There’s been a long-running battle between the Left and the Right over “science.” More specifically, the Left has long been asserting that the Right is anti-science, and the Right has recently taken enough notice to start firing back. The Left’s “anti-science” accusations are rooted primarily in two areas: the beliefs of fundamentalist conservatives and global warming. As to the former, there are people who believe the Earth is about 6000 years old, per a literal interpretation of the Bible, and concurrently believe that the theory of evolution is wrong or a lie. These people are wrong, but not everyone on the Right is a young-earther. As to the latter, there are people who think that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is a giant, deliberate hoax (they’re wrong), and there are people who think the doomsday predictions and consequences are being exaggerated. Such folks actually exist across the ideological spectrum with creationism running about a 60-40 split Right vs Left, but the Left has successfully tarred the Right as being “anti-Science.”
Sources of the battle to declare one’s side the champions of “science” aside, it is a fact that each side sees being seen as defenders of “science” over “non-science/nonsense” is a Good Thing that puts them on the high ground. Given that politics in America has, despite some internecine fights and the improved visibility of third parties, devolved into a binary Left-Right, Democrat-Republican duality, it’s no surprise that the fight to claim ownership over “science” has degraded to the same duality.
The first problem is that neither side is without sin. There’s oodles of non-science evident on both sides of the political divide. Beyond the two aforementioned issues, unscientific hooey such as astrology, homeopathic medicine, ESP, “natural” and “alternative medicine,” anti-vaxx, “cleanses” and detoxification, cryptozoology, 9/11 trutherism, and all sorts of paranoia and conspiracy theories transcend the political divide.
The second problem is that “science” is often falsely conflated with policy. In the case of global warming, the theory and its predictions are presumed to mandate specific actions without regard to their efficacy, cost or harm, which ignores the reality that one can accept the legitimacy of AGW theories without being all-in on the press for “green” energy and carbon caps/taxes.
The third problem is that “science” is not an end-state, or a list of unchanging facts. “Science” once told us that trans fats are “heart healthy” in comparison to saturated fats, but now tells us the opposite.
The fourth problem is that a whole lot of “science” carries labels and bona fides that confer weight than they should. Merely dubbing something “science,” i.e. saying ‘a scientific study or studies concluded X, therefore “science” says it’s true, therefore you’re a [redacted] if you don’t see things my way,’ isn’t quite the mic-drop that people want it to be. Apart from the evolutionary nature of “science,” there’s the fact that a whole lot of “science” nowadays isn’t. Reproducibility, a fundamental requirement of the scientific method, turns out to be a rare species. A majority of today’s scientific findings are either wrong or useless, and academia and scientific research organizations are increasingly being questioned about a funding-driven, “publish or perish” environment that is producing mountains of garbage research.
Our world is an extremely complex place. As our scientific knowledge grows, as our ability to unravel its complexity becomes greater, it behooves us to remember that complexity when judging “science.” Unfortunately, we’ve grown so accustomed to thinking in binary, dualistic, Manichean terms that we reduce complexity beyond its limits of irreducibility. Thus, instead of considering that our climate is enormously complex, with multivariable interactions that cannot be considered independently, we reduce things to “if A then B” simplicity. Worse, we often do this without having a deep enough understanding of the definitions of A and B to even fully comprehend “if A then B.” Once we lock into a conclusion or a causative relationship, it becomes harder to roll back without suffering criticism or reputational harm, even if the latest information supports a revised position.
“It’s complicated” is often seen as a way to avoid facing a difficult truth. As such, and especially in our daily interactions with each other, we tend to be suspicious of those who use the phrase. Sometimes, though, “it is complicated.” That’s especially true with modern science. There are facts, and there are conclusions based on those facts. The conclusions aren’t always correct, even when they’re swaddled in the magic word “science.” We should neither trust “science” blindly nor dismiss “science” blindly. Complicated things require time and effort to understand, and we often cannot unravel the complex into the simple without destroying our understanding of those things.
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It would be great to go into the fact that different levels of certainty are required for a hypothesis depending on how many alternative hypotheses there are. So, for example, a simple high-school physics experiment turns out to be straightforward and does not require a huge amount of work to prove, but a medical experiment is a whole other game entirely. This might be lost on your readers but it’s really a fundamental part of science these days.
Better to put good information out there, IMO, than to dumb things down to the lowest common denominator. Too much of the latter goes on in the press nowadays, which is a big part of the problem.
Of course, the press itself is often that lowest common denominator. If you’ve ever been associated with something “complicated” that the press has reported on (I have), you’ll have witnessed how unapologetically wrong they can get some things.
Since most people do not understand the scientific method, they are unable to contribute anything more than noise to a discussion about science. While sad, and perhaps even harsh, this is abundantly clear. Recall all the bleats about “the science is settled”? All that showed is that every single person who ever said that in earnest is scientifically illiterate, as the core of science is the modification or replacement of theory based on new evidence. Dogma is settled (for a time), but science is always subject to change, and changes frequently.
This of course begs many questions on the nature of evidence, and how it needs to be gathered and analyzed, but there too the public is largely illiterate. Few can answer a question like “how could it be discovered or measured”, and will instead resort to the fallacy of reliance on an authority believed to be correct. But history is full of authorities who were not only incorrect, but so far from reality as to be easily disproved, yet they were still authorities to many.
In practice we cannot ignore them, so we have to try to educate them, even though that may be more work than were the Augean stables. Perhaps we need to start with the meanings of ‘simple’, ‘fundamental’, and ‘fact’.