American Scientist

When a highly regarded, Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer such as Ed Yong reprints his introduction to some of the year’s best science writing as an article titled “What Even Counts as Science Writing Anymore?”, I am left wondering whether the profession is on the cusp of transition—the kind of change that, in the sciences, is sometimes referred to as a paradigm shift or revolution. Such revolutions are spurred by anomalies and seeming mistakes. In such a time, what’s worked well in the past seems not to succeed any longer. It’s not just, as Yong suggests, that the COVID-19 pandemic is an “omnistory” touching so many facets of our lives that it seemed impossible to put into human perspective. It’s that the pandemic blew wide open the fact that the models of science engagement that have become de rigueur over the past generation aren’t able to handle the sheer flood of concerted disinformation and bad-faith argumentation that pervades public discourse, including about science.

It’s frustrating and it’s paradoxical. There are writers doing extraordinary work both communicating the complexities of nature and profiling the creative individuals who study it. Increasingly, skilled scientists and science communicators are doing the work of engagement, and the field is more robust and more diverse than it’s ever been. Their work is increasingly available to people all over the world. But at a time that should be a Golden Age of science writing, people are in the hospital from ingesting livestock medication.

Science disinformation has been around for a long time. But the scope and aims of it have evolved over the past few years. While particular industries such as tobacco and fossil fuels funded efforts to cast doubt on the dangers they created for largely economic reasons, and even the antivaccination movement of the 21st century was motivated by financial interest, today’s science denial is fully integrated with conspiracy theories and other forms of “fake news” that are part of a larger effort to cultivate and coordinate a community with identities and affiliations that serve a broader cultural and political purpose. The pandemic has allowed these purposes to focus more directly on scientific and medical topics. For many writers, trying to explain the science of coronaviruses amid the backdrop of antimask mandates and quarantine resisters revealed the limits of what today’s science communication could do.

It’s been nearly 30 years—a generation!—since professional science communication as a field began to seriously push back against what’s been called the knowledge deficit model (sometimes just called the “deficit model.”) (See “The Trust Fallacy,” July–August 2021.) That model describes a way of thinking about people’s understanding and acceptance of scientific knowledge, supposing that the greatest barrier to scientific literacy was a lack—or deficit—of information about a topic. If only people better understood evolution, the thinking went, they would stop being creationists. If they better understood the biochemistry of toxic pollutants, they would support environmentalism. If only we taught people more science, they would soak it up like sponges. This model was probably the dominant science communication paradigm in the English-speaking world for much of the Cold War era. And it took advantage of Cold War anxieties about a science “gap” between NATO and the Soviet’s allies to focus on pragmatic industrial and technocratic applications of scientific knowledge.

By the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, around the time that the deficit model was first named and criticized, science communication researchers began to point out that the deficit model paradigm wasn’t working as well as desired. While it may have inspired many people to become scientists, it also pushed away a lot of people whose interest in nature was not part of their career path. Also lingering in the minds of many American scientists at the time was the stunned realization that creationism was still widespread in the United States, brought to greater prominence through highly publicized “creation science” trials during the 1980s.

In the wake of this time of change came what we might call a science engagement model. (I take this term from former AAAS CEO Alan Leshner’s recent advice to scientists: “Don’t just explain: engage.” But I don’t mean for this term to be confused for engagement metrics that are commonly used by social media managers. Rather, engagement suggests the interactive and iterative nature of this kind of science communication.) This engagement model is probably the most common way of thinking about science communication at the moment. It emphasizes sustained relationship-building between scientists and their publics rather than the one-way flow of information from experts to audience. (See “How Climate Science Could Lead to Action,” January–February 2020.)

The other defining characteristic is an obligatory-seeming, almost ritualistic disparagement of the deficit model. Even in 2021, Leshner finds it necessary to invoke it as the epitome of what we’re not supposed to be doing. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report Communicating Science Effectively, published in 2017, practically begins with a section titled “Moving Beyond the ‘Deficit Model’ of Science Communication.” Even though a generation of science writers has come into a field that never thought the deficit model was good to begin with, it’s still talked about with such frequency as if to ensure that we never go back to that dark age.

But at moments of transformation, professionals start to look a bit less mythologically at their history and stop taking their methods for granted. This process started to happen five years ago at the beginning of the Trump Administration, with the science-themed protests that developed at that time and the debates over whether science could be separated from politics. It has come to a rapid boil in the world of COVID-19.

