communicating science
pharyngula | July 28, 2010JL Vernon is lobbying to have Huffpo dedicate a section of their undeservedly popular, cheesy website to science. He makes a superficially reasonable argument: to work within the belly of the beast to promote good science, in opposition to the tripe they usually publish. I'm sympathetic, really I am, but I see the Huffpo as a dead cause.
I also think Vernon fails to grasp the problem here. For instance, he complains about the refusal of anti-creationists to debate the opposition.
The most resounding message emerging from the opposition is the idea that having "real science" share a platform…
pharyngula | July 14, 2010Bleh. MSNBC is running a terrible article that claims they have "proof" that chickens came before eggs. It's just an awful mess, and one of the scientists is at least partly responsible.
The scientists found that a protein found only in a chicken's ovaries is necessary for the formation of the egg, according to the paper Wednesday. The egg can therefore only exist if it has been created inside a chicken.
…
"It had long been suspected that the egg came first but now we have the scientific proof that shows that in fact the chicken came first," said Dr. Colin Freeman, from Sheffield University…
pharyngula | July 12, 2010But the part where he gets in a sloppy threesome with the hydrogen twins is too racy!
pharyngula | June 28, 2010But I can't. I am quite possibly the worst dancer in our galaxy (notice the nod to my self-esteem: I can acknowledge that there might be an entity worse at dancing somewhere in the universe). But still, this announcement spoke to my inner Balanchine.
Who said scientists can't dance? The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is proud to announce the third annual "Dance Your Ph.D." interpretative dance video contest. The contest, which is open to anyone with a Ph.D. or pursuing a Ph.D. in a science-related field, asks scientists to transform their research into an…
pharyngula | June 28, 2010Chris Mooney has another vacuous op-ed in the Washington Post. It's aggravating because he actually starts out well, saying stuff that I agree with entirely, and then suffers a massive failure of either nerve or logic to offer meaningless noise as a solution.
The part I agree with is that he points out that education is not the only answer to our problems with creationism, climate change denial, and anti-vaccination movements. Many of the noisemakers behind these denialist machines are quite intelligent and well educated, and there isn't a clean and simple correlation between, for instance,…
pharyngula | June 26, 2010The Evolution 2010 meetings are taking place in Portland, Oregon as you read this (unless, of course, you're reading this in The Future, in which case they're all done) and Jen McCreight is attending and presenting there. She attended a symposium on communicating science which, unfortunately, turned out to be one-sided atheist bashing and the promotion of theistic accommodation — no dissenting views were offered, despite the fact that us ungodly assertive atheists are such a prominent part of the voice of evolution that they needed to discourage attendees from listening to us.
I get this…
laelaps | June 18, 2010
I can't help it - every time I pass a bookstore, I wonder whether they are going to carry my book when it comes out this autumn. November is still a long way away - summer does not even officially begin until next week - but I can't help but wonder where my book will pop up and how it will be received. It is both exciting and anxiety-inducing.
I try not to speculate too much about what will happen when Written in Stone comes out. It is not even entirely finished yet. Right now the original text and scribbled margin notes from the last copyedited version are being transformed into page proofs…
pharyngula | June 7, 2010I am no longer the Humanist of the Year, but have been officially succeeded by the eminent Bill Nye the Science Guy. Hemant has Nye's acceptance speech — I don't feel sad at all given the distinguished company I'm in.
It's a good talk, discussing how we need good stories to communicate science. And Nye talks the talk and walks the walk!
pharyngula | June 4, 2010People were apparently rather peeved about Morgan Freeman's appearance on the Daily Show on Wednesday night (that link is to the whole episode; Freeman appears at about 15 minutes in). He's narrating a new science show that, in the clip shown, seems to be mainly about physics and cosmology. After talking a bit about the show, they get down to the problematic bit: Stewart asks if scientists know what happened at the beginning of the universe, and Freeman basically says they don't; that there are different scientists with different ideas, some contentiousness, and some outright ignorance about…
pharyngula | June 4, 2010
These do seem to be a bit polarizing, with a strong I-hate-autotuning camp…I rather like most of them, although this particular example is a bit weak — autotuning doesn't help much with long passages of tech talk, and this one has it.
