Blue Collar Scientist

Over on Panda’s Thumb, there is a posting about the case of Nancey Murphy, a professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary. Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Bretheren, opposes intelligent design, and she wrote an article critical of creationist Philip Johnson’s book, Darwin on Trial. She has said that intelligent design creationism is not only poor theology, but “so stupid, I don’t want to give them my time.”

For her trouble, Philip Johnson called up a trustee of Fuller and reportedly tried to have her fired.

“His tactic has always been to fight dirty when anyone attacks his ideas,” (Murphy) said. “For a long time afterward, I would tell reporters I don’t want to comment, and I don’t want you to say I don’t want to comment. I’m tired of being careful.”

According to the story, Johnson denies it:

Johnson denied he had tried to get Murphy fired. He said that he had spoken with a former trustee of the seminary who was himself upset with Murphy but that he was not responsible for any action taken against her.

Yeah, right. Both the trustee and Johnson were pissed off at Murphey but they didn’t talk about being pissed off at Murphy and nothing they said could have encouraged such persecution. Makes perfect sense.

Anyway, if you read down through the comments, you come to a very interesting list of people that creationists have harassed, gotten fired, threatened, or killed because of their understanding of evolution. (Yes, creationists have killed someone over evolution.) It kind of puts the lie to creationist Johnson’s further remarks:

“It’s the Darwinists who hold the power in academia and who threaten the professional status and livelihoods of anyone who disagrees,” Johnson said. “They feel to teach anything but their orthodoxy is an act of professional treason.”

Apparently, Johnson is having some trouble telling the truth. Here’s a working list of people fired, compromised, or killed by creationist nutbags (no claim is made that this list is complete, and I’d like to see some citations to sources, so maybe I’ll work on that for a future post):

2 professors fired, Bitterman (SW CC Iowa) and Bolyanatz (Wheaton)

1 persecuted unmercifully Richard Colling (Olivet)

1 attempted firing Murphy (Fuller Theological by Phillip Johnson IDist)

1 successful death threats, assaults harrasment Gwen Pearson (UT Permian)

1 state official fired Chris Comer (Texas)

1 assault, fired from dept. Chair Paul Mirecki (U. of Kansas)

1 killed, Rudi Boa, Biomedical Student (Scotland)

Death Threats Eric Pianka UT Austin and the Texas Academy of Science engineered by a hostile, bizarre IDist named Bill Dembski

Death Threats Michael Korn, fugitive from justice, towards the UC Boulder biology department and miscellaneous evolutionary biologists.

Will Expelled be talking about these cases? Right. Didn’t think so.

Edit to add: Link for Richard Colling.

On Thursday, University of Oxford reported on the discovery of the largest impact crater in Britain. The 1.2 billion year old impact event is believed to have taken place near the northwest Scottish town of Ullapool.

According to the release, material long believed to be volcanic in origin turned out on closer inspection to be an ejecta blanket from the impact. The ejecta zone is about 50 kilometers across.

Analysis of the material found the tell-tale iridium concentrations characteristic of large impact ejecta (and most famously associated with the Chicxulub crater, the KT boundary impactor that contributed heavily to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other taxa). They also observed shock fracturing in some of the samples.

Apparently some of the ejecta blanket is exposed on the west coast of Scotland, which is pretty nice. Most impact events on Earth have been covered by more recent formations, and impact materials can only be accessed by fairly expensive drilling. To have the material exposed, and in a relatively convenient location to visit, is pretty nice for those studying impact geology.

In the first part of this series, I set out some understandings that I have about science framing as advocated by Nisbet and Mooney: First, that framing broadly understood is something we all do when we communicate on any issue, but that framing as it is associated with Nisbet and Mooney seems to me to be a set of disjointed, unsystematic techniques for communicating science, which avoids offending or alienating those who believe in antiscience. Their recommendations seem to be driven by several ideas:

1. controversies about science are analogous to political campaigns;
2. these campaigns need to be won;
3. they are best won by appealing broadly to religious science deniers;
4. through various specific techniques.

I said before that Nisbet and Mooney are wrong in several ways, and in part one I tackled how science controversies are not like political campaigns, informed by some of my own experience working in politics. In this part, I’m going to talk about the wisdom and effectiveness of appealing to science deniers.

