The Perils of Unleashing Students' Skepticism

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Perils-of-Unleashing/125926/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

By John Horgan

Don't always believe what scientists tell you. Be skeptical.

That's what I tell students in my history- of-science and science-writing classes. But some of them may have taken the lesson too much to heart.

I want to give my students the benefit of my hard-won knowledge of science's fallibility. Early in my career, I was a conventional gee-whiz science writer, easily impressed by scientists' claims. Fields such as physics, neuroscience, genetics, and artificial intelligence seemed to be bearing us toward a future in which bionic superhumans would zoom around the cosmos in warp-drive spaceships. Science was an "endless frontier," as the physicist Vannevar Bush put it in his famous 1945 report that paved the way for creation of the National Science Foundation.