tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/scientific-inquiry-8336/articlesScientific inquiry – The Conversation2024-03-26T12:48:20Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2242982024-03-26T12:48:20Z2024-03-26T12:48:20Z3 ways to use the solar eclipse to brighten your child’s knowledge of science<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/583531/original/file-20240321-16-fk38cj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C60%2C6720%2C4406&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In no case should a child look directly at the solar eclipse, but there are special eclipse glasses.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/child-observes-the-annular-solar-eclipse-by-using-special-news-photo/1724609614?adppopup=true">Anadolu via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth on April 8, 2024, it will represent a rare astronomical event that won’t take place for <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/eclipse-2024/">another 20 years</a> – a <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/eclipse-2024/where-when/">total solar eclipse</a>. For parents and educators, at least those who live along an arc of land from Texas up through Indiana and Maine, it offers a unique and memorable learning opportunity. </p>
<p>As STEM researchers at <a href="https://hhs.purdue.edu/center-for-early-learning/">Purdue’s Center for Early Learning</a>, we suggest three ways to make the total solar eclipse a fun experience for young children and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2019.1620232">teach some important science</a> along the way.</p>
<h2>1. Discuss historical versus modern understandings of eclipses</h2>
<p>It is important that children learn to <a href="https://www.sciencepracticesleadership.com/uploads/1/6/8/7/1687518/reiser,_berland,_&_kenyon_(2012).pdf">consider and contrast multiple ideas</a> when developing explanations for why something happens. One way to do this is to compare historical and modern explanations for why solar eclipses occur. </p>
<p>Share with the kids that, historically, many people across cultures feared eclipses. Some thought they <a href="https://www.britannica.com/list/the-sun-was-eaten-6-ways-cultures-have-explained-eclipses">signified disapproval from the gods</a>. Others believed they predicted bad tidings to come, including <a href="https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/black-monday-great-solar-eclipse-1652/">shipwrecks and storms</a>.</p>
<p>Contrast those explanations with easy-to-understand scientific explanations of today. Britannica Kids offers a great <a href="https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/eclipse/353079">resource for children under 8</a>. Scientific American has a webpage that <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-explain-aprils-total-solar-eclipse-to-kids/">works well for older kids</a>. </p>
<p>When contrasting scientific evidence with historical beliefs, it is important not to be critical of other cultures. Use the eclipse to talk about how scientific knowledge is built over time through observation. There are many things we do not know now that we will learn 10, 20 or even 100 years from now. </p>
<h2>2. Have conversations using scientific language</h2>
<p>Teaching children about the solar eclipse isn’t just about explaining the what and the why. It’s also about engaging in rich dialogue. Our prior research shows that young children’s science knowledge is <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2020.100981">highly based on language</a>. Both <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105473">parents</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2010.507496">teachers</a> play a role in shaping this language. </p>
<p>Use science-related vocabulary to enrich children’s understanding of the eclipse. Examples include: orbit, rotate, spin, reemerge, Sun, Moon, Earth, far, distance, total and partial. </p>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/07370008.2011.608027">Children understand science concepts more deeply</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2075">use more complex vocabulary</a> when adults use inquiry-based strategies. For example, adults can ask children what they see happening while watching the eclipse and why they think that is. Then the adults can ask the children to make predictions about what else could happen and provide evidence for their explanations. </p>
<p>Children can document their observations throughout the eclipse in their own <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2004.01.009">science journals</a> using both science-related vocabulary and drawings of what they see. The journals are a great opportunity to discuss their ideas and have rich conversations.</p>
<h2>3. Use household items to help children understand the eclipse</h2>
<p>Three-dimensional models allow children to visualize things that are otherwise difficult to see, such as the orbit of the Earth and the Moon. Comparisons between the model and their observations of real life, especially when guided by a teacher or parent, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619864601">help children build knowledge</a> about complex topics in science.</p>
<p>During the solar eclipse, the Moon moves directly between the Earth and the Sun. In small groups at school or at home, one child can represent the Earth, while another holds a basketball to represent the Sun and another a tennis ball to represent the Moon.</p>
<p>The child representing the Earth can orbit the Sun and rotate in place, experimenting with changing their distance from the Sun and Moon. Closing one eye, the child may eventually see the basketball completely blocked by the tennis ball when it aligns just right. This is what happens in a total solar eclipse. </p>
<p>In this exercise, children are not only modeling the eclipse but also building scientific vocabulary. Throughout the activity, parents and teachers can ask children to compare and contrast the model to their own observations. They can ask questions, such as why do the Sun and Moon look like they are similar sizes in the sky, even though we know that the Sun is many times larger than the Moon? If the Moon is smaller, how does it block the Sun completely? The key is to help children generate hypotheses, test their ideas and then develop new conclusions.</p>
<p>We hope these ideas will encourage everyone to take advantage of this wonderful scientific learning experience. We also warn you not to look directly into the Sun during the eclipse and to get the right <a href="https://eclipse.aas.org/eye-safety/viewers-filters">eclipse glasses</a>. Looking directly at the Sun, even through sunglasses or cameras, <a href="https://theconversation.com/total-solar-eclipses-while-stunning-can-damage-your-eyes-if-viewed-without-the-right-protection-221381">can cause severe injury to the eyes</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224298/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>If you have young kids, the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, represents a rare opportunity to teach them about science.David J. Purpura, Professor of Human Development and Family Science; Director of the Center for Early Learning, Purdue UniversityLauren Westerberg, Doctoral Candidate in Human Development and Family Science, Purdue UniversitySona Kumar, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Human Development and Family Science, Purdue UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2114102023-12-06T13:27:18Z2023-12-06T13:27:18ZIntellectual humility is a key ingredient for scientific progress<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563651/original/file-20231205-15-8od38k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=108%2C9%2C6484%2C4260&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Would technologies like the airplane ever get off the ground without people balancing commitment to their vision with openness to new ideas?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/on-december-17-at-10-30am-at-kitty-hawk-north-carolina-this-news-photo/1371400707">HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The virtue of intellectual humility is getting a lot of attention. It’s heralded as a part of <a href="https://wisdomcenter.uchicago.edu/news/wisdom-news/what-does-intellectual-humility-look">wisdom</a>, an aid to <a href="https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/five_reasons_why_intellectual_humility_is_good_for_you">self-improvement</a> and a catalyst for <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167221997619">more productive political dialogue</a>. While researchers define intellectual humility in various ways, the core of the idea is “<a href="https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/JTF_Intellectual_Humility_final.pdf">recognizing that one’s beliefs and opinions might be incorrect</a>.”</p>
<p>But achieving intellectual humility is hard. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190668">Overconfidence is a persistent problem</a>, faced by many, and does <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2008.02.007">not appear to be improved</a> by education or expertise. Even scientific pioneers can sometimes lack this valuable trait.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563649/original/file-20231205-29-legp7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black and white photo of man with white beard" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563649/original/file-20231205-29-legp7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563649/original/file-20231205-29-legp7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563649/original/file-20231205-29-legp7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563649/original/file-20231205-29-legp7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=794&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563649/original/file-20231205-29-legp7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563649/original/file-20231205-29-legp7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563649/original/file-20231205-29-legp7a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=998&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin, poses in 1902 with his compass.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/william-thomson-lord-kelvin-scottish-mathematician-and-news-photo/113443136">Universal History Archive/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Take the example of one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Thomson-Baron-Kelvin">Lord Kelvin</a>, who was not immune to overconfidence. <a href="https://archive.org/details/newark-advocate-1902-04-26/page/n3/mode/2up">In a 1902 interview</a> “on scientific matters now prominently before the public mind,” he was asked about the future of air travel: “(W)e have no hope of solving the problem of aerial navigation in any way?”</p>
<p>Lord Kelvin replied firmly: “No; I do not think there is any hope. Neither the balloon, nor the aeroplane, nor the gliding machine will be a practical success.” The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wright-brothers">Wright brothers’ first successful flight</a> was a little over a year later.</p>
<p>Scientific overconfidence is not confined to matters of technology. A few years earlier, Kelvin’s eminent colleague, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1907/michelson/biographical/">A. A. Michelson</a>, the first American to win a Nobel Prize in science, <a href="https://campub.lib.uchicago.edu/view/?docId=mvol-0005-0003-0002#page/15/mode/1up/">expressed a similarly striking view</a> about the fundamental laws of physics: “It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have now been firmly established.”</p>
<p>Over the next few decades – in no small part due to Michelson’s own work – fundamental physical theory underwent its most dramatic changes since the times of Newton, with the development of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics “<a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/HEIPAP">radically and irreversibly</a>” altering our view of the physical universe.</p>
<p>But is this sort of overconfidence a problem? Maybe it actually helps the progress of science? I suggest that intellectual humility is a better, more progressive stance for science.</p>
<h2>Thinking about what science knows</h2>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=aoHQHaAAAAAJ&hl=en">researcher</a> in philosophy of science for over 25 years and one-time editor of the main journal in the field, <a href="https://www.philsci.org/journal.php">Philosophy of Science</a>, I’ve had numerous studies and reflections on the nature of scientific knowledge cross my desk. The biggest questions are not settled.</p>
<p>How confident ought people be about the conclusions reached by science? How confident ought scientists be in their own theories?</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563654/original/file-20231205-15-vv17og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="colored etched plate illustrating Earth with planets orbiting around it" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563654/original/file-20231205-15-vv17og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563654/original/file-20231205-15-vv17og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563654/original/file-20231205-15-vv17og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563654/original/file-20231205-15-vv17og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563654/original/file-20231205-15-vv17og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563654/original/file-20231205-15-vv17og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563654/original/file-20231205-15-vv17og.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=640&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Eventually astronomy moved past the geocentric model of the universe with Earth at its center, which had stood for centuries.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/plate-from-the-cosmographical-atlas-harmonia-macrocosmica-news-photo/544173270">VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>One ever-present consideration goes by the name “the <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/#PessIndu">pessimistic induction</a>,” advanced most prominently in modern times by the philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Laudan">Larry Laudan</a>. Laudan pointed out that the history of science is littered with discarded theories and ideas.</p>
<p>It would be near-delusional to think that now, finally, we have found the science that will not be discarded. It is far more reasonable to conclude that today’s science will also, in large part, be rejected, or significantly modified, by future scientists.</p>
<p>But the pessimistic induction is not the end of the story. An equally powerful consideration, advanced prominently in modern times by the philosopher <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam">Hilary Putnam</a>, goes by the name “the no-miracles argument.” It would be a miracle, so the argument goes, if successful scientific predictions and explanations were just accidental, or lucky – that is, if the success of science did not arise from its getting something right about the nature of reality.</p>
<p>There must be something right about the theories that have, after all, made air travel – not to mention space travel, genetic engineering and so on – a reality. It would be near-delusional to conclude that present-day theories are just wrong. It is far more reasonable to conclude that there is something right about them.</p>
<h2>A pragmatic argument for overconfidence?</h2>
<p>Setting aside the philosophical theorizing, what is best for scientific progress?</p>
<p>Of course, scientists can be mistaken about the accuracy of their own positions. Even so, there is reason to believe that over the long arc of history – or, in the cases of Kelvin and Michelson, in relatively short order – such mistakes will be unveiled.</p>
<p>In the meantime, perhaps extreme confidence is important for doing good science. Maybe science needs people who tenaciously pursue new ideas with the kind of (over)confidence that can also lead to quaint declarations of the impossibility of air travel or the finality of physics. Yes, it can lead to dead ends, <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/another-retraction-looms-embattled-physicist-behind-blockbuster-superconductivity">retractions</a> and the like, but maybe that’s just the price of scientific progress.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563656/original/file-20231205-19-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="black and white photo portrait of man in tailcoat" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563656/original/file-20231205-19-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563656/original/file-20231205-19-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563656/original/file-20231205-19-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563656/original/file-20231205-19-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563656/original/file-20231205-19-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563656/original/file-20231205-19-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563656/original/file-20231205-19-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ignaz Semmelweis used antiseptic measures to slash death rates in his hospital.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ignaz-philip-semmelweis-hungarian-obstetrician-discovered-news-photo/113444168">Universal History Archive via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>In the 19th century, in the face of continued and strong opposition, the Hungarian doctor <a href="https://theconversation.com/ignaz-semmelweis-the-doctor-who-discovered-the-disease-fighting-power-of-hand-washing-in-1847-135528">Ignaz Semmelweis</a> consistently and repeatedly advocated for the importance of sanitation in hospitals. The medical community rejected his idea so severely that he wound up forgotten in a mental asylum. But he was, it seems, right, and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp048025">eventually the medical community came around</a> to his view.</p>
<p>Maybe we need people who can be committed so fully to the truth of their ideas in order for advances to be made. Maybe scientists should be overconfident. Maybe they should shun intellectual humility.</p>
<p>One might hope, as <a href="https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203979648">some have argued</a>, that the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/scientific-method">scientific process</a> – the <a href="https://theconversation.com/retractions-and-controversies-over-coronavirus-research-show-that-the-process-of-science-is-working-as-it-should-140326">review and testing</a> of theories and ideas – will eventually weed out the crackpot ideas and false theories. The cream will rise.</p>
<p>But sometimes it takes a long time, and it isn’t clear that scientific examinations, as opposed to social forces, are always the cause of the downfall of bad ideas. The 19th century (pseudo)science of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/phrenology">phrenology</a> was overturned “as much for its fixation on social categories as for an inability within the scientific community to replicate its findings,” as noted by a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.04.011">group of scientists</a> who put a kind of final nail in the coffin of phrenology in 2018, nearly 200 years after its heyday of correlating skull features with mental ability and character.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563647/original/file-20231205-15-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="masked man in scrubs washing at sink" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563647/original/file-20231205-15-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/563647/original/file-20231205-15-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563647/original/file-20231205-15-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563647/original/file-20231205-15-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563647/original/file-20231205-15-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563647/original/file-20231205-15-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/563647/original/file-20231205-15-x25n13.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Today’s health care workers follow careful sanitary protocols – long after Semmelweis first advocated them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/surgeon-washing-hands-before-egg-collection-news-photo/129377308">Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
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<h2>Intellectual humility as a middle ground</h2>
<p>The marketplace of ideas did produce the right results in the cases mentioned. Kelvin and Michelson were corrected fairly quickly. It took much longer for phrenology and hospital sanitation – and the consequences of this delay were undeniably disastrous in both cases.</p>
<p>Is there a way to encourage vigorous, committed and stubborn pursuit of new, possibly unpopular scientific ideas, while acknowledging the great value and power of the scientific enterprise as it now stands?</p>
<p>Here is where intellectual humility can play a positive role in science. Intellectual humility is not skepticism. It does not imply doubt. An intellectually humble person may have strong commitments to various beliefs – scientific, moral, religious, political or other – and may pursue those commitments with vigor. Their intellectual humility lies in their openness to the possibility, indeed strong likelihood, that nobody is in possession of the full truth, and that others, too, may have insights, ideas and evidence that should be taken into account when forming their own best judgments.</p>
<p>Intellectually humble people will therefore welcome challenges to their ideas, research programs that run contrary to current orthodoxy, and even the pursuit of what might seem to be crackpot theories. Remember, doctors in his time were convinced that Semmelweis was a crackpot.</p>
