eg. Why is real science so full of uncertainties?
 

Enemies of science

Spin doctors and government agencies are undermining the quest for knowledge

Alok Jha
Monday November 13, 2006

Guardian

So Tony Blair wants to be a science evangelist? In a recent speech in Oxford, he outlined his plan to stand up for science and face down those who distort and undermine it. He singled out animal rights extremists and people who cause confusion over MMR and GM technology.
But encouraging scientific progress is not just about giving good PR to new gadgets or cures. Most important is protecting the principle of free inquiry, something on which he and his government are way behind. His call for politicians to stand up for science belies the fact that his own administration systematically attacks this basic principle.

The biggest threat to science doesn't come from a mother scared of what the MMR jab might do to her child, or the extremist who burns down farms in solidarity with research animals. It comes from those who claim to respect the way science creates knowledge, but then misinterpret, distort or ignore that knowledge.

On the surface, scientists might seem to have little to worry about. Starved of prestige and money by successive Tory governments, they have seen labs rebuilt and reputations renewed under Labour. Blair talked of having trouble with science in his early years until a Damascene conversion left him "fascinated by scientific process, its reasoning, deduction and evidence-based analysis; inspired by scientific progress; and excited by scientific possibility".

But last week the conclusions of the Commons science committee inquiry into the government's use of scientific advice showed that his good intentions were not being mirrored by his own advisers. The report said that the government hid behind a fig leaf of scientific respectability when spinning controversial policies in a bid to make them more acceptable to voters, and it called for a "radical re-engineering" of its use of science.

Furthermore, scientists are becoming concerned at the rise of creationism in the British education system. The geneticist Steve Jones, who has lectured on evolution at schools for 20 years, says that he now regularly meets pupils who claim to believe in creationism. The creationist interpretation of fossil evidence is even encouraged in the new GCSE Gateway to Science curriculum. In August, a survey of British university students found that a third believed in either creationism or intelligent design.

At the end of the last parliamentary session, the government agency charged with licensing drugs took the remarkable decision that it would license homeopathic remedies. These glorified bottles of water can now carry details of the ailments they supposedly treat on their labels. The remedies do not need clinical trial data and peer-reviewed research to make their claims (as every modern pharmaceutical does). Scientists say the new rules are an affront to the principle of basing healthcare advice on scientific evidence.

Science is a tough master. Use this method of uncovering truth and you are not allowed to be selective about your evidence. But innovation, the technological answers to climate change, and all Blair's "glittering prizes" will come, at some point in the chain, from the basic rules of free inquiry grounded in scientific method: think of an idea, test it with experiments, draw conclusions, refine your experiments, and so on.

A forward-thinking nation loses respect for that free inquiry at its peril. Children taught to disregard evidence when trying to work out where the earth came from; a scientific agency deciding to abandon basic principles; and a government twisting research to fit its ideological message - none of that respects free inquiry. And if you don't stand up for that, you don't stand up for science.

Alok Jha is the Guardian's science correspondent

Broken Spells & Unveiled Secrets

a book review by James N. Gardner

Should the tools of science be used to study the phenomenon of religion? Or should the domain of the sacred remain a shrouded enclave, shielded from the prying eyes and profane proddings of anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and evolutionary biologists?

That is the question at the heart of the philosopher Daniel Dennetts important and timely new book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Dennett, a self-described bright the stylish neologism signifying a person of the atheist persuasion that he and Richard Dawkins began to promote in twin op-ed essays in 2003 comes out squarely in favor of scientific scrutiny of the origin and nature of religious faith:

It is high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on the best minds on the planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about. It affects not just our social, political, and economic conflicts, but the very meanings we find in our lives. For many people, probably a majority of the people on Earth, nothing matters more than religion. For this very reason, it is imperative that we learn as much as we can about it. That, in a nutshell, is the argument of this book.

Religion has, of course, been studied previously, both from the inside by theological scholars as diverse in viewpoint as Augustine, Emil Durkheim, and Mircea Eliade, and from the outside by pioneering investigators like William James and continuing throughout the 20th century by anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists. But only recently have the sophisticated techniques of modern science statistical analysis, investigatory methodologies developed in the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and methods used to associate genetic patterns with particular categories of behavior been deployed in order to put religion under the microscope of objective, unbiased scientific analysis. Only now, in fact, do we possess the tool kit especially the computational techniques to allow scientists to develop sophisticated models of the evolution of religious culture, analogous to dynamic software models of linguistic evolution and viral mutation.

