[We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from
climate change to vaccinations—faces furious opposition. Some even have doubts
about the moon landing.]
By Joel Achenbach
 |
| Photograph by Richard Barnes |
There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic
masterpiece Dr. Strangelove in which Jack D. Ripper, an
American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet
Union, unspools his paranoid worldview—and the explanation for why he drinks
“only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol”—to Lionel
Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force.
Ripper: Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation?
Fluoridation of water?
Mandrake: Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.
Ripper: Well, do you know what it is?
Mandrake: No. No, I don’t know what it is. No.
Ripper: Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously
conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?
The movie came out in 1964, by which time the health benefits of fluoridation
had been thoroughly established, and antifluoridation conspiracy theories could
be the stuff of comedy. So you might be surprised to learn that, half a century
later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013 citizens in
Portland, Oregon, one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate
their water, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like
the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that
fluoride could be harmful to human health.
Actually fluoride is a
natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking water
systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay—a cheap and safe way to
improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brusher or not.
That’s the scientific and medical consensus.
To which some people in
Portland, echoing antifluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t
believe you.
We live in an age when
all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to
the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition.
Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of
research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so
many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put
something in the water to make people argumentative. And there’s so much talk
about the trend these days—in books, articles, and academic conferences—that
science doubt itself has become a pop-culture meme. In the recent movieInterstellar, set
in a futuristic, downtrodden America where NASA has been forced into hiding,
school textbooks say the Apollo moon landings were faked.
In a sense all this is
not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never
before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in
rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we
can’t easily analyze.
We’re asked to accept,
for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified
organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it
isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more
dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to
some people the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad
scientists running amok—and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, they
talk about Frankenfood.
The world crackles with
real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t
easy. Should we be afraid that the Ebola virus, which is spread only by direct
contact with bodily fluids, will mutate into an airborne superplague? The
scientific consensus says that’s extremely unlikely: No virus has ever been
observed to completely change its mode of transmission in humans, and there’s
zero evidence that the latest strain of Ebola is any different. But type
“airborne Ebola” into an Internet search engine, and you’ll enter a dystopia
where this virus has almost supernatural powers, including the power to kill us
all.
In this bewildering world
we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s
what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia
McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the
prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose
to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.” But that method doesn’t
come naturally to most of us. And so we run into trouble, again and again.
The trouble goes way
back, of course. The scientific method leads
us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes
hard to swallow. In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth
spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine.
He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense—because it
sure looks like the sun’s going around the Earth, and you can’t feel the Earth
spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later
Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved
from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes,
whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So
is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we
all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of
the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate.
Even when we
intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our
intuitions—what researchers call our naive beliefs. A recent study by Andrew
Shtulman of Occidental College showed that even students with an advanced
science education had a hitch in their mental gait when asked to affirm or deny
that humans are descended from sea animals or that Earth goes around the sun.
Both truths are counterintuitive. The students, even those who correctly marked
“true,” were slower to answer those questions than questions about whether
humans are descended from tree-dwelling creatures (also true but easier to
grasp) or whether the moon goes around the Earth (also true but intuitive).
Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we
repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our
brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.
Most of us do that by
relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than
statistics. We might get a prostate-specific antigen test, even though it’s no
longer generally recommended, because it caught a close friend’s cancer—and we
pay less attention to statistical evidence, painstakingly compiled through
multiple studies, showing that the test rarely saves lives but triggers many
unnecessary surgeries. Or we hear about a cluster of cancer cases in a town
with a hazardous waste dump, and we assume pollution caused the cancers. Yet
just because two things happened together doesn’t mean one caused the other,
and just because events are clustered doesn’t mean they’re not still random.
We have trouble digesting
randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning. Science warns us, however,
that we can deceive ourselves. To be confident there’s a causal connection
between the dump and the cancers, you need statistical analysis showing that
there are many more cancers than would be expected randomly, evidence that the
victims were exposed to chemicals from the dump, and evidence that the
chemicals really can cause cancer.
Even for scientists, the
scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they’re vulnerable
to what they call confirmation bias—the tendency to look for and see only
evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us,
they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them. Once
their results are published, if they’re important enough, other scientists will
try to reproduce them—and, being congenitally skeptical and competitive, will
be very happy to announce that they don’t hold up. Scientific results are
always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment
or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or absolute
certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.
Sometimes scientists fall
short of the ideals of the scientific method. Especially in biomedical
research, there’s a disturbing trend toward results that can’t be reproduced
outside the lab that found them, a trend that has prompted a push for greater
transparency about how experiments are conducted. Francis Collins, the director
of the National Institutes of Health, worries about the “secret
sauce”—specialized procedures, customized software, quirky ingredients—that
researchers don’t share with their colleagues. But he still has faith in the
larger enterprise.
“Science will find the
truth,” Collins says. “It may get it wrong the first time and maybe the second
time, but ultimately it will find the truth.” That provisional quality of
science is another thing a lot of people have trouble with. To some climate
change skeptics, for example, the fact that a few scientists in the 1970s were worried
(quite reasonably, it seemed at the time) about the possibility of a coming ice
age is enough to discredit the concern about global warming now.
Last fall the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
consists of hundreds of scientists operating under the auspices of the United
Nations, released its fifth report in the past 25 years. This one repeated
louder and clearer than ever the consensus of the world’s scientists: The
planet’s surface temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the
past 130 years, and human actions, including the burning of fossil fuels, are
extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the warming since the
mid-20th century. Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage
than in other countries—retain doubts about that consensus or believe that
climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free
market and industrial society generally. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one
of the most powerful Republican voices on environmental matters, has long
declared global warming a hoax.
