 My name is Josh Rosenau. I work at the National Center for Science Education, and I'm a biologist and now something of a specialist in why people reject science. I've been at NCSE seven years in change, and before that I was a grad student at the University of Kansas and got involved in the fights over teaching evolution there and decided that I liked that part of what I was doing better than what I was supposed to be doing as a grad student, which was a valuable lesson to have learned, and possession opened up at NCSE, and off I went to do it and actually make money at it. So what is the purpose or the goals of NCSE? NCSE is a non-profit that defends evolution and climate change in school and more broadly makes sure that science is taught as science in classrooms. In the United States, our education system is very much localized, and individual teachers have a fair bit of autonomy. The individual school districts, the 17,000 school districts across the country have a lot of independence to set curriculum, to choose textbooks, and to hire and dismiss teachers who don't happen to match the community's desires. So there's a lot of informal pressure that can come to bear on individual teachers to ask them to just stop talking about evolution so much, not get into climate change, it's making parents uncomfortable, or to have them teach both sides, to teach non-science alongside science, or to teach things that have been debunked long ago alongside what is known to be the best available science today. And we also see things at the state level, efforts to change the science standards that try to guide the districts in a particular direction, that guide what textbooks are chosen, or state legislatures trying to rewrite the laws about what standards can be adopted, what must be taught, what may be taught to open the doors for teachers to go off the script, to go beyond what has been approved. Science denial often will cherry-pick a scientist or a sentence from something that a scientist wrote and say, here's a scientist who says that climate change is not happening. Here's a scientist, and sure, there are other scientists out there who say it is happening, but there are two equal and opposite experts, so there's a debate. Let's just have the debate. Make it seem as if they're just these two equal sides. Attacking the science in various ways, we talk about the three pillars of science denial. The idea that you attack the science, you make it seem as if the science evolution, climate change, vaccines, whatever it might be, is not credible, not widely accepted, that scientists are all turning against it and any day now the whole thing is going to collapse. Perhaps it's only being propped up by some conspiracy of scientists who are working behind the scenes to exclude contrary voices. All of this that I'm sure you have and will talk to lots of people about already. And then a pivot to the consequences. In the case of evolution, to say if evolution were true, it would mean that it would have bad consequences for society or if it were true, it would be bad for you individually. You would not go to heaven or people would behave bad. If we teach children that they come from animals, they will behave like animals. Really common argument. So it's essentially, regardless of the truth, it's morally bad. We shouldn't teach it because the consequences, regardless of whether it's true or not, would be harmful. But it can't be true because it would be bad if it were true. And then to make this fairness argument that there are two sides, usually exactly two sides, regardless of anything else, and we should just present both equally. We should present creationism as understood by fundamentalist Christians and evolution as understood by scientists and give them equal weight. But we're not going to bring in Native American creation stories. We're not going to bring in, you know, it's not that sort of two sides or many sides. Anything that weakens the science in that case is seen as inherently supporting the other because there are these exactly two possibilities. And I don't know is not one of them and there's not a third path. There's not multiple paths within the science. It's essentially either the science as it's understood or the pseudoscience. Creationism, they have this mantra, teach the controversy and climate denies it desperately trying to get into public debates with scientists. And have very much adopted that rhetoric of, you know, that there is a controversy and look, we're talking about it. So there must be a controversy, so we should teach the controversy. In science classrooms, regardless of whether there's scientific validity to it. So is it a good or a bad idea to get into public debates with science deniers? I don't think debates are productive. Science is not settled by a stage debate. Debate in many ways is a sport. You know, someone who's a high school debater will be given a topic and before the competition, but when they show up there's a coin flip of which side, which team is going to take which side of the topic. The skill of a good debater is to be able to argue any position, regardless of the truth or validity. Science, scientific questions are resolved in the literature. They're resolved with experimentation and peer review and all of that, which takes longer than an hour long stage debate and doesn't necessarily mean that everyone gets equal time and equal weight. So participating in debates where you have that structure, it just reinforces that idea that there are exactly two possibilities and that anything that weakens one must strengthen the other. So it doesn't teach people how science works properly and it gives equal time to ideas that are wrong. There are other structures. If people want to have those conversations, there can be ways to do that and to explore there is a social debate. There is something going on debating what we should do about climate change. Sure, that's a policy decision. We debate policy all the time. How should Christians think about evolution? That's a debate. There's an active ongoing debate. How much will sea levels rise? There's an ongoing scientific debate on this topic. Some people say this much, some people say this much. There's research. We can explore it. But none of those, the error bounds on neither of the two, none of the positions that are out there in the science, the error bounds don't include zero, right? So a debate between will ocean levels rise or not has no place. But will it rise a meter or will it rise 10 meters? Will the West Antarctic ice shelves slide off and inundate coastlines? Some people say yes soon. Some people say we've got a while. That's legitimate debate. So shifting from something that's not a scientific debate to something that is legitimate, shifting to a policy debate that's