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Hello, all:

I found this interesting and well argued.

Happy New Year to you all.

Eric Siegel
Director and
Chief Content Officer
New York Hall of Science
www.nyscience.org
(718) 699-0005 x 317
esiegel at nyscience dot org


> Opinion
> Your beliefs vs. the facts By Thomas W. Martin
> Thu Jan 3, 3:00 AM ET
>
>
>
> Tempe, Ariz. - Twenty years ago, as a college freshman, I knew
> precisely what it meant to be scientifically literate. In fact, I held
> an objective measure in the palm of my hand, courtesy of E.D. Hirsch.
> His book, "Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know," was
> a bestselling paperback, and conveniently listed thousands of names,
> terms, and phrases with which every educated person – he informed us –
> should be familiar.
>
> After plodding through the entire list during the course of an
> afternoon, I smugly discovered I could easily define each item of
> scientific vocabulary. Fuzziness about literary examples such as
> "Aeschylus" caused me no discomfort, but inability to rigorously
> describe "aerobic respiration" in the biochemical sense (not the
> superficial, then-popular Jane Fonda sense) would have induced severe
> nerdish embarrassment.
>
> The wrong kind of scientific literacy
> Today I teach science and its history at an honors college and am
> naturally far less confident about how to measure scientific literacy.
> The students who enter our program possess not only the expected high
> SAT scores, but also perfect or near-perfect scores on a battery of
> Advanced Placement exams, particularly in the basic sciences.
>
> A noticeable portion of those students also believe in the literal
> truth of certain ancient accounts of Earth's history that, to put it
> bluntly, directly contradict mountains of well-established data from
> geology, climatology, and biology. Without rehashing the ongoing
> culture wars surrounding this topic (and certainly without berating my
> own students), this serves as a useful place to begin tackling the
> notion of "scientific literacy."
>
> We frequently hear the refrain that if America simply raised the level
> of science courses, taught our children more subjects, and/or gave
> them more hands-on lab work, it could ensure the production of a
> citizenry capable of understanding an increasingly complex world. They
> would then be prepared to make the difficult choices of the 21st
> century.
>
> However, my incoming students' technical mastery already exceeds what
> even the most rosy-eyed optimist could realistically dream for America
> (or the globe) as a whole. In other words, even if a citizenry were to
> achieve an impressive degree of scientific literacy – construed as raw
> conceptual competence – it would still be entirely possible for those
> same citizens to routinely subordinate scientific evidence to their
> own deeply ingrained cultural suppositions.
>
> Evidence blindness
> More important, the phenomenon of "evidence blindness" is hardly
> restricted to inexperienced students, or even to ideological segments
> of the general population. To varying degrees, it can be found across
> the spectrum, including some very striking examples in the realm of
> professional science itself.
>
> As noted last year in Seed magazine, leading disciplinary
> practitioners who feel threatened by unorthodox new findings will
> sometimes band together to suppress such information, with the
> explicit intention of blocking its appearance in scientific journals.
>
> While these luminaries undoubtedly convince themselves they are merely
> upholding the integrity of their fields, the truth is that they (in
> quintessentially human fashion) are often more interested in
> preserving cherished beliefs than in encouraging potentially
> disruptive discoveries.
>
> Over the past few decades, growing evidence from cognitive science has
> revealed significant limits on the ability of individuals to criticize
> their own viewpoints. Even the most analytically gifted and
> experienced among us are susceptible to bias and self-deception to an
> extent that we (fittingly enough) generally fail to appreciate.
>
> As psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it in his book "Stumbling on
> Happiness," "Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a
> circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those
> boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective."
>
> The reason science does manage to be astonishingly effective is not
> because large groups are automatically wiser or less prone to
> self-deception than individuals. History adequately demonstrates that,
> if anything, the opposite is more nearly the case.
>
> Science works because its core dynamics – not its methods or
> techniques per se – are rooted in pitting intellects against one
> another. Science eventually yields impressive answers because it
> compels smart people to incessantly try to disprove the ideas
> generated by other smart people.
>
> The goal of science is to find those ideas that can withstand the long
> and hard barrage of evidence-based argument. That lesson must be
> experienced anew by the members of each generation, irrespective of
> their careers.
>
> Mastery of scientific concepts and theories is a necessary starting
> point, but it serves only as a prerequisite to joining the
> never-ending dialogue. Students must learn firsthand how to both
> imaginatively create new hypotheses and dispassionately critique them.
>
> Many commentators have rightly implored us to make certain that young
> people encounter the "thrill" of discovery. While this is undeniably
> desirable, it is arguably even more crucial that they experience the
> agony (if only on a modest scale) of having a pet hypothesis
> demolished by facts.
>
> Several current presidential candidates have insisted that they oppose
> the modern scientific account of Earth's natural history as a matter
> of principle. In the present cultural climate, altering one's beliefs
> in response to anything (facts included) is considered a sign of
> weakness.
>
> Students must be convinced that changing one's mind in light of the
> evidence is not weakness: Changing one's mind is the essence of
> intellectual growth.
>
> By encouraging students into evidence-based debates with one another,
> this mode of interaction, like any other, can become habitual. After
> being consistently challenged by their peers, most students eventually
> see that attempts to free themselves from facts are a hollow, and
> fundamentally precarious, form of "freedom."
>
> Value in criticizing ideas
> In an era in which we tremble at offending the sensibilities of our
> neighbors, students must comprehend that it is not only possible but
> absolutely vital that we criticize one another's ideas about reality
> firmly yet civilly. They must do this despite clear cases of prominent
> scientists falling into petty, acerbic (and therefore
> counterproductive) exchanges.
>
> The responsibility for fostering scientific literacy of this sort –
> that is, literacy construed as an ongoing commitment to evidence over
> preconception – falls upon all of us in our discussions both formal
> and informal, both public and private. When scientific celebrities
> fail to set a good example for students, it is especially incumbent
> upon the rest of us to set them back on the proverbial right track,
> rather than to reflexively hasten their derailment.
>
> We do our children no favors by going easy on them – or, more to the
> point – allowing them to go easy on each other. Nature has a way of
> being far tougher.
>
> If we can create environments in which they can safely have small
> epiphanies in the light of evidence, they will be motivated to share
> those lessons. They will then be scientifically literate in the sense
> that scientific discourse will continue to endure and flourish. And
> that is the sense that ultimately matters.
>
> • Thomas W. Martin is an honors faculty fellow at Barrett Honors
> College at Arizona State University in Tempe. This was the winning
> essay of the Second Annual Seed Science Writing Contest, published in
> Seed, Issue 12, September/October 2007. Included here by permission.


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