Manufactured ignorance

It's a crazy world where planting seeds of ignorance is more common than planting seeds of knowledge. Yet these appear to be the times we're living in, where the muddlement seed has not only sprouted but grown into a thick and lustrous bramble.

The media, the internet, the government and an assortment of lobbying groups have created a situation where for most people it becomes nigh on impossible to know who to believe on the big scientific questions of the day. But take a step back and a more meaningful picture begins to emerge.

Science is undoubtedly complex. Yet the "controversies" of science - the really big theories that generate mass heated debate - lie within certain distinct realms. Does burning fossil fuels cause global warming? Does smoking cause cancer? Do living things evolve by natural selection?

These questions have one particular feature in common - if the answer to any of them is Yes, massive vested interests are challenged.

Although answering any of science's big questions will generate debate, the debate doesn't always descend into such a barrage of bluster.

For example, the theory of plate tectonics is the idea that the Earth's crust is composed of several plates that "float" on an underlying layer of magma. It was absolutely revolutionary and led to a paradigm shift in thinking in geology.

And the discovery that deoxyribonucleic acid forms genes, the units of heredity, changed the face of biology forever.

But while there most certainly is debate on these subjects the arguments are scientific. And so are the counterarguments.

Compare this with the standard of debate about climate change or evolution, where all too often it's one frothing ranter locking horns with another.

Stanford University science history professor Robert N Proctor has a neat term for what we're doing as we examine what's going on here - "agnotology," which means the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt.

"People always assume that if someone doesn't know something, it's because they haven't paid attention or haven't yet figured it out," says Proctor.

"But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth - or drowning it out - or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what's true and what's not."

His wife Londa Schiebinger, also a science history professor, has developed the term.

She has contrasted agnotology with theory of knowledge - "epistemology."

"Ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but an outcome of cultural and political struggle," says Schiebinger.

There are all sorts of reasons why people might want to obscure the truth. Cold, hard cash - or the prospect of losing it - is the most obvious.

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, tobacco companies strove to create the impression in the public mind that scientific opinion was divided on whether smoking caused cancer. And later they tried to undermine evidence for passive smoking.

The industry was careful not to out-and-out deny the scientific research, but it stirred up what was in effect a "false controversy."

Big business is expert at this sort of thing - it's a form of PR.

Using a deliberate superinjection of doubt, companies can manufacture the illusion of controversy where in fact none exists. The idea is to present the image of scientists bickering among themselves about a subject that is still not settled. Creationists also use this argument in their calls to "teach the debate" over evolution.

In 2006, The Guardian reported on a memo from tobacco company Brown and Williamson which said: "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

We're seeing similar tactics being used in the realm of climate change, where oil companies in particular stand to lose megabucks should the world shift to a low-carbon economy.

ExxonMobil has been accused of being one of the worst offenders when it comes to deliberately muddying the waters of public understanding.

In 2006 Royal Society found that ExxonMobil had given $2.9m to US groups that "misinformed the public about climate change," 39 of which "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence."

The American Enterprise Institute reportedly offered scientists $10,000 to publish articles critical of the International Panel on Climate Change's 2007 climate change study. The institute had received more than $1.6m from Exxon. And its vice-chairman of trustees is Lee Raymond, former head of Exxon.

Industry propaganda techniques are becoming more sophisticated. In August Greenpeace revealed a leaked email from the American Petroleum Institute.

The message encouraged its members, oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell and BP, to send employees to "energy citizen" rallies against a climate change Bill requiring large utilities in each US state to produce an increasing percentage of their electricity from renewables.

Tricks like these have been dubbed "astroturfing." This is where campaigns or events are created by an organisation, but the campaign's origins are deliberately hidden to give the impression of popular "grass-roots" campaigning - hence the term astroturf. Fake grass.

The basic aim is to get the science discrediting campaign to snowball by getting a hold on the public's consciousness.

Science blogger Mark Hoofnagle has described a number of arguments commonly deployed to generate false controversies.

First up is the method of "conspiracy," suggesting that opponents have some kind of sinister motive behind their position. An example would be those, such as the Daily Mail's Melanie Phillips, who insist that climate change is merely a ploy by big government to extract more tax from us.

Next is the technique of "cherry-picking" the evidence. We've seen this recently over the supposed scandal of the leaked climate change emails from the University of East Anglia, where quotes taken out of context have been seized upon by climate change deniers. Cherry-picking can also involve pointing to famously discredited or flawed papers, to make opponents look like their views are based on weak research.

Then there is the use of "false" experts. Sometimes experts are paid to conduct research where a preferred outcome has already been specified, as appears to have been the case with the American Enterprise Institute.

Sometimes experts aren't really experts in a given subject at all. David Bellamy may be an admirable man in many respects, but there's no reason to give his views on global warming too much credence - he's a botanist, not a climatologist.

And PR firms often pump out "studies," usually without appropriate controls, purporting to be serious academic research - the anti-speed camera lobby, for example.

Science today is becoming more and more complex and the facts become harder and harder to discern above the media din.

While it's useful to admit when we don't know something and try to find out more about it, sometimes knowledge of a subject leaves us more uncertain than before.

It can be even more revealing to ask why we don't know something. Ignorance, like knowledge, can be manufactured.