The approach advocated by Dennett forthright demystification of a domain of human experience whose very essence is mystery, irrationality, and faith has provoked predictable opposition, some of it from surprising quarters. In a review of Breaking the Spell published in The New York Review of Books Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, forthrightly conceding his own pro-religion bias, chided Dennett for wearing his atheistic prejudices on his sleeve:

"My own prejudice, looking at religion from the inside, leads me to conclude that the good vastly outweighs the evil Without religion, the life of the country would be greatly impoverished Dennett, looking at religion from the outside, comes to the opposite conclusion. He sees the extreme religious sects that are breeding grounds for gangs of young terrorists and murderers, with the mass of ordinary believers giving them moral support by failing to turn them in to the police. He sees religion as an attractive nuisance in the legal sense, meaning a structure that attracts children and young people and exposes them to dangerous ideas and criminal temptations, like an unfenced swimming pool or an unlocked gun room."

But the whole point of Dennetts thoughtful book regrettably obscured by anti-religious rhetoric that would get him stricken from any jury empanelled to adjudicate the merits of his argument is precisely that the origins, developmental pathways, and internal dynamics of religious communities and belief systems should be subjected to intense scientific investigation, not shunned mindlessly as pathologies associated with the consumption of dangerous and outmoded cultural opiates. To argue otherwise to either dismiss the societal value proposition of religion ab initio or to agree with the late Stephen Jay Gould that religion and science are separate magisteria that should be contemplated in utter isolation and remain forever separated by a rigid cordon sanitaire is not only literally irrational but also profoundly at odds with basic lessons of history. As I pointed out in my book Biocosm:

"The overlapping domains of science, religion, and philosophy should be regarded as virtual rain forests of cross-pollinating ideas precious reserves of endlessly fecund memes that are the raw ingredients of consciousness itself in all its diverse manifestations. The messy science/religion/philosophy interface should be treasured as an incredibly fruitful cornucopia of creative ideas a constantly coevolving cultural triple helix of interacting ideas and beliefs that is, by far, the most precious of all the manifold treasures yielded by our history of cultural evolution on Earth."

In his classic Lowell Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1925, British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put forward an intriguing explanation for the curious fact that European civilization alone had yielded the cultural phenomenon we know as scientific inquiry. Whiteheads theory was that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology. More specifically, he contended that

"the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [was] the inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled."

Whence this instinctive conviction that there is discoverable pattern of order in the realm of nature? The source of the conviction, in Whiteheads view, was not the inherently obvious rationality of nature but rather a peculiarly European habit of thought a deeply ingrained, religiously derived, and essentially irrational faith in the existence of a rational natural order. The scientific sensibility, in short, was an unconscious derivative of medieval religious belief in the existence of a well-ordered universe that abides by invariant natural laws that can be discovered by dint of human investigation.

If Whitehead is correct, religion is not at all alien to scientific thought but bears an ancestral relationship to the set of intellectual disciplines that define our concept of modernity. Western religion, in short, is the father of Western science. What could be more fitting, then, than for science to focus the lens of skeptical inquiry on issues relating to its own dimly understood paternity that is to say, on religious belief, the historical source of scientists boundless faith in the discoverable rationality of the cosmos.

Much has been achieved, yet much remains to be done

ScienceWeek 2002
www.scienceweek.com

Ismail Serageldin (Library of Alexandria, EG) discusses world poverty, the author making the following points:

1) Much has been done to make the world a better place. The 20th century was one of struggle for emancipation. The colonies were liberated; many women received the franchise; and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities and nonconformists were acknowledged to have political and civil rights arising from their common humanity. There have been many socioeconomic improvements over the last 40 years: developing countries have doubled school enrolments, halved infant mortality and adult illiteracy, and extended life expectancy at birth by 20 years. Despite these advances, much remains to be done. A global developmental agenda demands our efforts and our solidarity.

2) At the present time, 1.2 billion people live on less than a dollar per day. 1 billion people do not have access to clean water. More than 2 billion people have no access to adequate sanitation. 1.3 billion people, mostly in cities in the developing world, are breathing air below the standards considered acceptable by the World Health Organization. 700 million people, mostly women and children, suffer from indoor air pollution due to biomass-burning stoves, equivalent to smoking three packs of cigarettes per day. Hundreds of millions of poor farmers have difficulty maintaining the fertility of soils from which they eke out a meager living.

