compared with many other issues: See Pew Research Center, “Economy, Jobs Trump All Other Policy Priorities in 2009,” January 22, 2009,
http://people-press.org/report/485/economy-top-policy-priority. Global warming ranked twentieth among public priorities, behind not only the economy and health care but such matters as “moral decline” and “lobbyists.”
73 a “he said, she said” controversy during the 1990s: See Boykoff and Boykoff, “Balance as Bias.”
75 the biggest behemoths: By the time you read this, the constellation of media giants may already have changed. It is, as media critic Mark Crispin Miller puts it, “always growing here and shriveling there, with certain of its members bulking up while others slowly fall apart or get digested whole . . . [but] the overall Leviathan itself keeps getting bigger, louder, brighter, forever taking up more time and space, in every street, in countless homes, in every other head.” Mark Crispin Miller, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” The Nation, December 20, 2001.
75 “conglomeration” . . . “consolidation”: The terms “concentration,” “consolidation,” and “conglomeration” are often tossed around indistinguishably in the media context. However, for our purposes, “consolidation” or “concentration” of ownership refers to developments in a particular sector of the media—for instance, television channel ownership is concentrated if one or several companies own the large majority of nationwide TV stations. “Conglomeration,” however, refers to major media companies owning properties in many different sectors—film, television, radio, books, and so on. We rely for the distinction on Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).
75 programming to the least common denominator: See Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (New York: Henry Holt, 2007).
76 fragmentation: Again, we want to thank Matthew Nisbet for directing our attention to this problem and the research that explores it.
76 the broadcast networks: For the transition from broadcast news to cable, and the implications for an informed public, see Markus Prior, “News vs. Entertainment: How Increasing Media Choice Widens Gaps in Political Knowledge and Turnout,” American Journal of Politicial Science, Vol. 49, No. 3 (July 2005), pp. 577-592. In a series of lectures delivered with Chris in 2007 and 2008, Matthew Nisbet frequently pointed out, based on Prior’s work, that twenty years ago, if you sat down to watch the news in the evening, these were your four choices—ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS.
77 The consequences are profound: Again, for an analysis of how media fragmentation decreases political literacy among those members of the public not much interested in the subject, see Prior, “News vs. Entertainment.”
77 employed over a dozen staff science writers: Russell, “Covering Controversial Science.”
Chapter 7
82 plotlines dependent upon the supernatural and the paranormal: William Evans, “Science and Reason in Film and Television,” Skeptical Inquirer (January-February 1996).
82
planet’s core stops spinning: An occurrence that, if it really did happen, would likely destroy us all and pose a vastly bigger risk than the film’s alleged microwave threat from space. No, waves of the sort produced by your microwave could not destroy the Golden Gate Bridge. For critiques of the science of
The Core, see Phil Plait’s movie review,
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/thecore_review.html. See also the discussion by Sidney Perkowitz in
Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 85-86. Finally, see Michael Barnett, Heather Wagner, Anne Gatling, et al., “The Impact of Science Fiction Film on Student Understanding of Science,”
Journal of Science Education and Technology, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April 2006), in which the authors use
The Core as a case study.
82 “unofficial curriculum of society”: Interview with Marty Kaplan, August 28, 2008.
82 one-third of the top fifty biggest film moneymakers: Perkowitz, Hollywood Science, p. 12.
83 the only audience group that sees past the veneer: See David Kirby, “Science Consultants, Fictional Films, and Scientific Practice,” Social Studies of Science, Vol. 33, No. 2 (April 2003), pp. 231-268.
83 contested on a scientific level: As discussed in ibid.
83 call on a scientist to consult: See Scott Frank, “Reel Reality: Science Consultants in Hollywood,” Science as Culture, Vol. 12, No. 4 (December 2003).
83 “hold hands through space suits”: This episode is related in Kirby, “Science Consultants.”
83 “not boring”: University of Southern California Annenberg School, “Enter the Entertainment Initiative,” informational materials.
83 “imperative to capture and hold attention”: Interview with Marty Kaplan, August 28, 2008.
84 the San Andreas fault: See Perkowitz, Hollywood Science, p. 85.
84 NBC’s . . . four-hour miniseries 10.5: For a scientific critique of 10.5, see Sid Perkins, “What’s Wrong with This Picture? Educating via Analyses of Science in Movies and TV,” Science News, October 16, 2004.
84
CBS’s Category 7: For a further parsing of nonsense in such movies, see Barnett, Wagner, Gatling, et al., “The Impact of Science Fiction Film on Student Understanding of Science,” May 16, 2007 lecture,
http://frontrow.bc.edu/program/barnett/.
84 films like The Core and Volcano: See ibid.
85 Hollywood’s medical plots . . . are legion: A 2008 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation and USC’s Norman Lear Center found that from 2004 through 2006, out of the top ten most highly rated scripted (i.e., not “reality”) shows on TV, 59 percent of episodes “had at least one health-related storyline,” with “storyline” defined as three or more lines of dialogue on a health topic. See Sheila T. Murphy, Heather J. Hether, and Victoria Rideout, “How Healthy Is Prime Time? An Analysis of Health Content in Popular Prime Time Television Programs,” Kaiser Family Foundation, September 2008.
85 “misrepresentation of CPR on television shows”: Susan J. Diem, John D. Lantos, and James A. Tulsky, “Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation on Television: Miracles and Misinformation,” New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 334, No. 24, June 13, 1996, pp. 1578-1582.
85 movies generally “show scientists as idiosyncratic nerds”: Quoted in Perkowitz, Hollywood Science, p. 172.
85 one in six scientists was depicted a villain: Scientist hero characters also emerge from the products of Hollywood (there are several in Jurassic Park, for instance). But we shouldn’t confuse counterexamples with a counterargument. In the entire corpus of Hollywood film, it’s undeniable there are a whole lot of freaky, geeky, and even evil scientists.
85 one in ten got killed: George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan, et al., “Television Entertainment and Viewers’ Conceptions of Science,” University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communications, July 1985. In another study, surveying 100 films made through the late 1980s and examining previous research on the subject, Lehigh University’s Stephen L. Goldman found that science and technology “have been depicted largely negatively in popular films of all genres.” See Goldman, “Images of Technology in Popular Films: Discussion and Filmography,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Summer 1989), pp. 275-301.
85 stereotypical views of scientists held by children: See, for example, Gayle A. Buck, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, and Susan K. Kirby, “Bringing Female Scientists into the Elementary Classroom: Confronting the Strength of Elementary Students’ Stereotypical Images of Scientists,” Journal of Elementary Science Education, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Fall 2002), pp. 1-9.
85 “They might say the person was too ‘normal’”: Quoted in Jonathan Knight, “Hollywood or Bust: Last Month, a Handful of Scientists Who Have Toyed with the Idea of Writing for the Movies Were Given a Masterclass by Tinseltown’s Finest,” Nature, Vol. 430, August 12, 2004.
86 a long literary tradition: See Jon Turney, Frankenstein’s Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
86 knowledge leads the scientist to play God: Or as Victor Frankenstein puts it in Shelley’s novel: “Learn . . . by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”
86 such depictions go all the way back to Fritz Lang: We can also detect the Frankenstein mythology in such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels as H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, both of which also became films.
86 mad scientist Rotwang builds an evil robot: As scientist and film enthusiast Sidney Perkowitz summarizes the plot: “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy builds girl.” Perkowitz, Hollywood Science, p. 7.
