Free speech editorial written and sumitted for your consideration by Mark:
“Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be taught in public schools.” Leslie Kaufman (New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/science/earth/04climate.html
The article set off a debate on another discussion list stocked mainly with history buffs. A year ago we had discussed the Darwin Debates, so someone forwarded this article to the list. Many on this blog attack lefty professors as ideological dupes. With permission, I forward a post from that discussion.
“I was going to post this article earlier because it reminded me of the discussion we had over a year ago about the certainties (and uncertainties) surrounding the issue of climate change and climate change science.
I think it’s easy to simply scoff at these efforts and feel quite smug about being on the right side of evidence and knowledge. But I wonder if there isn’t a more nuanced and carefully considered approach. After all, the history and sociology of science has shown us that scientific knowledge is socially and culturally bound and relatively restricted in its accuracy, (especially in real world circumstances). I wonder if a better response to these efforts might be to conceded uncertainty and move forward from there. Isn’t it, after all, helpful to remind our students that the IPCC report, to give one example, uses models of climate systems that do not include clouds, land/water interface effects, or the biota (yes, they ignored the effects of life on earth in their predictions, save the human production of CO2).
In other words, I think it does not forward our interests if we cast this as a debate between absolute ignorance and absolute knowledge, a characterization that seems to me to make it a religious struggle, rather than an intellectual conversation. This insistence on certainty, ends up being fodder for the insistence on uncertainty, as if one negates the other, when in fact, a perfectly reasonable and informed modern person can arrive at the conclusion that there is a lot of uncertainty about what climate change science reveals without concluding that that means we ought to stop asking the question or stop reducing our CO2 emissions, or a lot of uncertainty about the precise mechanisms of evolutionary change and significant gaps in the fossil record, without concluding that the earth is 6,000 years old.
In short, I think those of us concerned about the continued effectiveness of scientific knowledge as a crucial tool in our toolbox of reform ought to get out ahead of the lunatic fringe and concede the uncertainty, indeed, insist on it. To the extent that we don’t, I think we become merely mirror images of the closed minded insistence that none of it means anything at all and as such, we risk empowering a view that does ultimately undermine our own.
The naysayers are calling it an issue of academic freedom by this move. I think we ought to embrace such a claim and help explain how that view, in fact, elevates the tool of science not because it is more certain, but because it is much more aware of its knowledge and ignorance than theology or fundamentalist religion and so it becomes a very effective tool for gaining a material understanding of the world we inhabit. We have found no better. We may not always know what we’re doing, but we keep very careful track of what we are claiming and what we know and do not know as a result. In other words, these education reformers are not claiming very much more about the limits of science than we ourselves know to be true, they are instead trying to push us into a binary that I believe we cannot, in the end, absolutely defend. Let’s go with our strengths, no?”
So, how does that stance sit with the folks on Post Scripts?