Wanted: PhDs from Charm School to Teach the World

Jason, my lovely, ditched out on part of his Biology class so that we could spend our 11 month anniversary together. Being the ideal pupil, since the teacher was showing the movie Flock of Dodos that day, Jason ordered it through Netflicks and we watched it last weekend. What a great documentary! Jason and I talked for an hour afterward about it. It's written and directed by an evolutionary biologist with a sense of humor and genuine curiousity about how this controversy came about. He happens to be from Kansas, and so was particularly moved by the controversy in his home state about teaching Intelligent Design (in addition to evolution and other theories on the origin of man) in schools.


I will be giving a bit of the movie away here, but one of his points is that scientists are so appalled by these challeges to evolution and find them so laughable that their attitude is to ignore them. This benefits the intelligent design subscribers because the scientists are seen as snobs. Meanwhile the intelligent design folk can speak in a language that non-scientists can understand.

Controversy is an often-used tool to drive a wedge into scientifically proven phenomena. People love a controversy. "Which side are you on?" people ask each other, and take the bits and pieces of out-of-context fact and sometimes fiction they've gathered here and there to support their opinion. Who has time to actually sit down and synthesize all the evidence? I admit I am in the science arena, and there is absolutely no way any one person can see ALL of the data. You have to pick and choose. You have to know enough to weigh what is important against what is not. It's so much easier to come to an emotionally snuggly conclusion. Evolution is a big example. It's snuggly to believe that gaps in the evolutionary record, or situations of complexity that are difficult to explain (but are in fact explainable), indicate the presence of a divine power.

Global Climate Change is another. Isn't it much more nice and snuggly to believe there is no problem, that scientists are crying "Wolf" in a mad grab for funding dollars? It is true that there are some scientists out there that will say anything to grab those dollars from policymakers. I'm priviledged, so far, not to have met any of them, except for one example whose lecture I attended and who received the heckling of a lifetime from his disgusted scientific audience (incidentally, he was also employed by the Bush administration). There is, thankfully, an ethic underneath science as solid as the Hippocratic oath is for a doctor. Nothing is more disgusting to a scientist than to discover someone fudging a number or twisting a yarn out of data. Caution in interpreting data is taught from the very beginning. So is responsibility to true reporting.

But scientists definitely need to learn how to put up their fists in the public arena. Instead they decline to get into the ring, believing that their numbers and figures and journal articles can take the blows. Well, they don't. In fact, those ways make smart people feel ignorant, and are not going to get anyone on the side of science. People don't have the time to put down their busy lives and read journal articles that make their eyes swim with terminology only a handful of people in the world understand, and will revile scientists for talking over their heads!

Thank goodness for Al Gore, who figured this out long ago. Look how much he has accomplished so far, and he is not (A) valedictorian of charm school or (B) A scientist! Yet people believe him. Imagine what a charming scientist could do. Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, you left us too soon. We need a JFK or a MLK to further our second green revolution, and to quash the evolution debate.

Volunteers? Please send head-shots and CV's to: anyone who will listen.