Why Science?

David M. Harrison*
Dept. of Physics, Univ of Toronto
Toronto ON M5S 1A7 Canada

This note is based on course notes used to lead a discussion of the importance of science.
The discussion has been successfully used for student motivation in an introductory
course in physics at the University of Toronto. There is no physics content in this note,
and although the subject of physics is prominent, other areas are also discussed. There are
some questions used for stimulating discussion in class, and the answers are discussed at
the end. There are extensive references, indicated by numbered superscripts, if you wish
to learn more.

I. Introduction
In 1600 all educated people in England† believed the following:1

• Witches can summon storms that sink ships at sea.

• Werewolves exist, although there happen to not be any in England. They can be
found in Belgium.
• A murdered body will bleed in the presence of the murderer.
• Mice are spontaneously generated in piles of straw.
• There exists an ointment that, if rubbed on a dagger that has caused a wound, will
cure that wound.
• The shape, color, and texture of a plant can be a clue to how it will work as a
medicine because God designed nature to be interpreted by mankind.
• Nature abhors a vacuum.
• The earth stands still and the sun and stars turn around the earth once every
twenty-four hours.
• Rainbows are a sign from God.
• Dreams predict the future, if we know how to interpret them.
• Letting blood from the patient, which balances the humors in the body, can cure
most illnesses.

By about 1730 an educated person would believe none of these things except for the last
one.‡

*
Email: david.harrison AT utoronto.ca
†
It makes no significant difference if it were someone from any other European country.
‡
We will explore the use of bloodletting later.
 2

It is tempting to dismiss those folks from 1600 as just being stupid. However this seems
wrong: there is no evidence that they were any stupider (or smarter) than we are today.

We will begin by discussing what happened beginning in about 1600.

Question 1. How could all those educated people in 1600 believe all those wrong
things?

II. The Scientific Revolution

What happened beginning in about 1600 is that Galileo, Torricelli, Newton, and others
invented science and the scientific method. This happened largely in Europe. Thus,
although there were contributions from Persia, China, India, and elsewhere, our
discussion is largely Euro-centric. Note that science is taken to be an invention, not a
discovery. The result of the invention is often called the Scientific Revolution. The
English poet Alexander Pope summarised the impact of the revolution nicely in 1730:2

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.

The scientific method involves a cycle of observation, hypothesis, and testing. Figure 1
illustrates.3

Figure 1. The Scientific Method

 3

The invention of science was initially focused on understanding the problem of the
relation between motion and force, i.e. dynamics. Here we will be emphasizing the nature
of the scientific method that led to these advances in understanding. We will then extend
the scientific method to topics beyond dynamics.

Science is based on the beliefs that:4

• The world is intelligible. The phenomena we experience may be explained by

principles that are deeper than the phenomena themselves, and we are capable of
discovering those principles.
• We must allow the world to tell us whether our ideas about it are correct. The
traditional causes of belief – faith, revelation, dogma, authority, common sense –
are generators of error and should be dismissed. Instead we need to let the data
speak to us.

Highly influential in the invention of science was the

Royal Society of London (founded in 1660), whose
motto is “Nullus in Verba” or “Take nobody’s word
for it.Ӥ Instead of accepting the word of the
authorities such as Aristotle, they embarked on a
program of observational experiments.** The
Society’s coat of arms is to the right.

Figure 2. The Royal Society Coat of Arms

Here we will concentrate on classical physics, which is physics before the discovery of
quantum mechanics in the 1920’s. Classical physics makes some assumptions about the
nature of the universe:

• The world is mechanistic, a “clockwork”.

• It is describable by Laws.
• The Laws are mathematical.

Is the universe really like this? It turns out that quantum mechanics calls into question
the first assumption, that the world is mechanistic. Nonetheless, we will assume that the

§
Including your physics professors!
**
The Royal Society also sponsored expeditions of discovery, including the famous
voyages of Captain James Cook to the South Pacific on board the HMS Resolution and
HMS Endeavor. It turns out that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was a big
fan of Captain Cook. Captain Cook was the model for Captain James Kirk on the TV
show, and the mission of the starship Enterprise was much the same as the mission of the
sea ships Resolution and Endeavor.
 4

world really is like a big machine with strict cause and effect governing its behavior. As
we shall see, in our everyday life this assumption is usually very reasonable.

