Link of the Day: Science Illiteracy
This Salon article tackles the reasons for our collective science illiteracy in America. It’s not only our education system that’s to blame, or the false dichotomy of science vs. religion, the article argues, but also pop culture, mass media and the gullibility of public figures.
Money quote:
Polling data from the Pew organization reveals something fairly stunning about global warming and public opinion: If you’re a Republican, you are vastly less likely than a Democrat to accept the scientific consensus that global warming is brought about by human activities. You probably have a bias in favor of business and industry and don’t believe factory or automotive emissions exacerbate global warming. But that’s not all. The higher your level of education, the more skeptical you probably are that humans are to blame. Why? One possible reason is that more education makes you better at finding information and arguments that are supportive of what you already wanted to believe — as Crichton clearly did.
But the same thing can also be true of Democrats and liberals. Consider vaccination. An army of aggrieved parents nationwide, likely spurred in part by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., swears today that vaccines are the reason their children developed autism, and they seem virtually impossible to convince otherwise. Scientific research has soundly refuted this contention, but every time a new study on the subject comes out, the parents and their supporters have a “scientific” answer that allows them to retain their beliefs. They get their information from the Internet, from other parents of like mind, from a few non-mainstream researchers and doctors who continue to challenge the scientific consensus, and perhaps most of all — as was much the case with Crichton and global warming — from a group of celebrities, most prominently Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, who have made a cause of championing such misinformation and almost assuredly deeply believe in it.
Tags: Angels and Demons, Autism, Education, Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, Michael Crichton, RFK, Science
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15 July 2009 at 1:44 pm
Science is largely a method: careful, meticulous observation, slow, modest inferences constrained by data. Of course, this is an anathema to the rapid pace of pop culture, and the rumor, gossip and broad generalizations that live there.
As the Salon piece points out, real science is, well, boring, and doesn’t make a good movie. Science isn’t there to tell a story, and often the narratives that people find attractive don’t conform to scientific discovery.
Minus the (boring) method at the heart of science, science is represented in popular culture as a body of beliefs, i.e. scientists say this or that. Stripped of the justification for those beliefs, though, pop culture reduces them to biases- science has its opinion, but i have mine, and they’re all equally valid, or at least there’s no reason for me to change mine.
Leaving out how science acquires its beliefs, then, makes it seem that any given person can leave out how they got their beliefs, which results in pseudo-justifications such as ‘it’s just what i believe’, as if that was immune to argument. Pop culture, in this way, diminishes the authority science should have by dint of its superior methods of discovery. From here, lacking any epistemological authority, it is easy to paint the power of science as an evil force, out there to undermine our beliefs.
Good science education, then, involves teaching respect for method- for how we acquire our beliefs, not just what science believes.