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  3. (1) History is riddled with science denial. From Newton’s law of gravitation

(1) History is riddled with science denial. From Newton’s law of gravitation

游客2023-10-21  83
问题     (1) History is riddled with science denial. From Newton’s law of gravitation to Hanaoka Seinshu’s use of anesthesia, there’s no shortage of discoveries that have been scoffed at, ridiculed, and wholly rejected by prominent thinkers before eventually settling into the human narrative. But too often, significant damage is done—and sometimes lives are lost—while these debates play out. After centuries of dismissing scientific discoveries, only to be proven wrong time and again, you’d think we’d learn to have a little more faith in the experts.
    (2) In the era of social media, around-the-clock cable news, and Donald Trump, preventing the spread of misinformation has become one of the greatest challenges facing the scientific community. That’s especially true when it comes to politics. On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, science journalist and author Dave Levitan calls out some of Washington’s worst offenders.
    (3) Levitan has spent countless hours pouring over statements made by politicians about science. Sometimes our leaders get the facts right. But frequently, says Levitan, they distort, misrepresent, or fabricate the data in order to pander to their audience or push an agenda. That’s the subject of Levitan’s forthcoming book, Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science.
    (4) While misleading rhetoric is nothing new in politics, the danger it poses to environmental and public health may be at an all-time high. In a country where scientific literacy is already in decline, misinformation about topics as significant as climate change or infectious diseases can have devastating consequences. Yet many politicians, purposely or not, continue to get the science wrong. Levitan points to Sen. James Inhofe as an example of the perfect "denier-in-chief." Last year, Inhofe brought a snowball to the Senate floor to dispute the science of global warming. His implication: Because there was snow on the ground, the Earth couldn’t possibly be getting warmer. It was a classic display of a cherry-picking politician using a single data point to obscure an indisputable trend.
    (5) Two years ago, as Sen. Rand Paul was gearing up to run for president, he slammed the National Institutes of Health for funding research on fruit flies. "Have you seen what the NIH spends money on?" Paul said, according to the Washington Post. "Nine hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars spent to discover whether or not male fruit flies would like to consort with younger female fruit flies." When you put it like that, the NIH sounds ridiculous. But Paul missed the mark completely. As Levitan wrote at the time:
    (6) The characterization of the project as simply testing "whether male fruit flies like younger female fruit flies" is misleading. The study was in fact part of ongoing work looking into olfaction and other sensory perception, the aging process and how it relates to sexual and social activity. A paper that came out of the same line of inquiry appeared in the prestigious journal Science in 2013, showing that exposure to female pheromones without the opportunity to mate actually decreased male flies’ life spans. In short, sexual reward "specifically promoted healthy aging, " according to Scott Pletcher (the scientist whose research Paul was criticizing). "His lab’s work could yield insights both into how humans age and into aging-related diseases… Paul is entitled to his opinions on where government funds are best spent, but the study of flies has yielded important benefits to human health."
    (7) Misrepresenting research is "a way to get people to not want the government to spend money, " Levitan says. "The effect, though, is that people don’t understand the importance of basic science research."
    (8) Of course, scientists share the burden of communicating their findings clearly, but most of them don’t have the public megaphones that elected officials do. "Politicians have a lot of responsibility, " Levitan says. "They’re the ones legislating and governing where money goes and what science actually can get done. Some random scientist can’t just decide he’s going to give a speech and everyone will watch."
    (9) In the end, Levitan offers voters a simple way to sift through the BS: Have a healthy degree of skepticism when politicians talk about science. "If they’re making fun of basic research, " he says, "they’re probably wrong." And his advice to the politicians; Let the scientific consensus be your talking point. (本文选自 Newsweek) [br] It can be inferred from the last two paragraphs that________.
选项 A、scientists are sometimes forbidden to tell the truth
B、politicians have more control over public propaganda
C、time has come for scientists to educate their audience
D、it is immoral for politicians to attack basic science
答案 B
解析 推断题。原文第八段第一句指出，虽然科学家们也有传达其科学发现的责任，但是由于他们中大多数不是官员，没有那样的公共话语权，因此莱文坦说“政治家们有很大的责任”，其原因就是他们对公共传播具有更强的控制力，因此B为答案。科学家们难以传播科学信息的原因，在作者看来是他们公众话语权有限，而不是被禁止讲真话，故排除A；作者并没有提到是否应该解决科学家公共话语权有限的问题，C在原文中没有依据，故排除；最后一段中谈到了应该如何面对有关基础科学的信息的问题，他对大众的建议是要有质疑精神，对政治家们的建议是不要拿基础科学开玩笑，正面采用科学共识作为自己的论据，并没有提到道德问题，故排除D。
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