Sean B Carroll - Science Writing in the Age of Denial (lecture)

[Music] Sean Carroll is the alan wilson professor of molecular biology and genetics here at the university of wisconsin and he is also the vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and with that welcome Sean Carroll this morning I want to talk about the denial of evolution and about the evolution of denial and I hope to show you how indeed we have all been here before for inspiration I'm going to call upon a writer although certainly not a science writer why not Albert Camus but I thought pick somebody who's who actually had who knew what Hitler meant as he lived through the occupation of France and and knew what a communist was these are terms thrown around of course in the public sphere these days kind of lost their their gravity but Camus in 1946 just as Europe was awakening from the nightmare of World War two was confronting the out the outbreak of the Cold War and he said at the time that we're living in nihilism we shall not get out of it by pretending to ignore the evil of our time or by deciding to deny it the only hope is to name it on the contrary and to inventory it to discover the cure for the disease so I'm just gonna take a little liberty with Albert's words and say you know we're living in denial ISM and what we need to do is inventory it understand it before we can come up with some possible remedies for this disease so I'm going to talk about the denial of evolution and as a working evolutionary biologist of course this was my introduction to denialism confronted it pretty much my whole career and I have to I'll start here with sort of a confession which is I think you know certainly for myself and I think for the vast majority of my colleagues one can when encountering this we first thought it was about data because some of the arguments were about data you know some of the arguments were all that doesn't prove that or you don't know that etc oh no we will show you we know that now that will we'll find out even more stuff so actually we are in a golden age not just a science but in evolutionary science last twenty years or so have been fabulous in terms of our understanding the history of life and the mechanisms of evolution that's great yet nothing's really changed in the public sphere in all surveys that have been taken in the American public for the last 3040 years show the same thing and that's because it's never been about the data okay took a while okay you know we had the data Wow but I do want to acknowledge you know that this this sentiment has is out there you know the astonishing revelations of recent research and paleontology have done still more to turn what twenty years ago was a brilliant speculation to an establishing a questionable truth this from The Times of London in April 21 1882 that was Darwin's obituary so 130 years later we're still here so it's not about the data rather most certainly it's I think this is a very honest reflection of at least what it's about in terms of evolution in this country you know when science and the Bible differs science is obviously misinterpreted its data and this is from Henry Morris the co-founder of the institution for the Institute for Creation Research which was a major force in advocating creation science as a discipline and creation science into textbooks and an early round of legal cases and it really is sort of a predecessor to intelligent design so this is the issue it's not about the data so if it's not about the data what are we talking about and how might we deal with it and so what I want to share with you is is my personal epiphany I hope you'll find it at least you know enlightening for a few minutes and it came from an obscure an entirely unexpected place for me I was researching something for entirely different reasons and I encountered this article it's from the Pediatrics journal in the year 2000 the age doesn't matter the analysis is timeless and this is the analysis of a microbiologist and two chiropractor's of the historical opposition to vaccination among the chiropractors and using Arthur's guide here I'll just tell you the giveaway here is that when I read this paper I had a terrible case of deja vu or which also means I learned something because it resonated with me in a particular way so I want to take a few minutes to explain to you why understanding chiropractors approaches to or attitudes about vaccinations was so enlightening to me so in this article the three authors were prompted by their concerns particularly the to chiropractic authors we're concerned about what they saw as their colleagues attitudes in the profession about vaccinations and those attitudes for example were reflected in various small scale surveys such as a 1992 survey that showed 37% of the American chiropractors surveyed then show that there was thought that there was no scientific proof that immunization prevents some infectious disease or another survey of Boston chiropractors that only 30% of them recommended childhood vaccinations and that 42% of chiropractors responding to a 9999 survey reported that their own children had received no vaccinations and so these chiropractors were concerned because they thought this was doing damage to their profession so the article is about a historical analysis sort of the roots of chiropractic and how those attitudes still persisted you know at the turn of this most recent century and they explained