<p>This openness to inquiry does not, of course, imply that scientists are obligated to accept theories they take to be wrong. What we ought to accept is that we too might be wrong, that something good might come of the pursuit of those other ideas and theories, and that tolerating rather than persecuting those who pursue such things just might be the best way forward for science and for society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211410/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Dickson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment. This article was produced with support from UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and the John Templeton Foundation as part of the GGSC's initiative on Expanding Awareness of the Science of Intellectual Humility.</span></em></p>An intellectually humble person may have strong commitments to various beliefs − but balanced with an openness to the likelihood that others, too, may have valuable insights, ideas and evidence.Michael Dickson, Professor of Philosophy, University of South CarolinaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2157322023-10-26T13:38:18Z2023-10-26T13:38:18ZA mystery disease hit South Africa’s pine trees 40 years ago: new DNA technology has found the killer<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555224/original/file-20231023-29-u8m533.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An unidentified fungal killer swept through a South African pine plantation in the 1980s. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rodger Shagam</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the 1970s and 1980s, pine trees growing in various forestry plantations in South Africa’s Western Cape province began to die in patches. These trees succumbed to a mysterious root disease and the patches expanded gradually. Spontaneous regrowth of seedlings in the patches died dramatically. </p>
<p>As in many other true crime dramas, the finger was initially pointed at the most likely suspect: the root-infecting <em><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28519717/">Phytophthora cinnamomi</a></em>. Its name – plant (phyto) destroyer (phthora) – reveals its power to cause harm; the pathogen is known to cause disease in almost 5,000 different plants.</p>
<p>After further investigation and the collection of many samples, tree pathologists shifted the blame onto the fungus <em>Leptographium serpens</em> (now known as <em>Leptographium alacre</em>). This fungus is well known to be transported by insects and was previously only known in Europe. It was visually identified from the roots of the dying trees. Now it was the prime suspect. </p>
<p>Doubts lingered, though. Most <em>Leptographium</em> species are not known to act as primary disease agents and so <em>L. serpens</em> was most likely not able to cause the disease. Other fungi were also found within the roots of the diseased trees but could not be identified at the time due to a lack of more advanced techniques.</p>
<p>Knowing that the then-available technologies could not provide the complete answer to this mystery, the pathologists took more samples from the dead and dying pine trees, and stored them carefully. The hope was that one day they would have a better idea of the cause of this disease outbreak. </p>
<p>Fast forward to 2023 and a new character enters the mystery: DNA sequencing. This modern technology did what wasn’t possible a few decades ago, allowing our team of molecular mycologists <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42161-023-01502-1">to identify the real culprit</a>.</p>
<p>This tale is a testament to the ever-evolving nature of scientific inquiry. It reinforces the idea that, in the pursuit of knowledge, no stone should be left unturned and no assumption should be taken for granted. Through a blend of perseverance, technology, and a touch of serendipity, it was possible to solve a decades-old mystery.</p>
<h2>Tracking a killer</h2>
<p>Back in the 1980s the samples were stored in the culture collection of the <a href="https://www.fabinet.up.ac.za">Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute</a> at the University of Pretoria. In 2020, the samples were revived by a team that included ourselves and several others who recently <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42161-023-01502-1">published a paper</a> on the topic. </p>
<p>We sequenced the samples’ DNA to reveal their unique genetic code. By comparing this code against genetic databases, it was possible to figure out exactly what was causing the tree disease. And so, more than four decades after the disease was first described, the pathogen was finally identified as <em>Rhizina undulata</em>. <em>L. serpens</em>, the long time primary suspect, was finally exonerated. </p>
<p><em>Rhizina undulata</em> is <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/00382167.1984.9629524">well known</a> to cause tree disease and death, mainly in Europe. This fungus is known colloquially as the “coffee fire fungus” because the intense heat caused by fires made by campers in a forest to brew coffee activates its dormant spores. This allows it to colonise the roots of conifers, including pines. <em>R. undulata</em> is also well known in South Africa, where it kills many pines in the aftermath of forest fire and when trees are felled to clear a plantation.</p>
<p>What remains a mystery, however, is the trigger that activated this fungus in the Western Cape plantations. No fires were known to have occurred during the relevant time period.</p>
<p>One potential clue to the trigger may lie in the soil in which these trees were planted. Known as Table Mountain sandstone, this soil is sandy and acidic. Acidic soil <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/S0007-1536(67)80014-7">has been shown</a> in the laboratory to encourage <em>R. undulata</em> growth. This naturally occurring acidity may have been the nudge the pathogen needed to infect the pine trees. It is also possible that the fungus was activated by heat radiating from the quartz rocks that are common in the areas in which the dying trees were planted.</p>
<h2>It pays to be patient</h2>
<p>In the years since the mysterious Western Cape outbreak, <em>R. undulata</em> has become well known to foresters in pine plantations in other parts of South Africa and has done great damage to newly planted trees after fires. These fires can be accidental or due to what is known as slash-burning after trees are harvested. </p>
<p>Identifying <em>R. undulata</em> as the culprit in those (no longer active) Western Cape plantations means scientists have more data that might help to better understand the biology of the fungus – which may lead to better control strategies in the future.</p>
<p>Our work is also a testament to the timeliness of scientific progress and the importance of patience. This story could only be fully unravelled when more advanced techniques were developed. It shows the power of modern technologies to solve historical problems. This underlines the need for continued investment into research and the development of new tools, both in South Africa and worldwide.</p>
<p>Our study also strongly advocates for the preservation of diverse fungal cultures for extended periods of time, regardless of their perceived importance at the time they are collected. The lack of accessible culture collections for lesser-known fungi, in South Africa and internationally, highlights the need for innovative approaches to safeguard these invaluable resources. This shift could revolutionise the study of microbes, opening new avenues beyond traditional species descriptions.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/215732/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andi Wilson receives funding from the National Research Foundation through a Scarce Skills Postdoctoral Fellowship. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Brenda Wingfield receives funding from South African Department of Science and Innovation. DSI-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael John Wingfield has previously received Grant funding from the South African National Research Foundation and the Department of Science and Innovation as the director of the DSI/NRF Center of Excellence in Tree Health Biotechnology</span></em></p>Through a blend of perseverance, technology, and a touch of serendipity, it was possible to solve a decades-old mystery.Andi Wilson, Postdoctoral fellow, University of PretoriaBrenda Wingfield, Previous Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and DSI-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics, Professor in Genetics, University of Pretoria, University of PretoriaMichael John Wingfield, Professor, Advisor to the Executive, University of Pretoria, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2079932023-06-28T16:55:23Z2023-06-28T16:55:23ZIs ‘wokeism’ slowly killing scientific merit? Look to the latter for the real threat to science<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534051/original/file-20230626-19-t91dl1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C20%2C4521%2C2984&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It has become quite common to complain nowadays that, given the overall concern for marginalized groups and the claim that social justice should be of interest to anyone, ideology rules science. Some go even as far as comparing the current research system with <a href="https://ethos.lps.library.cmu.edu/article/id/560/">Lysenkoism</a>, a flawed approach to plant genetics promoted by Soviet and Chinese authorities.</p>
<p>Such as the case with an April 27 op-ed in the <em>Wall Street Journal</em>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hurtful-idea-of-scientific-merit-controversy-nih-energy-research-f122f74d">“The ‘hurtful’ idea of scientific merit”</a>, by scientists Jerry Coyne and Anna Krylov. Institutions and journals, they asserted, have forgotten “scientific merit” and replaced it with ideology, fearing that the so-called “wokists” are supported by governments and official agencies in the same way that Trofim Lysenko’s false theory of the inheritance of acquired characters was enforced by Stalin. If true, this is terrible news, since in USSR the ideological supremacy of Lysenkoism led to many executions and exiles.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534045/original/file-20230626-7296-eraf42.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534045/original/file-20230626-7296-eraf42.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534045/original/file-20230626-7296-eraf42.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534045/original/file-20230626-7296-eraf42.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534045/original/file-20230626-7296-eraf42.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534045/original/file-20230626-7296-eraf42.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534045/original/file-20230626-7296-eraf42.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1022&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The adoption of Trofim Lysenko’s pseudo-scientific ideas contributed to the famines that killed millions of people in the USSR and China.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko#/media/File:Trofim_Lysenko_portrait.jpg">Russian Federation foundation/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The “anti-wokeist” have raised analogous critiques on many occasions. An example in the humanities was the denouncement of the disclosure of the relations between poet <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/25/british-library-apologises-for-linking-ted-hughes-to-slave-trade?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other">Ted Hughes’s family and slavery</a>. In psychology, there was the case where the introduction of the <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0963721417753600">notion of “white privilege” in psychology</a> was criticized.</p>
<h2>The tricky concept of scientific merit</h2>
<p>Coyne and Krylov speak of biology, but one would easily admit that the controversies over so-called wokism, social justice and truth are a concern for academia overall, which includes natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and law. Their claim is supposed to hold for academia in general, and “scientific merit” is here synonymous with “academic merit”. (These two terms will be used equivalently hereafter.) But such notion of “scientific merit” is obscure, and in the absence of a reliable method to measure it, invoking it is an empty claim. Worse, the way merit itself is used by institutions and policies proves ultimately much more deleterious to science than any radicalized “social-justice warrior ideology”, if this phrase is even meaningful.</p>
<p>“Merit” in academia means that one should be credited with a robust and measurable contribution to science. Yet when a discovery is made or some theorem is proved, this is always based on former works, as it has been reminded us through an <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5">exhaustive reconstitution</a> of the role Rosalind Franklin played in the worldly praised discovery of DNA (1953) by Crick and Watson, who were awarded the Nobel Prize for this while Franklin died four years earlier. Hence the attribution of merit is complicated by the inextricability of causal contributions, making the notion of “intellectual credit” complex, as is the very idea of an “author”, to whom this credit in principle is due. As in a soccer or handball team, parsing each player’s contributions to the goal the team scored is no trivial business.</p>
<p>Thus, social conventions have been invented to overcome this almost metaphysical underdetermination of the “author” (and hence her or his merit). In science, one of them is the <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0198117"><em>disciplines</em></a>: being an author is not the same in mathematics as in sociology, and disciplines determine what is required to sign a paper, hence to be an author within a given field. Another conventional tool is the <em>citation</em> – the more one is cited, the higher their merit.</p>
<p>Citation rankings are therefore supposed to track the genuine <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691125169/on-justification"><em>grandeur</em></a> of individuals. Estimating this requires listing all papers signed by an individual and cited by their peers, and gives rise to metrics such as the <em>impact factor</em> (for journals) or the <em>h-index</em> (for scientists), which are the basis of our merit system in science, since any assessment of one’s academic and chances to be hired, promoted or funded in any country juggles with such combined figures. As Canadian sociologist <a href="https://www.ost.uqam.ca/en/publications/the-transformation-of-the-scientific-paper-from-knowledge-to-accounting-unit/">Yves Gingras put it</a>, while the “paper” had been a unit of knowledge for four centuries, it is now also a unit of evaluation and is used daily by hiring committees and funding agencies worldwide.</p>
<p>Unlike what Coyne and Krylov say, these intend to find the most meriting scientists by tracking the number of citations and publications – the latter allowing one to increase the former, since the more papers you publish, the more citations your work will get. Hearing that China is now the <a href="https://theconversation.com/china-now-publishes-more-high-quality-science-than-any-other-nation-should-the-us-be-worried-192080">first publishing country</a> and worrying about its imminent victory in the race for publications, as we daily hear it, only makes sense if you equate science’s value with these grandeur metrics.</p>
<h2>Where science loses out in the idea of merit</h2>
<p>Yet measuring scientific merit in this way damages the quality of science for three reasons that have been analysed by scientists themselves. The overall result is that such kind of measurement yields “natural selection from bad science”, as the evolutionary biologists Paul E. Smaldino and Richard McElreath put it in a <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.160384">2016 paper</a>. Why?</p>
<p>First, one can easily game the metrics – for example, by slicing one paper into two, or writing one more paper by solely tweaking the parameters of a model. Obviously, this strategy unnecessarily expands the amount of literature that researchers have to read and thereby increases the difficulty of distinguishing signal from noise in a growing forest of academic papers. Shortcuts such as fraud or plagiarism are also thereby incentivized; no wonder that agencies for scientific integrity and trackers of scientific misconduct have proliferated.</p>
<p>Second, this measure of merit induces less exploratory science, since being exploratory takes time and risks finding nothing so that your competitors will reap all the rewards. For the same reason, journals will favour what ecologists traditionally refer to as <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fdec0000033"><em>exploitation</em> rather than <em>exploration</em> of new territories</a>, since their impact factor relies on citation numbers. A recent <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x%23citeas"><em>Nature</em> paper</a> argued that science became much less disruptive in the last decade, while bibliometry-based assessments have flourished.</p>
<p>Finally, even if one wants to keep a measure of merit related to publication activity, bibliometry-based merit is unidimensional because real science – as revealed by its computer-assisted quantitative study – develops as an unfolding landscape rather than a linear progress. Therein, what constitutes a “major contribution” to science could take several forms, depending on where one stands in this landscape.</p>
<h2>Rethinking scientific progress</h2>
<p>At the ISC-PIF (Paris) <a href="https://iscpif.fr/projects/gargantext/?lang=en">researchers have mapped the dynamics of science</a> by detecting over the years the emergence, fusion, fission, and divergence of topics defined by clusters of correlated words (as exemplified in the figure below about the field of quantum computing, where fissions and merging that occurred in the history of the field are graphically visible). It appears that the kinds of work done by scientists in distinct stages of arising, growth, or decline of a field (understood here as a set of topics) are very different, and yield incomparable types of merits.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534625/original/file-20230628-21-uoc72f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534625/original/file-20230628-21-uoc72f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534625/original/file-20230628-21-uoc72f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534625/original/file-20230628-21-uoc72f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534625/original/file-20230628-21-uoc72f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534625/original/file-20230628-21-uoc72f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534625/original/file-20230628-21-uoc72f.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=579&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Advances over time in the field of quantum computing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>When a field is mature, it is easy to produce many papers. However, when it is emerging – for instance by the fission of a field or the fusion of two previous ones – the publications and audiences are scarce, so that one cannot produce as many papers as a competitor working in a more mature field. Levelling everything through common reference to citation numbers – notwithstanding how refined might be the metrics – will always miss the proper nature of each specific contribution to science.</p>
<p>Whatever the word <em>merit</em> means in science, it is multidimensional, thus all bibliometry-based indexes and metrics will miss it because they will turn it into a unidimensional figure. But this ill-defined and ill-measured merit, as the basis of any assessment of scientists and therefore allocation of resources (positions, grants, etc.), will be instrumental in shaping the physiognomy of academia and thereby corrupt science in a firmer way than any ideology.</p>
<p>Therefore, vindicating merit as it is currently assessed is not a gold standard for science. In turn, such merit is already known to be a deleterious approach to knowledge production, yielding several negative consequences for science as well as for scientists.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207993/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>While some worry “wokeist” ideology could corrupt scientific merit, it could be our problematic understanding of the latter poses an even greater threat to science, two philosophers argue.Philippe Huneman, Directeur de recherche CNRS, Institut d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-SorbonneDavid Chavalarias, Research director, Centre d’Analyses de Mathématiques Sociales (CAMS), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1969192023-01-24T13:22:32Z2023-01-24T13:22:32ZLots of people believe in Bigfoot and other pseudoscience claims – this course examines why<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505185/original/file-20230118-22-sxk00c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=11%2C0%2C1979%2C997&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Don't believe the hype about Bigfoot, a flat Earth or ancient aliens.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Collage from Getty Images sources</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Text saying: Uncommon Courses, from The Conversation" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499014/original/file-20221205-17-kcwec8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/uncommon-courses-130908">Uncommon Courses</a> is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.</em> </p>
<h2>Title of course</h2>
<p>“Psychology of Pseudoscience”</p>
<h2>What prompted the idea for the course?</h2>
<p>While teaching a course on research methods at the United States Air Force Academy, I concluded that the course needed a bigger emphasis on broad scientific reasoning skills.</p>
<p>So I incorporated material about the difference between science – the <a href="https://sciencecouncil.org/about-science/our-definition-of-science/">systematic process of evidence-based inquiry</a> – and <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo15996988.html">pseudoscience</a>, which is the promotion of unreliable scientific claims as if they are more reliable than other explanations. </p>
