Science consumers versus scientific citizens
Reading the comments on Those crazy scientists, I thought there were two interesting issues brought up.
The first, by oddprofessor:
They lose faith because they don't trust the process, because they don't understand the process. And that's a real tragedy.
The second, by tomysky:
the areas that people like me--horribly ignorant to far too much--hear about most frequently are influenced and confused even further by politics, media and religion/philosophy.
I think that the first problem, people not understanding the scientific process, makes the ground more fertile for the second problem, that it's easy to be influenced by other areas on what should fundamentally scientific issues.
I think the root of the problem, though, is how we educate people about science, as well as everything else. In essence, I think this is a problem of education. I'm not one of those people who says, "In the good old days, things were better." I think we've always had a large chunk of the population which has been scientifically illiterate and probably always will. I think the notion of compulsory education was meant to remedy that, but the method used simply reinforces science illiteracy because it was based on the Prussian method of educating soldiers and laborers: teach them enough to follow orders and directions, but not enough to actually think for themselves. Social obedience is key. (I'm not saying the system is bad as I think widespread literacy is extremely important...but the implementation of the system goes completely counter to how science functions.)
What this has evolved into is a system where children are taught things in black and white. They memorize facts, and there are always right or wrong answers. There is no ambiguity. And frankly, I see advocates of this method coming from both the scientific literate as well as the science-phobes: our version of the truth must be taught as fact, and children should memorize these facts. Either way, it's in the same vein: "You must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."
What it should really be a process of discovering facts along with reasoning skills. A prime example is the age of the universe. When I learned the age of the universe, I was told it was approximately 7 billion years old. Then the teacher moved on to the next fact. Shortly thereafter, there was a big hulabaloo because Hubble sent back pictures from an area of the universe believed to be nearly 14 billion years old.
How could that be?
It was one of my first introductions to the process of science, and some scientist showed up on the news that night explaining that process. He said that we thought the universe was 7 billion years old because we had no evidence to give us any indication it was older. However, when presented with evidence that it's older, we have to change our understanding.
We have to understand that a fact is merely the representation of our knowledge at a given time and not something immutable. But how do you teach that?
The best way, and the least used in schools, is to shift away from science as an area of facts and into an area of the process of discovery. Get kids used to the fact that knowledge grows and changes over time. Give them a problem, like asking them how a plant grows (i.e. where does the mass of the plant come from?). Have them brainstorm ideas and keep a list. Then they should conduct an experiment measuring the mass of plants, the mass of the water given to the plant, the mass of the soil in which the plant is growing, etc. Then, after the experiment, have them use their measurements to invalidate or validate some of the hypotheses. Any kid that knows how to read numbers and add and subtract can do the experiment.
You see, usually someone is told about this experiment and the results. They are expected to memorize it and regurgitate on a test. After all, why would we do something that someone already did? The results are the important part, right? All we're after is the facts...
'Facts' are easy to test. Herding a group of 4th graders around with dirt and buckets of water and plants and measurement devices and beakers is hard. But the point of the experiment is not to teach facts. It is to understand how our perception of a process changes as we acquire more knowledge. Because, really, we live in a world that science is moving so fast that it can change very quickly. The facts are things we discover as part of the process, but the process itself is just as important...or possibly more important.
It should be reinforced, after that, by talking about how the students' various hypotheses matched what people believed historically and how it has changed. We are very prone to thinking that what we know now was what people always knew and believed. That is false. People's understanding has been shifting for a long time. The major difference is that the timescale on which those changes have happened has drastically decreased.
But what about an adult? So many of us were already brought up in the 'facts as immutable objects' schooling system that it's impossible to know where to turn. As Luke mentioned, adults also have the added complications of political, religious, and other issues.
First, science has become a much bigger endeavor than it ever has been in history. I think the problem is that it's also such a competitive field that people have to make a big splash and get their results out quickly because of career issues. So I think the way the enterprise is run is adding to the confusion. There are additional complications that certain results may bolster people politically, economically, and, perhaps, spiritually. But my personal feeling is that is the sort of thing you should ignore. It's the "noise" in the system. What a scientifically literate adult understands is that the result making a big splash today may fall by the wayside once problems with process are discovered. The 'facts' which stand up over time are the things upon which we need to focus.
