Ham-on-Nye: What we have here is not, at least not entirely, a failure to communicate

I really don't have anything to add to the "who won and who lost" discussion about this week's Ham-on-Nye debate. So here's an analysis, not of the debate itself, but of some of the analysis of the debate, much of which has been laying the blame for the significant public rejection of the theory of evolution here on poor science communication. "Bad Astronomer," Phil Plait's opinion piece on the Slate website is a good example of this kind of criticism.

I would be one of the last people to claim that science communication does not need improvement. Improving science communication is important to me and to the organization I run, the Atlanta Science Tavern. But there's a lot more at issue here than whether the way we go about communicating the science evolution has been good or bad.

From what I've read, public science communication in the U.S. is not all that different from informal science education in much of Europe where evolution is widely accepted. The reality of anthropogenic climate change isn't such a hard-sell in Europe, either. But, interestingly enough, rejection of vaccination as a safe and effective public health measure is commonplace both here and abroad. Vaccination, in particular childhood vaccination, is considered by a large fraction of both populations to be dangerous, in spite of concerted efforts to educate the public to the contrary. The reason this is happening is because the question of vaccination safety and effectiveness has ceased to be a scientific issue in the last dozen years or so and instead has become a political one. This is an important distinction.

Revival meeting during the Second Great Awakening

So we need to appreciate the political dimension of our "evolution problem" in order to address it properly. Rejection of evolution here, much like the denial of climate change, is rooted in our political and cultural history, a history marked by "Great Awakenings" of religious fervor and a stubborn insistence that America is in some respects exceptional and that the rules that apply elsewhere in the world, however rational, do not necessarily apply here.

The implication is that the kind of difficulty that we experience in trying to maintain the integrity of the science curriculum in public schools, has a lot in common with the challenges we face in enacting rational gun control laws or sensible policies that ensure access to necessary health care for all our citizens. Of course, better communication, whether on the theory of evolution or the costs of gun-related crimes and accidents or the benefits of a healthy populace, is an important part of solving these problems. But it is not the entire solution, maybe not even most of it.

So, by all means, let's redouble our efforts to improve science communications. But it is important to keep in mind that the struggle here is primarily political and that it has more to do with values beliefs and less to do with knowledge and understanding.

Killer Arguments versus the Scientific Consensus

As Director of the Atlanta Science Tavern and a full-time science advocate of sorts, I frequently find myself wrestling with the question of how to communicate what is meant by the scientific consensus and why it should be trusted, especially in regard to the formulation of public policy.

State of Fear book cover

Often the issue comes up in a discussion in which one of he participants appeals to a single book or a limited set of studies as the definitive position to take on a complex and controversial science-related topic. The arguments appear compelling, and the supporting research seems well documented. Doesn't this place the burden on opponents, even if they subscribe to a view consistent with accepted scientific opinion, to read and critique these "killer" arguments?

This situation presented itself again recently as a result of a comment thread having to do with global warming on a Facebook group called "Rationals". One participant, who strongly doubted the reality of climate change, cited Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear as the basis for her thinking. She also offered some intuitive, commonsense arguments against the claims made by climate scientists.

What follows, with some minor edits, is my response to her.

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IPCC Fourth Assessment Report

If any document should be required reading for this discussion, I would suggest "Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007" (link). You may prefer the single chapter called "Summary for Policymakers".

Why do I suggest it instead of, say, Michael Crichton's State of Fear? It's not because I have read Crichton's book - I haven't - or because I dispute his sources - I don't. It's because I could spend my life reading the variety of positions that various individuals and organizations hold concerning climate change. Even though I am relatively scientifically astute, I just don't have the expertise or the time to navigate all the competing claims.

The demand that one must read Crichton's book to engage in this debate "scientifically" is easily countered: require that anyone holding an a view opposing your own read all your authors of choice. If this isn't a recipe for deadlock, I don't know what is.

So the question for me isn't whether Crichton is right or wrong. It is how does a discerning and intelligent lay person go about adopting a position on a controversial scientific topic, like climate change and its causes, which have significant public policy implications.