<p>I wanted to understand why people promote claims that conflict with science. I jumped at the opportunity to develop this type of course at SUNY Cortland.</p>
<h2>What does the course explore?</h2>
<p>We look at some of the common scientific reasoning failures that pseudoscience exploits. These include <a href="https://aiptcomics.com/2021/02/01/stormtroopers-science-evidence-anecdotes/">hand-picking anecdotes</a> to support a belief, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/">developing a set of beliefs</a> that explain every possible outcome, <a href="https://skepticalinquirer.org/2017/05/vaccines-autism-and-the-promotion-of-irrelevant-research-a-science-pseudosc/">promoting irrelevant research</a>, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo15996988.html">ignoring contradictory information</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550614567356">believing in unsubstantiated conpiracies</a>.</p>
<p>We particularly highlight <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480">motivated reasoning</a>, the tendency for people to process information in a way that helps them confirm what they already want to believe. For example, someone might accept scientific consensus about cancer treatments but question it with regard to vaccines – even though both are supported by strong scientific evidence and expert consensus. </p>
<p>We also review <a href="https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.50.6.1141">group polarization</a>, in which people develop more extreme positions after interacting with similarly minded group members.</p>
<p>Some of the topics we examine include the <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/yes-flat-earthers-really-do-exist/">flat-Earth</a> belief, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/denying-evolution-9780878936595?cc=us&lang=en&">creationism</a>, <a href="https://skepticalinquirer.org/2002/03/bigfoot-at-50-evaluating-a-half-century-of-bigfoot-evidence/">Bigfoot and other cryptozoology ideas</a>, <a href="https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/02/the-great-australian-psychic-prediction-project-pondering-the-published-predictions-of-prominent-psychics/">psychic ability</a>, <a href="https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/therapeutic-response.pdf">conversion therapy</a>, <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/vaccines-and-your-child/9780231153072">anti-vaccination</a>, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/318419a0">astrology</a>, <a href="https://skepticalinquirer.org/2003/01/amityville-the-horror-of-it-all/">ghosts</a> and <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-madhouse-effect/9780231177863">climate change denial</a>.</p>
<p>Students complete two papers to reinforce their knowledge. First, students develop their own bogus scientific claims and a corresponding plan to convince people that their claims are legitimate. Allowing students to invent and promote novel forms of pseudoscience gives them a safe context in which to examine specious scientific arguments.</p>
<p>Second, students review old issues of <a href="https://skepticalinquirer.org/">Skeptical Inquirer</a>, the leading national magazine about science and critical thinking, to summarize the topics that were being addressed at that time. Students also dive more deeply into a specific topic like unexplained cattle mutilations or the Bermuda Triangle. Then they write a paper based on an <a href="https://skepticalinquirer.org/2022/12/on-the-origin-of-skeptical-inquirer/">example I recently published</a> in Skeptical Inquirer. I’m hopeful that future column installments will include students’ work.</p>
<h2>Why is this course relevant now?</h2>
<p>The internet has provided pseudoscience communities with the unprecedented ability to promote their false claims.</p>
<p>For instance, flat-Earthers have <a href="https://theconversation.com/i-watched-hundreds-of-flat-earth-videos-to-learn-how-conspiracy-theories-spread-and-what-it-could-mean-for-fighting-disinformation-184589">relied on YouTube</a> to create doubt about Earth as a globe. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization uses Facebook to support Bigfoot belief. These platforms take advantage of people’s tendency to believe material posted by their <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13527266.2011.620764">friends</a> or <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10503-011-9219-6">authoritative-sounding sources</a>.</p>
<p>This course is also relevant now because the consequences of poor scientific reasoning are so significant. People who believe these sorts of false claims risk their own health and that of the planet, by <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-17430-6">avoiding helpful, safe vaccines</a> or <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-madhouse-effect/9780231177863">useful discussions about the problems presented by climate change</a>.</p>
<h2>What’s a critical lesson from the course?</h2>
<p>It’s important for students to understand that <a href="https://centerforinquiry.org/video/why-were-all-susceptible-to-pseudoscience-craig-foster/">reasonable, intelligent people promote pseudoscience</a>. When people encounter pseudoscience they don’t personally believe, they sometimes conclude that the pseudoscience supporters are unintelligent or mentally unwell. This type of explanation is shortsighted. </p>
<p>Everyday people are drawn into believing pseudoscience because they have limited cognitive resources and they use cognitive strategies, like relying on anecdotes, that can lead to erroneous belief. Human scientific reasoning is particularly flawed when humans really <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/44085270">want to reach a particular conclusion</a>.</p>
<p>Belief in pseudoscience also develops out of social interactions. Friends and family members commonly share their reasons for believing in creationism, ghosts, fad diets and so forth. This type of social influence goes into overdrive when people <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/13684302211050323">join communities that collectively promote pseudoscience</a>. I have attended Bigfoot and flat-Earth conferences. These conferences create powerful social experiences, because so many friendly people are available to explain that Bigfoot is alive or the Earth is flat, both of which are, clearly, false.</p>
<h2>What materials does the course feature?</h2>
<p>The “Defining Pseudoscience and Science” chapter by Sven Ove Hansson in “<a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo15996988.html">Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem</a>” sets up what I call the psychological puzzle of pseudoscience: How do people convince themselves and others that an unreliable scientific claim is actually reliable?</p>
<p>We also have guest speakers, including philosophy of science scholar <a href="https://massimopigliucci.org/">Massimo Pigliucci</a>, journalist and folklorist <a href="http://benjaminradford.com/">Ben Radford</a>, exposer of psychics <a href="https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/susan-gerbic-back-on-tour/">Susan Gerbic</a>, a local Bigfoot enthusiast, and Janyce Boynton, who discussed <a href="https://www.facilitatedcommunication.org">facilitated communication</a>, a discredited communication technique in which some people physically assist nonverbal people with their communication, for example, by guiding their hands as they type.</p>
<h2>What will the course prepare students to do?</h2>
<p>The course prepares students to identify dubious scientific claims. In so doing, they should <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-018-9513-3">become less vulnerable</a> to being drawn into pseudoscience. The course also enhances familiarity with specific forms of pseudoscience. I expect climate change denial, anti-vaccination and creationism to remain major points of contention in American society for decades. Educated people should understand the discussions that occur around these kind of social problems.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/196919/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Craig Foster is affiliated with facilitatedcommunication.org.
Anything else to declare: I am a Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow.</span></em></p>A university course teaches students why people believe false and evidence-starved claims, to show them how to determine what’s accurate and real and what’s neither.Craig A. Foster, Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, State University of New York CortlandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1692292021-10-05T22:52:30Z2021-10-05T22:52:30ZThe 2021 Nobel Prize for medicine helps unravel mysteries about how the body senses temperature and pressure<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424665/original/file-20211005-21-h2el9x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=214%2C206%2C4897%2C3196&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">David Julius, one of the two recipients of the 2021 medicine Nobel Prize, used the active component in chile peppers to study how the brain senses heat.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/close-up-of-jalapeno-pepper-against-red-background-royalty-free-image/1137507603?adppopup=true">Anton Eine/EyeEm via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Humans rely on our senses to tell us about the world. Which way is that waterfall? Is it day or night? Is that food fresh or spoiled?</p>
<p>Such questions are harder to answer if our sensory systems can’t detect the sound of rushing water, the shimmer of moonlight or the odor of spoiled milk. Prior to this week, the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/about/the-nobel-committee-for-physiology-or-medicine/">Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine</a> had recognized important advances in our understanding of how sensations are detected in three sensory systems: <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1961/summary/">hearing</a>, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1967/summary/">vision</a> and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2004/summary/">smell</a>. </p>
<p>Now, the Nobel Committee has awarded this year’s prize in medicine to two scientists who have advanced our understanding of this detection process for “somatosensation,” the sense responsible for the perceptions of touch, temperature, vibration, pain and proprioception – the body’s ability to sense its own movements and position in space.</p>
<p>On Oct. 4, 2021, <a href="https://juliuslab.ucsf.edu">David Julius</a>, a professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and <a href="https://www.scripps.edu/faculty/patapoutian/">Ardem Patapoutian</a>, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Scripps Research, were awarded the <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2021/press-release/">Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine</a> for their pioneering work identifying proteins that the body uses to detect temperature and pressure. These two scientists led teams that unraveled key steps in the processes by which temperature and pressure are recognized by sensory cells and converted into signals that can be interpreted by the brain as perceptions such as warmth, cold or texture.</p>
<p>My <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=OkGT5MEAAAAJ&hl=en">own research</a> has long focused on understanding these types of processes as they relate to the senses of smell and taste. Using the tools of molecular biology and neuroscience – not unlike some of those employed by Julius and Patapoutian – my collaborators and I are working to understand how smell and taste receptors enable us to detect the diverse chemicals that make up odors and tastes. </p>
<p>The work of Julius and Patapoutian has greatly expanded scientists’ views of how the nervous system deciphers the external and internal world by introducing us to entirely new classes of sensory receptors. Their findings have yielded critical and novel insights into the physiology of temperature, pain and touch sensation.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424661/original/file-20211005-25-3x18xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Large screen displaying the winners of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424661/original/file-20211005-25-3x18xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/424661/original/file-20211005-25-3x18xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424661/original/file-20211005-25-3x18xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424661/original/file-20211005-25-3x18xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424661/original/file-20211005-25-3x18xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424661/original/file-20211005-25-3x18xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/424661/original/file-20211005-25-3x18xt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">David Julius, left, and Ardem Patapoutian are shown on a screen after winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/thomas-perlmann-the-secretary-of-the-nobel-committee-stands-news-photo/1235686593?adppopup=true">Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Bringing the heat</h2>
<p>Scientific inquiry is an attempt to answer questions about processes that people observe in nature. Some of the biggest advances come from taking a new perspective – and applying new techniques to – a long-studied question. </p>
<p>The path toward the discovery of a heat-sensing receptor by Julius and colleagues began with a simple observation that many people have made during a meal – that chili peppers can cause a burning, painful sensation. Indeed, we often describe spicy foods as being “hot” even if the food itself is cold. Many plants, including chiles, herbs and spices, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-801694-7.00021-4">produce compounds</a> that can be irritating when encountered in excess, but add complexity to foods in moderation.</p>
<p>Nociceptors are special sensory neurons that carry pain information, including pain from potentially damaging levels of heat. Scientists who study pain had known for years that capsaicin – the chemical in chiles responsible for their perceived heat – activates nociceptors. However, the mechanism by which this occurs was still unknown when Julius and his colleagues tackled the problem in the mid-1990s. </p>
<p>The Julius group’s important innovation was to use capsaicin itself as a tool to isolate the sensory receptor that detects capsaicin, a feat <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/39807">they reported</a> in 1997. To do this, they tested thousands of different proteins produced by rodent sensory neurons until they found one that responded to capsaicin and its chemical cousins. As predicted, this protein also responded to high temperatures, indicating that it was the long sought-after heat sensor in these neurons.</p>
<p>This protein, named TRPV1, was the first of a group of related proteins discovered by Julius’ lab and other groups that respond to diverse plant chemicals and different temperatures. For example, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nature719">the protein TRPM8</a> is activated by both cold and menthol, the chemical that causes the cooling sensation of mint, while <a href="https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0505356102">the protein TRPA1</a> is turned on by the pungent compounds found in garlic. </p>
<h2>Finding the touch</h2>
<p>While Patapoutian and colleagues <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(02)00652-9">also investigated</a> this family of temperature-sensing proteins, they soon turned their attention to another aspect of somatosensation - touch. </p>
<p>But they faced a unique challenge: All cells seem to respond to physical pressure. So the question became: How could the researchers differentiate the function of a specific pressure sensor from this more general response? </p>
<p>They took a clever approach. Instead of testing the products of single genes for their ability to respond to pressure – a strategy that worked so well for identifying the capsaicin receptor – Patapoutian and his team instead <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1193270">silenced single genes</a>, one by one, in a touch-sensitive cell until the cell lost its ability to respond. </p>
<p>They then confirmed in nerve cells that two related proteins, named Piezo1 and Piezo2, mediated responses to physical stimulation. Later, the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13251">Patapoutian group</a> and others showed more directly that Piezo proteins are critical for touch itself.</p>
<h2>Opening doors to new scientific discoveries</h2>
<p>The discoveries of Julius and Patapoutian have given sensory researchers fundamental insights into how people interact with their world. But they will almost certainly lead to important medical advances as well.</p>
<p>For example, red blood cells also express Piezo1, which may help them change shape to fit through tiny capillaries. However, certain mutations in Piezo1 can lead to deformed red blood cells and a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2899">rare type of anemia</a>, in which red blood cell numbers are depleted.</p>
<p>Topical capsaicin creams are already used by many people as over-the-counter treatments for the relief of minor muscle pains. But this family of temperature-sensing proteins could also prove to be useful targets for new drugs aimed at treating debilitating, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s40265-020-01429-2">chronic pain</a>.</p>
<p>[<em>Over 110,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletter to understand the world.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=100Ksignup">Sign up today</a>.]</p>
<p>Temperature-sensitive Trp-family proteins remain important for the detection of compounds present in a variety of edible plants such as chiles, mint and garlic. For people with an impaired sense of smell or taste, stimulating these pathways can help enhance the palatability of food that otherwise may seem flavorless. Identifying new flavor compounds that specifically target these novel proteins may help increase the enjoyment of food and drink by the millions of people experiencing smell or taste disorders, including those caused by COVID-19.</p>
<p>Nature gave us a hint that a whole new world of biology was waiting to be discovered. Julius and Patapoutian have now pointed the way.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169229/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven D. Munger is professor and vice-chair of the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics and Director of the Center for Smell and Taste at the University of Florida. He receives research funding from the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders and from the US Department of Agriculture. He is a member of the advisory board of the charity Fifth Sense, Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal "Chemical Senses," and co-edited the book "Chemosensory Transduction: The Detection of Odors, Tastes and Other Chemostimuli." He is co-founder and CEO of Redolynt, LLC, a company focused on developing smell and taste testing. </span></em></p>The joint award recognizes the long road to deciphering the biology behind the brain’s ability to sense its surroundings – work that paves the way for a number of medical and biological breakthroughs.Steven D. Munger, Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1557112021-03-29T12:08:37Z2021-03-29T12:08:37ZProject-based learning deepens science knowledge for 3rd graders in Michigan<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390482/original/file-20210318-19-1fgxpiw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C2400%2C1591&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Project-based learning gets kids to explore natural phenomena and solve real-world problems.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/children-look-at-plants-and-insects-in-the-garden-of-news-photo/564054715?adppopup=true">Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/research-brief-83231">Research Brief</a> is a short take about interesting academic work.</em></p>
<h2>The big idea</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.lucasedresearch.org">Project-based learning</a> – a teaching approach whereby students explore and solve real-world challenges – can improve third graders’ scientific knowledge as well as their social and emotional skills.</p>
<p><a href="https://mlpbl.open3d.science/techreport">Our study</a> evaluated 2,371 third graders in 46 Michigan schools. Approximately half of the sample received an intervention called Multiple Literacies in Project-Based Learning. The others received traditional science instruction. </p>
<p>The project-based learning program is a yearlong science intervention that includes materials for curriculum, teacher professional development and student testing. It aims to develop students’ science knowledge to understand their world by drawing on their individual and cultural life experiences. At the same time, it also builds reading and math skills and improves social and emotional learning. </p>
<p>Each unit starts with a driving question such as: “How can we design fun, moving toys that any kid can build?” From there, students ask their own questions and investigate what causes moving objects to start, stop or change directions. They collect and analyze data to use as evidence to support their claims and build models to show their thinking. They go on to design and develop products which they share with their classmates, family and school community. For instance, in the toy unit, third grade students received suggestions from first graders to build a toy car or boat that can move fast, straight and go a long distance.</p>
<p>Students in the project-based intervention scored 8% higher on the Michigan state science test than the group of students who received traditional instruction. They also demonstrated greater social and emotional learning compared with the other group, based on surveys done at the start and end of the school year. The survey measured collaboration, ownership and self-reflection.</p>