In 1814 Laplace nicely summarised the clockwork nature of the universe:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the
cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces
that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is
composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis,
it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the
universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be
uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Question 2. If Laplace is correct, do you have free will to decide, for example,
whether to study physics tonight or instead go to the movies?

III. Extending the Scientific Method

So far, we have been discussing the scientific method in the context of dynamics. The
basic method and assumptions have been extended to many other fields.

For example, another of Newton’s many contributions is his Law of Gravitation. This
law combined with his laws of motion allowed the first complete description of the
motions of the Earth, moon, the other planets, and the stars. By now the method used is
familiar to us. People have been observing the motion of celestial objects, i.e. doing
observational experiments, for as long as there have been people. Particularly notable for
this story are the data of Tycho Brahe in the late 1500’s. Then in the early 1600’s
Johannes Kepler analysed Brahe’s data and devised three rules that explained the
observations of the motion of the planets. Sometimes these are called Kepler’s Laws of
Planetary Motion, although they are closer to ad hoc rules than full-fledged laws. Then
in 1687 Newton published his Law of Universal Gravitation. This coupled with his laws
of motion explained Kepler’s Laws and much more, including for example, the motion of
the moon around the earth.

The scientific method was also used to achieve a greater understanding of the phenomena
of electricity and magnetism. Here is a brief timeline of some of these developments:5

1550 – 1600: the first truly scientific approach to the study of electricity and
magnetism by William Gilbert.

1750 – 1799: Benjamin Franklin with his famous kite experiment and other forays
into science extends our understanding of electricity.
 5

1800 – 1819: Alessandro Volta invents the first primitive battery, discovering that
electricity can be generated through chemical processes; scientists quickly seize
on the new tool to invent electric lighting.

1820 – 1829: Hans Christian Ørsted’s accidental discovery that an electrical

current moves a compass needle rocks the scientific world; a spate of experiments
follows, immediately leading to the first electromagnet and electric motor.

1830 – 1849: Michael Faraday produces his brilliant and enduring research into
electricity and magnetism.

1850 – 1869: The Industrial Revolution is in full force. Zenobe Gramme invents
the electrical generator. James Clerk Maxwell formulates his series of equations
on electrodynamics, which unified the electric and magnetic interactions into a
single electromagnetic interaction.

1870 – 1879: The telephone and first practical incandescent light bulb are
invented while the word "electron" enters the scientific lexicon.

Surprisingly, one of the last holdouts against the Scientific Revolution was biology. Up
until close to the middle of the 19th century biology was dominated by vitalism, the theory
that the origin and phenomenon of life depend on some force or principle that is different
from purely chemical or physical forces. Then in 1842 four young physiologists signed
an oath repudiating vitalism and vowing to consider only physicochemical forces. It is
called the Reymond-Brucke oath, and they signed it in blood, like pirates. As Jaynes
wrote, “This was the most coherent and shrill statement of scientific materialism up to
that time. And [it was] enormously influential.”6

One of the four physiologists who signed the oath was Hermann von Helmholtz. Shortly
after, he largely moved from physiology to physics, especially biological physics. Five
years after signing the oath, he was one of the first to proclaim the principle of
conservation of energy.

You will recall that earlier in the term we discussed a list of things all educated
Europeans believed in 1600, and that by 1730 nobody believed any of them except one.
The exception was the belief that letting blood from the patient can cure most illnesses.
Once science was accepted as the foundation for biology and medicine, then by the
1860’s Charles Bennett started collecting data that showed that bloodletting was actually
harmful, at least in treating pneumonia. Subsequent studies by Louis, Pasteur, Koch,
Virchow, and others used the new scientific methods for other diseases, and the use of
bloodletting gradually diminished to a few select conditions.7

Here is final example. In the early 1900’s scientific observation led to the discovery of
blood groups by Landsteiner and others. It is estimated that this discovery has since
saved about a billion lives.8
 6

IV. The Enlightenment

The common sense of the eighteenth century, its grasp of the obvious facts of
human suffering, and of the obvious demands of human nature on nature, acted
on the world like a bath of moral cleansing.
- Alfred North Whitehead, 1925

The physical sciences are, of course, concerned with the physical world. As we have
seen, the methodology of the physical sciences was largely developed in the 17th century.
In the 18th century thinkers began to realize that the same process of evidence-based
rational thought could be applied to social issues. This realization is called the
Enlightenment or sometimes The Age of Reason. Steven Pinker describes the shift in
thinking of the Enlightenment this way:

Our [18th century] ancestors replaced dogma, tradition and authority with reason,
debate, and institutions of truth-seeking. They replaced superstition and magic
with science. And they shifted their values from the glory of the tribe, nation,
race, class or faith toward universal human flourishing.9

As Kant put it in 1784: “Dare to know!”10

The consequences of the Enlightenment have been profound. To just choose one
example, the values of the Enlightenment revolutionized the relation between the people
and their government; in the case of the United States and France the revolutions were
literal.

