Teaching Skeptical Inquiry

A new political season is upon us, and surely it will provide plenty of new examples for me to use during my first week of class. For more than two decades, I have spent at least the first week of my introductory biology course discussing human population growth, its underlying causes, and its environmental ramifications. I always begin with the website www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html (along with an overhead of the same page on the first day of the previous semester). This leads to a discussion of: what the numbers mean (expressed down to the unit level) and just how reliable they are; who is responsible for these numbers and what their biases might be; and alternative predictions to consider. Of course, here we are talking about government agencies, but the same kinds of data surround us in our daily lives. The ensuing discussion is my opening for bringing up examples from advertising, commercials, and, of course, politics, especially as they relate to science. I encourage this kind of questioning throughout the remainder of the course, especially when I can use examples illustrating how such questioning led to changes in our understanding of science. What I have never done, however, is to systematically analyze the underlying problems students face when dealing with science and scientific controversies. That is what Seethaler has done in Lies, Damned Lies, and Science. She identifies 10 tools, each one the subject of a chapter, that students can use to evaluate not only scientific controversies, but also science-related claims