Bit of a kerfuffle over at DramaBlogs ScienceBlogs, in the wake of PZ Myers’s visit to a screening of Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution movie, Expelled. PZ apparently signed up online for tickets to a screening (under his own name), but upon arrival he was recognized by the organizers, and asked to leave. Expelled from Expelled! It’s the 21st century, we all have to re-calibrate our irony meters. Adding to the fun was the fact that the rest of PZ’s party was allowed to continue in to see the movie — and among the friends he had dragged along was Richard Dawkins, who was apparently not recognized. This is too delicious a story to pass up, and it’s already been reported in the New York Times and elsewhere.
But not everyone is amused, even on the pro-science side. Chris Mooney complains that the controversy gives a huge boost, in the form of priceless publicity, to Expelled and its supporters. People who never would have heard of the movie will now be curious to see it; the filmmakers are already gloating about all the attention.
I think that Chris is right: this is publicity for the movie that they couldn’t possibly have received any other way, and PZ and Dawkins are basically doing exactly what the filmmakers were hoping for all along.
And they should keep right on doing it.
To understand why, consider the much more intemperate response by Matt Nisbet, Chris’s partner in the Framing Science game. They have been exhorting scientists to communicate more effectively by framing issues in a way that resonate with their audiences. This sounds like very good advice, and in fact kind of obvious and uncontroversial. But when ask to give examples, Chris and Matt often choose Richard Dawkins as their poster boy for what not to do. Personally I think that Dawkins has been very good for the cultural discourse overall, but Matt and Chris fear that his avowed atheism will turn people against science, making things easier for folks who want to fight against evolution in public schools.
In his post, Matt is perfectly blatant: PZ and Dawkins are hurting the cause, and should just shut up. When called up by the media, they should decline to speak, instead suggesting that the reporter contact someone who can give the pro-evolution message in a way that is friendlier to religion.
As you might expect, neither PZ, nor Dawkins, nor any of their ilk (and I count myself among them) are likely to follow this undoubtedly well-intentioned advice, as this pithy rejoinder demonstrates. The heart of the difference in approaches is evident in the analogies that Matt brings up, namely to political campaigns:
If Dawkins and PZ really care about countering the message of The Expelled camp, they need to play the role of Samantha Power, Geraldine Ferraro and so many other political operatives who through misstatements and polarizing rhetoric have ended up being liabilities to the causes and campaigns that they support. Lay low and let others do the talking.
When Chris and Matt talk to the PZ/Dawkins crowd, they do a really bad job of understanding and working within the presuppositions of their audience — exactly what framing is supposed to be all about. To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt that such a contest is going on. But it’s not all that is going on, and it’s not the only motivation one might have for wading into discussions of science and religion.
There is a more basic motivation: telling the truth.
What Matt and Chris (seemingly) fail to understand is that PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins are not trying to be successful politicians, persuading the largest number of people to come over to their side. They have no interest in being politicians. They are critics, and their goal is to say correct things about the world and argue against incorrect statements. Of course, they would certainly like to see evolution rather than creationism taught in schools, and ultimately they would be very happy if all of humanity were persuaded of the correctness of their views. But their books and blogs about science and religion are not strategic documents designed to bring about some desired outcome; they are attempts to say true things about issues they care about. Telling them “Shut up! You’ll offend the sensibilities of people we are trying to persuade!” is like talking to a brick wall, or at least in an alien language. You will have to frame things much better than that.
Politicians and critics often don’t get along. And the choice to be one or the other usually comes down more to the personality of the individual rather than some careful cost-benefit analysis. (You know that PZ will be regaling youngsters with the story of how he was expelled from Expelled for decades to come.) I’m very much in the mold of a critic; one of my first ever blog posts was why I could never be a politician. It’s easy enough to tell the difference: even if a critic knew for a fact that a certain true statement would harm their cause politically, they would still insist on saying it.
But one stance or the other is not better nor worse; society very much needs both politicians and critics. The job of a critic sounds very lofty — speaking truth to power, heedless of extraordinary social pressures and the hooting condemnation of a benighted populace. But if everyone were a critic, it would be a disaster. We need politicians to actually things done, and (in the rare instances where it is carried out with integrity) the role of a politician should be one of the most honored in society. A gifted politician will understand the contours of what is possible, and work within the constraints posed by the real world to move society in a better direction.
However, we also need critics. If everyone were a politician, it would be equally disastrous. In Bernard Shaw’s famous phrasing, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” The perfect can be the enemy of the good, but if we don’t have a loud and persistent chorus of voices reminding us of how far short we fall of perfection, we won’t work as hard as we can to get there.