the history of chiropractic founded by DD Palmer in 1895 he defined chiropractic as an art a science and a philosophy he asserted that correcting of vertebral subluxations so sort of misalignment of the spine influenced the life force within the body so that was the working principle of chiropractic and established a school in Davenport Iowa and this school was left to his son Bartlett Joshua Palmer who became active and a leader in the field subsequent to his father and it was a Bartlett Joshua had had various comments with respect to the relationship between spinal misalignments and disease he specifically rejected the germ theory of disease he understood that germs existed but he thought the germs could only thrive because of underlying problems with the spine and so he said things like for example vaccine virus or other poisons will not permanently affect the patient when the chiropractor keeps the vertebra in proper position now you might think this is sort of quaint turn of the last century you know thinking but what really shocked me was when I dug now more into this general topic and learned about the attitudes of chiropractors in the 1950s towards polio and the advent of the polio vaccine so polio victims were a common patient population for chiropractors obviously there were lots of physical problems that polio patients were dealing with chiropractors offered their methods methodologies for for potential therapy so there was it was actively promoted this is a brochure from the Los Angeles chiropractic association from April 1954 not only they they advocate very prompt therapy for polio victims within the first few days of being struck the operating theory was that spinal adjustment did something to disperse the so-called fatigue toxins and they claimed unusual success although I now have to sort of insert a little bit that it really was just minimal supportive care the recovery rate from polio was about 60 percent and that's essentially what the chiropractor's observed so I'm going to get a little jab in here but there's not a sense of controlled clinical trials okay what shocked me even more this is April 1954 the vaccine was introduced in 1955 is that they actively opposed and disputed the efficacy of polio vaccine so they actively opposed the public campaigns you know the March of Dimes federal and state agencies to get everyone vaccinated to control this disease let me share with you just one particular quote from the Denver Post from the remember the Colorado Chiropractic Association you can read it out but think now about sort of the techniques being used the language being used to persuade readers your thoughtful consideration should be given to the fact that contamination of the human body through the injection of diseased animal cells must be abhorrent to the Creator who equipped us with life cell life peculiar our own and it's not miscible with that of animals okay so an argument against injecting foreign substances was just one of many to suggest that the vaccine shouldn't be used now you might think as you know about the story of polio that you know data would change this I want to at least show you a little data this is the epidemiological reporting of polio cases and we have much more data since then but I think you can tell the trend over the years before the vaccine was introduced and then subsequently so the vaccine was introduced in in 1955 it took a while of course for everyone to be vaccinated and for the full course of immunizations to take place but you can start to see relative to about twenty eight thousand cases in fifty five or thirty eight thousand and fifty four you start seeing a tape ring and then obviously things are dropping by orders of magnitude okay so a science success story certainly I know growing up in the 60s this is something I always heard you know Jonas Salk was a American hero for doing this but not in all communities as late as 1959 the national organization of the chiropractor the Journal of National Chiropractic Association was making such comments published in their journal in in 1959 that the test to fight against polio has failed alleging the death rate has increased among the children have been in fact vaccinated there's no vaccine against fatigue or at occasion the interior chord whereas in the mild especially the more acute cases chiropractic is supreme adjustments to the entire spine will break up the chord congestion so four years after the introduction of the polio vaccine arguments were still being made that that was a failure that that was dangerous and that chiropractic was the method that should be used so I found this really really surprising but again this was an episode fifty years ago what the chiropractics I was reading in the 2000 article in Pediatrics were talking about was attitudes you know at the in the last decade or so and when I found this article so informative is they really spelled out the major arguments that chiropractic had been making now for almost a century against vaccinations and when I read those arguments I had the deja vu feeling because I could superimpose those arguments entirely upon what I had been reading from the anti evolution forces so I saw in this paper a general manual of denialism and with a little bit of sort of recoding of some of the statements I really understood that to deny a piece of science there was sort of a common playbook a common set of tactics so what I want to do