Here is a fairly recent example of how the scientific method has been extended into fields
other than the physical sciences. It is from economics.

Up until about 2000, economists had a standard model of labor that assumed that labor
markets were competitive, and that workers would choose to work where they were paid
more. This meant that companies would only hire as many workers as made financial
sense. An increase in the minimum wage that companies were required to pay their
workers would make labor more expensive, which should translate into lower
employment. Virtually all economists accepted at least the rough outlines of this model
and the conclusion that increasing the minimum wage kills jobs. Note that the main
justification for the storyline of the model is only that it seemed to make sense to the
economists.

In the early 1990’s David Card and Alan Krueger started collecting data on employment
and increases in the minimum wage in the U.S. or in individual states in the U.S. For
example, in 1994 the minimum wage in New Jersey increased from $4.25/hr to $5.05/hr,
while in neighboring Pennsylvania the minimum wage was unchanged at $4.25/hr. Card
and Krueger compared trends in employment in fast-food restaurants on opposite sides of
the border between the two states. From this and similar “natural experiments” involving
other states they concluded that increasing the minimum wage does not kill jobs. They
 7

published their results in a seminal book, Myth and Measurement, in 1995.11 The initial
response was hostile: their motivation, data, and analysis were viciously attacked.
Eventually, however, the attacks were shown to be baseless, their results have been
replicated, and now almost all economists accept that at least moderate increases in the
minimum wage do not reduce employment. So Card and Krueger’s applying of the
scientific method to the question of the minimum wage has changed economics and
politics.

Another example of evidence-based thinking about issues beyond the physical sciences
involves the field of education. Basically we have begun to learn how to apply the
scientific method to the problem of how we learn. Over the past few decades experiments
have been devised whose results indicate which teaching methods are effective and which
are not. These results have caused a revolution in the way we teach. Led by physics (of
course!), the results of the research have been widely adopted by many STEM educators,
and are now spreading even more widely. In physics, the premier journal is The Physical
Review, which has separate sections for different fields of physics; one of those sections
is devoted to Physics Education Research (PER).12

V. The Industrial Revolution

The Scientific Revolution was a gift to us from the 17th century, and the Enlightenment
from the 18th. The 19th century gave us something too: the Industrial Revolution. It was
based on applying the results of science to how we produce the goods that we want or
require, and how those goods are transported from where they are manufactured to where
we wish to use them. It also began a revolution in how we communicate with each other.

For example, in §III – Extending the Scientific Method above we presented a brief
timeline of the development of electricity and magnetism. Many of those items, such as
the electric motor, electrical generator, telephone, and incandescent light bulb, could only
be produced in quantity and widely distributed because of the Industrial Revolution.

The values of the Enlightenment were and continue to be important in insuring that at
least some of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution are available to everybody
worldwide, instead of being totally concentrated in the hands of a very few.

I began §IV – The Enlightenment with a quote from Whitehead. Although I like the
sentiment presented in the quotation, I think his use of the phrase common sense is
unfortunate. As Einstein said in a well-known quote, “Common sense is the collection of
prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”13 In fact, common sense is related to a way of
thinking that is called by the psychologists System 1. It is fast, intuitive, and almost
instantaneous. This is different from System 2, which is slow, deliberative, and involves
reasoning and analysis.14 An example is walking down a sidewalk. If it is a nice day you
can walk along barely paying any attention to where you are placing your feet, where
your next step will be, etc.: your System 1 is in control. However if there has been an ice
storm and the sidewalk is coated in a cm of ice, you are quite conscious and think
 8

carefully about where you step: your System 2 has taken over. In terms of brain
physiology, System 1 is associated with evolutionarily older regions of the brain, while
System 2 occurs in more recently evolved regions.15 We will discuss all this further
below.

