National Geograpic: Quit being part of the problem!

I love science shows. I watch them all the time. When I'm looking for something on tv the first place I go is the Discover Channel, followed by the Science Channel, The History Channel and National Geographic. I've relied on such channels to provide me with high quality educational shows for many many years, and I have to say that much of what I know about science is based on these shows. So last night while I was watching "Naked Science: Pluto Rediscovered" on National Geographic, I was appalled at the glaring errors and simply unscientific statements that were made in the show. Especially considering some of the high quality scientists that were featured.

Continue reading.
The show started off with a history of Pluto, how it was discovered, and how it was named. They said that it was named after the Greek god of the underworld. It wasn't. The planets are named after Roman Gods. Pluto is the Roman God of the underworld. Hades is the Greek. It's minor, I know, one may say nit-picky. However this is a siteable source. It featured many respected astronomers. I think it has a responsibility to it's audience, and to the scientific community to make sure what it is saying is true. However, if that was the only gaffe, I probably would have let it go.

Later it started talking about the New Horizon probe, a space craft that we are sending to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. We currently don't have a way to get a space craft to go fast enough to reach Pluto, at least not on it's own power. So to generate enough speed to make it to the outer solar system, we use the enormous gravity of Jupiter to give us a little push. While we were there, New Horizons took some stunning photos of Jupiter and some of it's moons. This is where the second gaffe took place. The show claimed that New Horizon took a photo of Jupiter's largest moon IO. The only problem is that IO isn't the largest moon. In fact it's the third largest moon of Jupiter. I'm not an astronomer by trade. I'm not a producer who makes science shows, nor am I a screen writer who writes narration for science shows. The fact that I know this, and I recognized the error on the first viewing, while feeding a fussy 6 week old baby and no one else who had the power to correct this in the months it took to produce this program caught it, is shocking to say the least.

This however wasn't the worst of it. Science in this country is under attack more than ever before. Not since the Pope locked up Galileo for his audacious claims that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, has there been such an organized and concerted attempt to undermine the teaching of basic scientific principles. Lead with the call of "it's just a theory." No words make me gnash my teeth more than those. However here, in a show made by scientists, and produced for the purpose of teaching science, did they make such a statement. Granted not like the others do, but possibly much much worse. Let me explain.

Kenneth Edgeworth was a good scientist. He followed the scientific method precisely.

[he] hypothesised that, in the region beyond Neptune, the material within the primordial solar nebula was too widely spaced to condense into planets, and so rather condensed into a myriad of smaller bodies. From this he concluded that “the outer region of the solar system, beyond the orbits of the planets, is occupied by a very large number of comparatively small bodies.
-- wikipedia

He observed, he formed a hypothesis that made a specific prediction. However, it wasn't until 1992 that one of these bodies was actually observed. 6 months later, they found another one which confirmed the existence of the Kuiper Belt. It was at this point that Edgeworth's (and others) hypothesis became a theory. It can't be a theory until it has been backed up with experimental (or in this case observational) results.

However when Naked Science explained this, they said, (and I'd quote if I could remember it exactly) until 1992, there was nothing to back this up, it was just a theory. Now you may think this is all much ado about nothing. But lets look at this in today's context. We have people who are going around claiming that evolution is just a theory and in fact it is a theory, it's a very good one. It made many specific predictions, many of which have come to be proven true. Natural Selection predates genetics, it predates DNA, it even predates most of archeology, Yet it predicted all of them. Every day we are discovering more facts to add to the mountains of facts that confirm the theory of natural selection, and we have yet to find one that contradicts it. If we did, we would change it, or discard it to fit with our observations. That is science! By referring to Edgeworth's hypothesis as "just a theory," or even calling it a theory at all, while at the same time pointing out that it had no factual evidence to back it up, puts it, in the uneducated viewers mind, on the same level of natural selection, and simply feeds the fire of ignorance that is threatening to push us back into the dark ages.

I think we should expect more from our science based broadcasters. I hope they and the many fine scientists who were featured in the program, read this and speak out.