Tim Radford on a still small voice

'Uncertain Science... Uncertain World' - Henry N Pollack (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

Scientists, like everybody else, want it both ways.

They want to be heard, but they don’t want to be pinned down. They want the privilege of being right, but the luxury of being wrong. They want people to understand that the world works the way science says it does, but always with the solemn caveat that paradigms may shift and the evidence may say something different later on.

More dangerously, they want the rest of us to accept that there is a truth, independent of the humans who claim to reveal it, even though the day-by-day story of discovery shows that the giants of science can be as stubbornly wrong-headed as the great men of politics.

Most disconcertingly, they want science to be about probability and uncertainty.

Uncertainty and its consequences
If science really is about uncertainty – a mantra that scientists themselves repeat sagely, implicitly reproving the public for expecting them to deliver certainty instead – then who needs it?  It’s a serious question. The public expects geologists to tell marble from micaceous schist, mycologists to know a tasty mushroom from a hallucinogenic toadstool and dendrochronologists to date the cathedral rafters accurately, or at least more accurately than a chorister could.

Inasmuch as science has a social function, it is to provide a certain level of expertise: to know better, or at least know better than the rest of us, about some chosen aspect of life, the universe and everything, and to assert so with more confidence.

But is that what we get? ‘The richness of scientific uncertainty has often been unappreciated and/or misunderstood by the general public, people not regularly engaged in science,’ observes Henry Pollack. For ‘people not regularly engaged in science’ read religious fundamentalists. For ‘the richness of scientific uncertainty’ read Darwin’s theory of evolution and see how far up a gum tree that line of thinking can get you. Creation scientists for instance ‘can conceive of no experiment, no observation that might disprove Genesis. Therein lies the reason that the practitioners of “creation science” are not really scientists,’ he writes. So, does that mean they are wrong? Or just not really scientists?  And is there something wrong with not really being a scientist?

Horticultural tour

On its own terms, Pollack’s book is a terrific vademecum to the business of science: what you can reasonably expect from science, what scientists have to do to be more sure of being right, what other scientists have to do to make sense of the latest evidence. He takes the reader through what he calls ‘the garden of uncertainty’ to deliver little homilies on this or that bit of herbaceous border, shrubbery, thicket or thorn bush along the way.

He is, I think, refreshingly right about the media: journalists like to be serious, fair and accurate, and they certainly like to be read, but they do not see themselves as part of the machinery of science education. He puts a very good argument for more emphasis in the schools on the methodology of inquiry, rather than facts, although I have always thought that facts had much to be said for them as well. He uses some of the investment in science – climate research, energy supply and demand, social security and so on – as texts around which to weave a series of short sermons on how scientists arrive at their conclusions and what the tricky bits are.

Climate complexity

He is pretty sharp about the Bush Administration’s slippery use of weasel terms such as ‘sound science’ and ‘uncertain science’ to discount the avalanche of alarming environmental data now routinely emerging from weather, ocean and glacial observatories the world over. His explanations of the complexity and uncertainty and difficulties of measurement that geophysicists and climate scientists must deal with every day with are models of their kind.

The message, of course, is that researchers really have thought through the uncertainties, looked at 64 different factors that could confound their reasoning, and have still come to the big conclusion that global warming is happening, and that humans have a role in it.

Sadly, this kind of thoughtful meditation will not convince the powerful, the greedy or the unscrupulous forces that resist the pressure to change, because of course they will choose not to hear. The voice of reason is soft-spoken.  A quiet insistence on the truth, especially accompanied by a rider that it might be wrong, may be just too quiet to be heard. Which would be, in the case of this rewarding book, a great pity.

Tim Radford is the former Science Editor of the Guardian