Why Scientists are NOT AS GOOD as Creationists …
Published by Greg February 23rd, 2007 in Framing Science, Creationism, Commentary, Science Education… at a certain limited number of things.
The usual argument is as follows: Scientists are not good at communicating with the general public; they can’t simplify the complexities of what they study; they can’t make themselves clear. On top of that, they don’t get credit in academia for engaging the public. For these reasons, creationism manages to keep a hold on the public and science just can’t seem to shake it.
Well, that second bit, I agree with. We don’t get academic credit for engaging the public, and we get in many contexts only a tiny bit of credit for good teaching. But I’m not going to address these problems at this time.
I don’t accept that scientists are no good at communicating with the public or at simplifying complexities. Let’s take this second one first: How can we not be good at simplifying complex things? This is what we do! Scientific investigation demands the ability to deal with complexities, and often to abstract complexities and work them into generalities or principles that are always simpler than the natural state. This is as much a part of the scientific method as data collection and hypothesis testing. Simplification is our middle name.
So this leaves being able to explain things to the general public.
Actually, we’re pretty good at this too. I assert that many (not all) scientists are pretty darn good at explaining things when we have to. Many, many of our grant proposals have to be written to be “understood by an informed but nonspecialist audience.” We often have to communicate across subfields in order to get collaborative work done. And, many of us pay a lot of attention to our teaching, and are pretty freekin’ good at it.
Yes, we can explain things.
Then what’s the problem?
The problem, in my view, is that engaging the public has for a long time been considered a disdainful activity among academics. This is not a small issue. All popularizers are disdained by their colleagues. I can recall dozens of conversations with colleagues of … I shall not name them but you can guess who they may be … various popularizers in Evolutionary Biology and related fields, clearly indicating that these individuals were not respected, and were often simply disliked, for their activities.
There is a culture within academia in general, and this includes the sciences, that gives the anti-evolutionists (creationists) a wide open hole through which they can drive a zeppelin.
And now, you’all Disdainers of Walking Among the UnWashed, you are paying for this culture of Ivory Tower Introversion. As is pointed out in the Flock of Dodos movie, and this is very true, it is NOT OK to use the word “Evolution” in a National Science Foundation grant proposal. How did that get to be? How often have scientists (for all the trouble and expense they cause) pulled our national nuts out of one fire or another? And now, the word “Evolution” in a grant proposal will get that proposal dragged out, in a neo-Proxmire-esque fashion, onto the floors of Congress for ridicule. Whenever a big evolution project goes forward, there is pressure for funding Decoupage the Ten Commandments Class in Home Economics programs from Hoboken to Venice Beach.
Fellow scientists, get with the program. You are, it turns out, part of the problem. Please start being part of the solution.
OH, and that’s chestnuts. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. It’s easy to put the nuts on the fire, but not so easy to pull them out.
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Related Posts:
- Why scientists are not as good as creationists …
- Framing Science “Paper Is Deeply Flawed
- Framing Frames in the Service of Science
- Framing Nesbit: Is He Offering Us McScience?
- Can we frame something and see how it goes?
- Science is the BEST!!!
- Why we foam at the mouth
- Atheism is not the problem
- Instead of framing, let’s go camping!
17 Responses to “Why Scientists are NOT AS GOOD as Creationists …”
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I would be careful to jump on the bandwagon of “boring scientists” which is not only counter intuitive( science is cool!)but also, it is counter evo propaganda that is played upon by that strain of religiously fervent Evango-sloths and clockstoppers that depend upon lazy intellect for their sustenance, and donations at the altar. Imagine if you will a scene where, instead of a biblical hero burning a goat before the altr, he was dissecting it instead, and hypothesizing that the collection plate was really a scam, and realizing that even the priests are eating the fatted calf, not G-d? Then who would do the hard work of cleaning the temple troves?
I’ll try to do the best I can. Just started up my own blog, and since I want to complain about the more advanced part of my science, I have to explain some of the basics.
Speaking of framing: we have heard for the last several decades that men are perverts, etc( pick your favorite anti-male cliche’) and that we are only interested in ‘body parts’ of women ( pick your favorite stereotype of men talking to breasts) But here, on the right of Gregs blog is a study that found:
” that men are more likely than women to first look at faces rather than other parts of a nude body.
Also, the women in the study spent more time than the men looking at images of couples having sex.
“Men looked at the female face much more than women, and both looked at the genitals comparably,” .
It is interesting to see this kind of feminist created stereotype defying science getting more press. I would also suggest there is a link between this kind of male framing and the ‘white male scientist’ -vs- Creationist ID framing as well.
Fisrt, scientists and creationsists are like comparing apples and pears. Similar but different.
But, I absoutly agree with you in that we (scientists) can explain our points. I have always belived that, simplifying a process or descriptions or whatever was my best natural ability as a geologist…that and i can pick up spatial patterns like motha-effah, but i digress.
if thats all true or not, one would have to ask my audience.
I think that you make your material very readable and understandable, and thats is what simplifying is about.
The claim that scientists do not know how to communicate (”they make the wrong assumptions” is how N & M put it) is what bugged me more than anything else about their piece in Science.
They presented no data to back up they got their assumption and if their basic assumption is wrong, that makes one wonder what else they got wrong.
I will take seriously the suggestions of people who have actually studied the issue of science communication, but N & M have not convinced me that they fall in that category. In fact, they have convinced me of the opposite.
I think Mooney and Nisbet need to take some science AND some education classes to learn what people actually have discovered about communicating science over the years.
One of the other problems is that religious evangelicals proactively stake out the rhetorical moral high ground, and the very act of engaging them or their arguments at all puts science on the defensive. They make the proposition that there can be no such thing as a moral foundation that is not based in God, and right then and there they have the hearts and minds of the faithful by the balls, to mix metaphors. People feel religious, and they feel moral, both of which feel like good things; and to give ground on either of those scores becomes a threat to their self-image. Science is in the position of attempting to disprove the goodness of the very people whose opinions are to be influenced; a perfect recipe for alienating the target audience.
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