alive and active debate, sure, should we do anything about climate change? That's not a scientific question. It's informed by the science, but it's informed by values and other things that people can certainly debate productively. I think probably the most obvious parallel is the love of lists of scientists. So the Oregon Institute's list of 30-some-odd thousand people who claim, at least, to have scientific credentials, saying that climate change isn't real. Creationists love to create lists like that. Here are 600 PhDs who say that evolution is wrong. And we responded to that a few years ago with something that we call Project Steve, where we said, okay, you've got 600 people who are PhDs in some field who say that evolution is wrong. Here are 600 people named Steve, PhD scientists in relevant fields who say that evolution is the best description of the diversity of life on Earth and that it should be taught in schools. You can create lists of almost anything, and it can sound really impressive, 600 scientists, but we've got 600 Steve's. We've got 1,400 Steve's now. And it makes it really easy then to say when someone says, oh, they're all these scientists, the Heartland Institute just sent out around a mailing, here are 58 people who will debate climate change. How many of them are named Steve? How many of them are scientists? How many of them have credentials? Sure, but how many of them are named Steve? And how many scientists can you find named Steve who think that climate change is real and is caused by humans and, heck, that we should do something about? You think that humor is a useful communication term? Humor is incredibly powerful because there's essentially nothing you can do against it without looking humorless. You either take the joke really seriously or you just laugh at yourself, but there's no denying it at the end of the day. You're being made fun of. You either laugh along with the joke and diffuse it to some extent like that, or you just make it that much funnier. Do you have any tips for scientists who are trying to communicate with science for the public? I think asking questions is something that scientists can be bad at and that can be really important. Scientists tend to come at this thinking that there is this knowledge deficit out there, that I am a scientist, I've studied this for a long time, I know a bunch of stuff. You're not a scientist, so let me tell you a bunch of things and you'll learn them because I'm telling them to you, I'm very smart and I'm using big words and that doesn't tend to work as well as scientists would like. It doesn't work in the classroom, which is unfortunate because that's where scientists tend to do this the most, but it certainly doesn't work with the press. So figuring out where people are coming from and what they are wondering about, what are their questions, what do they already understand and what would they like to understand, what's relevant to their lives. If they're resisting the science, if they feel like there's credibility to science denial claims, why? It's almost never, certainly with evolution. When I'm talking to someone who is really insistent that evolution is wrong, I've had more of these conversations than the same sorts of conversations with climate change but the same dynamic plays out there. They start off saying, well, there are no transitional fossils while there are. There are no archaeopteryx. No, archaeopteryx is a hoax or it's not really the ancestor of modern birds or whatever. So we can sort of go down that rabbit hole for a while and we can be arguing about fossils, but it doesn't change their mind and so at some point I'll try to sort of bring the conversation around to something else or they throw up their hands and say, well, okay, maybe you're right about that but you can't create genetic information. So we talk about genes for a while and eventually it somehow comes around to creating life on Earth and now we're having the real conversation because they've introduced the idea of religion into the conversation and that's what's driving them to deny evolution. That's what makes them care about archaeopteryx or genes or any of these other things. So we could talk about genes and archaeopteryx and fossils and all sorts of cool stuff all day but they're not going to hear what I have to say until I've addressed whatever concerns they might have about I can't think that archaeopteryx is the ancestor of modern birds because if I did then evolution would be right and I would have to throw away everything that I pulled true about the soul being reunited with my loved ones after I'm dead. Which would you rather be right about? Right? So know where people are coming from and think about ways to connect to them on that same level. In that scenario, do you share their religious beliefs or do you know someone who does have a problem with evolution? Do you know someone who shares their political or economic beliefs, their concerns about certainly in the US a lot of the rhetoric around climate changes making sure that America is America that we will not be the same sort of country if we do all the things that are needed in order to address climate change. So talk about the military, talk about businesses that are already taking serious steps on climate change. Connect it to those concerns which lets you get back then to the science. They're doing this because they understand this piece of science and here's where that comes from. So you work back to the science from those same concerns. It works the same regarding vaccines, climate change, evolution, GMOs, nuclear, almost anything where people have absorbed something that is that connects to their values, connects to their identity in key ways that are leaving them not really appreciating the science. You have to start there. The place that I always start is sort of the very simple first principles. We know that when we're burning a lot of fossil fuels and other stuff that releases carbon dioxide into the air. We see this all around this is hard to dispute and we know and have known for 150 years that carbon dioxide does in the atmosphere. We know that it traps heat. So what do we expect to happen? From those two simple facts that are readily demonstrated what do we expect to happen? We should expect to see temperature increase. We should expect to see that change patterns of weather in all sorts of ways around the world and that's what we see. So that's the baseline and we had that worked out Svante Arranius in 1896 had worked that out. Everything else is just icing on the cake. There's a lot to tell us how we should predict weather patterns to change how we should expect all sorts of other things to happen but the basic story we've known for a long time and now it's just a matter of what we do with that information.