86
The paradigmatic modern example of the evil scientist trope . . . E.T.: There are many other such films, often linked to the biomedical sciences and especially to the subject of cloning. One thinks of films like 2005’s
The Island—in which the doctor running the clone complex has a “God complex”—but the same trope appears in flicks ranging from
Jurassic Park to
Star Wars (especially episodes 2 and 3) to 1995’s
Batman Forever, in which mad scientist Edward Nigma (“The Riddler”) develops a device to extract victims’ thoughts and intelligence, making him smarter but ultimately contributing to his mental breakdown. As
Slate magazine put it after surveying nearly a century of “mad scientist” films: “What do cinematic images of scientists say about cultural attitudes toward scientific progress? They are usually about science as a source of anxiety, scientists as outsiders and oddballs, research as very likely to get into the wrong hands, and scientific institutions as dangerous places to be. Never mind that cinema depends on technological progress—this is one of the great unresolved contradictions of popular culture.” Christopher Frayling, “Spawn of Frankenstein: Mad Scientists in the Movies,”
Slate, May 9, 2006,
http://www.slate.com/id/2140772/.
Possibly that contradiction arises in part as the legacy of the late 1960s and 1970s, a period that instilled doubt about science and its societal benefits and costs among many intellectuals, including those in the entertainment industry. Possibly it goes back still further, descending from the battles between C. P. Snow and the “literary intellectuals” who had such a negative view of technology-dependent industrialization. Frankenstein was a product of the British Romantic movement.
These are undoubtedly important antecedents and influences; but with film and television we must always bear in mind that the bottom line involves not ideology, but profits—or as Stephen Colbert has so felicitously put it, getting “asses in seats.” So if these depictions of scientists recur, it’s likely they serve some purpose, even if it’s one as narrow as predictability—giving audiences more of what they already know and have thus come to expect.
87 “being rational is considered the opposite of being creative”: Interview with Matthew Chapman, August 20, 2008.
87 “threateningly intelligent”: Interview with Joe Petricca, September 5, 2008.
87 maximum degree of ichthyological realism possible: See Alison Abbot, “The Fabulous Fish Guy,” Nature, Vol. 427, February 19, 2004, pp. 672-673.
87 “word that comes to mind is serendipitous”: Interview with Martin Gunderson, August 27, 2008.
87 hectoring annoyance: Not every scientist is overly literal-minded or unable to grasp the exigencies of storytelling. But the generalization isn’t entirely without merit. For instance, Joe Petricca describes an experiment in which the American Film Institute set up a workshop to train a group of scientists in the art of screenwriting. “They would have these incredible, fascinating, you-can’t-believe-they’re-true scientific ideas, stuff you can’t even make up,” he remembers, “but not a character in sight, not a person, no nothing.” But “the granularity of science, the specificity of science, doesn’t help the story,” Petricca said. “The story is about honesty, the story is about emotion—even if it’s a ridiculous story, or a comedy story. Those are the things that will speak to an audience.” Interview with Joe Petricca, September 5, 2008.
88 “The natural world is fascinating”: Richard Dawkins quoted in Andrew Pollack, “Scientists Seek a New Movie Role: Hero, Not Villain,” New York Times, December 1, 1998.
88
movie producer Michael Crichton: Despite his late-life attacks on climate science, there can be no doubt that Michael Crichton was a great innovator and had massive influence upon the depiction of science in Hollywood and in popular culture. As Chris has argued, we shouldn’t let one late-life misjudgment totally cloud our image of him. See Mooney, “The Crichton Effect: A Chief Designer of the Image of Science in America Passes,”
Science Progress, November 11, 2008,
http://www.scienceprogress.org/2008/11/the-crichton-effect/.
89 seek out constructive consulting roles: There’s at least some evidence suggesting Hollywood science-consultant numbers are actually on the rise—or at least, they were as of 2003, according to a study published in that year by University of Manchester science-communication scholar David Kirby. Kirby, “Science Consultants.”
89 reported that the experience was a very enjoyable one: Frank, “Reel Reality.”
89
and that they made a real difference: There are risks in science consulting, such as getting used as a rubber stamp whom filmmakers can cite to show that they did indeed run things by an expert. The scientifically ludicrous
Volcano, for instance, had a consultant, and
The Core director Jon Amiel has boasted, “We wanted to actually put some science in the science fiction.” Quoted in Cindy White, “Director Jon Amiel Spear-heads a New Journey to the Center of the Earth,”
Sci-Fi Weekly, March 24, 2003,
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/interviews/sfw9571.html. But it’s also clear that those scientists who work or consult with Hollywood can learn a great deal about how to be an effective go-between, connecting two worlds and two cultures.
89 attempts to cast scientific leaders . . . in the role of out-and-out villains: Frank, “Reel Reality.”
89 invited onboard by those at the head of film projects: Ibid.
89 By the time a science consultant arrives: Ibid.
89
aware of the realities and constraints of filmmaking: As an example, consider Marty Kaplan’s Norman Lear Center, whose “Hollywood Health and Society” project—funded by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health—focuses on medical content in television dramas. One central role played by the project is to take calls from television writers who have medical questions and quickly put them in contact with on-call experts: Over 200 such inquiries were answered in the year 2006. See Lauren Movius, Michael Cody, Grace Huang, et al., “Motivating Television Viewers to Become Organ Donors,”
Cases in Public Health Communication and Marketing (June 2007). “Without trying to wag a finger, without saying that there is a compromise between profit—which is what the entertainment industry is about—and storytelling, there are often intriguing solutions that can be both accurate and live within the parameters of the storytelling situation you’re in,” explains Kaplan. “We don’t succeed because people want to be good guys . . . We succeed because writers and producers and network executives have come to the point of view that if you can be accurate, without a cost to the entertainment value and story structure and so on, it’s probably a good thing to do.” (Interview with Marty Kaplan, August 28, 2008.)
Sensitivity of this type is critical, because Hollywood is already massively overlobbied by scores of interest groups that monitor the depictions of all sorts of subjects, and all have their own grievances and wants. The “Hollywood Health and Society” project teaches another lesson, too, a more practical one. It is this: Although those unfamiliar with the industry tend to think first about ways of influencing blockbuster films, the truth is that it’s possible to have a far greater and more immediate impact through television.
The reason is sheer numbers. Studios see tens of thousands of film-scripts and script ideas per year, and even after winnowing these down dramatically and putting some small percentage of projects into development, only one in twenty ideas that survive the first cut gets produced. By the time the call has been made to bring a particular film project all the way to production, “there have been 7 million meetings, script conferences, notes,” says Kaplan. “And in at the end walks a scientist or consultant, and says, ‘No, it can’t work like that’? The notion of throwing out key elements of the story is not very welcome.” (Interview with Marty Kaplan, August 28, 2008.)
Television is different. The audience is still very large: During the week of October 22, 2007, the ten leading network prime-time shows drew in 15 to 21 million viewers apiece. Murphy, Hether, and Rideout, “How Healthy Is Prime Time?” But these shows—like House and Grey’s Anatomy—have to produce weekly episodes, often retaining for that purpose regular consultants who work intensively with the writers week in and week out to offer ideas and feedback.
Consider the successful CBS series Numb3rs, which features a non-nerdy mathematician (played by David Krumholtz) who helps his FBI agent brother solve crimes. Stanford University mathematician Keith Devlin, who consulted for the show during its first season, was aware that creators Ridley and Tony Scott very much wanted to have a scientist-mathematician hero character. He explains his motivation for helping out thusly: “I just knew, if it was successful as a series, it would have a huge impact on the public perception of mathematics.” That certainly did occur—during the 2005-2006 season Numb3rs garnered an average of 13 million viewers per night. (Movius, Cody, Huang, et al., “Motivating Television Viewers to Become Organ Donors.”) Devlin adds: “Once audiences get used to the fact that you can have good science intelligently portrayed, that raises the bar and the expectations.” (Interview with Keith Devlin, September 5, 2008.)
