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Many Americans can tell us who the finalists of American Idol and Dancing With The Stars are, but cannot tell us why Watson and Crick are important, what it means to say that viruses mutate and why that is important, or what positive and negative reinforcement are and their relevance to human behavior. In addition, the U.S. is the only developed country in which evolution is a controversial issue rather than settled science. The problem is not just one of ignorance of facts; it is also one of the inability to adequately reason as the U.S. faces the problems of health care, global warming, energy, and education, among others. At the same time, according to a National Science Foundation 2008 report, only 15 percent of the public follows science news “very closely.” Science ranks behind 10 other subjects in terms of people's interest.
As Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum demonstrate in their book “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future,” there is plenty of blame to go around. The primary sources of the problem are the mass media, politicians and scientists themselves.
According to Mooney and Kirshenbaum, the 1996 Telecommunications Act that deregulated media companies and allowed further mergers and consolidations, was a disaster for serious public-interest journalism and for science in particular. The now very large media conglomerates needed to satisfy their shareholders' expectations of consistent profits. Thus informative science content, which could not compete with such fare as celebrity news, was not deemed worth retaining. The fragmentation of media by the many cable channels, the Internet, blogs, Facebook and Twitter makes it easy to avoid any serious news. Thus, say Mooney and Kirshenbaum, “there's a crisis today in the realm of science communication.” And scientists have not made communicating with the public much of a priority.
Politicians are an important part of the problem. They reflect their constituents' and society's lack of interest in science. If science can be used to help a politician, for example, by establishing a large research facility in the representative's district and the senator's state, they can be counted on to sing the praises of science. Conversely, they may denigrate scientists' findings if they run counter to constituents' interests, for example in the area of energy policy.
The primary solution to the problem of unscientific America, Mooney and Kirshenbaum argue, is scientists learning to explain the relevance of science to Americans' everyday life, and scientists relating how science can help solve society's problems. This approach does not mean filling people's heads with myriad facts and figures. But that does not mean no facts should be known. An important audience would be politicians, to whom scientists should reach out. This would require a good deal of work, particularly since the scientific community has not invested much in such an endeavor. The goal should be a redefinition of the role of the scientist in public affairs. What is needed is a new category of scientists who can frame policy issues and who understand the political pressures inherent in the legislative and policy-making arenas. They will also understand the importance of packaging science issues in such a way that politicians can recognize the packaging as media friendly.
What is proposed here would be a significant change in the behavior of most scientists because communicating the relevance of science to the public has been a low priority for scientists. Thus most scientists are not trained in such communication and there is little reward for engaging in it. Indeed some scientists denigrate such behavior. In contrast, Mooney and Kirshenbaum advocate development of a group of scientists who can be “ambassadors” to our larger society.
It is easy to disparage the public's ignorance of and lack of interest in science. But this is akin to blaming the victim.
Peter Lamal is an emeritus professor of psychology at UNC Charlotte.
