The State of Science. Marc Zimmer
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Fake News and Science
In an essay in the New York Times Magazine in 2016, Jonathan Mahler writes that people “are abandoning traditional sources of information, from the government to the institutional media, in favor of a D.I.Y. approach to fact‐finding” and are “forming a radical new relationship between citizen and truth.”[20] In addition, over the last decade science has been revolutionized by the development of new techniques that allow scientists to conduct experiments bordering on the fantastic, increasing the difficulty for the layperson to distinguish between fact, hyperbole, quackery, and fake news (chapters 9 and 11).
Fake news and pseudoscience occasionally get the better of scientific facts in Congress, too. Congress also struggles with the fact that the amount of scientific knowledge in the world is not only increasing but growing faster and faster. At the same time, science is becoming more complex thanks to a spike in interdisciplinary work between previously disparate fields, such as optics, electrical engineering, and neuroscience joining forces in optogenetics (chapter 8). This has resulted in an ever-widening gap between the scientific knowledge of legislators, religious leaders, and voters and the total available science knowledge.
In Congress, which is ultimately in charge of regulating and defining the direction of science research in the United States, these difficulties are amplified by the fact that there are only 3 scientists and 8 engineers in the 115th Congress of the United States, while there are 218 lawyers. The 7 radio talk show hosts, 26 farmers, and 8 ordained ministers all outnumber the scientists as well. Similarly low numbers are found in Australia and Canada, where scientists make up just 4 percent of each country’s parliament. The vast predominance of lawyers in the House of Representatives and Senate sets the tone of the debate in the U.S. Congress. Trial lawyers are trained to win debates, they use facts selectively, and they aren’t looking for the truth, nor are they interested in presenting the whole picture. In contrast, science relies on gathering evidence, weighing that evidence, and validating theories.[21] Scientists and science in general don’t do well in politics (Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher, both chemists, are obvious exceptions). Scientists believe in the importance of facts and think they can win public debates by using facts, despite empirical evidence that suggests passionate opinion will often overcome scientific facts. We can no longer rely on Congress to provide the leadership and guidelines for scientists and industries to deal with the problems and ethical dilemmas associated with gene editing (chapter 9), climate change (chapter 11), and quackery (chapter 12). Scientists have to become more media savvy. They have to learn how to interact with journalists, regulators, and politicians, and they need to have a larger presence on social media. Scientists make good administrators, and many are university presidents; it is time some make the transition into politics.
Having placed today’s science in a wider context, it is time to see the new science, contrast it with the old science, see all that good science can do, and lament how it can be abused as bad and pseudoscience. (In an earlier incarnation, this book was subtiitled “New Science, Old Science, Good Science, Bad Science.”)
1.
Gershenfeld, N. (2018). “Ansatz,” in This idea is brilliant: Lost, overlooked, and underappreciated scientific concepts everyone should know (ed. J. Brockman), New York: HarperPerennial.
2.
Kelly, E. (2017). Mary Somerville: The woman for whom the word “scientist” was made, AllThatsInteresting, https://allthatsinteresting.com/mary-somerville.
3.
Secord, J. (2018). Mary Somerville’s vision of science, Physics Today, 47.
4.
Bar-On, Y. M., Phillips, R., and Milo, R. (2018). The biomass distribution on Earth, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 125(25), 6506–6511.
5.
Harari, Y. N. (2017). Homo deus: A brief history of tomorrow, first U.S. ed., New York: HarperCollins.
6.
Subramanian, M. (2019). Anthropocene now: Influential panel votes to recognize earth’s new epoch. Atomic age would mark the start of the current geologic time unit, if proposal receives final approval, Nature News, May 21.
7.
McKibben, B. (2019). Falter: Has the human game begun to play itself out? New York: Henry Holt.
8.
Ball, P. (2018). “Demographics,” in What the future looks like: Scientists predict the next great discoveries and reveal how today’s breakthroughs are already shaping our world (ed. J. Al-Khalili), New York: The Experiment.
9.
Harari, Y. N. Homo deus.
10.
Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 lessons for the 21st century, first ed., New York: Spiegel & Grau.
11.
Giussani, B. (2018). “Exponential,” in This idea is brilliant: Lost, overlooked, and underappreciated scientific concepts everyone should know (ed. J. Brockman), New York: HarperPerennial.
12.
Quoted in Yong, E. (2018). A controversial virus study reveals a critical flaw in how science is done: After researchers resurrected a long-dead pox, some critics argue that it’s too easy for scientists to make decisions of global consequence, The Atlantic, October 4.
13.
Yong, E. A controversial virus study.
14.
Popovich, N., Albeck-Ripka, L., and Pierre-Louis, K. (2019). 83 environmental rules being rolled back under Trump, New York Times, June 7.
15.
Sullivan, M., and Sellers, C. (2019). The EPA has backed off enforcement under Trump—here are the numbers, The Conversation, January 3.
16.
Environmental Protection Agency. (2019). Our nation’s air—Air quality improves as America grows, July 1, https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2019-2007/documents/air
trendsreport_07012019_custom_v07012011_d07012011.pdf.
17.
Schreckinger, B. (2018). Trump acknowledges climate change—At his golf course, Politico, May 23, https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-climate-change-golf-course-223436.
18.
Funk, C., and Rainie, L. (2015). Public and scientists’ views on science and society, Pew Research Center, January 29.
19.
Crease, R. (2019). The workshop and the world: What ten thinkers can teach us about science and authority, New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
20.
Mahler, J. (2016). The problem with “self-investigation” in a post-truth era, The New York Times Magazine, December 27.
21.
Otto, S. L. (2016). The war on science: Who’s waging it, why it matters, what we can do about it, first ed., Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Chapter 2
The Professional Scientist
Is the disheveled, gray-haired, Einstein-like character in a lab coat still a good representation of a scientist? Who are our scientists, and who should they be?
In an interview with the Guardian, Donna Strickland, 2018 physics laureate and the third woman to ever receive a Nobel Prize in physics, says, “I don’t see myself as a woman in science. I see myself as a scientist.”[1]
As