Science and the media: 11 - 17 December
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0759
Steve Corneliussen’s topics this week:
- Neil deGrasse Tyson’s New York Times letter on physics education and the late Richard Holbrooke’s achievements.
- A Washington Post report about a Fox News policy on reporting climate science.
- A Nature editorial about science and hype in the internet age.
- Coverage in the New York Times of anthropologists’ redefinition of the place of science in their profession.
- A former NASA engineer’s blast at Obama space policy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
Neil deGrasse Tyson: physics training for diplomats
“True science literacy,” writes the astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson in a New York Times letter , “is less about what you know and more about how your brain is wired for asking questions.” The letter responds to the article “Richard C. Holbrooke, 1941–2010: Strong American Voice in Diplomacy and Crisis” by telling how Tyson learned of the special role of physics in the late diplomat’s education.
Tyson says that when he gave Holbrooke a tour of the newly opened Rose Center for Earth and Space and Hayden Planetarium in 2000, he “could not help notice how fluent [Holbrooke] was in the depth and breadth of his cosmic curiosity.” It turned out that Holbrooke had studied physics before switching to politics. Tyson continues:
I could not resist asking him whether that exposure to physics made a difference in his career as a diplomat, especially in tense, war-torn areas of the world that are resistant to negotiated peace settlements.
He answered emphatically “yes,” citing the physics-inspired approach of sifting for the fundamental drivers of a cause or phenomenon—stripped of all ornament. To get there, one must assess how and when to ignore the surrounding details, which can give the illusion of importance, yet in the end, are often irrelevant distractions to solutions of otherwise intractable problems.
Mr. Holbrooke’s career was a living endorsement for more scientifically literate peace negotiators in the world.
Fox News, RealClimate, and “balance” in climate-science reporting
The debate continues over the nature of journalistic “balance” in climate-science reporting.
Fox News Channel’s top Washington editor, according to a Washington Post report , has “ordered the network’s reporters to couple any mention of global climate change with skepticism about the data underlying such a scientific conclusion.”
The Post cites the group liberal Media Matters . Here’s the heart of the Post’s article:
Media Matters for America said the internal e-mail from Bill Sammon, Fox News’s Washington bureau chief, called into question the network’s impartiality in reporting on climate change. In an e-mail sent last December to Fox News’s journalists in the wake of a global conference on climate change, Sammon asked Fox journalists to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.”
The Post adds that “Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters’ head of research, said the latest e-mail showed that Fox News was attempting to create a false impression of the climate issue by giving a ‘fringe’ minority of global-warming skeptics equal weight with those who have concluded the planet is growing warmer.”
Fox News famously calls itself “fair and balanced.” This latest incident calls to mind an often-cited, five-year-old posting from the scientists at RealClimate under the headline “The False Objectivity of ‘Balance.’” Here’s the heart of that posting:
We here at RC continue to be disappointed with the tendency for some journalistic outlets to favor so-called “balance” over accuracy in their treatment of politically controversial scientific issues such as global climate change. While giving equal coverage to two opposing sides may seem appropriate in political discourse, it is manifestly inappropriate in discussions of science, where objective truths exist. In the case of climate change, a clear consensus exists among mainstream researchers that human influences on climate are already detectable, and that potentially far more substantial changes are likely to take place in the future if we continue to burn fossil fuels at current rates. There are only a handful of “contrarian” climate scientists who continue to dispute that consensus. To give these contrarians equal time or space in public discourse on climate change out of a sense of need for journalistic “balance” is as indefensible as, say, granting the Flat Earth Society an equal say with NASA in the design of a new space satellite. It’s plainly inappropriate. But it stubbornly persists nonetheless.
Nature‘s teaching moment: NASA microbiology controversy
This story about science and hype in the internet age started with NASA’s publicizing of a paper in Science called “A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus.” The story continued with a good bit of journalistic and blogosphere controversy, all of it accelerated by NASA scientists’ avoidance of real-time Internet discussion of serious objections to their paper.
Now a Nature editorial is using the incident to promote the idea that “blogs and online comments can provide valuable feedback on newly published research” and to urge scientists “to adjust their mindsets to embrace and respond to these new forums for debate.”
In a New York Times report , Dennis Overbye summarized the controversy:
The announcement that NASA experimenters had found a bacterium that seems to be able to subsist on arsenic in place of phosphorus—an element until now deemed essential for life—set off a cascading storm of criticism on the Internet, first about alleged errors and sloppiness in the paper published in Science by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues, and then about their and NASA’s refusal to address the criticisms.
The result has been a stormy brew of debate about the role of peer review, bloggers and the reliability of NASA.
