[Vision2020] Welcome to the Age of Denial

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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August 21, 2013
Welcome to the Age of Denial By ADAM FRANK

ROCHESTER — IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God
had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the
fraction of the population who are creationists is 46
percent<http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx>.


In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63
percent <http://bit.ly/cXdpdX> of Americans understood it was a problem.
Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58
percent.

The timeline of these polls defines my career in science. In 1982 I was an
undergraduate physics major. In 1989 I was a graduate student. My dream was
that, in a quarter-century, I would be a professor of astrophysics,
introducing a new generation of students to the powerful yet delicate craft
of scientific research.

Much of that dream has come true. Yet instead of sending my students into a
world that celebrates the latest science has to offer, I am delivering them
into a society ambivalent, even skeptical, about the fruits of science.

This is not a world the scientists I trained with would recognize. Many of
them served on the Manhattan Project. Afterward, they helped create the
technologies that drove America’s postwar prosperity. In that era of the
mid-20th century, politicians were expected to support science financially
but otherwise leave it alone. The disaster of Lysenkoism, in which
Communist ideology distorted scientific truth and all but destroyed Russian
biological science, was still a fresh memory.

The triumph of Western science led most of my professors to believe that
progress was inevitable. While the bargain between science and political
culture was at times challenged — the nuclear power debate of the 1970s,
for example — the battles were fought using scientific evidence.
Manufacturing doubt remained firmly off-limits.

Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to
deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current
in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I
was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology
as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country.
Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus
test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.

Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR
playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate
science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine
campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims
about links between autism and vaccination.

The list goes on. North Carolina has
banned<http://abcnews.go.com/US/north-carolina-bans-latest-science-rising-sea-level/story?id=16913782>state
planners from using climate data in their projections of future sea
levels. So many Oregon parents have refused vaccination that the state
is revising
its school entry
policies<http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/06/10/2127601/oregon-vaccine-stigma-bill-advances/>.
And all of this is happening in a culture that is less engaged with science
and technology as intellectual pursuits than at any point I can remember.

Thus, even as our day-to-day experiences have become dependent on
technological progress, many of our leaders have abandoned the postwar
bargain in favor of what the scientist Michael Mann calls the “scientization
of politics<http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-scientization-of-politics>.”


What do I tell my students? From one end of their educational trajectory to
the other, our society told these kids science was important. How confusing
is it for them now, when scientists receive death threats for simply doing
honest research on our planet’s climate history?

Americans always expected their children to face a brighter economic
future, and we scientists expected our students to inherit a world where
science was embraced by an ever-larger fraction of the population. This
never implied turning science into a religion or demanding slavish
acceptance of this year’s hot research trends. We face many daunting
challenges as a society, and they won’t all be solved with more science and
math education. But what has been lost is an understanding that science’s
open-ended, evidence-based processes — rather than just its results — are
essential to meeting those challenges.

My professors’ generation could respond to silliness like creationism with
head-scratching bemusement. My students cannot afford that luxury. Instead
they must become fierce champions of science in the marketplace of ideas.

During my undergraduate studies I was shocked at the low opinion some of my
professors had of the astronomer Carl Sagan. For me his efforts to
popularize science were an inspiration, but for them such “outreach” was a
diversion. That view makes no sense today.

The enthusiasm and generous spirit that Mr. Sagan used to advocate for
science now must inspire all of us. There are science Twitter feeds and
blogs to run, citywide science festivals and high school science fairs that
need input. For the civic-minded nonscientists there are school board
curriculum meetings and long-term climate response plans that cry out for
the participation of informed citizens. And for every parent and
grandparent there is the opportunity to make a few more trips to the
science museum with your children.

Behind the giant particle accelerators and space observatories, science is
a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition. And as we
know from history’s darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions
can be broken and lost. Perhaps that is the most important lesson all
lifelong students of science must learn now.

Adam Frank <http://tinyurl.com/kywtmhf>, a professor of physics and
astronomy at the University of Rochester, is the author of “About Time:
Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang” and a founder of
NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog.




-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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