{"id":1066,"date":"2015-03-23T21:53:10","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T21:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jo-online.vsb.bc.ca\/blogs\/jo\/spence\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2015-03-23T21:53:10","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T21:53:10","slug":"what-is-science-do-you-believe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.vsb.bc.ca\/jspence\/2015\/03\/23\/what-is-science-do-you-believe\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Science? Do you BELIEVE?"},"content":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/ngm.nationalgeographic.com\/2015\/03\/science-doubters\/achenbach-text<\/a><\/p>\n

Full Text below in case the link is dead for you<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a scene in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove<\/i> in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who\u2019s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview\u2014and the explanation for why he drinks \u201conly distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol\u201d\u2014to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force.<\/p>\n

Ripper:<\/b> Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?<\/p>\n

Mandrake:<\/b> Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.<\/p>\n

Ripper:<\/b> Well, do you know what it is?<\/p>\n

Mandrake:<\/b> No. No, I don\u2019t know what it is. No.<\/p>\n

Ripper:<\/b> Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?<\/p>\n

The movie came out<\/b> in 1964, by which time the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established, and antifluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy. So you might be surprised to learn that, half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013 citizens in Portland, Oregon, one of only a few major American cities that don\u2019t fluoridate their water, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn\u2019t like the idea of the government adding \u201cchemicals\u201d to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.<\/p>\n

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay\u2014a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brusher or not. That\u2019s the scientific and medical consensus.<\/p>\n

To which some people in Portland, echoing antifluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don\u2019t believe you.<\/p>\n

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge\u2014from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change\u2014faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you\u2019d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative. And there\u2019s so much talk about the trend these days\u2014in books, articles, and academic conferences\u2014that science doubt itself has become a pop-culture meme. In the recent movieInterstellar,<\/i> set in a futuristic, downtrodden America where NASA has been forced into hiding, school textbooks say the Apollo moon landings were faked.<\/p>\n

In a sense all this is not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards\u2014but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can\u2019t easily analyze.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re asked to accept, for example, that it\u2019s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there\u2019s no evidence that it isn\u2019t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok\u2014and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein,<\/i> they talk about Frankenfood.<\/p>\n

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn\u2019t easy. Should we be afraid that the Ebola virus, which is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids, will mutate into an airborne superplague? The scientific consensus says that\u2019s extremely unlikely: No virus has ever been observed to completely change its mode of transmission in humans, and there\u2019s zero evidence that the latest strain of Ebola is any different. But type \u201cairborne Ebola\u201d into an Internet search engine, and you\u2019ll enter a dystopia where this virus has almost supernatural powers, including the power to kill us all.<\/p>\n

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that\u2019s what science is for. \u201cScience is not a body of facts,\u201d says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science,<\/i> the prestigious journal. \u201cScience is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.\u201d But that method doesn\u2019t come naturally to most of us. And so we run into trouble, again and again.<\/p>\n

\"PictureLIBRARY OF CONGRESS, GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION<\/p>\n
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SQUARE INTUITIONS DIE HARD
\nThat the Earth is round has been known since antiquity\u2014Columbus knew he wouldn\u2019t sail off the edge of the world\u2014but alternative geographies persisted even after circumnavigations had become common. This 1893 map by Orlando Ferguson, a South Dakota businessman, is a loopy variation on 19th-century flat-Earth beliefs. Flat-Earthers held that the planet was centered on the North Pole and bounded by a wall of ice, with the sun, moon, and planets a few hundred miles above the surface. Science often demands that we discount our direct sensory experiences\u2014such as seeing the sun cross the sky as if circling the Earth\u2014in favor of theories that challenge our beliefs about our place in the universe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The trouble goes way back,<\/b> of course. The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow. In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn\u2019t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense\u2014because it sure looks like the sun\u2019s going around the Earth, and you can\u2019t feel the Earth spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth\u2019s climate.<\/p>\n

Even when we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions\u2014what researchers call our naive beliefs. A recent study by Andrew Shtulman of Occidental College showed that even students with an advanced science education had a hitch in their mental gait when asked to affirm or deny that humans are descended from sea animals or that Earth goes around the sun. Both truths are counterintuitive. The students, even those who correctly marked \u201ctrue,\u201d were slower to answer those questions than questions about whether humans are descended from tree-dwelling creatures (also true but easier to grasp) or whether the moon goes around the Earth (also true but intuitive). Shtulman\u2019s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.<\/p>\n

