Films with just dinosaurs
There’s a contretemps going on between a number of scienceblogs types, primarily our pal PeeZed, and the increasingly annoying Chris Mooney, over Mooney’s new book Unscientific America, cowritten with Sheril Kirschenbaum. The book’s subtitle, “How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future,” made me sit up and take notice when it first began to be discussed in earshot, but I suspect I won’t be buying it.
Of course I won’t venture a review, because I haven’t read it. it’s other people’s reviews, and Mooney’s response to them, that have prompted my decision. The critics claim that the book pins its hopes for stemming scientific illiteracy on making sure science’s advocates are nicer to the ignorant. Mooney’s responses do nothing to dissuade me that that analysis is correct. I have nothing against being nice: you are indeed far likelier to persuade people if you don’t insult them. But the incivility complaint is generally leveled by those people, the corporate climate change deniers and advocates of extinction, who stand to gain monetarily from other people’s ignorance, and who thus use any rhetorical trope they can to dissuade their adherents from actually looking at the facts of the matter.
(Incidentally, Mooney’s utterly useless pal Matthew Nisbet has decided that we shouldn’t use the phrase “climate change deniers” to describe those who, when faced with the facts about climate change, deny them. His reasoning is self-Godwinizing. If one needed more evidence that Nisbet is angling for long-term employment in the Ecological Devastation Industry, I don’t know how much more compelling a datum one could ask for. “Don’t call them what they actually are. That’s rude.”)
Anyway, for those of you who are interested in who said what, PZ’s review of the book is here, and Mooney/Kirschenbaum’s responses are serialized into parts One and Two, and there are other references scattered around both blogs and the rest of ScienceBlogs as well, including this very valuable and measured review by Janet Stemwedel.
My take: The book itself may be very valuable in places, but any argument that advoactes those of us who feel strongly about an issue squelch our opinions in order to present a Constructive United front is not something I want to spend time engaging with. This is true whether the opinions at issue involve a person’s privately held contempt for religions, or concern for desert landscapes arrayed against an Overwhelming Progressive Mandate For Giving Obama What He Wants, or whatever. Been there, done that.
The point of all this information isn’t to tell you to avoid reading Mooney and Kirschenbaum’s book: you probably should read it. But there was something in one of Mooney’s posts that made my brain stall out with the sheer, unresearched, out-of-the-ass wrongness of it. In disputing one of PZ’s statements about the book’s treatment of the popular perception of science, Mooney dismisses the Framers’ Bete Noire Richard Dawkins:
Dawkins was quoted in the New York Times saying that the film Jurassic Park didn’t even need to have human characters in it, because the dinosaurs were so stunning. His words were: “The natural world is fascinating in its own right. It really doesn’t need human drama to be fascinating.” We provide this quotation, and the accompanying context, in the book. Myers does not.
Assuming Dawkins was quoted accurately, these words shows how little he understands about mass entertainment. A film with just dinosaurs running around would never have been so successful (and would never have been made). That was our point.
“As successful as Jurassic Park” is a pretty high bar, one the vast majority of mere human dramas cannot clear.
Still, it took me about five seconds to come up with a citation of a phenomenally successful, popular, critically acclaimed film that did, indeed, feature “just dinosaurs running around,” with no human drama.
Really, Mr. Mooney: these grandiose statements about how we untutored yokels must have our science spoonfed to us? You really ought to make them harder for us to falsify with a few keystrokes. That is in fact the scientific method, as I am given in my plebeian way to understand it.
Comments
Maybe Mooney never saw March of the Penguins? I think Winged Migration was also pretty successful.
Nisbet reminds me of a science blog version of David Broder.
I’ve read bits and pieces of the framing wars, but I’m still not sure what people are really fighting over.
To be fair, the Hollywood chapter of Unscientific America does mention March of the Penguins - it just dismisses it as successful despite it’s boring focus on nature. Here’s the quote, which immediately follows the whole Dawkins-thinks-Jurassic Park-should-only-have-dinosaurs paragraph:
Such science-centrism simply won’t work for the broader, non-scientist population. It ignores their compelling need not to be bored. Successes like March of the Penguins notwithstanding, most of the time people need to see and hear stories about other people, or about animals that are given human attributes, as in Disney-Pixar films. Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot. Either science will align itself with these overweening objectives or it will literally get flattened by the drive for profit.
Peggy, thanks for that. That paragraph actually makes the position of Mooney and Kirschenbaum even worse by at least an order of magnitude.
What a tedious mess. “March of the Penguins” notwithstanding? Notwithstanding what? I suppose they meant “‘March of the Penguins’ disproving our statement should be ignored while we blather on ad nauseam about things we don’t understand…”
It’s this kind of gibberish that harms science—and it’s precisely why I paid attention to Mooney et al. for about five minutes before realizing a sack of wet hair had more common sense.
Let me add to the general thanks, Peggy. What a depressing clarification.
The irony of Mooney and Kirschenbaum, Science Communicators by avocation, hectoring scientists about how better to convey science to the public is rather staggering. There’s an element of “do our job for us” here that just can’t be ignored.
As a science communicator myself for a couple decades now, I have come to see that there’s an unslaked thirst out in the world for entertaining, non-watered-down science storytelling that pays full respect to the uncertainty and nuance to be found in the real world, and that respects the intellects and curiosities of the readership.
Mooney and Kirschenbaum’s recognition of this thirst, if they have such a recognition, is not well-displayed by the above paragraph.
And — to risk tu quoque — it’s a bit hard to take seriously admonitions about what the public wants in science communication from an industry that’s currently pushing a dinosaur movie set in the Ice Age. Just sayin’.
Setting aside the rightness or wrongness of that particular attack on Dawkins, I find it interesting that they even bothered making it. It looks like they were really reaching for another reason to attack someone they don’t like, and so settled on inventing something out of thin air.
That sounds like Concern Trolling in book form; it’s the classic shut-down of “if you can’t get your point across in a nice, unthreatening, easily ignored manner, then you shouldn’t speak at all.”
I must be getting old and cranky, because I have absolutely no tolerance for that line of argument anymore.
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