From the FEB/MAR 2006 issue of Seed. On newsstands now.
Credit: Lise Gagne
I recently spent two and a half months during a book tour across the United States speaking about political attacks on science. At universities from Caltech to Oberlin, I heard a recurring series of questions from my audiences: How can scientists combat the political distortion of science? How can they defend evolution? How can they win back America, and better translate what they know for the public?
These aren’t easy questions to answer, since they go beyond hard and fast matters of scientific accuracy and into the more nebulous realm of political communication and strategy. So over the course of my travels, I began to formulate my response, mindful of the conditions that have prompted such a political awakening among scientists in the first place.
What the scientific community—not just scientists, mind you, but people who care about the role science plays in building a better society—is realizing is that scientific knowledge itself is politically vulnerable. We’ve seen the Bush administration’s assaults on science on issues ranging from climate change to Plan B emergency contraception (the “morning after” pill); we’re witnessing a newly resurgent anti-evolutionist movement that’s spreading community-to-community and state-to-state. And we’re frustrated with a national media that seeks to hear “both sides,” even on subjects (like evolution) where no scientific debate actually exists.
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Coming to grips with science’s newly exposed political and cultural vulnerability will require scientists to emphasize a rather different set of skills than they’re used to privileging. Although it’s not true of all scientists, too many have grown accustomed to the security of their labs and university communities, occasionally lamenting the American public’s poor understanding of science but doing little in a concerted way to improve it. And small wonder: American science rewards the publication of peer-reviewed research, but offers little incentive for scientists to communicate and translate what they know to the public. So scientists in the US have little practice when it comes to crafting a message or winning a political debate, and their inexperience sometimes leads to ill-advised actions that have the tendency to backfire.
It’s becoming possible to craft a communications strategy that’s based on a rich understanding of how the human mind actually operates.
Consider the scientific community’s engagement (or lack thereof) with the anti-evolutionist Kansas State Board of Education. When the Board called hearings on evolution, the scientific community boycotted. When the Board began to rewrite state science standards, compromising biology education, the National Academy of Sciences denied the Kansas Board permission to use their copyrighted educational material. The scientific community’s distrust of the Kansas Board is understandable. But such actions make scientists look like haughty snobs and elitists who simply refuse to engage with ordinary Americans—an already prevalent stereotype that hardly needs reinforcing.