 I'm Eugenie Scott. I'm the former executive director of the National Center for Science Education. I'm currently retired, but I still keep my hand in a little bit for helping to make sure that students in the United States learn about evolution and climate change. Oh, I was always interested in science. I can't remember when I wasn't interested in science. Although, technically speaking, it would probably be more accurate to say I was interested in nature. There's a difference, because science is the study of nature, and I didn't quite get into that until probably university level, quite honestly. Unfortunately, K through 12, science education in the United States doesn't always, at least when I was going to school, but that was back in the Pleistocene, doesn't always get into the actual aspects of science the way we think of it today. Well, I got very interested in evolution when I was probably in middle school, because my older sister brought back her college textbook in anthropology. Anthropology, what's that? That's a big word, so I started paging through the book. They had these great reconstructions of Neanderthals and Homo erectus and all these fossils, and I just thought they were great. It was just so exciting to see all this. So what's this? This is anthropology. OK, I want to be an anthropologist. And then I became one. The National Center for Science Education began back in the late 70s and early 80s, back when there was a lot of legislation going around in the United States to require that if K through 12 teachers taught evolution, they also had to balance it with the teaching of something called creation science, which is a term of art, believe me. And creation science was supposedly an alternative science that would correct the flaws that would be in the textbook and the normal curriculum. And of course, scientists and teachers were not about to put up with that, so we started getting organized to try to combat this legislation that was popping up all over the place. And out of that group of scientists and teachers emerged in the early 1980s, the National Center, what became the National Center for Science Education. Mostly what NCSE has done over the almost 30 years of its existence is to work at the grassroots level with citizens, with teachers, with parents, of all professions, scientists, and others to try to stop problems before they begin. So the NCSE helps local citizens to address these issues, to persuade a school board or a state legislature that a policy that would require the teaching of creationism or that would somehow water down the teaching of evolution don't get passed. So it's an awful lot of local organizing. Because this is not a scientific issue. If it were a scientific issue, we could go home, because we've got the science. But it's not a scientific issue. It is unfortunately a political issue. So you have to think politically. And that's what NCSE has done over the years, to try to help good science be taught and keep the bad stuff out. And about two and a half or so years ago, we added climate change to our portfolio, if you will. Because we were finding that teachers were getting beat up for teaching climate change similarly to how they were being discouraged from teaching evolution. And we began to notice the parallels in these two movements and how it was affecting science education. And we thought that maybe some of the experience that we had gained over the years in dealing with the evolution issue, we might be able to apply to the climate science issue as well. There are a number of parallels, but there also are some very distinct differences between the two. Sort of the 20,000 foot level, if you go back and you look at these two controversies, the main similarity is that it's really not about the science. People do not show up at school board meetings and wait there behind a microphone for hours to speak for three minutes because they really feel passionate about the Cambrian explosion or because they feel passionate about the differential between the land temperature and ocean temperature. I mean, this is not what really motivates people. What motivates people to fight against climate change or evolution is some sort of ideological or emotional concomitant to this controversy. In the case of evolution, the ideology, of course, is religion. People of particular Christian views and, of course, in Great Britain, it's Muslims. But people of certain religiously conservative Christian views don't want their kids to be taught evolution because it has consequences for their religious views. People of certain political or economic ideologies don't want their kids to be taught climate change because climate change has consequences for their particular ideological views. So it's really not about the science, it's really about the ideology. One of the first things that we noticed about parallels between the anti-evolution and anti-climate change movements was tactics because the first tactic, of course, is to attack the science. The science of evolution is weak. The science of global warming is weak. Therefore, we can reject them. The second thing that we noticed about the parallels between evolution and climate change is that it's not so much the science as the consequences of the science for the particular ideology. Conservative Christians believe that if evolution is true, then the Bible is false, there is no God, there is no salvation, you will not be reunited with God at the end times, and these are very, very important issues. Children will not have a moral right to guide them. There are very, very important issues