communicating science
pharyngula | September 18, 2008My Denver talk is up on youtube. I will be stunned if anyone manages to listen to it — the sound is a bit echoey, and I went on way too long.
pharyngula | September 14, 2008Let's make it a musical Sunday morning for the godless! Tristero, occasional commenter here and regular writer at Hullabaloo, is actually a professional composer in real life, and he has been busy.
I had wanted to do a piece with a scientific subject for a very long time. Many years ago, someone in the New Yorker- very likely Richard Dawkins - noted that while religion had its masterpieces like Bach's St Matthew Passion, science had no comparable works. That struck me as an amusing, and exciting, challenge. I knew I could never write anything remotely approaching the St. Matthew, but the…
laelaps | September 11, 2008As reported today in the Guardian, the director of education of the Royal Society, Michael Reiss, believes that creationism should be brought into the science classroom as an alternate "worldview" to evolution. It is not a misconception, fairy tale, or jumble of nonsense, Reiss argues, but just another way of looking at the world. What a bunch of bunk...
For years creationists have argued that the long public argument over evolution is not one of science, but of worldviews. We have all the same facts, they say, but we look at them through different "glasses." Reiss' position plays right into…
pharyngula | September 11, 2008We have a little argument going on in one of the pointless poll threads. The question being asked is, "Do you believe in the Big Bang?" Some people are indignant (and correct!) and protesting that their views on scientific matters are not a matter of opinion, but of impartial assessment of the evidence; these views are independent of personal belief, and are also held provisionally, subject to revision in the face of better evidence.
These people are also being infuriatingly pedantic, and are expressing an attitude that interferes with the communication of ideas. Don't sputter out a bunch of…
laelaps | September 1, 2008When do you think that the following passage was first published?
John Doe guesses that evolution is true, but he rather wishes it were not. ... John Doe suspects from head-lines in his newspaper that evolution is a debatable theory, that it is being overthrown every six months, and that it may be discarded before long.
Those of you who saw the list of the new items I picked up yesterday probably guessed correctly; that the quote came from the 1925 popular book Evolution for John Doe by Henshaw Ward. Although written in 1925 it still (unfortunately) relevant, particularly when newspapers that…
laelaps | August 28, 2008I'm not really a fan of the Templeton Foundation. In the past they've contributed quite a bit of money to the intelligent design crowd and folks who want to foster a teleological view of evolution, and the work resulting from the funded projects appears to be generally unimpressive. When John Templeton, the figure that started the foundation, died last month Nature ran an article about the foundation and what Templeton set out to achieve. Discussing Templeton's aims, the article reads;
He believed institutional religion to be antiquated, and hoped a dialogue with researchers might bring about…
laelaps | August 27, 2008There's going to be a lot of talk about Darwin in the coming year. It's practically impossible to talk about evolution without tipping our hat to him in some way, but as Carl Zimmer recently pointed out during a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution (which he was kind enough to post) what we know about evolution does not begin and end with Darwin. The point is familiar but it still deserves reiteration, particularly since many efforts to communicate evolutionary science to the public fixate on Darwin and Darwin alone. As Carl himself said;
Darwin deserves celebrating, but that doesn't mean we…
pharyngula | August 25, 2008Any science journalists out there? You might not want to read this webcomic. The rest of you…sure, go have a laugh. It's rather accurate.
laelaps | August 25, 2008In a week I'll be headed back into the dusty, faded-pastel halls of higher learning for the fall semester, and given that I expect many of you will be doing the same I thought I would open up a thread about evolution education. As I have said multiple times, just because creationism isn't being taught doesn't mean that students are receiving a firm grounding in evolutionary biology. In my own experience, during high school evolution was a quick sub-unit that was paired with population genetics toward the end of the spring. Even in college courses I attended, evolution was relegated to the…
laelaps | August 15, 2008Olivia Judson has a short column in the opinion section of the New York Times about the importance of teaching evolution in public schools. Like Judson, I am frustrated that evolution is often taught as a distinct biological phenomena at the end of the year, hardly presented as the concept that makes sense of the rest of biology (as Theodosius Dobzhansky once said). Rather than being a powerful idea that connects what is being taught it is often treated as little more than a footnote, if it is mentioned at all. Just because a school isn't mired in a creationist controversy doesn't mean that…
laelaps | August 14, 2008Now this is pretty damn cool. Peter McGrath of the Beagle Project Blog liveblogged the airing of the 2nd episode of Richard Dawkins' The Genius of Charles Darwin (I posted a few thoughts last week here). Michael Barton and Richard Carter show up, too, and it's definitely some interesting commentary on the documentary.
