Four million years ago, huge volcanoes were exploding like firecrackers along the drought-stricken African rift valley, blanketing the landscape in ash, burning the forests back into remnants. Most primates took a risk avoidance strategy and stuck to the forest, where they could hide and climb trees.
Some didn’t, however. They took to the savannah, where the chances of an unpleasant death were significantly higher. They adjusted to this problem by building a close-knit, communicative society and evolving an upright stance so they could see what was coming over the tall grass. About 2.3 million years ago they developed the skill to flake tools and weapons from stone, and by 1.7 million years were using fire. They were us.
Fast-forward to a volcanic beach in Lombok, around 120,000 years ago, where several families have just agreed to embark on the most momentous adventure in the human story. They are going to board some fragile bamboo rafts, with their children, food and water and do something unbelievably bold: they are going to sail over the horizon, beyond the limits of their world, and settle a new continent we now call Australasia. These Indonesian ‘pilgrim forefathers’ are the ancestors of our aboriginal and PNG peoples. They were the world’s first sea voyagers.
The story of humankind is the story of risk-taking. It accompanies us from our earliest beginnings, into the 21st century and beyond. It is also the story of risk identification, reduction and avoidance. These two characteristics are hard-wired into humanity over four million years, possibly longer. We are both highly adventurous and extremely cautious, risk-accepting and risk-averse.
Our story is one of seeking to avoid unpleasant forms of death – by famine, by disease, by poisoning, by predation, by thirst, by fire, flood and cataclysm, by human aggression.
The spectacular success of the last two hundred years has been the application of science and technology to identify, limit and eliminate risks, to extend life and enhance security.
However, as the public is well aware – but researchers occasionally seem to forget – S&T do not always deliver unmixed blessings. Many of the major threats which confront humanity today are the products of earlier technologies themselves designed to limit risk or improve security: landscape degradation and the pollution of air, soil, water and sea, loss of biodiversity, modern occupational diseases, modern wars and weaponry, the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, possibly even AIDS, are byproducts of technologies and their recent widespread adoption in an effort to improve the human condition.
Nowadays the educated public is reasonably confident, on the basis of prior experience, that today’s technology solution is tomorrow’s problem.
Hence the debates about genetically modified food, about stem cell research and xenografts, about nanotechnology, energy and transport, about how IT is changing our lives, about farming systems, about mining, about pollution, about sustainability and greenhouse, about diet and drugs, about aging, about water, about employment.
For years I was a newspaper editor and I knew – as most editors know – that if you print a lot of good news, people stop buying your paper. Conversely, if you publish the correct mix of doom, gloom and disaster, your circulation swells. I have done the experiment!
The publication of ‘bad news’ is not a vice peculiar to editors. It’s an unequivocal instruction from the market. It’s what the people, on average, demand. As a science journalist I found myself a ‘good news journalist in a bad news industry’, unable to publish stories of genuine merit because the overwhelming news demand was for stories of threats, crises, brawls, scares and accidents. I began to wonder what it is about humans that they want to devour all this gloom along with their breakfasts?
Maybe the answer is that we are adapted to identify and avoid risk. This is an imperative which runs right through our social fabric – and has done for millions of years.
Today’s media, trivial, vapid and irresponsible though it sometimes seems, forms part of an incredibly delicate and effective early-warning network, by which new risks are identified, brought into public focus, weighed alongside other risks for priority, pressed upon government to act – and then, generally, handed to scientists, technologists and engineers to actually remove or limit.
A great deal of science and technology today has its origins in the public’s inchoate desire to live in safer, cleaner, greener, healthier, less risky world.
Out of the closet
The first three centuries of science were an age of relative freedom in the exchange of knowledge. Then, in the 20th Century, science fell under the control of governments. Much of it was bent towards developing better weapons. Through World War I, WWII and the Cold War science was subject to great secrecy – to the dismay of some its practitioners:
Sir Henry Dale, president of the British Royal Society, said in 1946:
“I hold it to be our right and our duty to unite in telling the world insistently that if national policies fail to free science in peace from the secrecy it accepted as a necessity of war, they will poison its very spirit…” 1
The founder of Australia’s CSIRO, Sir David Rivett, too, spoke of
“...the threat, now much more than a mere threat, to that free trade in scientific knowledge of all kinds, which has been the glory of these last three hundred years that have seen the most rapid advance in human knowledge of Nature since man began his course.” 2
Rivett’s argument, that one of the sacred tenets of science is free exchange of human knowledge, is worth bearing in mind as we consider how society responds to risk today.
