Putting science in a frame

During February's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a large audience packed the room for a session with a provocative title: "Communicating Science in a Religious America." Seven speakers discussed how scientific information is delivered to and perceived by a public that interprets it in light of personal beliefs, religious and otherwise.

The talks were organized by Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communications who is a proponent of the framing of science, in which communications techniques borrowed from the political realm are applied to promote scientific understanding. As such, a number of speakers advocated specific frames for publicly controversial scientific issues. Unfortunately, the use of those frames appears likely to generate controversy within the scientific community, and several speakers noted that science faces challenges that go well beyond communicating knowledge to the public. There were some hints of a way forward that might work for both the scientific community and the public, but the challenges appear significant.

Ken Miller, designed by fish

The first speaker was Ken Miller, a cell biologist on the faculty of Brown University. Miller has done appearances everywhere from The Colbert Report to the witness box of the Dover trial over intelligent design. His high school biology textbook has carried stickers warning of its content on evolution, yet, as a practicing Catholic, he's written books describing the compatibility between evolution and his view of theology. There are few people better placed to discuss the often-messy intersection between science and religious faith.

Miller's talk focused on the ID movement, which he described as a scientific failure, but a public relations success story. He noted how the US trailed all European nations apart from Turkey in terms of its acceptance of the scientific evidence for evolution, but argued that these numbers don't lend themselves to a simplistic "science versus religion" analysis. Miller pointed out that less than 20 percent of the US population subscribes to biblical literalism, while far higher rates reject evolutionary science.

This discrepancy, Miller suggested, is the result of a deep discomfort with the fact that evolution is grounded in the random occurrence of mutations. Fundamentally, people don't want to think they were the product of a chain of accidents. Miller also played a video clip of former senator Rick Santorum, who argued that this randomness made no moral demands of people, suggesting that evolution could allow them to take an "anything goes" approach to social contracts. In this environment, design, with its emphasis on purposefulness and goals, makes for an emotionally compelling alternative. ID "backs us into a corner," Miller said, as "we have to argue that there is no design." That argument is made harder by the fact that many biologists have stated that things look designed, or drawn analogies between biological features and machinery.





Embrace your fishy design, says Miller

Image: Beth Rooney

The solution to this, in Miller's view, is to describe evolution as a design process. Evolution is not an accident or a mistake, but a predictable property of nature, in which the process of exploring fitness space necessarily designs adaptations. Miller feels that the human body is designed; it's just designed by evolution using a fish as its raw material, an argument he borrowed from a recent book, Your Inner Fish by the discoverer of Tiktaalik.

The genetic material that produces humans is also a design, which evolution has produced using the primate genome as a foundation. For Miller, the laws of physics and chemistry necessitate a spontaneous and creative design process, and we simply know that process by the term "evolution." For the religious, he said, that design process can imply God. For anyone else, however, it comes from some other source.

Although this presentation might make for good public relations, there appears to be a danger that it will further fragment the scientific community. The appearance of design is a very subjective thing, and there are many biologists (including myself) that don't subscribe to the view that their subject matter looks designed. It's also far from clear that the atheists will be comfortable being told that they should look for any source for the necessity of evolution as a design process.

Matt Nisbet frames atheists

If atheists might feel uncomfortable with Miller's suggestion, they would likely be very unhappy by a talk from Matt Nisbet, entitled "New atheism and the public image of science." Nisbet argued in favor of framing, which, to a certain extent, is Miller's approach applied broadly: find values and perceptions that are shared between the public and scientific communities and emphasize those. An example Nisbet gave is the shared awe of nature, which can be used as a frame in which the results and implications of environmental studies can be presented.

Framing has not been without controversy, as some have viewed is as little more than a form of empty platitude or an attempt to dumb down science. What became clear from Nisbet's talk, however, is that there can also be people left out of the ostensibly-shared values; it should be no surprise they are objecting.





There's no conflict in the

National Academies' frame

Nisbet focused on evolution, arguing that it needs to be framed as a method of societal advancement, a relatively easy argument to make in the age of drug-resistant bacteria. But he also said that the frame needs to emphasize a lack of conflict between evolution and personal beliefs. Both of these frames went into the production of the National Academies' new book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism (PDF), which used surveys and focus groups to identify and address the audience it needed to reach. Nisbet also cited surveys of the national press that indicate that the "no conflict" frame was reaching the public. Even during peaks of coverage, such as the Dover trial, coverage that linked evolution and religious issues didn't rise to the level of that seen with stem cell coverage, and only a quarter of the articles used conflict imagery in their descriptions.

Unfortunately, from Nisbet's perspective, not everyone has gotten with the program. The "New Atheists," such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, have claimed to apply scientific standards such as objective empirical evidence to religious issues and, using this as a standard for reason, have found religious beliefs to be unreasonable. Whether this is an appropriate use of scientific logic is irrelevant to Nisbet; instead, he focuses on the fact that the new atheists aren't going along with non-conflict framing, and he argues they are harming science in the process

I personally agree that the presentation of scientific principles as in conflict with, or capable of invalidating, religious beliefs does the scientific community more harm than good. That said, I'm extremely uncomfortable with telling those who have chosen to do so that they shouldn't be part of the public engagement process. It smacks of censorship, and implies that atheists are not fully part of the scientific community. So long as speakers distinguish their beliefs from the scientific process, nobody should be discouraged from discussing a topic because it conflicts with a public relations agenda.