<h2>Why it matters</h2>
<p>K-12 students need to learn scientific ideas – such as balanced and unbalanced forces and adaptation – to understand the world, including the pressing environmental problems they are likely to face as a result of climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the importance of evidence in making scientific claims. </p>
<p>Unlike a traditional elementary school science curriculum, which relies on textbooks and covering information, project-based learning students learn how to explain natural events such as why dinosaurs died out but tiny mammals survived, and why objects start or stop moving or change directions. They design solutions to engineering problems, and acquire the intellectual tools to seek out additional knowledge when needed. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390486/original/file-20210318-15-483nbp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Kids work together on sidewalk in snow" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390486/original/file-20210318-15-483nbp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/390486/original/file-20210318-15-483nbp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390486/original/file-20210318-15-483nbp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390486/original/file-20210318-15-483nbp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390486/original/file-20210318-15-483nbp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390486/original/file-20210318-15-483nbp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/390486/original/file-20210318-15-483nbp.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Michigan elementary school students measure their shadows for a lesson on using the sun and stars to navigate.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Create for STEM Institute</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Multiple Literacies in Project-Based Learning program was designed using principles supported by research and aligning with <a href="https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practices-crosscutting-concepts">recommendations</a> from the <a href="https://tethys.pnnl.gov/organization/national-research-council-national-academies-nrc">National Research Council</a> on how to support student learning, such as using engineering practices to help make sense of compelling phenomena.</p>
<h2>What still isn’t known</h2>
<p>We expect – but do no yet know – that if students continue to experience the project-based curriculum in fourth and fifth grades, their knowledge of science, social and emotional learning and creative problem-solving will continue to grow. We also expect that as teachers gain experience teaching project-based learning, their students’ science knowledge and creative problem-solving will increase even more. </p>
<p>We are also learning ways to better capture and keep children’s attention with challenging real-world problems and compelling phenomena.</p>
<h2>What other research is being done</h2>
<p>We have conducted a similar project-based intervention in high school chemistry and physics. Our findings show that it increased science achievement and interest in pursuing STEM careers for all students, regardless of ability and backgrounds. We are currently exploring how to make project-based learning usable and lasting in various environments, including virtual, hybrid and face-to-face instruction.</p>
<p>[<em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/155711/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joseph S Krajcik receives funding from George Lucas Educational Foundaton. The work we are writing about was funded by the George Lucas Educational Foundation.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Schneider receives funding from George Lucas Educational Foundation. The work we are writing about was funded by the George Lucas Educational Foundation.</span></em></p>Students who took part in the program scored 8% higher on the state science test than students who received traditional instruction, and demonstrated greater social and emotional learning.Joseph S. Krajcik, Professor of Science Education, Michigan State UniversityBarbara Schneider, Professor of Education and Sociology, Michigan State University, Michigan State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1377562020-05-12T12:35:06Z2020-05-12T12:35:06ZAI tool searches thousands of scientific papers to guide researchers to coronavirus insights<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/332869/original/file-20200505-83757-1nuyewy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C8000%2C4491&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Artificial intelligence can do what humans can't – connect the dots across the majority of coronavirus research.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/coronavirus-royalty-free-image/1215382103?adppopup=true">baranozdemir/E+ via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.</em></p>
<h2>The big idea</h2>
<p>The scientific community worldwide has mobilized with unprecedented speed to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, and the emerging research output is staggering. Every day, <a href="https://covid19primer.com/dashboard">hundreds of scientific papers about COVID-19 come out</a>, in both traditional journals and non-peer-reviewed preprints. There’s already far more than any human could possibly keep up with, and more research is constantly emerging.</p>
<p>And it’s not just new research. We estimate that there are as many as 500,000 papers relevant to COVID-19 that were published before the outbreak, including papers related to the outbreaks of SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. Any one of these might contain the key information that leads to effective treatment or a vaccine for COVID-19.</p>
<p>Traditional methods of searching through the research literature just don’t cut it anymore. This is why <a href="https://www.covidscholar.org/about">we and our colleagues</a> at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab are using the latest artificial intelligence techniques to build <a href="https://www.covidscholar.org/">COVIDScholar</a>, a search engine dedicated to COVID-19. COVIDScholar includes tools that pick up subtle clues like similar drugs or research methodologies to recommend relevant research to scientists. AI can’t replace scientists, but it can help them gain new insights from more papers than they could read in a lifetime.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333182/original/file-20200506-49538-ey2oya.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333182/original/file-20200506-49538-ey2oya.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333182/original/file-20200506-49538-ey2oya.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333182/original/file-20200506-49538-ey2oya.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333182/original/file-20200506-49538-ey2oya.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333182/original/file-20200506-49538-ey2oya.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333182/original/file-20200506-49538-ey2oya.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=496&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">COVIDScholar is a search engine with machine learning algorithms under the hood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screen capture by The Conversation</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Why it matters</h2>
<p>When it comes to finding effective treatments for COVID-19, time is of the essence. Scientists spend <a href="https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189753">23% of their time searching for and reading papers</a>. Every second our search tools can save them is more time to spend making discoveries in the lab and analyzing data.</p>
<p>AI can do more than just save scientists time. Our group’s previous work showed that AI <a href="https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1335-8">can capture latent scientific knowledge</a> from text, making connections that humans missed. There, we showed that AI was able to suggest new, cutting-edge functional materials years before their discovery by humans. The information was there all along, but it took combining information from hundreds of thousands of papers to find it.</p>
<p>We are now applying the same techniques to COVID-19, to find existing drugs that could be repurposed, genetic links that might help develop a vaccine or effective treatment regimens. We’re also starting to build in new innovations, like using molecular structures to help find which drugs are similar to each other, including those that are similar in unexpected ways.</p>
<h2>How we do this work</h2>
<p>The most important part of our work is the data. We’ve built web scrapers that collect new papers as they’re published from a wide variety of sources, making them available on our website within 15 minutes of their appearance online. We also clean the data, fixing mistakes in formatting and comparing the same paper from multiple sources to find the best version. Our machine learning algorithms then go to work on the paper, tagging it with subject categories and marking work important to COVID-19.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333116/original/file-20200506-49550-10it6ws.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/333116/original/file-20200506-49550-10it6ws.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=181&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333116/original/file-20200506-49550-10it6ws.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333116/original/file-20200506-49550-10it6ws.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=181&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333116/original/file-20200506-49550-10it6ws.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333116/original/file-20200506-49550-10it6ws.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/333116/original/file-20200506-49550-10it6ws.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=228&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">COVIDScholar labels and categorizes about 250 journal papers a day to help researchers make connections they might otherwise miss.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kevin Cruse and Haoyan Huo</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We’re also continuously seeking out experts in new areas. Their input and annotation of data is what allows us to train new AI models.</p>
<h2>What’s next</h2>
<p>So far, we have assembled a collection of over 60,000 papers on COVID-19, and we’re expanding the collection daily. We’ve also built search tools that group research into categories, suggest related research and allow users to find papers that connect different concepts, such as papers that connect a specific drug to the diseases it’s been used to treat in the past. We’re now building AI algorithms that allow researchers to plug search results into quantitative models for studying topics like protein interactions. We’re also starting to dig through the past literature to find hidden gems.</p>
<p>We hope that very soon, researchers using COVIDScholar will start to identify relationships that they might never have imagined, bringing us closer to treatments and a remedy for COVID-19.</p>
<p>[<em>You’re too busy to read everything. We get it. That’s why we’ve got a weekly newsletter.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybusy">Sign up for good Sunday reading.</a> ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/137756/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amalie Trewartha receives funding from the Department of Energy and has previously received funding from the Toyota Research Institute.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Dagdelen works for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He receives funding from Berkeley Lab and previously from the Toyota Research Institute. </span></em></p>The scientific community is churning out vast quantities of research about the coronavirus pandemic – far too much for researchers to absorb. An AI system aims to do the heavy lifting for them.Amalie Trewartha, Post Doctoral Fellow, University of California, BerkeleyJohn Dagdelen, Graduate Student Researcher, Persson Group, University of California, BerkeleyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1195972019-07-02T19:45:43Z2019-07-02T19:45:43ZFreedom of speech: a history from the forbidden fruit to Facebook<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282147/original/file-20190702-105182-1gchrfm.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=598%2C0%2C3059%2C2000&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Humans have always sought knowledge, all the way back to Eve.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wes Mountain/The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This essay is part of a series of articles on <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-future-of-education-72196">the future of education</a>.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Free speech is in the news. Not least because several leading universities have adopted a “<a href="https://theconversation.com/dan-tehan-wants-a-model-code-on-free-speech-at-universities-what-is-it-and-do-unis-need-it-119163">model code</a>” to protect it on campus. And then there’s the Israel Folau saga, and <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/israel-folau-it-may-be-free-speech-but-it-is-also-hate-speech-20190624-h1fn6v.html">debate over</a> whether his Instagram post was free speech, or just hate speech.</p>
<p>If the Bible is to be believed, humans have sought knowledge since <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2%3A4-3%3A24&version=NIV">Eve</a>. They have been disagreeing since <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%204">Cain and Abel</a>. From long before kings, people have been subject to rulers with a vested interest in controlling what was said and done.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1143044067082690562"}"></div></p>
<p>Humans have always had a need to ask big questions and their freedom to ask them has often pushed against orthodoxies. Big questions make many people uneasy. Socrates, killed by the Athenians for corrupting the youth <a href="https://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/plato/apology.htm">in 399 BCE</a>, is only the most iconic example of what can happen when politics and piety combine against intellectuals who ask too many questions. </p>
<p>Or questions of the wrong kind.</p>
<p>In all this, there’s an implicit idea we understand the basic meaning of “free speech”, and we are all entitled to it. But what does it really mean, and how entitled are we?</p>
<h2>Where does it come from?</h2>
<p>The Ancient Greek <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/cynics">Cynics</a> – who valued a simple life, close to nature – valorised “parrhesia” or frank speech as an ethical, not a legal thing. Ancient polytheism (the belief in many gods) made the idea of religious intolerance <a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/voltaire-toleration-and-other-essays">unheard of</a>, outside of condemning the odd philosopher. </p>
<p>But it was only in the 17th and 18th centuries that arguments for religious tolerance and the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Toleration-Conflict-Present-Ideas-Context/dp/0521885779">freedoms of conscience and speech</a> took the forms we now take for granted. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-free-speech-64797">Explainer: what is free speech?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Protestantism">Protestantism</a>, which began in Europe in the early 16th century, challenged the authority of the Catholic Church and its priests to interpret the Bible. Protestants appealed to individuals’ consciences and championed the translation of the Holy Book into the languages of ordinary people. </p>
<p>Protestant thinker <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/A-Letter-Concerning-Toleration">John Locke</a> argued, in 1689, that no person can compel another’s God-given conscience. Therefore, all attempts to do this should be forbidden. </p>
<p>At the same time, philosophers began to challenge the limits of human knowledge concerning God, immortality and the mysteries of faith. </p>
<p>People who claim the right to persecute others believe they know the truth. But the continuing disagreements between different religious sects <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-old-ideas-about-tolerance-can-help-us-live-more-peacefully-today-114082">speaks against</a> the idea God has delivered his truth uniquely and unambiguously to any one group. </p>
<p>We are condemned by the limits of our knowledge to learn to tolerate our differences. But not at any cost.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282138/original/file-20190702-105164-wtah9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282138/original/file-20190702-105164-wtah9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282138/original/file-20190702-105164-wtah9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282138/original/file-20190702-105164-wtah9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282138/original/file-20190702-105164-wtah9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282138/original/file-20190702-105164-wtah9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282138/original/file-20190702-105164-wtah9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282138/original/file-20190702-105164-wtah9d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">We are condemned by the limits of our knowledge to learn to tolerate our differences.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">from shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Defending freedom of conscience and speech is not an unlimited prospect. None of the great 18th century advocates of free speech, such as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Voltaire">Voltaire</a>, accepted libel, slander, defamation, incitements to violence, treason or collusion with foreign powers, as anything other than crimes. </p>
<p>It was not intolerant to censor groups who expressed a wish to overthrow the constitution. Or those who would harm members of a population who committed no offences. It was not intolerant to sanction individuals who incite violence against members of other religious or racial groups, solely on grounds of their group identities.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/after-charlottesville-how-we-define-tolerance-becomes-a-key-question-83793">After Charlottesville, how we define tolerance becomes a key question</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>At stake in these limits of free speech is what 19th century philosopher <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mill">John Stuart Mill</a> called the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle">harm principle</a>”. According to this idea, supposedly free speech that causes or incites harm to others is not truly “free” at all. </p>
<p>Such speech attacks the preconditions of civil debate, which requires a minimum of respect and safety for one’s opponents.</p>
<p>Mill also held that a good society should allow a diversity of views to be presented <a href="https://www.bartleby.com/130/2.html">without fear or favour</a>. A group in which unquestioned orthodoxy prevails may miss evidence, reason badly, and be unduly influenced by political pressures (making sure the “right” view is maintained). </p>
<p>A society should be able to check different views against each other, refute and rectify errors, and ideally achieve a more comprehensive and truer set of beliefs. </p>
<h2>Freedom of debate</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Speech-Problems-Philosophy-Haworth/dp/0415148049">Critics</a> of Mill’s diversity ideal have said it mistakes society for a university seminar room. They contend politicians and academics have <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-politics">a more qualified sense</a> of the value of seeking knowledge than impartial inquirers. </p>
<p>This criticism points to the special place of universities when it comes to concerns surrounding freedom of speech, past and present.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dan-tehan-wants-a-model-code-on-free-speech-at-universities-what-is-it-and-do-unis-need-it-119163">Dan Tehan wants a 'model code' on free speech at universities – what is it and do unis need it?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>When the great medieval universities were founded, they were established as autonomous <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Universities-Charles-Homer-Haskins/dp/0801490154">corporations</a>, as against private businesses or arms of public government.</p>
<p>If free inquiry to cultivate educated citizens was to flourish, the thought was, it must be <a href="https://ir.canterbury.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10092/12069/Sharpe_Issue1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">insulated from the pressures</a> of economic and political life. If an intellectual is a paid spokesman of a company or government, they will have strong incentives to suppress inconvenient truths, present only parts of the evidence, and to attack opponents, not their arguments, so as to lead critics from the trail. </p>