And we should hardly be surprised that bloggers and polemicists tend to be critics rather than politicians. We should have people out there selling evolution to skeptical listeners who might be committed to religion and suspicious of science. But that doesn’t mean that sincere voices who believe that thinking scientifically sends you down the path to atheism should be told to shut up. Without stubborn critics who refuse to compromise on their vision of the truth, our discourse would be an enormously poorer place.
Wow, what great comments, all. Very well said. Pz’s and Dawkin’s rhetorical skills do leave something to be desired but that said, it’s a pity that they even have to say them at all. All I know is that the whole creo/evo mess leaves me stupified and wondering WTF happened here?
Religions have grouped their shits on the population for so long that we now find ourselves here wondering about how to “frame” the rhetoric of religion’s critics…the supporters of observable, peer reviewed science? Holy shit, we all need to find voices half as clear as PZ and Dawkins and have at it right with them…screw the framing bit…it’s time to get busy and active in support of what we can observe, now! We’ll figure out to do it more clearly later!
It’s almost as though the shit is so deep the methane is beginning to affect our ability to think clearly…since history hasn’t been here before who knows what “framing buttons” to push so I say, push them all! And Dawkins and PZ are doing a great job at that. There’s time for an assessment down the road in order to make adjustments for what works and what doesn’t but until we get more voices crying from the wilderness we have but little to test and critique. IMHO.
Carl Sagan: “Science as a Candle in the Dark”
Richard Dawkins: “The God Delusion”
Carl Sagan, when dealing with people who have no knowledge of or experience with science, would treat them the same way he would treat a child who was scared of the dark. Dawkins might rap them on the knuckles and send them off to bed with no supper, metaphorically speaking. (Hint: it’s never that productive to tell people they’re deluded)
Note: Unfortunately, some people really did use Darwin’s ideas as the basis of their eugenics programs, most notably Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term. Galton believed in selective breeding to create “a highly gifted race of men” which he called “positive” eugenics. Getting rid of the “genetic undesirables” was subsequently termed “negative” eugenics, and that inspired various unpleasant events in 20th century history, didn’t it?
Scientifically, eugenics was nonsense – but that doesn’t stop it from being used by creationists as a straw man in their sad & curious attempts to disprove the evolutionary history of life. Scientists should just admit what happened and note that scientific theories, just like religious beliefs, can sometimes be misused for political purposes.
Ike wrote:
Note: Unfortunately, some people really did use Darwin’s ideas as the basis of their eugenics programs, most notably Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term. Galton believed in selective breeding to create “a highly gifted race of men” which he called “positive” eugenics. Getting rid of the “genetic undesirables” was subsequently termed “negative” eugenics, and that inspired various unpleasant events in 20th century history, didn’t it?
The modern synthesis that occurred in the early 20th century demonstrated that maintaining variation was one key to maintaining fitness. Any marginal validity notions of racial purity might have gathered from an evolutionary perspective was gone prior to the “unpleasant events” you speak of. Thus as you say below, scientifically, eugenics was nonsense. And of course, killing of the Other motivated by notions of racial, ethnic, or indeed religious purity goes back as far as recorded history, predating evolutionary theory by millenia.
Scientifically, eugenics was nonsense – but that doesn’t stop it from being used by creationists as a straw man in their sad & curious attempts to disprove the evolutionary history of life. Scientists should just admit what happened and note that scientific theories, just like religious beliefs, can sometimes be misused for political purposes.
That’s already happened, repeatedly (scientists admitting that scientific theories, including those involving genetics and evolution, can be and have been misused). It hasn’t stopped the propaganda. But of course this is consistent with the history of evangelical protest against other misuses of genetics, such as biological weapons research – oh, wait….
Re: #45 and #46
Ignoring the creationists isn’t an option. They’ve been gaining ground and will do so quicker if left unopposed. Nisbett and Mooney have made little impact on them so far (but by all means let them keep trying!), whereas Dawkins et al. have got them on the defensive.
Plus, misleading the public about science (‘framing’) is morally wrong in addition to likely being a poor strategic move.
Jeff (#12): It was firebrands like PZ that got me passionate, and out of a sort of helpless cynicism. He’s the sort of person who convinced me it was possible for science to make more progress on hearts and minds.
