364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the things that I often uh rant about a little bit when I'm talking about science education, uh, how we teach science. in elementary school, secondary school, undergraduates. I I do try to say I'm not an expert on the field of science education, and I do think that uh experts deserve a voice here. So I have a limited set of things that I'm willing to rant about. But one of them is that we sort of teach the product of science and not the process of science. As we'll talk about in today's podcast, our guest today is Stuart Feierstein, and he he brings up a good analogy. It's like you're teaching a a history course.

Imagine you you have an art course in uh your secondary school in your high school or whatever, and all they do is show you works of fine art. They don't actually teach you how to paint in your art course, right? Imagine you were trying to learn piano and your piano teacher just showed you a bunch of or let made you listen to a bunch of beautiful piano solos. You're not being taught the process of doing it. In the science courses that we teach, you're given facts. F equals MA, you know, here are the different kinds of rocks. Here is the way that natural selection happens or whatever, and then you're tested on your knowledge of the facts. But the process of doing science is so different than that. And I do think that uh our

inability to get across the process, even if people aren't gonna grow up to be scientists, has led to a real public misunderstanding. Of how science works. Science is not about facts. You know, facts are the output. That that's true, but we have along the way a whole bunch of Ignorance and failure and things we don't know the answer to. And it's important to appreciate both. what we have learned and what we have not yet.

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