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Category: Climate change

Evangelicals and the nonreligious don’t differ in science literacy

2011-10-10
by Josh Rosenau

Sociologist John Evans talks about his research on evangelical attitudes toward science. Writing for the LA Times, he says:

I recently conducted survey research comparing the most conservative of Protestants â those who identify with a conservative Protestant denomination, attend church regularly and take the Bible literally, or about 11% of the population in my analysis â with those who do not participate in any religion. The conservative Protestants are equally likely to understand scientific methods, to know scientific facts and to claim knowledge of science. They are as likely as the nonreligious to have majored in science or to have a scientific occupation. While other studies have shown that the elite scientists who work at the 20 top research universities are less religious than the public, it appears that the vast majority of people with workaday scientific occupations are like their neighbors, religiously speaking â¦

There are, of course, a few fact claims in which conservative Protestant theology and science differ, such as the origins of humans and the universe. Here we find that typical conservative Protestants are likely to believe the teaching of their religion on the issue and not the scientific claim.

We could complain that they are being inconsistent in believing the scientific method some of the time but not always. Yet social science research has long shown that people typically are not very consistent. The people who are more consistent are those who are punished for inconsistency: philosophers, media pundits, political activists and politicians. [Note, though, that media pundits are not punished for inconsistency. ‑JR] â¦

The greatest conflict between fundamentalists, evangelicals and science is not over facts but over values. While scientists like to say that their work is value-free, that is not how the public views it, and conservative Protestants especially have homed in on the moral message of science. William Jennings Bryan, famed defender of the creationist perspective at the Scopes “monkey trial,” was not just opposed to evolution for contradicting the Bible but also concerned that the underlying philosophy of Darwinism had ruined the morals of German youth and had caused World War I.

The situation today is not that different: Contemporary “intelligent design” advocates, for example, are deeply worried that the teaching of evolution has a negative effect on children’s values.

The same research that shows fundamentalists generally believe in science’s ability to gather facts about the world also shows that they do not want scientists to lead the public debate on issues concerning morality.

Is it still futile then? Can the two “sides” never agree?

No, it isn’t futile. Understanding what concerns the “other side” would help. â¦

To move forward, we, as a country, need to lower the political conflict. Yes, the views found in fundamentalist churches are not exactly the same as those at the National Science Foundation. But we would see less of the polarizing “we real Americans” rhetoric from the religious right if its members were not ridiculed as know-nothings. Conservative Protestants are not fundamentally opposed to all science.

These points largely echo those I’ve made on this blog for years, though there are places I’d quibble. Evangelicals value science and technology, surely, but their view of science is a cod-Baconian science, not so much 19th century as 17th, and wrong even from Bacon’s perspective. A love of technology and adherence to an outdated and restrictive inductive mode of inquiry is not love of science, and it is in that gap which one can find the “fundamental opposition to science.”

But Evans is right that this sort of research can guide us towards better ways to engage people around science. Knowing that evangelicals treat science as what we can touch and influence directly does indeed suggest that climate change communication should focus on direct measurements, not on models, and the same for evolution. (The trick, of course, is that the really interesting parts of climate science or evolutionary sciences involve taking direct measurements and making model-based, testable extrapolations.)

I’m especially intrigued by the finding that evangelicals are as likely as nonreligious folks to major in science and that both groups perform comparably on science literacy tests. Elaine Howard Ecklund’s survey of scientists at elite universities found almost no evangelicals, so clearly there’s something keeping evangelicals from continuing in science past college, and that’s worth exploring in more detail. Do they apply for grad school in equal numbers? If not, why not, and if so, why do they so rarely become professors?

It’s conceivable that the flawed concept of science which evangelicals often hold becomes an obstacle to advanced scientific study. But I’d like to think that a science major will have had to confront that issue before graduating. If not, it suggests a flaw in college-level science education.

Part of the dropoff is surely explained by the correlation of evangelical belief and conservative political ideology. For various social reasons, conservatives don’t choose to pursue advanced degrees as often as liberals do, and evangelicals are often conservatives, so the same forces will apply. But that’s not a big enough effect to explain the magnitude of this shift.

