The Problem With Science
By: Emily Kingsley
Tags: Education, Books, Society, Culture, Science

Or should I say — the problem with people?

Photo by Lily Banse on Unsplash

Science has a problem. Or maybe it’s more like we have a problem with science. And since I’m a high school science teacher, this problem is one I’ve had to wrestle with. A lot.

My son is turning four next week. He loves trucks, monster trucks, bulldozers, fire trucks, and dirt bikes.

And he also loves Caldecott Medal-winning books. Early on, he started noticing the gold and silver circles emblazoned on books like Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McClosky and Owl Moon by Janet Yolen.

At Barnes and Noble, I always have a hard time saying no. But I’d be a monster to tun him down when he says, “Please, mom! It’s a Caldecott book!”

Although the Caldecott books lack the excitement of the noise-maker books or the action figure books published by Disney or Pixar, he still loves them. As a result, we often end up reading them on repeat until I can recite each page without even glancing at it.

This fall, we’ve been reading the 1947 Caldecott Medal winner. It’s called The Little Island, by Margaret Wise Brown and I’ve got to say, it is a very strange book.

To summarize, it’s a year in the life of a small, rocky island off the coast of Maine. It starts off describing the plants, weather, and animals on the island. Pretty boilerplate reading.

But then towards the end, a young, faceless couple sails to the island with a little black kitten. The little kitten starts an argument with the island, which is when things start to get weird.

The island — yes, it’s a talking island — points out to the kitten that it is connected to the land under the sea.

The kitten finds this farfetched and wants proof. So, the kitten catches a fish with its paw. The kitten interrogates the fish about the island’s absurd claim:

“How is an island part of the land?” “Come with me,” said the fish, “down into the dark secret places of the sea and I will show you.” “I can’t swim,” said the cat. “Show me another way or I’ll eat you up.” “Then you must take it on faith what I tell you,” said the fish. “What’s that?” said the cat — “Faith.” “To believe what I tell you about what you don’t know,” said the fish.

In case you’ve forgotten, we’re currently experiencing a global pandemic of historic proportions. And as we’ve moved through different phases of it — the beginning of the beginning, the pre-middle, the end of the beginning, the pre-surge, and more — I’ve been struck by this section of the book again and again.

The virus that has taken us to our knees is tiny — .0000000393701 inches in diameter. For reference, the poppy seed on your bagel is .04 inches in diameter. We can’t see it. We can’t touch it, hold it in our hands or swat it with a fly swatter.

This means, like the little kitten, we’re left to have faith in what other people tell us about the virus. And with no shortage of people telling us about it, it can be tough to know who to believe. It’s hard to sort the anecdotes from the opinions from the facts, especially since they all sort of sound the same.

Lots of times, wanting to do the right thing, people believe in information that sounds science-ish, but isn’t actually based in science.

Yesterday, I had a discussion with one of my students about masks. She pointed out, “The carbon dioxide molecules cling to the fibers of the mask and then when you rebreathe them, they build up to toxic levels in your body until you pass out.”

Science-ish. But certainly not true.

When I asked her where she heard this, she rolled her eyes — duh — the internet.

It’s easy to criticize her in her for being naive, but we all fall victim to this false logic in one way or another. Early on, I told my son that the pandemic would be over by his birthday and he could have a big party at his favorite farm. I thought I was right, but in fact — I was dead wrong.

In a way, we’re all a bunch of little black kittens, just pulling fish out of the water, trying to figure out if we can trust what they’re telling us.

And the problem is, there’s a lot of fish in the sea. There are scientist fish, politician fish, conspiracy fish, religious fish, Twitter fish, and crazy fish. And it’s not always easy to tell the difference, which means knowing who to believe feels incredibly hard.

As a result, we tend to believe for the wrong reasons. We believe them because they are loud, or because they are confident. We believe them because our friends believe them. We believe them because they are attractive or because they have a million followers. We believe them because they are saying something we already believe to be true.

It’s not a great system.

I’ve been reading a book — not a Caldecott winner, but still a great book — called The Ghost Map with my students this fall. It’s the true story of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854. For a story that happened more than a century and a half ago, it’s shockingly relevant.

In 1854, popular, but wrong ideas about how cholera was spread resulted in many unnecessary deaths. In 1854, letters to the editor of popular newspapers suggested that people should try unproven cholera remedies like heroin and bloodletting. In 1854, an unknown scientist found the cause of cholera but wasn’t able to convince people of his ideas until he teamed up with a popular, well-connected clergyman.

In reading this book, I’m reminded of two things: the first is that science doesn’t change. Gravity, water, chemical reactions, pathogens — they carry on regardless of our understanding of them. The second is that there’s nothing new about human nature.

We will always struggle to believe in things we can’t see. We will always make bad decisions. We will always believe the wrong people and make the wrong call. But what keeps us from going extinct in a folly of our own errors is our constant, steady drive to do better.

But while science doesn’t change and human nature doesn’t change, there is something that does change. It’s our acceptance and understanding of science. It ebbs and flows across time and topic in strange and unpredictable ways.

Consider this — at a time when DNA testing services like 23andMe are exploding in popularity, many people reject ideas about climate change. I’d love to talk to someone who believes in science enough to spit in a tube and find out their great-great-grandpa is from Tuvalu, but not enough to accept the fact that sea-level rise is predicted to destroy the island nation in less than a hundred years time.

And here’s the thing — science doesn’t care if we believe in it or understand it. It just marches on, growing, killing, swelling, shrinking. To science, we’re just a bunch of faces in the bleachers trying to figure out the rules of the game.

So I guess the question for the day is this: are we ebbing, or flowing?

As a teacher, I hope we are ebbing. I hope we are learning to believe in scientists and the things they tell us, even when we tell us about things we can’t see or touch.

In The Little Island, the fish explains to the Kitten how the land and the island are connected underwater. And even though the kitten can’t see it for himself, accepts what the fish says.