Science and the Media

Here at Cosmic Variance we’re all about the football/physics crossovers. But even we have our limits.

These limits have been emphatically violated by Gregg Easterbrook, commenting at NFL.com about the weekend in football and gamma-ray bursts. Easterbrook doesn’t even attempt to actually tie his occasional science musings into the subject matter of his football columns; he just sticks them in there because nobody would ever read anything he wrote about science by itself. (Well, pot, kettle, okay.) His unfortunate track record along these lines includes weird statements about cosmology, particle physics, and extra dimensions.

Now he’s on about gamma-ray bursts. These are mysterious events that don’t last very long (minutes down to milliseconds) but are very bright, much brighter than supernovae. Astronomers have recently put together a convincing story about short-duration bursts: they arise from the collisions of two neutron stars with each other.

This story was assembled from such old-fashioned techniques as making observations with actual telescopes, and comparing to the predictions of theoretical models that involve equations and all that. None of which is necessary in the great Easterbrookian scheme of things. He has a better idea: that gamma-ray bursts are “the emission lines of horrific weapons being used by civilizations that have acquired fantastic knowledge compared to us, but no additional wisdom.” Aliens blowing themselves up! Of course, NFL.com is a publication aimed at the general public, so Easterbrook wasn’t able to show us his calculation of how the spectrum and time-series data from the Swift satellite and ground-based followups are better fit by the suicidal-aliens hypothesis. But I’m sure he’ll be submitting his findings to the Astrophysical Journal any day now.

Thanks to Kriston for the pointer.

As PZ and Chris Mooney point out, we finally see an article about evolution and creationism that gets it right — by making it clear from the outset that evolutionary theory is well-established science and supported by mountains of evidence.

When scientists announced last month they had determined the exact order of all 3 billion bits of genetic code that go into making a chimpanzee, it was no surprise that the sequence was more than 96 percent identical to the human genome. Charles Darwin had deduced more than a century ago that chimps were among humans’ closest cousins.

But decoding chimpanzees’ DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests.

If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species’ DNA and the two animals’ population sizes.

“That’s a very specific prediction,” said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project.

Sure enough, when Lander and his colleagues tallied the harmful mutations in the chimp genome, the number fit perfectly into the range that evolutionary theory had predicted.

Their analysis was just the latest of many in such disparate fields as genetics, biochemistry, geology and paleontology that in recent years have added new credence to the central tenet of evolutionary theory: That a smidgeon of cells 3.5 billion years ago could — through mechanisms no more extraordinary than random mutation and natural selection — give rise to the astonishing tapestry of biological diversity that today thrives on Earth.

Evolution’s repeated power to predict the unexpected goes a long way toward explaining why so many scientists and others are practically apoplectic over the recent decision by a Pennsylvania school board to treat evolution as an unproven hypothesis, on par with “alternative” explanations such as Intelligent Design (ID), the proposition that life as we know it could not have arisen without the helping hand of some mysterious intelligent force.

Kudos to Rick Weiss and David Brown of the Washington Post. And to everyone else: see, it’s not that hard!

All I can say is, someone must be reading Cosmic Variance. Sunday’s New York Times has an Op-Ed piece by Lisa Randall on how scientists communicate with the public, and it echoes many of the issues we’ve been discussing here at CV. One of her themes is how words are used differently by specialists than they are in common usage.

Scientists’ different use of language becomes especially obvious (and amusing) to me when I hear scientific terms translated into another language. “La théorie des champs” and “la théorie des cordes” are the French versions of “field theory” and “string theory.” When I think of “un champs,” I think of cows grazing in a pasture, but when I think of “field theory” I have no such association. It is the theory I use that combines quantum mechanics and special relativity and describes objects existing throughout space that create and destroy particles. And string theory is not about strings that you tie around your finger that are made up of atoms; strings are the basic fundamental objects out of which everything is made. The words “string theory” give you a picture, but that picture can sometimes lead to misconceptions about the science.

These amusing images underscore a real issue: the unintentional confusion caused when a scientist is trying to be perfectly precise, yet creates an entirely incorrect impression in the mind of a listener. Words like “energy” or “work” or “uncertainty” can mean different things to experts and non-experts.

And the stakes are high:

The very different uses of the word “theory” provide a field day for advocates of “intelligent design.” By conflating a scientific theory with the colloquial use of the word, creationists instantly diminish the significance of science in general and evolution’s supporting scientific evidence in particular. Admittedly, the debate is complicated by the less precise nature of evolutionary theory and our inability to perform experiments to test the progression of a particular species. Moreover, evolution is by no means a complete theory. We have yet to learn how the initial conditions for evolution came about – why we have 23 pairs of chromosomes and at which level evolution operates are only two of the things we don’t understand. But such gaps should serve as incentives for questions and further scientific advances, not for abandoning the scientific enterprise.

This debate might be tamed if scientists clearly acknowledged both the successes and limitations of the current theory, so that the indisputable elements are clearly isolated. But skeptics have to acknowledge that the way to progress is by scientifically addressing the missing elements, not by ignoring evidence. The current controversy over what to teach is just embarrassing.

Word.

Kenneth Chang, author of yesterday’s New York Times article on Intelligent Design, left a comment to the post here about that article, in which I called it a “disaster” (he also commented at Pharyngula, and perhaps elsewhere). He didn’t convince me that the article was a non-disaster, but it’s good to see a willingness to dive into the discussion.