Quite frankly, I’m currently having a hard time believing that the same person doing these really bad examples of framing is the one who wrote on the Republican War on Science. PZ and Dawkins scored as complete a victory as was possible. All these people can think to do is to blindly chant that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Personally, I find some of PZ Myers’ and Hitchens’ writing stylistically reminescent of Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo journalism” – hilarious if you agree with the sentiments or don’t much care either way, but abrasively hurtful if you disagree. The best of their writings are wonderfully good – see the Myers piece Brad DeLong linked to recently, comparing cell chemical reactions with a casino. So I am willing to take the rough with the smooth, but what bothers me about the Pharyngula blog is the lack of moderation of comments. With 1000-comment posts, PZ probably doesn’t have time to moderate them thoroughly, but it has been a very long time since I have seen him try to curb the hostility and verbal excesses of those commenters who often attack any dissenting comment, turning some threads into feeding frenzies. (On the other hand, many of his commenters are among the best in the business.)
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Jim V wrote:
Personally, I find some of PZ Myers’ and Hitchens’ writing stylistically reminescent of Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo journalism”
First line of Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:” We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Find me a line from The God Delusion reminiscent of that.
Eliot #46:
The fundamental difference in the analogy is that your dog is trying to get attention in general. Creationists are doing it to get attention from people other than you. Your ignoring the creationists would be like ignoring the dog while your 5-year-old (if you have one) squeals with glee as he watches the paper get shredded.
Ignoring cranks works. Ignoring well-oiled, funded and supported machines of misinformation does not.
You can’t ignore them. It’s part of a bigger political problem. What a lot of media pundits, authors, preachers of fundamentalist churches, etc. are doing is lumping in this way:
liberals/theory of evolution/atheists/uppity academics/socialism/fascists…
When the President of the United States says in public that we “should teach the controversy,” there’s a problem. Either he is willfully ignorant or pandering to religious fundamentalists, but either way it is not leadership in regards to science education.
When candidates like Huckabee tell a student in a forum that the Bible is right and he believes it when said student asked about teaching evolution, there’s a problem. These people are not perpetual motion cranks – they have access to political figures and affect legislation.
Failure to see this problem is at our peril. Bush & Co. may need scientists to build bombs, but the general public they don’t seem to care much about in regards to science education. Then science ultimately has less supporters who would advocate for research, etc. Looking to the future – Bill Gates recently went before Congress to emphasize the future of science and technology education.
bah, I vote for drafting a couple of critics against their wills. Krugman and Carroll ’08!
“Stephen on Mar 24th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Could, perhaps, they instead have noticed his behavior and language? Might he have been making disparaging comments about the other people there or religion in general?
In a word: no. I gather you haven’t seen any of PZ’s videos or heard his radio talks. He is in person a very mild-mannered and quietly-spoken person. He is also, when addressing a general audience, almost as gentlemanly as Dawkins. It’s only on his blog that he sometimes plays the incendiary dragon, because he knows that much of his audience there appreciates it.”
Thanks for this explanation. You’re correct, my only exposure to his character was from his blog and his comments on other people’s blogs. It obviously created a false impression for me of his actual character. I see what happened at the “Expelled” showing in an entirely different light now.
Why not appeal to the chinese method? If it goes against the progress and the governament, shut them down. Your economy grows faster.
Elliot (#46) wrote:
>
> Our dog starts ripping up newspapers when my wife is on the phone.
> The behaviorist said it is nothing more than attention getting behavior
Going off on a tangent somewhat (but this is a scientific blog, right?), the behaviorist may be anthropomorphising your dog’s behaviour.
It’s doubtful a dog seeing you on the phone understands that you are communicating with another person, even if it can hear a muffled voice at the other end.
When it sees you holding an object to your mouth and mumbling, it can only interpret this as you “worrying” at the phone as if it were a bone or some morsel, and the dog wants to imitate you and join in with whatever comes to hand.
I’m not sure why Mooney sees PZ being expelled from “Expelled” as positive publicity for IDers. If anything, this oughta serve as negative publicity for them. After all, I can’t think of anything more hypocritical than expelling someone from something entitled “Expelled”.
And even though the public was awfully stupid to elect GW Bush not once, but twice, I don’t think, unlike Mooney does, that the public is stupid enough not to see Ben Stein as nothing more than a flaming hypocrite!
Carl Sagan wouldn’t even get on TV these days, except maybe PBS the way Neil Degrasse Tyson does.
When Sagan was on TV, news was Walter Cronkite and science was PBS. Now Republicans run PBS and have turned it into mostly cooking shows and infomercials and very “balanced” flag-waiving documentaries… and the “news” is Hannity and Colmes, Hardball, etc.
They might put Carl Sagan on once against Bill Donohue from the Catholic League on Hardball, but they’d never put him on again because he wouldn’t work in the shout-everyone-down format.
On science, certainly, there are few that can beat PZ Myers. No culturally aware person would want to read PZ Myers on atheism.
