[ExI] The "war on science" is over. Now what?

[Damien Broderick]

http://www.slate.com/id/2208789/

Science
Mission Accomplished

The "war on science" is over. Now what?
By Chris Mooney

The "war on science" is over. Or at least it is in the sense that I 
originally meant the phrase: We're at the close of the Bush 
administration's years of attacks on the integrity of scientific 
informationits biased editing of technical documents, muzzling of 
government researchers, and shameless dispersal of faulty ideas about 
issues like global warming.

The attacks generated dramatic outrage and considerable activism from 
the traditionally staid science community and the sympathy of 
politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. So it's no great 
surprise to find the president-elect setting out to restore dignity 
to the role of science in government. George W. Bush didn't even 
bother to name his White House science adviser until well into his 
first term, and his appointee (physicist John Marburger) didn't win 
Senate confirmation until October 2001. In contrast, Obama has 
already named a Nobel laureate physicist (Steven Chu) to head the 
Energy Department and a climate specialist and prominent leader of 
the scientific community, Harvard's John Holdren, as his 
Cabinet-level science adviser.

Scientists are ecstatic about these developments and about Obama's 
recent promise to listen to them "even when it's 
inconvenientespecially when it's inconvenient." But it would be the 
gravest of errors for researchers to simply return victorious to 
their labs and fall back on a time-honored stance of political 
detachment. If the war on science is over, we're now entering the 
postwar phase of reconstructionthe scientific equivalent of 
nation-building. The Bush science controversies were just one 
manifestation of a deeper and long-standing gulf between the science 
community and the broader American public, one with roots stretching 
back to our indigenous tradition of anti-intellectualism (as so 
famously described by historian Richard Hofstadter in his classic 
work from 1963) and Yankee distrust of expertise and authority. So 
this is certainly no time for complacency. Scientists, with the 
support of the administration, should now be setting out to win over 
the hearts and minds of the American public, creating a stronger 
edifice of trust and understanding to help ensure that conflict 
doesn't come raging back again.

Consider: While scientists may be resurgent in Washington, their 
world as a whole remains distant and bizarre to most Americans. Only 
18 percent of us know a scientist personally, according to a 2005 
survey (subscription required), and when asked in 2007 to name 
scientific "role models," the results were dismal. Forty-four percent 
of Americans couldn't come up with a name at all, and among those few 
who did, their top answers were either not scientists or not alive: 
Bill Gates, Al Gore, Albert Einstein.

This bad news comes at a time when we need an appreciation of 
sciencean understanding of its fundamental role in sound policymaking 
and the future of the economymore than ever: to help solve our 
intertwined climate and energy problems, to bolster our long-term 
technological competitiveness, and to prepare our society for the 
coming controversies that research in fields like genetics and 
neuroscience stands ready to unleash. Instead, the communication gap 
between scientists and ordinary Americans has brought about (or 
helped to perpetuate) a number of home-grown anti-science 
pathologies. A seemingly immovable core of Americans don't believe in 
evolution and think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, nearly 
half of us, according to polling data. Americans are also more likely 
to reject the Big Bang theory than are people from other countries. 
Indeed, the public has become polarized about the nature of reality 
itself: College-educated Democrats are now more than twice as likely 
as college-educated Republicans to believe that global warming is 
real and human-caused.

To help heal such disconnects, the president-electas "communicator in 
chief"will surely be saying as much about science as he can. But as 
we all know, he has a few other minor matters to worry about. 
Scientists and those who care about sciencejournalists, policy 
analysts, and concerned citizensmust do the rest.

The problems they face are difficult and deeply rooted but not 
necessarily unfixable. Fortunately, most Americans aren't actively 
anti-science; the problem, rather, is that the science world is 
either alien to them or something they rarely think about. (Most 
people derive their image of scientists from popular culture: nerdy, 
socially awkward, and often responsible for nearly destroying the 
world.) To succeed in the postwar landscape, science communicators 
must find better ways of talking to people on their own terms and 
making research meaningful in their lives.

There will be hurdles along the way. Americans are repeatedly being 
told that science represents an assault on their core beliefs and 
values. Battles over the relationship between science and religion 
are newly resurgent, driven in part by the "New Atheism" of Sam 
Harris, Richard Dawkins, and others, and in part by culture warriors 
on the other side of the aisle who continue to see evolution as a 
stalking horse for irreligion. If science is ordinarily distant from 
the lives of ordinary Americans, unending science-religion conflicts 
can make it seem hostile.

Another hurdle involves not the message but the medium: Newspaper 
science sections have shrunken or vanished across the nation; on 
television, real science news has long been struggling, and CNN has 
let go of its entire science and technology unit. The science 
blogosphere is, of course, boomingbut as media scholars like Matthew 
Nisbet of American University have observed, the blogs are unlikely 
to reach very many citizens who aren't already science lovers. And 
what would be the effect if the blogs did get to a wider audience? 
The semi-finalists in the recent "Best Science Blog" of 2008 contest 
were a site that questions the reality of global warming and PZ 
Myers' Pharyngulaground zero for a potent mix of pro-evolution 
advocacy and uncompromising criticism of religion.

And so we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Science is more 
important than eversomething our new president fully recognizes. Yet 
for most Americans, science is probably becoming more distant, not 
less; it's harder to locate and identify, and it's often more 
aggressive toward their core beliefs. In this context, scientists 
certainly shouldn't retreat to their labs. Rather, they should reach 
out to the public like never before. There's a lot of work to do.

Chris Mooney is the author of The Republican War on Science and 
co-author (with Sheril Kirshenbaum) of the forthcoming Unscientific 
America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.