VI. Consequences
The scientific method, the results of science, the values of the Enlightenment, and the
Industrial Revolution have combined to have a profound effect on our lives. For example,
worldwide the average life expectancy has more than doubled since at least 1760. Figure
3 illustrates:16

Figure 3. Historical Life Expectancy

Similarly, the fraction of children who die before reaching the age of 5 used to be
between a quarter and a third. It has now plunged by a hundredfold, and the plunge has
been global. Figure 4 illustrates:17 Among the many consequences of the dramatic drop in
child mortality is that parents are now having fewer children, since they no longer have to
hedge their bets against losing their whole families.

Figure 4. Historical Infant Mortality Rates.

 9

There have been similarly dramatic advances in maternal mortality, percentage of people
who are malnourished, people living in extreme poverty, literacy especially female
literacy, and more.18

When he was U.S. President, Barack Obama said in 2016:19

The world today with all its pain and all its sorrow, is more just, more democratic,
more free, more tolerant, healthier, wealthier, better educated, more connected,
more empathetic than ever before.

If you didn’t know ahead of time what your social status would be, what your race
was, what your gender was or sexual orientation was, what country you were
living in, and you asked what moment in history would you like to be born…..
you’d choose right now.

Question 3. Do you agree with Obama?

Of course, there was and continues to be pushback against these advances.

For example, the Romantics, if I understand them, seem to think that the existential angst
of a starving artist living, however briefly, in an unheated garret in Paris is somehow
more authentic. Whatever that means.

Another example is Darwin and Wallace’s 1858 theory of evolution. The fact of
evolution has been confirmed by subsequent scientific studies thousands of times.
Nonetheless, many have refused to accept this reality. Part of this has been due to a
conflict between evolution and various religious tenets. In the U.S. denial of evolution
has been particularly strong by evangelical Christians.20 Today, 34% of Americans reject
evolution entirely.21 Canadians do considerably better: 61% of Canadians think human
beings evolved from simpler life forms.22 But before Canadians can start patting
themselves on their backs, another way to state the statistic is that 39% of Canadians
don’t necessarily think human beings evolved from simpler life forms.

In India the higher-education minister has recently demanded that the theory of evolution
be removed from school curricula because “Darwin’s theory is scientifically wrong.”23
This too has religious overtones, since the current Indian government is governed by the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), whose policies have historically advocated Hindu
nationalist positions.

One pushback against science with literally deadly consequences is the belief by some
parents that vaccinating children causes autism. This is despite a huge amount of publicly
available data that show that this belief is wrong.24 The measles vaccine is estimated to
have saved 120 million lives.25 But today children are dying because their parents refused
to vaccinate them. We will explore this topic further below.
 10

Our final example involves what is almost certainly the single most difficult problem that
we face today: climate change. Again the data are overwhelming that climate change is
real and that human activity is a major cause. The consequences of allowing this to
continue are extremely frightening. Nonetheless, in the US 14% of the people reject the
existence of climate change and 34% reject the idea that it is caused by human
activities.26 Canada is hardly better: nearly a third of Canadians say they’re not convinced
that climate change is being caused by human activity.27 Some of the climate deniers
believe that the whole thing is a massive hoax being perpetrated by climate scientists.

VII. Scientists in Society

As scientists, or at least scientists in training, we have a particular responsibility to use
our expertise to help inform debates on current social issues.

For example, vaccination rates of young children are falling, in large part because of
parent’s fear of a link between vaccinations and autism (ASD).28 Here are some data from
the condensed form of Ref. 24.

Table I. Four-Year Olds With and Without an Older Sibling with ASD

Older Sibling with ASD Number of ASD Cases Sample Size

No 460 91 648
Yes 89 1 878

It is convenient to express the rate r of ASD as the number per 100,000 people. So for
kids without an older sibling with ASD the rate is:

Number of ASD Cases 460

rNo = × 10 5 = × 10 5
Sample Size 91,648 (1)
= 502

As with any result of an experimental measurement, there is an associated uncertainty in

the result. It is reasonable to calculate the uncertainty in the rate, ΔrNo , to be:

Number of ASD Cases

ΔrNo = × 10 5
Sample Size
= 23 (2)

so we write:
rNo = 502 ± 23 (3)

We similarly find that for four-year olds with a sibling with ASD the rate is:
 11

rYes = 4700 ± 500 (4)

Clearly, there is a large correlation in ASD with having an older sibling also with ASD.

