Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Science Education

  • Appeal to Numbers and Supposed Authority

    When I was in the U. S. Air Force, I had to attend a human relations training program. The instructor was enlisted, but very proudly informed us of his two master’s level degrees. During the course of his presentation he brought up a particular bumper sticker, which happened to be one I had on my car. Of course my buddies made sure he knew I had one, and so he starts to make his point about how I should not have such a bumper sticker. When I disagreed, and pointed out that nobody was obliged to obey my bumper sticker, he became quite annoyed. During a break he came to me and said, “I have a master’s degree in management and one in human relations. Don’t you think I know what I’m talking about?” He had no way to know that I also had a graduate degree, though I possess only a meager one of the same, but he was very shocked when I said that I too had one of those pieces of paper and so was in a good position to know what it was worth.

    His was an argument from authority, and at least it came from an area in which he could claim some authority. He might even have had a point about my bumper sticker. 🙂 But today I’m interested in the argument from authority when one has no authority, and the argument from numbers when one is in the minority. Religious debates, and particularly creation-evolution debates, are often characterized by these types of claims.

    Recently in an online debate I observed someone arguing in favor of a young earth brought up a paper on ocean sediments and their evidence for the age of the earth. When another correspondent questioned the report, the first individual called him an undergraduate student critiquing a paper by a PhD in geology. We get various forms of the argument from authority and the argument from numbers in creation-evolution debates all the time and it’s really quite a humorous process. (You can find this discussion on The Religion Forum.

    Before I go into this just a little more, let me give you relevant links on this topic. The ocean sediment argument is one of those that is so simplistic and so bad that there really aren’t that many detailed refutations online, so let me give some links. First, the source article is ICR’s Impact #8, Evolution: The Oceans Say No!. Note that while the author’s credentials right now are listed as an MS degree, since this document was written, he has received a PhD. Now in case anyone is interested in the basic refutation to this, try the following article from the US Geological Survey: Developing the theory. It gives some of the basics and should lead you to some answers. In addition, Glenn R. Morton’s article Young Earth Arguments: A Second Look and the following article, The Age of the Earth from the Talk Origins Archive expands on material that may not be fully obvious from the more general article.

    Note that there are many people who are quite thoroughly qualified in the field who challenge the views of this “PhD in geology.” And this is the thing that got me thinking about this particular blog entry. Let me give another example. I was debating a Seventh-day Adventist about the proper interpretation of Daniel 8:13 & 14. (I’m ex-SDA, so I occasionally get into these debates.) This individual cites some SDA authorities on the subject, which happen to include my uncle Don F. Neufeld, editor of the SDA Bible Commentary. When I do not accept these individuals as authority (my late uncle would have been appalled at the notion that I would accept his position on authority, but that’s beside the point), he asked how I could hold my opinion against “all those experts.” He suggested I was alone in my opinion. Now I’m not particularly concerned about being alone on an issue, but I found that very interesting, because the interpretation I was proposing is, in fact, one that is either supported or offered as an option by practically every commentary on the book of Daniel. Those who hold the “investigative judgment” position that is held by many SDAs are in a distinct minority. And that is not relevant. I would never use the argument that the SDA position is a minority position as a refutation of that position. It’s perfectly possible that a minority position can be right.

    But it again is an example of someone in a position of weakness trying to use the appeal to numbers. The idea is to convince the person holding a minority view that their view is untenable because it is a minority view. But the argument from numbers when one is in a minority position already is a peculiar form of deception, or even of self-deception. I think the two arguments–from (false) authority, and from (false) numbers are closely related, and they are a favorite of creationists of all stripes, from young earth to intelligent design advocates. The number of fake degrees among young earth creationists is one good example (see Some Questionable Creationist Credentials). The fact that they spend a good deal of time talking about the number of people who support them is another.

    If you have the evidence, talk about the evidence. If you don’t you have to have something to talk about. But why talk about numbers and authority when those are precisely the things you don’t have? For every PhD that creationists can claim there are thousands in opposition. For examples of the argument from numbers see Project Steve, a satire of lists of people in support of some position or another, when that position is actually supported only by a tiny minority.