<p>A large part of the medieval syllabus, especially in the Arts faculties, consisted of teaching students how to <a href="https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15151.html">question and debate</a> competing opinions. The medieval <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-literary/">summas</a> reflect this culture: a form of text where propositions were raised, counter-propositions considered and rebutted, and comprehensive syntheses sought.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282158/original/file-20190702-164980-1v4y46n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282158/original/file-20190702-164980-1v4y46n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/282158/original/file-20190702-164980-1v4y46n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282158/original/file-20190702-164980-1v4y46n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282158/original/file-20190702-164980-1v4y46n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282158/original/file-20190702-164980-1v4y46n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282158/original/file-20190702-164980-1v4y46n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/282158/original/file-20190702-164980-1v4y46n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Students were taught to debate by putting forward an argument and addressing counter-arguments.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/E0rsKheWqmk">Jonathan Sharp/Unsplash</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is not to deny some counter-positions were beyond the pale. It served a person well to entertain them only as “the devil’s advocate”. </p>
<p>And at different times, certain propositions were condemned. For instance, the so called “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condemnations_of_1210%E2%80%931277">Condemnations</a>” of 1210-1277 at the medieval University of Paris, constrained a set of teachings considered heretical. These included teachings of Aristotle such as that human acts are not ruled by the providence of God and that there was never a first human.</p>
<p>At other times, books considered immoral by the Roman Catholic Church were burnt or put on the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Index-Librorum-Prohibitorum">Index</a> of prohibited works. And those that published such works, such as the 12th Century philosopher and poet Peter <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/abelard/">Abelard</a>, were imprisoned. </p>
<p>Such practices would survive well into the 18th century in Catholic France, when encyclopedist <a href="https://www.iep.utm.edu/diderot/">Denis Diderot</a> suffered a similar fate.</p>
<p>Early modern forms of scientific inquiry challenged the medieval paradigm. It was felt to <a href="https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/birth-of-the-modern-mind-the-intellectual-history-of-the-17th-and-18th-centuries.html">rely too much</a> on an established canon of authorities and so neglect peoples’ own experiences and capacities to reason on what these experiences revealed about the world.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-the-scientific-method-and-why-do-so-many-people-get-it-wrong-65117">What exactly is the scientific method and why do so many people get it wrong?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Philosopher <a href="https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/bacon/francis/b12a/index.html">Francis Bacon, sometimes known as the father of empiricism, argued</a> we cannot rely on the books of professors. New ways of asking questions and testing provisionally held hypotheses about the world should become decisive.</p>
<p>Since nature is so vast, and humans so limited, we would also need to inquire as part of a shared scientific culture, rather than placing our faith in individual geniuses. </p>
<p>Each inquirer would have to submit her results and conclusions to the scrutiny and testing of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Regimens-Mind-Modern-Cultura-Tradition/dp/0226116395">their peers</a>. Such dialogue alone could make sure anyone’s ideas were not the fancies of an isolated dreamer. </p>
<p>Without this form of freedom of inquiry, with active fostering of dissenting voices, there could be no sciences.</p>
<h2>Where are we now?</h2>
<p>People from different political camps agonise about the fate of free speech. Those on the right point to humanities departments, arguing an artificial, <a href="https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/">unrepresentative conformism</a> presides there. Those on the left have long pointed to economics and business departments, levelling similar accusations.</p>
<p>All the while, all departments are subject to the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-University-Governance-Reinvention-Australia/dp/052179448X">changing fate of universities</a> that have lost a good deal of their post-medieval independence from political and economic forces.</p>
<p>So, the situation is not as simple as the controversies make it.</p>
<p>On one hand, charges of ideological closure need to be balanced against the way a certain (already discovered) truth exerts what philosopher and political analyst <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1967/02/25/truth-and-politics">Hannah Arendt</a> termed a coercive value.</p>
<p>No one is intellectually “free”, in any real sense, to claim the earth is flat. Blind denial of overwhelming evidence, however inconvenient, is not an exercise of liberty.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/no-youre-not-entitled-to-your-opinion-9978">No, you're not entitled to your opinion</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>On the other hand, in more behavioural disciplines like politics, there is no one truth. When learning about social structures, to not consider conservatives as well as progressives is to foreclose students’ freedom of inquiry. </p>
<p>To teach <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/23da4f1e-df48-11e3-86a4-00144feabdc0">a single economic perspective</a> as unquestionably “scientific”, without considering its philosophical assumptions and historical failings, is likewise to do free inquiry (and our students) a disservice.</p>
<p>The question of how we should teach openly anti-liberal, anti-democratic thinkers is <a href="https://www.academia.edu/37018845/Dangerous_Minds_in_Dangerous_Times">more complex</a>. But surely to do so without explaining to students the implications of these thinkers’ ideas, and how they have been used by malign historical forces, is once more to sell intellectual freedom (and our democracy) short.</p>
<p>The final curve ball in free speech debates today comes from social media. Single remarks made anywhere in the world can now be ripped from their context, “go viral”, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/books/review/jon-ronsons-so-youve-been-publicly-shamed.html">cost someone</a> their livelihood.</p>
<p>Freedom of speech, to be meaningful, depends on the ability of people of differing opinions to state their opinions (so long as their opinions are not criminal and don’t incite hatred or violence) without fear that, by doing so, they will be jeopardising their own and loved ones’ well-being.</p>
<p>When such conditions apply, as the Colonel used to say on Hogan’s Heroes, “we have ways of making you talk”. And also ways of keeping people silent.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/119597/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Sharpe works for Deakin University, and has previously received ARC funding to work on religion and politics, and the history of different conceptions of philosophy.</span></em></p>Free inquiry has always been a fraught business, from Eden to Facebook, but is a key component of any open society. It shouldn’t be taken for granted.Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/777602017-06-23T01:14:49Z2017-06-23T01:14:49ZForget the insight of a lone genius – innovation is an evolving process of trial and error<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175072/original/file-20170621-9586-18nagvx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Out of all these ideas, will one rise to the top?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/new-idea-concept-crumpled-office-paper-538395124">KlingSup/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Scientific discovery is popularly believed to result from the sheer genius of intellectual stars such as Darwin and Einstein. Their work is often thought to reflect their unique contributions with little or no regard to their own prior experience or to the efforts of their lesser-known predecessors. Conventional wisdom also places <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/science/louis-pasteur-chirality-chemistry.html">great weight on insight</a>, preconception and design in promoting breakthrough scientific achievements, as if ideas <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/10/opinion/sunday/eureka-yes-eureka.html">spontaneously pop into one’s head</a> – fully formed and functional.</p>
<p>There may be some limited truth to this view. However, as an experimental psychologist and a philosopher of science, we believe that it largely misrepresents the real nature of scientific discovery, as well as creativity and innovation in many other realms of human endeavor.</p>
<p>Setting aside the Darwins and Einsteins – whose <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1279086/">monumental contributions</a> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5673782/">are duly celebrated</a> – we suggest that innovation is more a process of trial and error, where two steps forward may sometimes come with one step back, as well as one or more steps to the right or left. Instead of revolution, think evolution. This evolutionary view of human innovation undermines the notion of creative genius and recognizes the cumulative nature of scientific progress.</p>
<h2>Wrong ideas on the path to right ones</h2>
<p>In a 2017 book, one of us (ERS) <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-tale-of-seven-scientists-and-a-new-philosophy-of-science-9780190232993">discusses seven little-known scientists</a> whose partly “wrong ideas” yielded major advances in the hands of others.</p>
<p>Consider one of those unheralded scientists: John Nicholson, a Cambridge University mathematical physicist working in the 1910s, when atomic theory was in an early stage of development. Nicholson postulated the existence of “proto-elements” in outer space. Using a fanciful atomic theory, Nicholson estimated the relative weights of his atoms of coronium, nebulium, proto-fluorine and so on. By combining different numbers of these alleged proto-atoms, Nicholson could recover the weights of all the elements in the then-known periodic table. On a dramatically larger scale, Nicholson could also account for astrophysical details in the Milky Way’s Orion Nebula.</p>
<p>These successes are all the more noteworthy given the fact that none of Nicholson’s proto-elements actually exist.</p>
<p>Yet, amid his often wild speculations, Nicholson also proposed that a defining aspect of atoms – what physicists call the angular momentum of their electrons – can have only certain discrete values, or quanta. Niels Bohr, the father of modern atomic theory, jumped off from this interesting idea to conceive his <a href="https://www.universetoday.com/46886/bohrs-atomic-model/">now-famous model of the atom</a>.</p>
<p>What are we to make of this history? One might simply conclude that science is a collective and cumulative enterprise. Ideas spread and some scientists are more adept than others at exploiting them. That may be true, but there may be a deeper insight to be gleaned.</p>
<h2>Orderly march or random stroll?</h2>
<p>We propose that science is constantly evolving, much as species of animals do. In biological systems, organisms may display new characteristics that result from random genetic mutations. In the same way, random mutations of ideas may help pave the way for advances in science. If mutations in either biology or science prove beneficial, then the animal or the scientific theory will continue to thrive and perhaps reproduce.</p>
<p>In this decidedly Darwinian scenario, there is no design, intelligent or otherwise. There is only random variation and selection, with biological or behavioral evolution unfolding in a trial-and-error fashion.</p>
<p>Support for this evolutionary view of behavioral innovation comes from many <a href="https://evolution-institute.org/article/what-we-make-and-do-can-evolve-with-no-end-in-sight/">diverse realms of human endeavor</a>, as one of us (EAW) has recently documented. Consider one striking example.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175073/original/file-20170621-14473-1gb1plt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175073/original/file-20170621-14473-1gb1plt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175073/original/file-20170621-14473-1gb1plt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175073/original/file-20170621-14473-1gb1plt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175073/original/file-20170621-14473-1gb1plt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175073/original/file-20170621-14473-1gb1plt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175073/original/file-20170621-14473-1gb1plt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/175073/original/file-20170621-14473-1gb1plt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A serendipitous improvement can spread like wildfire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Breeders-Cup-Classic-Horse-Racing/b9c63b94d35e4dae86bddc9b45d86ba3/2/0">AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A particularly influential innovation can be spotted at the thoroughbred racetrack. It requires viewing horse and jockey from either the front or rear: the jockey’s left stirrup is often placed as much as a foot lower than the right. This so-called <a href="http://racehorseherbal.com/wordpress/?p=217">“acey-deucey” stirrup placement</a> is believed to confer important advantages on oval tracks, where in the U.S., only left turns are encountered in counterclockwise races. Although science has yet to prove its efficacy, acey-deucey placement may permit the horse and rider to “lean” into the turn and provide the pair with greater strength by harnessing the centripetal force of a tight turn.</p>
<p>A relatively unknown jockey named Jackie Westrope developed acey-deucey, although it was popularized by a far more famous rider, Eddie Arcaro. Had Westrope conducted methodical investigations or examined extensive film records in a shrewd plan to outrun his rivals? Had he foreseen the speed advantage that would be conferred by riding acey-deucey? No. He suffered a leg injury which left him unable to fully bend his left knee. It was a gimpy left leg that led to Westrope’s off-kilter style – which just happened to coincide with enhanced left-hand turning performance. That’s serendipity.</p>
<p>What was not serendipitous was the rapid and widespread adoption of riding acey-deucey by many of Westrope’s competitors, a racing style which continues in today’s thoroughbred racing.</p>
<h2>Variation and selection, with no end in sight</h2>
<p>Plenty of other examples show that, in many realms of human endeavor, <a href="https://evolution-institute.org/article/what-we-make-and-do-can-evolve-with-no-end-in-sight/">fresh advances can arise from error, misadventure and serendipity</a>. Examples such as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2012/may/08/50-stunning-olympic-moments-dick-fosbury">Fosbury Flop</a>, <a href="http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2011/11/post-it-notes-were-invented-by-accident/">Post-It Notes</a> and the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/dr-heimlich-got-maneuver/">Heimlich Maneuver</a> all give lie to the claim that ingenious, designing minds are responsible for human creativity and invention. Far more mundane and mechanical forces may be at work; forces that are fundamentally connected to the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. </p>
<p>The notions of insight, creativity and genius are often invoked, but they remain <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sudden-genius/201011/can-we-define-genius">vague and of doubtful scientific utility</a>, especially when one considers the diverse and enduring contributions of individuals such as Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Picasso and Tolstoy; Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Curie, Pasteur and Edison. These notions merely label rather than explain the evolution of human innovations. We need another approach, and there is a promising candidate.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2012.98-213">Law of Effect</a> was discovered by <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-L-Thorndike">psychologist Edward Thorndike</a> 40 years after Charles Darwin published “The Origin of Species.” This simple law holds that organisms tend to <a href="https://www.simplypsychology.org/edward-thorndike.html">repeat successful behaviors and to refrain from performing unsuccessful ones</a>. Just like the Law of Natural Selection, upon which evolution depends, the Law of Effect involves an entirely mechanical process of variation and selection; further, it too blindly proceeds with no end in sight.</p>
<p>Of course, the origin of novel ideas and behaviors demands much further study. In particular, the provenance of the raw material on which the law of effect operates is not as clearly known as that of the genetic mutations on which the law of natural selection operates. The generation of novel ideas and behaviors may not be entirely random, but constrained by prior successes and failures – of the current individual (such as Bohr) or of predecessors (such as Nicholson).</p>
<p>The time seems right for jettisoning the jejune notions of <a href="http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/designing-minds/1">intelligent design</a> and genius, and for scientifically exploring the true origins of creative behavior.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/77760/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>We don’t know much about the origins of most human achievements – scientific and otherwise. Like evolution, does progress occur as random insights are selected for or against?Edward Wasserman, Professor of Experimental Psychology, University of IowaEric Scerri, Science Author & Chemistry Lecturer, University of California, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/651172016-09-14T20:15:31Z2016-09-14T20:15:31ZWhat exactly is the scientific method and why do so many people get it wrong?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137030/original/image-20160908-25237-l96xeb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Science works in ways that reflect our rationality. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://flic.kr/p/omHUa4">armymaterielcommand/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Claims that the “the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/04/andrew-bolt-fails-to-electrify-at-festival-of-dangerous-ideas-libertarian-love-in">science isn’t settled</a>” with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works. </p>
<p>So what is the scientific method, and why do so many people, sometimes including those trained in science, get it so wrong?</p>
<p>The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general. </p>
<h2>Science and reasoning</h2>
<p>Humans have two primary modes of reasoning: deduction and induction. When we reason deductively, we tease out the implications of information already available to us.</p>
<p>For example, if I tell you that Will is between the ages of Cate and Abby, and that Abby is older than Cate, you can deduce that Will must be older than Cate. </p>
<p>That answer was embedded in the problem, you just had to untangle it from what you already knew. This is how Sudoku puzzles work. Deduction is also the reasoning we use in mathematics.</p>
<p>Inductive reasoning goes beyond the information contained in what we already know and can extend our knowledge into new areas. We induce using generalisations and analogies. </p>
<p>Generalisations include observing regularities in nature and imagining they are everywhere uniform – this is, in part, how we create the so-called laws of nature. </p>
<p>Generalisations also create classes of things, such as “mammals” or “electrons”. We also generalise to define aspects of human behaviour, including psychological tendencies and economic trends.</p>
<p>Analogies make claims of similarities between two things, and extend this to make new knowledge. </p>
<p>For example, if I find a fossilised skull of an extinct animal that has sharp teeth, I might wonder what it ate. I look for animals alive today that have sharp teeth and notice they are carnivores. </p>
<p>Reasoning by analogy, I conclude that the animal was also a carnivore.</p>
<p>Using induction and inferring to the best possible explanation consistent with the evidence, science teaches us more about the world than we could simply deduce.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137169/original/image-20160909-13379-r1mnui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137169/original/image-20160909-13379-r1mnui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137169/original/image-20160909-13379-r1mnui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137169/original/image-20160909-13379-r1mnui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137169/original/image-20160909-13379-r1mnui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137169/original/image-20160909-13379-r1mnui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137169/original/image-20160909-13379-r1mnui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137169/original/image-20160909-13379-r1mnui.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Saber tooth cat skull: just look at the fangs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/badlandsnationalpark/7468302686/">Flickr/Badlands National Park</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Science and uncertainty</h2>
<p>Most of our <a href="https://theconversation.com/listen-and-learn-the-language-of-science-and-scepticism-6633">theories</a> or models are inductive analogies with the world, or parts of it. </p>
<p>If inputs to my particular theory produce outputs that match those of the real world, I consider it a good analogy, and therefore a good theory. If it doesn’t match, then I must reject it, or refine or redesign the theory to make it more analogous.</p>
<p>If I get many results of the same kind over time and space, I might generalise to a conclusion. But no amount of success can prove me right. Each confirming instance only increases my confidence in my idea. As Albert Einstein <a href="http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins100017.html">famously said</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity (which are models and therefore analogies of how he thought the universe works) have been supported by experimental evidence many times under many conditions.</p>