Evolution is one such issue. Darwin said that species will adapt, over several generations, to their environment. He had a lot of evidence but lacked a mechanism for that to happen. Much later, genes were discovered. Since then, evolution has been observed in a laboratory. There have been theories on large and small scales about how this may happen, especially in individual groups of organisms. However, even if these areas are in debate, consensus among scientists is that evolution is the only theory that accounts for the relationships observed in virtually every area of the biological and medical sciences. Therefore, one should look for a) the theory that has a consensus in the scientific community and b) one that has withstood the test of time.
But the second issue is nearly as important: where do you find this information?
The best answer is from scientists. With the advent of the internet, it's a lot easier to access scientists and scientific journals directly. As an adult, you can't rely on a teacher standing in front of you, as in high school, and feeding you information that has been run through some sort of 'distillation' process to leave just the essential stuff in an understandable form. That's what our culture breeds with it's Prussian-based system of reciting facts absorbing whatever an authority figure tells us. As we move from high school to adulthood, those authority figures change from teachers to the media, the clergy, the politician, some of whom have no more an idea of how to deal with these issues than the average adult. Who do they go to for information of a scientific nature?
There are good sources of science for the layman: Scientific American and Science News Weekly come to mind. These are written, in many cases, not by journalists but by actual scientists. Go to blogs written by scientists (ScienceBlogs and Discover have excellent examples of such, if you filter out some of the more political aspects of the internet).
I know a lot of people look at those articles and honestly don't understand them. My first response is, "Good!" It helps someone understand that they can't take an area where someone has devoted years of their life and be able to understand it in 30 minutes. This includes a politician or member of the clergy or anyone else. But if they read it and try to understand it, and they keep reading more of it, they will develop an understanding. They will get a sense of what seems to stay constant in the long-term and what has changed over time. They will start to be able to distinguish the noise from the consensus.
I think if we could get people to peel themselves away from their TVs and talking heads for 30 minutes a day and spend those 30 minutes on something involving educating themselves from a legitimate source, we would have, essentially, a population that's about a scientifically literate as we really need. But that would require effort on many people's parts, and many people have never had training enabling them to understand the scientific process which is, as oddprofessor said, the real tragedy.
The first, by oddprofessor:
They lose faith because they don't trust the process, because they don't understand the process. And that's a real tragedy.
The second, by tomysky:
the areas that people like me--horribly ignorant to far too much--hear about most frequently are influenced and confused even further by politics, media and religion/philosophy.
I think that the first problem, people not understanding the scientific process, makes the ground more fertile for the second problem, that it's easy to be influenced by other areas on what should fundamentally scientific issues.
I think the root of the problem, though, is how we educate people about science, as well as everything else. In essence, I think this is a problem of education. I'm not one of those people who says, "In the good old days, things were better." I think we've always had a large chunk of the population which has been scientifically illiterate and probably always will. I think the notion of compulsory education was meant to remedy that, but the method used simply reinforces science illiteracy because it was based on the Prussian method of educating soldiers and laborers: teach them enough to follow orders and directions, but not enough to actually think for themselves. Social obedience is key. (I'm not saying the system is bad as I think widespread literacy is extremely important...but the implementation of the system goes completely counter to how science functions.)
What this has evolved into is a system where children are taught things in black and white. They memorize facts, and there are always right or wrong answers. There is no ambiguity. And frankly, I see advocates of this method coming from both the scientific literate as well as the science-phobes: our version of the truth must be taught as fact, and children should memorize these facts. Either way, it's in the same vein: "You must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will."
What it should really be a process of discovering facts along with reasoning skills. A prime example is the age of the universe. When I learned the age of the universe, I was told it was approximately 7 billion years old. Then the teacher moved on to the next fact. Shortly thereafter, there was a big hulabaloo because Hubble sent back pictures from an area of the universe believed to be nearly 14 billion years old.
How could that be?
It was one of my first introductions to the process of science, and some scientist showed up on the news that night explaining that process. He said that we thought the universe was 7 billion years old because we had no evidence to give us any indication it was older. However, when presented with evidence that it's older, we have to change our understanding.
We have to understand that a fact is merely the representation of our knowledge at a given time and not something immutable. But how do you teach that?
