In Homer’s Iliad, set during the ninth year of the Trojan War, Cassandra was a love interest of Apollo. Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy. Apollo’s love unrequited, he cursed Cassandra’s gift by granting a disbelieving ear to all who heard her message. Unfortunately for the Trojans, in the 10th year of the war Cassandra prophesied of the Greeks building a large horse within which they would place soldiers to lay siege to Troy. Her prophecy falling on deaf ears, the Greek army later ended the epic war by successfully infiltrating the city.

Today’s scientists are the Cassandras of the 21st Century. Of persistent and increasing concern is the general public’s extraordinary lack of scientific literacy. The language and process of science is not being taught or pursued with enough urgency and rigor; this renders many of us incapable of drawing proper inferences about the world. This concern is not merely academic. Many of us in this Year of Science are aware of the statistics on what percentage of Americans believe in the evolution (39%) and, in this International Year of Astronomy, how many of us believe the sun revolves around the earth (18%). But the problem is deeper, more systematic, and more relevant than these polls suggest. If I am successful, by the time you’re done reading this you will understand just how deeply problematic scientific illiteracy is.

Scientific literacy is not an inherently sexy topic but it is a pressing one because the transfer and comprehension of timely information increasingly sustain our interdependent world. The information presented to us on a daily basis is growing progressively more complex and in order to make sound decisions about what to purchase, how to invest our money, what to eat, how to lose weight, or even for whom to vote, we must rely on our ability to make sense of the complicated ways humans around the world tend to behave; we must make sense of large numbers and probabilities, graphs and charts; and above all else, we must find ways to cooperate and understand each other. The good news is that science can assist us in these personal, professional, and political endeavors if we have the will to push for better scientific understanding.

The problem permeates: A series of personal considerations

Is it ethical for a Minnesotan to eat a banana?

In order to come to a decision on such a simple matter, we must realize that food is not simply food anymore. Food now comes to us with labels such as ‘organic’ or ‘genetically modified’ or ‘fair trade’ or ‘local’. Aside from knowing exactly what ‘genetically modified’ or ‘organic’ mean, there are other considerations worth mentioning.

The banana must travel for days or weeks under a sophisticated refrigeration system over hundreds and often thousands of miles in order to prevent premature ripening. Further, the banana must be treated with ethylene gas when it arrives at its destination to prompt ripening. With all the refrigeration and miles traveled, the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere and the amount of energy expended is considerable.

Moreover, as Peter Singer suggests in his book The Way We Eat, if the banana is out of season, it must travel additional miles to arrive at its final destination. One must also consider the ramifications of turning to a more local food source. Eating locally and seasonally has been shown to strengthen local economies and support rural farms and family owned businesses. If these considerations are important to you, you’ll think twice about eating a banana. But distilling such complex information demands scientific thinking and a general repertoire of scientific knowledge.

What’s the best way to lose weight, or, how do I get ripped?

In order to come to a decision on another simple matter, skeptical scientific thinking will always outperform gullibility and the tendency to pursue a quick fix.

First, there is no such thing as spot-fat-reduction. In other words, purchasing an Ab-Roller in order to slim your waistline will not cause the fat to magically disappear from your waistline any quicker than for any other part of your body. Increasing the number of calories burned and decreasing the number of calories consumed will slim your waistline––but particularly if you are male, your waistline will likely be the last body part slimmed. There is no way around this.

Second, in order to increase the number of calories burned one can augment their aerobic regimen (running, stair-climbing, cycling)––something most of us know temporarily increases the metabolism of sugars followed by fats––by lifting weights. Lifting weights causes muscular hypertrophy, which increases the body’s basal metabolic rate. In other words, it takes energy to rebuild muscle. The value added by resistance training is that your body doesn’t stop burning calories after you step off the treadmill. In light of this rather simple science, Americans spend billions of dollars on quick fixes with little result.

Sadly, scientific language (muscular hypertrophy, CO2, genetic modification) is less appealing than simple language and simple answers. Moreover, trends are less persuasive than individual data points and human-interest stories and extreme cases (outliers), govern our fears and distort our perceptions of reality. A cool day on a summer afternoon in Texas is seen and often presented as evidence for why “global warming” is a hoax. Time magazine ran a ‘myth buster’ piece in 1975, which misrepresented the state of science at the time and it is being used to this day as ammunition for the climate change naysayers.

Dramatic headlines and cover stories sell newspapers and magazines even in the most reputable media and this is unlikely to change. As people who are interested in what is true, we have nothing to rely on but our ability to be incisive and discerning consumers of information. But even the most intellectually acute among us seem to feel blindsided and condescended to when presented a table, a regression equation, or a probability density function. The intellectually acute I am referring to are, of course, urban professionals working for large corporations.

Professional puzzles

In business, corporations often fail to take advantage of sound research methodology.

Sources close to me say that IBM MBAs often have difficulty making proper inferences from data and understanding proper research methodologies––often to the bane of in-house researchers working to increase productivity and add value to the corporation.