Appealing to Science Deniers

If you want to win a public policy debate about sicence, like Nisbet and Mooney do, you need to get 51% of the vote. How best to do that?

Nisbet and Mooney say it is best done by avoiding alienating antisciencers. They want us to craft a message that is going to appeal to extremist religious people (evolution deniers, in other words) in order to depolarize the debate and unify the electorate so they - meaning religious antiscience extremists - can get behind our side of the issue. I’d call that a great idea, if it would work.

Will it work?

Nisbet and Mooney don’t know, and I will explain why they don’t know shortly. But for now, I’ll discuss this observation: political strategists often find it better, based on evidence, to polarize the debate.

We’ve all heard about - and Nisbet and Mooney occasionally cite - polling that describes the religious demographic in America. But this polling has not been designed to determine the implications for science-related policy debates. Nisbet and Mooney point to the polling and claim that the massive percentage of Americans who say they believe strongly in god means that we can’t afford to alienate them. But it could as easily be that we can’t afford not to alienate them if we want to win a policy debate.

Let’s explore this by looking at a somewhat different issue. Polling suggests that religious belief correlates with a desire to outlaw abortion and used armed government agents to prevent ladies from having them¹. But could it be that something else correlates even more strongly with taking a position on abortion?

Maybe. The correlation between religion and the ban-abortion movement is considerably less than 100%, with wide swaths of organized Christianity being pro-choice. At least on paper, this includes many mainstream protestant groups, such as the Episcopalians, the Methodists, and many others. Even within the more conservative Catholic church, healthy groups of organized dissenters promote the idea that, while abortion is bad, other consequences might well be worse, and that the use of government force to ban the procedure is a bad idea. So religious belief correlates only about 60% or so² with a desire to use government force to stop abortion.

But I can easily imagine a stronger correlation between knowing what a blastocyst is, and wanting abortion to be legal.

If you were a political operative, working from limited resources to ensure reproductive rights, which would you rather do - craft a message that appealed to all religious people, or craft a message that resulted in more people knowing what a bastocyst is? There is no certainly correct answer in this particular case. We can reasonably assume that any message in favor of legal abortion, no matter how well crafted, will fail to appeal to most religious people who want to ban it. Therefore, it could be that crafting a message that will not appeal to these people, but which will appeal more strongly to potential swing voters, would be the better idea. We don’t know how to do that because we don’t have a good characterization of the populations at issue.

We also don’t have that kind of characterization in science controversies - and Nisbet and Mooney don’t either. Their recommendations are based on the flimsiest of evidence culled from studies of communication of unrelated issues. Nisbet and Mooney have done no research³ to determine whether their advice is really any good. Is there something that is a better correlate to science acceptance than religion? They have no idea. If there was such a thing, it might be better to craft messages to appeal to that thing - but nobody knows whether this is true.

So why should I take Nisbet and Mooney’s advice if they can provide no evidence showing whether it is good or not?

Moving on…. It is a routine goal of political operatives to “wedge” the groups they want to get votes from. The metaphor is that of driving a wedge into firewood to split it, and the creationists used this metaphor in the naming of their “wedge strategy” - a strategy that is hardly unique amongst public policy campaigns.

The technique begins by finding a population you’d like to get votes from - in Nisbet and Mooney’s case, it is religious people - and picking at disagreements within that community. Although we would think that people having something in common would hang together rather than separately, this is rarely the case. Amongst religious people, it is almost laughably easy to wedge Catholics against Baptists by exploiting their relatively small differences in order to overcome the solidarity otherwise enjoyed as a result of their massive agreements. And if you can appeal to a small percentage of a population, it can sometimes put you over the top in votes. Let’s say you are polling 48% today, having paid no special attention to the religious population Nisbet and Mooney want us to appeal to. If we could snag 10% of the votes from that population, what could we win by? Not unusually, in real political campaigns, the difference could result in six points, bringing a candidate to 54%, a strong win. In such cases, it is a no-brainer. You wedge that group, perhaps deliberately pissing off 90% of them in an attempt to get the ten percent you can appeal to. You do this because it is easier to accomplish than to successfully appeal to everyone in that population.