A common vaccine used with children is called MMR (mumps, measles, rubella). Here
are some more data from the condensed form of Ref. 24.

Table II. Four-year Olds Without an Older Sibling with ASD

MMR Vaccination Status Number of ASD Cases Sample Size

1 dose 395 79 691
Unvaccinated 65 11 957

For these samples, the rate of ASD for children who have been vaccinated is:

rV = 496 ± 25 (5)

and for unvaccinated children it is:

rU = 544 ± 67 (6)

Note that if we ignore the uncertainties and just look at the values, then rV = 496 and
rU = 544. So the vaccinated children have a slightly lower autism rate than the
unvaccinated ones.

Although the value of rV is smaller than the value rU, they are the same within
uncertainties. The smallest value of rU consistent with its uncertainty is 544 – 67 = 477,
while the largest value of rV, consistent with its uncertainty is 496 + 25 = 521. Since
477 < 521, there is no measured difference in autism rates.

This does not mean that the data proves there is no correlation, only that if such a
correlation exists it is too small to be seen with this experiment.

Increasing the sample sizes would reduce the uncertainties, and perhaps show a very very
small correlation. There are many other experiments on MMR and ASD, and combining
all those results in what is called a meta-analysis has failed to show any correlation.29

The data for children with an older sibling with ASD, which are not shown, show similar
trends.
 12

The belief in a link between vaccinations and ASD is largely due to some fraudulent
science published by Andrew Wakefield in 1998.30 Many other non-scientists, whom I
will not dignify here by naming or referencing, have propagated the belief.

But, if parents who believe in such a link and refuse to vaccinate their children are
confronted with the data such as Table II, the effect is that they believe that vaccinations
cause autism even more strongly!

This is worth repeating: anti-vax parents, when shown the data, cling to their belief even
more.

Question 4. You are talking with a parent who believes that vaccinations cause autism.
What strategy may help you change their mind?

Since the introduction of vaccinations and immunizations over 200 years ago, there has
been pushback against them. As with the rejection of evolution, the pushback has
religious overtones. Some evangelical Christians, for example, claim that diseases are
God’s punishment for our sins, and vaccinations are attempting to thwart God’s will.31 In
some Muslim majority countries, particularly Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, Muslim
fundamentalists are violently resisting vaccination efforts.32 Also, in some ultra-Orthodox
Jewish communities a small number of rabbis are leading anti-vaccination movements.33

There is more to this story than just the tendency of us all to reject data that is in conflict
with our pre-conceptions. We all have biases, and those biases can actually interfere with
how we interpret data. The remainder of this section illustrates this. The discussion is
based on work by Kahan, Peters, Dawson, and Slovic.34

Here are some made up data on the effectiveness of a new skin cream for a sample of
poeple.

Table III. Made Up Data on a Skin Cream Effectiveness.

Rash Improved Rash Got Worse

Used New Skin Cream 223 75
Did Not Use New Skin Cream 107 21

Just from inspection we see that for people using the skin cream about three times as saw
many saw an improvement compared to those who saw their rash get worse. For those
who didn’t use the skin cream, about five times as many people saw an improvement
compared to those who saw their rash get worse.

Put another way, in terms of the total samples, about ¼ = 25% of people who used the
cream saw their rashes get worse, while only about 1/6 = 16% of people who didn’t use
the cream saw their rashes worsen.
 13

The conclusion is that the skin cream is not effective.

When this question was given to a large sample of people in the U.S., most of those who
were numerate†† could correctly answer the question provided they were prompted to
think carefully about it. People who were not numerate couldn’t deal with it at all.

Here are some made up data on gun control and crime rates for a sample of different
regions.

Table IV. Made Up Data on Gun Control and the Crime Rate.

Crime Rate Improved Crime Rate Got Worse

Gun Control 223 75
No Gun Control 107 21

Note that the numbers in the table are the same as for Table III. If this data were real,
then, you would conclude that gun control is not effective.

This data were presented to a large sample of people in the U.S. When given to numerate
right-wing Republicans, most spotted the conclusion that no gun control was better. But
most numerate left-wing Democrats missed this entirely. For the Democrats, their biases
in favor of gun control made them blind to what the data indicate.