I have been instructed by current Pfizer in-house researchers to “dumb down” research findings when presenting them to executives because, often, presenting evidence is not persuasive. Instead, “using personal examples about how this solution worked for Acme Corporation is much more persuasive.” In other words, instead of mentioning the likelihood of outcomes, promising or guaranteeing increased productivity is more persuasive––especially if it is delivered in the form of a story or anecdote. This neglect of science in favor of emotional appeal has the inauspicious side effect of relegating sound research on human performance to the dustbins of HR departments at the expense of corporations and their employees.

Many corporations still operate under the mistaken assumption that wages and performance have a positive linear relationship. In fact, it is not the case that increasing wages or delivering bonuses proportionally increases worker productivity.

A sad reminder: these examples are set at two of the most technologically oriented corporations in the world where innovation and science drive the corporate ethos. If IBM and Pfizer hold science in such low esteem (in this case the behavioral and social sciences assisting the inner-workings of their companies), what can we say for the likes of Citigroup or General Electric or General Motors or AIG?

A political predicament

If poor personal choices and unproductive and wasteful corporations were the only noteworthy result of a scientifically illiterate and intellectually incurious populace, my argument may not be burdened with such moral weight. But in a democracy, the movements of the sea will determine the direction of every last fish, however large or cunning. The tendencies and fallacies and biases of the public at large and our lack of awareness of them (or perhaps our awareness but insouciance towards them) will determine whether we all sink or whether we all swim. A culture of unreason and an ineffectual educational system have left us far too undiscerning and gullible.

Dangerously, an uninformed public can prompt a whole host of unwise government actions such as the American response to 9/11. At other times, rational concerns about E. coli-ridden spinach or tainted beef or poisonous toys can cycle out of control into great scares demanding urgent action in a way that perhaps more pressing (but less emotionally appealing) concerns such as runaway military spending or global climate change cannot.

In the 1980s several cows were observed behaving erratically. The cows had bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). BSE was renamed “mad cow disease” by the press and in 1996 when ten young people’s deaths were linked to BSE populist outrage ensued. The British government, backed by the scientific community, ensured the people that the problem was isolated and had been contained and that existing supplies of beef were safe. However, due to pressure from the frenetic media and a frantic populace, the British government was forced to slaughter 4.7 million cows costing millions of dollars.

This sort of mass hysteria leading to politically popular but expensive and often improper government responses is unnerving given our human tendencies to confirm what we think we already know, surround ourselves with people who already agree with us, and gravitate to online news sources, blogs, and other media sympathetic to our own opinion.

When is the last time you turned on Bill O’Reilly or other members of the cable news commentariat and witnessed a guest change their opinion instantly based on the evidence that the other party provided? In your own life, when is the last time you changed your political opinion based on the evidence someone else provided?

If the threshold for mind changing is so high, it is worth asking what the point of this form of political debate is at all. The raised voices, sarcasm, incomplete facts, and manipulated statistics presented to an undiscerning public are manifestly unhelpful. It is often said that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. But even though probability neglect and a failure to recognize and distinguish true outliers from poseurs threaten to make this claim truer than ever, we have the power to make mathematics the language of truth that it truly is.

This is not an ideological or political case I am making. It is the question of whether we, as democratically empowered people, have the capacity to distinguish reality from the fictions generated in our own minds and in the minds of others in such a way that allows us to make proper decisions based on a sound understanding of the world around us. The first step is getting our facts and our statistics in line and using science to put things in perspective. For example, which ought we to fear more: plane crashes and terrorist attacks or car crashes and heart attacks? Scientific thinking about probabilities can put this quandary into perspective.

The next step is to obtain a general grasp of the social sciences in order to inform and enlighten our understanding of political disagreement above and beyond the interpretation of reality. The social sciences, for example, can offer stunning insights into why liberals and conservatives disagree and don’t seem very liable to change their political opinions. A scientific understanding of personal differences, professional practices, and political affiliations has the potential to foster positive conflict, a healthy exchange of ideas, and legitimate differences of opinion.

In addition, knowing something about risk and uncertainty can go a long way toward explaining our current financial crisis; knowing something about ingroup/outgroup distinctions can go a long way toward explaining why things like Abu Ghraib happen; and knowing something about motivation can go a long way toward explaining why offering employees more money won’t necessarily make them more productive.

Conclusion

Politicians and public administrators can often be punished for posing legitimate scientific questions and attempting to answer them honestly. A prominent example of this is Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council who came under fire for suggesting that innate differences between men and women might be one explanation for the discrepancy between men and women in math and science careers. On the other hand, politicians like Mark Pryor (R) of Arkansas benefit politically from either being coy or sincerely not understanding basic science, sometimes to hilarious effect.

We must put an end to the meme that science is knowledge or that science is a body of facts. Science is a process by which humans come to a better understanding of the universe and each other. It is for this reason that I am not a fan of the word “tolerance.” Tolerance is something that happens when we fail to achieve an understanding others and it is this full understanding that ought to be our goal. Science can help light the path, but only if we listen to it and use it wisely. After all, science is a process, not a conclusion.

*NOTE: I am not advocating here for everyone who reads this to begin a rigorous study of biology or astronomy or to begin taking college courses. We can all be scientifically informed. We can take community education classes, sit in on lectures, surf the web or even YouTube, or do things the old-fashioned way and read a book. I close with a list and a quotation.

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