Timothy White, a paleoanthropologist at Berkeley, is rightly famous for his work on hominin fossils, especially Lucy. And he’s done some good work against creationism as well: he was the scientist who most flummoxed the UK creationists in our television show “Conspiracy Road Trip“. The fundies just couldn’t get around his sequential presentation and explanation of hominin skulls (see the segment starting at 43:37).
And White has ample experience with a media that loves new stories about human evolution. (Neandertals copulating with H. sapiens sapiens! Denisovans! Hobbit people in Indonesia!) But I guess that experience has soured him, leading to his November 26 piece in the Guardian whose title tells the tale: “Why combining science and showmanship risks the future of research.”
It’s curiously garbled and splenetic, but the thesis is that showmanship—both scientists’ own participation in the media and the media’s distortion of science—is causing serious damage to “the credibility of scientists.”
Here’s what White objects to:
- Distortion of scientific findings by the media, which also neglects the hard work behind science in favor of “aha moments.” (One example he gives is a NOVA/National Geographic program implying that Darwin’s tree of life was wrong because there is gene flow between different lineages, including hominin linages like Neandertals and “modern” humans. Sound familiar? Remember the New Scientist cover?)
- Science may be done and published too quickly on the media’s time schedule, like the premature announcement of Darwinius masillae, a “missing link” between primate groups that proved to be bogus.
- Scientists can be seduced by the media, since publicity and media stardom can enhance their professional careers.
- “Peer review” by people on the Internet that bypasses “normal” peer review of papers in journals. As he writes:
“Do we really want to rely on cartoonists as peer reviewers, or Hollywood scriptwriters to replace documentarians? Do we really want authors, journal editors, and peer reviewers evaluating science with one eye trained on the 11 o’clock news?” (Look at the link, though.)
White argues that the consequences of the media/science mishmash are dire: “Our fates increasingly depend on science and technology. So there are some serious questions to ponder if broadcast and publication schedules distort knowledge production and dissemination in this mash-up of science and the modern media.” The article ends with a rather curmudgeonly tirade against the corruption of science:
In 1875, Mark Twain wrote to the legendary entertainer P.T. Barnum, noting that whereas his circus shows were stupendous, Mr. Barnum himself was “the biggest marvel.” Had Barnum’s over-the-top self-promotion and publicity stunts even worked on the ever-skeptical Twain? Barnum, of course, expertly exhibited many oddities in his shows. I haven’t researched whether his spectaculars ever featured a wheelbarrow’s worth of mixed bones. But given that he did exhibit a mermaid, a microcephalic, and Tom Thumb, it is unlikely that the showman would have passed on the opportunity.
Approaching 150 years later, the internet’s great speed and connectivity have disrupted many things, including review mechanisms in science, education, and journalism. We can accurately guess what old P.T. Barnum’s perspective would have been on the entertainment end of the present disruption spectrum—worship of the money, the advertising, and the spectaculars that we watch today on our phones, tablets and desktops. We certainly miss Mark Twain’s keen eye for corruption and human nature, and his talent for the right words to make fun of it all.
Given the deliberate, careful, sustained, and ultimately solid research and logic behind Charles Darwin’s most brilliant insights, it is not difficult to guess his reactions to this modern mash-up: emotions ranging between wonder and dismay.
While I have immense respect for White and his work, I simply can’t agree with his arguments. Yes, there are some downsides of the media/science romance, including television shows that present the occult or the dubious without criticism, or National Geographic‘s current infatuation with religious myth. But, by and large, most science shows and articles are pretty good. Witness David Attenborough, the new Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the books of science “stars” like Brian Greene, Lisa Randall, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and E. O. Wilson.
Further, the reputation of scientists, at least in the US, is not falling. We remain at the same high level of public esteem as ever. Surveys show (see here, for instance) that “in the U.S., scientists and their organizations enjoy almost unrivaled respect, admiration, and cultural authority. Americans overwhelmingly trust scientists, support scientific funding, and believe in the promise of research and technology. Among institutions, only the military enjoys greater admiration and deference.” That was from a Pew Poll six years ago, but a National Science Foundation poll only a year ago found that “more than 90 percent of Americans think scientists are ‘helping to solve challenging problems’ and are ‘dedicated people who work for the good of humanity.'”
So what’s the problem? I don’t think there is one.
As far as I can see as a newly superannuated research scientist, being a media “star” can get one attention and dosh, but does very little for one’s scientific career. Remember when Carl Sagan failed to get into the National Academy of Sciences because he was a “popularizer”? He was immensely influential and a great public educator, but that snobbish body didn’t see what he did as a contribution to science. It’s still pretty much that way. I too learned that my popular books and writings had absolutely no influence on my professional advancement. But that was fine with me, for I saw the popularization as an enjoyable avocation and the science as a vocation.
Finally, bringing professional science reviewing into the public realm has way more upsides than downsides. First of all, internet review is FAST, and problems with papers can be noted and publicized far more quickly than they are if handled through normal professional channels. (Criticisms of published work that is submitted to journals often takes months to appear, and is often buried online.) Think of how fast we learned that Darwinius was bogus as a missing link, or that the so-called “arsenic-based life” in Mono Lake was due to contamination. That was days, not months.
The debunking of published science in these and other cases was done not just by blogging scientists, but by science-friendly amateurs and even journalists like Carl Zimmer.
As for unduly neglecting the tedious aspects of science, well, White has a point there. “Eureka moments” are rare, and most science ends in failure. (I estimate that in my own career, only about one-third of the projects I did panned out.) But people’s attention spans are limited, there’s lots of competition forit, and it’s better to show the Eurkena moments than to show nothing.
Looking at the plethora of science books in my nearby bookstore, seeing all the biologists, physicists and cosmologists who have become public figures, and seeing the respect that Americans have for science (evolution is a sad exception!), I just can’t get worked up about the “problems” highlighted by White. Yes, there may be some mutant children produced by the coitus between science and the media, but that’s more than outweighed by the many healthy offspring of that intercourse. The more public science, the better!
. . . But maybe I’m wrong:
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