The best way, and the least used in schools, is to shift away from science as an area of facts and into an area of the process of discovery. Get kids used to the fact that knowledge grows and changes over time. Give them a problem, like asking them how a plant grows (i.e. where does the mass of the plant come from?). Have them brainstorm ideas and keep a list. Then they should conduct an experiment measuring the mass of plants, the mass of the water given to the plant, the mass of the soil in which the plant is growing, etc. Then, after the experiment, have them use their measurements to invalidate or validate some of the hypotheses. Any kid that knows how to read numbers and add and subtract can do the experiment.
You see, usually someone is told about this experiment and the results. They are expected to memorize it and regurgitate on a test. After all, why would we do something that someone already did? The results are the important part, right? All we're after is the facts...
'Facts' are easy to test. Herding a group of 4th graders around with dirt and buckets of water and plants and measurement devices and beakers is hard. But the point of the experiment is not to teach facts. It is to understand how our perception of a process changes as we acquire more knowledge. Because, really, we live in a world that science is moving so fast that it can change very quickly. The facts are things we discover as part of the process, but the process itself is just as important...or possibly more important.
It should be reinforced, after that, by talking about how the students' various hypotheses matched what people believed historically and how it has changed. We are very prone to thinking that what we know now was what people always knew and believed. That is false. People's understanding has been shifting for a long time. The major difference is that the timescale on which those changes have happened has drastically decreased.
But what about an adult? So many of us were already brought up in the 'facts as immutable objects' schooling system that it's impossible to know where to turn. As Luke mentioned, adults also have the added complications of political, religious, and other issues.
First, science has become a much bigger endeavor than it ever has been in history. I think the problem is that it's also such a competitive field that people have to make a big splash and get their results out quickly because of career issues. So I think the way the enterprise is run is adding to the confusion. There are additional complications that certain results may bolster people politically, economically, and, perhaps, spiritually. But my personal feeling is that is the sort of thing you should ignore. It's the "noise" in the system. What a scientifically literate adult understands is that the result making a big splash today may fall by the wayside once problems with process are discovered. The 'facts' which stand up over time are the things upon which we need to focus.
Evolution is one such issue. Darwin said that species will adapt, over several generations, to their environment. He had a lot of evidence but lacked a mechanism for that to happen. Much later, genes were discovered. Since then, evolution has been observed in a laboratory. There have been theories on large and small scales about how this may happen, especially in individual groups of organisms. However, even if these areas are in debate, consensus among scientists is that evolution is the only theory that accounts for the relationships observed in virtually every area of the biological and medical sciences. Therefore, one should look for a) the theory that has a consensus in the scientific community and b) one that has withstood the test of time.
But the second issue is nearly as important: where do you find this information?
The best answer is from scientists. With the advent of the internet, it's a lot easier to access scientists and scientific journals directly. As an adult, you can't rely on a teacher standing in front of you, as in high school, and feeding you information that has been run through some sort of 'distillation' process to leave just the essential stuff in an understandable form. That's what our culture breeds with it's Prussian-based system of reciting facts absorbing whatever an authority figure tells us. As we move from high school to adulthood, those authority figures change from teachers to the media, the clergy, the politician, some of whom have no more an idea of how to deal with these issues than the average adult. Who do they go to for information of a scientific nature?
There are good sources of science for the layman: Scientific American and Science News Weekly come to mind. These are written, in many cases, not by journalists but by actual scientists. Go to blogs written by scientists (ScienceBlogs and Discover have excellent examples of such, if you filter out some of the more political aspects of the internet).
I know a lot of people look at those articles and honestly don't understand them. My first response is, "Good!" It helps someone understand that they can't take an area where someone has devoted years of their life and be able to understand it in 30 minutes. This includes a politician or member of the clergy or anyone else. But if they read it and try to understand it, and they keep reading more of it, they will develop an understanding. They will get a sense of what seems to stay constant in the long-term and what has changed over time. They will start to be able to distinguish the noise from the consensus.
I think if we could get people to peel themselves away from their TVs and talking heads for 30 minutes a day and spend those 30 minutes on something involving educating themselves from a legitimate source, we would have, essentially, a population that's about a scientifically literate as we really need. But that would require effort on many people's parts, and many people have never had training enabling them to understand the scientific process which is, as oddprofessor said, the real tragedy.