Recently I had what Cassie has dubbed a “Hubble moment.” I’ve been on the board of directors at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing for at least a decade, but had somehow never grasped the fine print of how our Taylor Blakeslee fellowship came to be.
I knew it was named after two science writer greats — former AP science editor Alton Blakeslee and AP writer Rennie Taylor, but I didn’t know that the seed money had come from The American Tentative Society.
In a beautiful obituary for her father, Alton Blakeslee, the science writer Sandra Blakeslee explained that The American Tentative Society “was hatched in the wee hours of the morning, over many bottles of Jack Daniels, in Santa Rosa, California.” Her father and friends Taylor and Pat McGrady would get together on occasion.
“Rennie felt that most Americans view science as facts cast in stone rather than as an ever-changing, tentative enterprise. In his will, he stipulated that his estate be used to set up the ATS to honor scientists whose work demonstrates the tentative nature of our knowledge,” Sandra wrote.
The elder Blakeslee served as President of the ATS, and enjoyed throwing luncheons for scientists. “They drank toasts to Rennie, of course, and did more serious work like supporting young science writers.”
Alton Blakeslee told Science magazine that during its first eight years, the ATS was little more than a “lively concept,” but they were looking for projects to fund. (The title of the small blurb printed in Science was “American Tentative Society Has Money, Needs Ideas.”) That was 1974. The organization was eventually disbanded in the 1990s, and the money went to CASW.
Since then, the Taylor Blakeslee Fellowship has supported a large number of up and coming science writers. But we’re all still facing this problem that Taylor had sought to address with the ATS.
As I discuss in my new podcast series, the public too often views science as a creator of facts, rather than a provisional process, full of uncertainties. This misunderstanding has consequences, as we saw during the pandemic when a subset of the public lost faith in science when they saw it updating as new evidence came in. Of course, we also have a long history of nefarious interests weaponizing the uncertainty that’s inherent in science to create doubt in the public’s mind.
How do we counteract the public’s misunderstandings of science? I’ve spent a great deal of my career thinking about this, and I still don’t have a satisfying answer. But I do think it might be time to revive the ATS.
Photo by Christina Morillo.
I still remember the shock when what my science teachers were trying to tell me finally sunk in. In order to prove something, you need an infinite number of examples. But in order to disprove it, you only need one contrary one. Science is not in the business of proving things. It disproves things.
You start with a grand, broad idea made out of observations, then you slowly whittle away all the things it cannot be until you are left with something that has proven resistant to being disproved. It may stand for centuries and even be called a “Law of Science”, but there is always that niggling little doubt that one contrary piece of evidence will show up and *bam*. Down it goes.
Think of the Law of Gravity and how it described the orbits of everything we could see in the sky. It was simple and elegant. And it worked for everything for hundreds of years. Until it didn’t. Mercury didn’t orbit according to the so-called Law of Gravity. At first it was put down to inaccuracies in the observations. But then the observations were nailed down. Et voila! The Law of Gravity was broken only to be later patched up by Einsteinian ideas about relativity.
In Science, nothing is certain. As your byline says, “Science says the first word on everything, and the Last Word on Nothing.” I love that quote.
I love that quote too, and have never understood how a writer like Victor Hugo came up with it. Like, how did he even know? I suppose I could google it.