USC’s Norman Lear Center worked with Numb3rs writer J. David Harden to provide information for a January 27, 2006, episode, entitled “Harvest,” which involved the subject of organ donation. (Movius, Cody, Huang, et al., “Motivating Television Viewers to Become Organ Donors.”) The episode, which was viewed by 13.36 million people, ended with a kind of teachable moment in which the characters discuss how important it is to become an organ donor; afterward, in surveys posted on the show’s Web site and fan sites, viewers expressed themselves as more likely to sign up to be a donor after seeing the episode. As Harden has commented: “I’m not naive—we all understand TV has a big impact. Just consider the size of the audience for our show: Eleven million people and upwards watching Friday nights. You definitely live with a sense that there’s some responsibility incumbent upon you in the face of that audience.”
90 a Hollywood film had a massive impact: This isn’t the only example of Hollywood depictions influencing politics. In 1998, two blockbuster films—Armageddon and Deep Impact—dramatized the risk to the planet from a collision with a so-called near-Earth object (an asteroid in one film, a comet in the other). Although one could quibble with some of the specific details in these films—the asteroid in Armageddon is unrealistically large, for instance—there’s no doubt that both treated a scenario that doesn’t merely lie within the realm of theoretical possibility but has occurred repeatedly in the past history of the planet. These treatments resulted in dramatically increased public awareness and closely coincided with (and may have helped trigger) the launch of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, which now tracks such risks. For further details, see Kirby, “Science Consultants.”
90 growth of student interest in the field: See Scott Smallwood, “As Seen on TV: ‘CSI’ and ‘The X-Files’ Help Build Forensics Programs,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 19, 2002.
90 a positive role model . . . who overcomes numerous obstacles: Still, none of this could prevent the need to construct, for the film version of Contact, a love interest for Arroway that doesn’t exist in the novel—her semi-mechanical fling with the preacher Palmer Joss (Matthew McConnaughey). Some scientists were displeased at the compulsory affair, but, well, that’s Hollywood. See Pollack, “Scientists Seek a New Movie Role.”
92 “genetic determinism”: See David Kirby, “The New Eugenics in Cinema: Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy in Gattaca,” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 2, Pt. 2 (2000), pp. 193-215.
92 Gattaca
challenges such questionable presumptions: Alas,
Gattaca wasn’t successful enough at the box office to count as a model that Hollywood would want to follow again—it only grossed $12 million domestically.
Gattaca earnings figures from Box Office Mojo,
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=gattaca.htm.
92 those who had seen it were significantly more worried: Anthony Leiserowitz, “Before and After The Day After Tomorrow,” Environment 46 (2004), pp. 22-37. Leiserowitz also found that the film’s U.S. viewership within a few weeks of its release was roughly 21 million, or 10 percent of the population. Yet this was not enough to significantly move total public opinion on global warming. That’s a sobering consideration, especially in light of yet another of Leiserowitz’s findings: The film generated over ten times as much media attention as the 2001 release of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Third Assessment Report,” the definitive scientific study of climate change and its impact, which is released at roughly five-year intervals. In the total media arena, then, The Day After Tomorrow made a much bigger splash than the release of a groundbreaking scientific report, but a much smaller one than a sustained politico-media scandal story, such as the Abu Ghraib prison saga.
Chapter 8
97 hardly a monolithic group: For instance, Hitchens’s writings suggest he would disapprove of the desecration of religious symbols. See God Is Not Great (New York: Twelve, 2007), p. 11: “I leave it to the faithful to burn each other’s churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do. When I go to the mosque, I take off my shoes. When I go to the synagogue, I cover my head.”
97 Sam Harris questions . . . tolerating religious moderates: Sam Harris, The End of Faith (New York: Norton, 2004 [paperback]). See, for example, p. 15: “I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”
97 “
Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists”: Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); see pp. 66-69. Such charges are then taken up by radicalized followers, as shown in comments like the following from one atheist blog, which introduces the charming term “theistard”: “Why should we encourage the malignant tumour of religion? Why, appeasers? Because you people are a bunch of spineless pushovers? Because you appeasers are a bunch of theistardenablers who seem to be acting more and more like theistards as the days go by?” Quotation from
http://www.evolvedrational.com/2008/04/spineless-appeasers-or-closet-theistard.html.
98 so with the Big Bang: Ibid.
98 A 2007 study: Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher P. Scheitle, “Religion Among Academic Scientists: Distinctions, Disciplines, and Demographics,” Social Problems, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 289-307.
99 wholly dismantled by scientific experts: See, for instance, Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982).
99 aren’t really operating on that level: What the evolution wars really need, in our opinion, is better strategy, better communication, more serious engagement, and the rethinking of assumptions. Frankly, they also need you to write a check to the leading defender of evolution in the country, the Oakland, California-based National Center for Science Education, which does not attack religion and whose director, Eugenie Scott, commented to us as follows on the science-religion question: “It just isn’t a matter of either you’re an atheist who believes in evolution, or you’re a Christian who believes in special creation. There’s all kinds of intermediate positions here that people need to consider, and if your goal is to keep evolution in the schools, help people understand what science is, and why it’s such a good way of learning about the natural world, that dichotomization is just starting off in a ten foot deep hole. Why handicap yourself?”
100 “The appeal of creationism is emotional”: Kenneth Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2002 [paperback]), p. 173.
100
the essential organizing principle of their lives: As Miller summarized the viewpoint in ibid., pp. 186-187: “If evolution leads logically to the exclusion of God from a meaningless universe, then evolution must be fought at every opportunity.” Added Michigan State University philosopher of science Robert Pennock: “Creationists believe that moral value itself is at stake.” Pennock,
Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 311.
The internal papers of the intelligent design movement further demonstrate that the animus against evolution isn’t really driven by science—it’s far bigger than that. The notorious “Wedge Document,” from the intelligent design-promoting Discovery Institute, accuses Charles Darwin of joining Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in a triumvirate of thinkers who “portrayed humans not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals or machines who inhabited a universe ruled by purely impersonal forces and whose behavior and very thoughts were dictated by the unbending forces of biology, chemistry, and environment.” The consequences of this materialism, the document alleges, have been “devastating”—and that’s why the Discovery Institute seeks “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.” For the text of the “Wedge Document,” see
http://ncseweb.org/creationism/general/wedge-document.
100
quality science and supernatural beliefs are irreconcilable: The idea that science and faith are pretty much doomed to conflict is one of the New Atheists’ central doctrines. As
End of Faith author Sam Harris has put it: “The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.” Harris, “Science Must Destroy Religion,”
Huffington Post, January 2, 2006,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/science-must-destroy-reli_b_13153.html.
100 “damaging to the well-being of the human race”: This scene at City College was reported in Cornelia Dean, “Scientists Speak Up on Mix of God and Science,” New York Times, August 23, 2005.
100 historical scholarship: For a historically sophisticated analysis of the relationship between science and religion that eschews ideology and debunks both the strong “conflict” and strong “harmony” narratives, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
100 contradicts Hauptman’s simplistic assertion: And for that matter, any assertion that the relationship is, or even could be, simple or black and white. The intricacy of the science-religion question arises from the dramatic ways in which both have changed over the centuries, to say nothing of the diversity of world faiths, the diversity within faiths, and the interaction of both science and religion with the political and economic realities prevailing in different nations at different times. For all of these reasons, the truth is, as science historian John Hedley Brooke has written, “There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion. It is what different individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts.” Ibid., p. 321. For another historical account that does not support either a “conflict” or a “harmony” thesis, see David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
100 leading lights of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment: These scientists had no problem throwing off some incorrect notions inherited at least in part from religious traditions (perhaps most notably an Earth-centered cosmology) while retaining an underlying faith. As the eighteenth-century English chemist Joseph Priestley put it, scientific advancement could serve as the “means under God of extirpating all error and prejudice, and of putting an end to all undue and usurped authority in the business of religion as well as of science.” Quoted in Brooke, Science and Religion, p. 25.