I still have to liveblog my 2nd viewing of the first episode (and I hope to do the same for the other two parts), but after watching the first half of the 2nd episode last night I have to say that I'm not very impressed by this series. I can see now why many critics of Dawkins…
laelaps | August 14, 2008I never quite know what to say when people call me a scientist. I take it as a compliment, certainly, but I'm usually unsure as to whether I can apply the word to myself or not. Is a scientist defined by their journey through the academic meat grinder? By expert knowledge? By skeptical thought? The popular imagery of scientists is often of a socially-inept nerd or of a mad scientist, both archetypes representing scientists as being so detached from the public that they almost literally don't speak the same language. As I've said before I find this characterization unfortunate, but in order to…
laelaps | August 12, 2008I try to be careful when using the term "ignorant." The dictionary definition could apply to anyone who is "unlearned" or "uneducated" in a particular area, i.e. I am nearly completely ignorant when it comes to quantum physics. I have always felt that the common usage of the term is more charged, however; that it not only indicates a lack of education but a lack of desire to learn anything about the subject at all. This probably stems from the root word, "ignore," but whatever it's derivation it is certainly not a compliment. It was somewhat unsettling, then, to read a review paper by an…
pzminion | August 12, 2008Posted by LisaJ
I find it astounding in this day and age, with the many grand scientific discoveries and advances we've seen and in our increasingly technologically dependent world, that a large proportion of our population (at least in Canada and the US, with which I have more personal experience) seems uninterested in understanding and learning about science. We have a wealth of information available at our fingertips and an educational system with the potential to accommodate any type of scientific mind, but yet we science-minded individuals are not in the majority. We are a culture that…
pzminion | August 9, 2008Just for fun, contrast Nisbet's latest wank-fest with the spat going on between Libby Purves and Richard Dawkins in the Times. (also see Libby's rebuttal).
In her criticism of the Dawkins, Purves invokes a false dilemma akin to that of our domestic framing expert, but I note a conspicuous absence of vituperative smugness in her approach.
~Danio
pzminion | August 8, 2008Matt Nisbet is railing against PZ and the image of the Angry Atheist again. In fairness, PZ would probably choose to comment on this on Matt's turf, rather than linking to it from Pharyngula. But PZ's on vacation, and I'm not inclined to be so noble, especially given the exceedingly smarmy tone of Nisbet's post:
For sure, atheists for a long time have been unfairly stereotyped in the mainstream media and in popular culture. But we also have a lot of lousy self-proclaimed spokespeople who do damage to our public image. They're usually angry, grumpy, uncharismatic male loners with a passion…
pharyngula | August 6, 2008Peter Wood has an interesting commentary in the Chronicle today. At least, it starts out well, but by the end it turns into a bit of a train wreck. The good part is a discussion of a growing deficiency in science and math training in the US. The usual ignorant reaction to this problem is to flog the students and demand more drill-and-practice in the classroom, more testing, incentives and punishments for the schools … the familiar Republican litany of No Child Left Behind, which treats the problem as a superficial one that can be corrected with more multiple-choice tests, or by marshaling…
laelaps | August 6, 2008Popularizers of science are faced with a daunting problem when it comes to communicating their enthusiasm for nature; their audience doesn't speak the same language. I don't mean this to say that scientists are inherently poor communicators or all deliver jargon-packed lectures that extinguish interest. Rather, many people don't have a grasp of the basic "alphabet" of science, and it is sometimes difficult to keep in mind that what you or I might consider a "basic" fact is something that is not so easily grasped to someone who hasn't heard it before. This is made all the more difficult when…