War on Scientific Illiteracy

Steven Pinker reviews a must read book;

In “The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science,” Natalie Angier aims to do her part for scientific literacy. Though Angier is a regular contributor to the Science Times section of this newspaper, “The Canon” departs from the usual treatment of science by journalists, who typically cover the “news,” the finding that upsets the apple cart, rather than the consensus. Though one can understand why journalists tend to report the latest word from the front — editors’ demand for news rather than pedagogy, and the desire to show that science is a fractious human activity rather than priestly revelation — this approach doesn’t always serve a widespread understanding of science. The results of isolated experiments are more ephemeral than conclusions from literature reviews (which usually don’t fit into a press release), and the discovery-du-jour approach can whipsaw readers between contradictory claims and leave them thinking, “Whatever.”

Angier’s goals are summed up in two words in her subtitle: beautiful basics. “The Canon” presents the fundamentals of science: numbers and probability, matter and energy, the origins and structure of living things, and the natural history of our planet, solar system, galaxy and universe. These are, she judges, the basics that every educated person should master, and a prerequisite to a genuine understanding of the material in any newspaper’s science coverage. And she presents these basics as beautiful: worthy of knowing for their own sake, even if they won’t help us save the planet, age successfully or compete with the Chinese.

“The Canon” begins on an engaging note, lamenting what is one of my pet peeves as well — the idea that science is something for kids. When their children turn 13, Angier notes, many parents abandon their memberships in zoos and science museums for more “mature” institutions like theaters and art museums. And who can blame them, when visiting a modern science museum, in her priceless description, consists of a “mad pinball pinging from one hands-on science exhibit to the next, pounding on knobs to make artificial earthquakes, or cranking gears to see Newton’s laws in motion, or something like that; who bothers to read the explanatory placards anyway? And, oops, hmm, hey, Mom, this thing seems to have stopped working!” Many new science museums seem to be built on the dubious theory that a person’s life interests are formed in childhood — that “just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” Instead they may be conveying the message “When I was a child ... I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

Angier’s first chapter, “Thinking Scientifically,” makes the case for scientific literacy and portrays the mind-set of scientists. Anyone who knows a boffin (as the British affectionately call the women and men in white coats) will recognize the passionate and irreverent voices of her subjects. (“Most of the time,” one of them tells her, “when you get an amazing, counterintuitive result, it means you screwed up the experiment.”) Thankfully, she does not try to render something called “the scientific method” (a phrase that never passes the lips of a real scientist) but conveys the idea that science is just the attempt to understand the world with a special effort to ensuring that the things you say about it are true.

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"People who would sneer at the vulgarian . . ."