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In 2007, two Hollywood screenwriters launched a grassroots, nonpartisan
initiative called ScienceDebate2008 to encourage America's presidential candidates
to publicly debate science policy. Scientists thought this was a "great idea", Unscientific America explains, "because they
assumed that the rational airing of policies and differences should lead to
better decision making".
But politicians, including the nominees of both major
political parties, "viewed it as a lose-lose proposition". In the words of
ScienceDebate2008's CEO, Shawn Otto, a televised science debate "would require
lots of prep time and huge political exposure in order to move a relatively
niche audience".
Editor's Note: This is the third part in a four-part book
review. Click
here if you missed the introduction. Click here for the previous entry in this series.
Science Escape 2008
Ultimately, ScienceDebate2008 secured written answers to 14
questions from the presidential nominees of both major parties. Yet "it was
two screenwriters – mass communicators – and not scientists themselves," Shawn
Otto adds, who secured this limited achievement.
So why didn't America's
citizen-scientists drive the debate from the start? "Effective communication
isn't rocket science," Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum explain, but "most
scientists are source-oriented communicators" who would rather speak to their
peers in "scientist-speak" than address politicians, the public, and television
reporters.
Mooney and Kirshenbaum use the history of ScienceDebate 2008
to encourage American scientists to embrace a style of "receiver-oriented communication"
that considers the needs of a larger, national audience. In dealing with
politicians, scientists "should establish long-term relationships that are multi-directional
in nature" rather than limiting their outreach to requests for research
funding. In dealing with the media, scientists must also adjust their approach.
Specifically, scientists "will have to accept that their advice is being judged
not on its substantive content – at least not at first – but explicitly on the
utility of its packaging."
The Crisis in Science
Communication
But can scientists rely upon the media to get a science
story straight, if it's even covered at all? In Unscientific America, Mooney and Kirshenbaum also claim that
"there's a crisis today in the realm of science communication," a crisis that
will only deepen "as market forces continue to dismantle
public-interest-oriented, informative journalism of all types and supplant it
with entertainment, blogging, or nothing at all." In the newspaper industry,
declining profits have led to sharp cuts in science coverage. On the Internet,
"the typical blog mode is to find an individual piece of science reporting with
some particular failing and blast it." On cable TV, "fragmentation" and the
rise of "partisan media" prevail.
Science and Stereotypes
Science and scientists don't fare much better in Hollywood, Unscientific America continues. Part of
the problem is "a sense that science is inimical to storytelling" because "it
quashes creativity, which be allowed to breathe". Scientists are creative, of
course, but "the scientific method, as a process" is a lengthy one that doesn't
lend itself to an hour-long film or television program. Then there's the matter
of how TV shows and movies depict scientists themselves. As James Cameron, the
director of films such as Aliens and
The Terminator, has observed, these
forms of entertainment generally "show scientists as idiosyncratic nerds or actively
the villains".
"We don't see many films about evil literary critics,"
Mooney and Kirshenbaum note, so "it's safe to infer there's something about
scientists that triggers a particular type of stereotyping." The origins of
this bias run deeper than an American "disdain of intellect," a phenomenon that
the historian Richard Hofstadter described in his 1962 classic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
According to the authors of Unscientific
America, the public's attitude towards scientists reflects "our society's
uneasiness with the power they can sometimes wield." Unfortunately, some members
of the profession respond in kind with unfair depictions of real or imagined
adversaries.
The Great Desecration
Paul Zachary Myers, a University of Minnesota
biology professor, provides a case in point. In 2008, "PZ" Myers asked readers
of his popular Pharyngula blog to "score me some consecrated communion wafers"
from a Catholic Church so that he could desecrate the Eucharist and post
pictures of this "profound disrespect". Myers' example is an extreme one, but the authors of Unscientific
America cite "a large number of 'New Atheist' voices" who contribute to this
renewed tension between science and religion in America. Still, some of the most prominent
names that the authors cite (e.g., Christopher Hitchens) are not those of
scientists at all, but of journalists and other academics who write about
science-related subjects.
Unscientific America's analysis
may be overly broad here, but its conclusions are bold. "The American
scientific community gains nothing from the condescending rhetoric of the New
Atheists", Mooney and Kirshenbaum claim. "America is a very religious
nation", they add, "and if forced to chose between faith and science, vast
numbers of Americans will choose the former".
Author's Note: Click here for the fourth and final part of this series.
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