Climate change

Dispatch from the Values Voters Summit

2011-10-08
by Josh Rosenau

Sarah Posner reports from the Values Voters Summit, a gathering of the theocracy-in-waiting. Various GOP presidential candidates spoke, as did Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association:

Fischer followed Romney’s speech with an ugly anti-Muslim, anti-gay, anti-liberal speech. Although he did not mention Mormonism, he did emphasize, repeatedly, that the president of the United States “needs to be a main of sincere, authentic, genuine Christian faith.”

In the rest of his laundry list of presidential prerequisites, Fischer veered from there to discuss the “mythical separation of church and state,” the need for a president to “reject the morally and scientifically bankrupt theory of evolution,” and to believe in “the same Creator” as the founders– the “creator revealed in the pages of the Old and New Testaments.” That led him to an extended anti-Muslim rant

After which he declared that we “haven’t had any attacks since 9/11 because we started singing ‘God Bless America’ in the 7th inning stretch.”

I don’t highlight this just to make fun of Fischer. I’ve written (as have other science bloggers) about why candidates’ views on evolution matter, but this is a peek into the reasons that anti-evolution conservatives think it’s an important question.

The question, I emphasize again, is not about policy. A president won’t enact policies that change how evolution is taught; those choices happen in local school boards. The question is about the values a candidate would bring to the Oval Office.

For folks like me (as I said in the previous post):

Precisely because evolution is so distant from presidential policy, it makes a useful way to evaluate a candidate’s openness to evidence, to scientific expertise (or professional expertise in general), and to empirical testing more broadly.

i-d918cd1f4c72639a7f581f7b47fd32a2-evil-tree-evolution.jpg For Fischer and others in the radical religious right, the issue isn’t about openness to evidence, and the importance of respecting science. It’s about the supposed moral problems of evolution. To someone like Fischer, and for creationist groups like the Discovery Institute or Answers in Genesis, evolution is a gateway to a whole host of social ills. The illustration here is a colorized version of a graphic attributed by to R. G. Elmendorf in Chris Toumey’s excellent God’s Own Scientists, an anthropology of creationism in 1980s North Carolina. Elmendorf’s figure is from a pamphlet issued by the Pittsburgh Creation Society which argues:

Evolution is not just a “harmless biological theory” â it produces evil fruit. Evolution is the supposedly “scientific” rationale for all kinds of unbiblical ideas which permeate society today and concern many people. Evolution “holds up” these ideas, and if evolution is destroyed, these ideas will fall. â¦

What is the best way to counteract the evil fruit of evolution? Opposing these things one-by-one is good, but it does not deal with the underlying cause. The tree will produce fruit faster than it can be spotted and removed. A more effective approach is to chop the tree off at its base by scientifically discrediting evolution. When the tree falls, the fruit will go down with it, and unbelieving man will be left “without excuse” (Romans 1/21). That is the real reason why scientific creationism represents such a serious threat to the evolutionary establishment.

From my own experience and these sorts of documents and data, I agree wholeheartedly with Toumey’s assessment:

Creationism is a moral theory that evolution is intimately involved in immorality, as cause or effect or both. This view also implies that one can repudiate immorality by adhering to a literal belief in creation.

As Toumey points out, this plays out differently for different religious groups, with what he calls “the New Religious Right” seeing the issue “according to its ultimate implications for moral order,” conservative Baptists (the old Religious Right) focused narrowly on a scriptural critique of evolution “so that their understanding of evolution lacks the broad moral critique of U.S. culture that the New Religious RIght attaches to the idea of evolution,” standard evangelicals wanting to skirt the entire issue so as not to dull their popular appeal.

This moral aspect of creationism is a key part of its rise as a movement in the 1920s. Through the earlier part of the century, the nascent fundamentalist movement took various positions on evolution, with some essays in The Fundamentals (the series of edited volumes which gave fundamentalism its name) defending evolution, or defending some parts while rejecting others. It wasn’t until William Jennings Bryan â no fundamentalist himself â tied evolution to immorality â to German militarism in World War I, the Leopold and Loeb trial, and other social ills â and until the pitched battle of the Scopes trial, that fundamentalism came to define itself as antievolution.