This is not an unfamiliar challenge. A public controversy swirls around the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines, and there are endless papers by "anti-vaccers" such Andrew Wakefield and his supporters that are pointed to as required reading. Likewise with the teaching of the theory of evolution by natural selection in public schools. Here the "must read" opposing point of view includes all the Intelligent Design tracts issued by the creationist-leaning Discovery Institute.

(I would note that these debates are rife with their own intuitive justifications, not unlike the one leveled at climate change scientists having to do with our "obvious" incapacity to model climate patterns over a period of decades. For anti-vaccination, the intuition is that vaccines containing mercury are "obviously" toxic. For the Intelligent Design community, commonsense supposedly tells us that certain biological processes are "obviously" too complex to have originated through natural processes.)

The answer to the question, from both a practical and an intellectual perspective, is that with such scientific controversies we seek to determine, to the best of our ability, whether there is a consensus in the scientific community.

For climate change and its causes the existence of such a consensus is indisputable. The vast majority of the thousands of researchers engaged in climate research agree with the findings of the IPCC. The same kind of consensus holds among experts in vaccine safety and evolutionary biology relative to challenges made by anti-vaccers and Intelligent Design proponents, respectively.

Does this mean that the scientific consensus about climate change is necessarily correct? No, it doesn't. Since all scientific claims are provisional, the ones made about climate change are subject to revision. But the fact of the matter is that policy making can't wait for "final" answers in urgent circumstances. We have to respond to threats, and we have to go with our best understanding of the situation, which, to a large extent, is another name for the scientific consensus.

Does this mean that contrarians and outliers are all kooks and nuts? Not at all. There is a small but concerted scientific opposition to climate change, but it appears as though that their ranks are dwindling. (See this recent New York Times op-ed for an example). It does mean that the burden of proof has shifted dramatically to the opponents of accepted climate change science.

Finally, the question of the trustworthiness of the climate research community in general and the IPCC in particular has to be addressed. The thousands of scientists engaged in these studies represent dozens of countries and hundreds of research institutions. It's not clear what their objective would be in deliberately distorting the evidence and analysis underlying conclusions relative to anthropogenic climate change, but it would require a conspiracy of gargantuan proportions.

Having been a scientist at one time myself, I find the suggestion that these dedicated men and women are engaging in "group think" hardly convincing. Scientists revel in proving one another wrong. Although I do admit the gatekeepers of peer-reviewed journals might reflexively look askance at an outlying submission these days, I do believe that well-founded opposing points of view have seen the publication light of day. Scientists as a whole are a smart, honest and self-reflective lot when it comes to their work.

Of course the process of developing this climate change consensus has seen its own share of errors and even acts of malfeasance. What human endeavor on this scale hasn't? The good news is that the scientific process is self-correcting. This is why rational people find the process so trustworthy. It is skeptical of its own conclusions and committed - come hell or high water - to finding the best available explanations consistent with the evidence at hand.


Killer Arguments versus the Scientific Consensus by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://thoughtsarise.blogspot.com/2012/11/killer-arguments-versus-scientific.html.

One-Way Mission to Mars - Kumbaya Fail

In this fourth part of my critique of a recently proposed one-way mission to Mars I address whether a kick-start colonization of Mars can be justified on political grounds. My third post disputes whether such a colony is either a safe or a cost-effective way to pursue important scientific goals. You can find the introduction to the series here.

In their November 2010 paper in the Journal of Cosmology, along with other reasons for pursuing an expedited one-way mission to Mars, Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies assert that

establishing a permanent multicultural and multinational human presence on another world would have a major beneficial political and social implications for Earth, and serve as a strong unifying and uplifting theme for all humanity.

It is hard to see how they derive confidence in such a claim.