is I want to give you those six arguments in outline the six broad sort of categories of arguments and outline and lets you sort of rest on those for a minute and see how well you think those fit to the cases denialism that you've ever thought about or studied or heard about whatever see if you think it's a fairly good fit give you enough time to jot them down as a note if you think they are worthwhile but to me the the benefit of organizing these was to realize that you can throw any argument at me now about evolution climate change etc and I am it's in one of these six bins okay so here are the bins start by doubting the science anything that can be done to shed doubt on the science all right an evolutions case you know that would be that you know arguments about mutation or arguments about fossils or arguments that we you know radio dating is invalid take take what you like the second is to question scientists motives and integrity okay so if it's not necessarily the data that's the that's you know mistaken is this it's the motivation of the people behind the data that they have some agenda or that they're motivated by profit for example in the case of let's say vaccines the other is to magnify normal legitimate disagreements among scientists it's the way science works and the psyche gadfly's as authorities and what I mean by gadflies of course is a small number of people perhaps largely may be credentialed credentialed doctors credentialed scientists who hold a minority opinion a tiny minority opinion against whatever the consensus might be and then we often see that in certain settings as balance and that you hear these two voices even though those two voices do not represent equally sized constituencies in the scientific community exaggerated potential harm and I would sort of say this is sort of a sliding bar here because if these things aren't working scare the hell out of people okay or it can be sort of mixed in with the others but to exaggerate potential harm means to say that you know if even if this is factually correct and you got to realize that there's there's danger here I think another parachute is just appeal to personal freedom all right all right all right all right all right but I'm an American I don't have to you know and that's a very important strain of feeling in our country and I think what when it fundamentally boils down to in so many cases is that to accept the science would repudiate some key philosophy whatever that might be okay so from a scholarly level this is my contribution today all right these six dug out of my twisted path your evolutionary biology and and reading about chiropractors I just wanna give you a lifetime to absorb this this might be framing who knows for some subsequent questions now to back this up I'm just going to show you a few quotes related to some of these points so you get to feel these arguments although many of you in the room would probably be familiar with this and I don't want to bash you to death with too much quoting but nonetheless I think it's worthwhile how these arguments look like and sound like so how do we doubt the science well with respect to chiropractors and vaccination the argument is that while the Centers for Disease Control statistics they make it clear that the majority of diseases that are now routinely vaccinated against we're disappearing before either the cause was discovered or the vaccine developed so these things would have disappeared anyway same argument applied to polio the equivalent in evolution is there's no real scientific evidence that evolutions occurring at present or ever occurred in the past evolutions not a fact of science in fact it's not even science at all okay I'm just gonna jump ahead how about exaggerating harm you can find plenty of this in medical arguments against vaccination or you know biology and healthcare students need to learn the demonstrated adverse events associated with childhood vaccines death encephalopathy demyelinating diseases infections anaphylaxis arthritis etcetera and certainly that's true if those are really some of the clinical experience directly attributable to vaccines that people should know about adverse events and adverse events do happen with with vaccines however there's no emphasis on the adverse event of not vaccinating and what that happens to what happens to community immunity in epidemics risk to particular patient populations etc now a case of evolution you know what harm is here you know in fossils certainly the Hartmann Darwin and this is a this is a not an uncommon argument that the many factors have produced the Nazi Holocaust in World War two one of the most important was Darwin's notion that evolutionary progress occurs mainly as a result of the elimination of the weak in the struggle for survival so you know Darwin if Darwin was you know couldn't possibly true because these things are evil rather than of course Darwin was being misappropriated if indeed he was missing appropriated to to horror peel the personal freedom that nothing should be compulsory so let me show you right off the current website of the American Chiropractic Association the policy they adopted in the 90s and hold to this day so resolved since the scientific community acknowledges that the use of vaccines is not without risk etc the Chiropractic Association supports each individual's right to freedom of choice in his or her own healthcare based on informed awareness