By Dr. Robert Thorson
‘I hate science.”
In my nearly 30 years of teaching introductory college science courses, not a year has gone by without at least a few of my students making this claim. But disliking science makes about as much sense to me as disliking music. Why should a curious, intelligent young adult from a good high school science program resist something so fascinating?
An answer arrived in my campus mailbox last year in the form of a Science magazine article titled “Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science” written by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg, both at Yale University’s Department of Psychology. Ironically, the more children make sense of their world intuitively, the harder it is for them to molt this mental exoskeleton and replace it with the more flexible and rational skin of adulthood.
A generalized antipathy toward and a misunderstanding of science would be of only academic interest if our public policies didn’t depend on embracing, rather than avoiding scientific reasoning.
Consider climate change. The lack of progress for more than a generation derives in part from unspoken conclusions ingrained into voting adults when they were children. Species extinctions? Stem cell research and cloning? Nuclear waste disposal? Women in combat? Happy clams from flushed anti-depressants in wastewater? The congressmen and women who vote such policies up or down do so with the beliefs of their constituents in mind. And these beliefs are often gut reactions based on mental schemas rooted in childhood.
Evolution? It’s a fact, though a somewhat counterintuitive one. Astrology? Many of my students believe that it influences their daily lives, and that extrasensory perception helps them get dates. The success of intercessory prayer, the existence of ghosts and angels and the mystical reality of out-ofbody experiences are widely held, though completely unproven, beliefs. Aside from the results of survey research, my proof that students believe these things comes from thousands of snippets of overheard cellphone conversations taking place among the throngs on campus sidewalks.
The main question then is, “Why is there so much pseudoscience in a world so well understood by science?” According to Bloom and Skolnnick-Weisberg, “the main source of resistance” to science “concerns what children know before their exposure to science.” By the time kids are in preschool, they have already assembled plausible, though often erroneous, conceptual models for how things work and why people behave as they do.
For example, most kids have trouble with the concept of a spherical Earth until they are well into elementary school. A spherical Earth is simply inconsistent with their common experiences of a wide horizon and that objects fall down, rather than up. They reason that things would fall away from the Earth on the other side, and that the Earth must have a flat bottom.
They also develop a “propensity for ‘promiscuous teleology,’ ” meaning a bias for believing that everything has a design and purpose, including why plants and animals do what they do. To accept evolution as adults, they must first discard the perfectly reasonable supposition of design. Additionally, the more solid is their earlier belief in design, the harder it is for them to accept that life evolved blindly through chance events.
Mind vs. brain dualism is another childhood intuition that is very difficult to root out. Children understand that their brains are needed to solve logical problems. But they do not believe that their brains have anything to do with their rich imaginary lives. The firmly held adult belief in a soul existing separately from the biochemical body derives in part from this early childhood understanding.
Thus, the main problem with science education is not that children are enormous blank slates needing to be filled up, but that their slates have already been filled, in places with ideas that are illogical. These places need to be erased before new, less intuitive but correct ideas can be chalked into their brains.
“I hate science.” This remark probably has more to do with the struggle to overcome childhood misunderstandings than from any lack of interest or talent. Indeed, old habits die hard.
But it’s never too late to grow up.