Bryan Fischer’s comments, and indeed the creation/evolution struggle in general, cannot be understood outside that context. Fischer and others in his wing of the conservative movement agree that evolution is a shibboleth, but with a different nature than I (and probably you) attach to it. For these voters, evolution is an excellent way to test a candidate’s morality because it is so abstracted from actual policy (unlike abortion, say), but to their eyes it bears directly on the sorts of moral stances that they want to guide a policymaker. If a candidate rejects evolution, it signals that he (or she) will vote the right way on abortion, terrorism, gay rights, women’s rights, and if the figure above is to be believed, hard rock.

In trying to talk to people about evolution, it’s crucial to understand that context, and not to simply dismiss those concerns if they bring them up. While I certainly don’t see evolution as a moral issue, or one which dictates the values and ethics which guide me, it’s important to be able to explain why that’s so, and why others need not fear that accepting evolution will have such pernicious influences on their own morality. That empathic step â seeing the issue through another person’s eyes â is crucial to helping them see the evidence for evolution in its own terms, and not through a glass clouded with unrelated questions of religious and moral implications.

And doing so might even turn around some votes.

Climate change

The Lesser Depression and its environmental silver lining

2011-10-05
by Josh Rosenau

Modeled Behavior tells A Tale of Two Recessions, noting a rather shocking statistic:

as of the last few years the auto fleet in the United States has begun to shrink. That is, we are scrapping cars at a faster rate than we are producing them.

Unless something changes in the next 18 months, our scrappage rate will begin to exceed new cars sales by the millions of units per year. In a country that is still growing in population and still adding drivers every year its hard to explain why the optimal path is suddenly for the vehicle fleet to shrink.

What economist Karl Smith means is that it’s hard to see how this is an optimal economic path. That people are getting rid of old, inefficient cars, and switching to carshares, public transit, and other less-polluting solutions is very good news from an environmental perspective.

Similarly, the Lesser Depression has resulted in reduced carbon emissions across the board, putting the US well on its way to meeting emissions reduction targets set in Copenhagen. But it also means that we may not even try to meet our commitments to invest in climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing nations.

To a degree, this echoes a theme Grist’s David Roberts discussed a month ago (we discussed it here). While various folks have taken stabs at devising economic systems that can be stable and happy without economic growth, that’s not the system we have now. Those emissions reductions are coming because people are out of work, because factories are sitting idle, because vital infrastructure is being neglected. We’re emitting less carbon dioxide because we aren’t building as many cars, because the construction bubble burst and took with it demand for steel and concrete. But people still need houses, and they still need to get around. We can hardly celebrate the fact that less gas is being burned because fewer people have jobs to drive to.

We can hope, of course, that people who have decided to go without cars during this economic collapse will stick with that decision when they can once again afford a car. And we can hope that people who find ways to save on gas today will keep doing that when gas prices fall or salaries increase.

But it’d be far better if we as a nation, and as individual states and cities, could find ways to lock in those changes. Buying new buses and trains would make it easier for people to stick with their carless lifestyle when the economy turns around, and it’d put people back to work building trains and buses and laying new track, and maybe repaving streets and rebuilding bridges so that they can handle heavier bus traffic.

We’re seeing some of that already. In Kansas, the Climate and Energy Project has been reaching out to communities across the state, finding ways to encourage investments in energy efficiency and clean technology. They’ve worked closely with utilities across the state to make it cheaper and easier for energy consumers to upgrade their homes and businesses. They created competitions between cities to see which could save the most energy.

Earlier this week, CEP board member Nancy Jackson came to Berkeley to speak with folks from Lawrence Berkeley Labs, including policy and consumer behavior scientist Merrian Fuller. In this year’s competition, Jackson said, Lawrence and Manhattan are competing head-to-head, and it sounds like the competition is pretty intense. These competitions and other efforts have had a huge effect in Kansas, bringing together governments and utilities and communities to find ways to save energy, but the future of those gains remains to be seen. CEP and similar programs in other states got substantial funding from the 2009 stimulus bill, but that money will run out soon. The successes and the knowledge gained from experiments across the country could all be lost if with that funding.