of the benefits and possible adverse effects of vaccination supportive of a conscious clause or waiver and compulsory vaccination laws maintain an individual's right to freedom of choice in health care matters now a little context of that there's a century-long tension between the conventional medical community and chiropractic about lots and lots of diseases and how they're how they're treated and so this sort of individual right of freedom to choose how how one gets their health cares is just deeply embedded in the case of evolutionary biology there's ideas like MTG alternatives teach balance teach the controversy or just allow students to opt out of studying evolution altogether as a matter of personal freedom if they find an objection to this line of thought just opt-out and in terms of refuting the key philosophy here's the issue now there's course layers of these issues but certainly if the fundamental premise of your discipline is that disease as a result of misalignments of the spine then acceptance of the germ theory and vaccination would repudiate the founding premise of the discipline and this for a significant percentage of the chiropractic community today is the issue okay so they just it's just ground they can't give similar ground and religious grounds in the in the case of those that adhere to a fundamental perspective on the Bible the issue about evolution is that if the earth is as old as scientists say if things have changed naturally if humans came here naturally if we evolved from preceding forms that this undermines their reading of Scripture and hence the validity of the Gospel message so that's a that's a really really huge obstacle and I'm not trying to say I'm just trying to characterize this the way it is this is the obstacle if you're an evolutionary scientist or educator for perhaps thirty thirty thirty-five percent of the country in terms of accepting evolutionary science all right so there's where we are where do we go from here I'm sure over the two days we're gonna be talking about the power of these sorts of arguments and the entrenchment that that leads to and how difficult is to get people to change their minds and I really wrestled this I think it's it's it's it's a difficult reality to face I think as an evolutionary biologist you know who really thinks that we've made tremendous amounts of progress in a hundred and fifty years in the last 25 years you know to realize that perhaps half the country is deaf to anything you could possibly say especially if you think the story you have to tell is is is really a magnificent achievement of humans figuring out where we came from and of understanding the complex relationships of living things on the planet and you know the deep deep history of our own species you know magnificent stuff not interested so where do we go are there any cures there's no way I'm going to sit here and tell you that I have discovered any particular cure but doing nothing is not acceptable so what are we going to do and I subscribe here to HG Wells Maxim that human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe so I choose education and until Casta catastrophe takes us all away so I want to change the perspective here a little bit from and I think it may be an interesting part of our discussion to what you as science writers in any medium are facing and maybe what the educational landscape is is like or what the opportunity the educational landscape presents so I'll just tell you flat-out after talking writing etc about evolution for a lot of years to the general public you know I certainly know that 99.9% of anyone I ever interacted with was already a member of the choir the only people that I had an interesting experience with is a glimmer of changing minds where I would say people under 22 so I don't know how much I should know whether I don't know how much social science research holds this up but I think it's really hard to chase people's minds somewhere around that college age to college graduate age and so to me as a scientist you just have to decide then you got to go younger this is the only way we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna approach this and you may have to change your methodology that packing the textbooks with you know really deeper and deeper knowledge is not necessarily the way to get people to understand what you're talking about so I'm gonna talk about what I think we all have in common whether we're scientists scientists educators journalists etc which is storytelling and I talk about the power of storytelling and if anything while I don't think anyone here in the media is going to is going to be enlightened by what I have to say it's almost it's just a reminder a conscious reminder to educators and to fellow scientists that everything we do is about storytelling when we talk to our students when we talk to each other it is all about storytelling and and being more effective storytellers both in terms of content and method is one thing that we can certainly work on and I'm going to offer you for your critical input an example of that okay so I think Rudyard Kipling put this best I just subscribe to his theory his educational theory that if history were taught in the form of stories it would never be forgotten okay if if my kids can remember movie lines and I can remember what happened in a Red Sox game in 1967 and 75 and 86 and this weekend there's something to storytelling there's