This controversial time for science can’t be blamed on the deficit model. So why isn’t the engagement model working? For all the good that it has accomplished, might the engagement model focusing on relationship building and trust not be adapted to a world of bad-faith actors and rapid-fire hogwash? What might we find if we look at how science communication worked in earlier times?

It might help to recall that professional science communication didn’t start with the deficit model. It didn’t even start with scientists. Science popularization has several antecedents, from Renaissance-era Cabinets of Curiosity—forerunners of natural history museums—to written travel accounts and illustrations penned by European explorer-colonizers, to detailed treatises on particular regions or phenomena. But what perhaps played the most central role in creating science writing as a kind of literary genre (in English, at least) is a source that may surprise many scientists today: theology.

Not long after the era of Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, and others associated with the Scientific Revolution, debates about religion in the English-speaking world began to focus heavily on discussions of nature. Part of the reason for this focus was the complicated religious landscape in the British Isles coming out of the English Civil War in 1651. (The world’s oldest scientific society, the Royal Society of London, was established in 1660 in the aftermath of that religious and political conflict.)

By the 1700s, this discussion had evolved into a literary genre we often call natural theology. Unlike theological arguments that focused primarily on the Bible, natural theology looked at examples of parsimony and providence in nature to draw religious conclusions about the divine forces that its writers presumed created and ordered the world around us. Some fans of the history of science may be familiar with William Paley, whose 1802 book opened with a famous discussion of how looking at a watch might lead us to reason that it had a designer and then looked at examples in natural history to infer a divine hand behind the world around us. Paley is most often remembered (not entirely fairly) as the anti-Darwin, the personification of religious thinking that stood in the way of the theory of evolution. (His historical influence led at least one former professor of the public understanding of science, in the heyday of the deficit model, to base a bestselling popular science book on the ableist metaphor of a blind watchmaker.)

What’s usually overlooked about Paley’s Natural Theology is that two-thirds of the book’s text consists of detailed descriptions of various plants, animals, astronomy, geology, and chemistry. These chapters didn’t often make explicit references to God, but they did reflect a sense of a moral order to the world. In the decades that followed, works of natural theology continued this pattern of vivid, detailed descriptions of the natural world, intended for an audience that grew as industrial book and magazine production led to mass-affordable printed works. Over time, works derived from natural theology and the literary conventions of naturalistic description came to be seen as useful, not for the religious argumentation they included, but for their portrayals of the natural world. That religious legacy helped this new genre of popular science to gain acceptance and be seen as respectable for mainstream audiences.

The first professional science popularizers were not deficit modelers, nor were they engagement-minded in the way we think of today. Natural theology had always contained a mixture of logical argumentation and appeals to the readers’ sense of awe and wonder. Religious authors knew that reason alone may not inspire belief, but that a sense of amazement at the natural world could reinforce such religious feeling. Even the more secular among these, who sometimes depicted organized religion as hostile to science, used certain narrative conventions, the invocation of emotion and the sense of nature as majestic in their colorful descriptions, because they knew that this writing was both expected by their readers and created emotional attachment to the world.

One thing that didn’t change for much of the 19th century was that to the natural theologians, and the science writers who inherited their legacy, nature itself was unabashedly political. To Paley, nature showed a multitude of examples that minimized suffering and mostly balanced the well-being of creatures. (Paley was opposed to the violence and upheaval of the French Revolution, like many British conservatives, but also advocated for the abolition of slavery and more equitable distribution of wealth to maintain social order.) Paley thought that nature was one way God illustrated how human societies should live. Even more secular-minded writers often accepted the idea that nature should inform our moral impressions and guide our recommendations. And they didn’t shy away from the political consequences of science.

At a moment when science writing seems to be asking what it will be going forward, it’s worth thinking about what science writing owes to its religious origins. As Yong himself pointed out in another recent piece on public health, sometimes scientists abandon the sense of political activism and efforts to make moral recommendations out of a fear of being seen as too “political” or insufficiently objective. The past several years have made clear that whether scientists want it or not, politics will come for them if they don’t come to it. (See “Science Communication Lessons from ‘Kofta-Gate,’” July–August 2019.) The same is true of science writing, and it may be part of why the engagement model of the last few decades has lost efficacy against new kinds of disinformation. It turns out that pseudoscience and bad-faith actors can engage too and are less reticent about evoking emotional responses and drawing moral prescriptions from nature.

I don’t mean that science writing needs to go back to church. But this moment may be a time to reflect on why and how so much science engagement derives from a paradigm that helped scientists build relationships with the public but has left them reluctant to express true feelings.