Professor Lipps:

I recently read your editorial entitled "The Media, Trash Science, and Paleontology". It is a subject near and dear to me, as I am both a science journalist and a person of faith. I often run across people in my work who have never been exposed to good, mainstream science and who are suspicious of the scientific paradigm. My wife and I recently finished a manuscript for a christian publisher on the subject of dinosaurs. This publisher (Chariot/Victor) has given us free rein to discuss timelines and extinction theories, both of which are hot buttons in the christian community. The book is a wonderful opportunity to infuse good science into an area that traditionally has had only exposure to Creation "Science". Our text has been reviewed by Bob Bakker, Jack Horner, and Ken Carpenter. We hope it will encourage critical thinking while serving as a tool in the continuing battle to free people from a fear of science. Thought you might like to know!

By the way, I am enjoying the electronic magazine very much. Thanks for all your hard work.

Michael Carroll

RESPONSE
6 July 1999

Thank you for the kind words. I am pleased to hear of your project, for I see no conflict between science and religion myself. They work differently towards different ends and both are important to people. My main push is for science literacy simply because we live in a society that is so dependent on science and technology that everyone should understand how it works. If you can dispell the "hot button" aspect of science, paleontology and evolution in particular, I salute you.

Jere

27 May 1999

Editorializing on Creationism in a paleontology journal is surely preaching to the choir. However, there is one point raised in Dr. Lipps' editorial which may require further examination. He writes:

"The task before American paleontologists, geologists, evolutionists, and anthropologists is large. We must move to educate the public, not only in schools but on television, in the newspapers and the other media."

Must we? Even, should we? In the journals, privately, in addresses to scientific audiences, we are so often exhorted to convert the heathen, to send missionaries to the unenlightened and to uplift the ignorant masses.

Scientists, we are told, are the keepers of the flame, initiates who have a special relationship with the truth and a duty to convert others. I, for one, believed this for many years. But I now think I may have been very wrong. This is one reason why. I don't pretend to know what science is in a philosophical sense. However, scientists as working people pursue knowledge according to a special set of rules which we think of as science. Among these rules are things that sound like moral or philosophical propositions: honest reporting of data, objectivity, a willingness always to reexamine assumptions and to question fundamentals. However, these are not a complete philosophy by any means. They are universally accepted working principles of the craft because they work. That is, they generate data and explanations for data which the world at large finds useful or entertaining.

At the same time, there are socialists and libertarians, Catholics and Klansmen, saints and libertines, who can all, with equal justice, consider themselves good scientists, as well as dedicated members of whatever creed or party suits them. I even went to graduate school with a Creationist who, by what seemed at the time an amazing feat of schizophrenia, managed to be a pretty fair molecular biologist.

The point is that we have nothing to convert the heathen to. All we have is a set of pragmatically justified working rules. I can tell the Creationist that it is vanishingly unlikely that Varanops coexisted with Methuselah, according to these rules, or that Ichthyostega walked the earth with Adam, if indeed it walked the earth at all. I can even say that history seems to vindicate my set of rules better than his, in a pragmatic sort of way.

However, we can't forget that these are just working rules. They are not a complete philosophy. A scientist who presents herself as a spokesperson for logic or truth, outside her special area, commits something close to fraud. Scientists have no special qualifications even to judge the worth of their own working assumptions, except to make the circular observation that these assumptions seem to work within the context we call science. To the extent Creationists pretend to practice religion as science, this also approaches fraud; but there are many frauds, and even more honest errors. A great deal of what is passed off as science on the Discovery channel worries me more than Creationism.

Fortunately, good science has a way of pushing out bad. Faith may or may not move mountains. But bad faith will never even move a bicycle consistently. That takes sound engineering and good science, and these tend to win the races. We do not need to share the political vision of the bicycle engineer. The materials scientist who came up with the frame alloy does not need to give television interviews or preach. These people have no special duty, no obvious qualifications, and may have no ability at all, to do these things effectively. But, if the world wants fast bicycles then they will be heard where they speak best -- in the lab and on the drawing board. As long as people wonder about how humans came to be, what dinosaurs were like, how life got started -- all questions that even children ask -- good paleontology will displace even the most well-funded nonsense: not because paleontologists are more photogenic or articulate, but because they give explanations that work better conceptually and in the field.

As this is already too long a letter for its purpose, I will shut it down with a final disclaimer. I use "we" loosely. I am no longer, and have not been for some time, employed as a working scientist. Whether I correctly remember what it means to be one, you will have to judge for yourself.

--Toby White

RESPONSE
6 July 1999

Toby White suggests two things in his comment on my editorial.

1. That an editorial about creationism in a paleontology journal is preaching to the choir; and,
2. that my urging to educate the public about how science works is presumptuous.

Let me elaborate a bit.

