… Science is not a philosophy or a religion. It is a method—imperfect, yet powerful—of testing and accumulating knowledge. It’s not something you believe. You can believe that the scientific method is a good way of amassing knowledge. You can use that knowledge to shape policy.
Yet that’s not how American politics—especially in this election—talk about science. “When people say ‘Do you believe in climate change or global warming,’ that is the wrong framing,” says Cristine Russell, a veteran science reporter now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Science is not a belief system.”
My first success as a writer occurred when I was about 15 and won a contest sponsored by Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences for a paper about photomicrographs I had taken of life in a nearby pond. I claim only to be scientifically literate, butI have begun to notice that a lot of people are not even that.
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