Should we do this in science debates? I have no idea from evidence. I have no polling that indicates who we might wedge or whether it would be effective. I only have anecdotal experience to guide my way. But my point is that Nisbet and Mooney are just as naive: they don’t offer up any such polling either. They act as though we have to appeal to, or at least avoid offending, all religious people, without having bothered to look at whether we really do. That may sound great if you are unaware of how common using a wedge is, but glossing over why you shouldn’t wedge the opposition doesn’t pass muster if you have real experience in the field of public policy communication.

Finally, Nisbet and Mooney are naive on one other point as well. It involves the “base.” The “base” are the people you can count on to vote for you, no matter what - if they vote. You have to keep them motivated enough to show up at the polls. If you alienate them, make them feel like second-class citizens by reaching out to people they don’t like and don’t understand, will you keep their support? They won’t vote for the alternative, but they might not vote at all, and that’s the problem. The example provided by thousands of political campaigns shows that alienating the base by trying to appeal too broadly is a real danger. Elections have been lost in this manner.

How is this an issue in the science debates? I can give at least one example. The state of Florida was recently subjected to an onslaught of creationist lobbying against good science standards for public schools, coordinated by out-of-state lobbyists and apparently paid for with out-of-state money. This was fought off by and large as a result of the work of Florida Citizens for Science. Now, if Dawkins and PZ Myers go quiet like Nisbet and Mooney childishly demand, what happens to the base? Will the activists working at these kind of tasks decide it just isn’t worth it if they lack air cover from such heavy hitters?

I’d be very worried about that, myself. I’d be worried enough that I’d be doing some polling to find out “what happens if” we make this broad appeal to religion and squelch Myers and Dawkins. Have Nisbet and Mooney done such polling?

No.

So why be so reckless? We don’t have good evidence about what to do here, but we can at least pay attention to what evidence there is, and that evidence suggests that Nisbet and Mooney propose something dangerous.

In the next (and I think final) installment, I will talk about specific tactics for use in this debate, and about the Overton window, and why Nisbet and Mooney’s ignoring that concept is dangerous.

1. See that bit of framing I did there? [↩]
2. I’m relaying from memory some poll results shared with me by a Planned Parenthood board member. This shouldn’t be assumed to be accurate; my point still stands whether the correlation is 55% or 95%. [↩]
3. That I can find, at least. [↩]

My TIVO has a season pass on the word “evolution,” and it has just informed me that a half-hour TV show called “Epelled: No Intelligence Allowed” will air on April 6 at 11:30 PM Alaska Daylight Time on FAMNET, whatever station that is - definitely a religious station, but nothing I’ve ever heard of. The program appears on my schedule as an infomercial.

Is this already available online somewhere? Or is this going to be the first airing?

Edit to add: Assuming there’s no eastern/pacific split on this station, that would be at 3:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time. Not exactly a great time slot.

Update: I have some moose in the freezer - meat which came from hunting the animal, just in case anyone is under the impression there are moose ranches in Alaska - and I’ve made arrangements to have some of the cuts medically imaged in search of lead fragments sometime in the next week! Stay tuned for results! Post follows:

But what else is new, eh?

This time, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (whose website is down as I write, returning 0-length html documents), an industry group representing firearms manufacturers and ammunition makers, has issued a press release that savages scientific results as being cruel and unscientific. The release, with a little additional reporting from AP writer James McPherson, is getting wide play today.

The story starts last year, when Dr. William Cornatzer of Bismark, North Dakota took 100 one-pound packages of venison that had been donated to food pantries, and imaged them in a CAT scanner. The CAT scan showed that more than 60 of the samples had been contaminated with high levels of lead from the bullets used to kill the animals. Every package had some level of contamination.

Cornatzer is a dermatologist and professor at the University of North Dakota medical school in Grand Forks.

The North Dakota Health Department followed up with its own tests, which confirmed Dr. Cornatzer’s results. Minnesota and Iowa evaluated the results, with some media reporting they also conducted their own tests. As a result, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Iowa have alerted food pantries in the state to the contamination and suggested they not distribute the meat.

Lead poisoning results in reduced cognitive abilities, nausea, abdominal pain, irritability, insomnia, headache, seizure, coma, and death. It can also result in constipation, vomiting, weight loss, anemia, kidney damage, learning disability in children, and reproductive damage and infertility.

