Barnum on Science

Here's a challenge for science: LEARN TO SPEAK

P.Z. Meyers Posted this quote from Salon, and his own excellent analysis:
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(Salon quote)
>>At one point, as Elsberry was zipping through his talk about the synthesis of species, the young woman next to me muttered "Jesus" in exasperation before abandoning her frantic effort to take notes. For the rest of the talk, she just sat there, eyes half shut, letting the names, facts and figures wash over her like a foreign language.

>>Elsberry's commitment to detail and lack of rhetorical flourish sent Sperling into a bit of a panic. "Dr. Elsberry is a wonderful and meticulous scientist, but I don't think he really could see how little of what he was saying his audience even understood," she said after his lecture. "And now, to be brutally honest, I'm worried that I may be undermining my own science teaching." In other words, she was afraid the next speakers, the anti-evolutionists, might win the day.

It's true: we aren't trained to be showmen. We are very good at talking to other scientists—I'm sure Wesley's talk would have been a pleasure for me to listen to, and I would have learned much and been appreciative of the substance—but most of it would have whooshed over the heads of a lay audience. I wrestle with this in my public talks, too. There's always this stuff that I am very excited about and that I know my peers think is really nifty and that gets right down to the heart of the joy and wonder of biology, but it's so far from the perspective of the audience that it is well nigh impossible to communicate. And I know that when I try, I usually fail.<<
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(From Meyers' Blog)
Another problem is that we're used to giving lectures that people are required to attend in order to absorb the raw information they need to do well on a test. I don't think my students show up for the visceral joy of hearing me talk.

The two creationists in the series, on the other hand, are simple and clear (and the young earth creationist has the advantage of being entertainingly insane). They don't have any complex data to explain, so they aren't tempted to try, and they put everything in terms everyone can follow. An absence of evidence can be an advantage in a talk, because then everything rests on well-honed rhetoric; the scientist's reliance on actual information means we often skimp on the presentation.

I've heard Johnson speak, and he's smooth and confident, and slyly appeals to his audience's prejudices. Of course, he also lies like a censored . It simplifies lecture preparation if you can simply make up glib lies to fill in the holes, another strategy to which scientists will not resort.

This is another hard problem, and I can't pretend to be a great speaker myself. I do think that what we need, though, is to be able to give talks with fire: a passion for the subject and well-warranted anger at the distortions of the creationists. We need to be able to both communicate the meaty information (the real strength of science) and the concrete meanings of that often abstract data. This is hard work. It's also work that is rarely effective in a one hour talk, and takes a generation and a multitude to push the message across. We're behind the creationists on that, and we need to get working on it.