In the past decade there has been a discernible shift from public acceptance of the authority of science, towards doubts about its ethics and morality, a mistrust of how it operates and a growing suspicion about who directs it and for whose benefit it labours.
Since the end of the Cold War science has become less closely identified in the public mind with national security and increasingly aligned with the interests of the large global corporations who are the world’s technology powerhouses and research funding sources.
This has led many communities to ask whether science is still acting in their interests – or those of global wealth and power? People willing to tolerate exclusion from the scientific process for national security reasons are not prepared to put up with it for the sake of foreign commercial interests. Coupled with unsettling new technologies such as genetic manipulation of food, xenografting, nanotechology and the cloning of human cell lines, this has led to the present focus on the ethics and control of science.
There are disturbing moral questions, such as why 25 million people are dying in Africa without access to the AIDS drugs which are available in the west. Or why 500 children die from preventable diseases every 15 minutes. These deaths are not merely due to disease – but are also caused by lack of access to rather basic knowledge. These are examples of how modern science widens, rather than narrows, the gap between rich and poor, the powerful and the powerless.
“One would think,” writes US Professor of Physics Juan Roederer, “that scientists have a lot of friends and enjoy public respect. After all, statistics clearly demonstrate that over 50 percent of the economic growth in advanced countries is based on the application of government-sponsored research.
“So why is it that in many countries – and most notably the advanced countries – we scientists have no defined constituency, being viewed by politicians as naïve, socially ineffective and self important. Why is it that pseudo-science, anti-intellectualism, irrational beliefs and cults flourish like never before? Why is it that universities… are coming under malicious, sometimes even vicious public scrutiny?”3
Roederer notes ‘an alarming erosion of public trust’ in science, which is causing many societies and politicians to suspect the motives of the research community, to scrutinise and control it, and even to limit its scope and freedoms. It goes without saying that such limitations, when placed upon science, usually have harmful consequences for free thought, the exchange of ideas and the ability of science to make new discoveries.
The ‘crisis of trust’ in modern science was highlighted in the UK House of Lords Third Report on Science and Technology in 2000, which recorded ‘much interest but little trust among the British public in science today’: 4
‘Society’s relationship with science is in a critical phase. Science today is exciting and full of opportunities. Yet public confidence in scientific advice to Government has been rocked by BSE; and many people are uneasy about the rapid advance of areas such as biotechnology and IT – even though, for everyday purposes, they take science and technology for granted. This crisis of confidence is of great importance both to…society and … science.’
Many societies and groups are starting to protest their exclusion from the scientific process. While grateful for the life-saving and life-enhancing benefits of science, in western democracies the community is already jerking the reins, resisting the relentless onward thrust of knowledge acquisition and application. Some are retreating into age-old beliefs, new-age beliefs, superstitions, pseudosciences, alternative medicines, conspiracies and there is a general questioning, in almost all societies, of the morality, ethics, practices, motives, ownership and control of modern science.
The ambivalence of society towards science is illustrated in a Eurobarometer poll which found a generally positive perception of science and technology – however over 80 percent of respondents felt scientists should be compelled by the authorities to respect moral standards.
Coupled with the public’s perfectly healthy and natural suspicion of new things and new technologies, it is clear why this mistrust is compounding perceptions of risk. It is not merely the science which is mistrusted – but increasingly the practitioner, the institution and the funder.
To the public, the risk lies not merely in the GMO – but also in the motives of the corporation that seeks to introduce it, and in the question of who really stands to gain from it.
Science is under great pressure in Australia to commercialise its outcomes and to develop external and private sources of funding – and in some ways this is healthy. However recent public opinion research reveals a disturbing paradox: the closer science gets to industry, especially foreign industry, the less the public trusts it. Or, put another way, the greater the perception of risk, the greater the likelihood the public will stall or reject its offerings.
Dealing with this paradox, and its effect on the acceptance and uptake by society of new technologies, is going to require something a great deal more sophisticated than the now discredited ‘public understanding of science’ – or PUS – model.
This held that, if only scientists could get the public to think more like scientists and less like the public, then they would realise that S&T isn’t nearly as risky as they assume. PUS is based on the flawed assumption that, if you can get society to understand basic physics, chemistry or biology, then, somehow, they will be more accepting of new things which come from science.
Wrong. Several studies have demonstrated convincingly, that, the more educated the public is about science, the more cautious and resistant it is to certain innovations. People start behaving like scientists: they become skeptical.