3) To this stock of problems, we can now add a slew of new challenges. The human population is increasing by 80 million persons a year, mostly in the poorest countries. Dramatic overconsumption and waste in wealthy nations and population pressure in poor countries are putting enormous pressures on the ecosystems on which we all depend.

4) The world's marine fisheries are grossly overexploited. Soils are eroding. Water is becoming scarcer. Deforestation is continuing. We must redouble our efforts to address the global challenges of desertification, climate change, and biodiversity. Agriculture must be transformed to promote sustainable food security for the billions of hungry people in the world. The challenges of urban poverty and environmental destruction are unprecedented, and will only increase with the urban populations of developing nations expected to treble over the next two generations. In the 47 "least developed" countries of the world, 10% of the world's population subsists on less than 0.5% of the world's income. Some 40,000 people die from hunger-related causes every day. One sixth or more of the human family lives a marginalized existence. Therein lies the challenge before us. Will we accept such human degradation as inevitable? Or will we strive to help the less fortunate? Will we regard ourselves as no longer responsible for future generations, or will we try to act as true stewards of Earth? It is not resources that are lacking; it is the will to harness them. Indeed, the world has never been richer, and the future promises even more.(1,2)

References:
1. J. Bronowski, Science and Human Values (Harper and Row, New York, 1956).
2. R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993) [publisher's information]
 

This is brilliant - yet it must surely be accompanied by the scolding of mass media outlets that profit from deliberately flouting scientific reasoning:

Calls for science to become 'fourth R'
Press Association
Tuesday October 26 2004
The Guardian

Scientific reasoning should become the "fourth R" in British schools, taught alongside reading, writing and arithmetic, the government's former chief scientist said today.

Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society, will use a speech this evening to call for all young people to learn about the process of reasoning in a scientific way up to the age of 19.

He says he was "alarmed" that there is no explicit commitment to science in proposals for a diploma system for 14 to 19-year-olds set out in the Tomlinson report last week.

A member of the Royal Society's education committee, Edgar Jenkins, said today he was "disappointed" at the failure of the former chief schools inspector, Mike Tomlinson, to focus on science.

Scientific reasoning is vital if tomorrow's adults are to make informed judgments on public issues, such as the controversy over the MMR vaccine or the safety of mobile phone masts, he said.

"We want people to engage in the kind of debates they will have to face as adult citizens," Professor Jenkins told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"You can't engage in a debate about a science-related issue unless you know some of the underlying science."

Even youngsters who choose not to pursue studies in physics, chemistry or other scientific subjects need to develop their scientific reasoning skills, said the professor.

All people need an ability to understand "how science has been established and what degree of confidence we can have in the scientific knowledge we already know".

"I think we can put students in a position where they can begin to think scientifically about a whole range of problems," he said.

Lord May will express concern this evening about declining numbers of students taking traditional science subjects at A-level, warning it will have "deeply damaging effects on the country".

Entries this summer in physics, chemistry and maths were respectively 34%, 16% and 22% lower than in 1991, he will say.

Mr Tomlinson's proposals for a four-level diploma require students to demonstrate "core skills" in maths, English and information technology.

Lord May wants "scientific reasoning" added to this.

He will tell a dinner of the Chartered Management Institute in London: "This does not mean making everybody study the traditional science subjects up to
19.

"Instead, it means finding appropriate and creative ways of developing young people's application of the scientific approach to problems, so that they can make better-informed decisions about science-related issues in their lives.

"Above all, in the drive for flexibility and inclusiveness, the government must not allow the Tomlinson report to be interpreted as a signal that most young people should be able to turn their backs on science after the age of 16."
 

SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE DOOMS DEMOCRACY

Increasingly hi-tech nations need informed citizens, making scientific literacy a human right and scientific illiteracy a disability

George Dvorsky     Betterhumans     12/22/2003

I recently put a painting on my fridge door by my six-year old son, Lucas. In this particular composition, Lucas portrays a scientist diligently working in his "nanotechnology lab," operating what appears to be (to me anyway) a molecular assembler. When I asked Lucas if he knew what nanotechnology was, he replied, "Sure, Daddy, it's technology and robots that work at a microscopic size."

