Blue Collar Scientist

Over on Skepchick, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m particularly fond of articles by writerdd. A short time ago, she unleashed her latest in a series of especially sensible posts about communicating our ideas as evidence-based thinkers.

I personally find debates tedious and grating…. I believe that story telling is much more powerful form of communication, particularly when talking to believers. That’s not to say that evidence and logic should be left to whither on the vine, but data and factual evidence should be incorporated into a personal message that has emotional as well as intellectual punch.

As someone who does science education and outreach primarily through public speaking, I couldn’t agree more. At some of my presentations, people pick debates with me during Q&A, often about subjects peripheral to the topic I’m speaking on. The Big Bang Theory, which is disliked by creationists almost as much as evolution, is a frequent target; evolution is as well, even though I am not a biologist and say so forthrightly to people who engage me on the topic.

Nevertheless I have some stock material that I generally reply with. As writerdd suggests, it does incorporate data and evidence, meant to show why I accept science on an intellectual level.

I’d make a wild guess this is part of what bugs writerdd about debates - they are typically only about intellectual assent. Even if emotional appeals are made (typically of the “Hitler was an atheist” variety), the idea is to bludgeon your opponents into agreement, and stifle their thinking. Such emotional appeals are not meant in a constructive, positive way. They are not uplifting to humans; they are just manipulative debate tactics.

Writerdd is correct that we should be making positive emotional appeals. And my stock material doesn’t stop at data - includes very blatant appeals to emotion. I have a few stock slides about evolution¹, and they show things like transitional fossils, they offer examples of molecular evidence for evolution, they offer examples of how evolutionary theory helps us by dealing with resistant bacteria and preventing birth defects, and so on. But at the end of this material, I talk in blatantly poetic terms about how much better a world we live in as a result of understanding evolution, and I talk about how

When I go hiking², and I take a break on a ridge and I’m looking out over miles and miles of tundra, forest in the distance, birds circling in the air, and moose in the valleys below, I know that I’m related to every living thing that I see. I know that because of evolution. Thanks to evolution I know that my DNA is pretty much the same as the DNA in everything else alive. But it means more than that to me. It isn’t just about what I know, it is about what I feel. It makes me feel connected to my world. It makes me feel like I am a part of something bigger, and something far better than me. I’m just some guy, but I’m part of a bigger system, and everything else in that system shares my blood, my tissue³, and the special molecule that made me. I know that going back through the generations, through millions of generations of parents, my family tree hooks up with the family tree of every butterfly and every flower on the planet. That is very important to me, and incredibly powerful for me.

If I’ve been baited into rolling out this material by a creationist, I’ll end it with:

The alternative to this glorious feeling of connection, this deep understanding that I have a place in this system, and the understanding that it is for this reason we must be good to our neighbors - the alternative that some people would force on me, is that I’m made of dirt.

At which point I show a slide of a strip mine. Granted this latter bit is somewhat argumentative, perhaps in the way that writerdd would see as a debate. But the lead up to it is not. The lead up is a positive expression of what an understanding of evolution does for us spiritually.

It doesn’t matter what your topic is - if you can’t include some positive emotional appeals to make your topic attractive and accessible to people, you have failed at communicating it. Science does not exist in a vacuum. Reality is reality, and a scientific experiment is going to have a certain outcome regardless of what we’d like to be the case, but once we know the truth about the universe - once the scientific results are in - we are then obligated to communicate this in a way that matters to people. And people are emotional folks.

1. And in my “copious free time” I am working on preparing them so that I can post them here for all to use. [↩]
2. Remember, I live in Alaska, where the hiking is absolutely glorious. [↩]
3. I’ll typically grab my forearm at this point by way of passionate illustration [↩]