In my first year of graduate school at the University of Idaho, I joined a bunch of my colleagues in the audience of a debate staged between an evolutionary biologist and a creationist. I remember almost nothing of the debate’s specifics. The creationist held up largely by talking past his opponent, and the audience discussion after featured howlers like the suggestion that the almighty intelligent designer had, as an indication of his power, arranged the sun and the moon so they appear to be the same size as viewed from Earth. (They demonstrably do not.) None of it felt particularly threatening. My gang of biologists and biologists-in-training went for drinks afterward at one of the less-fratty bars near campus, in a more or less uniform mood of self-assurance.
Well.
That creationist was on the faculty of a little religious college that had its campus in downtown Moscow, Idaho, within a block of the bar where we were took our after-debate party. The college is one ministry of a church founded in Moscow by the creationist’s brother, in pursuit of an effort to “reconstruct” the U.S. into his vision of theocracy, modeled on the slaveholding Confederate South. That effort is now a nationwide network of home-schoolers, religious schools, and churches — including a congregation that counts among its members the current nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
So much for that self-assurance.
I started my career in evolutionary biology at what was, in retrospect, a brief moment of triumphalism for the field. In my first semester of grad school, the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial concluded that “intelligent design” — the claim that complex biological molecules are proof of an intelligent creator — was not allowable in a public school’s science curriculum, because it was ultimately a religious, not scientific, position. The first Evolution meetings I attended included a panel discussion with the legal team that won Kitzmiller; and within that same year the U of I hosted a seminar by the director of the National Center for Science Education, who had helped plan the Kitzmiller strategy.
The sense coming out of Kitzmiller was that facts had won decisively. The plaintiffs’ counsel piled up research papers in front of a pro-ID witness to make the point that he was rejecting scientific consensus. They also discovered incomplete find-and-replace errors that revealed how an overtly religious creationist textbook had been sanitized into an ID-centric version.
And yet, coming up on two decades later, the victory of factual truth has proven to have all the structural integrity of a wax teakettle. The incoming U.S. presidential administration is aligned with a conservative movement that has continued to push the legal limits on introducing sectarian beliefs into public education — with support from the highest court in the nation — and has clear plans to undermine the independence of public schoolteachers across every subject, including science. It also reflects what is in retrospect a remarkable alignment of denialist campaigns since the days of Kitzmiller — uniting and empowering activists against action to limit climate change, against vaccination, against evidence-based gender-affirming treatment and reproductive care, and against efforts to correct racial and gender inequities.
Looking over the omni-denialism of our new government, it is hardly surprising that it is led by a man who recognizably uses creationist debating tactics. On all of these topics, evidence-based positions are lost in a mainstream media that has retreated from adjudicating what is true or false, and swamped in discussions on social media platforms incapable of or uninterested in moderating against denialism. “Teach the controversy” has long been Creationists’ reasonable-sounding request to have their religious beliefs treated as a viable alternative to the history of the living world we’ve pieced together with the tools of science. We have not yet been forced to teach the controversy, for the most part, but outside science classrooms we now live the controversy, surrounded by public discourse in which false ideas never get rejected, so long as they have a sufficiently powerful constituency.
Evidence-based reasoning advances by rejecting what is false. How can scientists do our jobs, much less engage with a broader public, in a society that seems to be incapable of collectively rejecting what is false?
I’m not going to pretend I have any definitive answer. However, what currently gives me hope is that, first, science has absolutely faced similar circumstances in other times and places, and advanced and informed society nonetheless. (That “nonetheless” covers a lot of hardship born by individual people, however!) Second, scientists still have the public’s trust even as we live the controversy — 76% of Americans express “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest, and that broad pattern holds up internationally, with the U.S. showing greater trust in scientists than the global mean. How do we show ourselves worthy of that trust, and draw on it to advocate for evidence, even while we’re living in the controversy?
Here are my ideas, spiraling outward from the very personal (what should you do to personally set yourself up to break through the noise with your expertise) to the broader institutional and then sort of cycling back around to what you, personally, need. This isn’t and can’t be comprehensive or prescriptive, but it’s what feels workable to me, at this moment. Maybe it’ll help you, too:
Build a public profile you control. If you want to have a public voice, you probably do need to engage on currently active social media platforms — but only to the extent that you can usefully communicate on them, and you should first and foremost have a public presence that isn’t dependent on a single platform or company. Build a website you can update with your personal and professional news — here’s a terrific new guide to getting that off the ground quickly, relatively cheaply, and relatively simply — and engage on social platforms by sharing from that personal home base.
Focus on what you know and how you know it. A caveat to the widespread public trust in scientists is the denialist tactic of “equal and opposite PhDs” — parrying the testimony of genuine experts with rebuttal from anyone with an advanced degree, so the debate becomes “scientists disagree” even if informed experts don’t, in fact, disagree. The solution to this is, I think, to identify your core expertise — the topic on which you can swiftly explain the evidence and reasoning underlying expert consensus — and stick to it. Readers of this blog will have some obvious candidates for topics: biodiversity loss, climate change impacts, our understanding of human diversity — and good old evolution itself.
Follow and boost a network of real individual people. Part of focusing on what you know is pointing to others who know other topics better, when those topics arise. Trust is built by honesty about our own limitations. Social media has encouraged the growth of omniexperts, people with public profiles building huge followings by having an opinion on whatever topic is currently trending — and inevitably having uninformed opinions on at least some of those topics. For most of us, other people’s expertise will be salient more often than our own. Know what you know, and know who knows other things better. And, by the same token that you should build a personal online presence independent of any one social network, know where to find these folks outside centralized social platforms. Then you can refer to them — link to them, boost their posts, cite their work — when their expertise is salient.
Find, support, and help build trustworthy institutions. Further outward from the circle of people you can follow, boost, and cite directly are larger institutions that need support, service, and engagement, and which offer you support in return. Scholarly societies are the core of this for scientists — join relevant ones if you haven’t already, and pick one or two to engage at a deeper level. I am only just dipping my toe into service for the American Society of Naturalists, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, and it’s already enriched my experience with the society. Read your societies’ journals, send your papers to them, and take on reviewing service when asked. Beyond the core institutional network of your field are journalistic outlets, which you can judge by their track record, and support with subscriptions — for me the big ones are now my local NPR affiliates and ProPublica, as well as more topic-specific options like Scientific American, Bolts, and Assigned Media.
And then also, find yourself at least one institution that is not primarily about work or information, but just about connecting with other people in person. This can be a religious congregation, if that’s your inclination, but really anything that fits the bill of “regular organized in-person activities.” For me that’s the Los Angeles Frontrunners, who literally give me something to do on a Sunday morning — a group run, then brunch — as well as friends to join on weekend getaways, the occasional potluck, and community service opportunities including fundraising to help our city cope with the catastrophic wildfires that have been burning here for the last two weeks.
Reading through those thoughts as I revise, I realize the unifying thread here is build ties to people, not platforms. Those ties may be online, in many cases, and mediated through publications and larger organizations — but they can be organized to survive the loss of any one app or method of contact. In the last four years we’ve seen how tenuous social media is as a means for staying in touch and contributing to the public conversation, and it seems likely many of the big platforms will only become more fully converted to living the controversy that lets denialism thrive.
Creationists and their denialist allies have spent decades organizing their own network of institutions and relationships to get them to this triumphalist point. To hold our ground as scientists, we’ve got to remember that we can do the same.