Dr. William Cornatzer explains how the contamination occurs:

“When [a bullet] hits the deer, it sends little bits of schrapnel-type lead that are almost liquid at that point because of the speed the bullet is going,” explains Cornatzer.

The impact is enough to scatter the deadly toxin throughout the entire animal. Luckily, not all bullets are the same. Dr. Cornatzer says you should avoid bullets that have lead in them that fragment when they hit deer. Instead, you should choose something that`s lead free that mushrooms.

Cornatzer’s tests were spurred by previous scientific results showing that California condors were getting lead poisoned by eating animals killed and abandoned by hunters:

Cornatzer said he became concerned after hearing about possible lead fragments through his membership in the Peregrine Fund of Boise, Idaho, a group that promotes the conservation of birds of prey, including peregrine falcons and California condors.

The organization says lead from bullets in the carcasses of animals is primarily responsible for lead poisoning that has endangered the condors.

A lead bullet shot from a high-powered rifle “fragments into hundreds of tiny pieces,” said Rick Watson, vice president and director of international programs for the Peregrine Fund. “Usually a hunter cuts away damaged meat, but the lead sprays through a large part of the animal,” he said.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation has apparently coordinated multiple statements from the same talking points attacking the discovery that lead from bullets results in widespread contamination of venison:

“It’s alarmist and not supported by any science,” said Lawrence Keane, a vice president and lawyer for the Newton, Conn.-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association for the firearms and ammunition industry. “High quality protein is now taken out of the mouths of needy, hungry people.”

Not supported by any science? So a doctor using a CAT scanner and a health department using materials assays are doing something unscientific? Only in his dreams.

Says Doug Burdin, a lawyer for the Tucson, Ariz. group Safari Club International:

“This is disheartening, and we certainly don’t think this program should come to an end on the unscientific assessment that has occurred here.”

Does Doug think that dowsing rods were used to find the lead?

And what is with the lawyers passing judgement on scientific results? I’ll grant that not all lawyers are scientifically ignorant. But these two seem to be.

Jason Foss, president of Pheasants for the Future (and of unknown lawyer status), says:

“Sportsmen have been shooting deer for hundreds of years with lead bullets with no problems.”

Poor Jason apparently has no idea that it has only been a few decades that hunters have been using high-powered ammunition with fragmenting lead bullets. As muzzle-loaders know, balls do not fragment on impact; neither do a number of bullet types designed to mushroom rather than fragment.

This is just another sad example of ignorant people lining up to attack science without seeing the opportunities that scientific results present. Hunters and their families will enjoy improved health if they respect the dangers of lead poisoning. Guidelines about the amounts and frequency of consumption of hunted meat could protect non-hunters. And manufacturers of premium, non-fragmenting ammunition have certainly not been well-served by their industry organization, which has essentially just taken a crap all over their business. NSSF had a tremendous opportunity to look like the good guys, if only they had chosen to respond opportunistically to the news; but instead they seem to take a stand against medicine, CAT scanners, and good public health. And in favor of lead in food.

For years, creationists have shrilly insisted that the more complex a life form is, the slower it could evolve adaptive traits. Supposedly this showed that evolution wouldn’t work, or something.

Of course, just bleating that something is true doesn’t make it so. And as in so many other cases when we are dealing with creationist rhetoric, this one isn’t true either.

Yesterday Nature published a paper with the inspiring title Pleiotropic scaling of gene effects and the ‘cost of complexity.’ The experiments described in the paper deliver a body-blow to the so-called “cost of complexity” hypothesis.

The researchers did something very straightforward - they caused mutations in mice, and then measured the results. If the “cost of complexity” crowd were right, then making a single genetic mutation should affect many different unrelated traits. If they were wrong, then the effects would be limited to either a single trait, or several related traits. The researchers found that the latter was the case.

A more technical way of discussing the findings is to say that pleiotropies are rare. A pleiotropy exists when a single gene strongly affects a variety of phenotypic traits. While pleiotropies do exist - a famous example causes phenylketonuria in humans - the study shows that they are not common in a broad sample of gene mutations, as creationists claimed. As a consequence, even complex organisms can adapt through mutation without paying a price for their complexity.