1. I should hope that paleontologists are the choir when it comes to creationism. My aim was not to preach, but to add a few songs and verses that PE's international audience might find useful, interesting, or not be aware of because of their other duties or because they have not been confronted with creationism in the place where they live. These songs or verses are: A. To call attention to the new efforts of creationists involving "intelligent design" of biomolecules and other detailed structures; B. To let paleontologists in other countries where creationists are making inroads know that they may be confronted as this world-wide effort continues; C. To tell paleontologists about renewed efforts that are underway to counter creationism by the National Research Council, the Paleontological Society, and others; D. To suggest that all of us work towards increased scientific literacy because it seems required in our highly scientific and technical society; and, E. To tell paleontologists who had not directly encountered creationists of my own experience in one of their centers.

2. To show my presumptuousness, Toby White quotes the first two sentences of my penultimate paragraph. Done that way, I look like I am attempting to "convert the heathen, to send missionaries to the unenlightened, and to uplift the ignorant masses". The complete paragraph aimed to emphasize the need to educate the general public about science and how science works. This is, in fact, not original with me--Carl Sagan, Leon Lederman, Paul Ehrlich, and the National Research Council among many others have all urged that Americans become literate in science because our very way of life depends on it. I urged that the public (which is about 95% scientifically illiterate) be educated about how science works so that they can understand and evaluate scientific issues in their lives, their nation, and the world. Nothing philosophical here, just the tools to learn how to do it. . I have done that elsewhere too (Lipps, 1996, 1998,1999).

I agree with White that scientists pretending to have the truth are frauds. In fact, they are not even scientists since we don't do science that way. We use our various methods to eliminate wrong ideas, and thus perhaps move closer to some truth. We have plenty of examples in geology and paleontology where we have gone astray in the past, and we surely are headed down some wrong paths now. But eventually we hope that the methods of science will correct that course and bring us closer to the truth. Eliminating false ideas, whether they be scientific, pseudoscientific, or just the claims of your insurance salesman, is a good thing for people in general, and the tools of science provide a powerful way to do that.

If we live in a materialistic, real world, then the methods of science are a far better way to understand it than the dogma of "socialists and libertarians, Catholics and Klansmen, saints and libertines". Science eschews dogma. That is a fundamental difference, and one that people in general should know. The methods of science provide a reasonable way to live, even for creationists, who, like everyone else, already practice science in one degree or another.

The last sentence of my paragraph reads: "Cooperation and collaboration with these media [TV, radio, newspapers, etc.] seems to me the only way to accomplish the kind of educated society required by our science- and technology-dominated lives."

That is the whole point.
Lipps, Jere H.

1996. The Decline of Reason. Paleontological Society Papers 2: 3-10

1998. The Media, Trash Science, and Paleontology. Palaeontologia Electronica.

1999. Beyond Reason: Science and the Mass Media, p. 71-90, In J. W. Schopf (Ed.). Evolution! Facts and Fallacies. Academic Press.

4 April 1999

I think that creation "science" should be taught in schools. Yes, I do but not as an equal contender against evolution but as a platform upon which teachers can launch their discussions of evolution.

In physics class (I'm only 17) I still learn about Aristotlelianism but not as though it were fact (of course). Understanding the way things aren't is imperative to understanding the way things are!

Early this year I was involved in my first debate against a creationist. I learned to understand the general ideas about creation science. At that time my knowledge of evolution was limited, I knew what I did from my own knowledge of dinosaur research and from having read a great book called The Beak of the Finch (Jonathan Weiner). I understood micro- and macro-evolution in their basic concepts.

When encountered with creationist arguments and supplied by my own determination I was quite capable at understanding WHY his attacks were empty.

What this did was cause me to probe deeper into the concept of evolution by means of natural selection. I cannot begin to describe to you how much more I understand evolution from the inside out and with my limited education. I learned so much that I re-examined the school's biology curriculum (the course I had taken last year) and noticed how pitifully weak the unit on evolution was. I asked the teacher how much time he actually was going to spend on it (1 or maybe 2 weeks!). I took the opportunity to do a guest lecture for one day (I was able to teach the teacher).

If evolution were compared to the "stock" creationist arguments in a biology class ( which I did not do). and then the students were asked to deconstruct the creationist attack on the basis of what they knew I think that they would benefit from the same learning experience that I had.

I'd really like to know what anyone else thinks, and If I'm not clear about anything in my explanation I'd be glad to elaborate!

Martin Brazeau
Grade 11, Philemon Wright High School Hull, Quebec
CANADA

3 March 1999

Wonderful to be introduced to your Palaeontologica Electronica. I got onto it from a news article published by our Australian Broadcasting Commission Web Page. I shall be regularly accessing your site.

Being retired, I have not had any problems with the creationists for a while. Sorry to hear that they are still a major problem. I would recommend two books to you that really helped with my discussions with these people.

1. Telling Lies for God. Ian Plimer. Random House. Australia. Ian Plimer is the Professor of Geology at Melbourne University.
2. Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. John Selby Spong. Harper, San Francisco.

These books have a wonderful "double whammy" effect when read sequentially. First the Geology and then then Rescuing the Bible. Yesssss! You really can use a scientific method on observations made from the Bible. Maybe you cannot test all your predictions, but you can generate some very interesting ideas.

Malcolm Oliver
Brush Grove, New South Wales, Australia