101 “conflict” narrative: For Draper and White see David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, Introduction to God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
101 “Thou didst”: Biblical quotations from The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).
101 diseases have come to be understood as naturally caused: By 1800, Brooke notes, “It had become less acceptable to ascribe illness to divine warning or punishment.”Science and Religion, p. 155.
102 proof of a designer’s active hand: Such was the case made in Anglican priest William Paley’s influential 1802 book, Natural Theology, which advanced the famous “argument from design.” In yet another indication of the complexity of the science-religion relationship, natural theology drove a considerable amount of scientific inquiry, inspiring parsons and priests to become students of nature and seek out new evidence of what they perceived to be God’s work. See Brooke, Science and Religion, pp. 192-225.
102 religion would have to retreat: And this time the retreat was particularly painful, because although Darwin at first made little mention of the implications of his theory for “man and his origins,” everyone could tell where this line of thought carried. We weren’t so special; and nature, featuring constant bloody competition for survival and a long history of extinctions, didn’t sound much like the kind of system that a benevolent, loving God would design.
102 Darwinian revolution: Rather than forever unseating religion, then, Darwin is perhaps better understood as having shown the power of a scientific methodology that did not admit of any role for the miraculous or supernatural causation when it came to explaining the workings of things. As University of Wisconsin science historian Ronald Numbers puts it: “By the mid 19th century, students of nature, scientists, were almost unanimous—even among some of the creationists—in their conviction that appeals to the supernatural had no place in doing science. It didn’t mean you couldn’t believe in the supernatural and many of them did, but if you appealed to a miracle, then that was cheating.” Interview with Ronald Numbers, October 20, 2008.
102 major Anglican clergymen: Brooke, Science and Religion, pp. 41, 293-294.
102 “
The more we know of the fixed laws of nature”: Quoted in ibid., p. 271. Today, the idea of trying to preserve a role for religion in the shrinking space of natural explanation has come to be called the “God of the gaps” approach, and disdained by serious religious thinkers. It’s simply a losing strategy; to quote Kenneth Miller, it turns God into a mere “magician” and a bumbling one at that, constantly meddling around with nature and designing organisms fated to later go extinct. This is why many theologians and religious adherents have such a problem with “intelligent design”: They think it trivializes God at least as much as it impugns science.
And yet none of what we know from science excludes a different religious possibility: That some creator set in motion the laws of nature, and now—albeit in a scientifically undetectable way—acts through them. “The discovery that naturalistic explanations can account for the workings of living things neither confirms nor denies the idea that a Creator is responsible for them,” writes Miller (
Finding Darwin’s God, p. 268). John Haught, a Catholic theologian at Georgetown University, even argues that had a camera been present at the scene of Christ’s rising from the dead, it would have recorded nothing. “We trivialize the whole meaning of the Resurrection when we start asking, Is it scientifically verifiable?” says Haught. See Steve Paulson, “The Atheist Delusion,”
Salon.com, December 18, 2007.
103 National Academy of Sciences: See National Academies, Teaching About Evolution and the Nature of Science (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1998), p. 58, noting: “Religions and science answer different questions about the world. Whether there is a purpose to the universe or a purpose for human existence are not questions for science.”
103
American Association for the Advancement of Science: As Francisco Ayala, former priest and past president of AAAS, has written, “Science and religion concern nonoverlapping realms of knowledge. It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that evolutionary theory and religious belief appear to be antithetical.” Quoted in Cornelia Dean, “Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God,”
New York Times, April 29, 2008.
Ayala’s words invoke an influential postulate about the science-religion relationship that comes from the work of Stephen Jay Gould, who described science and religion as “nonoverlapping magisteria” (NOMA) that cannot conflict due to their separate spheres—a distinction designed to promote “the principled resolution of supposed ‘conflict’ or ‘warfare’ between science and religion.” Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” in Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998).
As Gould described NOMA: “No conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap . . . The net of science covers the empirical realm: what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the usual cliches, we get the ages of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.”
Let us acknowledge that this stance is not unproblematic. For instance, religion cannot be the only source of “moral meaning and value” or else atheists couldn’t have any, which is clearly not the case. And many religious believers—especially creationists—would have a lot of trouble restraining themselves from making claims about the empirical realm.
Still, Gould’s words express an honest attempt to ensure respect and avoid conflict, and one with “important practical consequences in a world of such diverse passions,” for it demands “mutual humility.” And note that it is no refutation of the NOMA principle to find cases in which religious believers have transgressed against it by making claims about the natural world. This is something creationists do all the time and in fact, they do by definition. Gould knew people are constantly violating NOMA, but his prescription is that this is where the line ought to be drawn in order to create conditions conducive to overall peace and understanding.
103 not
the same thing as philosophical naturalism: To elaborate: A philosophical naturalist, in Robert Pennock’s definition, “would be someone who says the world as it is in its ultimate reality, its metaphysical reality, is nothing but material natural processes, and there is no supernatural, there is no god, there is nothing beyond.” However, this claim is about the ultimate nature of things, and so is not based on science itself. “Science is not in the business of making philosophical metaphysical claims.” See the testimony of Robert Pennock in the Dover, Pennsylvania, evolution trial of 2005,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day3am.html. Elsewhere Pennock has written, “Scientists need to recognize and respect, as most do, the limits of methodological naturalism. If individual scientists wish to dive into deeper metaphysical waters, then they should be clear when they are doing so . . . and not suggest that their conclusions are drawn strictly from within science.” Pennock, “God of the Gaps: The Argument from Ignorance and the Limits of Methodological Naturalism,” in Andrew J. Petto and Laurie R. Godfrey, eds.,
Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond (New York: Norton, 2008).
104 “
one is setting aside questions about whether the gods”: Again, see Pennock’s testimony in the Dover, Pennsylvania, evolution trial of 2005,
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day3am.html. For a more thorough exposition of his views on this question, see his book
Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
104 “Science is godless in the same way that plumbing is godless”: Ibid., p. 282.
104 collapse the distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism: Richard Dawkins is one example of this, but the same goes for another New Atheist, Victor Stenger, whose book title says it all: God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.
104 “
unequivocally a scientific question”: Dawkins,
The God Delusion, p. 59. In fact, Dawkins repeatedly claims that his critiques of the existence of God are “scientific” in nature, rather than philosophical or metaphysical. Or as he puts it at one point in the book, the existence of God is “a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability” (p. 48). At yet another point in the book, he argues that “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other” (p. 50).
We’re confounded by such claims. If God is a supernatural being, and supernatural agents are, by definition, “not constrained by natural laws” (Pennock, Tower of Babel, p. 289), then surely we cannot use science’s “methodological naturalism” to know anything about them. That includes testing whether they exist or establishing the probability of such existence.
