Web edition
: Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
MADISON, Wis. — The arc of science has faced roadblocks for
centuries, but the pattern of denying the weight of evidence has taken
on new virulence recently. Highly motivated people openly cast doubt on
well-established evidence — the theory of evolution, the human effects
on climate change, the value of vaccines and other findings that have
achieved an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community.
Researchers and science writers tasked with reporting on these issues
gathered April 23–24 at the University of Wisconsin at a meeting titled
“Science Writing in the Age of Denial.” Some noted that seemingly
spontaneous denial of science in the populace is quite often a carefully
choreographed attack.
Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at UW–Madison, has traced
similarities between an anti-polio vaccine movement by chiropractors in
the 1950s and later attempts by others to deny evolution.
“There was a common playbook,” Carroll said. The deniers started by
doubting the science, despite the evidence. They questioned the motives
of researchers and cited gadfly “authorities” to give the impression of a
disagreement among scientists. The doubters exaggerated potential harm,
Carroll said, and appealed to personal freedom — such as the right to
not get vaccinated.
Finally, he said, science denial embraced a viewpoint that “to accept
the science would repudiate some key philosophy” of an individual or
group. In the case of the polio vaccine, this would require the
acceptance of the fact that a virus causes the disease, which
chiropractic rejected. Same with evolution, Carroll said, which was
framed as undermining biblical teachings.
Historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego
has done similar investigations regarding climate change. Not long after
potent evidence began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s that global
warming is happening and that human fingerprints are all over it,
countervailing forces showed up to deny it, she said. “This emerged as a
politically motivated campaign saying the science was unsettled and
thus it was premature to act” to limit carbon dioxide emissions into the
atmosphere, she said.
This strategy has worked in part because initial doubts, once seeded,
can be difficult to overcome, said political scientist Arthur Lupia of
the University of Michigan. “We have a tendency to discredit that with
which we don’t believe,” he said.
Part of the strategy, Oreskes said, has been to demand “balance” from
journalists, even when the scientific community is already in
agreement. Researchers at the meeting generally acknowledged that more
than 97 percent of climate scientists now agree that the data on climate
change are legitimate in showing the human hand.
Even so, science writers run a risk of injecting false balance into
stories, and should take care to avoid other pitfalls of language, said
Cristine Russell who studies the media at Harvard University. “Saying
someone ‘believes’ in climate change or evolution is the wrong way to
characterize it,” she said. “It’s not a belief system. That suggests
that the evidence is something that can be dismissed.”
Wilson da Silva, editor and cofounder of the Australian magazine
Cosmos,
said journalists have a responsibility to write about these issues
unequivocally. “It is science that freed generations from the
superstitions of the past,” he said. In the modern context, writers
ought not be shy. “Science writers need to take an active role in
challenging quackery,” he said.
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