Basslines to Baselines

Since my friend Carl lent me Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion my mind has been primed for delving deeper into evolutionary theory. Last week I had the good fortune of finding myself at the Bell Museum’s Café Scientifique lecture/discussion series (held at the immaculate Varsity Theatre); the topic: Evolutionary Biology. The idea behind these events is to engage the public with scientific researchers in an informal way. A superb idea.
For a full report on the event I suggest Greg Laden’s blogpost. Suffice to say I had a blast. After the event Carl (who invited me in the first place) and I ran into the panelists and organizers at the Kitty Kat Club, which offered another layer of interaction to understand this volatile topic. I enjoyed it most when the discussion looked at the historical, social, political, and - to a lesser extent - philosophical, aspects of the topic. While I did learn new stuff about evolution, it was thankfully a discussion that did not get too technical.
To boil it down, the reoccurring theme was the evident divide between public understanding and scientific understanding. The mere fact that something in the vicinity of over 50% of the American population believes that the earth is a mere 6,000 years old (in accordance to a literal reading of the Bible) is somewhat of a shock. Of course put in perspective this is understandable, and needs to be understood or we’re kind of fucked.
A tangential Google search lead me to – of all people – Scott Adam’s blogpost about the subject of Intelligent Design and he offers a smart(-light-on-the-)ass point of view about why the public is not convinced by evolution. It’s a little more than coincidental that Adam’s post is in response to a blogpost by PZ Myers (I apologize for initially misspelling it: Meyers), one of the more outspoken panelists at the Café.
Myer’s could be the poster-child for scientists who should be shoed away whenever a layperson wants to know something about science. Don’t get me wrong, what little I know about the man I can say he’s well intentioned and is – above all else – intellectually genuine. But he’s got no tact, absolutely none for the uninitiated. To put it another way, scientists seem to lack the kind of communication skills needed to present science to the public – and who can blame them they probably should be doing other things. And yet we need this now more than ever.

How can we bridge this gap? Dilbert might be a good start.