The most beautiful aspect of science is that it will never be finished. For all of the incredible breakthroughs that we’ve celebrated, and all of the millions of papers and books filled with bright research and knowledge out there, there will always still be questions left unanswered. That makes the pursuit of knowledge all the more exciting.Many of those questions are wrapped into the knowledge we already have. For example, I studied zoology in college, a discipline that couldn’t work in its modern form without evolutionary theory. Thanks to the fossil record and the hundreds of thousands of various species of life alive today, there’s no doubt that evolution exists. But the exact mechanisms, the nuances, the all-important whys of its workings are still, and may always be, an area of intense research. That’s to say that there’s no black and white in science, which makes it so great.But, perhaps thanks to all those dummies waving their arms and shouting “it’s just a theory, so you admit you know nothing!” out there, as well as a media and public that cares more about what we know rather than what we don’t, perhaps science has been biased towards sharing the former. That’s the question posed in an excellent essay by University of Washington professor David P. Barash in the _LA Times.It, like everything in science, is a nuanced problem. Barash says that, while it’s important to celebrate success in science, only trumpeting what we know while having college students focus solely on memorizing facts gives the impression that science has it all figured out. That’s a problem, Barash writes:Paradoxically, the strong point of American higher education — our talent as a nation vis-a-vis, say, China — is that we are supposed to be more open to innovation and original thinking, whereas they are more “into” rote learning. It is time, therefore, to start teaching courses, giving lectures and writing books about what we don’t know about biology, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics.
There’s plenty to communicate because we are surrounded by mysteries, far more than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy. But don’t get the wrong idea, Horatio: Mystery is not the same as mysticism, and I’m not referring to some sort of ineffable, spiritualistic claptrap beyond the reach of natural law and human understanding. Just as “weeds” are plants that haven’t yet been assigned a value, scientific mysteries are simply good questions waiting for answers.The problem with science communication is that it’s impossible to properly render science’s million shades of gray in a world that’s increasingly black and white. In contentious fields, like evolution or climate research, scientists speaking in their normally-guarded tone — the data suggests this; we hypothesize that — already often is fodder enough for uninformed critics to claim that researchers don’t know what they’re talking about. Imagine if they only shared what they didn’t know!But those critics are missing the trees for the woods. Science is never static; every day, legions of talented researchers are answering more questions and discovering new ones in need of asking. It’s impossible to look at one moment in time and say that something is definitively fact or false, because rather than being one giant puzzle with pieces either fitting or not, science flows and branches depending on where individuals’ work takes them. That’s not to say that we know nothing, or that all work is impermanent; the incredibly vast body of human knowledge is anchored in a foundation that’s growing larger and more solid all the time. But trumpeting questions answered without also giving a nod to those yet to be asked is anathema to the tradition and spirit that built that foundation in the first place.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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