I judged a science fair last week, which is a bit like Stephen Harper saying he gave hugging lessons.
Science is not my forte. When the other students were inside memorizing the periodic table, I was outside learning how to smoke.
God's honest truth, my sole memory from science class is a teacher so shy she would smile at the garbage cans instead of the students. The only time she spoke above a murmur was the day a kid Harry Pottered an experiment and set himself on fire. "You boys at the back of the class, settle down," she blushed.
My pool of knowledge didn't exactly burst its banks as I aged. When my daughter loaded up with high school science courses, I told her chemistry teacher that I could help her with English and history homework, but that the rest was beyond me. "I've read your column," he replied. "I wouldn't help her with English, either." He was joking. I think.
This pretty much makes me a typical journalist. With a few exceptions such as the wonderful Margaret Munro, we're not noted for our firm grasp of science.
(After the 1995 transplant in which Mickey Mantle received a whole liver, the surgeon was asked if the organ came from a living donor. The doctor paused a moment before replying: "You're a sports reporter, aren't you?")
Nevertheless, I found myself in school last week (in the olden days when kids actually went to school), judging a science fair where exhibits posed such questions as "Is the sense of taste affected by the sense of smell?" (yes), "Do different brands of popcorn leave different amounts of unpopped popcorn in the bag?" (the least wasteful: Act 2) and "Do imperfect eggs hatch?" (yes, but only half as often as perfect ones).
In an experiment involving the conductivity of static electricity, a girl named Linnea asked whether water dribbling from a tap would bend toward combs that had been dragged through a variety of sources of hair ("Dad's, mine, Mom's and my dog's"). It did, against her expectations.
This result was not a failure. On the contrary, that is how science is supposed to work: pose a hypothesis, test it, come to the conclusion the evidence demands.
Politicians could take a lesson from Linnea. If there is one group that sucks at science more than journalists, it is politicians.
Many politicians are less interested in the truth than in what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness" - reality as, unencumbered by inconvenient evidence, we would like it to be. Truthiness allows us to leap to conclusions without tripping over facts.
Ignoring facts allows politicians to pretend a problem doesn't exist. This is what the Liberals did in 2001 when they decided the federal cabinet, not scientists, should choose which endangered animals to put on Canada's list of species at risk. If an animal wasn't on the list, they wouldn't have to make tricky political decisions about protecting it.
The Conservatives are worse. Listening to the Conservatives talk about science is like listening to the New Democrats talk about business, or the Liberals about Alberta. Conservatives speak ESL: the Environment as a Second Language. (Warren Kinsella's comment on Stockwell Day's belief that man roamed the Earth with dinosaurs: "The Flintstones was not a documentary.")
Two weeks ago, groups representing Canadian scientists and science writers sent an open letter to Harper calling on him to stop muzzling federal researchers. Federal scientists haven't been allowed to speak without permission since 2007, which means Canadians aren't hearing all sorts of interesting - or alarming - stuff about, say, climate change or declining fish stocks.
Not that we would understand it, anyway. A 2006 survey found a quarter of all Americans did not know the Earth goes around the sun. There's no reason to think Canadians are any better (though most of us are aware that the sun revolves around Toronto).
But that's OK. Lack of knowledge can be addressed through education, and unsupported beliefs can be corrected through the kind of testing we see at science fairs. Blind, wilful ignorance, not so much.
