Activists protesting against genetically modified organisms recently destroyed a field trial of genetically modified rice in the Philippines. Participants and sympathizers claimed that the crop was poisonous, would destroy biodiversity and was a means for industry to exploit the poor.

But the rice had no known health hazards. It did not dominate other rice species and thus would not threaten biodiversity. It had been altered to create beta carotene – a precursor to vitamin A, which counteracts blindness and other illnesses associated with weakened immune systems, thereby helping hundreds of thousands of children lacking vitamin A. The rice was developed not by industry but the International Rice Research Institute, a non-profit organization.

The Philippine vandalism, however, harmed far more than the rice and its intended beneficiaries. It damaged the credibility of the entire scientific infrastructure that created the rice and determined it to be safe.

This controversy is but one of several instances – including fracking, nuclear power, climate change, vaccination and evolution – playing out in ways that marginalize expertise and make scientific evidence seem irrelevant. One may have sound non-scientific reasons for opposing things like genetic modification, such as not wanting to “instrumentalize” nature. But making good judgments requires respecting what science has discovered about the world and debating issues on their merits. Marginalizing science allows such controversies to unfold as “morality plays” about social inequalities or injustices, or only about politics or economics, rather than as complex negotiations between what we want and what is possible. Inevitably, bad decisions result.

Never in history have good judgments about issues such as energy, pollution and health depended more on science. Yet incorporating science into such debates has been beset by saboteurs, undermined by politicians and met with scepticism. Why?

Three reasons

The answer lies in three separate entangled ingredients, which I dub “manipulated acoustics”, “impure science” and “magical thinking”.

“Acoustics” refers to the way partisans of positions are ever more adept at mimicking and manipulating the voice of science itself. They do this by manufacturing facts and spreading pseudo-evidence, generating pseudo “experts”, using celebrities as spokespeople and taking advantage of the media’s penchant for granting equal time to different sides of an argument, and priority to what’s extreme and photogenic. I needn’t supply examples; you can find them yourself. These factors amplify voices in a controversy regardless of their integrity.

By “impure science”, I mean the way partisans often denounce scientific findings they don’t like. They point to discrepancies between how these findings were produced and the image of science we learned in school as emerging “from nowhere”: pure, value-free and definitive. If a particular study was partly funded by a pharmaceutical company, if a model depends on projections rather than certainties, or if someone has ties to the nuclear industry, the results must be suspect, they claim.

Finally, and surprisingly, scientific advance itself implicitly promotes a harmful “magical thinking”. This curious phenomenon was first identified by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico almost 300 years ago in his 1725 book New Science. Vico pointed out that the very maturation of human thought tends to foster an over-reliance on analytical rationality that encourages people to indulge themselves and view the world’s resources as at their disposal. The very success of science and technology, in other words, encourages the illusion that almost everything is within our grasp.

This magical thinking makes us feel like free agents – entitled to choose our forms of energy, nutrition and environmental conditions, without having to make severe, costly and risky trade-offs. It’s an illusion that’s amplified by powerful money and political influence. Don’t like fossil fuels but scared by nuclear? Go solar! Hate starvation but creeped out by genetic manipulation? Grow more food! And if we can’t do these things, it must be someone else’s fault, probably a conspiracy. We are accustomed to relying on our benefits but resent having to pay for the infrastructure that produced them. As one US congressman remarked – my informant heard it first-hand but insists on remaining anonymous – “Why do we need Landsat satellites when we have Google Earth?”

The critical point

How, then, can we deal with these problems?

Contending with wonky acoustics requires patiently tracking down and exposing fabrications and misrepresentations – a task for scientists and the sceptics movement. It is tedious and time-consuming for sure, but there is a silver lining: when partisans manipulate acoustics they at least presuppose that offering evidence and appealing to experts is how such debates should work.

Dealing with charges of impure science, meanwhile, is not a task for scientists but science educators. Science education needs to convey the reality that real science does not emerge “from nowhere” but from real people with passion, values and commitments. Science, we need to remind everyone, is our best tool for navigating the complex modern world filled with a fear of hazards and people who manipulate and prey on that fear.

As for countering science-induced magical thinking, that is not a task for either scientists or educators but for the humanities. It would require an improved human self-recognition; making better known the full story of how human thought and institutions evolved, and how some things are gained and others lost with each step. Realizing progressive human ambitions, we need to remind ourselves, usually comes with hidden costs.

There is, in short, no quick fix for repairing the dismal way we resolve controversies. It won’t work simply by restating the importance of science, which would only make science appear like one lobby among others. Vico thought the solution required the development of what he called a “new science”; today, it will require revamping science, science education and the humanities for the 21st century.