#policiy

Spring/Hamami/Blüte - Its at this time of the year when one of my home’s natural beauties comes into place. The vast orchards of old fruit trees bloom and fascinate with their fine white and purple flowers. IN recent years its been promoted as the swabian hamami with the emphasis to recognize the beauty but also the danger. MOre and more trees are being ut down which is atrributed to the chanegs in the farming landscape. National and european agropolicies have lead strong industrialisation of farming which forces farmers to intensify further and further. Caring for old fruit trees which are in the way when mowing the lawns is not possible as they need to be cut, the fruit collected and replaced when sick. 

This policy was also designed to drive out the former model where much more small farmers were in place. My grandparents on both sides were farmers, they produced for their own living and made a little extra on the surplus goods they produced. THey planted the apple varieties they liked to eat tasty apples, bake cakes and make Most -the german cider. Today almost noone wants to do that anymore - and can’t as it is basically self-subsidized farming - food in the supermarket is way cheaper. 

Interestingly the EU even subsidized to care for apple trees - getting those subsidies as an individual however is a lot of work due to the beurocratic process it involves. If we made it easier for individuals to get a decent amount which covers their costs without too much hustel we could probably encourage more people to care for some trees by making subsidies easily accessible for individuals. 

The talk was opened with the statement that out of more than 600 members of parliament in Britain there was only one research scientist (Julian Huppert - the Cambridge MP,of course) and only a total of three science PhD holders (not counting medical doctors) and how this was an underrepresentation compared to lawyers and other professions. However, scientists does not really strike me as being underrepresented for society as a whole. 

While science and its representation through the media, blogs, social networks etc. have created vast public interest in science (whatever science actually means), the political process has been slow to adopt science in spite of calls for evidence based politics and that politicians and civil service are fairly removed from scientific thinking. While not being hostile to science, they approach politics from a different angle thinking more in terms of opinion polls and making the evidence fit the story rather than the other way around. He also said that the big understanding besides science and policy is that if policy makers look towards science they often want solutions, but all science can offer is probabilities or potential risks, as was seen during the recent Icelandic volcano eruptions.  

This led to Mark's central call that scientists should get involved in the political process: They should communicate their findings to the public, should lobby for reasonable politics that affect their field of research and should join political groups and parties in order to have direct influence. He also said that while humanities students (him having been a history undergrad at Oxford himself) have time to build political networks during university, science students are more busy and then later feel uncomfortable to engage in politics. 

With this I totally agree: Everyone who thinks that he has something to say, should try to get heard, may he be a scientist or whatever. But then this is just common sense. It is also common sense that the political process is more than just science, especially if science and only deliver probabilities. Making policy is a complex process with many stake-holders, personal and public consequences etc.

But then so is "science". Whenever people talk about science in general they adopt either a "cheerleader" (HOORAY, science/technology creates jobs) or "sceptic" (those scientist are part of a deliberate scam to take our hard earned money and determine how we should live) attitude. I think we should knowledge that there is no science in general: There is a theoretical process of gaining knowledge that is executed by groups of humans with all the interpersonal implications of the political process. I don't think that there is any way of lumping together all facets of research, technology, natural science etc. together. In addition to this: my seat neighbor remarked that the interaction between science and policy is very unique to different countries. 

One of my questions is: Would politics run by geeks be better than policies made by politicians? I am not convinced. In the end it has the same appeal as technocratic governments. There is a problem --> apply some science wizardry --> optimal solution. This cannot work! There needs to be a sort of open process, in which all perspectives are seen and in which the view of scientists in only one of them. And to be fair in the Q&A this was clarified by Mark with a crass example: A mandatory 6 pm curfew would significantly reduce crime, yet such a policy is not desired for other reasons. What matters is accountability of governments to their voters and to the public. 

I just read an interesting piece on Realclimate.org, ab blog anybody who is interested in Climate Science and the communication about it, should have in their feed reader.

So What’s A Teacher to Do?  Eugenie Scott (National Center for Science Education) asks, when scientific facts and concepts that are generally accepted in the science community, like climate change and evolution, are labeled "controversial issues" that should be avoided in the class room.

Communicating science to a public audience is incredibly hard, because scientists are used to be dealing with complex topics. And we all  know science is complicated: There is experiments or studies, data is presented that will always be incomplete and that then has to be used in order to draw conclusions from it by either adding to existing theories, modifying them or scrapping them all together. 

Media and the class room don't work like this, and they shouldn't. It seems tempting to demand that media and schools ought to send people on their own discovery for facts and understanding, but in the end schools must teach what is generally accepted as it is not possible to fit 2000 years of scientific endeavor into a few years of classes. Similarly, the news media must make a selection on what they present to the consumer. As always all selection is subjective on the perception of importance and the goals of the people who select. 

Therefore it is crucial that science education in school must enable students to understand scientific arguments on top of facts and scientific principles and how to make a selection on their own from the multitude of particular interests that claim to be the truth.