To further underscore this point, let’s examine Dawkins’s attempts to refute theologians who claim that God is “simple.” To the contrary, Dawkins argues, “however little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!” (p. 125). To Dawkins, such complexity makes God highly improbable, and this is one of his central arguments. The reasoning here draws upon Dawkins’s previous, important work on how natural selection creates complex organisms, described in books such as his Climbing Mount Improbable—but that’s precisely the problem. Why should we assume naturalistic arguments about “complexity” are applicable to a supernatural being? And even more important, how could we ever know reliably whether they apply? Certainly we cannot know as much through science.
At another point in The God Delusion, Dawkins attempts a similar maneuver, arguing that “a universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?” (p. 55). Simple: because it is untestable by science. We have a hard time seeing how one can examine two universes and control for the existence of a creative superintendent to see how they differ, when the creative superintendent is (again) supernatural and therefore not constrained by natural law.
The point is that while Dawkins’s position on God’s existence may be influenced by his scientific training and the kind of person it has made him—the thoughts it has engendered—the position itself is not the result of science. To quote Duke University evolutionary scientist Matt Cartmill: “Many scientists are atheists or agnostics who want to believe that the natural world they study is all there is, and being only human, they try to persuade themselves that science gives them grounds for that belief. It’s an honorable belief, but it isn’t a research finding.” Cartmill, “Oppressed by Evolution,” Discover, Vol. 19, No. 3 (March 1998), pp. 78-83.
None of this is to say that Dawkins is wrong; merely that with such arguments, he’s going beyond the realm of science, and shouldn’t claim otherwise. As a philosopher, he may well be right. Chris finds Dawkins’s “cosmic teapot” argument, cribbed from Bertrand Russell, particularly persuasive. This is the idea that there is no more reason to believe in any supernatural entity than there is to believe in a teapot floating somewhere in the middle of space. We see no reason to believe in something without evidence of its existence—but then, we also recognize that the term “evidence” itself presumes naturalism.
At minimum, then, Dawkins’s assertion that the refutation of God’s existence can proceed scientifically is highly questionable.
104
an intellectual error at best: It’s an error of no small consequence for the standing of science in America. Part of the weight of the compatibilist stance with respect to science and religion derives not merely from its philosophical or historical underpinnings (although these are very strong), but its practical significance. That significance manifests itself in multiple arenas—the legal one, the educational one, and in the broader public sphere, where it serves to maintain the good name of the scientific community and to show that it’s open-minded and tolerant.
Let’s take the law first. The pro-evolution legal strategy has long rested on the principle that evolutionary science is neutral with respect to religion, unable either to prove or disprove God’s existence. This in turn sets up the argument that creationism of course
is religion and thus illegal to teach in public school science classes under the First Amendment. Precisely such a strategy prevailed in the famous 2005 Dover, Pennsylvania, trial over the teaching of “intelligent design.” Far from being a scientific alternative to evolution, ID didn’t count as science at all, ruled the Bush-appointed district court judge John E. Jones III. It was a souped-up form of creationism, perhaps, but still ultimately reducible to religion. Therefore, its teaching violated the separation of church and state. As Jones put it in his opinion (relying heavily upon Robert Pennock’s testimony): “In deliberately omitting theological or ‘ultimate’ explanations for the existence or characteristics of the natural world, science does not consider issues of ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ in the world. While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they are not part of science. This self-imposed convention of science, which limits inquiry to testable, natural explanations about the natural world, is referred to by philosophers as ‘methodological naturalism’ and is sometimes known as the scientific method. Methodological naturalism is a ‘ground rule’ of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify.” See
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/kitzmiller_v_dover_decision.html/.
Thus has the compatibilist position on the relationship between science and religion devastated the anti-evolutionists in court.
And if the compatibilist stance has been crucial in the legal arena, it is equally important in science education, where mini-battles over science and religion are erupting constantly. As Patricia H. Kelley, a geologist at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, puts it: “In my own teaching experience, which has been mostly in the southern United States, students entering my class frequently have had the preconceived notion that science and religion are incompatible, and that they must either make a conscious decision to reject science or to reject religion.” Kelley, “Stephen Jay Gould’s Winnowing Fork: Science, Religion, and Creationism,” in Warren D. Allmon, Patricia H. Kelley, and Robert M. Moss, eds., Stephen Jay Gould: Reflections on His View of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Any teacher dealing with such students on the subject of evolution would be mad to take the New Atheist line with them. Yet teaching evolution from a “methodological naturalist” perspective lets everyone meet on common ground without feeling a threat to their beliefs, because they are not at stake, not on the table. See William W. Cobern, “The Competition of Secularism and Religion in Science Education,” Special Supplement, Religion in the News (Summer-Fall 2007).
In fact, education researchers have found that defusing the tension over science and religion facilitates learning about evolution. “I submit that anti-religious rhetoric is counter-productive. It actually hampers science education,” writes Shawn K. Stover, a biologist at Davis and Elkins College in West Virginia. In Stover’s view, students who feel that evolution is a threat to their beliefs will not “want to learn,” and only reconciliatory discussion can open them up to evolution. Stover, “The Great Divide: How to Resolve the War Between Science and Religion,” eSkeptic , September 24, 2008.
104 a nasty bullying tactic: Insofar as the new atheism strives to reach beyond science’s limitations—boundaries that end at the natural world—and claims that it’s “scientific” to be an atheist, then it also seeks to turn science into an anti-religious doctrine. In a very religious country like the United States, this would vastly strengthen the claims of anti-science religious conservatives, who strategically blur the distinction between science and atheism in order to lump them together. In a 2007 New York Times op-ed, for instance, Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) wrote that “if evolution means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence then I reject it.” But evolution doesn’t mean that: It can’t; it simply describes how human beings and other animals came to exist in their current form. Whether God was in some way also involved, perhaps by creating the universe and the laws that ultimately led to our existence through evolution, is a matter that’s simply impossible to address on a scientific level.
105 accept the teaching of evolution: We came across this list of religious organizations and their statements on evolution and creationism in Kelley, “Stephen Jay Gould’s Winnowing Fork.”
105 “
the weakness of the religious mind”: Dawkins,
The God Delusion, p. 16.
The God Delusion amounts to a “coming out” book for atheists, so no wonder it has riled them so (p. 4). Although its author says he will not “go out of my way to offend” in the book, neither will he “don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else” (p. 27). Dawkins’s wit is devastating, and his arguments powerful as well, but that’s precisely the point: Why then does he need to express them with such condescension?
We want to emphasize that New Atheists enjoy freedom of speech. No one is asking them to be quiet. However, we have every right to point out the consequences of the divisiveness they are fueling over science and religion.
What’s more, we have every right to ask this question: Why is it necessary that the intellectual case for atheism be made without moderation, conciliation, or humility? If atheism has compelling arguments behind it (as we believe it does), then atheists ought to be the first to reach out to religious believers on their own terms, seeking to create the types of dialogue that might convince some of them to reconsider what they’ve long held as true.
105 Sagan subjected all the standard arguments: Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, ed. Ann Druyan (New York: Penguin Press, 2006).
106 treated the subject of religion respectfully: As Sagan put it in ibid., “I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species” (p. 31).
Chapter 9
110 new form of citizen-journalist media—blogging: A blog (short for “weblog”) is a continuously updated Web page, on which entries are posted sequentially with the most recent item at the top of the page. Readers can often participate in an ongoing online conversation by leaving comments.
110
exploded in popularity and readership: Several studies have come up with very different estimates of the total number of blogs in existence, in part because it’s hard to determine how many of the supposed 100 million-plus blogs out there are truly active. See Technorati, “State of the Blogosphere 2008,”
http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/. But one thing is certain: Blogging is an expanding worldwide phenomenon that has enormous impact on policy, entertainment, and other spheres, and especially the news media.
