Gross: One thing I noticed in some of the comments last week was a tendency to glom onto rare events, like adverse reactions to vaccines, to reject an entire body of science. NCSE hasn’t taken on the anti-vaccination issue, but do you see something similar with those who reject evolution and climate change?
Scott: This kind of anomaly mongering is something that we’ve dealt with for decades with evolution. We’re starting to learn more about it with climate change. One such anomaly is the fact that 1998 was an unusually warm year. So if you measure from 1998 to 2008--the line goes down--cooling has happened, therefore global warming is not taking place. Now, this is exactly parallel to the kind of anomaly mongering you get with creationism. Where they’ll point to the live mollusk that carbon 14 dating indicated had been dead for 3,000 years, and say, therefore radioisotopic dating is not valid, therefore the Earth is young, therefore, evolution didn’t take place. It’s a logical series of arguments in one sense except the premises are all wrong because these are anomalies.
In the case of the 1998 year, that’s cherry picking the data in a most egregious fashion, because if you pick just about any other year, you’ll find that the climate is getting warmer. And with the living mollusk, that article was not an attack upon radioisotopic dating, but a methodology article showing the difference between carbon absorption in lacustrine [lake] versus riverine environments and how you must consider the source of your sample.
You find the same thing with people who object to vaccines. They’ll pick some anomalous observation and say, “See, see, we told you vaccines are dangerous,” or “We told you they’re ineffective,” or something along those lines.
To understand this phenomenon you really have to dig deeper into what is motivating people. First of all, I’d like to distinguish between the people who lead these movements versus the people who follow them. They’re not the ones generating the vaccine anomaly, so to speak, but they’ve read this literature and they’re parroting what they’ve heard. And your heart goes out to them. They’re concerned about their children. They don’t want their kids to get sick. But, as many admit, they don’t fully understand the science. And your decisions are obviously going to be influenced by your emotions. We’re human beings, not automatons. But you need to temper them with good information, empirical information, dare I say scientific information, in order to make the best decisions.
Gross: Another parallel with the evolution and climate change denial narrative, which seems to relate to motivation, is the changing rationale for doubting the science. The reasons change but the doubt doesn’t, as if doubt itself is a motivation. How do you counter doubt with science?
Scott: Well, I think one of the things to remember is that, like Gaul [Julius Caesar’s Gallic conquest -- http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.1.1.html ], the public is divided into three parts. You have the people who are perfectly okay with vaccines. You have the people who are really, really concerned about vaccines, and you have the vast majority of Americans who are in the middle. They haven’t thought about it very much. They are reachable with information.
I think we are unwise as scientists or as people who want to help the public understand science to ignore motivation. But we have to remember that different audiences are open to a different kinds of information. And I just can’t imagine that knowledge and information and the empirical evidence and the results of good studies are immaterial, especially for that middle group. They may be less likely to persuade the people in the category of “I’ve got my fingers stuck in my ears and I don’t want to listen” who have a really strong emotional, ideological investment in a position.
NCSE has always aimed at that big middle. In the case of evolution, the people who are not conservative Christians, who don’t have a religious or ideological reason to object to evolution but who just don’t know very much about it and who are reachable. I think with vaccines that should be the target for those of us who want to improve the understanding of vaccines and help communicate the importance of why you need to vaccinate your child.
Gross: How do you reach the people in the middle when organized groups routinely perpetuate the myths? For a nonscientist it’s very difficult to figure out what to think, especially when the so-called “debates” on these issues become so emotionally charged. How do you cut through the emotions to help people think rationally?
Scott: Our experience with the evolution and climate change issues has been to recognize that there is a huge amount of dichotomous thinking going on. In the case of evolution you’re either a good guy Christian creationist or you’re a bad guy evolutionist atheist. Those are the packages that many students come into classrooms with. So breaking apart these dichotomies is very important because they’re false dichotomies.
With Christians, there’s really a huge range of views about evolution from the most extreme creationists to theistic evolution, which is a position that God created [humans] through evolution. This is actually mainstream Christianity. The most extreme creationism goes from flat-Earthism through geocentrism to young-Earth creationism to old-Earth creationism to theistic evolution.
There’s also a lot of dichotomous thinking going on in terms of climate change as well that doesn’t have anything to do with the science. It has to do with the ideologies that prevent people from listening to the science. You’re either a good Republican, anti-global-warming person or you’re a pro-big-government, political liberal, global warming accepter.
Finding the people who think ideologically but still accept the science is what we would like to do. There are conservative Christians who are very concerned about the environment as a responsibility to take care of God’s creation. So, they take global warming seriously. The big picture is there are ideological reasons for objecting to global warming. There’s political ideology, economic ideology, and religious ideology. In all three of these cases there is a dichotomous way of thinking that you’re either a good guy or a bad guy and the bad guys are the ones who accept global warming.
Our job at NCSE, at least in global warming and evolution, has been to point out that these dichotomies are false. And to find the people in intermediate positions who hold those ideological positions, find the conservative Christians who accept evolution, find the Republicans who accept global warming, find the libertarians who accept global warming and say, “See, you don’t need to let ideology get in the way to accept the science.”
