Sans Fig Leaf
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"Questions and answers"
8 February, 2007
In my early 20s my best friend and I occasionally got into arguments about science and its relationship to religion. I maintained that they simply dealt in different realms. Science was really good at answering questions such as "How?" and "What?", whereas religion tackles questions like "What Does It Mean?" and "Should We or Shouldn't We?"
One time he asserted that science didn't do a very good job of telling us how and what and when, because scientists were always announcing new discoveries or theories that disproved the old ones. I tried to explain that the examples he was thinking of were not cases of a new discovery destroying the previous one, but rather that the new discovery was a refinement--because the new theory or model also explained all the old observations.
To give a seemingly trivial example, suppose that a group of people got together under a gorgeous, perfectly clear night sky and carefully counted all the stars they could see. Suppose they agree, once the process is done, that they can all see about 1000 stars. They announce the fact that there are 1000 stars in the night sky.
Now, suppose that someone invents a telescope. And they look at this same night sky, and quickly discover that in the dark empty spaces between any pair of that thousand stars, they find a hundred more stars that were too faint to see with the naked eye. There seems to be 100,000 stars in the night sky, now. So the new fact replaces the old one.
Then someone invents a better telescope and finds hundreds more stars in between every pair that could be seen with the old telescope. That means 10,000,000 stars in the night sky. Then someone builds an even better telescope, and discovers that not only are there even more faint stars in-between those 10,000,000, but many of those previously seen stars aren't just one star, but some of them are clusters of millions of stars that are even further away then we had imagined before. So that would mean that there were even more stars in the night sky than previously examined.
Each of these new discoveries didn't disprove the earlier ones. The thousand stars visible to the naked eye were still there, we just now know there are a whole lot more.
To give a slightly less trivial example, for a long time scientists struggled to explain how the sun burned. There it was, clearly visible as a big ball of flame in the sky, and we knew from the historical record alone that it had been burning, providing light and heat to our world, for thousands of years. What process could possibly sustain a fire for thousands of years without any measurable decrease in the size of the burning object?
Many theories were proposed, but each had problems. Some of the proposals looked pretty good--explaining most if not all of the observed phenomenon--until someone built a better telescope or found some other evidence. It wasn't until the Curries discovered radioactivity, which (along with a few other discoveries) led Einstein to figure out that matter and energy were just different forms of the same thing--and that a teeny, tiny bit of matter contains an enormous amount of energy--that a clear answer emerged.
Once those phenomenon have been studied on a much smaller scale in labs, and through even better observations of our own sun and far more distant stars, we now know that the sun actually is shrinking as its nuclear fires burn. It just shrinks so incredibly slowly that it takes hundreds of millions of years, rather than mere thousands, for enough of the mass to be used up to make a difference noticeable to the naked eye.
The same sort of thing continues in far more esoteric corners of science. Unfortunately, it isn't always apparent to the "person on the street" that the new theory is merely an extension or refinement of the old theory. There are a variety of reasons for this. Most of them boil down to a basic lack of familiarity with the topic. Some people just aren't interested and avoided science topics in school as much as possible. Even if they didn't actively avoid it, it is often possible to earn passing grades simply by learning to parrot back answers without ever actually understanding the actual phenomenon.
Similarly, when the information is presented in mainstream media, there is a tendency to condense and simplify--often distorting things so the theory or discovery bears no real relationship to the actual science. I'm not implying that the reporters are distorting things on purpose--rather it's a combination of the person writing about the science not really understanding it very well to begin with, plus facing a short deadline and the necessity to squeeze the story into a few hundred words at most.
This is particularly difficult since a legitimate scientist will seldom want to give simplified explanations. Understanding that whatever discovery has just been made is almost certain to be incomplete (like that 1000 stars visible to observers before the discover of telescopes), they try to explain those qualifications. "Given the limits of our current technology, it appears that…." The more esoteric or cutting edge the new discovery is, the less likely it can be accurately boiled down to 25 words or less.
Another significant factor in the distortion of this kind of news is the Myth of Balance. Too many editors, reporters, news directors, et cetera, believe that you can achieve objectivity in reporting by presenting "both sides." In other words, the opposing view must be given equal coverage to prevent bias.
There are many topics where it is useful to see multiple sides of the issue. Unfortunately very few important issues have only two sides. And not all opposing views disserve equal respect.
For example, though it is the accepted consensus of 99.9% of the scientists in the world (and nearly 99% of the non-scientists), that the earth is round, there exists a small but emphatic group who insist that the world is flat. And a couple of them even claim to be scientists, and have earned some kind of scientific degree from somewhere to boot.
The Flat-Earth Crazies don't usually get dragged onto the news shows to provide a counterpoint whenever someone talks about something happening on the other side of the world, or about weather satellites or space shuttle missions. However, for a lot of scientific topics, people who are just as deluded as the Flat-Earthers are given equal time to dispute explanations from the legitimate scientists.
Which is bad not just because it contributes to ignorance and misconception, but because it also distracts us from more important things. We can argue the minutia of climate change, but wouldn't it be better to put that effort into dealing with droughts, floods, declining animal and fish populations, and disruptions to farming?
And instead of trying to wedge God, or Shiva, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster into science textbooks, wouldn't it be better to put that effort into making sure all schools have enough textbooks, period? Or that teachers are paid adequately to keep the good ones in the career? Or that kids don't go to sleep night after night hungry? Could we perhaps take some steps to decrease the number of kids who die of preventable diseases? Maybe help some families that have fallen on hard times get back on their feet?
I'm not asking for anything more radical than the man who said, "Love your neighbor as you love yourself."
--Charles Darwin
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