at stake if evolution is true. In the case of climate change, where it's more of a political ideology and or an economic ideology, the concerns are more along the lines of, well, if climate change is true, that means that we're gonna have to strengthen central government because we're gonna have to take steps to curb the carbon production so that we can reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. That means a bigger central government. As political conservatives, we don't want a big central government. It means we're gonna have to put some constraints on capitalism, that socialism. So there's a lot of things that political conservatives are gonna lose also if climate change is right. Another parallel between the evolution and the climate change controversies is that the consequences for the ideology are stressed. So the ideologues on both sides frame the top, frame the controversy in terms of you've got to choose. You either are a good guy, Christian creationist, or you're a bad guy, atheist evolutionist. There's a line in the sand and they dichotomize the issue. In the case of climate change, it's another dichotomy. It's a different dichotomy, but it's still a dichotomy. You're either a good guy, conservative, capitalist who rejects climate change or you're a bad guy, socialist, liberal who accepts climate change. So people hearing these messages, if they are politically conservative, well, naturally I've gotta take this point of view. Otherwise I'm not being true to my values. Similarly, people who are religiously conservatives, well, I have to take this value because otherwise I'm not being true to my values. So there definitely are non-scientific issues that you have to deal with in this issue and in dealing with these controversies. In working with the evolution issue, we've found that the best way to get somebody to accept the science is to have a message delivered by somebody that they trust that will assuage their fears that they have to choose between faith and science. And so evangelicals who accept evolution are the best ambassadors to the conservative religious community because they're the ones who have the same ideological view but they also accept the science. So that sets up a clash, so to speak. You don't expect this, so tell me more. And similarly with the climate change issue, you have the message that climate change is real, we have to deal with it. Let's talk about what sort of policies we can institute have that message delivered by somebody who is from the same ideological background, somebody who is politically conservative, somebody who is not a socialist, there aren't that many socialists in the United States to start with anyway. But libertarian and politically conservative views can be packaged in a way, shall we say, that allows somebody from that ideological tradition to listen to the science. Now we feel that both the science of evolution and the science of climate change are strong enough so that if a person can listen to them without the ideological fingers in the ears, so to speak, that the science is gonna be persuasive. But you've gotta get the fingers out of the ears before the science has a chance to work. We have stressed the facts that it's not a dichotomy. This dichotomous view that you've gotta choose, you're either an evolutionist or you're religious or you're either a political conservative or you accept climate change. Those dichotomies are really ruining these two controversies. They really are very strongly held by the anti's on both sides. It is necessary to try to convince people that, no, scientists are really arguing about the details of evolution. We're not arguing about whether evolution took place. And similarly for climate change, we're concerned about the details of climate change, how far is the ocean gonna rise? Not whether it's gonna rise, because the planet is warming and there are gonna be consequences for that. There's a lot of different ways of trying to help people understand that consensus. One of them is through humor. Project Steve was an effort to try to poke a little bit of fun at the creationist, shall we say. Creationists have for years come up with these lists of scientists who doubt Darwin scientists who reject evolution and they're always trivial, frankly. And back in the early 2000s, I think it was 2002 or three, something like that. The intelligent design creationist took out these full page ads around the country for promoting this idea that evolution was shaky science and this was scientists doubting Darwin. And we found that very annoying and there were a lot of people who wrote us and emailed us and said, oh, NCSE has to get up a petition. We can get tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of scientists to sign a statement about evolution happen and we thought that was pretty dumb because it was pretty dumb to have a petition of scientists who doubt evolution. I mean, when is science done by vote? I mean, you don't vote on how the world works. You test explanations and you accept the ones that work and that's the way it's done. You don't just raise your hand if you like evolution, that's silly. So we decided that we would poke a little fun at the intelligent design petition of scientists doubting Darwin. They had 100 scientists who doubted evolution. And so we came up with a list of 200 scientists who signed a statement about evolution as an important scientific idea, natural selections are very important, don't teach creationism in school. It was a nicely written little paragraph there. And we got 200 scientists to sign, twice as many of course