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics. We might get a prostate-specific antigen test, even though it\u2019s no longer generally recommended, because it caught a close friend\u2019s cancer\u2014and we pay less attention to statistical evidence, painstakingly compiled through multiple studies, showing that the test rarely saves lives but triggers many unnecessary surgeries. Or we hear about a cluster of cancer cases in a town with a hazardous waste dump, and we assume pollution caused the cancers. Yet just because two things happened together doesn\u2019t mean one caused the other, and just because events are clustered doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re not still random.<\/p>\n

We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning. Science warns us, however, that we can deceive ourselves. To be confident there\u2019s a causal connection between the dump and the cancers, you need statistical analysis showing that there are many more cancers than would be expected randomly, evidence that the victims were exposed to chemicals from the dump, and evidence that the chemicals really can cause cancer.<\/p>\n

\"PicturePHOTO: BETTMAN\/CORBIS<\/p>\n
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EVOLUTION ON TRIAL
\nIn 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, where John Scopes was standing trial for teaching evolution in high school, a creationist bookseller hawked his wares. Modern biology makes no sense without the concept of evolution, but religious activists in the United States continue to demand that creationism be taught as an alternative in biology class. When science conflicts with a person\u2019s core beliefs, it usually loses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they\u2019re vulnerable to what they call confirmation bias\u2014the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them. Once their results are published, if they\u2019re important enough, other scientists will try to reproduce them\u2014and, being congenitally skeptical and competitive, will be very happy to announce that they don\u2019t hold up. Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.<\/p>\n

Sometimes scientists fall short of the ideals of the scientific method. Especially in biomedical research, there\u2019s a disturbing trend toward results that can\u2019t be reproduced outside the lab that found them, a trend that has prompted a push for greater transparency about how experiments are conducted. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, worries about the \u201csecret sauce\u201d\u2014specialized procedures, customized software, quirky ingredients\u2014that researchers don\u2019t share with their colleagues. But he still has faith in the larger enterprise.<\/p>\n

\u201cScience will find the truth,\u201d Collins says. \u201cIt may get it wrong the first time and maybe the second time, but ultimately it will find the truth.\u201d That provisional quality of science is another thing a lot of people have trouble with. To some climate change skeptics, for example, the fact that a few scientists in the 1970s were worried (quite reasonably, it seemed at the time) about the possibility of a coming ice age is enough to discredit the concern about global warming now.<\/p>\n

Last fall<\/b> the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which consists of hundreds of scientists operating under the auspices of the United Nations, released its fifth report in the past 25 years. This one repeated louder and clearer than ever the consensus of the world\u2019s scientists: The planet\u2019s surface temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 130 years, and human actions, including the burning of fossil fuels, are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the warming since the mid-20th century. Many people in the United States\u2014a far greater percentage than in other countries\u2014retain doubts about that consensus or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the most powerful Republican voices on environmental matters, has long declared global warming a hoax.<\/p>\n

The idea that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is laughable\u2014scientists love to debunk one another. It\u2019s very clear, however, that organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public\u2019s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.<\/p>\n

The news media give abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists, and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses. Not so. The (boring) truth is that it usually advances incrementally, through the steady accretion of data and insights gathered by many people over many years. So it has been with the consensus on climate change. That\u2019s not about to go poof with the next thermometer reading.<\/p>\n

But industry PR, however misleading, isn\u2019t enough to explain why only 40 percent of Americans, according to the most recent poll from the Pew Research Center, accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming.<\/p>\n

The \u201cscience communication problem,\u201d as it\u2019s blandly called by the scientists who study it, has yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe\u2014and why they so often don\u2019t accept the scientific consensus. It\u2019s not that they can\u2019t grasp it, according to Dan Kahan of Yale University. In one study he asked 1,540 Americans, a representative sample, to rate the threat of climate change on a scale of zero to ten. Then he correlated that with the subjects\u2019 science literacy. He found that higher literacy was associated with stronger views\u2014at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that\u2019s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.<\/p>\n

Americans fall into two basic camps, Kahan says. Those with a more \u201cegalitarian\u201d and \u201ccommunitarian\u201d mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it\u2019s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they\u2019re likely to see the risks of climate change. In contrast, people with a \u201chierarchical\u201d and \u201cindividualistic\u201d mind-set respect leaders of industry and don\u2019t like government interfering in their affairs; they\u2019re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to\u2014some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.<\/p>\n

