If you can believe it, a 1999 Gallop poll showed 6 percent of Americans thought the 1969 moon landing was a hoax. A 2016 poll conducted by the National Science Board found that 27 percent of respondents incorrectly believed the sun revolves around the Earth. Recent surveys have also shown that between 1 and 2 percent of people believe the Earth is flat.
Such false beliefs are understandable. This is what can happen in a large country with unequal education, growing skepticism or outright hostility to institutions, and misinformation and disinformation spread with accelerating technological ease targeted to splintered audiences with shrinking attention spans.
As we have seen, false beliefs about the legitimacy of elections or the dangers of a global pandemic can carry dire consequences. For example, people who have been skeptical about the efficacy of masks to slow the spread of COVID-19 often point to the shifting advice offered by public health experts. Or they bring up one or more proposed treatment that ultimately proved ineffective or unsafe. They ask: Why believe them now when they said something else earlier?
This is a valid question. Here is the answer: This is how science evolves and works. Following the science is how this pandemic will end. And science is where we need to continue placing our trust.
To clarify, I primarily mean science as a discipline. It’s the method you might have learned about in grade school, in which hypotheses are tested to determine a series of facts that might align into a theory and explain something about how our world works. Notably, this doesn’t always work in a straight line. New knowledge can replace prior understanding. Progress is the point.
Following the science is how this pandemic will end. And science is where we need to continue placing our trust.
I also mean science as a collective endeavor, practiced by individuals and institutions around the world in pursuit of knowledge and — in the case of medical science — the capacity to improve and save lives. And this too can get messy. People make mistakes, experimental designs can be faulty, and findings from different labs can contradict.
But this structure — the systematic, careful pursuit of verifiable facts — offers our only path forward. Disagreement, unexpected results, collaboration, complexity, inspiration, innovation. These are both the tools and products of an endeavor that dates to the first humanoids capable of questioning something about themselves and their environment.
Science is why we have multiple safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines. It is why we know that masks and physical distancing help prevent the spread of the virus behind this terrible disease. It is how we landed on the moon and currently navigate our planet with phones connected to orbiting satellites. It is how Aristotle determined the Earth was spherical more than 2,300 years ago.
Science is how Women’s Health Research at Yale has uncovered critical aspects about the health of women and sex-and-gender differences that make lives better for everyone. And we must continue to make science better. Not because scientists are always correct or should replace elected leaders to make policy decisions. But because we and our leaders should make decisions based on the best available information. And for that, science is the best source.