Here is another made up dataset on gun control and crime rates. Note that here the
numbers in the two rows have been reversed from the previous dataset.

Table V. More Made Up Data on Gun Control and the Crime Rate.

Crime Rate Improved Crime Rate Got Worse

Gun Control 107 21
No Gun Control 223 75

This data were presented to another large sample of people in the U.S. When given to
numerate left-wing Democrats, most spotted the conclusion that gun control was
effective. But most numerate right-wing Republicans missed this. For the Republicans,
their biases against gun control made them blind to what the data indicate.

Although our example of gun control is in the context of U.S. politics, the conclusion is
much more general: our biases and preconceptions can dramatically impact how we
analyse and interpret data.

Question 5. What can we do about biases and preconceptions influencing the way
that we analyse and interpret data?
††
Numerate means being able to understand and work with numbers. It is for math the
same as the word literate is for the ability to work with written language.
 14

VIII. Conclusions
We have seen that the invention of science and the scientific method had a profound
effect on eliminating superstition in a period of just over 100 years. Applying those
methods to social issues in the Enlightenment had an equally profound effect on the way
that people interact with their governments, and formed a basis for evidence-based public
policy still used today. Applying science to how to produce the goods and services that
we wish or desire in the Industrial Revolution coupled with the values of the
Enlightenment has caused a dramatic increase in the quality of life of people around the
world.

However, it seems that the push-back against these advances has recently been
accelerating. This is in part because of a conflict between the results of science and
various religious tenets. This push-back is also fed in part by the common tendency of all
of us to reject evidence that is in conflict with not only our religious beliefs but also our
non-religious biases and pre-conceptions.

I close with a final example. There is no doubt that one of if not the single most
important problem facing us today is the fact of climate change. Regardless of its cause, it
is vital that we take measures to stop this phenomenon if we are to survive. As of this
writing the most recent report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change emphasizes just how dire the situation has become.35 Further, the 2018 Nobel
Prize in economics was shared by Robert Nordhaus for his work showing that carbon
taxes are an effective way to reduce our production of greenhouse gases; these gases at
least contribute to global warming. And yet, many of the elected leaders of governments
at various levels around the world refuse to accept these conclusions.

Question Answers
These are my answers to the questions that appear above. Your answers may be equally
valid and different from mine.

QUESTION 1

An educated person in 1600 believed that Aristotle (4th century BCE) was the greatest
philosopher who ever lived, and Pliny (1st century CE), Galen and Ptolemy (4th century
CE) were the best authorities on biology, medicine, and astronomy respectively. And, of
course, in matters of faith the authority was the Bible. Although the educated person had
a few books, all these authorities’ ideas were primarily communicated by contemporary
authorities: the professors and priests.

For example, Aristotle in The History of Animals wrote that animals and plants could be
spontaneously generated for certain conditions.36 And since Aristotle was considered to
be infallible, up to about 1600 educated people accepted this without question.
Spontaneous generation was first put to the experimental test in the 17th century by Jan
 15

Baptists von Helmont, William Harvey, and especially Francesco Redi, and was shown
not to occur.

Question 2

If our minds are governed by the same physical-mechanical rules as the physical
universe, then perhaps we do not have free will. We will return to the life sciences and
the scientific method later in this document.

Someone once asked the great psychologist C.G. Jung, “Do we have free will or not?”
Jung wisely replied, “Yes.”

Question 3

If I got to choose things beyond just when, I would be tempted to choose being a straight
white upper-class male in Victorian England, born in about 1860. But choosing 1860 for
any other sexual orientation, race, class, gender, or location would give me a dramatically
lower prospect of living a full and happy life. Lacking such a choice, I would choose
right now.

Question 4

This is a really tough question that many smart people have been thinking about.

One thing that doesn’t work is to begin with “No …”. This will cause your conversation
with the parent to become confrontational, and confrontation seldom if ever changes
anybody’s mind.

Perhaps actors trained in improvisation can point us towards an effective strategy. The
art of improvisation features a dialog founded on “Yes, and” and improv. training
involves lots of practice in this “game”.37 For example, here is a made-up dialog where
we imagine that it is raining.

Person A: It is a lovely day today.

Person B: Yes, and ducks particularly like it when it rains.
Person A: Yes, and ducks go “quack quack” when they are happy.
Person B: Yes, and “quack” is one of my favorite sounds.
Person A: Yes, and …

So perhaps the first thing to say to the parent is, “Yes, and the belief in vaccinations
causing autism is because of some research published by Wakefield in 1998.” Then
maybe a conversation on this important topic can occur.

