Reflections of a “scientific illiterate”

Reviewing Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

My name is Andrew, and I am scientifically illiterate.

Just thought I’d get that off my chest!

And before you protest too much, I do have some pretty convincing evidence.  Math makes my head ache.   I cannot recite the Earth’s geological timeline from memory.  And there’s a one in ten chance that I’ll stumble over pronouncing terms like artemisinin and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.

The problem lies of course with what is understood by “scientific illiteracy” rather than my abilities—at least I hope that’s the case.

The idea that modern society only works if it is based on a common understanding, appreciation and use of science has been around for a while.  It seems to make sense – in a society that is increasingly dependent on science, widespread scientific ignorance is likely to lead to non-democratic leadership by a scientific elite, or ill-informed (but democratic) decisions that are ultimately destructive.

The solution would seem to be to replace scientific ignorance with scientific literacy.  Get everyone thinking and acting like scientists, and the world will surely be a better place.

Unfortunately, this perspective turns out to be rather naïve.  Dividing the world into scientific illiterates and literates devalues the many other skill sets and perspectives that contribute to healthy decision-making within society.  It also encourages an over-simplistic approach to the challenges of critical thinking and evidence-based decision making—namely that educating people more about science will result in them making the “right” decisions.  And it has a tendency to lead to scientific literacy being measured in ways that have little bearing on a person’s ability to make informed decisions…

Over the past decade or so, scholars and policy makers have come to realize that more sophisticated approaches are needed if science-informed, yet democratic, decisions are to be made by people.  As a result, rather than talk about scientific literacy, discussions now tend to revolve around the ideas of dialogue and engagement – empowering people in a complex society to make personal and group decisions that are ultimately constructive.

So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to review Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s new book “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.”

Fortunately, it didn’t take much reading to convince me that their perspective is rather more sophisticated than the book’s title suggests. Unscientific America is a laudable attempt to tackle science’s place in American society in an easily accessible way.  Highly readable, largely enjoyable, occasionally infuriating, the book takes on the challenge of how to empower members of society to make the best use of science.

There was a lot that I liked about the book – and a lot that resonated with my own views.  But there were also points where I felt the book fell short of what it could be.

Despite the book’s rather sensationalist subtitle, Mooney and Kirshenbaum do a good job of placing scientific illiteracy in a modern context.  Chapter 2 on “rethinking the problem of scientific illiteracy” provides an accessible overview of current thinking – and does it reasonably well.  The notion of a “public” that will make the “right” decisions if only they are sufficiently well educated – the so-called deficit model – is introduced, examined, then carefully put aside.  The problem, Mooney and Kirshenbaum point out, is that the deficit model can all too easily be used to exempt scientists from the responsibility of ensuring their work is an integral part of the society they belong to:

“It’s an educational problem, they say, or a problem with the media (which doesn’t cover science accurately or pay it enough attention), and then they go back to their labs.”

But rather than discard the term “scientific illiteracy,” Mooney and Kirshenbaum prefer to redefine it, in their words “getting past issues of finger-pointing and buck-passing and the misconception that our problems can be reduced to what non-scientists say in response to survey questions.”

Their solution: emphasize an aspect of scientific literacy that stresses citizens’ awareness of the importance of science to politics, policy, and a collective future.

This makes a lot of sense, and is in many ways the lynchpin of the book.  But I do have my reservations over their adherence to the idea of scientific literacy.

When scholars began to realize that the deficit model wasn’t particularly helpful to integrating science and society (for a multitude of reasons), they began to move away from talking about “science literacy” and towards talking about developing dialogues and engaging people in making science-informed decisions.  These approaches complement broader discussions on the roles of critical thinking and evidence-based decision-making; integrating science into a more holistic perspective of modern society.

Having established the central focus of the book, Mooney and Kirshenbaum present their ideas in a series of connected essays.  From a distance, the structure makes sense.  Chapters 1 and 2 set out the challenge as seen by the authors.  Chapters 3 and 4 continue on to fill in the historical background – how American culture’s apparently strained relationship with science got to where it is now.  Chapters 5 – 8 then deal with specific issues that highlight the current state of play—science in the media, science and popular entertainment, science and religion, and science and politics.  Finally, chapters 9 and 10 begin to explore possible solutions to the “problem” of scientific illiteracy – culminating in a short conclusion that attempts to pull everything together.

Some of these chapters are a good and informative read.  I was enjoying myself immensely up to chapter 8.  But then I felt that the book began to run out of steam.  Repeatedly, I found myself intrigued by questions set up by Chris and Sheril, then disappointed by a lack of resolution.  In an attempt to try and keep things simple I suspect they ended glossing over a lot of things (see my comments below on the book’s endnotes). But in the latter chapters I was increasingly aware of a lack of depth behind the points being made.

A good example is “Bruising their religion”—the chapter on science, religion and the “new atheists.”  This particular chapter has ruffled plenty of feathers throughout the blogosphere already, and I don’t intend to ruffle more by adding my two cents worth to Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s perspective.  But I do want to highlight the intellectual letdown that I felt when reading the chapter – something that I experienced with increasing frequency as I progressed toward the end of the book.

In this chapter, Mooney and Kirshenbaum roundly criticize vocal and intellectually aggressive proponents of atheism—a crowd that will stop at little it seems to denigrate religious beliefs and humiliate those who adhere to them.  They argue that the crude combative and even ignorant tactics employed by people like PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins do more to undermine scientific literacy than they do to support it.