Independence Day
movie poster

Space and space missions are a standard of science fiction when it comes to creating story lines that unite humanity in spite of centuries-old divisions. This unification is often accomplished most efficiently when planet Earth is in imminent danger of being destroyed by an asteroid impact or being conquered by an alien armada.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than at the climax of the 1996 movie Independence Day, where the American president, played by Bill Pullman, delivers a speech that rallies his troops for a last-ditch airborne counterattack on an invading force, with identical calls to arms being enacted simultaneously around the globe by people of all races and all creeds and all colors, apparently.

Earthrise, December 1968

I came of age during the the Apollo program and, as a 14-year old, watched enraptured as Neil Armstrong placed his booted foot on lunar soil. Old enough to appreciate what this meant as a national achievement and as an engineering tour de force, I was also old enough to be aware of the promise that it offered to be a unifying force for "all mankind", one beautifully anticipated in the earthrise Christmas Eve image taken by the astronauts of Apollo 8 less than a year before.

Although that day in July 1969 was celebrated the world over, the moon landings themselves failed to have any long-term impact as far as bringing people closer together. The Cold War and its proxy conflicts raged on, indifferent to these wondrous technological achievements.

International Space Station from
the Space Shuttle Atlantis

Another example of an unmet promise of political uplift offered by a costly space mission, this one closer to home, is that embodied by the International Space Station (ISS). Touted as a permanent multicultural and multinational human presence in low-earth orbit, it, too, was to provide Earth-bound humans with a transcendent unifying theme.

Yet, resplendent, orbiting above the planet at an altitude of 350 km (220 miles), it goes largely unnoticed by the world below. This is not to say that the Space Station has not called into being a remarkable intergovernmental collaboration on an unprecedented scale, but to note that, although an engineering triumph, it has resulted in few if any discernible "major beneficial political and social implications" of the type advertised by the one-way Mars mission proposal. If the tepid public reaction to the ISS is any indication, then it's not clear that such expectations should weigh in favorably in our evaluation of Schulze-Makuch and Davies's scheme to establish a human settlement on Mars post haste.

As with other motivations for the proposed expedited colonization of Mars - that it serve as a science outpost and as a lifeboat for humanity - rational analysis demands that we consider how alternative approaches compare as far as promoting a more positive political and social climate here on Earth. In other words, given that a one-way mission would cost hundreds of billions of dollars or more, how might similar - or even significantly smaller sums - be spent to foster feelings of union and brotherhood.

Jimmy Carter tries to comfort a 6-year-old
at Savelugu (Ghana) Hospital as a
Carter Center technical assistant dresses
her painful Guinea worm wound.

Although little can be done directly to bridge the divides of malignant ideologies, religious fanaticism and misguided nationalism that separate us, it has been long understood the alleviation of much of human suffering is within our grasp and that the result of doing so would yield unquestionable major political and social benefits. An example of an immediately attainable objective would be the eradication of endemic diseases such as guinea worm. A more ambitious challenge would be to commit to insure that every person on the planet is provided with adequate daily nutrition as well as access to a reliable source of drinking water.

U.S. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
with a $110 million per unit cost

Without a doubt, goals such as these are politically daunting, but they are technically and economically feasible, particularly if countries like the United States expand their vision of international security - and with it the application of their annual one trillion dollars of "defense" spending - to encompass important non-military threats to world order and human well-being. Indeed, mobilizing the nations of the planet to mitigate the damage anticipated as a result of disruptive climate change this century, provides a ready-made unifying goal for humanity, one which we are morally obligated to address and, to the extent that we prevail in our efforts, one which could both unite and ennoble us.

Suffice it to say, we don't need to go shopping around for extraterrestrial projects, such as an ill-considered one-way mission to Mars, in order to concoct challenges to inspire and unify us, when working in broad international coalitions against terrestrial scourges, such as disease, hunger, global warming, not only would generate a much greater sense of unity and common purpose, but also would offer desperately needed material advances to billions of people here on Earth.

Part 5: One-Way Mission to Mars - Ethics Fail

One-Way Mission to Mars - Kumbaya Fail by Marc Merlin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at thoughtsarise.blogspot.com.