110
largest blogs, such as the Huffington Post: According to the blog-indexing site Technorati, as of late 2006, twenty-two of the top 100 most-linked news and information sources were blogs. Technorati, “State of the Blogosphere 2007,”
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000493.html.
110 1,000 science blogs in existence: Laura Bonetta, “Scientists Enter the Blogosphere,” Cell, Vol. 129, May 4, 2007, pp. 443-445.
110 where we hang our hats: Chris has been blogging, with varying degrees of intensity, since the year 2001—shortly after the phenomenon really kicked into gear in the wake of the 9/11 attacks—and has been blogging about science since 2003, when he launched The Intersection. Sheril joined that blog in 2007 while still working within academia and has experienced firsthand the mixed feelings about blogging that currently exist in the ivory tower. The Intersection spent several years on the ScienceBlogs network before moving, in 2009, to Discover Blogs.
111
leaving other, older sources in the dust: The Internet’s “margin over other sources is large and growing,” observes the National Science Foundation. Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, Chap. 7, “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding,”
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/pdf/c07.pdf.
111
back-scratching communities: For an elaboration of this problem, see Cass Sunstein,
Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
111 bridge the traditional “two cultures” divide: John S. Wilkins, “The Roles, Reasons and Restrictions of Science Blogs,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Vol. 23, No. 8 (August 2008), pp. 411-413.
111
anti-science forces . . . establish their own Internet hubs: As Sunstein and colleagues have written, the grouping together of like-minded people (in this case, strong science supporters) can lead to “increased extremism, decreased internal diversity, and greater divisions across ideological lines. These effects should be expected to occur when groups self-sort in purely geographical terms; they should also occur when the sorting occurs in terms of what people read and watch.” See David Schkade, Cass Sunstein, and Reid Hastie, “What Happened on Deliberation Day,” Working Paper, July 2006, AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies,
http://aei-brookings.org/admin/authorpdfs/redirect-safely.php?fname=../pdffiles/phpb7.pdf.
The famed philosopher Jürgen Habermas has similarly remarked that “in the context of liberal regimes the rise of millions of fragmented chat-rooms across the world [tends] to lead to the fragmentation of large, but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics.” Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society—Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research” (see his footnote 14),
http://www.icahdq.org/Speech_by_Habermas.pdf.
112 the soundly refuted claim: See Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck, “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (September 2008), pp. 1325-1337.
112
their ever-growing influence on the traditional press: It has become a regular blogospheric occurrence that once a number of sites start buzzing about a topic, the result is increased pressure upon traditional journalists to take up the cry as well. To relate just one example from our own experience, in May 2008 Sheril composed a short blog post entitled “What’s Not Making News,” which addressed the topic of ocean acidification and simply read: “Ocean acidification is intimately connected to our changing climate and as important as global warming. We’re just not hearing about it in the news enough because the media has all but ignored the problem. So we must make the case that more scientists ought to be exploring the threat, educating the public as to why it matters, and implementing effective policy to mitigate the impact of excess CO
2 in our oceans (and everywhere else),”
http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2008/05/whats_not_in_the_news.php.
The entry was swiftly picked up by major news media sources in print and even inspired a story about ocean acidification that aired during prime time on ABC News, featuring the famed marine explorer Sylvia Earle. In a matter of days, a single blog post drew national media attention to a critical environmental issue.
112 online version of a scientific conference: Unlike the average conference, though, this dialogue is open to interested non-expert members of the public who can also comment, question the scientists, and participate in the growth of knowledge—all without having to pay upward of $1,000 for airfare, admission, and a hotel stay, which is the typical minimum expenditure required to attend a scientific meeting these days.
112 comment threads: As mentioned above, blogs generally allow readers to post comments. A “thread” is simply a long list of these, keyed to a particular blog entry, in which the most recent comment sits lowest on the page.
112
hundreds of high-level, astute contributions: Such examples help defuse the skepticism, which exists both within and outside the scientific community, about the value of participating in the blogosphere. We don’t much sympathize with those traditionalist scientists who frown on blogging, worrying that unlike professional academic publications, blogs offer no formal peer-review process even as politics, opinion, and attitude abound. There are reports from some young scientists that they’ve been told to “stop blogging and concentrate on ‘real’ work” (Wilkins, “The Roles, Reasons and Restrictions of Science Blogs”), yet in fact, all kinds of innovative scientific thinking is being facilitated by the Web, and at least among the best science blogs, a de facto peer-review process also exists thanks to reader commentary and participation.
Thus, although the response to science blogging from the institutional scientific community has been mixed, it appears to be gaining acceptance as a useful tool within the ivory tower. With increasing frequency, prominent scientists can be found sending press releases about their published work to well-established blogs in the hope of achieving wider distribution.
And no wonder: Whereas most scientific journals are expensive to subscribe to and typically difficult to access, blogs are free and openly available to everyone online. Scientific journals have even begun to treat bloggers like traditional science journalists, sending them notifications and embargoed articles before publication, hoping that they will receive attention and commentary in the blogosphere.
112 user-friendly, and open-access dialogue about science: For many outside of academia, blogging affords the opportunity to ask experts questions and interact with the science community. In this way, science blogging has at least some potential to break down the “us” versus “them” mentality separating scientists and non-scientists, and to help interested citizens separate fact from hype on critical health and environmental issues such as the alleged link between vaccines and autism.
113
report back online: Whenever our friend Duke researcher Vanessa Woods travels to Congo with her husband, Dr. Brian Hare, to study bonobos (an endangered close relative of humans), her blog “Bonobo Handshake” (
http://bonobohandshake.blogspot.com) describes her work and encourages readers to participate in conservation. Across the globe we find something similar: Meteorologist Tasmin Gray blogs at “Frozen Cheese” (
http://www.frozen-cheese.blogspot.com/) about climate change and the ozone hole from the Halley research station in the Antarctic. And when Sheril traveled to South Africa with conservation biologist Stuart Pimm, she brought Intersection readers along by posting entries about biodiversity and research during the journey.
At the same time, blogging has made the science community, or at least some of its individual members, seem far less imposing and intimidating. For example, University of Southern California physicist Clifford Johnson may write about space exploration one day and about his gardening hobby the next on his blog “Asymptotia” (
http://asymptotia.com/). Readers who follow scientist bloggers are constantly reminded that scientists are people, too.
113
stumbling over them by accident: As
Houston Chronicle science reporter (and blogger) Eric Berger has put it: “The Web is a great medium for scientists to share and discuss results through pre-prints, listservs, wikis and the like. But it’s not good at all for engaging a wide segment of the public-at-large in science. The general public, the average member of which is not inclined toward science, is unlikely to stumble upon or patronize Seed or ScienceBlogs. They’re busy going to ESPN or Gawker or a host of other Web sites. The great thing about the Internet is that people have absolute choice over the content they consume. The terrible thing about the Internet is that people have absolute choice over the content they consume.” Eric Berger, comment to The Intersection, October 29, 2008,
http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2008/10/the_science_writers_lament.php#comment-1180076.
113
“feeding the beast”: Because of these demands on time and energy, science blogging attracts a particular type of personality. Bloggers must participate every day in an ongoing online dialogue, constantly generate new content, and (perhaps) moderate and answer comments, all while attending to whatever professional and personal responsibilities they may have. Those able to shoulder all this will not necessarily stand as representative of their disciplines: Indeed, according to Technorati, 57 percent of U.S. bloggers are male and 42 percent are age eighteen to thirty-four; 75 percent have college degrees; 42 percent have been to graduate school; and more than half have an annual household income of over $75,000. Technorati, “State of the Blogosphere 2008,”
http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/who-are-the-bloggers/. These bloggers are not exactly a snapshot of the general public, or even the science community at large. For instance, in our experience men vastly outnumber women in the science blogosphere.
