AP English Language — Style — Drill 2

The following text is adapted from an address delivered by marine biologist and science writer Dr. Eleanor Marsh to the National Association of Science Journalists in Washington, D.C., in 2004. I am often asked whether I believe in the obligations of the scientist to explain her work to the public. The question troubles me, because it implies that such explanation is optional — a kindness the scientist may or may not choose to extend, like an afterthought appended to the real work. I do not think it is optional. I think it is inseparable from the work itself. We live in a world shaped at every level by scientific knowledge — a world in which the food we eat, the air we breathe, the medicines we take, the land we inhabit have all been profoundly altered by decisions made in laboratories and research stations most people will never visit, by processes most people do not understand. The scientist who withholds that knowledge — who retreats into professional language, who addresses only colleagues, who considers the general public unworthy of the complexity — is not being rigorous. She is being irresponsible. I want to say something harder than that. It is not enough to explain. Explanation without wonder is a kind of condescension — the presentation of facts to people who are expected to receive them passively, to nod and be grateful and ask no difficult questions. What science communication at its best offers is not information but invitation: an invitation into the habits of mind that make scientific understanding possible. Curiosity. Tolerance for uncertainty. The willingness to revise a conclusion when the evidence demands it. These are not specialist skills. They are the foundations of good thinking in any domain, and the public has both the capacity and the right to practice them. The natural world offers the best argument I know for this kind of communication. A child who has been taught to see a tidal pool — not as a collection of organisms to be catalogued, but as a set of relationships to be wondered at — has been given something that no subsequent lesson can easily take away. She has been given the habit of noticing. And the habit of noticing is the beginning of everything. I am sometimes told that the public cannot handle complexity. I have spent my career betting against this assumption, and I have not lost yet. What the public cannot handle — what none of us can handle — is being talked at by experts who have forgotten that the point of knowledge is not its accumulation but its use: in living more wisely, in protecting what we value, in asking better questions about the world we inhabit together.