    Please understand that I am not in any way advocating that one simply accept the real majority position. Sometimes one has to accept authority simply because one is not well enough informed on a particular subject. But those competent in that subject should be able to propose new, minority positions and have them judged on the actual evidence.

    I am not certain just why the appeal to (supposed) numbers and the appeal to (alleged) authority are so popular. I can only think of two options. 1) Someone has such a narrow frame of reference that they simply do not comprehend the numbers. I think my SDA friend falls into this category. He was simply unaware of the numbers involved. 2) Someone knows that he has no solid support, but is using deception to convince people who don’t know any better that their position is better than it really is.

  • Do you know these things?

    From the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune: Why is the sky blue? Facts you should know.

    The quiz doesn’t provide scoring, but the answers are at the end. Bar that I must say I mentally fudged the amount of water (thinking “about 3/4” instead of the precise 71%), and the “sky is blue question” when I just thought “diffusion,” I knew the answers to these, and I’m no scientist.

    What about you?

  • Resistance to Evolutionary Theory

    Why is it that some people resist evolutionary theory so stubbornly? Many times I have used the argument that evolutionary theory is more complex than creationism, and that we are asking people to go against their intuition in favor of the evidence. But the more I think about it, the less I think that is true. I do think that most creationist thoroughly and systematically misunderstand the basics of evolutionary theory. But I’m going to suggest that the misunderstandings result from the need to reject it, and not the other way around. Most of these folks could understand, but at the most fundamental level they don’t want to.

    Many of you will find this article pretty redundant. The reason I took up the topic is because of the example, which is in my area of expertise, and thus it tickled me to use it as an example. In addition, it was when I did a paper on the comparison of the Septuagint and Masoretic text versions of the genealogies that I first began to question young earth creationism. I read my first creationist literature before I was ten, and was pretty much steeped in it by the time I was in college. Then I began to examine it critically.

    Let me illustrate from Kent Hovind’s Creation Science Evangelism, and their article titled Who Was Cainan? This is actually a rather simple question, and I’m only going to discuss it briefly as an illustration. Basically, if you take your choice of available modern Bible versions, and read the genealogy of Jesus provided by Luke, you can find the order of the post-flood patriarchs. (Luke reads these leading back to Adam, and I’m going to put them in chronological order here.) Luke has Shem, Arphaxad, Cainan, Shelah (also known as Sala) and so forth (verses 35-36). You can compare this to the genealogy of Genesis 11:10-13, and the order is Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah. Cainan is missing from the list.

    Now there is a simple explanation for this. This additional name occurs in the Septuagint (LXX), and this indicates that there is a textual variant in the text of Genesis, and the LXX, or another manuscript containing the same variant, was likely Luke’s source for this passage. Alternatively, the name could have been added by a copyist based on the same source, but the evidence for this is vanishingly light. If you consider the evolution of a text of this nature, you will start most likely with oral transmission for a period of time, followed by creation of written copies (there’s little agreement on the date of writing, though I suspect they may be quite early in the process of development of the Pentateuch, and form a framework for portions of it). These written copies are then included by redactors in broader documents, and then those documents are copied multiple times. Luke simply uses the documents available to him.

    Now old earth creationists use this very case to suggest that there may be gaps in the genealogies of Genesis, thus giving us Biblical room for a greater age for humanity on earth, and certainly a much earlier date for the flood. I would suggest in addition that the very formation of the lists into 10 names before and 10 names after suggests selected lists. So the old earth creationists find this name very convenient in support of their position.

    CSE cites Jonathan Sarfati of Answers in Genesis, who indicates that he believes this is one of the few copyists errors in our largely excellent manuscripts. For him, it is the autographs that are inerrant, and not any copy or translation. Thus, we solve the problem more or less by assuming a copyist’s error, and also assuming that the form of the text we have is correct. There is considerable variation in the genealogies in the LXX of Genesis 5 & 11, but this is beyond the scope of this entry. Also, I’m not trying to criticize Sarfati, and am not basing this on his work. (You can see his discussion at Cainan on the Answers in Genesis site.) So one set of young earth creationists would solve the problem with the assumption it was an error.