113
favors polemicism over nuance: A related drawback lies in the fact that much science blogging takes a pervasively critical, debunking attitude. Perhaps the dominant mode of discourse is to take some misconception or bit of misinformation, skewer it, and explain the truth of things. Such debunking performs an important service, but at the same time, it leads to a hypercritical orientation, in which science bloggers are always slicing and dicing bad logic and bad facts (and even bad grammar). Once again, such fare won’t necessarily have much appeal to any audience other than an already science-centered one.
Meanwhile, the number of visitors to blogs who take an active role in their comments section is generally a small fraction of those who read the site silently (the so-called lurkers), and those who do post comments often generate nastiness and attacks rather than constructive dialogue.
Consider the once-popular ScienceBlog called Next Generation Energy (
http://scienceblogs.com/energy/), on which Sheril wrote a post about rising to the energy challenges of the twenty-first century. The thread of commentary that followed was hijacked by an unrelenting climate change denier known as “LudHunter,” who responded to every other participant with skepticism and personal attacks against what he termed “gaia-worshipping masturbation in the echo chamber,” http://scienceblogs.
com/energy/2008/07/a_reaction_commensurate_to_the.php. Eventually one of “Ludhunter’s” profane responses was held for moderation because of its content, and as a result he composed a post on his personal blog called “Spiked by the tyrant snatch on
scienceblogs.com,” calling moderation a “classic Goebbels move,”
http://ludhunter.wordpress.com/2008/07/. He subsequently apologized, explaining he had “downed 3 Jack and cokes just before, and was gettin’ ornery,” but the dialogue (long since abandoned by Sheril) continued for over a week. In the end, “LudHunter” got the last word by telling the final objector to “get off the doom bandwagon before she soils her polyester shirt with tofu and bong resin.” Not surprisingly, after this exchange, Next Generation Energy never regained the same traffic numbers.
114
likely also the most alienating one: Even within the science-blogging community, many have been offended by, and polarized over, unending fights over science and religion. Rob Knop, a physicist and former ScienceBlogs contributor who happens also to be a Christian, found himself pilloried on the site after responding to the claim that science and religion are always mutually exclusive. In 2007, he ended a long post by explaining: “Anything that happens as real ‘miracle,’ as real divine intervention, happens through human agency, so there’s no need to invoke the divine if you want to explain the mechanics of it, which is after all what science is all about. But the
meaning of it—well, that’s not even a valid question often in science, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid question to
people, and that’s why we have humanities and theology and other forms of intellectual endeavors that aren’t science,”
http://scienceblogs.com/interactions/2007/03/so_why_am_i_a_christian_specif_1.php.
Here Knop sought to bridge the culture gap by reconciling two different ways of thinking and communicating about the world—but even though his post generated nearly 200 comments, and some readers were willing to ask questions, many atheists and religious fundamentalists alike called him delusional, indoctrinated, and worse.
Chapter 10
117
sounded the alarm: National Academy of Sciences,
Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007). But note that an early version of the report came out in late 2005. See National Academies press release, “Broad Federal Effort Urgently Needed to Create New, High-Quality Jobs for All Americans in the 21st Century,” October 12, 2005,
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=11463.
118
large and very welcome increases: For details on the science-funding provisions of the economic stimulus bill of early 2009, see American Association for the Advancement of Science, “Final Stimulus Bill Provides $21.5 Billion for Federal R&D,”
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/stim09c.htm.
118 more than any other nation in the biomedical research arena: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Main Science and Technology Indicators, biannual series, 2008.
118 total government-funded research and development: Ibid.
118 employ the most scientists: Ibid.
118
chief source of valuable new patents: National Science Foundation, Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, Chap. 6,
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/pdf/c06.pdf. See Figure 6-38, based on Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development patent data.
119 “Neither . . . scientific literacy”: National Academy of Sciences, America’s Lab Report: Investigations in High School Science (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005).
120 Miley Cyrus probably seems a lot more relevant to their lives: Our public policies don’t help when it comes to making science relevant to students. The No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, requires states to test students’ factual knowledge of science rather than encouraging a more comprehensive appreciation for the subject. Ursula Goodenough, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis who participated in a 2005 state science-standards-review process conducted by the Fordham Institute, has made the case that this will lead to an overemphasis on “teaching the test”: “As things now stand, K-12 students go into science classes and hear about cells one day and atoms another day, but lack any opportunity or guidance for integrating these understandings into larger contexts . . . most students find science classes tedious and boring and drop out as soon as they’ve met the requirements.” Tony Fitzpatrick, “Tell a Story: Teaching Science Should Have a Narrative Component, Goodenough Says,” Washington University St. Louis Record, March 24, 2006.
120 Who are these lost scientists?: And possibly the students who lose that sense of wonderment with science that they may once have had, as a result of being continually forced to memorize from college textbooks that seem to increase in girth every few years—so much that “elephantiasis of the textbook” is now a subject actually fretted over in the published scientific literature. See R. C. Kerber, “Elephantiasis of the Textbook,” Journal of Chemical Education, Vol. 65 (1988), pp. 719-720.
120 median age at the time of doctorate receipt: Ibid.
121
pressing on can become a heavy financial burden: In a 2003 article for the
Scientist, Daniel S. Greenberg vividly illustrated the problem: “Consider the economic fates of two bright college graduates, Jane and Jill, both 22. Jane excels at a top law school, and after graduation three years later, is wooed and hired by a top law firm at the going rate—$125,000 a year, with a year end bonus of $25,000 to $50,000.
“Jill heads down the long trail to a PhD in physics, and after six Spartan years on graduate stipends rising to $20,000 a year, finally gets her degree. Tenure-track jobs appropriate to her rigorous training are scarce, but, more fortunate than her other classmates, she lands a good postdoc appointment—at $35,000 a year, without health insurance or professional independence. Three years later, when attorney Jane is raking in $150,000 a year, plus bonuses, Jill is nail-biting over another postdoc appointment, with an unusually ample postdoc recompense of $45,000 per annum. Medicine and business management similarly trump science in earning power.” Greenberg, “The Mythical Scientist Shortage,” Scientist, Vol. 17, No. 6, March 24, 2003, p. 68.
121
five straight years of increases: The 2007 figures are the most recent available data at the time this book is going to press. Here it may help to anticipate some objections. It is often asked, “But aren’t all these new Ph.D.s from other countries than the U.S.?” The truth is that although the rate of increase is bigger for non-U.S. citizen degree recipients, all doctorates are on the rise. See ibid. The entire body of Ph.D.s is growing; moreover, it’s important to bear in mind that many foreign students remain in the United States to work after obtaining their doctorates.
Whether all of these scientists are “enough” to keep us competitive is exceedingly difficult to say. However, it’s definitely incorrect to suggest (as so many regularly do) that our numbers of researchers are in decline at the moment.
121 an average of 1.9 years: Ibid.
121 Fifty-eight percent: Ibid.
121 34 percent: Ibid.
121 from 74 to 44 percent: Ibid. The decline was from 60 to 31 percent at research universities.
123 Every year: Data collected before the U.S. recession was declared in 2008.
123 more than three times as many . . . graduates: Lowell and Salzman, “Into the Eye of the Storm.”
123 not if it only provides technical scientific expertise: As the Urban Institute study put it: “In our interviews with engineering managers . . . rarely, if ever, do they say they are unable to find graduates with the requisite technical skills but rather the ‘shortage’ is of engineers with communication, management, interpersonal and other soft skills.”