The idea that hundreds of
scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a vast hoax is
laughable—scientists love to debunk one another. It’s very clear, however, that
organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately
tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by
promoting a few skeptics.
The news media give
abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists,
and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full
of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses. Not so. The (boring) truth is
that it usually advances incrementally, through the steady accretion of data
and insights gathered by many people over many years. So it has been with the
consensus on climate change. That’s not about to go poof with the next
thermometer reading.
But industry PR, however
misleading, isn’t enough to explain why only 40 percent of Americans, according
to the most recent poll from the Pew Research Center, accept that human
activity is the dominant cause of global warming.
The “science
communication problem,” as it’s blandly called by the scientists who study it,
has yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe—and
why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus. It’s not that they
can’t grasp it, according to Dan Kahan of Yale University. In one study he
asked 1,540 Americans, a representative sample, to rate the threat of climate
change on a scale of zero to ten. Then he correlated that with the subjects’
science literacy. He found that higher literacy was associated with stronger
views—at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on
climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use
scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by
their worldview.
Americans fall into two
basic camps, Kahan says. Those with a more “egalitarian” and “communitarian”
mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to
something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see
the risks of climate change. In contrast, people with a “hierarchical” and
“individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like
government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about
climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to—some kind
of tax or regulation to limit emissions.
In the U.S., climate
change somehow has become a litmus test that identifies you as belonging to one
or the other of these two antagonistic tribes. When we argue about it, Kahan
says, we’re actually arguing about who we are, what our crowd is. We’re
thinking, People like us believe this. People like that do not believe this.
For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it’s not irrational to reject
established climate science: Accepting it wouldn’t change the world, but it
might get him thrown out of his tribe.
“Take a barber in a rural
town in South Carolina,” Kahan has written. “Is it a good idea for him to
implore his customers to sign a petition urging Congress to take action on
climate change? No. If he does, he will find himself out of a job, just as his
former congressman, Bob Inglis, did when he himself proposed such action.”
Science appeals to our
rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the
biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. “We’re all in high
school. We’ve never left high school,” says Marcia McNutt. “People still have a
need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and
local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump
science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science.”
Meanwhile the Internet
makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to
find their own information and experts. Gone are the days when a small number
of powerful institutions—elite universities, encyclopedias, major news
organizations, even National Geographic—served as gatekeepers of
scientific information. The Internet has democratized information, which is a
good thing. But along with cable TV, it has made it possible to live in a
“filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.
How to penetrate the
bubble? How to convert climate skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t
help. Liz Neeley, who helps train scientists to be better communicators at an
organization called Compass, says that people need to hear from believers they
can trust, who share their fundamental values. She has personal experience with
this. Her father is a climate change skeptic and gets most of his information
on the issue from conservative media. In exasperation she finally confronted
him: “Do you believe them or me?” She told him she believes the scientists who
research climate change and knows many of them personally. “If you think I’m
wrong,” she said, “then you’re telling me that you don’t trust me.” Her
father’s stance on the issue softened. But it wasn’t the facts that did it.
If you’re a rationalist, there’s something a little dispiriting about all this. In
Kahan’s descriptions of how we decide what to believe, what we decide sometimes
sounds almost incidental. Those of us in the science-communication business are
as tribal as anyone else, he told me. We believe in scientific ideas not
because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an
affinity for the scientific community. When I mentioned to Kahan that I fully
accept evolution, he said, “Believing in evolution is just a description about
you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”
Maybe—except that
evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There
aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening.
Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe
has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is
built on things it got right.
Doubting science also has
consequences. The people who believe vaccines cause autism—often well educated
and affluent, by the way—are undermining “herd immunity” to such diseases as
whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong
since the prestigious British medical journal theLancet published a
study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted
the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism
connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual
Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously
said on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “The University of Google is
where I got my degree from.”)
In the climate debate the
consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate
change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative
action to combat global warming. They haven’t had to win the debate on the
merits; they’ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing
greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.
Some environmental
activists want scientists to emerge from their ivory towers and get more
involved in the policy battles. Any scientist going that route needs to do so
carefully, says Liz Neeley. “That line between science communication and
advocacy is very hard to step back from,” she says. In the debate over climate
change the central allegation of the skeptics is that the science saying it’s
real and a serious threat is politically tinged, driven by environmental
activism and not hard data. That’s not true, and it slanders honest scientists.
But it becomes more likely to be seen as plausible if scientists go beyond
their professional expertise and begin advocating specific policies.
It’s their very
detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes
science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than
what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but
their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s
not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people,
the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth
is more important than the tribe.
Scientific thinking has
to be taught, and sometimes it’s not taught well, McNutt says. Students come
away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method. Shtulman’s
research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what
evidence is. The scientific method doesn’t come naturally—but if you think
about it, neither does democracy. For most of human history neither existed. We
went around killing each other to get on a throne, praying to a rain god, and for
better and much worse, doing things pretty much as our ancestors did.
Now we have incredibly
rapid change, and it’s scary sometimes. It’s not all progress. Our science has
made us the dominant organisms, with all due respect to ants and blue-green
algae, and we’re changing the whole planet. Of course we’re right to ask
questions about some of the things science and technology allow us to do.
“Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a
scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people
using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.”
We need to get a lot better at finding answers, because it’s certain the
questions won’t be getting any simpler.