Here’s the Science paper’s abstract:
Life is mostly composed of the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Although these six elements make up nucleic acids, proteins, and lipids and thus the bulk of living matter, it is theoretically possible that some other elements in the periodic table could serve the same functions. Here, we describe a bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae, isolated from Mono Lake, California, which substitutes arsenic for phosphorus to sustain its growth. Our data show evidence for arsenate in macromolecules that normally contain phosphate, most notably nucleic acids and proteins. Exchange of one of the major bioelements may have profound evolutionary and geochemical significance.
“Profound evolutionary and geochemical significance”? For more than one participant in the controversy, that calls to mind the 1996 incident in which NASA announced that it had found microbe fossils in a Mars meteorite. Both Overbye and the Nature editorial cite the blog posting of Rosie Redfield of the University of British Columbia. Her hit rate has gone from hundreds per week to almost 90 000, Overbye says. Her opening paragraph:
Here’s a detailed review of the new paper from NASA claiming to have isolated a bacterium that substitutes arsenic for phosphorus on its macromolecules and metabolites. . . . NASA’s shameful analysis of the alleged bacteria in the Mars meteorite made me very suspicious of their microbiology, an attitude that’s only strengthened by my reading of this paper. Basically, it doesn’t present ANY convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA (or any other biological molecule).
Nature‘s editors see the incident as a teaching moment. They’re harsh about the researchers’ claim that further discussion must take place only in peer-reviewed forums: “In the face of worldwide attention on their paper, which NASA and the team deliberately courted, the researchers have stuck their heads in the digital sand.”
The editors assert that “a prompt and explicitly provisional response from the authors would have been a better approach, particularly given the way they encouraged the original attention.” They add: “Nature strongly encourages post-publication discussion on blogs and online commenting facilities as a complement to—but not a substitute for—conventional peer review.”
And Nature‘s editors conclude:
Bloggers and online commentators have an important part to play in the assessment of research findings, and many researchers’ blogs, in particular, contain better analyses of the true significance of a scientific finding or debate than is seen in much of the mainstream media. Science journalists who repeated NASA’s claims on the arsenic bacterium and did not tap into the widespread criticisms, did little to defend themselves from claims of reporting by press release. Blogging scientists, meanwhile, should remember that such informal forums do not excuse insults and casual discourtesy towards colleagues—especially those being urged to respond.
In the end, the scientific truth will prevail, as it usually does. In the meantime, researchers must accept some harsh truths about the speed and spread of digital criticism.
Anthropologists in “turmoil": Is their field a science?
Three recent New York Times headlines tell a story. On a Nicholas Wade article : “Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift.” On an anthropology journal editor’s letter : “The Definition of Science.” On Wade’s follow-up piece : “Anthropology Group Tries to Soothe Tempers After Dropping the Word ‘Science.’”
The long-range plan of the American Anthropological Association, Wade reports, used to state the formal intention “to advance anthropology as the science that studies humankind in all its aspects.” Last month the group’s executive board revised that statement to say, “The purposes of the association shall be to advance public understanding of humankind in all its aspects.” The board appended a list of subdisciplines that includes political research. The board also removed two other occurrences of the word science.
Though the association’s “statement of purpose” still describes anthropology as a science, the change has, according to Wade, “reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines—including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists—and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.”
Wade describes the reaction of Peter Peregrine, president of the Society for Anthropological Sciences:
[Peregrine] attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. “Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought,” [Peregrine] said.
Wade reports that the association has now “issued a statement of clarification, saying it recognizes ‘the crucial place of the scientific method in much anthropological research.’”
Homer Hickam blasts Obama space policy
Homer Hickam, the storytelling former NASA engineer who wrote Rocket Boys, Back to the Moon, and The Dinosaur Hunter, also contributes the occasional Wall Street Journal op-ed about NASA. His 14 December WSJ piece criticizes US space policy, and offers some harsh personal criticism in the process.
Hickam begins by praising recent non-NASA American space successes involving an unmanned US Air Force mini-shuttle and a private company’s cargo spacecraft. “All of which raises the question,” he says: “What’s NASA up to these days? The answer: Not much.”
He blames the Obama administration, and he names names. President Obama? “Doesn’t seem to care.” John Holdren, the physicist who serves as the president’s science adviser? “Prone to apocalyptic climate-change visions.” Charles Bolden, NASA’s leader? “Never led anything more complex than a six-person shuttle crew.” NASA Associate Administrator Lori Garver? “Known primarily for touting herself as the ‘Astromom’ while trying to convince dubious contributors to pay the Russians to fly her into space.”
Hickam recalls when presidents appointed what he calls “real managers to head NASA such as Jim Webb, a hard-headed businessman and government insider who knew how to get things done.” Now, he says, NASA’s best engineers can only “attend meetings, create PowerPoint charts, and count the days until retirement.”
Hickam proposes that if the Senate wants to change the situation, “here’s three things it can do": fund private companies to take over American spaceflight, “convince the president to install new management at NASA,” and establish a moon base.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