If that knowledge is lost, we also lose the ability to build on those successes once the economy starts growing substantially, let alone to use that knowledge to create new jobs and to spur needed economic growth, and to direct it in environmentally safe directions.

Climate change

Why science questions matter for candidates

2011-09-07
by Josh Rosenau

In the last few weeks, and at tonight’s Republican debate, lots of national politicians have been asked their views on evolution, and lots of politicians have answered embarrassingly.

We should bear in mind, as I pointed out before:

Like the Miss USA contestants, most politicians (excluding those on local school boards or state boards of education) will have little opportunity to influence how evolution is taught. In answering questions about evolution during campaigns, their goal is rarely to indicate a clear conception of how science works and why evolution is central to modern biology. Instead, they must alienate as few constituents as possible, keep their base happy, and avoid an embarrassing misstep that could draw harmful national mockery. Because of the widespread perception that human evolution carries implications for the nature of morality, the soul, and other central aspects of personal identity and ethics, candidates tend to skirt the issue. They often call for equal time for evolution and creationism and then rapidly transition to the importance of religion in their personal lives.

And lo and behold, tonight we had Rick Santorum commenting about evolution: “Absolutely not. I don’t believe it,” continuing “For evolution to explain the creation of the human species from nothing to human beings, absolutely not I don’t believe in that.” A couple weeks ago, Rick Perry replied (falsely) to a 9 year-old’s question about evolution by saying:

How old do I think the earth is? You know what? I don’t have any idea. I know it’s pretty old, so it goes back a long, long way. I’m not sure anybody actually knows completely and absolutely how long, how old the earth is. I hear your mom was asking about evolution. You know, it’s a theory that’s out there. It’s got some gaps in it, but in Texas we teach both creationism and evolution in our public schools, because I figured you’re smart enough to figure out which one is right.

Pretty much as I predicted (though note that Jon Huntsman has managed to actually endorse science as science). But why should we even care what politicians think about evolution, given that none of these candidates would, should they manage to win the presidency, be able to influence how evolution is taught?

In part, the issue is the President’s bully pulpit. Anti-evolution comments by Reagan and George W. Bush both inspired creationist activism at the local level, making life harder for students and teachers.

Far more important is that evolution is a shibboleth for a candidate’s general attitude towards evidence and ideology. The only basis for rejecting evolution is religious (and political) ideology, and it’s worth knowing whether a candidate is willing to toss out science and scientific testing for the sake of ideology. No question that it’s important to consider a candidate’s values, but people who don’t value evidence or expertise should not be in charge of important decisions. I have no trouble drawing a line between George W. Bush’s off-handed rejection of the evidence supporting evolution â and the expertise of scientists who tried to explain that evidence to him â and his dismissal of expert testimony and extensive evidence that Iraq did not, in 2003, possess WMDs or active WMD programs. Indeed, name any other policy failure of the Bush years, and a similar prioritizing of ideology over evidence becomes clear.

Precisely because evolution is so distant from presidential policy, it makes a useful way to evaluate a candidate’s openness to evidence, to scientific expertise (or professional expertise in general), and to empirical testing more broadly.

The other major topic of science denial at hand âÂ climate change âÂ is trickier precisely because rejection of the science is often a simple way to attack particular policies tied to climate change. Nonetheless, the way Rick Perry fumbled a question on climate change in tonight’s debate is informative. Perry was asked to justify his insistence (which Politifact continues to ding as “false”) that growing numbers of scientists reject climate science:

I do agree that there isâ¦the science is not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me is just nonsense. I tell somebody: “Just because you have a group of scientists that stood up and said, this is the fact” â¦ Galileo got outvoted for a spell. But the fact is, to put Americaâs economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country, is not good economics, and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you put the American economy in jeopardy.

Pressed on what scientists he’s found compelling on this issue, Perry dodged and dismissed the idea of listening to “some scientist somewhere.”