something about that whole impact of a narrative running through our heads so why should we tell stories well it turns out there's a big area of psychological research in this and it's an area called narrative theory and a branch of cognitive psychology and it research in this area talks about how human thought is fundamentally structured around stories right what were people talking about in the break you know what were you doing that well for example Deb started out with a story well we stayed really late last night and there probably could have been some stories and she prudently then deleted but whenever we're interacting to each other right did you see this last night or you know I was driving in this morning and I saw you know a deer across the road and da-da-da-da-da well where does this lead us the telling of stories well we use narratives to understand cause and effect and the connection between events over time all right this is one aspect above the nura well our neurons are involved in this but this is how we're holding on to things is understanding connections between events and cause-and-effect and we learn from stories because a well-told story or well understood story it presents a coherent argument in favor of a conclusion at a deeper level I think it's sort of the the next level of storytelling there's this possibility of immersion and transport what Spielberg and James Cameron Ridley Scott go after immersion in the story transports that reader that viewer that listener into the world of the story but then shares the motivations and emotions with the protagonist and that immersion experience shapes and can change beliefs and attitudes so how do we make storytelling more immersive how do we transport our listeners our our viewers or whatever to it to another place where they'll stay where they might absorb something more well Jerome Bruner who's one of the founders of this field in his book the culture of education talk specifically about storytelling as a concerned science that science in fact lends itself to narrative storytelling because the process science is narrative it consists of spinning hypotheses about nature and testing them and correcting the hypotheses and getting one's head straight as he says the history of science can be dramatically recounted as a set of almost heroic narratives in problem-solving so these thoughts really resonated with me and and certainly after 20-some odd years of experience of teaching here at the University of Wisconsin I had noticed that when occasionally I went off topic and might get lost for fifteen or twenty minutes in some story about some characters and science and some adventures they were on or some peculiar intersection with our culture that the students would even see me years later on the on Henry Mall or on the downtown square and say you know I still remember some of those stories you told and I know they didn't remember any of the genetics I caught him so you know humbling experience except for it just reinforced the notion that that the stories count so I started telling a lot more stories that's really what led me down the pathway to writing more but then I learned there's only the dissemination of written stories there's well there's the limit of them there's some limits of the medium and when you're looking for immersion I think there's other media besides the printed word that can carry a lot more weight and that's one of the major reasons I went to HHMI to get involved in science education and why we founded a film unit a television and film unit called tangle Bank studios with a goal of producing long-form broadcasts and theatrical films about science and scientists but equally important and maybe we'll find out we'll know the data some decade from now maybe as or more importantly to craft short educational films for the classroom so here it is here's the strategy my kids to college age kids don't own TVs they don't pay their bills a lot of parents I'll just you can look at nodding here those of you who have parents of kids maybe that have left home you know do they own a TV are they watching are they paying that the cable bill it's really going out of style so if you'd gave me the job Shawny I'll produce programs for those 25 year olds I don't know how to reach him 18 and unders I know how to reach them where they're captive in the classroom where they have an authority figure at the front of the classroom where they have an authority figure that has 50 minutes with them to elaborate anything that might be there and say for example a short film or any sort of short story that we might share with them furthermore and keep this in mind 4 million of those kids become voters every year well 4 million other voters die so in a decade that's 40 million new that's 40 million new members of the electorate and 40 million gone okay so it's a long-term campaign can we do a better job of getting across science in the classroom and the dots I'm trying to connect is that can organizations can scientists like myself all of us can organizations like nonprofits like yous work with teachers and their vast numbers and equip them better and make a dent well maybe so we're launching on that this experiment of making these short films I'm going to share one with you and shock of all shocks it's in the area of evolution so these are short stories teachers tell us that 10 or 12 minutes is about the right length in a classroom they've