Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening in the Sciences
Larry Hurd
I am pleased to see the resurrection of the Washington and Lee Journal of Science. I am encouraged by the aspirations of the new editorial staff to transform WLJS from what surely was the most ignored of the university's many publications, to an instrument of genuine communication from the sciences to the university community. In that spirit, I offer the following.
Human communication consists of reading, writing, speaking (or singing), and listening. The science departments are working on the first three of these, and are improving all the time. We teach seminars in which students read primary research articles, critically evaluate and synthesize them into a topic, and present a talk to the professor and the rest of the students in the course. We increasingly require the writing of formal scientific papers based on laboratory exercises. How about listening? Don't students have to listen to lectures and laboratory demonstrations? Don't science students and faculty listen to each other all the time? Sure, but I think there is a critical point we have almost completely missed in science education at modern universities: listening outside the sciences, especially to what is being said about science by non-scientists. Recently, I found myself where I didn't really want to be, at yet another "discussion" of the creationism/evolution confrontation. I have become weary of these things, where lots of people speak over, under, and around each other about concepts few of them really comprehend. It was depressingly clear that most of the speakers from the audience, and at least two of the faculty panelists, did not understand what a scientific theory is, much less how science proceeds by building theory. This, in spite of a careful definition by biologist John Knox at the beginning of the session.
So, I sat through the same old arguments, and heard the same old mistaken notions about the process of science in general, and about evolutionary science in particular. Then it occurred to me, in sort of an epiphany, if you'll excuse the context, why it is that this kind of nonsense never dies. Putting aside the specific matter of evolution for a moment, the general question is why "they" don't seem to understand scientific principles that "we" have tried to teach them.
In order for most people to really understand a thing, it must exhibit some sort of relevance to their own human experience. After all, understanding abstract concepts is not intuitive, it requires a long period of training, and people with this kind of training are called scientists. Though a large proportion of W&L students are science majors of one flavor or another, most are not. We are, however, a liberal arts institution, committed to giving every student a dose of nearly every thing, including science. Thus, we do teach science courses to non-science majors, but are we really communicating effectively?
"Our" job as academic scientists talking to non-scientists (I include college level science students talking to their non-science friends) is not only to display the information structure of science, but also to demonstrate its application and importance. This is not a new thought, but it is not often enough put into practice (probably because it isn't always easy, but who ever promised that education would be easy?). If someone who has passed courses in science still believes that: evolution violates the laws of thermodynamics, the theory of evolution began and/or ended with Darwin, evolution has not been directly observed in nature, or that most scientific theories are destined to be discarded and replaced like last year's fashions, then as a student that person's mind probably was on something more relevant to her/him at the time.
The mistaken notion (expressed by one of the panel members in the above-mentioned public discussion) that science is somehow value-free, i.e., that students should leave their ethics outside the lab, is advocated by no science professor I have ever known. In the same way, we cannot afford to leave science hanging in the hallway outside classes in history or philosophy. Scientists, after all, are not the only ones who make decisions about what science should be supported by public or private funding. It is a feature of human nature that misunderstanding leads to feelings of threat, and a threatened mind is a closed mind. Communication is always two-way; one-sided conversations are merely lectures into the wind. Unless and until we are better at communicating with non-scientists, we will continue to have people insisting that a religious belief is itself a scientific theory, i.e., that a rabbit is in fact a duck, and so they should get equal time in courses about ducks. Let's work on this together.