I will try to keep this short, especially since the combined length of all the reviews of Unscientific America probably outstrips the length of the book itself.*
I did not particularly like Unscientific America. Running a scant 132 pages, it is a scattershot survey of how scientists (according to authors Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum) have not pulled their weight in communicating important issues to the public. It is not an in-depth study of America's science culture wars but rather an extended op-ed whose content will be familiar to anyone who followed the various "framing" skirmishes of the past few years. As Jessica Palmer wrote in her review, reading Unscientific America is like "speed-dating at a science policy happy hour: a lot of elevator pitches about interesting issues, but when you're done, you don't feel like you really know anything (or anyone!) in depth."
Perhaps this approach will be fruitful in stimulating some discussion (at least if we can get over the controversy spurred by chapters 8 and 9, about "New Atheism" and science blogging, respectively), but I found it to be too shallow. I am not convinced, for instance, that public controversies about evolution, stem cell research, anthropogenic climate change, &c. can be solved by getting more scientists to become media-savvy. These controversies stem from the way personal, religious, and business interests filter (and sometimes distort) scientific information. Even if scientists did tweak the delivery of their message there is no guarantee it would be happily received by the public. It is not so much the message that is the problem as the way it is being transmitted and received.
[For more on this point see the excellent case study of how science, religion, "common sense", and business practices interacted in the book Trying Leviathan, which looks at an 1818 case which hinged upon the question of whether whales were fish or mammals.]
One of the more valuable observations of the book, however, is that there are many more people trained as scientists than jobs in academia. Perhaps these people, with solid background experience in science, would be good candidates for tomorrow's science communicators. The question is how these people might make the transition. As the authors note the mass media is downsizing science coverage to a terrifying degree, and that which is available (at least outside science magazines and venerable institutions like the New York Times) is not particularly good. How can scientists take up the author's challenge of putting more effort into reaching the public if the forums to do so are not available?
As other reviewers have noted the end notes of the book contain more detail than the actual body of the text. This is a shame, especially since the end notes are not well-anchored to the main text. Unless you are really committed to digging into the book it is easier to just skip or skim the endnotes. Couldn't the body of the book have been fleshed out with some of these details and thus made stronger? Certainly there was enough room for it.
If you have been following what Chris and Sheril have been saying on The Intersection over the past few years then you will have a good idea of whether you will like Unscientific America or not. If you tend to agree with them, you will like it, and if not you will be disappointed. It has the potential to foster some discussion about how to improve science popularization but I think we are still waiting for a solid, synthetic work that goes beyond the now-common "Don't be such a scientist!" trope. Scientists with a knack for popularization should be encouraged to continue to communicate with the public, but it is beyond time that we move past the worn "The public is deluded"/"Scientists are cranky and boring" dichotomy if we are going to make any headway.
*Reviews have also appeared at Uncertain Principles, Neurotopia, Pharyngula, Adventures in Ethics and Science, Thoughts From Kansas, and Bioephemera, to name just a few.
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Interesting observations on the book and the debate. One thing that bothers me about the entire "scientific literacy" debate is that it seems to presume there is a certain level of "appropriate" scientific literacy. Don't get me wrong, I wish Americans were much more knowledgeable about evolution, health, and climate change sciences. However, I think if you look more broadly, you'll see that Americans (and probably most people in the world) are broadly ignorant of many fields: geography, law, history, medicine - you name it, Americans probably don't know it. For example, every year or so National Geographic complains that most Americans think the Philippines is in South America, not Southeast Asia. In my own field of law, I've seen surveys suggesting people have no idea what the Constitution's Bill of Rights actually contains (and, no, the Miranda warnings aren't written anywhere in the Constitution). And one need only look at an election campaign to see how woefully ignorant Americans have become about history and politics, often falling for phony political ads. In short, I'm not convinced science just needs a few more communicators to make everything alright.
Giving America the benefit of the doubt, in modern society, with people specializing in narrow niches of their particular fields, it is extremely difficult to become a master of all subjects. Less charitably, the problem is much larger than "scientific literacy." Rather, we should 1) train students to develop better critical reasoning skills so they can parse reliable information from bogus hype, and 2) ideally find some way to filter the media and internet in order to guarantee the quality of information people receive. Most people don't have the time or skill to determine which scientific news sources (of the hundreds of thousands of blogs, newspapers, TV channels, etc) are reliable. I'm realistic enough to know we're not going to censor the internet in any intelligent way, but perhaps some sort of certification process (AAAS-approved or the like).
Al Gore's book "Assault on Reason" talks about these issues in an intelligent manner, although I disagree profoundly with his conclusion that the internet will be our savior (although blogs like Laelaps do give me some hope!).
This is perhaps off base. I have not read the book nor do I intend to. Just to focus on biology. I get the impression that almost everyone who goes to college, with the exceptions of other science majors and engineers, has to take a "General Education" course or course in biology. Now, we have these people, it is hard for them to get away, so we should be able to make 'biology appreciators" out of them. My goal has been that a student finishing the course should think that biology is both important and interesting.
Given this formal access to a large segment of the becoming educated population, is part of the problem that we are not recognizing the importance of the general education science courses and thus not doing the best job we can in terms of resources, faculty, etc. to see that they are successful?