Question 5

This is at least as difficult as Question 4. Here are some possible ideas.

 16

Earlier I wrote that we must let the data talk to us. However, for the data to communicate
with us we need to listen carefully. Whenever something or someone is talking to us, it is
difficult to listen and hear what it/they is/are actually saying. One aspect of the improv.
“Yes, and” game is that it teaches us to listen to what the other person is saying. There
are some studies that indicate that “Yes, and” type conversations such as were discussed
in the “answer” to Question 4 can be effective.38

Another aspect of this could relate to the System 1 / System 2 ways of thinking discussed
above at the end of §V – The Industrial Revolution. It turns out that many people have
difficulty suppressing an incorrect "gut" System 1 response and engage in further System
2 reflection to find a correct answer. There are some studies that indicate this it is
possible to influence people so that they are more likely to use System 2 in analyzing a
situation.39 Whether or not these methods are generally applicable is still unknown.

Sources and Copyright

All figures in this document are by the author or are used by permission.

This document is Copyright © 2018 David M. Harrison.

Last revision: April 26, 2019.

This document is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0

International license (CC BY-NC 4.0). Basically, you are free to use and adapt this
document for any non-commercial purpose. You may see a summary of the license at:

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

References
1
All but the last of these is from D. Wooton, The Invention of Science: A New History of
the Scientific Revolution (Harper, 2015), pg. 1.
2
A. Pope, “Epitaph Intended for Sir Isaac Newton,” (1730).
3
This is similar to a figure by E. Raeon, https://raeonscience.weebly.com/the-scientific-
method.html (Retrieved Oct. 18, 2018). A more complete and accurate figure is Figure
1.3 of E. Etkina, G. Planinsic, and A. Ven Heuvelen, College Physics: Explore and
Apply, 2nd ed. (Pearson, 2019), 4.
4
Paraphrased from S. Pinker, Englightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science,
Humanism, and Progress (Viking 2018), pg. 392 – 393.
5
Based on https://nationalmaglab.org/education/magnet-academy/history-of-electricity-
magnetism/timeline
 17

(Retrieved April 21, 2018).

6
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
(Mariner, 2003), pg. 437.
7
See, for example G. Greenstone, “The history of bloodletting,” BC Medical Jour. 52(1),
(2010), pg. 12. http://www.bcmj.org/premise/history-bloodletting (Retrieved Apr. 24,
2018).
8
Ref. 4 pg. 64.
9
S. Pinker, “The Enlightenment Is Working,” Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9, 2018.
10
I. Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” available at:
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html
11
D. Card and A. Krueger, Myth and Measurement (Princeton University Press, 1995). A
popular level introduction to their work is “Free Exchange: Natural Talent,” The
Economist 430 (9135), March 23, 2019, pg. 70.
12
https://journals.aps.org/prper/
13
For example https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/albert_einstein_125365 (Retrieved
Apr. 23, 2018).
14
See, for example, D. Kahnemann, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Anchor, 2013).
15
See, for example, R.M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and
Worst (Penguin, 2017).
16
Figure 5-1 of Ref. 4, pg. 54. This figure was supplied by Prof. Pinker.
17
Figure 5-2 of Ref. 4, pg. 56. This figure too was supplied by Prof. Pinker.
18
See, for example Ref. 8, passim.
19
Obama expressed this idea a number of times. This example is from a BBC 2
interview “Inside Obama’s White House – The Arc of History” (April 5, 2016) and
quoted in: http://sustainable-schools-alliance.org.uk/if-you-could-choose-when-to-be-
born-youd-choose-right-now/ (Retrieved April 22, 2018).
20
For example F. FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon
& Shuster, 2017), passim.
21
Pew Research Center, “For Darwin Day, 6 facts about the evolution debate,” Feb. 23,
2015 and since updated: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/10/darwin-day/
(Retrieved April 23, 2018).
22
Huffington Post Canada, “Believe in Evolution: Canadians More Likely Than
Americans to Endorse Evolution,” (June 9, 2012).
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/09/06/believe-in-evolution_n_1861373.html
(Retrieved Apr. 23, 2018).
23
For example The Guardian, “Indian education minister dismisses theory of evolution”,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/23/indian-education-minister-dismisses-
theory-of-evolution-satyapal-singh (Retrieved April 23, 2017).
24
For example, A. Jain, J. Marshall, A. Bulkema, T. Bancroft, J.P. Kelly, and C.J.
Newschaffer, “Autism Occurrence by MMR Vaccine Status Among US Children With
Older Siblings With and Without Autism,” Jour. Amer. Med. Assoc. 313(15), (April 21,
2015), pg. 1535. http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2275444 The data
here have been somewhat condensed in D.M. Harrison, Question 2 of “Uncertainty in
Physical Measurements Module 4 – Repeated Measurements,” (2014).
https://practicals.physics.utoronto.ca/practicals/document/57/
 18

