The Ten Questions

1. How reliable is the source of the claim?
2. Does the source make similar claims?
3. Have the claims been verified by somebody else?
4. Does this fit with the way the world works?
5. Has anyone tried to disprove the claim?
6. Where does the preponderance of evidence point?
7. Is the claimant playing by the rules of science?
8. Is the claimant providing positive evidence?
9. Does the new theory account for as many phenomena as the old theory?
10. Are personal beliefs driving the claim?

Credits

This is the first video by RDFTV.
Presented by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
Directed by Josh Timonen
Produced by Maureen Norton
Animation by Pew 36 Animation Studios
Music by Neal Acree
Post Production Sound by Sound Satisfaction
Supervising Sound Editor/Re-Recording Mixer: Gary J. Coppola, C.A.S.
Sound Editor: Ben Rauscher
Production Assistant: Graham Immel
Copyright © 2009 Upper Branch Productions, Inc.

Ever since Galileo began the tradition of communicating science in the vernacular so that all might share in its fruits, a tension has existed between those — call them “excluders” — who think science is for professionals only and regard its dissemination to wider audiences as infra dig and those — call them “includers” — who understand that all levels of science require clear composition and public understanding of process and product.

Throughout much of the 20th century the excluders have ruled the roost, punishing those in their flock who dared to write for those paying the bills. Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan, for example, whose PBS television series Cosmos was viewed by more than half a billion people, was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences primarily (his biographers have demonstrated through interviews with insiders) because he invested too much time in science popularization.

Over the past two decades, however, a literary genre has arisen in which professional scientists are presenting original research and theories in books written for both their colleagues and the public. Most of Stephen Jay Gould’s works are in this mode, as are those of Edward O. Wilson, Ernst Mayr, Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and others. In fact, if you want to be considered a cultured person in today’s society, it is not enough to be steeped in literature, art and music. You need to know something about science.

The problem is that most people do not get their science through books and PBS documentary series. Although science junkies can fill their trough with such outstanding series as PBS’s Nova and Scientific American Frontiers, most folks pick up bits and pieces from short newspaper articles or evening news sound bites, which typically alternate between scary medical findings and stunning Hubble Space Telescope images, leaving out the subtleties of how science is really done and why contradictory findings do not mean that the process has failed. Worse still, most networks pander to the ratings game and air a mélange of pseudoscience about ESP, UFOs and moon landing hoaxes.

Like most scientists, I complain bitterly and often about such dismal programming. We write letters to network executives, but to no avail. One solution is to create our own network. Thus, Cable Science Network, or CSN, is in the offing. Roger Bingham of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego is spearheading a movement (of which I am a part, along with Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, and Salk Institute neuroscientist Terry Sejnowski) to launch a nonprofit organization modeled on the ubiquitous C-SPAN (Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network), now available in more than 85 million homes. CSN would be science 24/7 — all science, all the time — freeing us, in Bingham’s words, from “the tyranny of the sound bite.”

Wouldn’t it be great to watch congressional hearings on cloning, bioterrorism, global warming and aging? Wouldn’t it be fabulous to attend — via cable — cutting-edge lectures given by scientists a various annual scientific conferences? Every year tens of thousands of neuroscientists, for example, converge to exchange data on how the brain works. Wouldn’t you love to sit in on some of those presentations rather than waiting to hear about one of them in a 30-second encapsulation on network TV? Science luminaries who today may have an audience of a couple hundred people in a university lecture hall could instead reach a couple hundred thousand.

With CSN, all this will bring science to the people — and to scientists, legislators, teachers and students — as never before. Sagan called science “a candle in the dark.” CSN is still in the developmental stage (see www.csntv.org), but if we can switch it on, it will be a candle whose light will illuminate a path toward the globalization of science.

In a 1987 lecture entitled “The Burden of Skepticism,” astronomer Carl Sagan succinctly summarized the delicate compromise between tradition and change:

It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas … If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones.

Why, we might inquire, do some people prefer orthodoxy while others favor heresy? Is there a personality trait for preferring tradition and another for change? This is an important question because the answer helps to explain why in the history of science some chose to support radical new ideas while others opposed them.

In 1990 David W. Swift published SETI Pioneers: Scientists Talk about Their Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, in which he identified an overabundance of firstborns, including Sagan. But is it a statistically significant overabundance? Swift, a sociologist at the University of Hawaii, did not compute this, but University of California at Berkeley psychologist Frank J. Sulloway and I did. Eight is the expected number of firstborns based on the number of siblings the SETI pioneers had, but 12 is the observed number. This difference is statistically significant at the 95 percent level of confidence.

So what? In Sulloway’s book Born to Rebel, he presents a summary of 196 controlled birth-order findings classified according to the Five-Factor Model of Personality:

Conscientiousness. Firstborns are more responsible, achievement oriented, organized, and planful.

Agreeableness. Laterborns are more easygoing, cooperative, and popular.

Openness to Experience. Firstborns are more conforming, traditional, and closely identified with parents.

Extroversion. Firstborns are more extroverted, assertive, and likely to exhibit leadership.

Neuroticism. Firstborns are more jealous, anxious, neurotic, fearful, and likely to affiliate under stress.

To evaluate Sagan’s personality, Sulloway and I requested a number of his friends to rate him on a standardized personality inventory of 40 descriptive adjectives using a nine-step scale between them. For example, I see Carl Sagan as someone who was: hardworking or lackadaisical, tough-minded or tender- minded, rebellious or conforming, et cetera.

The following results are in percentile rankings relative to Sulloway’s database of more than 7,276 subjects.

Most consistent with his firstborn status was Sagan’s exceptionally high ranking — 88th percentile — on conscientiousness (ambitiousness, dutifulness) and his strikingly low ranking of the 13th percentile on agreeableness (tender-mindedness, modesty). But his openness to experience (preference for novelty) was nearly off the scale at the 97th percentile. Why? First, birth order is hardly the only influence on openness and can be affected by cultural influences and social attitudes — Sagan was raised in a socially liberal Jewish family, and he was mentored by such scientific revolutionaries as Joshua Lederberg and H. J. Muller. Second, openness also includes an “intellectual” component, and firstborns tend to excel at intellectual pursuits, as reflected by their higher I.Q. scores and a tendency to win more Nobel Prizes in science.

Here is the key to understanding the exquisite balance between tradition and change: Sagan’s high openness led him to be a SETI pioneer, but his high conscientiousness made him skeptical of UFOs. Considering the example of Sagan, we can glean a valuable lesson on how science operates effectively in discriminating sense from nonsense, and it is science that helps us understand how and why this should be so. How recursive!

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