Arun wrote:
Really? And whom exactly do you, as a culturally aware person, read on atheism?
To amplify something I think was already pointed out above, the correct arena here is not really framing, but negotiation. Having atheist scientists remain silent allows the extreme of discourse (on ‘our’ side, at least) to be defined by moderate adherents of evolutionary theory, which does not properly counterbalance the willful ignorance of the fundamentalist side of the scales. By having Dawkins et al. stake out a position in favor of evangelical atheism, the centrist position, say theistic evolution, or simple secularism, is seen to be less extreme. In the political arena, the Republicans have mastered the art of asking for the moon in so-called negotiation and then settling for a mere 98% of their demands, while the Democrats lose again and again by their very reasonableness.
apples and oranges. science and religion.
I understand the desire to characterize them as opposites but they really aren’t in my view and doing so skews the discussion in ways that I feel are unfavorable to encouraging public support for science, including research and education.
So I suggest taking a step back and putting each in it’s appropriate plane of human activity rather than assuming there is no ground for co-existence..
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They ARE opposites.
One is the search to understand the universe as it is, regardless of whether or not the truth is comforting. Many, of course do find it comforting by changing their emotions to accept that reality.
The other is an attempt at self-gratification or at least self-comforting through willful delusion, by trying to force the universe into serving one’s own emotional needs. Hiding truth, obscuring or ignoring fact. Even the most liberal religionists who accept science still have simply found little nooks and crannies where science hasn’t gone yet in which to hide their imagined realities.
They cannot coexist in the sense of being intermingled. Science kills superstition, and superstition can kill science. Matter and anti-matter. They can only “coexist” if they are kept far apart.
Religion is “an attempt at self-gratification or at least self-comforting through willful delusion, by trying to force the universe into serving one’s own emotional needs”.
This is wonderful! We can understand, for instance, the Romans and the early Christians as a competition between competing needs for self-gratification. A breakthrough in historical and religious studies!
This is precisely why Dawkins and Myers are deadly bores on the subject of religion.
“No culturally aware person would want to read PZ Myers on atheism.”
But PZ is the Michael Moore of the atheist movement. And no movement is complete without such a figure — minus Moore’s waistline, of course. ;~)
“apples and oranges, science and religion”
Since I firmly believe in separation of church and state, I firmly believe in keeping science and religion separate, too. And while there’s nothing wrong with government sponoring science, there’s everything wrong with government sponoring religion!
I normally simply lurk on this site and
enjoy reading the banter, but in this case
feel the need to speak up.
I can’t tolerate either the intelligent designers
or the “scientific atheists”, and for each of those
groups I am bothered by precisely the same
tendency: they try to make science say something
that it cannot say.
Scientific research is an extraordinarily
reliable way of producing new knowledge about
the world around us, and it works because
research needs to be peer-reviewed, based
ultimately on reproducible experiments,
and quantifiable at some level of precision.
Hackneyed though the idea is, the basic model
of theory -> hypothesis -> experimental test
actually does play a role in the scientific process
(despite the messiness that inevitably accompanies
all human activity).
This process of truth-seeking has proven its
value over centuries, but both intelligent design
advocates and many atheists who claim the
support of science do not use this process to
come to their conclusions about the existence
of God (or a “designer”, or what have you),
which therefore lack the reliability of standard
scientific results.
Both sets of advocates suffer from the fact that
there is no “theory of God” which makes specific
hypotheses we can agree on (the way, say,
general relativity or plate tectonics or the theory
of evolution do). They therefore spend their
time arguing about what the appropriate set of
hypotheses is rather than the experimental
tests of them. That is, both sides are left arguing,
“No, really, what *would* Jesus do?”
For either side to apply a veneer of science
onto these ideas, then to put it on the shelf next to
peer-reviewed and reproducible scientific results,
and finally to sell it at the same price and as the
same product, is disingenuous at best and furthermore
reveals imprecision and lack of rigor in thought.
It makes them all look like “politicians” to me —
they’re not actually doing science and hewing to
its path towards truth, but using science as a rhetorical
stick against their opponents in debate. Perhaps
this approach is an effective short term tactic, perhaps
not, but as a scientist I’d be loath to place in these
people (and here I speak of the atheists who make
such arguments) my long term hopes for a public that
understands and believes in the results and the
methods of science.
Better to have an advocate that defends those truths
we have attained which are now nearly certain (the
laws of physics, evolution, etc), that acknowledges
the uncertainties in our knowledge (which is, after all,
science’s *strength*, not its weakness), and that
admits that there are limits to the questions we can
address with this approach.