Ripped from the Headlines: Editor's Notes on the Life and Death of Science

Photo of snowflakes

Max Seibold

Does science take a holiday on the holidays? Given the most recent studies (Summary | Full text | Full text PDF) that show more than half of Americans either reject evolution or hold equivocal views about its basic tenets, we might wonder if science in America is headed for a permanent vacation.

Factor in adult awareness of genetic concepts (a pitiful score of 4 on a 10-point scale) and the politicization of scientific principles — at least in the US — and it's easy to sketch a science-will-soon-be-dead scenario.

Would there be anyone in the forest to hear the tree fall?

It's best to take a global perspective at these gloomy moments. After all, science continues to be cherished in most European and Asian countries.

Still, there are moments when one wonders if America's anti-science disease is spreading. The UK's University of Reading, for example, just announced that its physics department will close in 2010. The department, it seems, was losing money because not enough students were enrolled. Indeed, since 1998, the number of core science and math degrees offered by higher education institutions in the UK has dropped 10 percent. Chemistry and physics have been the hardest hit.

Now, I don't profess to understand the details of how higher education is financed in Britain. But virtually every national and international economic forecasting report mentions the importance of scientific research to innovation and business development. And if you have been reading previous installments of Science Café, you have learned how chemistry and physics are teaming up with biology to propel discovery at UCSF.

Slighting one of the three seems shortsighted. Still, as a member of Parliament correctly pointed out, the deeper problem is the failure to ignite an interest in science early on. In short, you need to create demand.

Maybe what we need is a new growth industry, a Science Corps, patterned after the Peace Corps. Young and old could scatter across school districts throughout the US, run "curiosity-building" programs in day care centers and other venues, and recruit retired science teachers and scientists to develop and teach new curricula — at no cost to the school districts or organizations. The goal? To eliminate ignorance, which is every bit as important as battling disease.

In the meantime, those interested in actually "seeing science" and learning how experiments are conducted should take advantage of a new online window inside research laboratories. This new video website, named the Journal of Visualized Experiments, consists entirely of videos of scientists performing basic molecular biology protocols. The videos are not exactly arresting, but they are real and, in the desired public conversation about science, reality should rule.

Which leads me to the recent forum on science and religion at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. As reported in The New York Times by George Johnson, scientists of various stripes, while disagreeing in tone and toughness, agreed that "science needs to take on an evangelical role, vying with religion as teller of the greatest story ever told."

Johnson's story crackles with memorable quotes and clever characterizations. Consider this comment by Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureate in physics. "Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization." Or this by Oxford's Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion: "I am utterly fed up with the respect that we — all of us, including the secular among us — are brainwashed into bestowing on religion."

Whatever your views, the article makes clear that the scientific counterattack against the anti-evolution forces gathered under the banner of "intelligent design" is heating up.

A recent news item in Nature, "Was Life on Earth Inevitable?", may add fuel to the flame. Written by Philip Ball and subtitled "Life may be the ultimate in planetary stress relief," the story discusses the theory of biologist Harold Morowitz of George Mason University and — what else — a physicist, Eric Smith, of New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute.

They suggest that life on earth might have been inevitable because it was a necessary consequence of "available energy built up by geological processes." Or to put it another way, the geological environment and its energy-releasing reactions forced life into existence, and might do the same on any other sunny, wet and rocky planets, too.

Whether or not this proves to be true, the idea that an "Earth with life is always more stable than one without," despite several major extinctions, is both comforting and awe-inspiring. Ball closes his story with a wonderful metaphor. "The researchers call this process a 'collapse to life,' which in their view is as inevitable as the appearance of snowflakes in cold, moist air."

That image alone should put an entirely different glow on this winter of discontent.

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Related Links

Public acceptance of evolution
Science: 313;5788:765-766, August 11, 2006
Reading confirms physics closure
BBC News, November 21, 2006
Journal of Visualized Experiments
A free-for-all on science and religion
The New York Times, November 21, 2006
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Was life on Earth inevitable?
BioEd Online, November 14, 2006 (originally appeared in Nature)
Wilson A. Bentley, "The Snowflake Man"