got 50 minutes it leaves the other 40 for the teachers and especially if you support these films with activities that are really relevant and if these films are right on the button in terms of curricular requirements they're enthusiastic about it but as an evolutionary biologist you know we want to tell stories of how evolution works and the advantage of this last 20 years Golden Age of evolutionary science is that lots and lots of examples of the evolutionary process have been clarified buttoned up where we understand every element to the story the the role of natural selection right down to the exact base pair in DNA that's changed that's enabled an organism to adapt to for example some new habitats and that uh that empowers us to really address some common just misunderstanding misconceptions and deliberate misinformation that's out there so in the case of evolution that's about things like the idea that evolution is random there's an important component of that but that's not the entire process that it's slow so slow these things couldn't have happened that it's rare unlikely that mutations are only destructive and cannot generate new capabilities or for example that humans are not evolving so there's ways to address this from great empirical stories and the other ingredients that these stories are that you need a button-up example but you need some engaging way to tell this visually so we've worked with superb filmmakers I really want you just to sit back and relax and enjoy this film you're now in the classroom you will be the judge of whether or not this works [Music] across the American Southwest golden deserts dotted by cacti and brush stretch for miles yet here in New Mexico's valley of fire the landscape changes dramatically patches of Black Rock interrupts the sand remnants of volcanic eruptions that occurred about 1,000 years ago the eruption spewed a river of lava more than 40 miles long across the desert as the molten rock cooled it darkened leaving any creature dependent upon camouflage in serious trouble in the complex battle of life one of the constant struggles between seeing and not being seen the evolutionary game of hide-and-seek we've come here to the valley of fire in New Mexico a battlefield to find one of the tiniest soldiers and what it can teach us about how evolution works on the desert sands the rock pocket mouse blends in perfectly it's light colored fur concealing it from predators but on dark lava the same fur makes the mouse stand out attracting the many creatures that see it as food these mice for the Snickers bar of the desert they're eaten by foxes and coyotes and and rattlesnakes and certainly by owls and maybe even occasionally Hawks and most of those predators are visual predators so what happened to the pocket mice and found themselves on this new terrain when I accompanied biologist Michael Nachman onto the lava it doesn't take long to find out Nachman has been collecting mice unharmed in traps and it's a dark one it is yeah now our most of the ones you find up here dart almost always not only have the mice here evolved to be as dark as the rock they come into the night the color change has occurred precisely where it will conceal them from hunters white underbelly - that's right all of the dark ones here and our other lava foes have a white underbelly and presumably there's no selection for dark on the belly because predators are coming to stuff left to themselves the mice show no preference for light or dark rocks it's the Predators that have made the difference the change in color over evolutionary time in the population is driven by predators weeding out the mice that don't match their background but how did the dark mice arise in the first place and when a black mouse appears in a light population of mice that is usually going to be due to a new mutation and those are random and rare events to fully understand the pocket mouse transformation Nachman moves from the lava to the lab he and his team extract DNA from light and dark mice taken from one desert region the aim to find one or more genetic mutations that caused dark coloration a mutation is a change in the chemical letters that make up our genes it's a copying error that may occur when our cells divide mutation seems to mean that something bad has happened well mutations are neither good or bad whether they are favored or whether they are rejected or whether they're just neutral depends upon the conditions and organism finds itself so for the pocket Mouse a mutation that caused the mouse to turn black that is good if there you're living on Black Rock it's bad if you're living out in the sandy desert the light mice fur color is a trait controlled by many genes to figure out how dark mice evolved Nachman focuses on how these genes differ in dark and light mice one by one the jeans prove identical but at last something does turn up the difference between dark and light mice boils down to a difference of four chemical letters in a gene called mc1r because the gene controls the amount of dark pigment in a mouse's hair follicles a mouse with these mutations grows dark fur which gives it an advantage on a dark background but still that's one Mouse how would its dark fur spread to a whole population this lava flow is about a thousand years old and so you might wonder is has there been enough time it's only been a thousand years it's a very short period of time for a new mutation to come along