4/23/17

Why science is so hard to believe

OR

It’s turtles, all the way down*

Wait. What?  What’s so hard to believe about science? And yet it is hard.  I, for one, had to be trained to do it. To think like a scientist, we need to be willing to give up one fact for a better fact. To think like a scientist, we need to be willing to look beyond information that confirms what we already know and dip our toe into opposition thinking. To think like a scientist requires us to, well, think.

Take climate change, for example. While I have very little training in planetary science, I know how to read a research report and understand some/a little, depending. So in preparing this blog, I looked over The Stern Review, issued by the government of the United Kingdom.  It looks at the evidence for climate change and then the economic consequences.  It’s very readable. It also gives links to the original research, which is really important because Stern is summarizing what someone else wrote.  After a while, though, you don’t need to read every single paper.  The evidence is overwhelming.  The climate is changing, and the Earth is getting warmer.

Here’s some scientific evidence:

I like graphs, but they're not everyone's cup of tea. As an alternative, here's something non-scientific:

Muir Glacier Alaska.
The left side is August 13, 1941. The right side is August 31, 2004

So given that kind of evidence, why is it so hard to get people to believe the planet is getting warmer?

Part of that is confirmation bias, the inclination to only absorb information that agrees with what we already believe. But beyond that, something like personal experience can outweigh  abstract scientific findings.  Here's a great example. Imagine, first, a map of the United States.  If you had to guess what parts of the country contained people who believed in global warming and what parts don’t, you might come up with something like this from Yale University:

More than half the people in the orange/yellow zones report being worried about climate change.  Looks a bit like Clinton’s 2016 election map, right?  Well, except for Texas and Florida. But don’t jump to the conclusion that it’s a political thing alone. Here’s a map that shows where it actually IS getting hotter or colder based on record temperatures.

Scroll up and down. Notice how similar the maps are.  So how can we expect an average citizen in Tennessee or Kentucky -- already being told by their conservative media that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy -- how can we expect them to believe that the planet is getting warmer when their own experience is the opposite? That’s a tough clean and lift for most.

Here’s the original paper that identified these maps. 

And here’s a more accessible description of the results. 

However, lest anyone think I'm only targeting the right, there are also science deniers on the left.  Consider attitudes towards GMOs.

Genetically modified organisms have had genetic material from other organisms spliced into their DNA. In food products, the intent is to increase production and resistance to pests.  In the case of my Type I Diabetic husband, this means that altered e-coli can now produce human insulin that has kept him healthy and seeing and walking even after 40 years with the disease.

Anyway, more food to feed a growing world population. How is that a problem?  Genetic modification developed modern corn, for example.

Development of Corn over Time

An enlightening discussion with a botanist friend last weekend suggested that people worry about some kind of accidental transmission of undesirable contamination to the human population.  I get that.  Science can be wrong, sometimes dramatically and tragically wrong. You don’t need to look farther than Thalidomide to see how badly that can turn out. But are we wrong here?  The consensus (95% of studies) suggests that we’re not.  Here’s a summary that also looks at potential conflicts of interest in the research studies. LINK.

And while we’re talking about left wing anti-science attitudes, let us not miss the chance to take another potshot at the anti-vaccination crowd.  The latest suggests that some vets are identifying autism in dogs. Yes, dogs.  And somehow, just after vaccination.  Really? But I can’t make too much fun of these people.  We don’t know what causes autism, yet it can be devastating to every member of the family.  The need to find a cause and hold someone/something accountable must be enormous. 

But while I can understand part of the mind set that is driving some of these parents, the danger of not vaccinating children is clear, especially to babies who are too young to get their own immunity. Many states are setting more rigid guidelines for vaccinations in the hopes of preventing the return of childhood diseases we thought had finally been stopped.

And this brings us finally to my favorite Latin saying:  Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.  It describes a logical fallacy that says, because event Y follows event X, event Y must have been caused by event X. 

“My child showed the first symptoms of autism right after he got his first vaccinations. Therefore, the autism was caused by the vaccinations.”  But really, it’s just like saying, Dawn occurred right after the rooster crowed, therefore dawn was cause by the rooster crowing. 

Our brains are hard wired to interpret temporal connections as causal connections. It’s very, very hard to get past that. It requires thinking, which, I believe, is where we came in.

Now, about those turtles:

*According to Stephen Hawkings in his book, A Brief History of Time, the phrase, "It's turtles all the way down," originated from a conversation that occured directly after a speech which described how the earth revolves around the sun.  At the end of the speech an elderly lady stood up and said,

"What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."

The scientist then smugly asked,

"What is the tortoise standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"