This makes sense—intellectual bullying doesn’t often have pride of place in communications manuals!

Mooney and Kirshenbaum then state that the divide between science and religion is a false one, and the two are not mutually exclusive.  But they give no concrete evidence for this, beyond citing a handful of scientists who held (or hold) religious views.

The result is a reader who is left high and dry.  I wanted to know how science and religion may be reconciled, and why the preaching of the new atheists is intellectually as well as socially suspect.  But what I got was little more than opinion and unsubstantiated statements.

The following chapters in the book suffer from a similar glossing over of arguments—although perhaps not to the same extent as this chapter.  And as a result, I was left feeling frustrated at the lack of substance in what I was reading.

Unscientific America culminates in a six-page conclusion titled “A new mission for American Science.”  Reaching this point, I was full of expectations—this was where the meat would be (I thought), where I would finally learn how science illiteracy threatens our future, and what the answers are.

In the event, I found it a bit of a let down.  While I had enjoyed the book – which is only 132 pages long if you discount the extensive endnotes – I felt that I hadn’t been convinced that scientific illiteracy does indeed threaten America’s future.  And as for the solution to this apparently looming problem, everything seemed to lead up to Mooney and Kirshenbaum proposing that the responsibility for integrating science into society lies with scientists. After all the buildup, this seemed a little too easy.

To be fair, it’s an important conclusion.  If science is to be integrated into society, scientists as a group need to be a part of that society rather than apart from it.  It’s something that we are still a long way from achieving, but I would argue it is essential if future decisions are to help rather than hinder social development.

And to be honest, Mooney and Kirshenbaum do a good job of bringing this need to a broad audience.

But I can’t help feeling that Unscientific America falls short of what it could have been.  Mooney and Kirshenbaum clearly have a political and ideological bias that ends up being woven through the book, and at the end of the day this weakens its authority for me.  The Bush administration’s “war on science” for instance is cited repeatedly as hindering science literacy over the past 8 years, and Mooney and Kirshenbaum stress the need to move on from “an administration widely denounced for a disdain of science unprecedented in modern American history.”  Indeed, Chris Mooney has written about this in his previous book—The Republican War On Science.

Yet framing a book on science in such a strong political light is likely to alienate some readers, and will lead to diminished authority over time.

On top of this, I feel that Mooney and Kirshenbaum never quite succeeded in making a watertight case for why scientific illiteracy threatens our future—leading to the central premise of the book coming across as ideological rather than a persuasively argued and clearly defined challenge.

And that brings me back to the issue of scientific illiteracy.  From where I sit, it seems to be a phrase fraught with problems—it reinforces an “us” and “them” mentality, it has the potential to create arbitrary and often meaningless divisions.  And, to be frank, it gets some people’s backs up.  Joking aside, I could well be labeled “scientifically illiterate” under some measures of literacy.  Yet I think I have been somewhat successful in my career as a scientist, policy advisor and communicator.   So I struggle with a book so overtly focused on scientific illiteracy.  Mooney and Kirshenbaum have done a good job of framing scientific illiteracy in a sophisticated and accessible way.  But in the long run, I wonder whether the book would have had greater authority and a longer shelf life if it had made the break from dated concepts, and fully embraced the need for dialogue and engagement when integrating science into society.

So to wrap up – should you read this book?  Absolutely.  But read it forewarned.  Understand where the authors are coming from.  Accept that in 132 pages of writing for a general audience you won’t be taken on a deep and intellectually challenging journey.  And don’t hesitate to chapter-hop – I particularly liked chapter 2!

And above all, enjoy it – whether you agree with Mooney and Kirshenbaum or not, they are entertaining and talented writers, and Unscientific America is an enjoyable—and not too taxing—read.

Endnotes

About the endnotes in Unscientific America

Although Unscientific America only stretches to 132 pages it is complemented by 66 pages of endnotes, comprising citations and additional comments.  I’m not a great fan of this format—especially as the endnotes aren’t cited on the pages they relate to.  But it is an extensive resource for those who are interested in delving further into the points Chris and Sheril make.

I do have a problem though where there is extensive commentary included in the endnotes.  While reading the book, you have no idea whether a particular idea or comment is fleshed out later on, unless you keep one finger in the endnotes. This is not a comfortable way to read a book!  I understand why the book is published this way – it keeps things simple for readers (I almost wrote “scientifically illiterate readers” – slapped wrists for that!).  But it isn’t half a pain for anyone seriously interested in what the authors are trying to say.

It’s far better, in my opinion, to ensure that the relevant stuff is incorporated into the main text, not sequestered away where no-one will read it.

More on science and society

Many people have studied the complex interplay between science and society, and reams of work—from the scholarly to the popular—has been written on the subject.  To get a good feel for current thinking, I would recommend “What can we learn from 25 years of PUS survey research? Liberating and expanding the agenda” by Martin Bauer, Nick Allum and Steve Miller [PDF, 116 KB].  Also check out Matthew Nisbet’s blog, Framing Science, and the Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School.

And a final comment…

Since it was released several weeks ago, Unscientific America has been the subject of a number of reviews.  Although I’ve caught some of the chatter surrounding these, I have made a conscious effort not to read them before writing my own rather belated piece.  So hopefully these thoughts are mine, and not simply a regurgitation of other people’s ideas.

Now to see whether what I’ve written is completely out of step with the rest of the blogging world…

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Tagged as: Communication, Public Engagement, Science, Science Policy, Scientific Literacy, Unscientific America