The kid's in grade one and has already picked sides in the Drexler-Smalley debate. He can also already describe the human digestive system in detail. And he knows that humans evolved from apes, that the fastest that anything can travel in the Universe is the speed of light and that hypotheses aren't set in stonehe acknowledges that the current theory of how the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago is just that, a theory. So passionate is he for science that once, at an observatory open house, he overheard an astronomy professor teaching a class and felt compelled to correct him about how many moons orbit Saturn.

In addition to his insatiable appetite for all things scientific, Lucas has the advantage of a scientifically inclined father and exposure to excellent educational programs such as Bill Nye the Science Guy and The Magic Schoolbus, as well as Websites such as BrainPops.

With all this, I don't have to worry that Lucas will grow up scientifically illiterate. It's good to know that he'll be able to count off facts and figures, and even more comforting to know that he'll grow up with the broader, softer skills that science teaches, namely skepticism, empiricism and a dedication to formal methodologies. In other words, through learning about science, my son is becoming a critical thinker.

But he's probably in the minority. Ignorance of how science and technology works is rampant in our society, leading to a stunningly dependent, suggestible and ill-informed populace.

We all need to know about science. Without this knowledge we are powerless, forced to live in a fog about how things work. Without it, we are utterly dependent on others to form our opinion. Without it, we cannot properly participate in society as informed, critical and responsibly opinioned citizens. Moreover, in today's hi-tech information age world, democracy cannot work without a scientifically literate society.

On my way to work each day I pass a bus shelter ad that reads, "Literacy is a Right." Well, I'd take that further and declare that today scientific literacy is a basic human right. As with the inability to read, the inability to understand science and scientific methodology is nothing less than a disability.

Embarrassing ignorance
}Most of those who live in the West, particularly North Americans, are guilty of an anti-intellectual bias. Scientists are supposed to be nerds, right? And who wants to be a nerd? This sentiment, combined with a general suspicion of science and the predominance of aggressive theological and pseudoscientific memes, has resulted in much of the scientific illiteracy that now pervades our society.

It doesn't help that the educational system is in shambles and without focus, and that fatuous postmodernism and its insistence that nothing can truly be known now dominates many disciplines at most universities. Consequently, too many people wear their ignorance like a badge of honor, as if being clueless about science is something to be proud of.

Well, there's nothing noble about ignorance, and if anything scientific illiteracy should be considered downright embarrassing. A 2001 poll conducted by the National Science Foundation in the US revealed the pervasiveness of the problem. Results showed that only 48% of Americans knew that the earliest humans did not live at the same time as the dinosaurs, and that only 22% could properly define a molecule. The survey also showed that only 45% knew what DNA was and that lasers don't work by focusing sound waves, and that 48% knew that electrons were smaller than atoms.

Just as significant, only 21% of those surveyed were able to explain what it means to study something scientifically. Slightly over half understood probability, and only a third knew how an experiment is conducted.

Cognitively disabled
The trouble with ignorance is not so much what people don't know but what this causes them to believe.

There is a direct correlation between scientific illiteracy and a propensity for belief in superstitions, religion, the paranormal and pseudoscience. Those unacquainted with science also tend to be more prone to scam artists, unwise investments, fiscal schemes and bogus health and medical practices. On this last note, a number of opportunistic hucksters are beginning to take advantage of the hype created by pending life extension technologies and stem cell research, making grand promises to hopeful people that can't possibly be fulfilled; the scientifically illiterate make for easy targets.

It's safe to suggest, therefore, that those with a deficiency in scientific comprehension have underdeveloped critical thought faculties. In other words, they might as well be suffering from some kind of cognitive disorder.

A consequence of this disability is that some will be left behind. As neuroscientist Steven Pinker has noted, "As our economy comes to depend increasingly on technology, and as modern media present us with unprecedented choicesin our lifestyles, our workplaces, and our political commitmentsa child who cannot master an ever-increasing body of skills and knowledge will be left farther and farther behind."

Crippling society
The late Carl Sagan similarly worried about the effects of a scientifically illiterate society. "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology," he lamented. "We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."

Indeed, scientific illiteracy cripples culture, justice, democracy and society in general. When you have misinformed individuals you get unhealthy societies.

The way the media works today, with its problematic approach to "balanced" reporting instead of accurate reporting and its propensity for sensationalism, it is guilty of much of the misinformation and frequent fear-mongering that imbues news and pop culture.