Something I just noticed about this book: the "blame the scientists" thesis pretty much directly contradicts Mooney's earlier book, The Republican War on Science, which was, of course, all about "the way personal, religious, and business interests filter (and sometimes distort) scientific information".
I don't think it's a coincidence that his well-thought and well-researched earlier book was better received than the ignorant rants he's published since he drank the Nisbet kool-aid.
Darn, and I was hoping today you'd post your review of Fossil Hunter.
Among those "business interests" are the wide-circulation glossy "science" magazines, who'll happily monger a manufactroversy in order to move their product. (See, e.g., here and links therein.) I wonder how the training of new, trendy, sound-byte 2.0 specialists will fix that.
One thing I just don't get: why do the people who keep insisting "Never alienate your audience!" keep on doing exactly that when talking to scientists?
M&K keep going on about the Martyrdom of St. Sagan. As the maxim goes, the plural of anecdote is not data, and here, "anecdote" is pretty much in the singular. I would have preferred to see more systematic study on the question of how scientists actually feel about popularization. What's the use in looking at the most extreme case — one of the most dedicated popularizers in, well, ever — and taking his colleagues' reaction to him as the typical state of affairs?
And that's assuming, of course, that M&K's little hagiography is historically accurate. As Jason Rosenhouse wrote, after Harvard denied Sagan tenure,
While we're throwing anecdotes around, it is tempting to compare Sagan's story with that of a friend and colleague. Isaac Asimov, indefatigable popularizer, left the active teaching faculty of Boston University because his superiors in the administration couldn't stand him, and the feeling was mutual. He had tenure, though, so they couldn't take away his title. . . and a later, more genial administration promoted him to full professor, even though he hadn't even taught classes during the interim. Apparently, once a couple officious jerks were out of the way, having the Great Explainer affiliated with your university was a good thing.
If martyrdom means a full professorship and a closet full of honorary doctorates, sign me up and throw me in the ring with the lions.
It would be foolish to take Isaac Asimov's career path as a model for all young scientists to follow. (I write an awful lot, more in fact than most physics students I've met, but I know I couldn't keep up the Asimovian output rate.) But isn't it equally foolish to think the resentment generated by a Sagan-magnitude star would apply to everyone who wrote a book or two?
(Rosenhouse makes the additional point that attitudes toward public outreach and such vary considerably between the top-tier research institutions and the "teaching institutions that also do research". Yeah, a staid discussion about the academic job market is probably less dramatic than tales of the unjustly persecuted outsider, but it's what we actually need to have.)
I've a sample size of one; however, while the Good Doctor was an excellent popularizer, he was described to me by one of his former students (father of one of my college classmates) as "the worst professor I ever had". The "officious jerks" may have had the best interest of the students at heart. And shifting him from mediocre instructor to brilliant popularizer and grandmaster SF writer probably was a good thing overall.
I'm sure there were students at Cornell who couldn't stand Sagan because he was stoned during office hours, or whatever.
(This is rapidly diverging from whatever point I originally had, but anyway: Asimov's publications in the peer-reviewed biochemistry journals were not outstanding by any means, so whether or not he was good at teaching, science as a whole probably won out when he transferred to full-time writing.)
As I understand it, Harvard hires bright young new hires on a three year contract. At the end of that contract, the person is evaluated. If they are the best in the world, they are retained. If not, they are terminated. I know a couple of excellent colleagues who did not make it at harvard.
This would hardly surprise me. I lucked out and had some pretty good "X for non-majors" courses, but I've also seen 101- and 102-level classes fobbed off on people who had nothing near the skills necessary to teach that audience.
Thanks for the comments, everyone. I had a much longer, in-depth review planned, but I ended up scrapping it. I decided to try and keep things short. There are plenty of long reviews elsewhere if you are looking for something more in-depth.
I think Trying Leviathan is a really good alternative to U.A.. It has definitely shaped my perspective about science communication. We can fiddle with the message all we want, but we cannot always (often?) control how that message will be received. Improving "science literacy" might require shifts in politics, religion, &c. that we influence but not control.
From Blake Stacey "..but I've also seen 101- and 102-level classes fobbed off on people who had nothing near the skills necessary to teach that audience."
That has been my experience with a lot of courses at my college. It has been severely irritating to watch the teacher explain simple concepts with very bad, biased examples. A lot of these teachers seem to be in psychology and sociology fields, but there have also been a line of extremely bad math professors. (Such to a degree that I have to retake several of my math classes--as I apparently learned bad math.)
I believe the best class I have ever taken was astrobiology, a non-major course. The teacher was very good, and was patient with his non-science students.
New media guys like me can filter and funnel interesting material to a wider audience. Talented traditional media writers can weave interesting stories and convey at least some lessons. But the larger the interface between research scientists and the general public, the easier all that is, and without it, there's not a heck of a lot we can do.
If scientists -- excluding that handful of scientists here at Scienceblogs, Discover, and other orgs that do make an effort - don't make an effort to communicate better or in greater numbers, who will do it for them? You're absolutely right that antiscience forces are funded and career tracked to a degree that scientists can't match in sheer scope, but if they don't try, who will?