    But CSE does not approve of this answer. They want a result that allows them to claim that the Bible as they have it is inerrant, and not some autographs they can’t get a look at anyhow. So they must somehow preserve both the chronology of Genesis 11, and the presence of the name in Luke 3:36. Thus they explain how even if there was an intervening generation, the chronology would be unchanged. I’ll leave you to read the creative explanation directly from their site if you care to. In producing this ad hoc explanation, they use another interesting tactic, citing another group with very low credibility, Gail Riplinger’s AV Publications. Gail Riplinger is the author of one of the worst pieces of trash I have ever encountered in print, titled New Age Bible Versions.

    (At one point I started to critique that book, but after just a few pages I found there was insufficient space in the margins to keep track of even the major falsehoods, much less the more minor, but significant errors. (James White, who is much more conservative than I, nonetheless took the time to go through the book in detail. He has a lengthy response to New Age Bible Versions on his site, New Age Bible Versions Refuted. Riplinger in turn calls White’s material “libellous” and “actionable,” though I can’t see where she has tried to sue. For anyone who thinks Riplinger’s material has any value, look at her answer to the supposed question, “What is the most subtle change that new versions are making?”. In this she argues that changing the capitalization of pronouns that refer to God is changing the orthography of God’s word. I kid you not.)

    Now why do I go to this example? To illustrate a method. Neither CSE nor AiG can simply follow the evidence where it leads. The old earth creationists get into this situation in some cases, though in this case they have an explanation that accords with the evidence, though not, in my opinion, all of it. CSE has a previous theological position that the KJV as they have it must be inerrant, and thus there must be an explanation for that set of English words. AiG has a position that the autographs must be inerrant, and thus they must assume that the autograph did not contain the fateful added name. Old earth creationists accept the name because it is actually helpful to their claim that there are gaps in the genealogies of Genesis 5 & 11.

    You might say that I reject all these explanations simply because I want the passage to be inaccurate. But that is simply not the case. I would be fine with whatever variant was correct in the book of Luke, but the evidence points to the presence of Cainan in that text. It is possible, of course, that I’m wrong on this. Sarfati’s point about documents of the LXX might have some validity, though I think it’s weak. But you see, it would be no problem for me if he turned out to be right, and Cainan was not in the sacred, though unattainable, autograph.

    But the key here is that in the cases I cited we have something that must be true, so an ad hoc explanation for how it is true. With any ancient near eastern document, literary, or historical, the approach of historians is to examine critically its claims, and to determine its credibility based on that kind of historical study. Nobody thinks that the Sumerian antediluvian king lists are historical documents. Why? Because they give preposterous lengths for the reigns of the kings. But in the case of the Bible we are told to ignore all evidence in any direction except to confirm some interpretation. We should let the Bible speak for itself, and if we did we would realize that these lists belong to a different category of literature than “historical records” and could then treat them as such.

    So is it that evolution is counterintuitive? It seems rather intuitive to me, especially common descent. There is simply so much about the animal world that suggests a genetic relationship. I think it is not common sense, or our intuition that is the problem, but rather a prior commitment to treat a certain document as historical no matter what the evidence suggests. This results in a backwards methodology. A source is accurate not because one has checked it and found it so to the best of one’s abilities, but rather because it supports the position that already must be true.

    So one stray patriarch tells the story.

  • Home and Church Education

    As intelligent design (ID) propnents complain about censorship and freedom of speech, one thing is being ignored: They are getting their message out to the public, and any scientist who wishes to examine their data, should they care to provide some, can acquire the material should they desire to do so. In addition, high school students do not get all of their information in the classroom, nor should they. There are many other opportunities for us, as parents, to educate our children in things that are not part of the high school curriculum.

