It is a truth universally acknowledged that the closer you get to finishing your degree, the further you get to finishing that book that has been dog-eared on the same page for the last month.The time to read a book seems to get harder and harder as the years go on. As our burgeoning fresher’s have yet to learn; all the reading you do in your final year is exclusively for your degree. But what if there’s a way you can do both, read for pleasure and read for good educational measure? What if you could avoid the overwhelming work-guilt you feel when you so much as read a chapter of that new Taylor Jenkins Reid book everyone is talking about? Enter popular science. I’m not talking about science for dummies books (although at this rate, I need all the help I can get). Popular science spans a wide variety of different non-fiction texts, but they all intend to make science accessible for the general public. To delve deeper into popular science, I sat down with geneticist, neuroscientist, and author, Dr. Kevin Mitchell, to hear what he had to say about writing and communicating scientific discoveries and concepts to a wider audience.
What do you think is challenging about writing in your field in particular?
KM: “My field is kind of funny because it’s very interdisciplinary. It’s a mix of neuroscience, genetics, psychology, evolution, physiatry, and sometimes veering into philosophy, especially with my latest book. The challenge for me is getting to grips with all that stuff, but my career has fortunately spanned those areas. And then, of course, the other challenge is communicating that. The interesting thing is that most scientists are so specialised that to communicate the genetics, say, to those specialised in neuroscience is effectively the same as communicating it to the general educated public. In fact that’s how I got into writing for the general public, through writing interdisciplinary stuff within science. But in order to do that you just can’t assume anything. So the way you end up approaching the communication is by just writing for the general intelligent reader who doesn’t happen to know the stuff that you do happen to know so then you can tell them about it. The challenge with ‘my field’ or trying to cover lots of different areas is that you end up having to give background knowledge on a load of stuff before you even delve into any of the main points in the book because you’ve run out of words! Background knowledge ends up becoming your book.
There’s a fine balance between introducing ideas on a need-to-know basis, stripping out an overload of detail. But having said that, there’s some cases where you do have to put more detail in so that the reader will really get it and not just feel like they’ve got it because you kind of glossed over it or didn’t give a concrete example.
To tie in with all that, another challenge with writing the books I do, which are aimed at a broad audience, is that they’re also trying to do some specific science work. They are academic books and academics expect detail in the form of footnotes and references for everything you’re saying among many other things, whereas most readers can’t tolerate that as it just becomes highly unreadable, so you just have to make a choice. And you have to be willing to have your academic colleagues criticise you because it’s not properly referenced.”
“So you have to make it readable, and you have to think about the narrative. A lot of science books either describe the personal stories of the individual who carried out the work or some kind of anecdote that you can derive a lesson from”
How important is readability when it comes to writing about science?
KM: “Readability is how it comes across, it’s how clarity manifests itself. It is the clarity and the work that has been done in stripping out the extraneous details, or the little tangents, or the qualifiers, asides, and caveats that normally pepper academic writing. When we as scientists are reading academic papers, we do that filtering all ourselves. We learn how to sift through it or filter through it a bit more and our eyes are almost trained now to not see these references so as not to interrupt the flow of our reading.
So you have to make it readable, and you have to think about the narrative. A lot of science books either describe the personal stories of the individual who carried out the work or some kind of anecdote that you can derive a lesson from; you see that all the time in popular psychology books. It has to have a human interest hook. Personally, I don’t particularly like that model myself and I don’t write that way, so when I say ‘you have to think about the narrative’ I don’t mean it in that way. I think the hook is the idea, but you still need to have a narrative around the idea so that people can follow and so that it has a flow.”
“The scientific literature is full of stuff that is wrong, that’s just the harsh truth of it. When science journalists pick up stories and they get into the popular arena or when scientists themselves write books that lean on studies that aren’t well done or best practice science, then things just get out there and stick”
Can there be a case where you make the content so relatable or almost too accessible to the point that it becomes a misrepresentation of the research?
KM: “I think that can absolutely be the case. That issue can arise if you’re oversimplifying to the point of being wrong. There’s a difference between synthesising and explaining the big principles that you know are well supported by lots of stuff in that field and making simplistic claims that you know are not well supported in the field. So that’s a matter of having a wide knowledge of a field so you can see what the settled understanding is. I think there’s a lot of books out there that just rely on individual studies. A lot of popular psychology books are like that but they’ll phrase it as a general rule whereas if you look at it, they’re saying that this one study of 20 people with this teeny tiny effect size, and was never replicated or if it was replicated the results weren’t same, because it’s an inadequate attempt at a scientific study. But suddenly it becomes this fact. And that’s a danger I think, because particular findings are then presented as facts with implications and then you’re several steps away from the actual study that was done but you’re left with these implications that seem huge. I think that’s a big challenge.”
