Guest post by Neil Shubin: preparing for TV

I thought it might be useful for the readers of Pharyngula to get my sense of the Colbert show experience.

Being a scientist on the show carries with it some challenges. We need to convey facts of science correctly and do so in a way reveals how fun our science is to do and to think about. We need to educate, enlighten, and excite. The challenge is we need to do this in 5 minutes with Stephen Colbert sitting across the table. To make matters worse, the show does not tell you the tack Colbert is going to take in advance, largely because so much of what he does is ad lib.

Because of this, I was terrified when I received the invitation last Fri. I took a few hours to accept, largely because I needed a family conference on the strike. Once I came to terms with my decision (the readers do a good in the commentary on the various issues that swirled for us), I began to prepare for the interview.

How did I prepare for the Colbert interview? In watching successful science interviews (of which there are a number of real good examples to emulate) I saw some general patterns to a successful visit. It also definitely appears that Colbert likes scientists and he want them to be able to tell their story.

The best answers I saw responded to Colbert’s questions with a sentence that captured the essence of the science in an entertaining way. So, the day of my interview I came up with a number such answers for the questions I thought I’d get. For the most part, I prepared with answers defending evolution vs. other non-scientific approaches.

I was pretty nervous before the interview, so much so that I didn’t sleep much the night before. And, as it turned out, my predictions about Colbert’s questions were largely wrong– Colbert didn’t even touch creationism and did a number of riffs on things that weren’t even in the book (like the final questions). I was aided, though, by the experience of preparing my answers. It exercised my brain in a way that allowed me to respond to the questions he really asked.

In thinking about the experience a few days later I have one thought on language. As scientists we are very used to using language with a great deal of precision (note the string in the commentary on common ancestry, group inclusion, etc.). The challenge is adapting our highly precise vocabulary to the demands of a five minute performance on a show which is fundamentally not about science. It is a tough tightrope to walk to balance between language that is both engaging and precise. I had mixed success, but that has to be our aspiration for these kinds of experiences.

You can ask the question, a valid one, why bother with these kinds shows? If it is so difficult, and the conceptual and linguistic apparatus of science doesn’t easily conform to this venue, why do it? For me the answer is that we need to make science part of the public conversation. We live in a society where Britany Spears latest foible gets more ink than Mello and Fire’s 2006 Nobel discovery of RNAi– a breakthrough on a little worm that will likely lead to treatments of many diseases. Something is wrong here.

Thanks for your comments and criticisms and I hope my personal experience gives some perspective.

Neil Shubin

No way to run a bookstore

I love bookstores — I like the ones that have huge stacks of strange used books where you can find surprises, and I also like the big online stores where I can order anything I want. My kids are all the same way; when we make trips into the big city, the whole mess of us usually end up spending hours in places like Cummings or Uncle Hugo’s. But I finally found a bookstore with no redeeming values at all, one I will never patronize.

It’s called Abunga, and their motto is “Empowering Decency as your Family Friendly Bookstore”. What that means is that they allow bookstore members to vote against books, and if enough people reject a book, the store removes it from its database. This makes no sense to me. There are a lot of books that I deplore, and the way I cope with them is that I don’t buy them. I don’t go to the manager and tell them that no one else should be allowed to buy them.

So of course one set of books already banned is Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Looking around the site, it seems that they’re mainly pushing is religious pablum, naturally enough.

It seems a small thing, but that’s what you get when you give a religious cult majority rule — it’s not an opportunity for them to relax and enjoy their culture, but a reason to suppress minority views.

“Crazy” is when you start regarding the crazy as normal

I have mixed feelings about this article in Inside Higher Ed on the issue of approving an ICR degree program in Texas. On the one hand, it’s clear that the Texas bureaucracy is being cautious and thorough and working its way through their official protocols. Raymund Paredes, the commissioner of higher education, has raised concerns about the proposed program—online graduate degrees in he sciences are problematic because they lack the laboratory component; the proposed curriculum is not equivalent to other graduate programs in Texas; they haven’t documented that the ICR is a research institution. He’s said that because the subject is controversial, it’s going to be examined “thoroughly and fairly.”