His opening passage, like his comments on evolution, seem to forthrightly endorse the legitimacy of letting religious and political authority suppress (“outvote,” in his words) scientific results. ByDuring the time Galileo was publishing on heliocentrism, the idea was already circulating and widely accepted in scientific circles, including Jesuits. He wasn’t outvoted by scientists, he was outvoted by the political and religious leadership of his country.

If that’s what Perry is endorsing, then it’s a deeply troubling sign. More likely, he’s just flaunting his ignorance. Just as when he (or others) endorse balancing evolution and creationism, he’s setting forward the principle that we should ignore what experts tell us, ignore the accumulated evidence of a century or more of research, and let that ignorance drive policy.

These candidates’ answers don’t matter so much because of the particulars of the science they reject: they’ll have advisors who can give them facts. These answers matter because they tell us whether these candidates, once in office, would even bother asking for the evidence, would care what the facts even are.

Climate change

Evolution and climate change

2011-08-31
by Josh Rosenau

On twitter, journalist Dave Roberts wrote:

Evolution is not a free-floating “theory.” It underlies all of modern biology & ecology. Similarly for climate change: it’s a foundation.

I wrote back:

I agree (hence @NCSE’s work on both). But AGW is less foundation than integrative and crucial knowledge, built on other foundations

As NCSE shifts to combat attacks on climate science in classrooms, I’ve been thinking about the similarities and dissimilarities of these sciences, as well as the denialisms surrounding both.

Evolution is foundational to modern biology because all life evolved. That means that every cell, every molecule, every gene, every bone, and every ecological interaction exists in an evolutionary context. Evolution explains everything in biology (at the right level of abstraction). You can’t teach a biology class without teaching about evolution, not if you want it to make any sense. Evolution is the grand unified theory of biology (recalling that a theory is an explanatory framework that integrates evidence, hypotheses, and predictions, not just the loose thing it’s taken to mean colloquially).

As a consequence of all that, it’s highly integrated with other sciences. What we’ve learned about evolution ties into what we know about radiometric dating of rocks, and about molecular biology, and medicine, and ecology, and mathematical game theory, and engineering, and a host of other topics. If someone wants to uproot evolution, they have to tangle with the consequences for all those other fields as well. If the evolution is wrong because the earth is only 6,000 years old, it means radiometric dating is wrong, which means that very basic physics is wrong. It also means astronomy is probably wrong.

Climate change is not a scientific foundation in the same way. It is not meant to be a grand unified theory of climate, but it arises as a necessary consequence of basic climate science. Carbon dioxide traps heat. This is basic science, first demonstrated as Darwin was putting together The Origin of Species. We’re adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, as was known through the 19th century, and documented in detail in the 1950s. The effect of that added carbon dioxide is to increase global temperatures, a concept first described in the late 19th century by Svante Arrhenius, whose estimate of the effect of added carbon dioxide on global temperatures was pretty accurate, for being essentially a back of the envelope calculation.

The precision of that estimate, and estimates at finer resolutions, have improved markedly with global climate simulations, but the result hasn’t. And those simulations integrate everything we know about climate. So when people say that human activities couldn’t be causing climate change, they are challenging fairly basic issues in physics, either the basic physics of molecular bonds, or the flow of energy through the atmosphere.

But the real analogy comes in considering the consequences of climate change. Because the climate influences just about everything, and energy production influences pretty much every part of human society. Which means that no matter what you’re studying, there’s probably a way that climate change connects.

That makes it an important topic to address in schools. Not because it underlies everything, but because it links to everything. It integrates different parts of science, and of the social studies curriculum. Done right, it reinforces and helps make sense of complex but critical concepts in earth science and in biology. It’s a topic every student in school today will have to be dealing with for the rest of his or her life, which makes it interesting and relevant, and makes it all the more important to grant it a central role in science education.

I’m at a workshop on climate change education today and tomorrow, and the first speaker is arguing against placing such a premium on climate literacy, arguing in particular that it’s a “waste of time” to focus on climate change outside the context of a comprehensive earth systems course. As you might expect, this seems to have some people riled up. More on that anon.

Analogies between evolution denial and climate change denial are a bigger topic, and I’ve got a paper in prep that I don’t want to scoop, so I’ll leave that for later.