<p>We have great confidence in the theories as good descriptions of reality. But they cannot be proved correct, because proof is a creature that belongs to deduction.</p>
<h2>The hypothetico-deductive method</h2>
<p>Science also works deductively through the hypothetico-deductive method.</p>
<p>It goes like this. I have a hypothesis or model that predicts that X will occur under certain experimental conditions. Experimentally, X does not occur under those conditions. I can deduce, therefore, that the theory is flawed (assuming, of course, we trust the experimental conditions that produced not-X).</p>
<p>Under these conditions, I have proved that my hypothesis or model is incorrect (or at least incomplete). I reasoned deductively to do so.</p>
<p>But if X does occur, that does not mean I am correct, it just means that the experiment did not show my idea to be false. I now have increased confidence that I am correct, but I can’t be sure. </p>
<p>If one day experimental evidence that was beyond doubt was to go against Einstein’s predictions, we could deductively prove, through the hypothetico-deductive method, that his theories are incorrect or incomplete. But no number of confirming instances can prove he is right.</p>
<p>That an idea can be tested by experiment, that there can be experimental outcomes (in principle) that show the idea is incorrect, is what makes it a scientific one, at least according to the philosopher of science <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/">Karl Popper</a>.</p>
<p>As an example of an untestable, and hence unscientific position, take that held by Australian climate denialist and One Nation Senator <a href="http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=266524">Malcolm Roberts</a>. Roberts maintains there is <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2016/s4514518.htm">no empirical evidence</a> of human-induced climate change. </p>
<p>When presented with authoritative evidence during an episode of the ABC’S Q&A television debating show recently, he <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-16/professor-brian-cox-vs.-senator-malcolm-roberts/7746576">claimed that the evidence was corrupted</a>. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LxEGHW6Lbu8?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Professor Brian Cox explains climate science to senator Malcolm Roberts.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet his claim that human-induced climate change is not occurring cannot be put to the test as he would not accept any data showing him wrong. He is therefore not acting scientifically. He is indulging in <a href="https://theconversation.com/where-is-the-proof-in-pseudoscience-22184">pseudoscience</a>.</p>
<h2>Settled does not mean proved</h2>
<p>One of the great errors in the public understanding of science is to equate settled with proved. While Einstein’s theories are “settled”, they are not proved. But to plan for them not to work would be utter folly.</p>
<p>As the philosopher John Dewey pointed out in his book <a href="https://archive.org/stream/JohnDeweyLogicTheTheoryOfInquiry/%5BJohn_Dewey%5D_Logic_-_The_Theory_of_Inquiry_djvu.txt">Logic: The Theory of Inquiry</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In scientific inquiry, the criterion of what is taken to be settled, or to be knowledge, is [of the science] being so settled that it is available as a resource in further inquiry; not being settled in such a way as not to be subject to revision in further inquiry. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Those who demand the science be “settled” before we take action are seeking deductive certainty where we are working inductively. And there are other sources of confusion.</p>
<p>One is that simple statements about cause and effect are rare since nature is complex. For example, a theory might predict that X will cause Y, but that Y will be mitigated by the presence of Z and not occur at all if Q is above a critical level. To reduce this to the simple statement “X causes Y” is naive. </p>
<p>Another is that even though some broad ideas may be settled, the details remain a source of lively debate. For example, that evolution has occurred is certainly settled by any rational account. But some details of how natural selection operates are still being fleshed out. </p>
<p>To confuse the details of natural selection with the fact of evolution is highly analogous to quibbles about dates and exact temperatures from modelling and researching climate change when it is very clear that the planet is warming in general.</p>
<p>When our theories are successful at predicting outcomes, and form a web of higher level theories that are themselves successful, we have a strong case for grounding our actions in them.</p>
<p>The mark of intelligence is to progress in an uncertain world and the science of climate change, of human health and of the ecology of our planet has given us orders of magnitude more confidence than we need to act with certitude.</p>
<p>Demanding deductive certainty before committing to action does not make us strong, it paralyses us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65117/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Ellerton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>There’s a big difference between science and pseudoscience. But if people don’t understand how science works in the first place, it’s very easy for them to fall for the pseudoscience.Peter Ellerton, Lecturer in Critical Thinking, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/597152016-05-24T11:54:24Z2016-05-24T11:54:24ZRoyal Society president: GM crops feed much of the world today – why not tomorrow’s generations?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123763/original/image-20160524-10984-i0nr0t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FEMA_-_2086_-_Photograph_by_Andrea_Booher_taken_on_07-09-1993_in_Missouri.jpg">Andrea Booher/FEMA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>My parents researched malnutrition and under-nutrition in India, especially among children, and found that many diets recommended by Western nutritionists were in fact completely inapplicable to the poor. So they formulated cheap, healthy diets based on indigenous food with which people were familiar. Yet despite their many other efforts, a quarter of people in Indian and nearly one in nine people around the world do not have enough food to live a healthy active life. </p>
<p>The World Bank estimates that we will need to <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/foodsecurity">produce about 50% more food by 2050</a> to feed a population of nine billion people. And the past 50 years have seen agricultural productivity soar – <a href="http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/260638/aib786d_1_.pdf">corn yields in the US have doubled</a>, for example. But this has come with sharp increases in the use of fertilisers, pesticides and water which has brought its own problems. There is also no guarantee that this rate of increase in yields can be maintained.</p>
<p>Just as new agricultural techniques and equipment spurred on food production in the Middle Ages, and scientific crop breeding, fertilisers and pesticides did so for the Green Revolution of the 20th century, so we must rely on the latest technology to boost food production further. Genetic modification, or GM, used appropriately with proper regulation, may be part of the solution. Yet GM remains a highly contentious topic of debate where, unfortunately, the underlying facts are often obscured.</p>
<p>Views on GM differ across the world. Almost <a href="http://www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/briefs/51/default.asp">half of all crops grown in the US are GM</a>, whereas widespread opposition in Europe means virtually no GM crops are grown there. In Canada, regulation is focused on the characteristics of the crop produced, while in the EU <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/food/plant/gmo/index_en.htm">the focus is on how it has been modified</a>. GM crops do not damage the environment by nature of their modification; GM is merely a technology, and it is the resulting product that we should be concerned about and regulate, just as we would any new product.</p>
<p>There are outstanding plant scientists who work on GM in the UK, but the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments have declared their opposition to GM plants. Why is there such strong opposition in a country with great trust in scientists?</p>
<p>About 15 years ago when GM was just emerging, its main proponents and many of the initial products were from large multinational corporations – even though it was publicly funded scientists who produced much of the initial research. Understandably, many felt GM was a means for these corporations to impose a monopoly on crops and maximise their profits. This <a href="https://theconversation.com/seeds-of-doubt-why-consumers-weigh-up-gm-produce-and-turn-it-down-50106">perception</a> was not helped by some of the practices of these big companies, such as introducing herbicide resistant crops that led to the heavy use of herbicides – often made by the same companies.</p>
<p>The debate became polarised, and any sense that the evidence could be rationally assessed evaporated. There have been claims made about the negative <a href="https://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-journals/elsevier-announces-article-retraction-from-journal-food-and-chemical-toxicology">health effects</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/hard-evidence-does-gm-cotton-lead-to-farmer-suicide-in-india-24045">economic costs</a> of GM crops – claims later shown to be unsubstantiated. Today, <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/348830/bis-14-p111-public-attitudes-to-science-2014-main.pdf">half of those in the UK do not feel well informed</a> about GM crops.</p>
<h2>Everyday genetic modification</h2>
<p>GM involves the introduction of very specific genes into plants. In many ways this is much more controlled than the random mutations that are selected for in traditional plant breeding. Most of the commonly grown crops that we consider natural actually bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors, having been selectively modified through cross-breeding over the thousands of years that humans have been farming crops – in a sense, this is <a href="https://theconversation.com/all-our-food-is-genetically-modified-in-some-way-where-do-you-draw-the-line-56256">a form of genetic modification itself</a>.</p>
<p>In any case, we accept genetic modification in many other contexts: insulin used to treat diabetes is now made by GM microbes and has almost completely replaced animal insulin, for example. Many of the top selling drugs are proteins such as <a href="http://www.britannica.com/science/genetically-modified-organism/GMOs-in-medicine-and-research">antibodies made entirely by GM</a>, and now account for a third of all new medicines (and over <a href="http://www.drugs.com/stats/top100/sales">half of the biggest selling ones</a>). These are used to treat a host of diseases, from breast cancer to arthritis and leukaemia.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123762/original/image-20160524-12397-eg8skv.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123762/original/image-20160524-12397-eg8skv.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/123762/original/image-20160524-12397-eg8skv.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123762/original/image-20160524-12397-eg8skv.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123762/original/image-20160524-12397-eg8skv.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123762/original/image-20160524-12397-eg8skv.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123762/original/image-20160524-12397-eg8skv.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/123762/original/image-20160524-12397-eg8skv.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Millions of acres growing GM crops worldwide.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gmo_acreage_world_2009.PNG">Fafner/ISSSA</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>GM has been used to create insect-resistance in plants that greatly reduces or even eliminates the need for chemical insecticides, reducing the cost to the farmer and the environment. It also has the potential to make crops more nutritious, for example by adding healthier fats or more nutritious proteins. It’s been used to introduce nutrients such as beta carotene from which the body can make vitamin A – the so-called <a href="https://theconversation.com/golden-rice-naysayers-ignore-the-worlds-need-for-nutrition-19790">golden rice</a> – which prevents night blindness in children. And GM can potentially create crops that are drought resistant – something that as water becomes scarce will become increasingly important.</p>
<p>More than 10% of the world’s arable land is now used to grow GM plants. An <a href="http://nas-sites.org/ge-crops">extensive study</a> conducted by the US National Academies of Sciences recently reported that there has been no evidence of ill effects linked to the consumption of any approved GM crop since the widespread commercialisation of GM products 18 years ago. It also reported that there was no conclusive evidence of environmental problems resulting from GM crops.</p>
<p>GM is a tool, and how we use it is up to us. It certainly does not have to be the monopoly of a few multinational corporations. We can and should have adequate regulations to ensure the safety of any new crop strain (GM or otherwise) to both ourselves and the environment, and it is up to us to decide what traits in any new plant are acceptable. People may be opposed to GM crops for a variety of reasons and ultimately consumers will decide what they want to eat. But the one in nine people in poor countries facing malnutrition or starvation do not enjoy that choice. The availability of cheap, healthy and nutritious food for them is a matter of life and death.</p>
<p>Alongside other improvements in farming practices, genetic modification is an important part of a sustainable solution to global food shortages. However, the motto of the Royal Society is <a href="https://royalsociety.org/about-us/history/"><em>nullius in verba</em></a>; roughly, “take nobody’s word for it”. We need a well-informed debate based on an assessment of the evidence. The Royal Society has published <a href="http://www.royalsociety.org/gm-plants">GM Plants: questions and answers</a> which can play its part in this. People should look at the evidence – not just loudly voiced opinions – for themselves and make up their own minds.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/59715/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Venki Ramakrishnan is President of the Royal Society.</span></em></p>Science and technology has always helped us feed the world. GM has more to offer, if we let it.Venki Ramakrishnan, Professor and Deputy Director, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/564562016-04-20T11:12:02Z2016-04-20T11:12:02ZWhat the European Union can learn from CERN about international co-operation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115512/original/image-20160317-30247-10egagz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=177%2C0%2C1058%2C726&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://cds.cern.ch/tools/mediaarchive.py/copyright_notice?recid=833187&master_path=https://mediastream.cern.ch/MediaArchive/Photo/Masters/2005/0504012/0504012.JPG&ln=en&reference=CERN-SI-0504012&tirage=">CERN</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Can Europe work? This is the real question being asked of British people on June 23. Behind the details of subsidies, regulations and eurozones lies a more fundamental puzzle: can different nationalities retain their own identities and work together, without merging into some bland United States of Europe?</p>
<p>I would like to suggest that there may be an example to follow in the history of <a href="http://home.cern/about">CERN</a>, the international research organisation based in Switzerland, and home to the world-famous particle accelerators used recently by teams of thousands of scientists from many nations to confirm the existence of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/higgs-boson">Higgs boson</a>.</p>
<p>There are many similarities between CERN and the EU. The former was founded in 1954 and the latter in 1957, when the <a href="http://www.britannica.com/event/Treaty-of-Rome">Treaty of Rome</a> was signed (although it was then called the European Economic Community). Both CERN and the EU have grown over the years. The EU started with six countries and now brings together 28. CERN has grown from an initial 12 members, including the UK, to 21. </p>
<p>Both also emerged as a response to a post-war world in which the two superpowers dominated, not only militarily but also economically and scientifically. The US and the USSR were supreme on either side of the iron curtain, and with their great resources they pushed ahead with prestige research: space travel, electronics, and nuclear physics.</p>
<p>The European nations were impoverished by the financial and human cost of the war. Many of its greatest (often Jewish) scientists had fled to the US and were slow to come back. None had the people or the capacity to compete on their own. </p>
<h2>Teamwork</h2>
<p>CERN has proved remarkably, and enduringly, successful. The recent discovery of the Higgs particle at the Large Hadron Collider is just the latest in a string of ambitious but successful accelerator projects and scientific discoveries that have rewritten the particle physics textbooks. It was at CERN that the world wide web was invented, changing the lives of billions of people.</p>
<p>Nations such as France, Germany, and the UK, which were once proud of their national accelerator laboratories eventually had to abandon their independent programmes and convenient particle accelerators at Saclay, Hamburg and Harwell had to be sidelined in favour of the central machine.</p>
<p>Herwig Schopper, a past CERN director general, wrote a <a href="http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-540-89301-1">fascinating account</a>
of the high-level negotiations needed to persuade the national governments to support the construction of the LEP accelerator (the LHC’s precursor). All kinds of tactics were needed to placate national stubbornness – such as over money in the UK and national pride in Italy. He also details the schmoozing and diplomacy skills that need to be deployed by the head of CERN to keep every national government happy.</p>
<p>It has not always been a smooth ride. There have been strong disagreements about the size of the total budget and how it should be shared between member states.</p>
<p>As national science budgets have come under pressure, the millions spent on CERN have inevitably been eyed jealously by other scientific disciplines. Why spend quite so much on particle physics when high quality grant applications in other fields – the “unfunded alphas” – were being turned down due to a lack of funds? </p>
<p>So the existence of CERN and the way it is organised have come under strong scrutiny. In the 1980s, the <a href="http://cds.cern.ch/record/63800?ln=no">Abragam committee</a> was set up, at the insistence of the UK, to look for 25% savings at CERN. But in the end it recommended the budget should be kept as it was. And as recently as 2009, Austria threatened to leave. It was only dissuaded after an international outcry. </p>
<p>So the organisation has survived – not unscathed, and not unchanged – but it has survived.</p>
<h2>Life and work at CERN</h2>
<p>Although there is a small core of permanent CERN employees, most of the men and women working at the laboratory, on the experiments and accelerators, are visitors from national universities and institutes, or postdoctoral researchers on short-term contracts. Many will take up university posts in due course.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115508/original/image-20160317-30237-pj30q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/115508/original/image-20160317-30237-pj30q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115508/original/image-20160317-30237-pj30q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115508/original/image-20160317-30237-pj30q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115508/original/image-20160317-30237-pj30q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115508/original/image-20160317-30237-pj30q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/115508/original/image-20160317-30237-pj30q9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Too busy doing bad-ass experiments to argue about fishing quotas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://cds.cern.ch/record/1969029/files/IMG_2250.jpg?subformat=icon-1440">CERN</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So the members of the workforce retain their national links and national characteristics. Identity is important. The French, Germans and Italians I have worked with appear to have conformed to their national sterotypes, and I suspect they find my behaviour typically “British”. (I remember when, walking back from lunch to our experiment, we were hit by a sudden violent hailstorm. Everyone ran for cover – but the UK contingent just kept walking). The most popular topic of conversation in the canteen is probably – apart from work, of course – the idiosyncratic features of different languages. Being thrown together to work in international teams does not blur the differences, it sharpens them.</p>
<p>So European co-operation, at least in this example, works. European particle physics has overtaken not only the former eastern bloc, but even the United States, which now has nothing to match it.</p>