    I think that claims that ID materials are being censored are particularly empty. In this time in which internet publication is incredibly easy, it is practically impossible to keep an idea quiet. Acceptance is another matter. What the ID proponents crave is the opportunity to say, “See, we’ve been published in a peer reviewed journal.” It is unlikely that if the reviewers for a particular journal determine that an article is not sound enough to be published, the readers of that journal are going to be interested in it. After all, the journal has its customers as well, and if they are not presented with material that interests them, they will read something else. Thus creationists of various stripes create their own “peer reviewed” journals, that are read by those who are interested in such things. But the information is available to any scientist who finds it interesting.

    So it’s not that there is no way to make the information public that is the problem. The issue is really simply whether the high school students of the nation should be made a captive audience for ID. ID proponents are going to say, at this point, that right now these same students are a captive audience for Darwinism, but that is not accurate. They are a captive audience for science, whatever is the current consensus body of knowledge that represents. What every other new idea has had to do in order to get into the textbooks is to demonstrate through the scientific process that it is truly science, and to become the consensus view, it has to convince the key thinkers in the appropriate field that it (a proposed theory) represents the best explanation. ID propoents want to dodge this part of the process.

    But then there are those who, for religious reasons, believe that evolutionary theory is wrong, and they want it replaced with something. For the moment they are kind of united on the plan of getting their collective foot in the door, but be assured that once that is accomplished, there will be plenty of differences of opinion over just what variety of creationism should be taught. But I believe that these parents have a right, to a certain extent, to raise their children as they see fit. The limits of that right, in my view, involve avoiding abuse, and failing to prepare their children to live in the real world. I’d even go very far in allowing parents to determine to educate their children in ways I might find very counterproductive, though I do see a state interest in setting some standard of education. Within those limits, however, parents have many options, including home schooling, private schools, and supplementary materials provided at home or at church.

    The fact is that these ideas are not suppressed at all. They simply fall outside of certain boundaries for discussion at certain places and times. We don’t expect the psychology teacher to discuss horticulture in class (except, of course, as therapy!), and we don’t expect the science teacher to discuss religion. This is very similar to the frequent arguments about prayer in school. I hear parents complain regularly that their children can’t pray in school. But that’s not really the problem. The problem is that their children are not directed in prayer by teachers or staff, or that prayer is not officially mandated or provided for. The children can, and do pray. What the parents need to do is teach their own children how to pray, and how to lead prayers, and the young folks can meet as much as they want. I think that’s a much better idea than asking the school to teach children.

    The same thing applies to things that are not taught in science class, but we think our children ought to hear. I have some suggestions:

    1. Turn the TV off one night and spend some time talking to your children about your faith and how it relates to science. If you think the earth was created in one literal week, tell them. Explain your reasons. If you don’t know much about the subject, get one of the many books on your particular view of creation and learn.
    2. Provide your child with books that support your viewpoint. (I recommend having someone read materials on all sides, and then critically examine them. That will probably require you to get involved again.)
    3. Ask your church education department, to offer a seminar, Sunday School series, Wednesday night program, or series of sermons on origins. It’s your church, and you and your fellow believers will get to decide what the content should be. As you might have guessed, I think such teaching should talk about all views that Christians hold on origins, but that’s just my view. (I offer just such a seminar for churches.) Now we’re talking about your church.
    4. Regularly communicate with your children about your faith and theirs, and let them express themselves on what they have heard at school and elsewhere. Get involved with their education, whether they are in public, private, or home school.
    5. Encourage your church to have a substantive Sunday School program for various ages, so that children can learn about their faith and how it relates to the world. There’s no reason for young people to be shocked when they get to college because they find out the world is so different from what they are used to at church. I have frequently encountered young adults who feel that their pastors and Sunday School teachers lied to them. (It is more likely that those individuals simply didn’t know, although I have heard pastors justify withholding facts from their congregation.)
    6. Make your home a place where learning is an expected part of life. Books, computers, and opportunities to learn about the physical world should be plentiful. Let them know that questions are good.

    You will do much more to build your children’s faith by these means than by any amount of political activity to include religious materials in public school.

  • Zimmer: The Sixty-Million-Year Virus

    I only do this every few weeks, but I wanted to make sure that “Threads” readers noticed this wonderful article on The Loom. (Hat tip to Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where I saw it first.)

