Scientific Writing

I found this week’s readings very intriguing even though I am not a science person. In fact, the only science I was ever good at was biology and I think that’s because my lab partner was too scared to dissect anything, so I had to do it all. But I don’t think that my personal interest or feelings towards science affects my perception of the importance of advances in science and technology. I think that Lisa Dellwo hit on this a little bit in her blog Why Scientists (Should) Blog.

Dellwo talks about people not understanding what a scientist is and what they do. I don’t know the true definition of a scientist but I know that what they do is important. Most of the advances we have in our society originate from a scientific standpoint. Yet, most people still don’t make scientific and technological advancements important either in their personal life or on the news, as Dellwo also pointed out. In an interview Dellwo had with Rick MacPherson, interim executive director and conservation programs director at the Coral Reef Alliance, he said this about the public’s negative comments on science blogs: “the negative commenters are evidence that the general public doesn’t understand the evidence-based nature of science. People don’t understand how science works; it’s not a democratic process. . . . not opinions.” To me, this quote shows that scientific research is not driven by the process of discourse but rather by need and necessity. MacPherson stated that science is evidence based and because of this, I think that scientific research might be instigated by conversations but I don’t think it driven by them.

Bouncing off of the idea of research and the driving force behind it, the other article we read Will We Ever … Talk to Dolphins goes into the methodology behind researching into interspecies communication. The article dove into past interspecies communication researching methods, what worked, and what didn’t work. For the prompt this week, I don’t think any other information on the article is important but that fact that there is an article our there is more important to address.

The fact that both readings for this week were available online to anyone shows that scientists do communicate with us “non-science folk.” They tell us things that we might not understand without intense and lengthy explanations so that we can know what new things are being research and discovered in the scientific community. I would say that this is somewhat a responsibility, to make known this information, but I think that it is more of a courtesy. These scientists aren’t required to give any information of what they are doing to the public, yet they do. They want people to be informed and make their decisions on issues based on the facts rather than out of ignorance.