Decline and Fall

In honor of Darwin's Birthday I watched Flock of Dodos yesterday . It was an entertaining documentary that pointed out the main problem with the science side of the intelligent design/evolution debate: scientists really suck at public relations.

Take the ID slogan, "Teach the Controversy," for instance. As noted in the movie, there is no corollary on the other side of the debate. The feeble suggestion, "Teach the Science," clearly doesn't pack the same rhetorical punch, so the ones who actually have the facts on their side in this argument are seemingly doomed to lose the popular war; and only because no one in the scientific community seems to be able to string two sentences together in a way that makes the case for truth appealing.

As Aristotle noted in his Rhetoric, there are three elements of a good argument: logos, or the logical quality of the argument; ethos, or the credibility of the one making the argument; and pathos, or the way the argument is framed. I've debated the question of which of these is most important before, but now I realize that I have grossly underestimated the degree to which the silver-tongued presentation trumps the superior logic of a credible source. More than half of Americans now believe that human evolution is a hoax by a cabal of godless scientists. To put it simply: the scientific community is all logos and ethos, and no pathos, and as a result, the sophists are winning the war.

There was some discussion after the film, featuring several U of A professors, and this lack of pathos was the main topic. One professor pointed to the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science as a step that has been taken toward "selling" the scientific angle. I haven't spent much time with their site, but at first glance this looks feeble. Nothing like the PR blitzes we've seen from the likes of the Discovery Institute and other bald-faced liars in the name of god (who I won't link to here for ethical reasons).

Won't somebody hire a decent PR firm for the National Academies of Science?

Labels: creationism, reason