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Massimo Pigliucci Keynote Address Nonsense on Stilts about Science: Field Adventures of a Scientist- Philosopher MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI Philosophy Program, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10036 USA [email protected] ABSTRACT: Public discussions of science are often marred by two pernicious phenomena: a widespread rejection of scientific findings (e.g., the reality of anthropogenic climate change, the conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism, or the validity of evolutionary theory), coupled with an equally common acceptance of pseudoscientific notions (e.g., homeopathy, psychic readings, telepathy, tall tales about alien abductions, and so forth). The typical reaction by scientists and science educators is to decry the sorry state of science literacy among the general public, and to call for more science education as the answer to both problems. But the empirical evidence concerning the relationship between science literacy, rejection of science and acceptance of pseudoscience is mixed at best. In this chapter I argue that—while certainly important—efforts at increasing public knowledge of science (science education) need to be complemented by attention to common logical fallacies (philosophy), cognitive biases and dissonance (psychology), and the role of ideological commitments (sociology). Even this complex, multi-disciplinary approach to science education will likely only yield measurable results in the very long term. Meanwhile science remains, as Carl Sagan famously put it, a candle in the dark, delicate and in need of much nurturing. KEYWORDS: science literacy, science education, philosophy, psychology, sociology, pseudoscience. 1. INTRODUCTION: THE ACCIDENTAL PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL Most academics do not engage in public outreach, for a variety of reasons. First off, it is at least implicitly discouraged by the very structure of the academy, where one’s career is advanced (in decreasing order of importance, regardless of what anyone would tell you) by one’s success in research or scholarship (measured by peer-reviewed publications and grants), one’s teaching, and finally one’s service. It would be nice if at least the somewhat vague category of “service” included outreach lecturing and writing, but it is in fact pretty much confined to internal (and not really very useful) service, such as on departmental or college committees. Second, many of us are simply never trained for public outreach (or teaching, for that matter), and do not know how to relate in an understandable and engaging way to laypeople. Contra a popular academic myth, there is no particular reason for there to be a strong correlation between one’s scholarly excellence in a highly technical field of expertise and one’s ability to communicate in a non-technical matter about the broader context in which that scholarly work flourishes or makes sense (Sperber, 2001). Consequently, until 1997 I was yet another example of a non-engaged academic, pursuing my first tenure track job at the University of Tennessee, within the specialty field of Pigliucci, M. (2012). Nonsense on stilts about science: Field adventures of a scientist-philosopher. In J. Goodwin (Ed.), Between scientists & citizens: Proceedings of a conference at Iowa State University, June 1-2, 2012 (pp. 19-28). Ames, IA: Great Plains Society for the Study of Argumentation. Copyright © 2012 the author(s). MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI evolutionary biology (and more specifically the study of gene-environment interactions in plant model systems). But then something happened that made me pay attention and turned me into the accidental public intellectual that I have become since. A few months earlier, in March 1996, the Tennessee state legislature had attempted to pass a bill that would have ensured equal time for creationism in science classes throughout that state’s public high schools. A New York Times article published at the time summarized the idea in this manner: “If evolution is true, then it has nothing to fear from some other theory being taught; the truth will prevail,” State Senator David Fowler, a Republican from Chattanooga, argued on the Tennessee Senate floor this week. “But if intelligent design is the truth, then God forbid we should not teach it to our children.” (Applebome, 1996) The bill actually died in committee (though, unfortunately, the TN legislators were at it again in 2012, this time successfully (Thompson, 2012)). But during those months I had awoken to a reality that perhaps should not have surprised me to begin with: I was now living (and operating professionally, as an evolutionary biologist!) in the middle of the Bible Belt, in a country characterized by one of the most religious-puritanical attitudes among modern advanced societies (Uhlmann Poehlmanb, Tannenbaumc, & Bargh, 2012). As a reaction, I started one of the very earliest “Darwin Day” events on campus, an outreach program aiming at explaining to the public the nature of science and at exploring the relationship between science and religion. It has since become a major international event, with hundreds of locations worldwide every year (darwinday.org). Once I got started, I realized that public outreach ought to be an important part of what academics should be doing, in part because they are among the best-positioned individuals in our society to function as public intellectuals, to aid the layperson—in the words of Noam Chomsky—in the pursuit of a course in “intellectual self-defense” (Baillargeon, 2008). This quickly led me to maintaining a blog devoted to science and philosophy for the public (rationallyspeaking.org), as well as to publish a number of advocacy books concerned with pseudoscience (Pigliucci, 2002, 2010). Most recently, and to my own amusement, my scholarship and outreach converged, with the co-editing of a new book on the philosophy, history, and sociology of the so-called demarcation problem (Popper, 1957), i.e. the conceptual divide between science and pseudoscience (Pigliucci & Boudry, 2013). What follows is a summary of the lessons I have learned while putting together the book and during the now more than fifteen years devoted to interacting with the public, initially as a scientist, and more recently as a philosopher. 2. NOT JUST SCIENCE EDUCATION It is common for scientists and science educators to bemoan the fact that the American public is not scientifically literate, a state of affairs that is often blamed for much misunderstanding of science and embracing of pseudoscience. Indeed, the American Association for the Advancement of Science thinks that science literacy is so crucial that they have launched an ambitious “2061” project to improve it substantially (www.project2061.org/publications/bsl). There are good reasons to think that scientific literacy matters (Hazen, 2002), including so that people can better appreciate the world around us and, most crucially, make intelligent decisions about their lives—including who they vote for when it comes to public issues informed by science. 20 NONSENSE ON STILTS ABOUT SCIENCE: FIELD ADVENTURES OF A SCIENTIST-PHILOSOPHER However, scientific literacy cannot be the whole story. A report by the National Science Foundation pointed out that both Americans and Europeans do not “have a firm grasp of basic scientific facts and concepts, nor do they have an understanding of the scientific process,” (2004, p. 7-15) which makes it puzzling why, for instance, denial of evolution is a popular stance in the US but not in Europe (Miller, Scott, & Okamoto, 2006). Indeed, a number of years ago one of my students and I carried out a preliminary study of the relationship between scientific literacy and belief in pseudoscience, and the results were not at all encouraging (Johnson & Pigliucci, 2004). For instance, while we found a (small, but statistically significant) effect of major (science vs. non-science) in the amount of factual knowledge of science that undergraduate students were able to master, we uncovered no significant differences between science and non-science majors in either conceptual understanding of science or belief in pseudoscience. (Interestingly, and contra popular lore, there was also no effect of gender on either science understanding or acceptance of pseudoscience.) A more recent and much larger survey confirmed our results (Impey, Buxner, Antonellis, Johnson, & King, 2011): 10,000 students taking astronomy classes as part of their general education requirements were tested, and it turned out that belief in pseudoscience was high in the sample, that students’ degree of science literacy was only marginally better than in the general population, and—most crucially—that there was no correlation between their science literacy and their acceptance of pseudoscience. The authors also found that over a period of two decades there was no measurable improvement in students’ science literacy. This is not exactly surprising to people who have spent years “in the field,” so to speak, actually talking to (and sometimes debating) proponents of pseudoscientific notions. Contrary to popular belief among academics (and scientists in particular) these people are both intelligent and knowledgeable about science. Take the issue of creationism, for instance. I have debated the likes of Duane Gish (Institute for Creation Science) and Michael Behe and William Dembski (both associated with the Discovery Institute), among others. Gish and Behe have a PhD in biochemistry, and Dembski has academic credentials in both mathematics and
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