<p>It seems that Europe really exists, it is not just a collection of countries that happen to be adjacent on the map. It means something to be a European, at least in the context of scientific co-operation, without in any way lessening one’s identity as British (or English, Welsh, or Scottish for that matter). Hopefully we can now make that work in other fields as well.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56456/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Roger Barlow receives research funding from CERN and from STFC to work with CERN. He is a member of the Institute of Physics and the Royal Statistical Society. This article does not reflect the views of the research councils.</span></em></p>There have been squabbles of course, but the science project in Geneva is an example of putting differences aside to pursue common goals.Roger Barlow, Research Professor and Director of the International Institute for Accelerator Applications, University of HuddersfieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/548392016-03-01T04:28:34Z2016-03-01T04:28:34ZWhy it’s crucial that young scientists are taught the value of being wrong<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/113252/original/image-20160229-4066-s7g3sr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Children are natural scientists. They learn from their mistakes, then try something new.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Albert Einstein is the most famous scientist of all time. From Calgary to Cape Town the image of the wild-haired, contemplative lone genius holed up in a messy office, changing the universe, has evolved into the archetype of how society sees scientists. More than that, it has shaped the social perception of the whole scientific endeavour. </p>
<p>True science, we are led to believe from a very young age, is never wrong. True scientists – the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/galileo-galilei">Galileos</a>, <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/isaac-newton-9422656">Newtons</a> and <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/marie-curie-bio.html">Curies</a> – stare into the abyss and return with deep truths about the universe we inhabit. Anything less and, well, you might as well throw in the towel. And so scientists spend their careers desperately trying to be right in every classroom, seminar and paper. </p>
<p>But this is not how science works. It’s not even how science is <em>supposed</em> to work. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.livescience.com/20896-science-scientific-method.html">scientific method</a> is built on four cornerstones: observation, hypothesis, experiment and the revision of the hypothesis based on the results of the experiment. The last is just a fancy way of saying “admitting that you were wrong”. </p>
<p>And since it is this sequence by which hypotheses evolve into theories which grow into paradigms, science itself cannot progress without scientists admitting – to themselves even more than to society at large - to being wrong.</p>
<h2>Even Einstein erred</h2>
<p>By now, few people are unaware of the recent monumental detection of <a href="https://theconversation.com/gravitational-waves-will-the-global-south-provide-the-next-pulse-of-gravity-research-54583">gravitational waves</a> by the LIGO team. This was heralded as the final great test of Einstein’s General Relativity. </p>
<p>But many people probably don’t know that in 1936 Einstein himself, together with Nathan Rosen, <a href="http://dafix.uark.edu/%7Edanielk/Talks/PhysRev.pdf">submitted a paper</a> for publication claiming that such gravitational waves could not exist. The paper was rejected. Einstein was wrong! It wasn’t the first, nor the last time either. </p>
<p>More recently, in 2014, the <a href="http://bicepkeck.org/">BICEP</a> collaboration announced that it had detected evidence of gravitational waves from the <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-cosmic-microw/">cosmic microwave background</a>. After much fanfare in popular media and back and forth in the scientific community, it emerged that they, too, <a href="http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2014/sep/22/bicep2-gravitational-wave-result-bites-the-dust-thanks-to-new-planck-data">were wrong</a>. </p>
<p>So, why is it so important to realise that scientists being wrong is not a bug but a feature of science? </p>
<h2>Guarding the future of science</h2>
<p>First of all, we live in an age where information has never been more <a href="http://google.com/">accessible</a>. Ironically, with this growth of access to information has come a commensurate distrust in the expertise of scientists and even in the very science that has brought humankind to this juncture. </p>
<p>One has only to think of the surge of the anti-vaccine movement, resistance to GMOs, anxiety around wi-fi and even the raging non-battle between evolution and intelligent design. </p>
<p>In each of these cases, a small but vocal body pursuing its own agenda latched onto uncertainties and doubts expressed by scientists. Instead of appreciating this as the natural progression of the scientific process, these groups painted it as a dramatic failing of science and of scientists. </p>
<p>In some cases, as in former South African president Thabo Mbeki’s HIV/AIDS denialism, these views can have <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/26/aids-south-africa">life or death</a> consequences. </p>
<p>A second, perhaps more important reason, is for the very future of science itself. Even scientists sometimes don’t take the importance of being wrong seriously enough. This is due in no small part to the <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/terms/confirmation_bias.htm">confirmation bias</a> that seems built into our humanity. We are more likely to seek out and place value in information that confirms our own existing beliefs.</p>
<p>These views and the culture in which they form are then passed on to the next generation – our students pursuing science degrees at university.</p>
<h2>The way forward</h2>
<p>The current generation of students go through their degrees petrified of being wrong or of looking “stupid” among their peers and lecturers. This is particularly true in patriarchal environments that pervade Africa, where indeed many young people are taught not to question anything they’re told by elders.</p>
<p>And so no questions get asked. No guesses get made and no risks get taken as students grow more and more uncomfortable with being uncomfortable in lectures. For a continent that’s striving to produce the <a href="http://nef.org/">next Einstein</a>, this is a cycle that desperately needs breaking.</p>
<p>Fortunately breaking the cycle is not as difficult as it might seem. As much as we’d like to think otherwise, being wrong is something we as humans are inherently very good at. It is something that is manifest in how young children learn about the world, through play.</p>
<p>Natural scientists learn by trial and error, without fear of getting the answer wrong. Perhaps we as adults, students and teachers alike ought to take some lessons from them, cast aside our egos and embrace losing to nature. </p>
<p>But what do we know – we’re probably wrong anyway.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/54839/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeff Murugan receives funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amanda Weltman receives funding from the National Research Foundation of South Africa and the Department of Science and Technology of South Africa. </span></em></p>Scientists being wrong is not a bug or a glitch – it’s a feature of science and mistakes can actually lead to new, deeper discoveries.Jeff Murugan, Associate Professor of Mathematical Physics, University of Cape TownAmanda Weltman, South African Research Chair in Physical Cosmology, Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape TownLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/464522015-08-27T07:50:21Z2015-08-27T07:50:21ZActivists misuse open records requests to harass researchers<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93057/original/image-20150826-15424-1sud94d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A researcher buried in records requests can’t attend to actual science. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=130718771&src=lb-29877982">Man image via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This winter, Kevin Folta, a plant molecular biologist with the University of Florida’s (UF) Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), became the target of a sweeping public records request from <a href="http://usrtk.org/">US Right to Know</a>, an activist group that seeks to expose what it calls “the failures of the corporate food system,” after answering questions on a website called <a href="https://gmoanswers.com">GMO Answers</a>.</p>
<p>Folta is chairman of the Department of Horticultural Sciences here, which I oversee as senior vice president of agriculture and natural resources at UF. His research uses genomics tools to guide traditional breeding efforts in Florida crops. On the GMO Answers site, he writes about the science of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), critically evaluating claims about the technology. He is not compensated for his time, and uses GMO Answers as a means to educate interested parties about the technology.</p>
<p>The result of this records request has been a months-long vetting of Folta’s communications by university attorneys in preparation for handing over thousands of emails to US Right to Know. The request is also a major distraction from his work as a scientist.</p>
<p>In my administrative role, I have to oversee these kinds of records requests and make sure we are abiding by both the law and ethical standards of scientific research. Requests such as the one from US Right to Know consume attention and energy, pose the danger of silencing other scientists and impede us from pursuing our true mission of groundbreaking science.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92847/original/image-20150824-17755-1ph8dgk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92847/original/image-20150824-17755-1ph8dgk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92847/original/image-20150824-17755-1ph8dgk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92847/original/image-20150824-17755-1ph8dgk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92847/original/image-20150824-17755-1ph8dgk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92847/original/image-20150824-17755-1ph8dgk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92847/original/image-20150824-17755-1ph8dgk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92847/original/image-20150824-17755-1ph8dgk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=638&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 2009, Google Suggest was at the ready to serve up results about Climategate.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/searchengineland/4161122805">search-engine-land</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Climategate’ and misrepresented messages</h2>
<p>Folta is certainly not the first or only scientist to face activists bent on cherry-picking emails to distort research with a goal of applying pressure to men and women who work on controversial topics.</p>
<p>The most notorious case has been dubbed “Climategate,” in which hackers extracted thousands of emails from the server of a British university in 2009. Climate change <a href="http://politicalvelcraft.org/2012/02/12/u-s-senate-epw-committee-found-climate-scientists-obstructed-concealed-manipulated-colluded-lobbied-influence-upon-political-processes/">deniers asserted</a> that the <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/">emails demonstrated</a> global warming was a worldwide scientific <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/11/23/climategate-2-0-new-e-mails-rock-the-global-warming-debate/">conspiracy</a>.</p>
<p>In a letter in the journal Science, 225 members of the US National Academy of Sciences <a href="http://doi.org/10.1126/science.328.5979.689">condemned the hack</a> as an example of “political assaults on scientists and climate scientists in particular.” Scientific organizations worldwide <a href="http://www.aaas.org/news/aaas-reaffirms-statements-climate-change-and-integrity">reiterated</a> the <a href="http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/climatechangeclarify.html">scientific consensus</a> around climate change. All that, of course, <a href="http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1987697,00.html">could not unring the bell</a> and put the controversy to rest.</p>
<p>What we’ve learned from episodes such as Climategate is that emails can be used out of context to confuse the public about issues around which there is, in fact, solid scientific consensus.</p>
<h2>Open records requests wielded as a weapon</h2>
<p>The abuse of open records law as an activists’ tool wielded against researchers is prevalent enough that the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group long recognized for its hard skeptical stance on agricultural biotechnology, earlier this year <a href="http://www.ucsusa.org/center-science-and-democracy/protecting-scientists-harassment/freedom-bully-how-laws#.VdtFK-uJnww">published a report</a> titled Freedom to Bully: How Laws Intended to Free Information Are Used to Harass Researchers.</p>
<p>It highlights multiple cases similar to Folta’s, by no means limited to agricultural biotechnology. For example:</p>
<ul>
<li>An occupational health scientist at West Virginia University received multiple <a href="http://www.statejournal.com/story/28222033/highland-mining-wvu-to-argue-foia-case">records requests from a mining company</a> after he investigated connections between mountaintop removal mining and adverse health effects.</li>
<li>A University of North Carolina <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121062/north-carolina-republicans-battle-uncs-gene-nichol-poverty-center">poverty researcher was targeted</a> by a conservative think tank, requiring him to review thousands of emails.</li>
<li>A legal scholar of religious freedom at the University of Virginia faced a Freedom of Information Act <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/05/douglas_laycock_gets_smeared_lgbtq_groups_attack_on_the_university_of_virginia.html">request backed by an LGBTQ advocacy group</a> for phone and email records between him and various religious liberty groups.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Harassing requests threaten scientific enterprise</h2>
<p>The expense of paper chases bothers me. What worries me more, though, is the prospect that other Kevin Foltas are silent because they do not want to be subjected to the harassment he endures. For instance, our national scientific societies have been silent during this episode.</p>
<p><a href="http://aec.ifas.ufl.edu/contact/faculty/joy_rumble.shtml">Joy Rumble</a>, an assistant professor of agricultural communication here at UF/IFAS, identifies this phenomenon as part of the <a href="http://masscommtheory.com/theory-overviews/spiral-of-silence/">spiral of silence</a>. People tend not to publicly share their beliefs if they feel they’re in the minority, the theory goes, for fear of isolation or reprisals. That silence feeds greater fear among dissenters as the status quo dominates the public discussion.</p>
<p>In a society in which the might of a megaphone too often trumps the power of ideas, self-censorship can mean truth loses.</p>
<p>And it’s not an abstract concept to Rumble. She, too, answered a question or two on GMO Answers. She, too, was then targeted by a public records request. Her crime, in the view of the detractors who seek to discredit her, appears to be <em>talking about</em> talking about biotechnology. She wants to help scientists become better communicators, to bridge the gap between scientific consensus and public perception.</p>
<p>The Union of Concerned Scientists report decries the use of broad records requests that can hijack researchers’ time, divert university money, and chill researchers’ interest in communicating with the public they serve.</p>
<p>It’s particularly distressing in an agricultural research context since <a href="https://www.wfp.org/hunger/stats">3.1 million children</a> under the age of five die each year from malnutrition, while there are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFD6DRn0Cg">no documented cases</a> of a child – or anyone – dying from eating GMO foods in the two decades they have been available to the public.</p>
<p>So when Folta gets death threats or has to deal with online posts about his deceased mother, or we have to search emails for nonexistent evidence of a conspiracy theory, that’s more than a nuisance. Harassment of researchers contributes to the locking up in labs of potential solutions to worldwide problems.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93058/original/image-20150826-15424-1vh7c8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93058/original/image-20150826-15424-1vh7c8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/93058/original/image-20150826-15424-1vh7c8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93058/original/image-20150826-15424-1vh7c8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93058/original/image-20150826-15424-1vh7c8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93058/original/image-20150826-15424-1vh7c8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93058/original/image-20150826-15424-1vh7c8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/93058/original/image-20150826-15424-1vh7c8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Legitimate researchers let the sun shine in and don’t cloud funding issues – without the need for harassment.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cdharrison/4703423688">Chris Harrison</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Transparency is crucial</h2>
<p>Yes, Folta’s email communications with agricultural companies should be public records. The integrity of public university research is based in part on its transparency. It’s germane that the public know where we get our funding, whatever the source.</p>
<p>That’s different from sifting through 4,600 pages of emails and other records to mine for defamatory out-of-context sentences. Reimbursements for travel and small financial contributions to defray the cost of a conference or student attendance at a meeting are poised to be paraded as bribery-for-service.</p>
<p>Yet our scientific statements reflect scientific consensus and experimental evidence, not the influence of funders. While we can point to examples of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-drug-industrys-influence-over-research-grows-so-does-the-potential-for-bias/2012/11/24/bb64d596-1264-11e2-be82-c3411b7680a9_story.html">cozy relationships between scientists and corporations</a> that raise questions of research integrity, I’d argue these instances aren’t the norm in the scientific community. A 2009 meta-analysis reports that 2% of scientists <a href="http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738">admit to fabricating or falsifying</a> data. If recognized, misconduct – such as allowing results to be dictated by a funding source – can destroy careers.</p>
<p>For example, researcher Eric Smart was shown to have <a href="http://www.kentucky.com/2012/11/26/2422095/university-of-kentucky-researcher.html">fabricated cardiovascular-diabetes data</a> for almost a decade. Once discovered, he resigned from his position, is excluded from applying for federal grants for seven years and now teaches high school chemistry. Others typically accept settlements that demand their research be supervised or that any employers certify publications.</p>
<p>Such disruptions in publication and grant funding are difficult to overcome in a scientific career. Making up data is a fast track to career suicide. Researchers recognize that, and the overwhelming majority would not deliberately take that kind of risk – above and beyond what their academic integrity would dictate. Yes, it’s important to acknowledge the concern that corporate funding could potentially influence or steer research in a way that falls short of falsifying data. But I have faith that the scientific enterprise self-corrects these unintentional lapses.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92950/original/image-20150825-15875-11v28r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92950/original/image-20150825-15875-11v28r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92950/original/image-20150825-15875-11v28r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92950/original/image-20150825-15875-11v28r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92950/original/image-20150825-15875-11v28r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92950/original/image-20150825-15875-11v28r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92950/original/image-20150825-15875-11v28r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92950/original/image-20150825-15875-11v28r4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Most researchers are by the book when it comes to their scientific publications.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/moonlightbulb/6307961852">Selena N B H</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>People opposed to this kind of harassment-via-records-request can sign the Cornell Alliance for Science <a href="http://cas.nonprofitsoapbox.com/science14">#Science14 letter</a>. It’s a petition in support of academic freedom and the 14 scientists at four universities currently targeted by anti-GMO activists’ public records requests. </p>
<p>As a university administrator, I’d rather spend money on so many things than taxpayer-funded witch hunts. We’re forced to divert funds that could be used in the search to alleviate human suffering rooted in starvation and malnutrition, in producing better food with less environmental impact, and keeping our agricultural industries strong.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46452/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jack Payne heads the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, which receives approximately $100 million a year in research funding from outside sources. Funders include federal agencies, among them the NIH, NSF, DoD and USDA. Other research funding comes from foundations, state and local governments, corporations, trade associations, and non-profits. Monsanto is among the many corporations that fund UF/IFAS biotechnology research.