as the intelligent design proponents, but all of ours were named Steve. And of course that generated a big giggle from the press and from anybody else when you think about it because it's so silly. I should say Steve's and Stephanie's. So we've had a great deal of fun with Project Steve. And of course once we announced Project Steve, the Steve's and Stephanie's just keep coming in over the transom. And I think we're up to like 1400 Steve's or something like that. You get a T-shirt I guess, maybe that's a selling point. I think climate science is different. I mean there are enough similarities in the approaches that deniers take for both and there's enough similarities but I think it's different enough. When a central point of your whole position is that the 5,000 feet of sediments and Grand Canyon was laid down in one year by Noah's flood, that's gotta take the cake. I mean that is topped only by, that is topped only by the idea that it was cut in a period of a week or 10 days. I mean that is just so out there you just have to give that the gold star. I haven't heard anything quite so zany from the climate science people. Although I mean it's fun to kind of just roll your eyes at some of the things that the creationists believe but frankly the anti-climate change people are a whole lot more important and they've got a whole lot more political clout and they've got a whole lot more money and the stakes are really a lot higher. I mean I think it's very important to have a scientifically literate population and that includes understanding evolution, its role in science and that's an important thing. But if you don't understand climate science, if you don't understand the fact that the planet is getting warmer, the oceans are getting warmer, the oceans are acidifying, serious consequences are taking place as a result of human actions that are producing more carbon dioxide and other products that increase warming. If you don't really understand that you are not only scientifically less literate than you should be but you are also politically and socially a lot less literate than you have to be because we are going to need to take some very serious measures to try to roll back if possible or certainly to cope with the kinds of changes that we're already producing. So yeah, I can have fun with creationism but I take climate change a lot more seriously. Philosophers of science have gotten themselves all tangled up in trying to define what science is. I deal with the general public. My definition of science is really, really simple. Science is a way of understanding the natural world using natural processes and these natural processes are tested against the natural world to come up with some explanations that help us understand better how the world works. Now, pseudoscience to me is maybe trying to do the same thing or at least trying to reflect this matter of natural inquiry that we call science but they get big parts of it wrong. The reason why creationism is a pseudoscience is that even though yes, they're trying to explain the natural world and yes, they at least go through the motions of trying to test some of their explanations, where they fail is that they are unwilling to recognize the data and observations that refute their explanations and you can't do that and call yourself a scientist. One of the problems with science is that maybe the most common phrase that a scientist utters is, oh crap, it didn't work because most of the time your explanations fail because if you test things right, you find out where your weaknesses are but then you refine and you go back and try it again. If you just ignore all of the evidence that refutes your explanation, you're not doing science. That's to me the sine qua non of being a pseudoscientist. Curiosity, I mean certainly all the scientists that I've known, they are people who are just driven by, gee, I wonder how that works, gee, I wonder why it's that way and then you use this process of science to try to answer those questions, to try to figure things out. It's just a real enthusiasm for figuring stuff out and explaining how the world works. It'd be nice if it were more remunerative but that's not the way it works. Yeah, boy, if you ever wanted to get rich quick scheme, you'd sure go into scientific research. That's gonna put you on the gravy train for life. Now, of course that's absurd. And what's particularly amusing about this is that the people who are making these claims are often spokespeople for major money interests, coal and gas and oil and other industries that benefit from the current energy productions that we have. You don't think these people are gonna lose money if the restrictions on carbon producing industries are put into effect, things like carbon taxes or even cap and trade, which is barely adequate. But those people are gonna be the ones who are gonna be losing money but this is the pot calling the kettle black. And unfortunately, the kettle is not even light gray. It's just a totally inappropriate kind of, the vast majority of scientists who are contributing to improving our knowledge about the natural world don't have big fancy laboratories. They don't have big huge salaries. They're not gonna retire to cushy second and third homes. I mean, this is not a get rich quick scheme, trust me. Have you had any complaints from Bob's or Peter's or John's that asking why you didn't go to Project Bob? Well, we've had wistful requests. Are you gonna have a project normant? No, it's only funny once that we can only do that. So I, sorry, your Bob's and Bill's and all you just can't be done, can't be done.