Similarly, the judicial system is not immune to the problems posed by a scientifically illiterate populace. Judges and jurors, with little background in the hard sciences, tend to be easily swayed by so-called expert witnesses who, despite taking sworn oaths, spew weak and bogus science to help lawyers defend their case.

Scientific illiteracy also has political implications, resulting in such things as the rise of the religious right in the Bush administration and the prominence of orthodox office holders at all levels of its government. A misappraisal of science has also resulted in backwards legislation in the US, Canada and Europe for stem cell research, cloning and genetically modified foods. A recent Eurobarometer poll revealed that 60% of Europeans believe that ordinary tomatoes do not contain genes while genetically engineered tomatoes do, while 50% believe that eating genetically modified fruit can cause a person's genes to become modified.

As early as the 1950s, scientist and novelist C.P. Snow was already sounding the alarm about increasingly ignorant electorates. Snow coined the term "two cultures" to refer to the growing divergence between those in society who understand science and technology sufficiently to make informed choices and those who do not.

Biologist and education critic Stephen Schneider recognizes the threat that a scientifically illiterate society poses to a functional democracy. "We all share a strong belief in democracy," he notes, "but it can only function well when the people understand the choices they need to make and are in a position to make trade-offs rationally." He believes that as issues get increasingly complex, "ignorance decouples the people from the knowledge they need to help guide policy choices that can shape our future."

Psychologist Barry L. Beyerstein agrees. He contends that it is essential for a well-functioning democracy that "we all be conversant with the basics of science so that we can cut through political rhetoric and the daily news when these issues arise."

Science fuels democracy
Like the right to vote, those living in a democracy should demand the right to scientific literacy so that they may become informed and discerning citizens. As Carl Sagan noted, "Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works." A central lesson of science, argued Sagan, is that to understand complex issues, people must try to free their minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, contradict and experiment. He strongly believed that arguments from authority were unacceptable.

Skepticism is one of the greatest tools that a person can have, and science teaches this as a matter of course. But the business of skepticism can often be dangerous. As Sagan observed, skepticism challenges established institutions. "If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year-old channelees," wrote Sagan, "Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be?"

Science helps us to be free of gross superstition and gross injustice. "Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove," Sagan argued. "It is no surprise that political revolutions, skepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together. Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science."

Indeed, as Schneider has observed, science literacy is not just about the "facts"knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology or economics per se. "More important for non-specialists," says Schneider, "is to understand the process of science, and how science interacts with public policy issues and gets communicated via the media."

What can be done?
All this begs the question: What can be done?

First and foremost there must to be a push for education reform. According to Pinker, most high school and college curricula have barely changed since medieval times mostly because "no one wants to be the philistine who seems to be saying that it is unimportant to learn a foreign language, or English literature, or trigonometry, or the classics." He worries about how classroom practices are set by "fads, romantic theories, slick packages, and political crusades." To alleviate the problem, Pinker believes that a scientific mindset needs to be applied to the educational process and a renewed commitment to the sciences, including the fields of economics, biology, probability and statistics.

Education reform also rests with the scientists themselves. Education critic Neal Lane, the former assistant to the US president for science and technology, has proposed the idea of the "civic scientist." "What we need," says Lane, "is the science community's leadership to educate the nation about the value of science and technology to our national well-being." Neal envisions a proactive and socially active scientific community.

We also need educational systems that are accountableones that respect the human right to a liberal education and high academic standards. It's preposterous that Creationism is still taught in some schools. This issue has nothing to do with freedom of religion and everything to do with one's right to be free from religion. Otherwise, schools might just as well teach that the Earth is flat and that the Moon is made out of cheese.

And finally, we all need to promote science as an attractive discipline and as a means to personal empowerment and social betterment. As science educator Nye has said to children across North America, science is cool.

And indeed it isand more so than ever before. Today, scientists are busy discussing the possibility of infinite universes, microscopic robots that will operate in the body, cyborg and artificial citizens, plants that can clean toxic waste in the soil and a manned expedition to Mars.

While exciting, however, all these things are prone to misunderstanding and apprehension. Unless we have a populace that can fully understand and assess these and other pending issues, we risk squandering what should be wonderful opportunities for individuals and the species. We also risk creating the "two cultures" envisioned by Snowthe intellectual haves and have-nots.

The time to act is now, for those who fail to grasp the scientific issues of our time will find the future truly incomprehensible.