Kevin Folta’s current research funding comes from the USDA to study light as a non-chemical control of fruit quality, flavor and nutrient content. His outreach is no longer sponsored by Monsanto but has received support from Oregon Farm Bureau, Manitoba Canola Commission and the US Pork Board as compensation for training or presentations. Many small individual donors also support the program. </span></em></p>Some activists use open records requests to bully researchers – distracting them from their actual work and silencing others who don’t want to draw attention.Jack Payne, Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources and Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of FloridaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/222852014-01-22T06:47:49Z2014-01-22T06:47:49ZCrowdfunding is a boost for science but it cannot replace core state investment<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/39588/original/46cmv9dt-1390328765.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Who decides what has a future in science?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">RMTip</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a recent article in <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/crowdfunding-could-threaten-government-investment/2010584.article">Times Higher Education</a>, it was argued that crowdfunding could threaten government investment in science and research.</p>
<p>Joe Cox, an economist from the University of Portsmouth suggested that the practice of academic crowdfunding – where researchers ask members of the public to back their project by making a donation – had the potential to complement existing funding mechanisms such as competitive grants, but also warned that it could be viewed by the government as a way to cut spending.</p>
<p>If scientists are making a pretty penny from an enthusiastic public, the pressure on government coffers could be reduced. And if this were to happen, Dr Cox pointed out, “dryer” topics might be less successful at attracting money from the general public, even if they are academically valuable. That could put certain fields under strain and cause problems later on in the innovation cycle.</p>
<p>The growth of crowdfunding as a mechanism for supporting research could therefore change the shape of scientific development. Obtaining funding, from whatever source, is dependent on articulating what the proposition holds for the funder. Discrete, attractive projects in areas such as the creative arts, or socially valuable technologies, naturally appeal to the general public. There is no wider obligation for crowdfunding investors than simply giving money for what they like. That often means a striking new piece of technology or a project that aims to cure a disease that they might one day contract. The government has broader responsibilities. It has to fund a wide range of research in order to fuel economic growth, cultural understanding and social progress. </p>
<p>At a recent [Dragon’s Den-style competition](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDjkgUcPIbY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDjkgUcPIbY) in Southampton, the winner, Benjamin Mawson, gave an eloquent account of his <a href="http://benjaminmawson.com/3D-BARE/">3DBare project</a>, describing how users could walk inside music. The runners-up, <a href="http://example.com/">BluPoint</a>, a system for storing digital content like music and making it available on phones via wifi, and <a href="http://tonycooke.wordpress.com/tag/waterwell/">WaterWell</a>, a digital water management system, gave equally powerful accounts of the social value of their projects.</p>
<p>It would be easy to see projects of this kind doing well from crowdfunding, were they to go down that route. They address social problems or offer a digital solution to an everyday need and would sit well among some of the non-academic projects that are to be found on sites such as Kickstarter. One academic project that had great success on Kickstarter is the <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2017062404/b-go-beyond">Flying Car</a>, a project that aims to build a mini helicopter-car hybrid. This broke it’s fundraising goal by miles and, in the end, attracted more than £120,000 in donations. It’s not hard to see why.</p>
<h2>The harder sell</h2>
<p>Yet in the very early stages, the outcomes for scientific research are neither clear cut nor easy to articulate. The start of development is often referred to as the “fuzzy front end” for the very reason that things are not clear. </p>
<p>Platform technologies in communications, algorithms, or new materials such as graphene, for example, can be taken forward in many directions, and it can be difficult to articulate the benefits in an attractive way.</p>
<p>In the case of graphene, what started out as an experiment using just a piece of sticky tape has become a huge scientific phenomenon. The material is now being touted as the next big thing in sexual health, if it can be used to produce condoms; in bionics, if it can be used to make more advanced artificial limbs; or even just in everyday technology, where it could be applied to make touchscreens more durable or phone chargers more efficient. Pitch one of the applications on a crowdfunding site and you are practically onto a dead cert. But the original research might not have been so successful. If the government left projects like this to the general public, we might start to miss out on amazing new discoveries.</p>
<p>Over in the life sciences, crowdfunding projects do often do well, but returns on investment may be years and years down the line, so maintaining public interest is a tough challenge. The government, on the other hand, is obliged to hang on in there if it is committed to tackling disease. </p>
<p>So while crowdfunding may have its place, it must be part of complementary funding strategies that ensure UK academics keep their place in the science mainstream and that the funding spectrum does not shift to late-stage, close-to-market business models.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/22285/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lorraine Warren received funding from the EPSRc to run the 'Dragon's Den'competition referred to in this article</span></em></p>In a recent article in Times Higher Education, it was argued that crowdfunding could threaten government investment in science and research. Joe Cox, an economist from the University of Portsmouth suggested…Lorraine Warren, Senior Lecturer in Innovation, University of SouthamptonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214472013-12-16T06:43:45Z2013-12-16T06:43:45ZChina isn’t creative enough to win a science Nobel<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/37593/original/wswg6m62-1386855851.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">China: "No, thanks. We don't want a Nobel peace prize."</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">andreasl</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“China is at the forefront of medicine and hi-tech and computing.” So said UK Chancellor George Osborne, who recently visited the country. Global tests for 15-year-olds show the youth of Shanghai are comfortably outperforming the rest of the world in science, as well as in reading and maths. Breathless media reports routinely refer to China as a “new scientific superpower”.</p>
<p>Headlines and sound bites would have you believe that China has already succeeded in transforming itself into an innovation-powered economy. Yet serious questions persist over China’s true capacity to create. And no one is more aware of its limitations than Chinese people themselves.</p>
<p>Triumph in the Nobel science category has become entwined in China’s resurgent nationalism, a national priority on par with the hosting of a successful Olympics or <a href="https://theconversation.com/prestige-and-one-upmanship-fuel-chinas-lunar-rover-20874">landing a spacecraft on the moon</a>. That Mo Yan, a mainland Chinese writer, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2012 in many ways magnified the government’s frustration. After all Chinese writers develop their craft in a constrained, illiberal environment, while leading scientists have access to limitless financial resources.</p>
<p>Acute insecurity in China reached fever pitch during last week’s Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies. The Communist Party has long craved a homegrown Nobel science prize, as evidence of a technological power to match its economic might and a vindication of the astonishing £243bn China has poured into the development of science and technology in the last seven years. Another year passes, another unsuccessful bid. The reality is that no Nobel science winner has been a product of China’s education system.</p>
<p>There are many reasons for China’s failure to win the prestigious award. An education system enslaved to rote learning and test scores is one. Zheng Yefu, a sociologist at Beijing’s Peking University, insists that no matter what university you study at – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or Yale – you have no chance of winning a Nobel Prize for science if you have spent your first 12 years in a Chinese school. An exaggeration perhaps but the premise of his argument is sound: individuality, curiosity, imagination and creativity are simply expunged by the Chinese education system.</p>
<h2>Down the wrong pipe</h2>
<p>There is a paucity of excellent Chinese scientists. Confucian doctrine teaches that “a good scholar will make an official” and some of the best scientists are more than willing to leave their labs for respected administrative roles that are probably tied to enormous resources.</p>
<p>Entrenched political and social barriers hinder progress. The Chinese academic system binds students to their mentors. Mentors are authority figures as formidable as strict parents, and to challenge them is unacceptable. This blind loyalty discourages criticism of senior academics and the science they advocate.</p>
<p>Chinese scientists complain the allocation of research funding is not meritocratic. There is little encouragement for scepticism towards existing theories, especially when those theories are propounded by senior academics that hold the departmental purse strings.</p>
<p>Equally, there are few incentives for researchers to risk exploring the unknown, as the system does not tolerate “failure” in research terms. Consequently Chinese scientists are more likely to conduct research that yields quick and achievable outcomes, rather than fostering grander aspirations for the advancement of knowledge.</p>
<p>All these factors converge to create one fundamental obstacle to China’s pursuit of a Nobel science prize: it is simply unable to embrace the values that underpin it.</p>
<p>In rewarding those who confer the “greatest benefit on mankind”, the Nobel Prize in science embodies an appreciation and celebration of not merely breakthroughs, discoveries and creativity but a universal set of values that are shared and practised by scientists regardless of nationality or culture. It is recognition of the latter that can achieve the former.</p>
<h2>Revolutions happen for a reason</h2>
<p>China’s embrace of science only dates back to the <a href="http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/chinese-students-protest-treaty-versailles-may-fourth-incident-1919">May Fourth Demonstrations</a> in 1919 when scholars, disillusioned with the direction of the new Chinese republic following the fall of the Qing Dynasty, called for a move away from traditional Chinese culture to Western ideals – or, as they termed it, “a rejection of Mr Confucius and the acceptance of Mr Science and Mr Democracy”.</p>
<p>But these concepts of science and democracy differed markedly from those advocated in the West and were used primarily as vehicles to attack Confucianism. The science championed during the May Fourth movement was celebrated not for its Enlightenment values but for its pragmatism, its usefulness.</p>
<p>Francis Bacon’s maxim “knowledge is power” ran right through Mao Zedong’s view of science following the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. Science and technology were considered as integral components of nation-building: leading academics contributed their knowledge for the sole purpose of modernising industry, agriculture and national defence.</p>
<p>The notion of saving the nation through science during the nationalist regime in the 1920s and 1930s has translated into current communist government policies of “revitalising the nation with science, technology and education” and “strengthening the nation through talent”. A <a href="https://theconversation.com/chinas-research-is-taking-a-leap-uk-can-take-advantage-19117">report by Nesta</a> in October argued that China should be regarded as “an absorptive state”, adding practical value to existing foreign technologies rather than creating novel technologies of its own.</p>
<p>This materialistic emphasis reflects the use of science as a means to a political end to make China powerful and prosperous. However a series of high-profile <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/china/21586845-flawed-system-judging-research-leading-academic-fraud-looks-good-paper">fraud scandals</a> involving leading scientists at China’s top academic institutions have raised concerns over this highly utilitarian view of science. They have led to calls for China to truly embrace the universal values of science as a means to take the country forward.</p>
<p>These core values of truth-seeking, integrity, intellectual curiosity, the challenging of authority and, above all, freedom of inquiry are shared by scientists all over the world. In this sense there is no such thing as “Chinese” science or “British science”, or science “with Chinese characteristics”.</p>
<p>On his latest visit to Beijing, US vice president Joe Biden told a group of young Chinese that “innovation can only occur when you breathe free” and that “children in America are rewarded – not punished – for challenging the status quo”.</p>
<p>The Chinese leadership would do well to apply these principles to the nurturing of its next generation of scientists. Only when it abandons cold-blooded pragmatism for a value-driven approach to science can it hope to win a coveted Nobel prize and ascend to real superpower status.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/21447/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cong Cao does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>“China is at the forefront of medicine and hi-tech and computing.” So said UK Chancellor George Osborne, who recently visited the country. Global tests for 15-year-olds show the youth of Shanghai are comfortably…Cong Cao, Associate Professor, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.