Evolution and Public Relations

I’m coming to this conversation about two weeks late. But it’s one that I wanted to hit on. A while back, Randy Olson showed up over at The Loom and left comments on things evolutionary biologists should do to improve communication with the general public. As you may recall, Olson is the maker of the film Flock of Dodos.

Olson’s list basically boils down to the following ten points:

1. Quality Control — put greater effort into raising the quality of evolution education materials. Boring science presentations to the general public get ignored.
2. Attitude — in the public battle, don’t call your opponents idiots. You lose credibility and people stop listening.
3. Concision — the shorter and more concise your message, the more likely people are to listen to it and remember it.
4. Modernization — the modern world gets its information from television. Embrace that medium and use it. Don’t put emphasis into writing at the expense of TV communication
5. Prioritization — communication costs real money, and we’d better budget at least a little bit for communication, instead of viewing it as an afterthought to real science.
6. Understanding — intellectuals are trained to think, not act. Olson suggests learning to better act for your audience. Essentially, he’s saying you have to understand that your audience is not “intellectual” in the same way a college class is intellectual.
7. Risk Taking/Innovation — don’t fall into the trap of having a boring and completely homogenous argument.
8. Humor – lighten up evolutionists. The guy who’s funny is the guy who’s listened to.
9. Unscripted Media and the Mass Audience — be more spontaneous. The guy who pulls his notes and reads verbatim is not as interesting as the guy who can shoot from the hip and actually say something worth hearing.
10. Sincerity — have passion and let that passion show that you care.

This list ended up creating a little bit of controversy. More than one blogger was upset with his suggestions. PZ Myers of Pharyngula in particular wrote:

Maybe it’s my own high dork factor talking, but I’m not too receptive to people telling me I need movie star qualities to be able to support science, or that we have to pander to superficial sensibilities to communicate a message. Our strengths are depth, intelligence, evidence, history, the whole damn natural world, and just plain having the best and most powerful explanation for its existence. Don’t tell us to dumb it down and glitz it up—I think people should be smart enough to understand it, and there’s grandeur enough in it that dressing it up in rhinestones is just silly. We need to know how to communicate real science, not Hollywood cartoon science, to people.

I like Olson’s comments in so far as they’re a suggestion that someone needs to tackle these points, not everyone. It should be obvious that science will have popularizers. Carl Sagan was an excellent popularizer. Ken Miller is one today.

Popularizers must — more or less — meet Olson’s challenge. The magic of our genes is really cool. Explaining the chemical composition of cytosine, guanine adenine, and thyamine (the four bases in DNA) isn’t going to sway many in the general public. In the same way, if faced with a lay audience, we should tailor our message about evolution to try and hit the high points that capture people’s interest and avoid losing their interest. We have a real challenge. Some of the concepts are not light and fluffy. We also have a public (at least a large segment of it) that’s opposed to the idea from the start.

That doesn’t mean we can’t use the suggestions above to try and better connect with our audience.