    I really don’t have anything to add on this one, but I do challenge young earth/old earth creationists to produce a credible scientific explanation for this data under their models.

  • AAAS on Hana and Francisco Ayala

    The AAAS web site has a wonderful profile of Hana and Francisco Ayala, along with an interview with both on video. Dr. Francisco Ayala states that ID is not science, but it is also very bad theology. He calls evolution the unifying principle of biology, and calls intelligent design “blasphemy.”

    This is worthwhile listening for anyone who is really interested in this issue. I strongly recommend listening to it. There is a written summary here.

  • Darksyde on Bill Dembski

    There’s a new post on The Daily Kos, Know Your Creationists: Bill Dembski, that readers may find interesting. It provides some background, and there are some links to some work on the math in the comments.

    I appreciate those mathematicians who have deconstructed Dembski’s math. When I first read something by him, it occurred to me that there was a major problem, in that the whole thing really depended on the probability of a process occurring when he really did not know what that process was. What is the probability of the bacterial flagellum being produced by natural processes? Unless we know the processes or we can truly eliminate all possible processes, there’s really no way to know. It could be absolutely impossible, or it could be quite a simple variation. I didn’t bother to plow through the math as I’m certainly not qualified to comment on it. There’s a simple principle however, applicable to any algorithm, that garbage in will produce garbage out. I simply (and perhaps lazily) assumed that if garbage was going out, it didn’t matter how many pages it took to describe the math, garbage was coming out.

    An excellent place to start on critiques of Dembski is the work of Howard van Till. His article E. Coli at the No Free Lunchroom: Bacterial Flagella and Dembski’s Case for Intelligent Design is excellent. You can read it as a PDF as well, which would be my own preference, and you can follow more of the exchange starting with the following links on the AAAS web site: Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion: Perspectives.

  • Why not Intelligent Design?

    As reported in various newspapers and summarized on the Florida Citizens for Science web site, (Textbook Debate Still Evolving, Letter to Brevard County School Board, and Textbooks Changed under Pressure) a school board member in Brevard County wants to adopt a science textbook including two paragraphs about intelligent design. I find the introduction of these two little paragraphs into the curriculum of a public school disturbing. (Please read the articles linked, or some of my discussion will not make sense.)
    Now some will (and some have) asked, why I should feel this way. After all, I’m a Bible teacher and an advocate for increased Bible study, though not at government expense. I’m an advocate of prayer, though not state sponsored prayer. I believe that the universe is designed. So what’s my problem?

    Well, I have several problems. Primarily, though, we are talking about a science textbook, and what is introduced here is not science. The contents of science textbooks should be material that has gone through the processes of science–proposal, study through the scientific method, publication after peer review, criticism by others qualified to do the criticism, and then normally after some time of discussion, acceptance as part of the body of science.

    These paragraphs do not represent any of that. They are there because people who could not get them accepted by active scientists, experts in the relevant fields, and so chose instead the process of public relations and political pressure. They abandoned the idea of seeking facts–accurate data–and instead sought popularity. They abandoned the idea of truth, and instead sought political force. What really gets on my nerves is that these are, in general, my fellow Christians. We supposedly share a commitment to openness and honesty. Most importantly, we should share a commitment to truth and to an individual’s freedom to test it, choose it, and express it.

    Now they sell this all as an issue of free speech. Shouldn’t we allow all sides of the topic to be discussed in public schools? But that is not quite the point. The marketplace of ideas is definitely open to them. They can, and do, express this in many venues. But free speech does not imply that all speech is equal in all settings. If I write a devotional article and submit it to Scientific American, just as an example, I could hardly expect them to welcome it and publish it. That wouldn’t be because they hate religion, but because that isn’t the sort of thing they publish. My freedom to write didn’t impose upon them a duty to publish, and more importantly, it didn’t impose on them a duty to accept what I say.

    The problem clearly isn’t free speech. There are ample opportunities for our children to hear these ideas. They can find them in books and they could hear them in Sunday Schools. It’s not the fault of our public education system that people don’t make adequate use of the available facilities. Since I do not accept the validity of intelligent design theory, I would oppose it–not the expression, but the viewpoint–in church settings or religious studies classrooms. But that, at least, would be the correct venue in which it should be discussed. Nobody is cutting off anyone’s free speech here. If they were, we would hear much less about all this.