“What we can present is our provisional understanding of a topic. At least that’s what I try to do, present our provisional understanding in the round and not focus on any individual studies in particular; big picture stuff. And that picture is subject to change, and that’s our best understanding right now. To me that’s just honest, because it shows science as a process that is ongoing.”
KM: “It’s a problem with the scientific literature. The scientific literature is full of stuff that is wrong, that’s just the harsh truth of it. When science journalists pick up stories and they get into the popular arena or when scientists themselves write books that lean on studies that aren’t well done or best practice science, then things just get out there and stick. For example, there’s an idea that psychological trauma can be passed on through generations by epigenetics (‘intergenerational inheritance/ intergenerational trauma’) . It’s very well known and lots of people would say they are of that view, or say that ‘that is a fact’. The truth of it is that this idea or so-called ‘fact’ relies on these very famous studies, such as those done in the aftermath of the Dutch Hunger Winter, but when you look back at those studies, they’re terrible and are prime examples of ‘bad science’ and reproducibility of research.
It’s much easier to market a book that makes sensational claims about trauma being inherited than it is to market one which suggests socioeconomic or cultural conditions in societies are inherited transgenerationally and really do make a big difference, more so than epigenetics could. There’s not always a need to make it scientifically valid and you shouldn’t have to lean on DNA methylation to convince people that poverty exists and it’s an intergenerational cycle that people can’t just get out of with great ease. In a way It’s trivialising real sociocultural phenomena and saying these issues can be reduced to molecular biology. There’s a tendency to think science just shows us the truth, and only the truth, that it is entirely objective 100% of the time. What people don’t often realise is that we’re always bringing some kind of assumptions, a certain set of beliefs, thoughts about what’s important to the design of scientific experiments and to their interpretation. And that applies to everything from quantum physics to mapping neurons in the brain. We, as scientists but more obviously as humans, are always doing some sort of philosophy whether we know we are or not”.
It seems that in the last few hundred years, science and philosophy have formed two separate branches, each refusing to recognise any attempt at re-amalgamation; though many have been made.
KM: “In philosophy, they’re not trying to get answers, it’s trying to get more questions. It’s trying to say what are the questions we should be asking, and can we clarify them and make the necessary distinctions that allow us to think clearly about whatever it is exactly. And for some of those kinds of questions the scientific method can provide some answers, which is great but the scientific method by itself if it’s not informed by clearly thought out questions is not doing any good work either”.
“It would be great if the general public and science journalists in particular were better educated on what makes good scientific study and what doesn’t”
The bridge between science and philosophy makes me consider more about whether the bridge between academic science and popular science is wider than we would imagine it or like it to be. This leads me to ask the question: Who are popular science books really for?
KM: “I think it varies a lot. Some popular science books are written more with experts in mind and then some are written more with the general public in mind. I think my own work is, I hope, somewhere in the middle. I think a lot about my parents when I’m writing. They’re educated people who are interested in lots of things as everyone is and if they can understand what’s in the book then I’m happy, I’ve hit that sweet spot and I’m satisfied that anyone in the general public could understand it. Whether they can analyse it critically or evaluate it, is a trickier thing because in order for you to be able to really evaluate the claims you’d need to already be aware of the specific data, the pitfalls of certain pieces of data and the initial sources of information or discovery like research papers, which is not something that is entirely accessible for the general public.”
“It would be great if the general public and science journalists in particular were better educated on what makes good scientific study and what doesn’t. So many of the studies that make it to the papers, they have certain characteristics that are easy to write about. They tend to be stand-alone studies, they’re not one small thing that’s part of a massive background of research. They’re just studies that say our results prove ‘x’, therefore we have conclusive evidence for ‘y’ phenomenon, hence we can close up shop and go home, we found the answer. They’re stand-alone so the journalist doesn’t have to know any background and the readers don’t have to have any background. Those are the ones that tend to get reported because they’re easy to understand and the journalists don’t have a good enough grounding to ask whether this was replicated elsewhere, what are the criticisms among experts, how many people in the sample size. They just read the headline and go from there. It’s understandable because most scientific studies are not news, they’re not an event that happened, it’s not always considered a sensational discovery by non-experts. In that way, I think a lot of science journalism is better suited to a magazine format, where there are feature articles about a general topic, for example – ‘Agency’ and what is the science behind that. With this format they can read a bunch of stuff and give this overall picture and not just talk about one study.”
Evidently, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with mixing both academia and pleasure; though the way in which the work is then served up to the public as a digestible scientific meal must remain an important aspect of consideration. So don’t hesitate to pick up that dog-eared work of popular science that’s been sitting on your table since the dawn of time, it may reveal itself as the best guide for the beginnings of exploration into the jungle that is scientific literature. But be wary of the sneaky beasts that are misrepresentation and misinformation, for they can suffocate you like a python with dishonesty, duplicity and deception.