From the abstract:

As perceived by Darwin, evolutionary adaptation by the processes of mutation and selection is difficult to understand for complex features that are the product of numerous traits acting in concert, for example the eye or the apparatus of flight. Typically, mutations simultaneously affect multiple phenotypic characters. This phenomenon is known as pleiotropy…. Some authors have suggested that pleiotropy can impede evolutionary progress (a so-called ‘cost of complexity’)…. Here we show, by studying pleiotropy in mice with the use of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) affecting skeletal characters, that most QTLs affect a relatively small subset of traits and that a substitution at a QTL has an effect on each trait that increases with the total number of traits affected. This suggests that evolution of higher organisms does not suffer a ‘cost of complexity’ because most mutations affect few traits and the size of the effects does not decrease with pleiotropy.

Wired has a nice article about the paper including some quotes from the PI:

“I think the main broader impact of this work is on the evolution-creationism debate,” wrote [Yale University evolutionary biologist Gunter] Wagner in an email. “I would say the only intellectually interesting argument that the creationists are using, at least the scientifically more sophisticated ones, is that random mutation can not lead to the evolution of complex organisms. And there are interesting mathematical arguments that have been made to support that. But our results show that organisms found a way around that problem by restricting mutational effects on very narrowly confined parts of the organisms.”

This paper undermines the whole creationist argument based on information theory that has become so popular in recent years. This should be remembered, and pointed out when creationists trot out their silly claims.

Back when this blog was young, and being read by five to ten people a day, I wrote about a hyped-up article announcing that Solar Cycle 24 had “officially” begun - a claim I found overblown and exaggerated.

The solar cycles in question are roughly 11 year cycles of increased and decreased solar activity. They vary quite a bit - sometimes they are ten years, sometimes twelve. And their boundaries are a bit fuzzy. But they average out to about 11 years, and the “11 year cycle” is an elementary part of solar physics.

The most visible solar activity that follows this 11 year cycle are sunspots and other magnetically-related phenomena - prominences, large flares, and so on. During solar maximum, there are lots of sunspots, they form in groups, and they are big; during minimum, the sun can be free of sunspots for weeks or months at a time, and when there are sunspots, they tend to be small and isolated.

One way of distinguishing that a cycle is ending and a new one is beginning is that the magnetic polarity of the sunspots reverses, and these new magnetically reversed sunspots appear in a high solar latitude.

As I went on to point out, scientists determine when the transition from one cycle to the next took place based on a retrospective look at the data. The hype in early January had to do with some small, magnetically reversed sunspots that had been discovered two days earlier. Real solar astronomers will have a working hypothesis about when the solar cycle changes, but nobody’s going to rush to publication claiming the solar cycle has “officially” changed after a couple small sunspots have been around for two days. You can’t clear peer review that fast, anyway.

And today, there’s a great example of why solar astronomers take their time about this sort of thing. As PhysOrg reports, three large sunspots have appeared on the sun that are not magnetically reversed - in other words, they are spots of solar cycle 23, which is ending, and not of solar cycle 24, about which hyped-up claims were made back in January.

“This week, three big sunspots appeared and they are all old cycle spots,” says NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. “We know this because of their magnetic polarity.”

As Hathaway points out, what’s really happening here is that both cycles are in progress, and we’re going to continue to get a mix of cycle 23 and cycle 24 spots for a while yet. What still isn’t clear, and won’t be clear for some time, is when cycle 24 actually began. Hathaway seems inclined to rule that the magnetically reversed spots of mid-2006 were not part of cycle 24, and he’s probably right. But it is important to remember that the 11-year solar cycle is merely the visible manifestation of periodic changes in the way the sun works. We’ll have a much better sense of just when cycle 24 began once all the data has been incorporated into the model. That’s just another way of saying that when that happens, we’ll have a much better sense of what’s actually going on with the sun.

Remember, we’re just talking about observations here. That’s just the first step in the scientific process: have a look around and see what’s going on. It is in the following steps - coming up with explanations, and then testing the proposed explanations against other observations and experiments - where things get interesting.

As is well known, prominent science framing advocates Nisbet, and less explicitly Mooney, have recently told PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins that they should stop talking about science because they do more harm than good. I promised before that I would be making some remarks on this topic, so here they are. I’m going to split up what would be a long post into smaller parts, so this is part 1.

In this discussion, the word “framing” has two meanings.