25
Ref. 4, pg. 64.
26
J. Marlon, P. Howe, M. Mildenberger, and A. Leisoritz, “Yale Climate Opinion Maps –
U.S. 2016,” http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us-
2016/?est=happening&type=value&geo=county (Retrieved Apr. 23, 2018).
27
P. Zimonjic, CBC News, “Nearly a third of Canadians don’t believe humans, industry
‘mostly’ cause climate change: poll,” (Apr. 4, 2018).
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poll-abacus-carbon-tax-1.4603824 (Retrieved Apr. 23,
2018).
28
For example, here is some U.S. data from the Center for Disease Control:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6740a4.htm?s_cid=mm6740a4_w
(Retrieved Oct. 16, 2018).
29
L.E. Taylor, A.L. Swerdfeger, and G.D. Eslick, “Vaccines are not associated with
autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies,” Vaccine
32(29), (June 2014), pg. 3623.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X14006367?via=ihub
(Retrieved Apr. 26, 2018).
30
For example an editorial “Wakefield’s article linking MMR vaccine and autism was
fraudulent,” BMJ (originally British Medical Journal) 342, (6 January 2011) 7452.
https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c7452
31
See, for example, A. Hussain, S. Ali, M. Ahmed, and S. Hussain, “The Anti-
vacinnation Movement: A Regression in Modern Medicine,” Cureus 10(7), (2018) e2919.
https://dx.doi.org/10.7759%2Fcureus.2919 (Retrieved April 28, 2019).
32
See, for example, “Cultural Perspectives on Vaccination,” The History of Vaccines
(2018). https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/articles/cultural-
perspectives-vaccination (Retrieved April 28, 2019).
33
See, for example, M. Friedman, “My Fellow Hasidic Jews Are Making a Terrible
Mistake About Vaccinations,” New York Times, (April 24, 2019) A23.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/my-fellow-hasidic-jews-are-making-a-
terrible-mistake-about-vaccinations.html (Retrieved April 26, 2019).
34
D.M. Kahan, E. Peters, E.C. Cantrell, and P. Slovic, “Motivated numeracy and
enlightened self-government,” Behavioural Public Policy 1(1), (2017) 547. A
https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2016.2. A popular level discussion is E. Klein, “How politics
makes us stupid, Vox, Apr. 6, 2014.
https://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid
35
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ (Retrieved Oct. 16, 2018).
36
Aristotle, The History of Animals Book V, Part 1, available at:
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.5.v.html (Retrieved May 1, 2018).
37
A favorite example is by Tina Fey, BossyPants (Reagan Arthur Books, 2011). An
except is: https://kicp-workshops.uchicago.edu/eo2014/pdf/Tina-Feys-rules-of-
improv.pdf (Retrieved Oct. 16, 2018).
38
For example D. Brockman and J. Kalla, “Durably reducing transphobia: A field
experiment on door-to-door canvassing, Science 352(6282), (2016) 220.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6282/220. A popular level discussion of this
work is B. Danizet-Lewis, “How Do You Change Voter’s Minds? Have a Conversation,”
New York Times, (April 7, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/magazine/how-
 19

do-you-change-voters-minds-have-a-conversation.html. See also M. Koerth-Baker, “Why

Politicians Don’t Always Listen to Political Scientists,” FiveThirtyEight (Oct. 18, 2018).
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-politicians-dont-always-listen-to-political-
scientists/
39
A.L. Alter, D.M. Oppenheimer, and N. Epley, “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive
Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning,” Jour. Expt. Psych. General 136(4), (2007) 569.
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~aalter/intuitive.pdf