With controversy about science communication, facts and alternative facts hitting the headlines recently, I’ve been having a number of conversations with colleagues from all over the world about why science seems to be losing in the current war on reason.

This isn’t in the usual fringe battle fronts like creationism or flat-Earthers. It’s on topics deep behind our lines, in areas like whether climate change exists or not, how many people were present at a given time at a given place and whether one man with a questionable grasp on reality should be the only source people get their news from.

We all knew that science would be in for a fight in the coming years but that’s going to be even more difficult when the staple defences such as evidence and not being suddenly censored have been spiked. How did this happen? Well, as anyone who had run-ins with keyboard warriors back in the forum days will know, it’s hard to argue with people who don’t even know the full extent of what they don’t know.

A controversial paper, When science becomes too easy: Science popularization inclines laypeople to underrate their dependence on experts published at the end of last year in the journal Public Understanding of Science, suggests that it’s the rise of science communication (or scicomm) that could be the cause of rising distrust in experts (Scharrer et al. 2016). Use of the word laypeople, aside, could it be that non-scientists, emboldened by easy-to-digest science stories in the media now have the confidence to reject what scientists say, or go with their gut feeling instead? As well as misunderstanding there’s also deliberate pig-headed ignorance for furthering political agendas to contend with too.

This is the disadvantage for science communication. Do you listen to the scientific analysis – which is full of probably, maybe, possibly, roughly, estimated, hypothesised – or do you just agree with someone who sounds convincing and shouts down/shuts down dissenting opinions? Media coverage and bad science communication sometimes gives the impression that scientists are always changing their minds on climate models, whether chocolate or wine will kill or cure you or whether Pluto is a planet or not. This wrongly creates the impression that scientists are a pretty fickle lot.

Despite the reputation for being about facts, there are very few hard facts in nature or science’s understanding of it. Take for example answering a simple question: when did the dinosaurs live? Easy, right? We must know that. We all kinda know that, so presumably the boffins have the proper technical answer. Here’s as concise as I could get it without losing my own interest:

The oldest fossil remains which can be definitely identified as belonging to the dinosaur group, and accurately dated by comparison of the fossil remains of other organisms in the surrounding rock with fossils found from localities which have been dated using radioactive decay rates of potassium argon isotopes in volcanic feldspar crystals, belong to Nyasasaurus parringtoni and are from between 229 ± 5 and 227.8 ± 0.3 million years ago (Currie et al. 2009 and Nesbitt et al. 2013). Although it is highly unlikely that the first dinosaur to have evolved was preserved, this is the oldest currently known. The appearance of the dinosaur group has been projected as far back as 240 million years ago (Nesbitt et al. 2013). Although one group of dinosaurs, birds, is still alive today, the non-avian dinosaurs are presumed to have gone extinct around between 65.9 and 66 million years ago, although the exact diversity of non-avian dinosaurs around this time is poorly known from the fossil record (Renne et al. 2013). Among other hypotheses, the impact of a large comet or asteroid is thought to have been a significant contributing factor.

Perhaps answering that question is not so easy. This is as tight as I can get an accurate answer and I’ve already “scicomm-ed” it a bit by not talking about places, stratigraphy and clumsily trying to describe biostratigraphy. A paragraph like this would never make it into a press release or museum label. For starters, at 170 words it is way longer than anything people are expected to read and take in from an average museum label. References would be the first thing to go; there’s too much text, some ugly editing and it breaks the flow. Trying to explain dating techniques is confusing and nobody knows what a feldspar is anyway. Round all the dates up. Cut the awkward bits about it being the first dinosaur and the stuff about “definitely identified as” and everybody knows about birds so lose it.

Here’s what it ends up becoming:

The oldest known dinosaur is 230-million-year-old Nyasasaurus parringtoni. Dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago.

Which is perfect for a museum label, tagline or press release and comprehensible to most (we won’t quibble about knowing what a dinosaur is or isn’t). However, I hope you can see that it’s also deceptive, belies the ambiguity around “the facts” as presented here and, perhaps most frustratingly (news sites are the worst for this), it doesn’t give readers the source material to go and chase up or query – always supposing that content isn’t hidden behind a journal’s paywall, that is …

By not flagging up what we don’t know here, we create a false sense of certainty that’s potentially later undermined by a new analysis, fossil discovery or alternative explanation.

Conversely, does flagging up the limits of our knowledge, as happened with modelling and predicting climate change, undermine the confidence in the scientific method even with unprecedented consensus on whether or not climate change exists?

You can boil the answer down even more to: we don’t know exactly. Science rarely deals with absolutes, but knowing this comes from scientific training. But not knowing exactly is not the same as anyone’s guess is good enough. What we currently know now could be overturned tomorrow with discoveries of new fossil specimens or with the use of dating techniques.

More often than not, the “facts” of science are actually a series of ever-increasing likelihoods. Evidence of non-avian dinosaurs being found in the Permian or after the Cretaceous would be news and well worth scrutinising, but not outside of the realms of possibility. Non-avian dinosaurs in the Carboniferous or living on a remote island today would be extremely unlikely, not impossible but certainly against the odds. We won’t ever find the first or last non-avian dinosaur but we can narrow the possibility down of when they likely existed.

This is why we train students to question every assumption, fact or proposition in science. Check where it came from, go back to the source and critically evaluate the author, the limitations on methodologies and the assumptions made. A favourite of mine is to get them to find the scientific basis for the well-worn “fact” that a third of every mouthful we eat comes from bees.

It’s a skill that we all need to keep practising now that “alternative facts” are muddying the understanding of what “scientific” facts are in the first place.

References

Currie, B.S., Columbi, C.E., Tabor, N., and Montanez, I., P. 2009. Stratigraphy and architecture of the Upper Triassic Ischigualasto Formation, Ischigualasto Provincial Park, San Juan, Argentina. Journal of South American Earth Sciences 27(1):74-87. Available on the web here.

Nesbitt, S.J., Barrett, P.M., Werning, S., Sidor, C.A. and Charig, A.J. The oldest dinosaur? A Middle Triassic dinosauriform from Tanzania. Biology Letters:9 20120949. Available on the web here.

Scharrer, L., Rupieper, Y., Stadtler, M. and Bromme, R. 2016. When science becomes too easy: Science popularization inclines laypeople to underrate their dependence on experts. Public Understanding of Science. Available on the web here.

Renne, P.R., Deino, A.L., Hilgen, F.J., Kuiper, K.F., Mark, D.F., Mitchell III, W.S., Morgan, L.E., Mundil, R. and Smit, J. 2013. Time Scales of Critical Events Around the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. SCIENCE 08 FEB 2013 : 684-687. Paywalled on the web here.