Science in a Connected World

The lines between real science and popular science have been blurred. In today's world of lightning fast advancements the vision needs focus soon.

It amazes me the information at my fingertips. With the click of a button or the tap of a screen I can find out how many olfactory sensors are within the lining of a bear's nose just as easily as I can find out the final score of the Yankee's double-header. The wealth of information within my reach is both powerful and satisfying. Yet equal to my amazement is my deep and unsettling concern.

In times past, it was relatively safe to assume that most information provided to the public en masse was fairly trustworthy. This is because before the advancement of electronic media, it took both time and expense to publish materials for widespread consumption. Anecdotal information and tomfoolery were not worth the expense to seek publication. Why spend hard-earned money if what you have to say is unproven or simply meant as a joke?

Now enter the World Wide Web and the age of information sharing. A place where people can not only dream of being anything they want they can become anything they want. Wiith simple keystrokes of their computer, they can capture their beliefs on any given topic and have an audience with anyone willing to listen or read. This is an absolutely wonderful platform for the arts where expression and creativity are the ultimate goal. This freedom to be heard, however, oftentimes has dreadful consequences for the sciences, a world in which scientific rigors are the sculpting tool necessary for accuracy of information.

You see, the sciences are founded on the scientific method. It includes making an observation, forming a hypothesis and making a prediction, then testing that prediction based on scientific experimentation, the results of which validate or invalidate your hypothesis. This process is how all the sciences advance, including biology, chemistry, physics, geology, psychology, and many more. In simplest form it is about finding the truth. It is a rigorous and beautiful process that requires peer review to make sure corners aren't cut and results can be duplicated. In no short order, it is what has built and shaped societies and everything we know about the natural world. Now enter my concern.

Within the last few years, science has become increasingly diluted because of this unregulated platform we call electronic media. On that platform beliefs and hypotheses have been promoted as fact without ever having been tested and have been filtered out to the general public. Don't get me wrong, the scientific method is alive and well and as strong as ever within the world of academia but it is being overwhelmed by "Hollywood-like" approaches where salesmanship and pictures often trump proven scientific results. None more so than in the world of wildlife biology.

I will give you a prime example. The public, by and large, loves wildlife. For some reason, most people believe that it is beneficial to feed wildlife yet countless research studies demonstrate the negative consequences of supplementally feeding wildlife. In fact, very few if any scientific studies suggest supplemental feeding is beneficial to the long-term health of wildlife populations. Then why does this feeding myth abound? Simple… someone put out food for an animal and saw how it helped that one individual animal. Their observation then suddenly jumped to fact that artificial feeding is beneficial to wildlife without ever having tested all the variables. Absent were the latent effects that were not readily observed. Impacts to other species, increase in capacity for disease transmission, changes in carrying capacity, and altered natural behavior are rarely viewed by the untrained eye.

Even worse is when unproven or detrimental actions are found to be profitable because they are soon marketed as scientifically-based. The proverbial "I saw it on TV or I read it on the internet so it must be true" conundrum. Yes, the advent and spread of fake news goes far beyond the political world.

Fortunately, any trained professional or critical thinker can see through the false claims but therein lies the problem. The overwhelming majority of the public doesn't fall in either of those categories, therefore, unproven claims are now becoming the leading "science." This worries me. Now in our prospective fields, discoveries no longer simply have to be revealed, they have to compete with and refute "popular science." Not an easy task in the ultra-rich world of marketing and media. It is no longer a desire to promote the most accurate information, it is simply who has the best pictures or story to tell regardless of its accuracy.

Mass communication is a wonderful thing. But communication without the ability to filter truth from falsehoods is not communication at all. It is simply static and wasted effort and I for one would like to see science return to what it once was, a tool for advancing our ever-growing body of knowledge.