Cornelia Dean provides wake-up call for science

By Milena Insam

Americans are extremely lacking in scientific understanding, the former science editor for the New York Times told the Rider community in a speech on Wednesday, March 1.

“Sixty-one percent of Americans believe that astrology is at least somewhat scientific. Forty-five percent of Americans accept evolution,” Cornelia Dean said.

These are the findings of a recent survey that Dean reported in her lecture at the Bart Luedeke Center Theater.

“There’s quite a lot of ignorance in science around,” said Dean. “One of the reasons is that it is badly taught at school.”

According to a poll conducted among high school students, the majority of students questioned were less interested in biology after taking the class for one year, Dean said.

During the lecture, Dean dicussed science journalism, which is one of her special subjects as a long-time editor of science news. Throughout her journalistic career, she served in various editorial positions in the science department as well as on the national desk.

She received her bachelor’s degree in American civilization from Brown University and a master’s degree from Boston University.

Presently, Dean gives lectures at Harvard University and is working on a book about the use and misuse of scientific information in American life. She is also the author of Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches, an examination of coastal erosion and land use.

Dean started her lecture with a quote from the English writer C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, a novel that caused “controversy and huge havoc” in both England and the States. It deals with the “gulf between mutual incomprehension between science and the rest of us.”

Dean expressed her deep concern about the distance most people have to scientific issues in today’s society.

“People do not reason probabilistically,” Dean said. “We have certain patterns of thinking that do not help us when it comes to scientific findings.”

Through her writings as well as her experiences as a scientific journalist, Dean has been trying to find an answer to people’s objection to science, which she defines as something “messy and chaotic,” and “not a constant revelation of truth.”

One problematic aspect that Dean mentioned is the phenomenon of science disengagement, the difficulty of catching the audience’s attention and interest in science.

“Science stories can be complex,” Dean said. “It’s hard to tell a complex story in an engaging way, in a way that people want to read it or watch it on TV.”

According to Dean, scientific journalists should be aware of their huge responsibility of increasing the public’s scientific knowledge.

“Journalists are trying to get better; in my opinion, scientists have to get better too,” she said. “Scientists have an affirmative obligation to citizens to help them understand science.”

However, it is also up to the individual to engage in science.

“I wish that people would encounter scientific magazines daily in their lives,” Dean said. “So they would make decisions with a [larger] database.”