It doesn't help that I'm not that keen on sending manned missions to Mars.
pharyngula | May 29, 2010John Timmer has written up a relevant paper on the tactics people use to avoid scientific conclusions. When science doesn't feed your biases, reject science.
A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term "scientific impotence"—the decision that science can't actually address the issue at hand properly. It finds evidence that not only supports the scientific impotence model, but suggests that it could be contagious. Once a subject has decided that a given topic is off limits to science, they tend to start applying the…
pharyngula | May 28, 2010A while back, I gave a keynote talk at an evo-devo conference, and one of the things I told them was that public outreach was important, and one tool to get your message out was blogging. Telling that to a mob of working scientists who have other pressing matters occupying them is dangerous, but I also told them of one easy way to spread the word about science: make your students do it, and coopt existing educational frameworks to make it happen. The specific suggestion I made was that graduate student journal clubs should be drafted to make writing a blog entry about that week's paper a part…
pharyngula | May 22, 2010Somebody ought to publish this 15 page comic about the anti-vaccination movement…and send it around to pediatricians' waiting rooms.
pharyngula | May 4, 2010The advocates of accommodationism and apologetics at Biologos have a new article up claiming that scientists ought not to advocate for science — we're supposed to emphasize uncertainty. That's lame; it feeds into the sterile stereotype of the scientist as some kind of dispassionate drone with little enthusiasm for ideas. As Jerry Coyne explains, it's also hypocritical of a site that promotes religion without hesitation to be arguing that scientists should be more ambiguous.
That's all we need, is for science to be made more boring, dry, and ambiguous. You'd almost think the Templetonites over…
laelaps | May 3, 2010Way back in 1989 (I was only six!), Eugenie Scott and other members of the National Center for Science Education got together for a mock debate pitting evolutionary scientists against creationist impersonators at the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. How things have changed (well, except young earth creationist arguments)...
pharyngula | April 29, 2010At last, some research in communicating evolution that I can agree with, because it corresponds to my prior experience and biases! Which is exactly the wrong reason to agree with it, of course, but it's a start, and with some significant reservations, is an interesting foundation to argue over.
Here's the abstract. It's a paper describing general strategies for winning over participants in public debates about science, which basically says, in terms more familiar to us, that waffling accommodationists are losers.
Public debates driven by incomplete scientific data where nobody can claim…
laelaps | April 27, 2010
Fossil fish from the Eocene age Green River Formation in Colorado. From Wikipedia.
I am pretty tired of Richard Dawkins putting down paleontology. In his 2004 tome The Ancestor's Tale, as well as in his latest book The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins felt compelled to cast the fossil record as an unnecessary bonus when it comes to demonstrating the reality of evolution. "The evidence for evolution would be entirely secure," he asserts in the latter book, "even if not a single corpse had ever fossilized." While this statement contains a crumb of truth - we have learned much about evolution…
pharyngula | April 22, 2010We haven't fired up the framing wars in a while, fortunately, but I just have to point you to this interview with Frank Luntz, the Republican Party's favorite spin doctor. "Communications Specialist" apparently means simply being able to lie persuasively to the public — it's the antithesis of what scientists should want to do.
pharyngula | April 19, 2010The Ask a Biologist site has been relaunched and revamped, and it's the perfect place for teachers and parents to send kids with difficult questions about biology. It's really easy: just go to the site, click on the "ask" button, and type in a question…and with a little patience, eventually a qualified expert will try to answer it. Give it a try!
askabiologist.org.uk is back, bigger and better, to answer your questions about all things biological. We are a group of over 60 professional biologists; Ph.D. students, Post-docs, lecturers and professors, who volunteer to give their time to answer…
laelaps | April 14, 2010Off the top of your head, how many female paleontologists can you name?
Hopefully, thanks to the recent publication of The Fossil Hunter and Remarkable Creatures, the brilliant 19th century fossil collector Mary Anning should spring to mind, but it seems to me that women are underrepresented in discussions of paleontology. In books, documentaries, news reports, and other popularizations, male authorities (from Georges Cuvier and William Buckland to Bob Bakker and Jack Horner today) take center stage much more often than women, and this is despite the fact that there are (and have been) many…