In the U.S., climate change somehow has become a litmus test that identifies you as belonging to one or the other of these two antagonistic tribes. When we argue about it, Kahan says, we\u2019re actually arguing about who we are, what our crowd is. We\u2019re thinking, People like us believe this. People like that do not believe this. For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it\u2019s not irrational to reject established climate science: Accepting it wouldn\u2019t change the world, but it might get him thrown out of his tribe.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake a barber in a rural town in South Carolina,\u201d Kahan has written. \u201cIs it a good idea for him to implore his customers to sign a petition urging Congress to take action on climate change? No. If he does, he will find himself out of a job, just as his former congressman, Bob Inglis, did when he himself proposed such action.\u201d<\/p>\n

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. \u201cWe\u2019re all in high school. We\u2019ve never left high school,\u201d says Marcia McNutt. \u201cPeople still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the Internet makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to find their own information and experts. Gone are the days when a small number of powerful institutions\u2014elite universities, encyclopedias, major news organizations, even National Geographic<\/i>\u2014served as gatekeepers of scientific information. The Internet has democratized information, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, it has made it possible to live in a \u201cfilter bubble\u201d that lets in only the information with which you already agree.<\/p>\n

How to penetrate the bubble? How to convert climate skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn\u2019t help. Liz Neeley, who helps train scientists to be better communicators at an organization called Compass, says that people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values. She has personal experience with this. Her father is a climate change skeptic and gets most of his information on the issue from conservative media. In exasperation she finally confronted him: \u201cDo you believe them or me?\u201d She told him she believes the scientists who research climate change and knows many of them personally. \u201cIf you think I\u2019m wrong,\u201d she said, \u201cthen you\u2019re telling me that you don\u2019t trust me.\u201d Her father\u2019s stance on the issue softened. But it wasn\u2019t the facts that did it.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a rationalist,<\/b> there\u2019s something a little dispiriting about all this. In Kahan\u2019s descriptions of how we decide what to believe, what we decide sometimes sounds almost incidental. Those of us in the science-communication business are as tribal as anyone else, he told me. We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community. When I mentioned to Kahan that I fully accept evolution, he said, \u201cBelieving in evolution is just a description about you. It\u2019s not an account of how you reason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe\u2014except that evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren\u2019t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter\u2014and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.<\/p>\n

Doubting science also has consequences. The people who believe vaccines cause autism\u2014often well educated and affluent, by the way\u2014are undermining \u201cherd immunity\u201d to such diseases as whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong since the prestigious British medical journal theLancet<\/i> published a study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously said on the Oprah Winfrey Show,<\/i> \u201cThe University of Google is where I got my degree from.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming. They haven\u2019t had to win the debate on the merits; they\u2019ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.<\/p>\n

Some environmental activists want scientists to emerge from their ivory towers and get more involved in the policy battles. Any scientist going that route needs to do so carefully, says Liz Neeley. \u201cThat line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,\u201d she says. In the debate over climate change the central allegation of the skeptics is that the science saying it\u2019s real and a serious threat is politically tinged, driven by environmental activism and not hard data. That\u2019s not true, and it slanders honest scientists. But it becomes more likely to be seen as plausible if scientists go beyond their professional expertise and begin advocating specific policies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It\u2019s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we\u2019d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else\u2014but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it\u2019s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.<\/p>\n

Scientific thinking has to be taught, and sometimes it\u2019s not taught well, McNutt says. Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method. Shtulman\u2019s research has shown that even many college students don\u2019t really understand what evidence is. The scientific method doesn\u2019t come naturally\u2014but if you think about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did.<\/p>\n

Now we have incredibly rapid change, and it\u2019s scary sometimes. It\u2019s not all progress. Our science has made us the dominant organisms, with all due respect to ants and blue-green algae, and we\u2019re changing the whole planet. Of course we\u2019re right to ask questions about some of the things science and technology allow us to do. \u201cEverybody should be questioning,\u201d says McNutt. \u201cThat\u2019s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.\u201d We need to get a lot better at finding answers, because it\u2019s certain the questions won\u2019t be getting any simpler.<\/p>\n

Washington Post<\/i> science writer Joel Achenbach has contributed to National Geographic<\/i>since 1998. Photographer Richard Barnes\u2019s last feature was the September 2014 cover story on Nero.<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/ngm.nationalgeographic.com\/2015\/03\/science-doubters\/achenbach-text Full Text below in case the link is dead for you   There\u2019s a scene in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s comic masterpiece Dr. Strangelove in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who\u2019s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on…<\/p>\n

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