OK, that’s all good. Let’s all calmly work through the proper channels.

On the other hand, though, it’s freaking insane. The ICR is an organization that demands a loyalty oath for its employees:

The statement of faith for everyone at the institute requires support for both “scientific creationism” and “Biblical creationism.” The former includes the belief that humans were created “in fully human form from the start” and that the universe was created “perfect” by the “creator.” The latter includes the beliefs that the Bible is literally true and “free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological.” Specifically, the statement requires belief in the literal creation of the earth in six days, that Adam and Eve were the first humans, and in the virgin birth of Jesus.

This is a sectarian theological program, a rinky-tink mob of cultists with no scientific credibility at all, demanding that a state recognize its work as equivalent to, say, that of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Texas Austin. Alarmed? Every Texan ought to be furious at the idea that any yahoo with a Bible and a flaky idée fixe can set themselves up as logistically equivalent to a multi-million dollar research institution.

And these people are proposing to teach the state’s teachers, who will then go on to teach the state’s children.

The whole idea is subversive, lunatic, and destructive to the educational system as a whole, and the commissioner can simultaneously say that it is “controversial” and that he could still authorize the program? Insanity.

Texas is in the spotlight on this issue, but there’s another state that needs to be examined: California. The ICR is moving from California, where they have been handing out degrees in creationist inanity for many years — where has the quality control been, California?

Maybe every state ought to reexamine its approval processes. It’s hard to believe that we’re actually seriously considering whether fundamentalist nonsense and distortions should be regarded as equivalent to modern science, and that these crackpots and their clown college proposal weren’t laughed at and rejected out of hand.

I really don’t understand Republicans

Somebody has to explain the logic of certain Republican values to me. Introducing something called the “Middle Class Job Protection Act” (which is actually, of course, nothing but a massive corporate tax cut), our own Little Miss Chipper Crazypants, Michele Bachmann, thinks this is good news:

I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.

Once upon a time, we had this thing called the 40 hour work week — the idea was that it was good for the middle class to be able to get a living wage from a reasonable amount of effort. Now we’ve got Republicans handing out corporate welfare and getting excited because the working class has to labor for longer hours in order to make ends meet. I don’t get it. Do they think their local mechanic likes having to put in longer hours grubbing in grease and barking their knuckles and wrenching their backs?

I remember a few rough years when my father had to work two jobs, a day job reading water meters for the city and then doing custodial work in the evenings. It wasn’t because this was a fantastic opportunity to achieve prosperity — it was because he was desperate to pay the rent and keep food on the table. When people are having to work harder, it’s not a sign that the middle class is thriving.

I’ll have to remember this one for when Bachmann tries to run for reelection.

(Hat tip to John McKay)

A Florida rumor

I heard this third hand, so it’s not exactly the most well-founded rumor around, but a contact with inside information in the Southern Baptist Ministries has heard that they want to help out with the koo-koo descent into creationist madness that is Florida. They have asked their Florida churches to send information to businesses and school boards — a fine idea, and perfectly acceptable practice, I would think — but you have to see the “information” to believe it.

The rumor is that they’re going to send a tract called Apes, Lies, and Ms. Henn. That’s right, a Jack Chick tract.

I’m torn. It seems unlikely, but on the other hand, it’s just stupid enough that it could be true. On our side we have the whole of the scientific literature; on theirs, a comic book featuring a little girl saying “We didn’t come from monkeys.” And which one will win is uncertain.

Floridians, keep an eye open and let me know if there is a sudden influx of Chick inanity in your community.

For the chess fans

Here’s an interesting twist of view: comparing the perspectives of a Law (Paul Davies) and Chaos (yours truly*) and applying the ideas to chess. Even in a relatively simple system where all the rules are fixed and known, is there an orderly, formulaic solution to the problem?

*There is a reason my oldest son is named Alaric, and why there is a shrine to Arioch in the infernal pit in the subbasement.