    The problem is that government authorities are refusing a state platform for them. That is their real complaint. They don’t want free speech; they want a forced audience, and the forced audience that they want is our children. Don’t let anyone convince you that adding ID theory to the classroom is a matter of free speech. It is not.

    So what about evolutionary theory taught in the classroom? I could argue the evidence for evolution, but that is not the key issue here. The key issue is that evolutionary theory has gone through the process. It has made itself open to testing and refutation. The scientists who support it have proposed and done the experiments. They have had their ideas tested now for a century and a half. Evolutionary theory is science. So is the theory of gravity, of relativity, and many of the ideas of quantum theory. Each of these is equally subject to question, and each may, in the future, be revised or replaced by something that more precisely represents the data available.

    That is what we need to teach our children in science class. Science. There is little enough time to teach real science. That is one good reason to limit what we teach to consensus science–what is agreed upon by the experts as working science. But there is a better reason. In basic education about science, we need to provide science with integrity. Not all ideas are equal, and we will, no matter what, choose some to present to our students as part of the science curriculum in middle and high school, while some will be left out. We need to make sure that what we present represents the scientific method at its best.

    The theory of evolution does that. The very element that anti-evolutionists (not creationists–I believe in God the creator and I also accept evolution), use the most in attacking evolution is one of the strongest reasons why it should be part of the curriculum: Elements of the theory are being challenged and tested on a daily basis. There is effectively no scientific disagreement on the outlines, but in the details there is an abundance of excellent science being done. The debates that anti-evolutionists cite as a weakness in fact demonstrate the great strength of evolutionary theory as science.

    If we allow a couple of paragraphs like this to enter into our science textbooks we have also opened the door to another disaster for knowledge and free exchange of ideas. We will have allowed popularity to determine the truth value of an idea or theory. I would think that my Christian brethren who have taken this position would consider the nature of their argument. Looking at polls and depending on popularity to win a debate about ideas is monstrously wrong, and should frighten any Christian. We know from our history what it is like to be in the minority, arguing for a viewpoint that we believe to be true, but is not accepted by those around us. We should treasure the free exchange of ideas. We should treasure the filter that we have in deciding the curriculum of our public (state supported) schools. When we instead try to have truth determined by popularity, we are stepping into very dangerous territory. It seems that being in the popular majority, in a country primarily of Christians, has made some of us intellectually and spiritually lazy.

    Finally, I do want to add a brief note on my theological problems with ID. These issues are not the ones that should be involved in the textbook controversy. The issues there are and should be scientific. But ID proponents are claiming the support of a broad range of people who believe in God, even theistic evolutionists. We get included when it’s convenient and excluded when our ideas are distasteful.

    I reject Intelligent Design because I believe the universe was designed by God. ID is mislabeled. It should be theistic. Further, it doesn’t prove what Christians want it to prove and what many think it proves. It proves only a level of divine intervention, not the absolute primacy of God the creator. I believe that God operates through natural processes, but I also believe God always operates everywhere. Because of that, intelligent design theory is anathema to me theologically. It’s not just God in the gaps; it is God reduced to a convenient size to be studied in a lab. I’m not surprised at the limited success ID advocates have had in producing new science. God woudn’t fit in their labs, so whatever they are studying is likely something else.

  • The Five Minute Solution

    It’s nice to know that the desire for the “five minute solution” is not restricted to my own field of Biblical studies. Many people have asked me over the years for a way to become really knowledgeable of the Bible with only a short devotional study, and I have to tell them that while one can benefit from five minutes a day, one will not become an expert on that plan.

    Recently I had been watching the way science is discussed in the media and in normal conversations, particularly with reference to the creation and evolution controversy. There people simply don’t want to take the time to understand the subject, whether reporters, opinion writers, or ordinary people expressing their opinions. The question has been whether scientists communicate badly, or whether the public needs to dig in and take more responsibility themselves. (For the record, I’m pretty simplistic on this one. I think better public education would solve or ameliorate many, many problems. I think it would be the best investment of public money possible. See my essay Make Education a Priority.)

