Scientific Consensus


Some scientific ideas are so easily grasped that they are easily explained to the general public.  Other ideas can only be fully understood after a minimum level of training and studies in the relevant area.  A few ideas are so obscure, so far removed from everyday experience that only a very few specialists fully understand the topic.

Science is a landscape in which anyone may wander.  How pleasant to sit in the green pastures of accumulated knowledge and dip the fingers in a stream of certainty.  But how much more exciting it is to scuba-dive through flooded caves in search of the foundations of science: how much more satisfying it is to climb the highest peak and see the bigger picture.

Men will sometimes blame hormones for how women act but it isn't just one gender - one thing that sets off hormone changes in men is competition, says a new PNAS study.

The average man experiences hormone changes similar to the henpecked bonobo prior to competition, but a more competitive man undergoes changes more like those found in a chimpanzee, say researchers from Duke and Harvard universities.  Chimpanzees live in male-dominated societies where status is paramount and aggression can be severe but in bonobo culture a female is always the most dominant and tolerance can allow for more flexible cooperation and food-sharing.

Despite some of the more outrageous claims to the contrary, SecondLife, while an abstract 3-D world, is not actually a teaching platform.   It had its moment and devolved rather quickly into another marketing tool for companies but conceptually it provides a good foundation for one.

To become one, a tool muct include things a training program with a sequence of activities for students to acquire knowledge as well as a methodology to evaluate previously defined learning results. 

Frustrated in dealing with the public?   You are not alone.   It may seem to researchers that the public is either stupid or intentionally ignoring evidence but it's not that one-sided, writes Chris Mooney in the Washington Post.

Chris generally doesn't think a lot of the science IQ of Americans (and don't even get him started on Republicans!) but he recognizes something more scientists should (and most do here, thus the whole Science 2.0 thing) - making scientifically smarter people does not mean they will always agree with you.