Why should we believe what scientists have to say? Unlike a lot of people who raise this question, I do believe what scientists have to say — and I am firmly convinced that you should, too. But nailing down exactly why has proved harder than I thought it would be. The more I have studied scientists and their public images, the more I have appreciated the complexity of how we view them — and the more I have begun to doubt whether we actually grant them the kind of authority that it often seems we do.
I first got a sense of this problem in a high-school biology class in 1987, when a fellow student asked if evolution contradicted creationism. The question surprised me; in my secular social world, no one took creationism seriously enough to ask such a question. Apparently, however, creationism was an important and vibrant enough idea that a reasonable person could consider it a viable counterweight to evolution. Though I lacked the words to articulate it at the time, I had gotten my first glimpse of the fact that scientific authority is socially constructed. Only rarely is accepting or rejecting a given proposition simply an intellectual matter of assessing its truth or falsity. To believe that an idea is valid, we need some sort of intermediary to present the notion in a way we can accept as true. That I believed in evolution at the age of 14 owed less to any scientific acumen on my part than to my happening to grow up amid people and ideas that made this sort of explanation for the natural world seem intuitive.
Years later, when I began studying the cultural history of science, I discovered a long history of public misconceptions. I grew interested in looking at scientific celebrities — people like Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin — to see what they could teach us about public understanding. The veneration of an individual figure is a rather profound distortion of the collective nature of science.
My favorite example of this is J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist renowned as the “father of the atomic bomb.” There is no doubt that Oppenheimer, as director of the laboratory at Los Alamos during World War II, played a critical role in the Manhattan Project. But that project has become a paradigmatic example of “big science”; it was a complex and collaborative enterprise involving multiple laboratories and thousands of workers (not to mention two billion dollars). If the Manhattan Project offers one lesson about modern science, it is that the individual is subordinated to the institutional: in other words, precisely what we ignore when we celebrate geniuses like Oppenheimer.
Even when there is better reason to associate a single person with a scientific advance, it is still misleading. Consider Darwin and natural selection. For one thing, Alfred Russel Wallace advanced the theory at essentially the same time that Darwin did. But it has also been well established that there were many precursors to his work, of which Charles Lyell’s uniformitarianism — the idea that gradual changes could produce dramatic results given sufficient time — is only one example. Darwin’s correspondence also makes clear that he was deeply immersed in the world of Victorian science. Every time I give my “Precursors to Darwin” lecture, I can almost feel the students wondering, “So what did he do?” Plenty, as it turns out. But just as “the father of the atomic bomb” is a distorting concept, so too does an individualist lens for viewing Darwin’s achievement obscure as much as it reveals.
Oppenheimer and Darwin are not outlier examples. Einstein, the most famous scientific celebrity of them all, once commented that “the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque.” And the fact that we have often chosen to distort science in this way is no accident. Science can seem unsettlingly impersonal and amoral, and there is something comforting about imagining the people behind it. (Even stereotypical stories of mad or evil scientists can be oddly reassuring, since they affirm that technological advance is something within the purview of individual, moral actors to control.)
Moreover, such narratives are comprehensible. We know how to adjudicate trust in a person; it is a lot less clear how a nonspecialist is supposed to take meaning out of a multiple-author, grant-funded study that reports preliminary conclusions on one aspect of a larger technical debate. Of course, all complicated subjects require some simplification when presented to nonexperts. But the gap between the actuality of science practice and its public portrayal seems larger than with most subjects, particularly when the focus is on individual greatness — an approach that bears some similarities to the “great man” theories of historical change, which scholars debunked decades ago.
Public scientists, however, are faced with particular burdens. Audiences have come to expect that science can provide information that is both objective and definitive. This helps attract audiences and establish authority, as simplified narratives often do. But it also creates impossible expectations. Climate-change skeptics, for example, have become quite skilled at raising the specter of uncertainty, as they exploit trivial or even illusory doubts about the evidence in order to justify inaction. Their motivations for doing so are clearly political. And their success hinges, in part, on unrealistic public attitudes about what scientists should be able to do.
Distortions of science may be frustrating, but it behooves us to examine why they persist. They can be thought of as coping mechanisms; they are how the nonscientists among us (myself included) cope with an intellectual endeavor that is too complicated for nonspecialists to understand but too important to ignore. And individual hagiography is only one such method. When we tell stories about the probable effects of climate change, we use the narrative tropes of apocalyptic literature — something that has deep cultural roots in religion, fiction, and even science (as with Cold War-era tales of nuclear devastation). I raise this point with some hesitation, being well aware that “story” can connote something untrue, or uncertain. But it need not. We should simply recognize that it is virtually impossible to explain anything scientific without recourse to some kind of story.
Those of us who are interested in the public understanding of science might do well to pay less attention to what people believe, and more to how they come to those beliefs. After all, I’m still not sure that my ninth-grade biology classmate and I were all that different in our cognitive processes. Both of us were assimilating information using pre-existing worldviews communicated to us by authorities and institutions that it had behooved us to trust in the past.
In fact, this might be the single most important thing I have gleaned from my studies of scientific celebrity: Those who accept scientific findings may not understand science all that much better than those who reject them. A lot of what looks like acceptance of scientific authority is, in fact, approval of the particular ideas and narratives that mediate the way we encounter science.
A final example: Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, is alternatively revered and reviled for her role in jump-starting the modern environmental movement. Most of her critics could not separate their assessment of her science from their desire to defend chemical pesticides from her attacks. But her admirers, too, were influenced by a narrative separate from the scientific facts, gravitating to the book because of its comforting imagery of a beautiful and restorative natural world. These Edenic images buttressed her scientific credibility among her supporters just as surely as her calls for state regulation undermined it in the eyes of her detractors.
What lessons might this hold for attempts to promote science or to defend it against unscrupulous attacks? These are big tasks. But we can perhaps make such efforts more effective if we recognize that accepting a scientific statement and granting real authority to science are different things. It is quite possible to do the former without having the deep understanding of science necessary to do the latter, and this suggests that there are large numbers of citizens who support science without really understanding it. Educating sympathetic audiences to comprehend science — rather than just trust it — may well be a better use of resources than arguing with the science deniers who grab the headlines.
David K. Hecht is an assistant professor of history at Bowdoin College and the author of Storytelling and Science: Rewriting Oppenheimer in the Nuclear Age (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).