This appears the case in Europe, where the general level of science education and understanding is higher than in the United States, and the general level of caution, concern and resistance is also higher. So is the level of criticism of science for ignoring public views and values.
Second there is a degree of fantasy in the scientific community about how easy it is to educate the public about science. The assumption seems to be that if the public can be taught more about, say, chemicals or GMOs, it will be more tolerant of risks and more accepting of their use in various ways. It will conveniently suspend the cautious behaviour which has stood humanity in such good stead for the past four million years. A moment’s reflection suggests that humans are not going to ditch millions of years of social conditioning for a credulous fling with the unknown, much though we enjoy the odd risk.
Third, there is a touch of dishonesty, or at least laziness, about the way a lot of modern science is presented to the public. It is often put forward as unrelieved good news. Another cure for cancer. Another solution to pollution. The good news is rarely balanced by acknowledgement of the possible risks, downsides, side-effects or adverse outcomes for sections of society.
People, and Australians in particular, are naturally sceptical of anyone who peddles unqualified good news – religious fundamentalist, used car salesperson, politician or … scientist.
IT, for instance, is often presented as a treasure chest of wonderful new ways to do things. The public, in its cynicism, wants to know how many jobs will be lost, what inconvenient new skills it will have to acquire, how much capital cost and downtime will be involved, and who will be the social and economic losers from change. You won’t find many IT announcements that deal with these things.
Another important change is that the era of ‘Trust me, I’m a scientist’ is as much a part of history as ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’, or ‘I’m from the government – I’m here to help you’. Professions and institutions, including science, no longer receive the unquestioning reverence they once enjoyed.
We are seeing more than a touch of this in Australia today – and it is liable to prove a significant obstacle in our progress towards a knowledge society.
The solution is a simple one – but not yet one which the majority of scientific and technological institutions, public and private, find comfortable to accept and adopt.
Towards a knowledge democracy
For the ‘knowledge society’ to exist, there must be significant change in the culture of S&T: its practitioners must recognise that the knowledge possessed by the community in the form of values, beliefs, traditions, morality, feelings, behaviours is critical to the successful uptake of scientific knowledge. These values, traditions and beliefs are rooted in millennia of experience and community behaviour in the identification and avoidance of risk.
S&T needs to recognise ‘lay knowledge’ and ‘scientific knowledge’ as equal, and necessary, partners in the innovation and adoption process.
The community can bring to science many ideas and perspectives which will result in the science being more widely accepted, rapidly adopted or commercialised, and of greater value to more people than would otherwise be the case. Since all science is performed with community sanction, society can also help restrict its misapplication or abuse.
The community can be a partner in the process of discovery and innovation, instead of an ill-informed recipient or an opponent. This is the true meaning of ‘knowledge society’.
To do this however, science must learn to listen. It must practice dialogue.
The prevailing S&T culture is one of debate, rather than dialogue. Science enjoys contention, the battle of ideas, winners and losers. In dealing with the community more subtle tools should be employed, more views and values encompassed, more voices acknowledged.
This is now being understood worldwide, though it is not yet particularly well practiced in any country. New Zealand is, perhaps, the world leader in practice of dialogue between science and society and the UK the deepest thinker about it.
Modern science communication is about far more than informing and enthusing the public about science and its products.
It is about building highways for the adoption and uptake of new knowledge, so society can advance, prosper and become more sustainable. And highways flow in both directions.
It is not the society with the best technology which will succeed, but rather the one which is most adept at understanding and using it well.
The democratisation of science through dialogue will ease fear of change, allay concerns about loss of control or the failure of ethical standards. It will limit exclusion. It will curb growing perceptions of risk.
In ‘Sharing Knowledge’, my co-author and I proposed a four-point charter for global science, technology and innovation, appealing to the world’s researchers, S&T managers, communicators and policymakers to help bring it about.
It states:
- Knowledge is the rightful inheritance of all the world’s people.
- The sharing of knowledge is as important as its discovery.
- Science will engage the community in a dialogue, each recognising the other as an equal partner in human advancement.
- Partnership between all nations, developed and developing, in knowledge sharing is central to the peace, wellbeing, health, progress and sustainability of humanity.
- 1 Dale H., Pilgrim Trust lecture to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, November 1946.
- Rivett D., Science and Responsibility, Canberra University College Commencement Lecture, 27 March 1947.
- Roederer J.G., Communicating with the Public Politicians and the Media, COSTED Occasional Paper No 1, July 1998.
- House of Lords, Science & Technology – Third report, February 2000.
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