I was just poking around Skepchick and found this reposting of a TED Talk given by Michael Specter, who is a journalist and a pretty fantastic orator on the subject of scientific denialism. This TED Talk really struck me as something that I’d like to share. Scientific denialism is easily one of the biggest threats we face, and he puts things in simple and clear terms.

If you’re not a regular watcher of TED Talks, change that. I’ve seen some incredible talks about topics ranging from classical music to stem cell research, and they never fail to entertain and educate.

He’s right when he talks about the culture of fear that we’re living in, but I’d like to add in paranoia to that description. I first really saw this when Princess Di died in that car accident. I was blown away by how quickly people leaped to the notion that it was probably a plot by the British royal family to get rid of her. I asked people on what they were basing this assumption, and they all said variations of the same thing, “She’s an embarrassment to them”. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Certainly there was always a warm place on the cover of British tabloids for her, but to make the leap that headlines in trash mags could justify a murder plot just seems strange to me.

We are mistrustful of institutions. I don’t pretend that this is new, but it’s certainly been exacerbated by the post-911 madness that swept the free world. And honestly, institutions have earned our lack of faith. What’s ironic is that our reaction to this distrust is to throw in with a whole new cadre of institutions, so long as they market themselves as being underdogs held down by Big Whatever. So long as they’re being held down, we’re happy to believe every word they say.

The truth is that science has moved us to where we are. It’s easy to say that we’re no better off than we were, but that’s laughable. Life expectancy is way up, and more importantly, so is quality of life. Find a time in human history where things were better than they are today. Pre-industrialization, when we were forced to tend fields and were utterly at the mercy of the changing weather patterns? Do you honestly believe that these societies had eight hour workdays followed by free evenings to fill as they pleased? Of course not. It’s stupid to even pretend that we have it bad, especially in the West where the only things we don’t have available to us are the things we haven’t imagined yet.

That’s what science did. There were mistakes along the way, and we’ve learned a lot from them. Using thalidomide as an example of why you can’t trust science is like using the Inquisition as a reason to not be a Catholic. I assure you, there are a plethora of reasons much more modern and much more disturbing to not be a Catholic. One of the things people don’t understand is that science learns from it’s mistakes and indeed revels in them. Admittedly, things like publication bias can cause important lessons to be lost, but that’s nothing compared to the destruction of the library in Alexandria.

And where are we going? I think we all have the same basic wants and needs. We want food to be healthy and plentiful. We want energy to be clean. We want air to be clean. We want streets to be safe. We want education to be accessible. We want a bright and safe future. Science is our ticket to these things. Science is our future, pure and simple.

Denialism is a form of ridiculous negativity. Saying something isn’t true in the face of all the evidence to the contrary is just pathetic, and we see it every day in the world around us. Whether it’s the person at work who always does it wrong even though you gave them the damned documentation to the people who argue that there weren’t any Jews killed in the war, we know it when we see it. Or we think we do. But believing that genetic modification of food leads to tomatoes with housefly wings is the same thing. Ignorance.

What’s the solution? Well, it’s simple. Turn off the bloody TV and find out about these things. Don’t look at any one side of an argument, try to see all the points and weigh them to see which ones are valid and which ones aren’t. If you need help, try using a baloney detection kit. By all means, don’t take the opinions of pharmaceutical companies as writ, but don’t take the opinions of Jenny McCarthy as writ either. Do your research! You have time to know so much more than you do right now, you just choose to fill it differently. But if you want your opinion to mean something, you’d better have one that’s grounded on facts.

Jim