Science

We finished our discussions of State of Fear this week, using articles to basically demonstrate that Crichton’s “facts,” while technically mostly true, generally misrepresent the overall point of the scientists he quotes; this let us to a discussion of how scientific results are generally so complex that someone with an agenda can easily misrepresent them. We discussed how even without a specific political agenda, scientific facts are often oversimplified by the media for popular consumption, which leads to a misunderstanding of how science is done and how precise science generally is.

Chrichton’s book argues that since there is conflicting evidence and we don’t have all the data and our models aren’t perfectly predictive yet, then it’s irresponsible to act because we don’t know enough. We discussed the danger in mistaking a lack of precision (regarding complex phenomena such as climate change) doesn’t mean we don’t know anything, and we discussed the dilemma of having to make policy decisions with an incomplete data set.

We discussed the incongruity between a legalistic or popular interpretation of the word “theory” with the scientific meaning of the word, which leads to a poplular misunderstanding of the amount of “doubt” there is in the scientific community about global warming.

We also discussed one particular example of “bad facts” in State of Fear in which Crichton misrepresented (flat out got wrong) the testimony of Robert Hansen about the likelihood of climate change; while Crichton cited the original testimony in his footnote, his book presented as fact a skewed misinterpretation of the proceedings that had been previously promoted by a well-known climate change skeptic. This was an important example because it “revealed” Crichton to have relied on climate change skeptics for his data, rather than doing his own independent research, as he leads the reader to believe.

Finally, we spent some time talking about the basic science behind global warming and the greenhouse effect.

Next week: Their State of Fear papers are due, and I’ll be handing out An Inconvenient Truth on Monday. I’ll use our double period on Monday to show the film, and then we’ll begin our close reading and discussion of the book.

We spent the week discussing State of Fear by Michael Crichton, the summer reading book. The book is a great entry to talk about the major themes in this class, for both its good and bad qualities. The bad: bad, misleading, and cherry-picked data, over-simplification of complex phenomena, unrealistic solutions, creation of false dichotomies, and use of condescention as a (very effective) tool of persuasion. The good: it brings up a number of points pertinent to scientific ethics and social issues: scientific bias based on assumptions/prejudices and funding sources, the often hysterical and misleading media reporting of scientific findings, the lack of understanding of complex scientific issues by the general public, the use of fear (in this case of a global climate-related catastrophe) to manipulate public policy, and so on.

I assigned the first paper (major assignment), due a week from Monday, based on the book and our discussions thus far.

Next week we will continue to discuss Crichton and fact-check his work. I plan to hand out An Inconvenient Truth and we will begin reading that and comparing its data to Crichton’s.

We’re finishing up our reading of “Mismeasure of Man” and summing up the lessons learned from the dark history of IQ testing. I used the example (using IQ to identify “feeble mindeds” for sterilization or sequestration–American eugenics in the early 1900s, and to support immigration restrictions before WWII) to illustrate how scientific inquiry is guided by social attitudes, and is in turn often used to validate those same attitudes.

We had an interesting discussion yesterday and today about the dangers of oversimplification in science when talking about complex human traits such as race and intelligence, when in fact, these traits are influenced by many factors, both biological and environmental. We also discussed the difference between individuals and groups when making statements about heritable traits. In other words, your genes may influence or your aptitude at a particular skill, but these individual heritable differences are not generally applicable to the identity groups (race, gender etc) to which you belong.

Tomorrow we close our discussion of race and begin talking about the science of gender differences.