    Now Newsweek, through a story featured on MSNBC, (Food News Blues) has brought a different topic into focus, but dealing with the same issues–diet. Now I need to make a personal confession. I’m overweight. But I grew up in a medical family, with my father an MD, my mother an RN, and the scientific approach to medicine a part of the daily intellectual diet. I can tell you why I’m overweight. I eat too much and exercise too little. I know how to solve the problem. Eat less and exercise more. There are numerous details about my diet that can be improved because of studies in nutrition. There are specific things that I should eat more of, and specific things I should eat less of, but none of those details change the basic formula.

    The writers blame the situation on “too much information.” Another blog (Remember, it’s never the media’s fault) has commented that this isn’t quite accurate. He asks about the writing of headlines that tend to misguide. There are several examples of those headlines in the Newsweek article as well. One wonders why they didn’t focus on that.

    As an aside, I recall a headline a few years ago about the excavation of a town in Galilee, where Peter once lived. The headline implied that the archeologists were looking for “the house where Jesus taught” while any reading of the archeologists reports would have suggested no such thing. The headline grabs attention, but it doesn’t convey information, at least not accurate information.

    But I think there is an even deeper problem. It’s not just too much information or badly formed headlines. We will get badly formed headlines and poorly organized information as long as that sells newspapers. The newspaper with the headline “LOW-FAT DIET DOES NOT CUT HEALTH RISKS, STUDY FINDS” will generally sell more copies than the one with the headline “LOW-FAT DIETARY PATTERN AND RISK OF INVASIVE BREAST CANCER.” And as long as that’s a fact, it’s silly of us to expect our news media to produce the latter–an accurate headline–when what we will pay for is the former.

    If we think we can get our health information in five minutes a day, we are going to get the quality of health information that people with that little interest in their health deserve. The same thing applies to every area of policy. We complain about the spin politicians put on things, but we tolerate it, and the media reports it, because we pay for it. Then we vote for the politician with the best spin, and he gets elected. Immediately after the election we return to griping about the horrible politicians and their spin. Well folks, they’re just providing for us what we’ll pay for. The media is just providing for us what we’ll pay for.

    Isn’t it about time we demand better?

  • More on Communicating Science

    Carl Zimmer has more on The Loom about communication and evolution, with an interview with Randy Olson, director of the movie A Flock of Dodos. I believe he has some good suggestions about communication, but I also believe we are still missing the largest issue. I don’t think that a nation that is addicted to information that is presented quickly, and requires little effort to comprehend is going to be able to understand the issues involved in science. That would be OK if people without any understanding of the issues were not trying to make decisions about it.

    PZ Meyers has already made some good notes over on Pharyngula.

    Those whose primary role is to communicate with the public should look at the suggestions here. But again, I don’t believe that those involved in scientific research and even in classroom teaching (beyond a few basic courses that are almost identical to the popular media) should have to be concerned about these types of things. They should take notice, however, of the fact that they are not well qualified to communicate with the general public. A number of scientists have gone out to debate with creationists who should have stayed in their labs.

    But that is not the primary problem with this debate. I believe that the primary problem is that we have an issue that can be expressed well by one-liners on one side, but requires serious study on the other. It is much easier to understand that “God did it and we don’t know how” than it is to deal with biological issues. Even at the gross amateur level (which is where I am), evolution is simply more complicated than creationism. Creationists will tend to win debates for this one reason alone.

    There is indeed a need for some good publicity work. There are major public misunderstandings that can be dealt with through some good publicity. Projects such as the Clergy Letter and Evolution Sunday help let people know that this is not an issue that divides between people of faith and the “infidels” (however defined), but rather that people of faith are involved in large numbers on the evolutionary side.

    I’m afraid that I sense a certain condescension from the media savvy communicators. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. I’m glad that scientists are principally gifted at dealing with complex scientific information. And just to keep beating my regular drum–solid education is what we need.