123 “soft skills”: Interview with Bill Bates, December 10, 2008.
123
situations of ridiculous competition: Matters have become particularly strained in the biomedical arena, where the constriction of opportunity for the youngest scientists has become a cause of outrage. As funding levels for the National Institutes of Health have declined sharply since 2003, young scientists have been disproportionately punished by a system where having a prior history of receiving research funds makes all the difference—where, in short, the rich get richer, and the young get sacrificed. According to
Science magazine, the average age for receiving a first grant from the NIH is forty-two. See Jocelyn Kaiser, “The Graying of NIH Research,”
Science, Vol. 322, No. 5903 (November 7, 2008), pp. 848-849. Less than three decades ago, 25 percent of the main independent research grants in the biomedical field went to scientists under the age of thirty-five; today, it’s less than 3 percent.
The NIH comprises an enormous slice of the financial pie for science—disbursing nearly $30 billion annually, about six times as much funding as the National Science Foundation—so its particular funding history explains many of the troubling trends we’re seeing today. As Congress doubled the NIH budget between 1998 and 2003, many new Ph.D. positions became available as principal investigators could afford to support multiple students. In turn, established faculty members had increased opportunities to publish and submit better grant proposals. By the time funding leveled off, they had a demonstrated history of winning awards based on the boom. See “A Broken Pipeline? Flat Funding of the NIH Puts a Generation of Science at Risk,” a Follow-Up Statement by a Group of Concerned Universities and Research Institutions, March 2008,
http://www.brokenpipeline.org/brokenpipeline.pdf.
The consequence today is that significantly more older scientists are finding funding compared with their younger colleagues. Again and again, grant money is going to those with a proven track record rather than those pushing novel, potentially groundbreaking ideas. Perhaps the situation was best summed up by Bush administration National Institutes of Health director Elias A. Zerhouni, who has worried that we must not “eat our seed corn.” See Zerhouni, “NIH in the Post-Doubling Era: Realities and Strategies,” Science, Vol. 314, No. 5802 (November 17, 2006), pp. 1088-1090.
124
falling behind in science: None of what we say in this chapter should be taken as an attempt to discount this grave concern. Consider: Although the United States still leads the world in total science and engineering Ph.D. production—and though our total number of Ph.D.s produced is also increasing, at least for the moment—China’s rate of increase is far greater as it approaches us from behind, a fact suggesting we may be ceding our lead and that it (and other nations) are catching up. Only about one-third of bachelor’s degrees attained in the United States are in science and engineering; by contrast, more than half of Chinese first degrees are in these fields. See National Science Foundation, “Science and Engineering Indicators 2008,” Chap. 2,
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/pdf/c02.pdf. If China continues to expand its science and engineering programs at its current pace, it may overtake U.S. Ph.D. production very soon; and in fact, by other measures its technological competitiveness is even closer to (or outstrips) ours. See Science|Business, “China Now Leading the U.S. in Technological Competitiveness,” February 7, 2008,
http://bulletin.sciencebusiness.net/ebulletins/showissue.php3?page=/548/2732/9918.
124
training a cadre of communication and outreach experts: An additional intriguing idea would be to pursue precisely the kind of synthesis that this book represents. Why not team up science graduates who wish to pursue outreach with recently minted science reporters who’ve just graduated from specialized journalism programs? Even though science-reporting jobs are vanishing from the traditional media, we find journalism schools producing more specialized science reporters than before. At present, science writer Cristine Russell notes, “the journalism pipeline for new science reporters is bigger than ever before,” with thirty graduate-level programs across the country specializing in training them. Russell, “Covering Controversial Science: Improving Reporting on Science and Public Policy,” 2006 Working Paper, Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy,
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/papers/working_papers/2006_4.pdf. It’s yet another pipeline mismatch that ought to be turned to our advantage, a “two cultures” collaboration just waiting to happen.
125
rethinking scientist
education: This is not to say that this way of thinking shouldn’t arc back to the opening stretches of the science pipeline as well—it certainly should. For instance, K-12 education should foster a more realistic portrayal of scientists. Schools should regularly partner with scientific institutions that can provide visiting scientists who are fun and colorful (not boring!) and willing to come talk to classes regularly. They should ensure that science teachers are prepared for a stronger curriculum and enthusiastic to keep our youngest students engaged.
Given that most six-year-olds already love subjects such as dinosaurs and space exploration, science shouldn’t be a difficult sell. So by all means, as the National Academies suggested in the Gathering Storm report, let’s recruit 10,000 teachers to educate 10 million minds. If the United States can succeed at keeping students engaged, it will be an investment producing exponential results. A firm understanding of science will foster the next generation of scientific leadership and literacy.
By the time students reach high school, we should provide rigorous challenges and also make sure students do not lose sight of science’s intimate relationship with other subjects. And it’s imperative that we shatter the false caricature that all scientists are out-of-touch nerds who can’t get a date. Schools should continue to bring in professionals from many walks of life who are engaging, interesting, and involved in changing the world. Hip, fun, trailblazing research pioneers are everywhere; we ought to start celebrating them. Let’s make names like Bonnie Bassler and Pardis Sabeti (Google them) as recognizable as Julia Roberts and Scarlett Johansson. And why on earth aren’t we following the lead of some innovative college courses and teaching our high school science students about science via the movies? Learning how science is often
wrong in such big-screen depictions, and how scientists themselves do not fit Hollywood stereotypes, would be highly illuminating and memorable. See, for instance, the University of Central Florida’s “Physics in Films” course,
http://www.cah.ucf.edu/news/2004-Physics-in-Films.php.
125 Merely straddling the line between physics and chemistry: See Brian Vastag, “Assembly Work,” Nature, Vol. 453 (May 2008), pp. 422-423.
125 IGERT: As we composed this book, 195 IGERT grants had been disbursed, averaging just over twenty per year. Yet each funding cycle, the National Science Foundation reports receiving between 400 and 500 preliminary IGERT proposals, only 20-25 percent of which even make it into the second stage because of current budgetary constraints. Congress should act now to dramatically expand funding for the program.
126 pent-up scientific talent: Addressing the plight of postdocs requires its own specific set of solutions. Many of these researchers in development express the concern that by embarking on the road less traveled, by way of congressional fellowships in policy, for instance—such as are offered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s excellent program—they could harm their careers, because they need to publish as much research as possible to win an academic job. Instead, we need to foster the recognition that working in the legislative and executive branches of government inherently makes them better scientists in the broadest sense of the term, because there is no better way to grasp how science influences society. It would behoove the nation if such opportunities drew in more talented scientists, rather than deterring them. And just as a fellowship program currently exists to bring scientists into the federal government and onto Capitol Hill, similar fellowships should bring them into the media, the entertainment industry, and the religious community.
Conclusion
128 “We’ve arranged a global civilization”: Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996).
128 pills that significantly lengthen the human life span: This is not necessarily as far off as you may think. See Robert N. Butler, Richard A. Miller, Daniel Perry, et al., “New Model of Health Promotion and Disease Prevention for the 21st Century,” British Medical Journal, Vol. 337, July 19, 2008, pp. 149-150, noting: “Investigating how genetic mutations influence the basic rate of ageing is likely to provide important clues about how to develop drugs that do much the same thing.”
129
synthetic “telepathy”: Again, perhaps not as crazy as you may think. See
http://cnslab.ss.uci.edu/muri/index.html, noting, “We aim to process EEG and MEG signals to determine what words a person is thinking and to whom or what location the message should be sent.”
132 “We require a common culture”: C. P. Snow, Public Affairs (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p. 10.