A friend who has been lurking here sent me an email the other day to get my take on the apparent attitude of American scientists toward stem cell research and toward the American public. My friend writes that he has been struck by the reaction of scientists in discussion of stem cell research that

“Gee, I just can’t understand what all the fuss is about — this is just research! The scientists in Europe are all laughing at us, because they just don’t understand what all the controversy is about! We’re losing ground and falling behind!” and so on.
Now, I don’t have a settled view about the various uses of stem cells. But I guess that I’m baffled by those scientists’ bafflement. They seem to think that it’s completely mysterious that people (many, but not all, of whom are motivated by their interpretations of their religious faith) would actually think that their ethical values should constrain their technological/scientific endeavors. Have I simply misperceived what those scientists are saying, do you think? Or is there some naive sort of view that their research really is ethically neutral, and that the real problem is with the people who insist on “politicizing” a perfectly legitimate undertaking? Or is it something else?

While I make no claims to be able to get into anyone else’s head (heck, some days my own is hard enough to access), I have some guesses about what’s going on here.

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Can’t blog … grading papers. But, to honor Lawrence Summers’ retirement from fair Harvard, here’s a musing from one year ago today:
Purely hypothetical case. All the names are made up. SInce it’s my thought experiment, I stipulate the facts. Of course, you are encouraged to disagree with me about what follows from those facts.
Consider an economist named Barry Winters. Barry is giving a talk at a conference about what can be done to attract more women to the study of math and science, and to keep them in the field long enough to become full professors. In his talk, Barry suggests as a possible hypothesis for the relatively low number of women in math and science careers that there may be innate biological factors that make males better at math and science than females. (Barry also relates an anecdote about his daughter naming her toy trucks as if they were dolls, but obviously, he means this anecdote to be illustrative rather than evidentiary.) Barry’s talk does not go over well with the rest of the participants in the conference.
Question: Is Barry just exercising academic freedom here?

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Commenting on my last post, Karl thinks PZ and I have missed the boat:

Janet said

“Science isn’t just putting forward a point of view, it’s inviting the audience to check it out and see how it holds up. Nothing for sale — the audience already has the critical faculties that are needed.”

no! No! and NO!

They do not. You and PZ are extremely intelligent people. You seem not to be able to accept how much less intelligent most of the populace is. After all, if they had critical faculties, they would be college graduates. They don’t know and don’t want to know how to “check it out”. They need to have it spelled out in simple words – with pictures.

Think of who have been the most popular exponents of science in the last 20 or 30 years – Sagan and Feynman. What made them popular? Presentation! Demonstration! Pictures! Even in teaching college classes they were lively, animated, entertaining – fun to listen to.

You, who write all these science blogs are brilliant, informative, but duller than …(can’t think of a witty metaphor).

You seem to have the same attitude as a Republican administration toward the working class. They don’t know what life is like when you don’t have a couple of mil in the bank. Why would you need Social Security – just invest 40 or 50K in the stock market every year. And YOU seem to think that everyone has an IQ of 120 or higher. Just hit your local library, or the Internet, and read all the wonderful blogs explaining about science.

Well that can’t happen. We need programs on network television that are attention-grabbing, dramatic, lively and geared towards the mass audience.

(I’ve taken the liberty of adding bold emphasis to a couple of Karl’s sentences.)

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By now, no doubt, you’ve seen Randy Olson’s advice for evolutionary biologists trying to communicate more effectively with members of the general public. While a number of his suggestions are common sense (e.g., try not to be boring), there was something about the ten suggestions, taken together, that bugged me. Not just me, either. John Lynch notes:

Randy Olson, following an MFA in filmmaking from USC, has decided that the way to improve evolution education is basically to engage in sort of dumbed-down glossiness that anti-evolutionists specialize in; all surface flash with little real depth. Olson seems to have forgotten that communicating science is difficult and it’s complexity doesn’t yield to simple Hollywoodization. Taking a bunch of acting classes – which he seems to suggest is necessary – wont solve that problem.

PZ Myers adds:

I’m not too receptive to people telling me I need movie star qualities to be able to support science, or that we have to pander to superficial sensibilities to communicate a message.

After turning it over in my head for awhile, I’ve decided that Olson’s suggestions bug me precisely because following them would probably undermine scientists’ communication with laypersons, not improve them.

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