The first is the general concern that every communicator has with the manner in which their message will be received. We all figure out how to say what we are saying in what we hope will be the most effective way. This has been well-described by Mark over at Good Math, Bad Math, in the event you want to read more.

The second meaning is framing as advocated by Nisbet and Mooney, and this is mostly what these posts are addressing. They propose what I find to be a disjointed, unsystematic set of techniques for communicating science which avoids offending or alienating those who believe in antiscience. Their ideas seem to be driven by several ideas:

• controversies about science are analogous to political campaigns;
• these campaigns need to be won;
• they are best won by appealing broadly to religious science deniers;
• through various specific techniques.

Nisbet and Mooney are wrong in many different ways, and for many different reasons. I’m going to discuss some of them.

Science Controversies aren’t Political Campaigns

I have a fair amount of experience working on political campaigns, starting with a hometown mayoral race, and ending up working on several campaigns for statewide and national offices. I stopped working in politics after college, preferring to concentrate first on earning a living, and later not so much on earning a living as doing something I liked (working in astronomy).

Science controversies have some parallels to a political campaign, but not very many. In a campaign, the task is to convince voters to vote for your candidate. By and large, this is done by crafting appealing opinions. The opinions are arguable - they may or may not be factual, and proposed actions can often never be proven to be better than some other proposed action. And you don’t have to look good to voters in order to win - you just have to look better than the other candidate.

While facts may inform peoples’ opinions, a campaign is not asking voters to accept facts. “Vote for me and I will kick start the economy by building a bridge across the river” is not a fact-based message. Building the bridge might be a good thing to do economically, but how would you really know? Such a proposal is phenomenologically too complex to model¹; it is subject to a great many variables, and voters aren’t in a position to understand whether the claim is factual or not. Most voters will vote on the basis of whether they want a bridge, not on the basis of whether the bridge will actually result in the things the candidate promises. Consequently, the goal of a political campaign is to make voters want the bridge, and to make your candidate look good for wanting to do something everyone else wants to do.

Science controversies, such as the evolution vs. creationism debate, are fundamentally different. For one thing, a creationist will never want evolution. Making that appeal will go nowhere. But more fundamentally, unlike the question of the consequences of building a bridge over the river, there are facts at issue in any science controversy. In the case of the evolution-creationism controversy, the facts are incontrovertible, but denied by one side. Unlike bridge building, the phenomenology of evolution is subject to good modeling and has a sound evidentiary basis, in a way that bridge economics and other public policy and electoral issues do not.

Nisbet and Mooney seem to think that science is a superior opinion to hold than, say, creationism. Unfortunately, that’s wrong; science is not a matter of opinion, but of facts and the best available explanations of those facts as determined by a sound methodology. Science is not a matter of opinion.

As far as I’m concerned, Nisbet and Mooney’s seeming presupposition is false: Science controversies are not like political campaigns, and as a result the rhetorical tools we need to employ within such a controversy need to be different from those used in political campaigns.

But it goes a bit deeper than that.

Some scientific facts are inherently incompatible with some religious beliefs. I know from personal experience that promoting these facts irritates a small minority of religious people. So far, I have not found a way to say that the universe is billions of years old, or explain how we know that, without sending at least some young-earth creationists into spitting fits of defensive, hysterical hostility. Discussing these facts clearly antagonizes them, but Nisbet and Mooney say that I’m not supposed to do that to creationists, and that we’ll never get our message across if that happens.

As an aside: Maybe I won’t get my message across to the creationist that gets unhinged when I mention the facts, but what about the other people in the room? I can be pretty sure I’ve reached most of them.

Nisbet and Mooney don’t say so explicitly, but it sure looks to me as though they are telling me to not talk about any scientific results or methods that have a chance of offending religious people. And here’s where I have the problem.

I consider the task of science communication to be to communicate science - to tell the truth about what is known about our universe - so I can’t accept Nisbet and Mooney’s version of framing. As far as I can see, Nisbet and Mooney would have us teaching a caricature of science, one that has its most remarkable - and difficult to accept - discoveries played down, or suppressed, so as not to be offensive to the superstitious.

Unfortunately that’s the kind of science communication we’ve had in the United States for my entire lifetime. That kind of science teaching is what has landed us in this boat. We do not need more of the same.

Next edition: How to really win a policy debate, and the trouble with appealing to science deniers.

1. At the present time. [↩]