The Trumps of this world, who now control all three branches of our government, act as if there are no scientific facts, just scientific opinions. And everyone is entitled to have his own opinion.
Perhaps this should occasion no surprise. Science is a latecomer and stepchild in human intellectual history. Narrative myth was the first, and is still the predominant, way we make sense of our bewildering world.
Humans are natural storytellers who create plausible and comforting explanations for things we don't understand. Scientific thinking is much less natural to us and use of the scientific method (systematic gathering, ordering, and analyzing of data to test theories of cause and effect) was discovered late in our intellectual history and has been pursued only sporadically and often not very well.
The earliest medical science, about 3,500 years old, came from Egypt; the oldest astronomy is from the same period in Mesopotamia. Ancient Greece and Rome greatly expanded abstract mathematical techniques for modeling the concrete physical world and developed scientific theories that competed- usually unsuccessfully- against the older mythic narratives of divine interventions. The Islamic world systematized empirical science, introduced quantitative and experimental methods, and refined the rules of inductive and deductive thinking- all more than one thousand years ago. Persia, India, and China all also made independent contributions.
Lagging far behind, Medieval Europe finally played catch-up via borrowings, during the Crusades, and then suddenly surged into leadership during the Renaissance and Enlightenment.
The past 400 years have witnessed incredible advances in our scientific knowledge, our mathematics, our ability to sense and measure things both large and small and our collection of vast arrays of empirical data on every conceivable topic. We may be tiny ants on a small pebble, but we are clever creatures and have managed to discover many of the fundamental secrets of the universe.
But, our brain wiring remains adapted to the world of 50,000 years ago. Evidence-based, data-driven, scientifically informed decision making is a new and fragile approach to life's problems. Many people are far more comfortable accepting authoritative traditional narratives -- however false.
And we humans passionately hold on to our beliefs even when confronted with compelling scientific evidence that we are dead wrong. Trying to dislodge false beliefs with scientific facts rarely results in grateful enlightenment. More often the belief becomes even more firmly entrenched, taking on a tenacious authority of tenure. Once a group has accepted a received "truth" for some time, arguing to the contrary from the facts is dismissed as rebellious, sacrilegious, and threatening.
A startling paradox of modern life is the contrast between our fingertip access to all the world's knowledge and the continued prevalence of credulity and ignorance. The Internet is a wonderful vehicle for conveying facts, but is equally likely to promote the rapid spread of falsehoods. New false narratives are arising all the time.
A particularly clear specimen case is the widespread panic in parents occasioned by a paper published in 1998 by the British doctor, Andrew Wakefield. He promoted what turned out to be a completely mythical connection between vaccination and autism.
The work could not be replicated by others and was soon exposed as an outright scientific fraud- stimulated by Wakefield's financial conflict of interest. The Lancet retracted the paper with the comment that it was "an elaborate fraud" and "utterly false." Wakefied was barred from practicing medicine. He was found guilty of thirty charges of scientific misconduct, of acting dishonestly, of being irresponsible. His proposed connection between vaccination and autism was tested independently in large data sets from all over the world and was never once confirmed.
No human being on earth has been more thoroughly discredited than Andrew Wakefield. It would seem impossible that any sentient person could still believe his lies. But he retains the loyalty of a large cohort of vaccine deniers. Rates of vaccination have dropped in the US, UK, and Ireland. Hundreds of thousands of kids are unvaccinated, resulting in scattered, but increasingly common, outbreaks of measles, mumps, and other easily controllable diseases, causing deaths and disability. Vaccine deniers put not only their own children at risk but also endanger the health and lives of other people. Their private false belief becomes a public health problem.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion on subjects not amenable to objective inquiry or whenever scientific facts are still equivocal and subject to alternative interpretations.
This caveat covers a lot of territory and always will. The universe is big and bewildering -- definite answers will probably always elude us on some of the most fundamental questions. But scientific facts are facts and you shouldn't be able to ignore the truth once it is well established, especially if your idiosyncratic beliefs hurt not just yourself but also your fellow citizens.
Vaccination doesn't cause autism. Evolution is responsible for life as we know it. The earth is not 6000 years old. There was a big bang. Man is irresponsibly altering our environment and causing a mass extinction.
Facts are objectively verifiable, whereas beliefs derive from subjective conviction or faith. Facts may need to be revised as new data contradict or revise the findings on which they are based, but the process allows for self-correction and ever-closer approximations to truth. Beliefs are often personal, arbitrary, and held with an emotional intensity that resists openness to factual truth and self-correction.
The probability gods love their little jokes and coincidences. Just as I wrote the last paragraph defending dull science fact against exciting narrative fiction, a breaking TV news story caught my wandering attention. A teenage boy had fallen through the ice and was trapped under freezing water for about fifteen minutes before CPR could be administered. Things didn't seem promising- his flat EEG suggested brain death -- but as the boy's distraught mother began praying loudly, he suddenly revived Lazarus-like and soon recovered completely.
There are two competing ways of explaining these events -- thrilling story or prosaic fact. Bystanders felt the thrill, believing they had witnessed "a genuine miracle." God had reached into an obscure hospital room to answer a mother's anguished prayer and demonstrate His abiding and merciful interest in each of our doings. Man is the center of His universe playing out a cosmic drama under divine auspices. Insofar as we can influence God through prayer, we have some control over our fate.
Alternate dull answer -- the kid's hypothermia in freezing water reduced his metabolism and put him in a kind of suspended animation that allowed a medical save. A certain percentage of kids under similar circumstances can be expected to survive following the statistical distribution of the bell shaped curve. His survival is a natural wonder, not a divinely inspired miracle.
The trouble with depending on miraculous solutions to realistic problems is that you don't work hard enough to develop realistic solutions. Medical science has great limitations in curing illness, but it is a much better bet than prayer. Depending on God to solve human problems seems like a long shot and an evasion of our own responsibility to do the right thing.
Can we improve science literacy and increase the rationality of our decision-making? Trump's triumph of ignorance over fact does not inspire confidence in human rationality or the future of our country and planet. Perhaps entrenched false beliefs are too intense and ideologically charged ever to succumb to fact.
But there is reason to hope that we as a species are collectively not as dumb as many of the specific politicians currently occupying positions of power. Money has driven our politics down to the lowest common denominator of special interest kleptocracy. Our country has a long history of better decision-making and many other countries are following policies more in accord with best scientific thinking.
Our current situation is unstable. As climate deteriorates, resources are exhausted, and our over-populated world experiences conflict and disease, decisions will either become more rational (to meet the challenges) or more faith-based (to rationalize them away). My guess is that we will get smarter as we face disaster, but I worry that our catching on may come too late.
Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.