and spread and so that all of the mice on this lava flow are black because really they all are indeed such a rapid spread of the mutation may seem unlikely until you do the math and the reason is that while only one new Mouse born in 100,000 may be black hundreds of thousands of mice are born in any given year and then those mice that are black have enough advantage that their babies do better and they have more offspring and their offspring have more offspring and just about a five percent advantage compounded year-in and year-out can very quickly turn the whole population black as we see today [Music] if dark color gives mice a 1% competitive advantage and you start with 1% of the population being dark in about 1,000 years 95% of the mice will be dark if instead the dark color gives them a 10% advantage and it only takes 100 years thanks to Nachman x' mice science has an example of evolution crystal-clear in every detail what's exciting about this is that we have a system that's very simple ecologically you have dark rocks and you have light rocks and you have dark mice and light mice it couldn't be simpler we know who the Predators are with the selective forces we know precisely the genetic basis of what makes the mice have an advantage or a disadvantage depending upon where they live all the pieces are finally together it's a perfect illustration of Darwin's process of natural selection in fact it's more than that for knock men's mice also counter a common misconception that evolution is a random process well there is one random component and that's the process of mutation via tations occur at random throughout our DNA every new organism is born with a new set of mutations but while mutation is random natural selection is not natural selection sorts out the winners and losers that's really what the whole process of evolution is driven by [Music] but if natural selection is not random would it produce the same result under the same conditions it does and here's proof Rock pocket mice collected by Nachman from other lava flows in other parts of the southwest these are two different black mice and they each evolved on different lava flows and the lava flows are hundreds of miles apart but the changes the genetic changes that made these mice black were different in each case and what's amazing to me is how similar the black mice are we didn't know when we started this whether we would find that there were the same genes or different genes and we were really surprised to find that they were completely different genes and yet if you look at the mice they look almost identical clearly there are different genetic ways to make a mouse dark but once the beneficial mutations appear natural selection the non-random part of evolution can under very similar conditions favor very similar adaptations in effect each of these lava flows is like rewinding the tape of life and allowing evolution to occur again and again and in each case we find the dark place have evolved the rock pocket might show us that evolution can and does repeat itself and why evolutionary change is never ending as environments transform so must the species that inhabit them adapting and readapting in the great and complex battle of life [Music] [Music] so the the idea behind this is to make films of broadcast quality with broadcast experience producers and then to craft them word-for-word in consultation with the primary scientists and with educators and then to get them to the teachers and this has been going on and I have to tell you that the feedback that we have to this point is gosh darn it it's really encouraging those stories where you combine Natural History so you take students to a new part of the world that they may not have seen you meet certain creatures and I think it's really crucial to be a memorable example as knocked and said I see you remember one phrase Snickers bars right right you know a key phrase can really help so you know this is obviously not a cure but it it I do want to remind you that in many ways in the public media you have a remedial job yes it's keeping current with new science and with new issues that are emerging from new science but goodness I'm pointing at science that has been settled science for many many many many decades yet it's something that really colors our our view of the world so getting into the classroom at least for some of us is going to be a really important objective what's really different from say watching TV or on the Internet is there's not a trained adult there guiding them through the material and answering questions or engaging them in a particular activity so we got to keep our eye on the ball that what happens K through 12 really is going to matter to what kind of electorate what kind of political discussion we're gonna have you know 10 or 20 years out and from these I just want to close with a little thought again from my buddy Khemu let's recognize that this is a time for hope even if it is a difficult hope thanks

Channel: Sean B Carroll

Views: 314

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: science, writing, denialism, denial, disbelief, evolution, politics, camus, albert, albertcamus, uwmadison, university of wisconsin, biology, evodevo, evo, devo, genetics, developmental biology, madison, wisconsin, education, lecture, information, howto, how, to

Id: ZZ-4Q8SkLbI

Length: 42min 30sec (2550 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020